Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 566
The other occasion is equally historic — memorable in its utter and awful failure. For the time it crushed Mark Twain with a dead weight of despair. The scene was the dinner given on December 17, 1877, by the staff of the Atlantic to the aged poet Whittier on his seventieth birthday. Present were Whittier himself, and Longfellow and Emerson and Holmes and all the great literary lights of Boston, the Magi of the East, refulgent with their own genius and consuming their own smoke. Mark Twain shouldn’t have given a damn for them, but he did. Longfellow was there and old Emerson — too deaf to hear — and others too stuffed to listen. But Mark Twain was afraid of them. In their eyes and in his own he was not in their class. They were ‘authors,’ real ones; he was just a rough, cheap westerner. So he prepared a speech line by line and word by word. It was a delightful piece of burlesque — picturing three old ‘bummers’ arriving at a western mining camp and spouting poetry. One ‘bum’ impersonated Longfellow, one Holmes, and one Emerson — the parody of their work was to show that. But the speech went wrong. The audience caught on to the ‘bums,’ but not to the parody — old men are slow in such things. There was a frozen silence. The speaker’s ‘inferiority complex’ (though he never lived to hear of it) seized him. His own face turned to misery.
The speech ended. The old men shuffled into their coats. It was all over.
Next day Mark Twain wrote agonized letters of apology. He wanted to resign everything, to quit everything, to give up everything — not to be Mark Twain any more. His despair was as fierce as his hopes had been eager. Years after, he read the speech again, and again sank into a pit of despair. Years after that, he read it again, and the light broke in and he felt that it was glorious. So it was. If he had given that speech to the students of Yale and Harvard instead of the stuffy old men in Boston, it would have taken the roof off.
The mention of General Grant and the famous Grant dinner at Chicago recalls one of the outstanding episodes of Mark Twain’s life in the hey-day of his success — his marvellous rescue of Grant and his family from ruin.
A grateful nation had made the hero of Appomattox its president. It has a way of doing so. It is said that the Chinese, in the days of the Empire, used to select by examination their highest scholars and make them generals. The Americans select their highest generals and make them presidents. Of Grant’s presidency there is no need to speak here. After his time expired he was induced to go into Wall Street business, or rather to lend his name as a cover for business of which he understood absolutely nothing. The colossal success of the fraudulent Ward was followed by catastrophic failure and the imprisonment of Ward, and carried down with it the fortune, and worse still the reputation, of General Grant. There he was — ruined — saved only from legal prosecution by national sympathy and by the fact that he was already stricken with a disease destined to prove fatal.
In his adversity he turned to the idea of living by his pen — of fighting over again with ink and compasses the battles won by the sword. A leading magazine offered him what they thought a handsome sum for articles on his campaigns; a publishing firm were willing to bring out a book of memoirs of his life. But the whole plan, in scope and in prospective return, was on a modest scale. At this point Mark Twain ‘butted in.’ He saw the idea of Grant’s memoirs with the eyes of Colonel Sellers! What! Offer the General a mere five hundred dollars for an article on the battle of Shiloh! What! Talk of ten thousand copies of a book from such a hand! ‘General’ (the words are actual), ‘a book telling the story of your life and battles should sell not less than a quarter of a million, perhaps twice that!’ And a little later, in a further discussion of the subject, ‘General, I have my cheque-book with me. I will draw you now a cheque for twenty-five thousand dollars as an advance royalty!’
And just for once the Colonel Sellers vision was absolutely correct.
Mark Twain had had a certain connection already, one might say friendship, with General Grant. Once, long before, he had visited him when President, and had relieved the awkwardness of the meeting by saying, ‘Mr. President, I am embarrassed, are you?’ Grant treasured the remark as a man without humour keeps an old joke. Afterwards came the famous dinner and other casual meetings.
Mark Twain did not ‘butt in’ in any offensive sense to steal the business of other publishers. He offered them a field they wouldn’t take, and when it was clear, occupied it himself for his own publishing firm, Webster and Company. He set the General to work dictating his memoirs, watched over him, encouraged, cheered him to it. Grant, stricken as he was, worked stubbornly on. All the best in the man shone on in his stubborn fight against approaching death. When the cancer in his throat reached the point where dictation was impossible, he took a pencil and wrote on, firmly, stubbornly, as if his pencil were an iron point against paper. He won out. There came a day when he laid aside the pencil; the Personal Memoirs of General Grant were ended. Three days later (July 23, 1885) the world learned that General Grant was dead.
Grant had written with the plain simplicity of one not looking for style or effect, but setting down what he had to say for its own sake, without a wasted word. So wrote Xenophon and Julius Caesar.
But the vast success of the Memoirs was not solely due to the national interest in the narration, the national appeal of the circumstances, or the plain soldierly writing of the General. It owed much to the energy and boldness of Mark Twain, the fearless disregard of expense with which the enterprise was launched, the skill with which it was carried through.
Before Grant died he had the satisfaction of knowing that his name and his family were saved. After he was dead the royalties paid to his widow ran to nearly four hundred and fifty thousand dollars!
After the great Grant episode comes as a landmark the publication of The Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. It appeared in December 1889, but it had been long in thought and preparation. Ever since he had first visited England, Mark Twain had wanted to write a book about English institutions. The plan was originally killed by kindness, but refused to stay dead. It revived in his mind. He carried it about with him, and by 1866, in his new Hartford home, he began the felicitous book with the happy title in which his England was encompassed. The writing was interrupted by the composition of sketches and articles, by dinners and speeches, and by the receipt of honorary degrees (such as the Yale Master of Arts in 1888), but it never stopped till it culminated in the issue of the book by Webster and Company, the author’s own publishing house.
To many of us who are old enough to remember most of Mark Twain’s works from the time of their appearance, there is a certain list which seemed then and seem now the real Mark Twain. The rest don’t matter. The list includes Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Innocents Abroad, Tom Sawyer (a little grudgingly), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and, most certainly and beyond controversy, the Connecticut Yankee. We don’t need to care what the critics say; we can recall the sheer unadulterated joy of that first perusal.
The story is based thus:
A Connecticut Yankee, a factory boss, skilled in all mechanical arts, is ‘put to sleep’ by a crack on the head with a crowbar from an employee. He wakes up to find himself — not forward in time as most Utopians are, but backward. He is lying on a grassy bank in the woodland country of King Arthur’s England. To him approaches a knight in ‘old time iron armour from head to heel.’
‘Fair sir, will ye joust?’ asks the knight.
‘Will I which?’ says the Yankee.
And with that the tale is on. The Yankee, about to be put to death, recalls the fact that an eclipse happened that very year and day, and ‘puts out’ the sun. This beats out Merlin and makes the Yankee a magician. He rules King Arthur’s England; introduces machinery, fights the superstitions of the church, the cruelty of the law, the brutality of the strong — only to meet disaster at the end.
It is a strange and wonderful tale, and carries with it not only a story but a meaning. By and through his Yankee Mark Twain is denouncing all the things that he hated — hereditary power, the church, aristocracy, privilege, superstition. He is able, under the guise of humour, to give vent to the fierce elemental ideas of justice and right and equality, hatred of oppression and religious persecution, by which he was inspired. In other books this could only be incidental — a word, a phrase, a quoted speech. Here it was the whole book.
It was no wonder that such a book called forth plenty of criticism, even of denunciation; no wonder that many of Mark Twain’s English admirers turned their backs on him. The book seemed to challenge this. In the first place, from the point of view of the historian, if taken seriously, it is contemptible. The date of the story is fixed by a solar eclipse which is part of its machinery as the year 528 a.d. The time is that of King Arthur. But the author has lumped into it in an indistinguishable mass the manners and customs of ten centuries, all the tyrannies of all the countries he ever heard of (except America) — the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Old Regime in France; all the aristocracies of Europe, with especial reference to the English, past and present; with this, and running all through it, is a denunciation, by name, of the Roman Catholic Church.
Witness, for example, the following typical quotations:
‘It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty towards their king and church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honour king and church and noble than a slave has to love and honour the lash. . . .’
‘Before the day of the church’s supremacy in the world, men were men and held their heads up.’
‘Any established church is an established crime, an established slave pen.’
‘A privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slave-holders under another name.’
Now of course it is not really the fictitious Yankee speaking here, but the author himself. The voice is Yankee but the hand is from Missouri.
Such criticism of England, past and present, from a citizen of the American Republic, was a little too much like a child of light reproving the children of darkness. Against the tyranny of aristocracy could be set the rising tyranny of the trust; the criminals and bandits of King Arthur’s time (whenever it was) were soon to be overmatched by the gangsters of the United States; against the power of the church stood the social tyranny of Puritanical America; denunciations of slavery came ill from a writer brought up in a slave-holding family in the greatest slave state the world ever saw, and the rack and stake of the Middle Ages could be paralleled in the hell-fires of the southern lynchers.
At best it was Satan rebuking sin, the pot calling the kettle black. Underneath was the insult that Mark Twain really thought America a far superior place to England, a fact of which the next generation were not so assured. But the delusion of American freedom died hard.
Yet real lovers of Mark Twain’s work, those who understand it, will ‘wipe all that out.’ When the Yankee book appeared, it was read by thousands with sheer unadultered joy from cover to cover; by thousands who didn’t care a rush for historical accuracy, and were as willing to fuse all the centuries together as the author was. To such readers the burlesque of chivalry was a delight; it was glorious to think of King Arthur’s knights set to play baseball and to ride round with advertising boards instead of hunting the Holy Grail. The reader threw off the dead weight of literary reverence and roared at the fun of it. And the denunciation of cruelty and tyranny, and the triumph of machine-power, the revolver against the knight on horseback — all that was equally thrilling. It didn’t matter where the tyranny was or when it was; the reader had a notion that the institutions of dark ages were dark indeed, and exulted in their overthrow.
These readers were right. The Yankee is the most ‘artistic’ of all Mark Twain’s works; the burlesque the most unbroken, the theme the most continuous and consistent. The book Huckleberry Finn is imperfect as art when it breaks or nearly breaks into burlesque; in other books the burlesque is imperfect when it breaks into sentiment. The Yankee is a complete artistic conception, carried unbroken to a finish. Such faults as it has, in the technique of humour, lie elsewhere. Mark Twain never could convey the idea of prolixity except by getting prolix; to convey the idea of an interminable speech, he makes one; as witness the talk of Alisande in the tale and many of his characters elsewhere. Art should do better than that.
One may pass over with but little comment the other writings and the other achievements of Mark Twain, from the time between the appearance of the Yankee and his financial disasters of four years later. All through this period, and long before it, he had been reading intermittently about Joan of Arc, and presently working on a book about her. There was a family trip to Europe again in 1891-92 (France, Germany, Switzerland). To the family themselves the trip was chiefly memorable for its happiness. But to students of Mark Twain’s work and life it is memorable for his famous dinner with the Kaiser and what he thought of that exalted potentate.
During that winter in Berlin, Mark Twain and his family saw more of ‘high society’ than at any time of their lives. They were entertained as leading celebrities of the day in diplomatic and aristocratic circles at a time when European nobility enjoyed its last and its brightest lustre. Highest of all honours for Mark Twain was an invitation to dine at the royal table of the ‘young’ German Emperor.
It is difficult for us, even for those of us whose memory carries back to it, to reconstruct the setting and surrounding of the past before the downfall of Europe: the pomp and majesty of kingship; the resplendent glory of unbroken militarism; the ancestral pride of nobility, the authority and dignity of the church and the stability of established society. The gap between all that and bankrupt nations, labour democracies, red revolutions, and the threatened collapse of our civilization, is as great as that between the majestic vassal of God, William the Second, and an old man with a half-withered arm sawing wood at Doom. Anyone now can see the real figure of the Kaiser; Mark Twain could see it then.
He dined as one of a large company as a guest of the Kaiser on February 20, 1892. Afterwards he wrote down (for himself) his impressions of the Emperor and his entourage, the silent dinner, the monologue conversations, the rigid questions and the rigid answers, the utter suppression of everyone except the sovereign himself. He recorded how he alone in all that obeisant company had the hardihood to venture a few original observations, with the result of universal consternation and discomfort. Years later, he related the incidents, from his notes, to his biographer for publication after his death.
Very different was a meeting a little later (in the following summer), at Nauheim, with the Prince of Wales (Edward vii.). This was as jovial and informal as the ‘Kaiser-contakt’ had been rigid and conventional. The two walked up and down arm in arm, the Prince joking with Mark about a reference he had made to His Highness in one of his books. The ‘royal memory,’ whether coached or not, worked its usual charm.
Meantime publishing went on in America. There was the book, The American Claimant, with a play made out of it, that brought in a lot of money. Then there was a new Tom Sawyer story published in St. Nicholas in 1893-1894, and later as a book. It was called Tom Sawyer Abroad, and is interesting only as illustrating the failures of genius. In this story Tom and Huck and Nigger Jim start off in a (highly) dirigible balloon, cross the Atlantic, and ‘fool around’ the Sahara Desert. The whole setting is about as unconvincing and pointless as if we had a sequel story in which, let us say, Sherlock Holmes becomes a country clergyman, or Mr. Pickwick joins the army and heads a cavalry charge in the Crimean War. Another sequel, Tom Sawyer, Detective, is a little happier, the scene at any rate being laid where it belongs.
And all this time, though he didn’t realize it, Mark Twain’s fortunes were moving towards disaster, like swift-flowing water moving silently towards a cataract.
One pauses a moment before contemplating the shipwreck of a happiness that was never again restored, to dwell upon the completeness of it. It was not only in the world’s goods and in the world’s applause that Mark Twain was blessed. There was added to it the felicity of his private life. His abiding love for his sweet wife was only a part of the happy domestic and family relations with which his life was blessed throughout. His father, indeed, was little more than a memory, albeit a cherished one. For his mother, Jane Clemens, — the ‘Aunt Polly’ of Tom Sawyer — he bore a constant affection and a deep respect, even after he ceased to obey her precepts and ‘touched’ liquor and ‘threw’ cards. He sent her money as soon and as often as he had any to send.
After he left home he seldom saw his mother, though in his pilot days he once took her for a trip down the river to New Orleans.
Later on, after her son’s marriage and his rise to eminence, Jane Clemens came east with her daughter Pamela (Mrs. Moffatt), and lived for a while in Fredonia (N.Y.), but she moved west again to make her home with her oldest son Orion at Keokuk. There Mark Twain and his wife and children visited her in the summer of 1886. There she died in her eighty-eighth year in the summer of 1890, while her son was at the height of his success. All her later life was filled with pride over his achievements.
Orion Clemens, older than Sam by ten years and in his later life supported by his brother’s bounty, was, in a way, nearer to Mark Twain, more sympathetic, than anyone else in the world. Orion was a sort of queer double of Sam, with the one quality of success left out. He was a printer who failed at printing (he hated to charge money for it), a writer who couldn’t write, an inventor who didn’t invent and a promoter who couldn’t promote anything. But he felt himself always on the threshold of success and on the brink of fortune. After his return from the West, he lived, in the earthly sense, chiefly in Keokuk, Iowa, but in the real sense in a world of dreams. He wrote, at his brother’s suggestion, a vast autobiography, pathetic in its record of failure. In his old age he was found one morning seated in the kitchen, his head upon the table — dead. Beside him were pens and paper; no doubt he had thought of something wonderful to write.
