Van Wyck Brooks

“ It is as old as Milton that there are talents which are "death to hide," and I suggest that Mark Twain's "talent" was just so hidden. That bitterness of his was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his creative life, a balked personality, an arrested development of which he was himself almost wholly unaware, but which for him destroyed the meaning of life. The spirit of the artist in him, like the genie at last released from the bottle, overspread in a gloomy vapor the mind it had never quite been able to possess. ”

“ Never was a writer more perfectly at home with his public—he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large." ”

“ That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on your part or your father's; that you have nothing, is a judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your improvidence. The world is a moral world, which it would not be if virtue and vice received the same rewards. This summary, though confessedly crude, may help, if it be not pushed too close, to define John Hay's position. The property you own—be it a tiny cottage or a palace—means so much more than the tangible object! With it are bound up whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization. ”

“ What if his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried, impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says, "is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... ”

“ Who can doubt, indeed, that it was the very greatness of his potential force, the strength of his instinctive preferences, that confirmed in Mark Twain his inborn Calvinistic will-to-despise human nature, that fixed in him the obsession of the miscarriage of the human spirit? If the great artist is the freest man, if the true creative life is, in fact, the embodiment of "free will," then it is only he that is born for greatness who can feel, as Mark Twain felt, that the universe is leagued against him. ”

“ As we can see now, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America against the creative spirit. In an age when every sensitive mind in England was in full revolt against the blind, mechanical, devastating forces of a "progress" that promised nothing but the ultimate collapse of civilization; when all Europe was alive with prophets, aristocratic prophets, proletarian prophets, religious and philosophical and humanitarian and economic and artistic prophets, crying out, in the name of the human spirit, against the obscene advance of capitalistic industrialism ”

“ Life in the gold-fields was, in fact, an infinite intensification of pioneering, it was a sort of furnace in which all the elements of human nature were transmuted into a single white flame, an incandescence of the passion of avarice. If we are to accept Mark Twain's description in "Roughing It" of the "flush times" in Virginia City, we can see that the spirit of the artist had about as good a chance of survival and development there as a butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown to be the 'livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever produced. ”

“ Howells: "My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, and which keeps on persecuting me regardless of my repentances." Imagine a European man of genius having to qualify, not as an individual, but as a member of a social order into which he had not been born! Charles Dickens never felt grateful to society because it tolerated the man who had once been a waif of the streets: Mark Twain, as Mr. Paine presents him, was always the barefoot boy among the gods. ”

“ Mark Twain's unbounded energy, his prodigal fertility, his large utterance, that "great, burly fancy" of his, as Mr. Howells calls it, his powers of feeling, the unique magnetism of his personality were the signs of an endowment, one cannot help thinking, more extraordinary than that of any other American writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or perhaps like Pushkin, who are as if intended by nature to preside over the genius of nations and give birth to the leading impulses of entire epochs. ”

“ Is it not perfectly plain that that deep contempt for man, the "coffee-mill," a contempt that has spread now even to the boy-nature of which Mark Twain had been the lifelong hierophant, must have had some far more personal root, must have sprung from some far more intimate chagrin? One goes back to the long series of "Pudd'nhead" maxims, not the bitter ones now, but those desperate notes that seem to bear no relation to the life even of a sardonic humorist:
Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead. ”

“ An American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon one of two conditions only: either he must be willing to stay at the bottom of the ladder of success or he must be able to climb to the top. No one cares to impugn a fool; no one dares to impugn a captain of industry.
Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence as a creative spirit, he put his foot on the first rung of that ladder. ”

“ Whenever, for any reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this process at work. ”

“ In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him, unconsciously, into a sort of bouleversement of all his actual personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. ”

“ To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the life of the man with an eye single to the main chance—that, one would almost say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain's humor. In almost every one of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them, he burns the house down in order to roast his pig—he destroys, that is to say, an entire complex of legitimate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single sham. ”

“ And are we not already in a position to see why the rôle of humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluctant to adopt it, why he always rebelled against it, and why it arrested his own development?
Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the undoing of the artist. It meant the suppression of his æsthetic desires, the degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses without in the end becoming the victim of his own habit? ”

“ In this respect, at least, the "Connecticut Yankee" was an assault, not upon a social institution, but upon the principle of beauty itself, an assault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd pioneer business man.
How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of "The Innocents Abroad," appearing as it did precisely at the psychological moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch of industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had become obligatory upon every American man! ”

“ Emerson, in short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties and his responsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of humanity. Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with him to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If he couldn't write without hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always, like the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group of people immediately surrounding him. ”

“ Mr. Howells, Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have guessed that he was missing his destiny. ”

“ That weary, discouraged father, struggling against conditions amid which, as he says, a man can do nothing but rot away, that kind, worn, wan, desperately optimistic, fanatically energetic mother, those ragged, wretched little children, sprawling on the floor, "sopping corn-bread in some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan"—it is the epic not only of Mark Twain's-infancy but of a whole phase of American civilization. How many books have been published of late years letting us behind the scenes of the glamorous myth of pioneering! ”

“ Paine, "was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place. For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. ”

“ To obey Jane Clemens, to do what seems good in her eyes, not to try life and make his own rejections, has become actually pleasing to him; it is his own will to make the journey of life "in bond," as surely as any box that was ever sent by freight. Never was an adolescence more utterly objective than Mr. Paine's record shows Mark Twain's to have been! For several years before he was twenty-one he drifted about as a journeyman printer: he went as far East as Washington, Philadelphia and New York. ”

“ There is the complete philosophy of the moral slave who not only has no autonomy but wishes to have none, who, in fact, finds all his comfort in having none, and delights in denying the possibility of independence just because he does not possess it himself. The pragmatists have escaped this net in their own interestingly temperamental fashion, like flying-fish, by jumping over it. It remains, nevertheless, the characteristic philosophy of Americans who have a deep emotional stake in the human situation; and one might almost say that it honors Mark Twain. ”

“ Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful, uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and passionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his. Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly happy." ”

“ Without the feeling that they were the children of destiny, without the social dream that some vast boon to humanity hung upon their enterprise, without the personal dream of immeasurable success for themselves, who would ever have endured such voluntary hardships? One recalls poor John Clemens, Mark Twain's father, absorbed in a perpetual motion machine that was to save mankind, no doubt, and bring its inventor millions. ”

“ It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss the relations between authors and their wives: so intensely personal is the atmosphere of our society that to "stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even of those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civilization is regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the way in which English criticism has thrashed out the pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Percy and Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the Bronte family and the Lambs and the Rossettis! ”

“ No wonder he has come to believe, as he tells us frankly in a later book, that there is no such thing as love in the world! Think of those villages Mark Twain himself has pictured for us, with their shabby, unpainted shacks, dropping with decay, the broken fences, the litter of rusty cans and foul rags, how like the leavings of some vast over-turned scrap-basket, some gigantic garbage-can! ”