Read The Portable Mark Twain for Free Online

themselves but for others. Their occasional happiness is nearly always mingled with gratitude. Often their sympathies are misplaced, but they are genuine. Huck, for example, is truly anxious for the safety of the supposedly drunken circus rider, and when Jim learns that the boy “dolphin,” rightful heir to the French throne, was locked up in a cell to die, his heartfelt response is “Po’ little chap.” These are comic mistakes in judgment because Huck and Jim take fictions for fact, but in their own fashion the reactions are as revealing of their fundamental decency as, say, Jim’s self-recrimination for hurting his deaf daughter or Huck’s regret for his cruel deception of Jim after they were separated in the fog. Together, the two know as much about the constitutional machinery of the republic or the failed promises of democracy as they do about British aristocracy or the French language, but their mixed-up exploits nevertheless constitute, in Ralph Ellison’s phrase, a “great drama of interracial fraternity.” As such, they provide, at once, an image of the nation’s possibilities and serve as an emblem of its largely self-inflicted limitations.

IV
    To say that most everything Twain wrote after Huckleberry Finn is a falling off and that a decline in creative energy corresponded to a darkening pessimism in the man is to repeat a commonplace. It is also to speak a half-truth. To be sure, in his last years Clemens was often skeptical and cynical. By 1894 he had lost his publishing house and had declared bankruptcy. He was humiliated, but he had other worries as well. His wife, Olivia, had always been frail, but her health was more and more uncertain; and Clemens himself had suffered from various ailments for years. He had embarked on a round-the-world lecture tour in 1895, in order to repair his fortunes and, by paying off his debts, to restore his good name. Clemens and his wife were still out of the country when their oldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis in 1896. After a prolonged illness, Olivia died in 1904; Jean, the youngest daughter, died from an epileptic seizure in December, 1909. In addition, Clemens had become disgusted and angry over his country’s chauvinistic swagger and its imperialistic policies, attitudes expressed most powerfully in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), and he believed that the nation had forsaken worthier objectives to satisfy a rapacious greed. In a word, if Twain had turned pessimist, he had his reasons.
    What is more, these subtractions from his life were complemented by a personal determinist philosophy that had been latent in his thinking since the 1870s but came more and more to the fore as an explanatory principle for human conduct and as a means to puncture the balloon of human vanity. The salient features of Clemens’s determinism are these: that thought is merely the mechanical putting together of sense impressions; that human beings are ruled by an interior master, or conscience, which commands us to gratify it; that originality is a myth and all our ideas derive from heredity and temperament or environment and training, and that instinct is merely “petrified thought” passed down from one generation to another. The author thought his “philosophy” quite scandalous and took some measures to disclose it without damaging his public image. In point of fact, however, much of what he had to say comported well enough with the conclusions of nineteenth-century science and psychology and there was little, if anything, that was very shocking about it.
    There was a curious discrepancy in his system, however, since, in contradiction of his own mechanical and materialistic assumptions, Twain retained a belief that the mind, or “me,” existed apart from its own mental machinery. That “me” took many forms, apparently. After his daughter Susy’s death, Clemens complained