Autobiography of Mark Twain (88 page)

These episodes used to vex me, years and years ago. But they don’t vex me now. I am older. If a person thinks that he has known me at some time or other, all I require of him is that he shall consider it a distinction to have known me; and then, as a rule, I am perfectly willing to remember all about it and add some things that he has forgotten.

Twichell came down from Hartford to be present at that meeting, and we chatted and smoked after we got back home. And reference was made again to that disastrous Boston speech which I made at Whittier’s seventieth birthday dinner; and Joe asked me if I was still minded to submit that speech to that Club in Washington, day after to-morrow, where Colonel Harvey and I are to be a couple of the four guests. And I said “No,” I had given that up—which was true. Because I have examined that speech a couple of times since, and have changed my notion about it—changed it entirely. I find it gross, coarse,—well, I needn’t go on with particulars. I didn’t like any part of it, from the beginning to the end. I found it always offensive and detestable. How do I account for this change of view? I don’t know. I can’t account for it. I am the person concerned. If I could put myself outside of myself and examine it from the point of view of a person not personally concerned in it, then no doubt I could analyze it and explain to my satisfaction the change which has taken place. As it is, I am merely moved by instinct. My instinct said, formerly, that it was an innocent speech, and funny. The same instinct, sitting cold and judicial, as a court of last resort, has reversed that verdict. I expect this latest verdict to remain.
*
I don’t remove the speech from the autobiography, because I think that this change of mind about it is interesting, whether the speech is or not, and therefore let it stay.

Twichell had a letter with him which interested me, and, by request, he left it with me, to be returned to him after I shall have used it. This letter is from the Reverend Charles Stowe, a son of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The letter is now about two months old—but in that time Joe
has pretty nearly worn it out, reading it to people. That is, reading a certain passage in it to people. He read that passage to me, to wit:

I was reading in the volume of Rev. Dr. Burton’s “Remains,” as the old folks used to say, your remarks at his funeral. I think for beauty of diction, richness of thought and delicacy and strength of psychological analysis, it is up to any of the masters of our tongue. The passage I admire most of all is the one beginning “Men marked the sunshine in him,” etc. I think the whole thing a gem, but this passage is a masterpiece of beautiful and dignified English. It is a shame that men like Dr. Parker and Dr. Burton are in the battle of life, in a way—no, that men like
you
and Dr. Burton are in a way like the 130-gun ships of the Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, outclassed by pigmies.

And Joe said “Mark, what do you think of that?”

I said “Well, Joe, I don’t want to commit myself. Send me the passage, and then I will furnish my opinion.”

Joe said “You know the charm of this whole thing lies in the fact that it wasn’t
I
that did that wonderful gem—it was Parker.”

But Twichell is getting a lot of satisfaction out of it. Some time ago, his daughters gathered together a large company of their young friends of the two sexes, and while they were in the midst of their banquet Joe came in and greeted them, and was welcomed. But, necessarily, with his gray head, he was in a considerable degree an embarrassment, and the hilarity without perhaps entirely breaking off, was diminished to the proper degree of reverence for Joe’s cloth and age. That being just the right atmosphere—just the right conditions, for an impressive reading of that passage in this letter, Joe read it with apparent pride, and almost juvenile vanity—while those young people dropped their eyes in pity for an old man who could display his vanities in such a way and take such a childish delight in them. Joe’s daughters turned crimson; glanced at each other, and were ready to cry over this humiliating exhibition. Then of course Twichell finished his performance by informing them that these praises were all deserved, but not by him—for Mr. Stowe had made a mistake. If he had gone and taken another look at that passage which he so highly praised, he would have noticed that it was the work of Rev. Dr. Parker, and not of himself.

At one of the Monday morning meetings of the clergy Twichell did the same thing. And with such excellent effect that in the midst of his reading Parker himself spoke out and said “Now Joe, this is too much. We know you can do fine things; we know you can do wonderful things; but you never did anything as wonderful as this that Charley Stowe is talking about. He is no competent critic, that is quite manifest. There isn’t anything in English Literature worthy of such an intemperate encomium as this that Charley Stowe is passing on your Burton speech.”

Then Joe explained that Parker was only damaging himself, because it was Parker’s speech he was reading about.

Parker is still in the harness. He has been shepherd of the same congregation—its children, and its grandchildren, and its great-grandchildren—for forty-six years. Joe says he is just as marvelous an artist in English phrasing, and just as fine and deep in thought as ever he was. To my knowledge, this is saying a great deal. For Parker was one of our remarkable men when
I knew him in the old Hartford days, and we had eight or ten men in that town who were ’way above the average.

Twichell’s congregation—the only congregation he has ever had since he entered the ministry—celebrated the fortieth anniversary of his accession to that pulpit, a couple of weeks ago. Joe entered the army as chaplain in the very beginning of the Civil War. He was a young chap, and had just been graduated from Yale, and the Yale Theological Seminary. He made all the campaigns of the Army of the Potomac. When he was mustered out, that congregation I am speaking of called him, and he has served them ever since, and always to their satisfaction—except once.

I have found among my old manuscripts one which I perceive to be about twenty-two years old. It has a heading, and looks as if I had meant it to serve as a magazine article. I can clearly see, now, why I didn’t print it. It is full of indications that its inspiration was what happened to Twichell about that time, and which produced a situation for him which he will not forget until he is dead, if he even forgets it then. I think I can see, all through this artful article, that I was trying to hint at Twichell, and the episode of that preacher whom I met on the street, and hint at various things that were exasperating me. And now that I read that old article, I perceive that I probably saw that my art was not ingenious enough—that I hadn’t covered Twichell up, and hadn’t covered up the episode that I was hinting at—that anybody in Hartford could read everything between the lines that I was trying to conceal.

I will insert this venerable article in this place, and then take up that episode in Joe’s history and tell about it.

The Character of Man

Concerning Man—he is too large a subject to be treated as a whole; so I will merely discuss a detail or two of him at this time. I desire to contemplate him from this point of view—this premiss: that he was not made for any useful purpose, for the reason that he hasn’t served any; that he was most likely not even made
intentionally;
and that his working himself up out of the oyster bed to his present position was probably matter of surprise and regret to the Creator. * * * * For his history, in all climes, all ages and all circumstances, furnishes oceans and continents of proof that of all the creatures that were made he is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one—the solitary one—that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices—the most hateful. That one thing puts him below the rats, the grubs, the trichinæ. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to
be
pain. But if the cat knows she is inflicting pain when she plays with the frightened mouse, then we must make an exception here; we must grant that in one detail man is the moral peer of the cat.
All
creatures kill—there seems to be no exception; but of the whole list, man is the only one that kills for fun; he is the only one that kills in malice, the only one that kills for revenge. Also—in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.

Shall he be extolled for his noble qualities, for his gentleness, his sweetness, his amiability, his lovingness, his courage, his devotion, his patience, his fortitude, his prudence, the various charms and graces of his spirit? The other animals share
all
these with him, yet are free from the blacknesses and rottennesses of his character.

* * * * There are certain sweet-smelling sugar-coated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate. One of these is, that there is such a thing in the world as independence: independence of thought, independence of opinion, independence of action. Another is, that the world loves to
see
independence—admires it, applauds it. Another is, that there is such a thing in the world as toleration—in religion, in politics, and such matters; and with it trains that already mentioned auxiliary lie that toleration is admired, and applauded. Out of these trunk-lies spring many branch ones: to wit, the lie that not all men are slaves; the lie that men are glad when other men succeed; glad when they prosper; glad to see them reach lofty heights; sorry to see them fall again. And yet other branch-lies: to wit, that there is heroism in man; that he is not mainly made up of malice and treachery; that he is sometimes not a coward; that there is something about him that ought to be perpetuated—in heaven, or hell, or somewhere. And these other branch-lies, to wit: that conscience, man’s moral medicine chest, is not only created by the Creator, but is put into man ready-charged with the right and only true and authentic correctives of conduct—and the duplicate chest, with the self-same correctives, unchanged, unmodified, distributed to all nations and all epochs. And yet one other branch-lie, to wit, that I am I, and you are you; that we are units, individuals, and have natures of our own, instead of being the tail-end of a tape-worm eternity of ancestors extending in linked procession back—and back—and back—to our source in the monkeys, with this so-called individuality of ours a decayed and rancid mush of inherited instincts and teachings derived, atom by atom, stench by stench, from the entire line of that sorry column, and not so much new and original matter in it as you could balance on a needle point and examine under a microscope. This makes well nigh fantastic the suggestion that there can be such a thing as a personal, original and responsible nature in a man, separable from that in him which is not original, and findable in such quantity as to enable the observer to say, This is a man, not a procession.

* * * * Consider that first mentioned lie: that there is such a thing in the world as independence; that it exists in individuals, that it exists in bodies of men. Surely if anything
is
proven, by whole oceans and continents of evidence, it is that the quality of independence was almost wholly left out of the human race. The scattering exceptions to the rule only emphasize it, light it up, make it glare. The whole population of New England meekly took their turns, for years, in standing up in the railway trains, without so much as a complaint above their breath, till at last these uncounted millions were able to produce exactly one single independent man, who stood to his rights and made the railroad give him a seat. Statistics and the law of probabilities warrant the assumption that it will take New England forty years to breed his fellow. There is a law, with a penalty attached, forbidding trains to occupy the Asylum street crossing more than five minutes at a time. For years people and carriages used to wait there nightly as much as twenty minutes on a stretch while New England trains monopolized that crossing. I used to hear men use vigorous language about that insolent wrong—but they waited, just the same.

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one—the one we use—which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable
in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics. Look at the candidates whom we loathe, one year, and are afraid to vote against the next; whom we cover with unimaginable filth, one year, and fall down on the public platform and worship, the next—and keep on doing it until the habitual shutting of our eyes to last year’s evidences brings us presently to a sincere and stupid belief in this year’s.
*
Look at the tyranny of party—at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty—a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes—and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits; and all the while, their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible-texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.

If we would learn what the human race really
is
, at bottom, we need only observe it in election times. A Hartford clergyman met me in the street, and spoke of a new nominee—denounced the nomination, in strong, earnest words—words that were refreshing for their independence, their manliness.
^†
He said, “I ought to be proud, perhaps, for this nominee is a relative of mine; on the contrary I am humiliated and disgusted; for I know him intimately—familiarly—and I know that he is an unscrupulous scoundrel, and always has been.” You should have seen this clergyman preside at a political meeting forty days later; and urge, and plead, and gush—and you should have heard him paint the character of this same nominee. You would have supposed he was describing the Cid, and Great-heart, and Sir Galahad, and Bayard the Spotless all rolled into one. Was he sincere? Yes—by that time; and therein lies the pathos of it all, the hopelessness of it all. It shows at what trivial cost of effort a man can teach himself a lie, and learn to believe it, when he perceives, by the general drift, that that is the popular thing to do. Does he believe his lie
yet?
Oh, probably not; he has no further use for it. It was but a passing incident; he spared to it the moment that was its due, then hastened back to the serious business of his life.