Mark Twain on Moral Training: A Theory "Weak as Water"

The conditions of Mark Twain's philosophical musings in later life have been extensively rummaged through and clearly demarcated: on the one hand, an aging Twain thinks and writes as a card-carrying pessimist who is genuinely displeased with mankind's dissolute condition; as such, he vociferously and imaginatively gives in to his free-thought and Calvinist impulses—enter stage right, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), "The Man That Corrupted hadleyburg" (1899), and What Is Man? (1906). On the other hand, however, is the life-worn celebrity, pompously clad in his white suit, who relentlessly holds familial and financial despair at bay by creatively and powerfully rendering the dream-like possibilities for the freedom of will—enter stage left, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1897–1908).

As a result of this rather untidy philosophical disunion, scholars have zealously conjured various and often compelling approaches to both explain and explain away Twain's late-life philosophical state of mind. However, what we have provided often appears overzealous and irreconcilable, ranging from coherence (i.e., Twain's later work and thinking provide logical connections), to dysfunction (i.e., the later work and thinking are messy, unmanageable, and ultimately disordered), to something in between, albeit with some patching here and some tuck-pointing there in all cases mentioned. Always a step ahead of us, Twain anticipates our intellectual masonry work by describing the truth-seeker (or scholar, in this case) as one who holds his "soldering iron in one hand and a bludgeon in his other."¹ While not a professed or certified mason—Twain might say "certifiable"—I have in the past set sail with those advocating something like coherence in the later works, suggesting Twain's apparent philosophical uncertainty represents a logical part of his consistent skepticism. But perhaps I have given in too easily to my own desires to grab at the allure of the absentpresent, the mythical white whale. Maybe I am the critic Twain imagines for the moral he provides at the end of his allegorical "A Fable" (1906), when he writes that "You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there."² Given the elasticity of Twain's mind, however, and his penchant for subversion and evasion, the field of inquiry remains wide open, and so we still have more questions than answers regarding his late-life philosophical resolve—and we still have a lot to say about him, in general, evidenced by the steady scholarly output on his life.

While most support the view that Twain's mind was made up in his later years—that he was in fact a card-carrying pessimist and determinist when it came to his sizing up mankind's dim prospects³—others leave the critical door slightly ajar:

For Clemens had not one but two philosophies; or one might say more particularly, two psychologies—the somewhat older positivistic one, . . . which viewed human beings as mechanisms, entirely products of their environment, and the newer one, emphasizing the forces of the unconscious and the significance of dreams. And one can find in the writings a continuing dialogue that he carried forward with a growing awareness of the ways in which these two psychologies enlisted his own divided sympathies and convictions.

Tuckey's both/and assessment of Twain's mature yet vacillating state of mind seems not only reasonable but ultimately instructive. And I am particularly taken by his phrase "a continuing dialogue that . . . [Twain] carried forward with a growing awareness of . . . his own divided sympathies and convictions."⁴

What we do know is that an aging Twain was heavily influenced in his thoughts on mankind's Moral Sense by his vast experiences and the various sources he encountered in his voracious reading, including the Bible, and works by authors very familiar to Twain scholars: Paine, Darwin, Holmes, James, Taine, Lecky, Edwards, and Ingersoll, among others. What we also know is that whether out of a need to speak the...