IV
In all probability the most celebrated if not equally admired Americans in England in the fall of 1872 were Henry M. Stanley and Mark Twain. Five years earlier their paths had crossed in St. Louis. Now Stanley was back from his journey through Zanzibar and Tanganyika, and although he was soon to be acclaimed as the great explorer of his era he was at first the target of an extraordinary campaign of vilification. He was abused as an impostor, not an American at all but the bastard son of a poor Welsh farmer. His claim that he had found Livingstone was denounced as a lie, and the letters and journals of Livingstone that he had brought back with him were called forgeries. Eventually Livingstone’s family validated the documents, Stanley’s claims were accepted, and as sign and symbol of his rehabilitation Queen Victoria gave him her thanks and a gold snuffbox set with jewels. Years later, Stanley said that from the bitter bread he ate for a while in London in 1872 he could trace all his subsequent thoughts and actions.
For Mark Twain too his encounter with the English was of critical importance. Stanley’s experience was of martyrdom vindicated, Mark Twain’s of unalloyed triumph. Stanley was ostracized partly because he practiced what the English thought of as cheeky American journalism. Mark Twain was the hero of a vogue for American humor, a love feast which, after forty or fifty years of scorn for American culture, had begun with Lowell, Holmes, and Artemus Ward. Taste had turned to the American West; Mark Twain arrived not only as Artemus Ward’s heir but as the ranking Western humorist and chronicler, and, like Whitman and Stephen Crane but to a much greater extent, he was accepted in England long before his probationary period in America had run out. Twelve volumes by or attributed to him were in print in England, and they barely satisfied the demand; half of these were cheap editions published by the enterprising pirate John Camden Hotten. Hotten’s introduction to Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (1873) was one of the first biographical accounts in print, and through Hotten’s piracies books by Mark Twain were made available to the English mass audience at a shilling or two a copy. Although Clemens did not get a cent from Hotten’s huge circulation, he did benefit from the enormously extended reputation it gave him. Thus, while one of his secondary purposes in coming to England was to stop Hotten’s piracies, he had to face up to the bitter paradox that he owed much of his standing in England to a man who not only stole from him but also took the insulting liberty of eking out little Mark Twain collections called Eye-Openers and Screamers with material by his own hand. “John Camden Hottentot,” Clemens called him in a letter to the Spectator written soon after his arrival. “My books are bad enough just as they are written, then what must they be after Mr. John Camden Hotten has composed half a dozen chapters and added the same to them?”
Back home, he could hardly help thinking, the word “humorist” was fenced about with all sorts of restrictions. The man adored by the masses could be certain that the best he could expect from the custodians of official culture was cool tolerance. In England, despite all the class divisions he believed would make such rich material for satire, there seemed to be no class division in taste as far as humor was concerned. He was a hero of the mass audience, but he was also given almost every honor and hospitality short of the dread accolade of having to dine with the Queen. At a ceremonial dinner attended by “the brains of London” he heard the name Mark Twain greeted with an ovation so loud and enthusiastic that the introductions came to an end. The Sheriff of London, in robes of office, gave him a speech of welcome that was “the longest and most extravagantly complimentary” of the evening. “I thought I was the humblest in that great titled assemblage,” he told Livy. “I did not know I was a lion.”
The lion had not been in England a month before he discovered that every door was open to him, that he was welcomed everywhere, “just the same as if I were a Prodigal Son getting back home again.” Charles Reade and Canon Charles Kingsley came to call on him; George Dolby, who had managed Dickens, urged him to lecture. He went to a stag hunt and dined with a direct descendant of the Plantagenet kings—“Why it had all the seeming of hob-nobbing with the Black Prince in the flesh!” At the Lord Mayor’s banquet, the Chancellor of England, wigged, gowned, and followed by a lackey who bore his sword and held his train, walked arm in arm with Mr. Clemens and told him how much he admired his work, how often he read it. “He always has my books at hand,” Clemens noted. “And it was pleasant in such an illustrious assemblage to overhear people talking about me at every step, and always complimentarily,” he wrote to Livy at midnight from the Langham Hotel, “and also to have these grandees come up and introduce themselves and apologize for it.” He did not get tired of reciting these triumphs and celebrations, so panoplied and full of medieval pageantry and yet so American in their enthusiasm and spontaneity, so different from the rejections of Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland and from the cool and standoffish friendship, deliberately English in style, of the Boston illuminates.
He paid back his welcome in kind. “I would rather live in England than America—which is treason,” he confessed to Livy. And he went about his visiting and sightseeing—to Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, Stratford and Oxford—in a love trance, humble, as eager to learn as any of the guidebook tourists he had once made fun of, dutifully reminding himself as much as Livy that the a in “Avon” is pronounced like the a in “Kate” and that the second w in “Warwick” is silent. “Rural England is too absolutely beautiful to be left out of doors,” he exclaimed, “ought to be under a glass case.”
Even before he left for home in November, after a little over two months, he had given up his plan to write a satirical book about the English. He had been too busy going to banquets, making speeches, and having a good time to collect his material: this was the explanation he gave, but beneath it lay the simple fact that he adored the English too much to satirize them. The skepticism and indignation that had sparked the humor of The Innocents Abroad were gone; now he felt them only toward his own country. He joked about the English in a genial way. “The finest monument in the world erected to glorify—the Commonplace,” he said of the Albert Memorial. “It is the most genuinely humorous idea I have met with in this grave land.” In a speech at the Savage Club, which he later revised for publication, he made a further comment about it which some of the Americans present preferred to believe was a mere slip of the tongue: “I admired that magnificent monument which will stand in all its beauty when the name it bears has crumbled into dust.” As for the local practice of measuring distances by cab fares: “I suppose if I were to ask a Londoner how far it is from the sublime to the ridiculous, he would try to express it in coin.”
Clemens had gone to Europe and the Holy Land on the Quaker City a representative democrat certain of the moral and material superiority of the American present to the historical past, of the New World to the Old. In the five years since, his attitude had become more troubled, less simplistic, an index of his growing bewilderment by America in the Gilded Age. The English made a lion of him partly because he epitomized certain exotic qualities which they considered distinctly American and distinctly Western. He in turn adored the English because their way of life offered him for the first time a baseline by which he could measure his discontent with his own country, and instead of a satire on the English he wrote The Gilded Age, an angry and reactionary book about Americans. He was fond of remembering Hannibal as “a little democracy” which also had an “aristocratic taint” which kept class lines clearly drawn. In England his appetite for a romantic past coupled with an orderly and dignified present was roused and satisfied. He saw about him stability, government by a responsible elite, the acceptance of a gentleman’s code. These were painful contrasts with the chicanery and cynicism, the demoralized civil service, the abuse of universal suffrage and legislative power, and all the excesses and failures of American society in the 1870s going through the most dynamic but least governable phase of its growth.
Eventually his Anglomania, as Howells called it, would cool, a
nd its obverse, his disgust with American democracy, would be moderated. In 1886, when he was writing A Connecticut Yankee, he was to welcome Henry Stanley to Boston with a tribute to his “indestructible Americanism.” “In this day and age,” he said, “when it is the custom to ape and imitate English methods and fashions, it is like a breath of fresh air to stand in the presence of this untainted American citizen,” and he concluded, “He is a product of institutions which exist in no other country on earth—institutions that bring out all that is best and most heroic in a man.” But in October 1872 he saw Stanley in quite another light. The campaign of vilification was over, Stanley was a popular hero, the mood of the Establishment was one of apology and reparation. At a dinner given by the Royal Geographical Society to make amends, Clemens was offended by Stanley’s bitterness. Instead of burying the hatchet and accepting the apologies and the honors, Stanley, for months a pariah, was still angry and resentful, and he flung out taunts at his hosts. Clemens’ psychological stance and vocabulary sum up the extent of his commitment to the English code and the rapidity of his transition from rough diamond to squire. The worst of it, he told Livy, was that Stanley was not a gentleman. He was a “puppy,” a “spaniel,” a monster of ingratitude and meanness of spirit. And Clemens was glad after all that Stanley was not really an American, having been born in Wales, “though indeed he must have learned his puppyism with us.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Era of incredible rottenness”
I
CLEMENS’ STORM-TOSSED VOYAGE home in November on the Cunarder Batavia only fed his Anglomania. The captain brought his ship about in a gale and sent off a volunteer lifeboat crew to pick up nine survivors of a dismasted bark. “It was worth any money to see that lifeboat climb those dizzy mountains of water, in a driving mist of spume-flakes, and fight its way inch by inch in the teeth of the gale,” Clemens wrote soon after landing. “Just the mere memory of it stirs a body so, that I would swing my hat and disgorge a cheer now, if I could do so without waking the baby.” And two months later, learning that the men had been rewarded by both the Royal Humane Society and the steamship line, he again paid tribute, in a letter to the New York Tribune, to English valor, English generosity, English benevolence, English fair-dealing, and the Cunard Steamship Company.
The English could do no wrong then, it seemed, and as the United States began a second term under the permissive leadership of its greatest military hero, a better judge of horseflesh than of human character, it appeared to Clemens that the Americans could do nothing right. Grant’s Vice-President, his private secretary, his brother-in-law, his Secretary of War, and his Secretary of the Treasury all had been or were soon to be implicated in the sort of crude jobbery and cynical abuse of office and influence that William M. Tweed practiced profitably in New York. And as the century dragged on toward a mock-heroic finale on San Juan Hill, other distinctive phenomena became clear: corporations and combinations emerged to stifle competition and swallow up the individual; the bribe became a convention of political life and the vote a commodity on sale; the economy relied on gaudily launched balloons of credit ballasted with only a brick or two of assets; there was misery and alienation in the cities; the cash nexus was supreme. “The people had desired money before this day,” Clemens said of Jay Gould in 1906, “but he taught them to fall down and worship it.”
To be sure, a strong case can be made for a more tolerant account of the Gilded Age. There was corruption, but there was also exposure, venality but not apathy; protest and reform were in the air. The railroad wars wasted men and money, but the railroads were built. There were panics and uncertainties, but by the end of the century the country achieved industrial maturity, and its means of production were rationalized. The age had its monuments of garish although exuberant taste such as the Philadelphia City Hall, which carried gimcrackery about as far (and as high) as it could go, but the Roeblings built the Brooklyn Bridge, a structure of purity and aspiration seeming to leap out of its times, and men of such originality as H. H. Richardson, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder were contributing to what Lewis Mumford would call a “Buried Renaissance.” A surprising number of periodicals of intellectual respectability if not incandescent excitement answered the needs of a rapidly growing audience. William James, C. S. Peirce, and Josiah Royce flourished; learned societies multiplied; the universities came of age. There were parvenus and vulgarians in places of power and influence, but they were there by virtue of a new social and economic mobility; a silent revolution had made every man a potential tycoon. And from the tycoons themselves, who had all the while insisted on the coincidence of private gain and public interest, began to flow endowments for the public good.
For Clemens at the time—and involved in his time—there appeared to be overwhelming evidence that democracy was a failure. Even Nook Farm was not immune to moral decay. No one appears to have been bothered by Henry Ward Beecher’s public conduct in accepting a fee of a thousand dollars to endorse a truss or, on another occasion, in accepting fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of stock from Jay Cooke in return for publishing favorable editorials in the Christian Union about the Northern Pacific. But while Clemens was still in England walking arm in arm with titled grandees, Victoria Woodhull—protégée of Commodore Vanderbilt, feminist, clairvoyant, and shill for a bottled “Elixir of Life”—published in her paper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, a sensational account of an adulterous relationship between Beecher and Mrs. Theodore Tilton. Victoria and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, were jailed for publishing obscene matter, but the charge remained in the air for years and was never really settled to anybody’s full satisfaction. At Nook Farm Henry’s intimate conduct became a shibboleth. Isabella Hooker, the queen regnant of the suburban grove and, like her friend Victoria Woodhull, a feminist and spiritualist, announced her firm belief that Henry was guilty. (Two years later Henry paid her back by announcing his firm belief that she was insane and ought to be locked up.) Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mary Beecher Perkins took up Henry’s defense, and the sisterly visiting back and forth between their houses and Isabella’s house came to an end; they closed their doors to her. And soon after he rejoined Livy and Susy in Hartford the newest member of the once harmonious Nook Farm community took his stand in respect to its feared and haughty leader. “Sam says Livy shall not cross Mrs. Hooker’s threshold,” Orion’s wife reported to Jane Clemens, “and if he talked to Mrs. H he will tell her in plain words the reason.”
The entire squalid and drawn-out affair—“the Beecher horror,” James Russell Lowell called it—became for Clemens symptomatic of his times, a nauseating way of summing up the contrast between his own country and the England he had just left and would soon rush back to. “The present era of incredible rottenness is not Democratic, it is not Republican, it is national,” he told Orion a few years later. “This nation is not reflected in Charles Sumner, but in Henry Ward Beecher, Benjamin Butler, Whitelaw Reid, Wm. M. Tweed. Politics are not going to cure moral ulcers like these, nor the decaying body they fester upon.” As the republic neared the centennial celebration of its birth, images of sickness and decay were everywhere. The patrician Lowell dreaded the “festering” daily tidings of “public scandal, private fraud”; from his study at Elmwood, the great house in Cambridge where he was born and where he would die, he could watch the sun setting over a long curve of the Charles, the marshes beyond, and “the Land of Broken Promise.” Lowell wondered, when he was criticized for his bitterness, whether Lincoln’s government of, by, and for the people had not become instead a “Kakistocracy,” a government “for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools.” In Washington, where he derived from his clerk’s job a subsistence that Leaves of Grass never gave him, Walt Whitman took stock of his times and his country. “The depravity of the business classes of our country,” he wrote in 1871, “is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.” In the hazy background of Democratic Vistas he saw the ultimate vindication of brotherhood, but
for him the foreground was dominated by “appalling dangers of universal suffrage” and more “hollowness of heart” than had ever existed. For Whitman both society and politics were “canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten.” But neither Lowell nor Whitman—one to become ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the other to become the guru of Camden, New Jersey—was involved in the same direct and painful way as Mark Twain with the failures and excesses they deplored. They looked at the American scene as through a window, not a mirror.
Mark Twain’s disgust with his times was partly the index of his involvement in them, and his disgust grew more bitter through the 1870s, the decade which was the core of what he called the Gilded Age. He could observe in himself the same wild speculative mania he saw all about him. Pamela and Orion lived all their lives in the expectation that the Tennessee land would make their fortunes, but while Sam eventually refused to have anything to do with exploiting the land (beyond writing about it), he was always, as miner, inventor, promoter, investor, and publisher, involved with some scheme that promised millions. He loved money for its own sake and for the luxury it could buy—soon after coming back from England he bought a tract of land at Nook Farm, on Farmington Avenue, and set an architect and builders to work on his stately mansion—but at the same time he feared in himself the “hardness and cynicism” which he said “the lust for money” was bound to produce. He knew the politics of the Gilded Age at first hand. “Was reporter in a legislature two sessions and the same in Congress one session,” he wrote in 1890, “and thus learned to know personally three sample-bodies of the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.” He loved the world of power and money: he was to be Grant’s friend, admirer, and publisher; Andrew Carnegie was to send him barrels of whiskey from his cellars; Henry H. Rogers, a chief strategist of the Standard Oil trust, was to help him out of bankruptcy and become “the only man I would give a damn for.” Such intimate involvements, both present and latent, with what also alarmed and disgusted him are part of the strength of the book he began to write early in 1873.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 22
