Mark Twain's pessimism

Abstract

The shift of interest from what a man is, to an interest in what made him that way, is a significant indication of the present generation's mechanistic turn of mind. Though mildly interested in the appearances of things, we are intensely concerned with an analysis of what produced those appearances. We delude ourselves with the belief that when we know how a thing works, we know all that is worth knowing. We disregard clearly defined values in a search for obscure and nebulous values which may conceivably lie hidden in the background. In the field of science, such a method is not without usefulness, because there, conjectured reasons can with much exactness be tested and proved, or tested and rejected. When the conjecture method is applied to literature, however, no check can be applied. We can discover endless varieties of motives, and causes, and relationships, but we have no way to put them to the test so that we may know their validity. We are in much the same case as the boy who at once dismembers his new watch to see what makes it go, and and thereafter is unable ever to put it together again. He is able to make other and curious combinations of the contents, but the watch as a watch is lost to him forever. It may be that his unscrewing and reassembling are to him an entirely satisfactory substitute for the watch he has lost, but to the spectator such an occupation seems unnecessary and profitless. Many of our latter-day critics are analogous to the boy with the watch - so interested in what has produced literature and so confident that they can find out, that they fail to give it even a fleeting consideration as literature.