I

Was Mark Twain a realist in the 1870s? The answer is not simple.

What leads one to say yes is that during most of the decade Mark Twain was William Dean Howells’ willing pupil in the practice of realistic writing. As Clemens’ editor, proofreader, reviewer, and friend, Howells, the dean of American realism, had ample opportunity to instruct. And as Howells’ protegé and friend, Clemens had ample opportunity to learn. When Howells as the Atlantic Monthly editor objected that an episode in "Old Times on the Mississippi" lacked naturalness, and counseled Clemens to "stick to actual fact and character in the thing, and give things in detail,"¹ Clemens was eager to please. Later Clemens showed how well he had learned his lesson in realism: responding to Howells’ approval of an account Clemens had written, he declared, "I don’t really see how the story of the runaway horse could read well with the little details of names & places & things left out. They are the true life of all narrative."² He could, moreover, expertly apply the lessons to his fiction when he pleased. If we take realism to be the detailed and objective "picturing" of everyday life, we can find several exemplary chapters in The Gilded Age, Tom Sawyer, and The Prince and the Pauper. Besides, Twain’s style, almost everywhere precise and graphic, was honed for realism.

But several things lead one to say no. The topic and tone of much of Twain’s writing of the seventies is far from realistic. There are, for example, the mythologizing in Roughing It, the outrageous burlesque on scientists in "Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls," the grim fairy tale about an embodied conscience in "The Recent Carnival of Crime," and the fabricated rafting adventures in A Tramp Abroad. Add to this the imaginative, even dreamlike, basis of so much of his work (Howells cordially classified him as an "unconscious" writer)³ plus the fact that Mark Twain never called himself a realist or, indeed, even used the term "realism," and we find ourselves puzzled to answer.

To get nearer the heart of the matter we must turn from such manifestations of realism as technique, topic, and tone to the idea at the center. Behind the practice of realism there needs to be a theory, however implicit, and behind a theory of realism lies some notion of

reality itself. What was Mark Twain’s idea of reality? What to him did the phenomena of nature represent?

There is not room outside of a book to track down, for purposes of comparison, the theories of reality of American realistic writers. And even in the scope of a book the project would be only partly successful. Not only is reality elusive of final definition, but realistic writers were only more or less explicit concerning philosophic fundamentals. Nevertheless, as a way of intimating a cultural milieu for Mark Twain’s ideas, two generalizations about American literary realism will be offered. First, the movement called realism was a response to a crisis. The culture was in transition between the fading authority of supernaturalism and the new dominance of scientific positivism. For millennia what had prevailed was the Greco–Judeo-Christian tradition of a splendid mysticism overarching the natural world and thus completing the cosmic scheme. Now science accepted as real only what could be perceived, recorded, charted, and measured. Second, there was no settled theory of reality among realists; instead there was an evolution. The evolution began with Howells and continued with Mark Twain, and it was in the direction of the crisis itself—from faith in a mysterious truth behind the face of things to the acceptance of nature as without soul.

Howells’ realism—his insistence that writers pay attention only to what is "simple, natural, and honest"—sounds objective and scientific, but he was more beholden to the old way of thinking, particularly to Emerson’s transcendentalism, than perhaps he realized, and therefore his idea of reality is confused. What can he mean in "Criticism and Fiction," his realist manifesto, by saying that "no author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature’s lips and caught her very accent"? This personifying of nature, this coy image of the advertent author, tells us nothing about nature’s message. And where Howells declares that the novelist, like the scientist, cannot ignore any fact of life for the various reasons that "nothing that God has made is contemptible," that the writer "feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men," and that "his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth lives,"⁴ he has hopelessly mixed scientific realism with the a priori convictions of transcendentalism.

Mark Twain too was caught in the crisis and he too suffered confusion, but by the mid-seventies a certain train of thought led him to probe deeply into the question of reality. In his "science of piloting" chapters in "Old Times on the Mississippi" he wrote an

analysis of the transaction between mind and nature which amounts to a statement of reality more clean-cut, more .searching, and more nearly free from contradiction than the so-called realists were generally able to manage.

Mark Twain would arrive at his theory of realism only by resisting several countering experiences and authorities. There was, to begin with, the religion he was born into, the modified Calvinism of Hannibal’s Presbyterian church and Old Ship of Zion Methodist Sunday school. It taught him that the way one lived on this earth had a good deal to do with temporal rewards and punishments and with whether one went to heaven or hell at last, though the final decision in every case was up to the close-hovering Almighty, who was just but awful and mysterious. Reality under this dispensation lay in the realm of the moral and prudential, and although the doctrine produced personal anxiety because of its moral imperatives it afforded philosophical security through its neatly circumscribed world view. Unfortunately Clemens’ subsequent intellectual understanding of the "religious folly [he was] born in"⁵ was strong enough to deprive him of its security but not always strong enough to relieve him of its anxieties.

A second experience working against a theory of realism was his dislocation following the advent of the Civil War. During the several years preceding the war Clemens prospered in the classic tradition of the self-made man. Industrious, studious, unsponsored, he rose from journeyman printer to licensed riverboat pilot. Indoctrinated in the Protestant ethic and succeeding according to formula, Clemens must have known in his heart that he lived in a moral universe. What happened to him next must surely have shaken that faith. The Civil War not only canceled his career but involved him in volunteering for and then deserting from the Confederate army. What could he do after skedaddling? Like Huck Finn, who also found himself at odds with "civilization," he lit out for the Territory. Uprooted from a verdant valley and a prestigious profession, a runaway from military duty, he found himself member of an unshapely community in a wasteland newly populated by silver-feverish prospectors, miners, promoters, and hell raisers. In migrating from the Mississippi to Nevada Territory he had moved from homeland to a natural and moral wilderness.

The experience introduced him to reality as absurdity. His signed "reporting" for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (1862–1864) was anything but objective; things could not be taken seriously.

Instead he wrote burlesques and hoaxes; he indulged in droll exaggerations and understatements; he assumed adversarial stances and developed a penchant for destroying personalities whether of friend or foe. His recoil from reality must have been strong, indeed, considering that for four previous years he had been trained in the exacting discipline of riverboat piloting in which a pilot "cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so; he must know it. . . . "⁶ But as an Enterprise reporter, according to his colleague William Wright, when it came to "‘cast-iron’ items, he gave them ‘a lick and a promise.’ He hated to have to do with figures, measurements, and solid facts. . . ."⁷ He would leave Nevada in a couple of years and eventually discover environments that he could pay close and loving attention to, but once he had learned the burlesque mode as a way of coping with the Nevada situation, it was always thereafter likely to emerge.

A third hindrance to his realism was his training in and penchant for showmanship. From 1866 on he was in and out of show business by virtue of lecture appearances, after-dinner speeches, and so on. As he understood it, the reality of showmanship was the effect created, and the effect depended on the showman’s ability to adapt to and exploit a particular audience. ". . . the same old practicing on audiences still goes on—" he wrote to his wife while on lecture tour in 1871, "the same old feeling of pulses & altering manner & matter to suit the symptoms."⁸ A few years earlier he had made an even more explicit analysis of the realities of showmanship while pondering the reason for the extraordinary success of the preaching of Edwin Hubble Chapin. Dr. Chapin could "just seize a congregation"; it was as if there were "an invisible wire leading from every auditor’s soul straight to a battery hidden away somewhere in that preacher’s head. . . ." What was it about Chapin’s delivery, Mark Twain mused, that "chained" his listeners? He concluded

that it must be Mr. Chapin’s strong, deep, unmistakable earnestness. There is nothing like that to convince people. Nobody can have confidence in cold, monotonous, inanimate utterances, though they were teeming with truth and wisdom. Manner is everything in these cases—matter is nothing. The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might.⁹

Manner is everything; matter is nothing as a statement of principle is at the opposite pole from realism. It might be called the Tom Sawyer principle in view of the fact that in less than ten years Twain would have illustrated that principle through Tom’s ability to create from his playmates pirate crews, robber gangs, and A-rab caravans

out of nothing more than fantasy and "style." Mark Twain had a Tom Sawyerish streak himself and yielded to it more than a few times, as in his theatrical description of the restoration of the holy fountain in A Connecticut Yankee in which the boss turns into a megalomaniac medicine man and after terrifying the populace with mumbojumbo concludes, "you can’t throw too much style into a miracle."¹⁰ But in the seventies Mark Twain generally kept his fantasies and his fantasy-prone characters under reasonable artistic control. In Tom Sawyer, for example, Tom’s fantasies are psychologically plausible.

Moral anxiety, hoaxing and burlesquing, promotion of manner and style to the injury of truth: these are some of Mark Twain’s anti-realistic responses. To them could be added others whose causes are more difficult to trace, such as his emotional oscillations which sometimes caused disturbing shifts in literary tone. But a sufficient number of these responses have been displayed, perhaps, to make his achievement of important thinking about reality a matter of wonder. He did go beyond his anti-realistic responses, and he developed his ideas of reality from the mainstream of Western culture.

For his theory of realism Mark Twain depended on two sets of ideas: deism and Darwinism. They represent, indeed, along with his boyhood Presbyterianism, the foundational ideas of his life, and he described his exposure to them in terms of excitement and shock. As a cub pilot he read Tom Paine’s "deist’s Bible," The Age of Reason, "with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power."¹¹ Darwin’s The Descent of Man was the book that "startled the world."¹²

It is nearly impossible to exaggerate the impact of The Age of Reason on the mind of Mark Twain. He read it when he was twenty-one or twenty-two, and apparently not again until he was in his seventies, yet its pristine meanings—and even phraseology—were wedged into his memory. Twice, that we know of, he wrote deistic credos echoing Paine,¹³ and in one he copied the format of Paine’s "profession of faith" with its series of paragraphs, each beginning "1 believe . . ." or "I do not believe . . ."

With Paine as his mentor Clemens declared that God revealed himself neither personally nor scripturally but through "His works," that His goodness was evinced not through special providences, since ‘the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws," but

through the "beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his colossal universe. . . ."¹⁴

Under deism the ground of reality for Mark Twain became the universal laws. Devised by a rational and benevolent deity, the laws not only regulated the workings of the cosmos but through their manifestations in nature assured men of the grandeur and goodness of the divine plan. The creation, Paine declared, is the word of God, "an ever existing original which every man can read."¹⁵ God made nature intelligible of His laws and gave man the intelligence to read it, thus opening the way for a meaningful transaction between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of appearances.

Deism is a winsome philosophy when abstractly regarded, but not without difficulties when applied to particulars. If the universal laws work with such perfect order and beneficence, how does one explain the accidents, absurdities, and horrors of life? When one turns from the telescope to survey the everyday scene, the divine order and significance of things is perhaps harder to discern.

During the century and a half following Newton, science turned its attention more and more to the minutiae of our planet. Among the multitudinous forms of life, among fossil remains, among the kinds and shapes of rocks, science sought to understand the laws of nature. Taxonomy—the classifying of things according to their principles or laws—flourished. Fixity of species was taken for granted. After all, nature manifested laws, and laws are changeless. But in the nineteenth-century doubts about nature’s conformity to some divine plan grew and climaxed with Darwin. The Darwinian revolution only incidentally involved the man-from-monkey notion; Darwin’s main achievement was to unfix nature, to disconnect it from absolutes and ideals, to turn public attention from nature’s laws to its processes, and to show nature as in flux. The new order was change and perpetual adjustment thereto.

Mark Twain had to be caught up in Darwinian ideas if only because no thoughtful citizen could escape them. He was, moreover, an admirer of Darwin (Darwin was to him "that great mind laboring for the whole human race"¹⁶) and read much of what Darwin wrote beginning with The Descent of Man in l871.¹⁷ He, like so many of his contemporaries, resisted Darwinian ideas during the long process of accepting them. By the 1870s the Darwinian vision of reality (corroborated by his experience) had modified his deism and prepared him to state a theory of realism more modern than Howells’.

He was, indeed, on the way to such a statement in 1867 when, toward the end of his sea voyage from California to New York, he

wrote what amounts to a modern psalm on the wonders of navigation—on the intelligence of man and the intelligibility of the physical world:

The ship has beautiful charts, compiled by Lieut. Maury, which are crammed with shoals, currents, lights, buoys, soundings, and winds, and calms and storms—black figures for soundings, and bright spots for beacons, and so on, and an interminable tangle, like a spider’s web, of red lines denoting the tracks of hundreds of ships whose logs were sent to Maury—everything mapped out so accurately that a man might know what water he had, what current, what beacon he was near, what style of wind he might expect, and from which direction, on any particular day of the year, at any given point on the world’s broad surface. "They that go down to the sea in ships see the wonders of the great deep"—but this modern navigation out-wonders any wonder the scriptural writers dreamt of. To see a man stand in the night, when everything looks alike—far out in the midst of a boundless sea—and measure from one star to another and tell to a dot right where the ship is—tell the very spot the little insignificant speck occupies on a vast expanse of land and sea twenty-five thousand miles in circumference! Verily, with his imperial intellect and his deep-searching wisdom, man is almost a god!’⁸

In comprehending the charts, in appreciating the contract between the planet’s phenomena and man’s "imperial intellect," Mark Twain enjoyed a moment of deistic beatitude.

His vision was deistic with a modern difference. The difference is one of emphasis—on human intelligence rather than on the intrinsic significance of nature. To Tom Paine the visible world was the manifestation of divine principles, of God’s unchangeable order. So simple a thing as a drawn triangle, said Paine, could not exist except that it was preceded by the principle of the triangle. The triangle "is no other than the image of the principle; it is a delineation to the eye, and from thence to the mind, of a principle that would otherwise be imperceptible." To Paine the first and most important part of the deistic contract was the divine order of things. The secondary part was "the choicest gift of God to man, the GIFT OF REASON."¹⁹ With his reason man might read the creation to learn the divine principles behind it. To Mark Twain here it is man’s reason, his "deep-searching wisdom," that organizes the indifferent movements of ocean and air.

Nevertheless, he had been graced with a vision of wholeness, and by 1875 he was ready to set down the discipline for its attainment.

Once again his metaphor was navigation, this time river piloting, and not piloting merely but the "wonderful science," "this great science," the "noble science of piloting."²⁰

The process by which the cub pilot learns "the shape of the river" through absorbing its countless details is aptly called a science, for it is not only deistic in basis but corresponds with the Darwinian method of understanding nature through assembling and assimilating countless bits of data. It is also the process through which Twain, the tyro novelist (he was in the throes of writing his first novel, Tom Sawyer), was trying to express the mystery and method of transforming the myriad memories of his Mississippi River boyhood into a shapely work of art. That the "science of piloting" chapters of "Old Times on the Mississippi" are in effect a statement of creative theory seems to me abundantly apparent. Not only is the river referred to again and again as a book, but the chapter "A Pilot’s Needs" might as well be titled "A Novelist’s Needs," for in it he ruminates on the marvel of memory, on the operation of the unconscious mind, on the temptation of slipping from one memory to another irresponsibly through association, and on the need for a proportioning judgment. With both analogies in mind—piloting as science and piloting as writing—let us see what the process of learning the river amounts to.

The first step in learning the river, Clemens’ mentor, pilot Horace Bixby explains to him, is to "‘get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away."’²¹ In due time cub Clemens "had a note-book that fairly bristled with the names of towns, ‘points,’ bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.," but since the information was only in the book and not in his head, his next task was to get the names of things "by heart." Once memorized, the data remained a "curiously inanimate mass of lumber." To know the name of a bend is of little help to a pilot. He must know the shape of the bend and finally "the shape of the river perfectly." Clemens set to work mentally "photographing" the shapes of parts of the river, only to find out that the shapes were always changing. They changed geologically—"The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything"—and they changed with perspective.

I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold into the bank! If there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape, I would find that

tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest, and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it! No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics.

"It was plain," Clemens concluded, "that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all the different ways that could be thought of,—upside down, wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and ‘thort-ships’. . . ." But Bixby’s advice, already given, is

"No! you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that’s in your head, and never mind the one that’s before your eyes."²²

More than an amusing reminiscence, Mark Twain’s formulation of the science of piloting, propitiously accomplished in the flood tide of his genius, is a philosophical statement of great power and striking modernity. The river, like Darwin’s planet, has been presented as a process. The vision that arises out of Origin of Species is of a global crust that for eons has risen, cracked, fallen, folded, never repeating a shape; and of generational streams of organism, forming ever new varieties and species while old ones die, disappear, or are luckily fossilized. Darwin achieved this vision only by moving beyond taxonomy, the comfortable science of naming things, just as cub Clemens later found that learning the names of things was only a beginning to understanding the shape of the ever-changing river.

Mark Twain was sure that he had discovered something new and important in the science of piloting. "I wish to show," he wrote, "in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderful science it is."

Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore, it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sandbars are never at rest, whose channels are forever dodging and shrinking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse or a single buoy. . . . I feel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that I feel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it who had piloted a steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject.²³

217

When he wrote this, Mark Twain could hardly have had the Darwinian revolution in mind; nevertheless, his contrast between the ease of navigating marked or unchanging channels and the difficulty of coping with the Mississippi is neatly analogous to the contrast between the manageable view of nature held when "fixity of species" was the byword and the Darwinian realization of nature as ever changing and ever requiring new adaptations.

In formulating this new science, Mark Twain moved beyond deism and its inherent Platonism. At first glance Mark Twain’s learning to steer by the shape of the river, the one in his head rather than the one before his eyes, may seem Platonic. But the shape of the river in terms of the pilot’s responsibility cannot possibly signify some unchanging channel beneath the shifting surface of the water. Instead, the shape must be determined anew at every bend and stretch. Safe water is not necessarily where it was last season or even last week, though the river’s apparent shape may not have changed. Not only shapes but countless signs and myriad memories point to the channel of the moment. The shape of the river is its three-dimensional reality, and the pilot by virtue of his superbly trained nervous system can, as it were, see to the bottom everywhere, can see where to run in easy water and where to avoid snags. Nor do the river’s plumbed secrets yield any divine message from God through nature to man. The river is obedient to the laws of physics but is indifferent to human weal.

Out of piloting, out of four years of making sense of meticulous observations, Mark Twain developed a theory of reality. It said that things, in all their incontrovertible and ever-changing particularity, are facts but not truth. It said that mind—the "imperial intellect"—both through logical thinking and unconscious processes—makes patterns and meanings out of facts. It was a theory which while writing the piloting chapters he regarded with great equanimity, and though his serenity was temporary, one likes to think that he could not have written great novels without first having dived so deeply into the question of reality.

Certainly his theory of the novelist’s materials and the novelist’s art is strikingly similar to his explanation of the pilot’s transaction with reality. That theory is most completely expressed in "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us" (1895). Bourget had written Outre-Mer, an assessment of American life as seen by a foreign visitor, and Twain was skeptical of the validity of that assessment. Bourget’s method was all right as far as it went: "he was an Observer, and

had a System—that used by naturalists and other scientists." He observed Americans and was presently able to classify them and to label the groups. But naming—as the cub pilot had learned—is not the same thing as understanding.

The Observer of Peoples has to be a Classifier, a Grouper, a Deducer, a Generalizer, a Psychologizer; and, first and last, a Thinker. He had to be all these, and when he is at home, observing his own folk, he is often able to prove competency. But history has shown that when he is abroad observing unfamiliar peoples the chances are heavily against him.

All that a foreigner can do, really, is to "Photograph the exteriors of a nation." He cannot "report its interior—its soul, its life, its speech, its thought."²⁴

Only the native novelist can know the soul of a people, and he learns it through "unconscious observation—absorption." Just as with the pilot, whose memory "unconsciously . . . lays up its vast stores, hour by hour, day by day,"²⁵ the novelist acquires his knowledge through "years and years of unconscious absorption; years and years of intercourse with the life concerned; of living it, indeed; sharing personally in its shames and prides; its joys and griefs, its loves and hates, its prosperities and reverses, its shows and shabbinesses." The native novelist does not, however, try to generalize the nation. "No, he lays plainly before you the ways and speech and life of a few people grouped in a certain place—his own place—and that is one book." Only "when a thousand able novels have been written [will] you have the soul of the people, the speech of the people. . . . And the shadings of character, manners, feelings, ambitions, will be infinite."²⁶ Although "soul of the people" has a Platonic ring to it, it can best be translated as total impression of life rather than as pre-existent essence. The vision of life here is rigorously anti-transcendental. The most thorough apprehension of human affairs will reveal not a mystic unity but infinite variety.

Of what value to Mark Twain was the science of piloting? He set out to answer that question toward the end of his March 1875 installment of "Old Times on the Mississippi." "The face of the water," he exultantly began, "became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice." The metaphors here are rich and mythic. The river communicates; it has a mind

and, as it were, a voice. The river’s message verges on the metaphysical. One is reminded of Howells’ author putting his ear to Nature’s lips, or of Paine’s declaring that "The creation speaketh a universal language. . . . It is an ever existing original which every man can read."²⁷

Twain continued in this exuberant vein for a sentence or two: "There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every re-perusal." Then he was surprised and swamped by a surge of contradiction. The face of the water is not a wonderful book. It does not yield "cherished secrets." It simply tells the pilot of hidden perils. A "faint dimple" on the water’s surface marking a submerged wreck or rock is "hideous to a pilot’s eye." The river’s face is not attractive "but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter." A paragraph begun in joy ends in horror.

From this storm of ambivalence Mark Twain sought the harbor of antithesis:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river . . . I had made an acquisition. But I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river. . . . All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.²⁸

The science of piloting, he concludes, has only practical value, but the beginning of his evaluation should not be forgotten. That beginning depends on the promise of deism, a promise of meaning behind the face of things, a promise which he would come to disbelieve but never, to his resentment, forget. What he learned from experience and from the Darwinian view of nature was that things have such shape and meaning as the creative mind gives them. He was his own kind of realist, capable of observing and reporting the world around him but not limited to it. Practiced in anti-realistic modes and relieved of commitment to things as they are, for there was no special Truth in them, he experimented in many imaginative shapes to see if they would signify. By 1875 he was, indeed, becoming an existentialist (though he never knew the term) and was destined in his audacious and lonely way to challenge (not always successfully) absurdity with his imperial intellect.

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON

NOTES

    ¹Mark Twain-Howells Letters, ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), p. 46.
   ²Mark Twain-Howells Letters, p. 203.
   ³Mark Twain-Howells Letters, p. 780.
   ⁴Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 14, 15.
   ⁵Mark Twain-Howells Letters, p. 461.
   ⁶Life on the Mississippi (Author’s National Edition, IX), p. 109.
   ⁷Mark Twain of the Enterprise, ed. Henry Nash Smith (Berkeley and Los Angeles; Univ. of California Press, 1957), p. 17.
   ⁸The Love Letters of Mark Twain, ed. Dixon Wecter (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 162.
   ⁹Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown, ed. Franklin Walker and G. Ezra Dane (New York: Knopf, 1940), pp. 174–75.
   ¹⁰A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, p. 197.
   ¹¹A. B. Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography (New York: Harper, 1912), p. 1445.
   ¹²Mark Twain’s Autobiography, ed. A. B. Paine (New York: Harper, 1924), I, 146.
   ¹³The first is published in part in Biography, pp. 412–13. It was written around 1870. The second is in Biography, pp. 1583–84, written in "the early eighties." Further evidence of his attraction to Paine’s philosophy was Twain’s becoming a Mason on February 18, 1861. Endorsed by Paine himself, Masonry "was a specialized type of deism." Alexander E. Jones, "Mark Twain and Freemasonry," American Literature, 26 (November 1954), 366–73.
   ¹⁴Biography, pp. 1583, 412.
   ¹⁵Thomas Paine, Representative Selections, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (New York: American Book Co., 1944), p. 258.
   ¹⁶Mark Twain’s Speeches, ed. A. B. Paine (New York: Harper, 1923), pp. 337–38.
   ¹⁷Clemens’ copy of The Descent of Man with his numerous underlinings and marginalia is in the Mark Twain Papers. Certain notations establish the date of reading as around November 1871.
   ¹⁸Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown, pp. 77–78.
   ¹⁹Paine, pp. 264–65.
   ²⁰Life on the Mississippi, pp. 86, 140.
   ²¹Bixby’s advice led Mark Twain into his lifelong practice of keeping a notebook. In the cub pilot’s notebook Clemens recorded data which would yield the shape of the river; in subsequent ones he recorded observations that helped him shape his books.
   ²²Life on the Mississippi, pp. 59, 60, 70, 70–71, 72, 75, 76, 72.
   ²³Life on the Mississippi, pp. 86–87.
   ²⁴Literary Essays, (Author’s National Edition, XXII), pp. 142–46.
   ²⁵Life on the Mississippi, p. 110.
   ²⁶Literary Essays, pp. 145–47.
   ²⁷Paine, p. 258.
   ²⁸Life on the Mississippi, pp. 82–85.