Mark Twain and Human Nature

University of Missouri Press

Contents

Chapter One

In 1865, Samuel Clemens wrote his brother Orion: "I have had a 'call' to literature, of a low order—i.e., humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit, & if I were to listen to that maxim of stern duty which says that to do right you must multiply the one or the two or the three talents which the Almighty entrusts to your keeping, I would long ago have ceased to meddle with the things for which I was by nature unfitted & turned my attention to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God's creatures. Poor, pitiful business!" (L1 322–23).

The timing of this announcement is interesting. It occurs only a month before the publication of his jumping frog story in the Saturday Press, which vaulted Clemens into literary celebrity and made the "Mark Twain" signature a familiar commodity. And it was not much more than a signature. Clemens adopted the pen name Mark Twain in 1863 with the publication of the first of his three "Letters" from Carson City. He had adopted other aliases before that, but this one stuck, even though it was at the time far from the firmly established literary persona it would become. With the widespread circulation of the jumping frog tale, his literary reputation grew and was cemented with the publication and instant success of The Innocents Abroad (1869). At the time, however, Mark Twain was an obscure presence in the literary scene, at least as far as the lucrative and necessary eastern literary market was concerned, and we have no reason to think he was responding to an unexpected opportunity instead of to the "maxim of stern duty."

In fact, the language of his declaration argues otherwise. In 1848, at the age of thirteen, he became a printer's apprentice, the first of a string of apprenticeships that preceded his rather flat-footed decision to become a scribbler and a humorist. Clemens had been instructed in the employable arts of typesetting, riverboat piloting, and journalism, and by all accounts (except perhaps his own, set down in "Old Times on the Mississippi" and elsewhere) he was an able pupil. These were forms of occupational training and derived from nineteenth-century notions of putting one's oar in the water and, through application and shrewd opportunism, making one's way in the world. But his decision to become a literary person was framed by a Christian sense of using what God has entrusted to him. After all, Matthew's parable had instructed that the man who had hidden his lord's money was cast into "outer darkness" where there shall be "weeping and the gnashing of teeth"; this was not a place for one equipped with a humorist's temperament.

By announcing his submission to an ordained and divinely approved "calling" to do the Lord's work as he has appointed all his servants in their various ways to perform it, Clemens was returning to the fold, though perhaps on his own terms. One always needs to be somewhat careful in assessing Clemens's statements of purpose. St. Paul had named the "diversities" of gifts that in mysterious ways contribute to the expression of a single Spirit—gifts of healing, wisdom, prophecy, miracles, and the like (1 Corinthians 12)—but he nowhere identified merrymaking as one of them. Still, Clemens seemed to believe that making God's creatures laugh was part of his own "nature," in the sense both that humor was instinctual with him and that the social utility of his work in the world might be a "poor" and "pitiful" business but was sanctioned nonetheless.

On the other hand, Clemens may simply have been bearding his brother Orion, one of his favorite pastimes. Orion was considering entering the ministry in those years, and Sam promised to read all of his sermons when that time came, though as "unsympathetically as a man of stone." "I have a religion," he added, "but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor." In the same letter, Clemens identified the two "powerful ambitions" in his life—to be a riverboat pilot and to be a preacher of the gospel. He succeeded at the first, but the Civil War effectively put a stop to this career. As for the other, Clemens confessed to utter failure because "I could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade—i.e. religion." Many years later, Clemens would describe himself as "God's fool"; for the moment, he was content to be God's jester, even if he privately granted the Lord no special authority, and may in fact have thought him a mere pretender to the throne. On the other hand, as opposed to his own stated ambitions, the call to literature was his compromised destiny. To be a humorist, it seemed, was part of his natural constitution; to make a living at that game required a bit more calculation.

I

Hannibal, Missouri was, and is, a small town. But during Sam Clemens's childhood it must have been a hive of activity. In 1830, the township could claim only thirty inhabitants; by 1840 the population had grown thirtyfold. Hannibal had become an important river port and a jumping-off place for goods being shipped to St. Joseph and on to the Far West. It also had become, in Dixon Wecter's word, a "porkopolis," with two pork-houses that annually processed around ten thousand head of swine. It had, as well, a whiskey distillery, a tobacco manufactory, sawmills and planing mills, and a hemp factory. There were four general stores, two hotels, two schools, two churches, and four saloons—probably the right proportion for any self-respecting community. Part of the relative prosperity and security of the place surely had to do with the geographical fact that it was on the way to somewhere else. Human traffic passed through the town from east to west, north to south.

The corpse Sam Clemens discovered in his father's office in 1844, at the age of nine, was that of a man bound for California. He was one of many abroad in the land who meant to improve his fortunes out west. In the gold rush of 1849, waves of emigrants passed through Hannibal, and around eighty local residents joined them in the pursuit of instant riches. Young Sam Clemens, by contrast, first sought his opportunities in the opposite direction, traveling to New York and Philadelphia in 1853. But the more familiar movement was north and south along the Mississippi River, and river traffic was more apt to give the young Clemens a palpable sense of the variety of the human species. Mark Twain, in "Old Times on the Mississippi," renders exquisitely the awakening of a "white town drowsing" when a steamboat arrives in town, but Herman Melville, perhaps, gives a more provocative sense of the human spectacle on a riverboat in The Confidence-Man (1857):

As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; ... jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of the multiform pilgrim species, man.

Melville's description derives from his recollection of his own trip down the Mississippi in September 1840 as far as Cairo, Illinois. If by chance the riverboat Melville traveled on stopped at Hannibal, the twenty-one-year-old New Yorker, without occupation and destined to set sail on the whaler Acushnet in only a few months, might have spotted a five-year-old Sam Clemens in the crowd. Even so early in his life Sam Clemens was probably inured to the spectacle, for he would have taken visitors and newcomers as an ordinary part of village life, just as slavery, sickness, and violence were accustomed facts of his experience. But Melville was alert to the "varieties of mortals" who "blended their varieties of visage and garb" along the river: "Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide." The Mississippi was an appropriate setting for Melville's meditations in the novel on the mysteries of human nature, which, as he was to say, in view of its contrasts and inconsistencies, was much like divine nature, "past finding out." Nevertheless, Melville was as convinced as Clemens would come to be that "The grand points of human nature are the same to-day as they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature." For Melville, the question of human nature was a metaphysical puzzle; for Clemens, it was largely a social condition. This may be simply another way of saying that Melville was a romantic and Clemens was a realist.

Melville rejected out of hand those "sallies of ingenuity, having for their end the revelation of human nature on fixed principles"; the best judges have "excluded with contempt from the ranks of the sciences" doubtful systems of reading character—palmistry, physiognomy, phrenology, psychology. By 1855, the year Clemens rather casually turned his lesson book for learning French into his first journal, the young man from Hannibal had seen for himself a bit of that pilgrim species, man—in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and many towns and villages. Among the earliest entries in that notebook, if one can call them that, were passages copied almost verbatim from George Sumner Weaver's Lectures on Mental Science According to the Philosophy of Phrenology (1852). Clemens copied passages on the four "temperaments"—the bilious, the sanguine, the lymphatic, and the nervous—identifying himself as sanguine and his brother Orion as nervous. Unlike Melville, apparently Clemens did not dispute the authority of this taxonomy of human character, but neither did he regard it as a sacred and unassailable classification, for he did not hesitate to slightly revise the wording in order to make a more perfect fit between his own self-estimation and the type defined by Weaver.

Phrenology was one available method to scrutinize oneself and others, and to that extent was both introspective and outwardly observant. By assuming that certain faculties were located in definite portions of the brain and that the conformation of the skull disclosed the size and therefore the development of those faculties, the phrenologists purported to be able to read individual character and prescribe a recipe for self-improvement. A phrenological "reading" supplied an inventory of the development of mental faculties, forty-two in all, ranging from "amativeness" (the desire to love and be loved), to "firmness" (a tendency toward obstinacy and tenaciousness), to "tune" (a propensity for making or appreciating music). Through a disciplined attempt to "cultivate" or "restrain" certain faculties, one might achieve a harmony of temperament and know what trade or profession to follow, what mate to choose, and how to educate one's children. The desire to know how to "read" the faces of others participated in what David R. Shi terms a "spectatorial vision." Particularly in large cities, commingling crowds, a diverse ethnic population, and constantly shifting social contexts meant, among many other things, that men and women were watching one another intently. They looked for clues about proper behavior, for a means to interpret obscure purposes and motivations, and for a reason to trust or distrust the strangers one encountered every day.

It is unclear how much or little faith Clemens placed in this pseudoscience. As late as 1885, he evidently got a phrenological reading from a Professor Beall in Cincinnati that disclosed Clemens's temperament to be "favorable to hard sense, logic, general intelligence and insight into human nature." Beall also discovered some indication of Wit and Mirth in him and a deficiency in Self-Esteem and Music. But Twain also made great good fun of the practice years later in The American Claimant and "The Secret History of Eddypus." The humor in the man was perpetually bubbling up to the surface, sometimes unbidden, as in his notebook entry in 1865, where the processes of mining for silver and mining for moral sentiments are conflated: "An expert can tell no more about what kind of rock is underneath by the croppings on the surface here than he can tell the quality of a man's brain by the style & material of the hat he wears." As a consequence, the expert concludes the mining company has "got the world by the ass, since it is manifest that no other organ of the earth's frame could have possibly produced such a dysentery of disorganized & half-digested slumgullion as is here presented" (N&J1, 88–89). The real point to be made here, however, is that Clemens at this time was at least to some degree interested in acquiring a system and a method for reading human character. Phrenology may well have been one of those early enthusiasms and untested convictions he disavowed in a letter he wrote to J. H. Burrough in 1876:

You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung & imagining he is re-modeling the world & is entirely capable of doing it right. Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness—& an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19–20. (N&J1, 15)

Though phrenologists might, at times, have been acute in assessing the character of a client, that reflected more on the astuteness of the practitioner than on the "science" he practiced. Besides, a phrenological reading tended to be flattering anyway. Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Ulysses S. Grant received positive readings, and, judging from the few evaluations I have inspected, it is perhaps safe to say, as Garrison Keillor says of the children in Lake Woebegon, that virtually everyone who paid for a reading was bound to come out "above average." As a system, it was impossibly vague and tended to shore up prevailing attitudes. As a form of career counseling, it kept its options open; but as a form of social control, it was very much of its time. A woman's skull generally indicated strong parental feelings and development in the regions of "Inhabitiveness," "Adhesiveness," "Benevolence," and "Veneration"; ergo, this angel in the house belongs at home. An aboriginal American's skull generally reveals a deficiency in "Ideality" and propensities for "Secretiveness," "Cautiousness," and "Pride"; a Negro's skull shows that "animal feelings predominate over both the intellect and the moral sentiments."

As practical explanation, phrenology was not much more than a tautological con game. "Phrenology hardly does more than restate the problem," observed William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890). "To answer the question, 'Why do I like children?' by saying, 'Because you have a large organ of philoprogenitiveness,' but renames the phenomenon to be explained." As a scientific theory, it was a logical muddle that presented each organ or faculty as though it were a fully formed person located in a specific region of the brain. As one German psychologist complained, "We have a parliament of little men together, each one of whom, as happens also in a real parliament, possesses but a single idea which he ceaselessly strives to make prevail.... Phrenology takes a start to get beyond the point of view of the ghost-like soul entity, but she ends by populating the whole skull with ghosts of the same order." Though Twain's reasoning on the nature of conscience in his tale "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" (1876) borrows little, if anything, from the logic of phrenology, the story does portray conscience as something of a little person (a homunculus) that has mysteriously escaped from the narrator's cranium in order to taunt him. The only ingredient in Twain's later thinking on human nature that may owe something to his youthful interest in phrenology is the notion of temperament, but that is a subject to be held in abeyance for a while. For now it is enough to suggest that when Clemens separated himself from the familiar environment of Hannibal and began to travel among strangers, he left what Kenneth Burke has called a "pre-forensic" environment, an "inner circle" of "familiar meanings with which one has grown up." As a consequence, he welcomed any clues that helped him map the terrain of the unfamiliar.

This pre-forensic environment, argues Burke, is "intimate" and authoritative by virtue of unsuspicious familiarity. "The inner circle is essentially the childhood level of experience. Such a thought makes one realize the special appeal that 'regionalism' may have for the poetic mind. For regionalism tends simply to extend the perspective of intimacy and immediacy that one gets in childhood. In childhood one does not think by concepts. 'Authority,' for instance, is not an idea—it has some personal embodiment in father, family doctor, teacher, whom the child accepts or rejects as a person. If he had a domineering maiden aunt with a wart on her nose, 'authority' might become the wart on his maiden aunt's nose." Sooner or later, however, an outer circle intrudes on even the most parochial of minds, "new material accumulates. This new material is not adequately handled by the smaller circle of meanings.... People then must strive to draw a wider circle that will encompass this new matter, left inadequately charted or located by the smaller circle." The writer, or anyone else for that matter, may reject the incursions of the new and unfamiliar and "freeze" emotionally and intellectually, but he or she may also bridge the gap between these two circles by means of concepts that in their turn may be humanized and made familiar by means of assimilation and integration of childlike and adult experience.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Mark Twain and Human Natureby Tom Quirk Copyright © 2007 by The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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