Mark Twain and Human Nature

Chapter Six. 1900–1910

C h a p t e r S i x 1 9 0 0 – 1 9 1 0 I There is no reason to dispute Hamlin Hill’s well-documented assertion in Mark Twain: God’s Fool that the last decade of Clemens’s life was a kind of “hell,” much of it of his own making.1 The story of the seemingly gratuitous depredations upon his security and happiness is a familiar one— the deaths of family members and friends, illness and pain, public humiliation and financial despair; likewise the adjectives (none of them pretty) to describe Twain’s moods—cynical, bitter, angry, suspicious, irrational, depressed, alienated, lonely, petty and trivial, hurt and hurtful. Hill was able to find a way to chart the contours of Twain’s last ten years and to organize the immense corpus of written materials he produced during that time according to certain watershed moments: the beginning of the new century until Olivia’s death in 1904, his “Indian Summer”; Twain’s compromised life from that period until he reached the high-water mark of public acclaim in receiving an honorary degree from Oxford in 1907, his “Götterdämmerung”; and his final three years when he tended to withdraw from the limelight and preferred to drift along in the role of “The Derelict.” 1. Mark Twain: God’s Fool (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), xvii. 2 3 8 The task of organization for our purposes is somewhat different, for we are concerned with the diverse written record left behind and its relation to his preoccupation with human nature. And it is diverse—fables, philosophical dialogues, soliloquies, autobiographical dictations, tales, sketches , polemical essays, speeches, fantasies, and the like. Some of them were published, some not; some of them were meant for publication at some distant future date when they would not give offense; some were published anonymously (What Is Man? for example); some were so formless as to refuse publication except as fragments, extracts, or specimens; many were left uncompleted at the time of his death (most notably, The Mysterious Stranger manuscripts). The enormous bulk of texts (thousands upon thousands of pages) owes something to the fact that Twain found solace in his work, for it lifted his spirits and was an engrossing activity he was able to love without stint. Thanks to the negotiations of Henry H. Rogers, Mark Twain arrived at a lucrative agreement with Harper and Brothers. He could milk that cash cow any time he wanted, but, perhaps to his credit, much of what he wrote was not meant for publication. Without the regulatory checks and balances that help one chart literary production (the demands of publishers, the judgment of critics, the appetites of readers, as well as clear indications of the author’s professional ambition), the pattern one may impose on the materials threatens to become arbitrary. It is clear, at any rate, that Twain’s interests as they are reflected in his writings developed, more or less, as a sheaf—some stalks growing tall and sending off shoots of their own, others languishing in the shade of predominating interests, still others barely germinating at all. One might choose to chop up the whole and bale it as a single, symmetrical, and unified point of view; certainly that is a tidier way than the one I propose: namely, to follow certain individual strands of Twain’s thought and show such affiliations one with the other as seems justified. Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of writing during this period that deserve some extended attention. First, there are the polemical writings . These include but are not restricted to Twain’s anti-imperialist essays ; his philosophical dialogue What Is Man? belongs; so, perhaps, does his diatribe against Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science or “A Dog’s Tale” (1903) (which was reprinted as a pamphlet by the National AntiVivisection Society in London), but they don’t contribute very much to our understanding of Twain’s theory of human nature. The polemical writings at least participate in the same sort of argumentative mood that prompted such essays as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” or “King 1 9 0 0 – 1 9 1 0 2 3 9 Leopold’s Soliloquy.” Second, there are those fantasies that draw upon Twain’s readings in science and generally concern the immensity of the universe and mankind’s insignificant place in the scheme...