What is a Man? And Other Essays of Mark Twain

Last night a mob
surrounded our hotel, shouting, howling, singing the
"Marseillaise," and pelting our windows with sticks and stones;
for we have Italian waiters, and the mob demanded that they be
turned out of the house instantly--to be drubbed, and then driven
out of the village.

Uhlic says Wagner despised "JENE PLAPPERUDE MUSIC," and
therefore "runs, trills, and SCHNORKEL are discarded by him."

It is the very way Professor Osborn
and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-
seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural History
Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest
skeleton that exists on the planet.

The precious bust, the priceless bust, the
calm bust, the serene bust, the emotionless bust, with the dandy
mustache, and the putty face, unseamed of care--that face which
has looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred
and fifty years and will still look down upon the awed pilgrim
three hundred more, with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle,
subtle expression of a bladder.

It was eagerly, unsatisfiably interested; it rioted in
the combinations; you implored it to drop the game and let you
get some sleep?

"Weather sheet's home!"--"Lee

Now then, what aggravates me is that these troglodytes and
muscovites and bandoleers and buccaneers are ALSO trying to crowd
in and share the benefit of the law, and compel everybody to
revere their Shakespeare and hold him sacred.

It is indicated by that
thing over his head, which is a LAST--shoemaker's last.

He thus won the general
gratitude, and they wanted to make him emperor--emperor over them
all--emperor of County Cork, but he said, No, walking delegate
was good enough for him.

With some seventy-three years and living in a villa
instead of a house, he is a fair target, and let him incorporate,
copyright, or patent himself as he will, there are some of his
"works" that will go swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as
graybeards gather about the fires and begin with, "I've heard
father tell," or possibly, "Once when I."
The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother--WAS my mother.

When an unrisky opportunity
offered, one lovely summer day, when we had sounded and buoyed a
tangled patch of crossings known as Hell's Half Acre, and were
aboard again and he had sneaked the PENNSYLVANIA triumphantly
through it without once scraping sand, and the A. T. LACEY had
followed in our wake and got stuck, and he was feeling good, I
showed it to him.

Lord Penzance, as all lawyers know, and
as the late Mr. Inderwick, K.C., has testified, was one of the
first legal authorities of his day, famous for his "remarkable
grasp of legal principles," and "endowed by nature with a
remarkable facility for marshaling facts, and for a clear
expression of his views."

FROM HIS
CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE A MAN NEVER DOES A SINGLE THING WHICH HAS
ANY
FIRST AND FOREMOST OBJECT BUT ONE--TO SECURE PEACE OF MIND,
SPIRITUAL COMFORT, FOR HIMSELF.

And why were the Congregationalists not
Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman
Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the Quakers
Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the
Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists
Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics
Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians
Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans
Salvation ...

The following is a brave attempt at a solution,
but it failed to liquify:


When they are going to say some prose or poetry before they
say the poetry or prose they must put a semicolon just after the
introduction of the prose or poetry.

He was the support of a superannuated father.

Landulph rose, and was in the act of claiming judgment by default
when a strange clacking sound was heard coming up the stairs.

There was marvelous freshness in the colors of the
mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that gracious
harmony into which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy
exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a
hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the
drifting flakes.

One
of the most trying defects which I find in these
Stratfordolaters, these Shakesperiods, these thugs, these
bangalores, these troglodytes, these herumfrodites, these
blatherskites, these buccaneers, these bandoleers, is their
spirit of irreverence.

It is
a fixed charge, and you pay it cheerfully, you pay it without a
murmur.

His answer was
as follows: "You require us to believe implicitly a fact, of
which, if true, positive and irrefragable evidence in his own
handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it.

The form
of bicycle he rode long ago became antiquated, but in the humor
of his pleasantry is a quality which does not grow old.

Dick Savage, twenty, the
baker's apprentice; Will Joyce, twenty-two, journeyman
blacksmith; and Henry Taylor, twenty-four, tobacco-stemmer--were
the other three.

Well, never mind Adam: but certainly Shakespeare's
creations--

O.M.

This
conveyancer's jargon could not have been picked up by hanging
round the courts of law in London two hundred and fifty years
ago, when suits as to the title of real property were
comparatively rare.

You were cordially glad you were not caught out and
incapable?

In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of
information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and
those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson,
Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns,
Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott,
Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning,
Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli--a fact which shows that
into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is...

Dates are
hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are
monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold,
they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to
help.

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

(from My Autobiography)


Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished
manuscript which constitute this formidable Autobiography and
Diary of mine, certain chapters will in some distant future be
found which deal with "Claimants"--claimants historically
notorious: Satan, Claimant; the Golden Calf, Claimant; the
Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, Claimant; Louis XVII.,

Here are three of them: (Fig.

But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that
this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.

If he can most satisfyingly perform this sole and only
duty by HELPING his neighbor, he will do it; if he can most
satisfyingly perform it by SWINDLING his neighbor, he will do it.

Both have been zealous Democrats; both have been
zealous Republicans; both have been zealous Mugwumps.

He was distinguished
for letting some buckwheat cakes burn, and the lady scolded him.

The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.

For instance:


. . . the just God avenging Robert Fitzhilderbrand's
perfidy, a worm grew in his vitals, which gradually gnawing its
way through his intestines fattened on the abandoned man till,
tortured with excruciating sufferings and venting himself in
bitter moans, he was by a fitting punishment brought to his end.

In America if you know which party-
collar a voter wears, you know what his associations are, and how
he came by his politics, and which breed of newspaper he reads to
get light, and which breed he diligently avoids, and which breed
of mass-meetings he attends in order to broaden his political
knowledge, and which breed of mass-meetings he doesn't attend,
except to refute its doctrines with brickbats.

Eminent Claimants,
successful Claimants, defeated Claimants, royal Claimants, pleb
Claimants, showy Claimants, shabby Claimants, revered Claimants,
despised Claimants, twinkle star-like here and there and yonder
through the mists of history and legend and tradition--and, oh,
all the darling tribe are clothed in mystery and romance, and we
read about them with deep interest and discuss them with loving
sympathy or with rancorous resentment, according to which side we
hitch ours...

The trouble was
this: this man merely PREACHED to the poor; that is not the
University Settlement's way; it deals in larger and better things
than that, and it did not enthuse over that crude Salvation-Army
eloquence.

I do not remember that
Wellington or Napoleon ever examined Shakespeare's battles and
sieges and strategies, and then decided and established for good
and all that they were militarily flawless; I do not remember
that any Nelson, or Drake, or Cook ever examined his seamanship
and said it showed profound and accurate familiarity with that
art; I don't remember that any king or prince or duke has ever
testified that Shakespeare was letter-perfect in his handling of
royal court-manners ...

Very hard indeed; incredibly hard,
almost, if the result of that labor was to be the smooth and
rounded and flexible and letter-perfect English of the "Venus and
Adonis" in the space of ten years; and at the same time learn
great and fine and unsurpassable literary FORM.

That flower which he is wearing in his
buttonhole is a rose--a white rose, a York rose--and will serve
to remind us of the War of the Roses, and that the white one was
the winning color when Edward got the throne and dispossessed the
Lancastrian dynasty.

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SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY


Interlaken, Switzerland, 1891.

[Figure 1] It is arranged on the basis of
Isaac Pitman's PHONOGRAPHY.

X

The Rest of the Equipment


The author of the Plays was equipped, beyond every other man
of his time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness
of mind, grace, and majesty of expression.

These times
and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the
strange sense of being thrust back into that Missourian village
and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived there so long
ago.

Otherwise you have been
misinformed, and he didn't do it.

The traveler told an
alluring tale of his long voyage up the great river from Para to
the sources of the Madeira, through the heart of an enchanted
land, a land wastefully rich in tropical wonders, a romantic land
where all the birds and flowers and animals were of the museum
varieties, and where the alligator and the crocodile and the
monkey seemed as much at home as if they were in the Zoo.

It is awkward and embarrassing to have
to keep referring to notes; and besides it breaks up your speech
and makes it ragged and non-coherent; but you can tear up your
pictures as soon as you have made them--they will stay fresh and
strong in your memory in the order and sequence in which you
scratched them down.

In those
days chicken livers were strangely and delicately sensitive to
coming events, no matter how far off they might be; and they
could never keep still, but would curl and squirm like that,
particularly when vultures came and showed interest in that
approaching great event and in breakfast.

Is it your opinion that men's acts proceed from
one central and unchanging and inalterable impulse, or from a
variety of impulses?

AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

(Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910)


WHAT IS MAN?

They wear diverse
clothes and are subject to diverse moods, but in whatsoever ways
they masquerade they are the SAME PERSON all the time.

No praiseful voice
was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited
seven years before he lifted his.

Perhaps the most celebrated turning-point recorded in
history was the crossing of the Rubicon.

It said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless,
be cheaply persuadable."

For the TEMPERAMENT is the man; the thing tricked out with
clothes and named Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more.

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A SIMPLIFIED ALPHABET


(This article, written during the autumn of 1899, was about
the last writing done by Mark Twain on any impersonal subject.)

You shall have a show in
the business and the foremanship, besides.

While she was out
for a moment I disloyally stole a look.

Attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford they are
meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies--intemperate
admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak; attributed
to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of the
moon's front side, the moon at the full--and not intemperate, not
overwrought, but sane and right, and justified.

If Shakespeare had been born and bred
on a barren and unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect
would have had no OUTSIDE MATERIAL to work with, and could have
invented none; and NO OUTSIDE INFLUENCES, teachings, moldings,
persuasions, inspirations, of a valuable sort, and could have
invented none; and so Shakespeare would have produced nothing.

Let us drop that lying phrase, and call them the
Unrevealed Creatures; so far as we can know, there is no such
thing as a dumb beast.

We had nine bones, and we
built the rest of him out of plaster of Paris.

He was
a journeyman cooper, and worked in the big cooper-shop belonging
to the great pork-packing establishment which was Marion City's
chief pride and sole source of prosperity.

You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,
clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and--so far as you or I
can make out--unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable,
how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly
unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley;
and how compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal
hung out anywhere to call attention to it.

"Aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"Taut

If he began to slaughter calves,
and poach deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the
earliest likely moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably
wretched from that school where he was supposably storing up
Latin for future literary use--he had his youthful hands full,
and much more than full.

Also, if I had a typewriting machine with the phonographic
alphabet on it--oh, the miracles I could do!

The Shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a
definite principle, an unchanging and immutable law: which is:
2 and 8 and 7 and 14, added together, make 165.

He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a History of
England under the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of
National History, a Philosophical Romance.

As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of
any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several
arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or
two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man,
savage or civilized!

It is mainly the
repetition over and over again, by the third-rates, of worn and
commonplace and juiceless forms that makes their novels such a
weariness and vexation to us, I think.

Isn't it Burgess?

Then there
will be no more quarreling, no more bandying of disrespectful
epithets, no more heartburnings.

Have you ever seen me uncheerful, unhappy.

But I have seen several entirely sincere people who THOUGHT they
were (permanent) Seekers after Truth.

The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is
developed into the special sense of hearing.

No praiseful voice
was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited
seven years before he lifted his.

The GOOD kind of training--whose best and highest
function is to see to it that every time it confers a
satisfaction upon its pupil a benefit shall fall at second hand
upon others.

To this place I nominate Mr. Howells.

That wasn't singing; that was the wailing,
screeching of third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the
interest of economy."

Hear him:


Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt
of each sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the
word the whole canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the
greatest rapidity possible everything was sheeted home and
hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under
headway.

There was never a Claimant that couldn't get a hearing, nor one
that couldn't accumulate a rapturous following, no matter how
flimsy and apparently unauthentic his claim might be.

The history of man is full of such accidents.

The capital of the United States is Long Island.

Drive tunnels and shafts into the hills; blast out the
iron ore; crush it, smelt it, reduce it to pig-iron; put some of
it through the Bessemer process and make steel of it.

Also,
he told an astonishing tale about COCA, a vegetable product of
miraculous powers, asserting that it was so nourishing and so
strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira
region would tramp up hill and down all day on a pinch of
powdered coca and require no other sustenance.

Beliefs are
ACQUIREMENTS, temperaments are BORN; beliefs are subject to
change, nothing whatever can change temperament.

Senator Davis wrote: "We seem to have something more than a
sciolist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar
art.

Rightly
viewed, calf-butchering accounts for "Titus Andronicus," the only
play--ain't it?--that the Stratford Shakespeare ever wrote; and
yet it is the only one everybody tried to chouse him out of, the
Baconians included.

I compare
it with his paper on Machiavelli in a late number of HARPER, and
I cannot find that his English has suffered any impairment.

It is so strange, so unrealizable.

It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among
the members of his family, overlooking no individual of it.

It would
strain the Unabridged Dictionary to hold them.

In the sustained exhibition of certain great
qualities--clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced
and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing--he is, in my
belief, without his peer in the English-writing world.

And why were the Congregationalists not
Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman
Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the Quakers
Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the
Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists
Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics
Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians
Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans
Salvation ...

This time the Expert took
up the position of short-stop, and got a man to shove up behind.

Her mental processes were what Edison's would have been.

Behind the
vast plate-glass windows of the upper floors of the house on the
corner one glimpsed terraced masses of fine-clothed men and
women, dim and shimmery, like people under water.

You begin to suspect--and I claim to KNOW
--that when a man is a shade MORE STRONGLY MOVED to do ONE of two
things or of two dozen things than he is to do any one of the
OTHERS, he will infallibly do that ONE thing, be it good or be it
evil; and if it be good, not all the beguilements of all the
casuistries can increase the strength of the impulse by a single
shade or add a shade to the comfort and contentment he will get
out of the act.

AS CONCERNS INTERPRETING THE DEITY


I

This line of hieroglyphics was for fourteen years the
despair of all the scholars who labored over the mysteries of the
Rosetta stone: [Figure 1]


After five years of study Champollion translated it thus:


Therefore let the worship of Epiphanes be maintained in all
the temples, this upon pain of death.

They stopped dead in their tracks and began
to gaze in a stupor of gratitude and satisfaction.

A striking
contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon,
and Spenser, and Raleigh, and the other distinguished literary
folk of Shakespeare's time passed from life!

So did I. He had a
notion that a flute would keep its health better if you took it
apart when it was not standing a watch; and so, when it was not
on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the compass-shelf under
the breastboard.

When I am reflecting, on these
occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think.

When I
go into danger--that is, into rich people's houses, where, in the
nature of things, they will have high-tariff cigars, red-and-gilt
girded and nested in a rosewood box along with a damp sponge,
cigars which develop a dismal black ash and burn down the side
and smell, and will grow hot to the fingers, and will go on
growing hotter and hotter, and go on smelling more and more
infamously and unendurably the deeper the fire tunnels down
inside below the thimbleful of honest...

With memory to
help, man preserves his observations and reasonings, reflects
upon them, adds to them, recombines, and so proceeds, stage by
stage, to far results--from the teakettle to the ocean
greyhound's complex engine; from personal labor to slave labor;
from wigwam to palace; from the capricious chase to agriculture
and stored food; from nomadic life to stable government and
concentrated authority; from incoherent hordes to massed armies.

If he knew anything of
human nature he knew that to plenty of young fellows present in that
great crowd he was a grand hero--and enviably situated.

When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the
other illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal
aptnesses, brilliances, profundities, and felicities so
prodigally displayed in the Plays, and try to fit them to the
historyless Stratford stage-manager, they sound wild, strange,
incredible, ludicrous; but when we put them in the mouth of Bacon
they do not sound strange, they seem in their natural and
rightful place, they seem at home there.

Under us the
square was noiseless, but it was full of citizens; officials in
fine uniforms were flitting about on errands, and in a doorstep
sat a figure in the uttermost raggedness of poverty, the feet
bare, the head bent humbly down; a youth of eighteen or twenty,
he was, and through the field-glass one could see that he was
tearing apart and munching riffraff that he had gathered
somewhere.

Suppose we add to the steam some
quicksilver in a vaporized condition, and turn the jet upon the
ingot, will there be an instantaneous result?

And it is
always at hand, always deliverable at a moment's notice.

Suppose your friends deride the hat, make fun of it: at once it
loses its value; you are ashamed of it, you put it out of your
sight, you never want to see it again.

But I also see, by what I have
learned of bicycling, that the right and only sure way to learn
German is by the bicycling method.

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THE DEATH OF JEAN



The death of Jean Clemens occurred early in the morning of
December 24, 1909.

Experts of unchallengeable authority have testified
definitely as to only one of Shakespeare's multifarious craft-
equipments, so far as my recollections of Shakespeare-Bacon talk
abide with me--his law-equipment.

It is this madness
for being noticed and talked about which has invented kingship
and the thousand other dignities, and tricked them out with
pretty and showy fineries; it has made kings pick one another's
pockets, scramble for one another's crowns and estates, slaughter
one another's subjects; it has raised up prize-fighters, and
poets, and villages mayors, and little and big politicians, and
big and little charity-founders, and bicycle champions, and
banditti chiefs, and fro...

Then he played the
Intermezzo; that was for Susy; then he played the Largo; that was
for their mother.

I have written it down; "Prejudices which
nothing within the rock itself had either power to remove or any
desire to remove."

They "suppose" he assisted his father in the butchering
business; and that, being only a boy, he didn't have to do full-
grown butchering, but only slaughtering calves.

These warnings
were obeyed, for there was a skull and crossbones at the top of
the poster.

Next day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry
Anne Hathaway.

If you know a man's
nationality you can come within a split hair of guessing the
complexion of his religion: English--Protestant; American--
ditto; Spaniard, Frenchman, Irishman, Italian, South American--
Roman Catholic; Russian--Greek Catholic; Turk--Mohammedan; and so
on.

Very well, what I am offering for acceptance and adopting is
not shorthand, but longhand, written with the SHORTHAND ALPHABET
UNREACHED.

Claimant;
William Shakespeare, Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant; Mary Baker
G. Eddy, Claimant--and the rest of them.

This is it:


Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.

Last night a mob
surrounded our hotel, shouting, howling, singing the
"Marseillaise," and pelting our windows with sticks and stones;
for we have Italian waiters, and the mob demanded that they be
turned out of the house instantly--to be drubbed, and then driven
out of the village.

You can get the details of the lives of
all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated
tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges,
lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors,
inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers,
prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys,
bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land
and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists,
cla...

It brings human
dignity pretty low, and for a moment the thing is not quite
realizable--but it is perfectly true.

These humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and
apologetic look of wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with
drowsiness, their bodies were adroop from crown to sole, and all
kind-hearted people refrained from asking them if they had been
to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as knowing they would lie.

The original wild ox
noticed that with the wind in his favor he could smell his enemy
in time to escape; then he inferred that it was worth while to
keep his nose to the wind.

It named in minute
detail every item of property he owned in the world--houses,
lands, sword, silver-gilt bowl, and so on--all the way down to
his "second-best bed" and its furniture.

He neglected his
duty--kept dodging it, shirking it, putting it off, and his
unrelenting conscience kept persecuting him for this conduct.

And why were the Congregationalists not
Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman
Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the Quakers
Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the
Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists
Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics
Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians
Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans
Salvation Warrior...

He gave
a full account of the assassination; he furnished even the
minutest particulars: how he deposited his keg of powder and
laid his train--from the house to such-and-such a spot; how
George Ronalds and Henry Hart came along just then, smoking, and
he borrowed Hart's cigar and fired the train with it, shouting,
"Down with all slave-tyrants!" and how Hart and Ronalds made no
effort to capture him, but ran away, and had never come forward
to testify yet.

Black flags hung down from all the houses; the
aspects were Sunday-like; the crowds on the sidewalks were quiet
and moved slowly; very few people were smoking; many ladies wore
deep mourning, gentlemen were in black as a rule; carriages were
speeding in all directions, with footmen and coachmen in black
clothes and wearing black cocked hats; the shops were closed; in
many windows were pictures of the Empress: as a beautiful young
bride of seventeen; as a serene and majestic la...

Robert Hardy was our first ABOLITIONIST--awful name!

Claimant;
William Shakespeare, Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant; Mary Baker
G. Eddy, Claimant--and the rest of them.

Free Will

Y.M.

If he had been
less intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more
solicitous about his Works, it would have been better for his
good name, and a kindness to us.

Whenever we have been furnished
with a tar baby ostensibly stuffed with jewels, and warned that
it will be dishonorable and irreverent to disembowel it and test
the jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off it.

I have been trying to make
her do service on a stupendous dial and check off the hours as
they glide along her pallid face up there against the sky, and
tell the time of day to the populations lying within fifty miles
of her and to the people in the moon, if they have a good
telescope there.

There were even
indications that he admired it; indications dimmed, it is true,
by the distance that lay between the lofty boss-pilotical
altitude and my lowly one, yet perceptible to me; perceptible,
and translatable into a compliment--compliment coming down from
about the snow-line and not well thawed in the transit, and not
likely to set anything afire, not even a cub-pilot's self-
conceit; still a detectable complement, and precious.

But in its
crypt lie several of the great dead of the House of Habsburg,
among them Maria Theresa and Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt.

It could drive lathes, drills, planers, punches,
polishers, in a word all the cunning machines of a great factory?

At the standpoint of the other schemes: That it is
good morals to let an ignorant duke do showy benevolences for his
pride's sake, a pretty low motive, and go on doing them unwarned,
lest if he were made acquainted with the actual motive which
prompted them he might shut up his purse and cease to be good?

But isn't spiritual enough to learn what is happening
in the outskirts without the help of the PHYSICAL messenger?

It would appear that whenever you ask a public-
school pupil when a thing--anything, no matter what--happened,
and he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492.

Personal Merit


[The Old Man and the Young Man had been conversing.

Please particularize.

I do not remember that
Wellington or Napoleon ever examined Shakespeare's battles and
sieges and strategies, and then decided and established for good
and all that they were militarily flawless; I do not remember
that any Nelson, or Drake, or Cook ever examined his seamanship
and said it showed profound and accurate familiarity with that
art; I don't remember that any king or prince or duke has ever
testified that Shakespeare was letter-perfect in his handling of
royal court-manners ...

Some rare men are wonderful watches,
with gold case, compensation balance, and all those things, and
some men are only simple and sweet and humble Waterburys.

It was an immense act of SELF-
SACRIFICE (as per the usual definition), for he did not want to
do it, and he never would have done it if he could have bought a
contented spirit and an unworried mind at smaller cost.

Next, three six-horse mourning-
coaches; outriders and coachmen in black, with cocked hats and
white wigs.

As instances, you
have all history: the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the
Egyptians, the Russians, the Germans, the French, the English,
the Spaniards, the Americans, the South Americans, the Japanese,
the Chinese, the Hindus, the Turks--a thousand wild and tame
religions, every kind of government that can be thought of, from
tiger to house-cat, each nation KNOWING it has the only true
religion and the only sane system of government, each despising
all the others, each an ass an...

To hear the students jubilate, one would suppose that the
question of whether Tell shot the apple or didn't was an
important matter; whereas it ranks in importance exactly with the
question of whether Washington chopped down the cherry-tree or
didn't.

They know
by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-
tadpole he is not going to STAY tadpole in their history-tank;
no, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged
bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on his hams, and puff out
his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; and
assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a thundering
bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud.

There she sits, friendless, upon her throne through
the long night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies
and sweet companionship and loving endearments which she craves,
by the gilded barriers of her awful rank; a forlorn exile in her
own house and home, weary object of formal ceremonies and
machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the free
air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the
splendid accident of her birth to trade this pric...

Alfred the Great reigned 872 years.

The mourning is
universal and genuine, the consternation is stupefying.

It is the shortest one in
English history except Lady Jane Grey's, which was only nine
days.

But even if we knew the simplified form for every word in
the language, the phonographic alphabet would still beat the
Simplified Speller "hands down" in the important matter of
economy of labor.

A little girl passed by, balancing a wash-board on her
head, and giggled, and seemed about to make a remark, but the boy
said, rebukingly, "Let him alone, he's going to a funeral."

You will now take thirteen pieces of BLUE paper, each two
inches square, and do William II.

Under us the
square was noiseless, but it was full of citizens; officials in
fine uniforms were flitting about on errands, and in a doorstep
sat a figure in the uttermost raggedness of poverty, the feet
bare, the head bent humbly down; a youth of eighteen or twenty,
he was, and through the field-glass one could see that he was
tearing apart and munching riffraff that he had gathered
somewhere.

This will take you
twenty minutes, or thirty, and by that time you will find that
you can make a whale in less time than an unpracticed person can
make a sardine; also, up to the time you die you will always be
able to furnish William's dates to any ignorant person that
inquires after them.

So they have been in no hesitancy about drawing
out the bad things he did as well as the good in their efforts to
get a "Mark Twain" story, all incidents being viewed in the light
of his present fame, until the volume of "Twainiana" is already
considerable and growing in proportion as the "old timers" drop
away and the stories are retold second and third hand by their
descendants.

Whenever I happened upon him on the
ground floor he always followed me about, and when I went
upstairs he went too--in a tumultuous gallop.

So it has happened that the "old timers" who went to school
with Mark or were with him on some of his usual escapades have
been honored with large audiences whenever they were in a
reminiscent mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with
the ordinary boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist and
whose every boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of
what was to come.

To write "laff," the pen has to make the SAME NUMBER of
strokes--no labor is saved to the penman.

You could make the engine out of the rocks themselves?

A powerful
agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it
plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much
traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do
not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE
right one blazes out on us.

Again: "To acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles,
and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms and phrases
not only of the conveyancer's office, but of the pleader's
chambers and the Courts at Westminster, nothing short of
employment in some career involving constant contact with legal
questions and general legal work would be requisite.

I was
supposing that my musical regeneration was accomplished and
perfected, because I enjoyed both of these operas, singing and
all, and, moreover, one of them was "Parsifal," but the experts
have disenchanted me.

Down out of the long-
vanished past, across the abyss of the ages, if you listen, you
can still hear the believing multitudes shouting for Perkin
Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.

He said that the dismounting
was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave
that to the last.

This was a stupendously important moment.

But I have seen several entirely sincere people who THOUGHT they
were (permanent) Seekers after Truth.

When a man is making a
speech and you are to follow him don't jot down notes to speak
from, jot down PICTURES.

No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly,
more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in
what he uttered.

These warnings
were obeyed, for there was a skull and crossbones at the top of
the poster.

I assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had
wholly misconceived my attitude; that I had the highest respect
for Satan, and that my reverence for him equaled, and possibly
even exceeded, that of any member of the church.

Maybe we can get on the track of the secret original
impulse, the REAL impulse, that moved him to so nobly self-
sacrifice his family in the Savior's cause under the superstition
that he was sacrificing himself.

No. And YOU DID NOT FORM THAT ONE;
your machinery did it for you--automatically and instantly,
without reflection or the need of it.

Some authorities think it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is
much doubt.

Edward II. now; twenty BLUE squares.

There MUST be a genuinely and utterly self-sacrificing
act recorded in human history somewhere.

How did they happen to be Presbyterians and not
Congregationalists?

The dog had a young bird in his
mouth--unhurt.

It is not a MERIT that it
does the things which it is set to do--it can't HELP doing them.

One reason is, because there are a dozen that are
recognizably competent to do that poem.

Under us the
square was noiseless, but it was full of citizens; officials in
fine uniforms were flitting about on errands, and in a doorstep
sat a figure in the uttermost raggedness of poverty, the feet
bare, the head bent humbly down; a youth of eighteen or twenty,
he was, and through the field-glass one could see that he was
tearing apart and munching riffraff that he had gathered
somewhere.

Very well; now that Wagner and I understand each
other, perhaps we shall get along better, and I shall stop
calling Waggner, on the American plan, and thereafter call him
Waggner as per German custom, for I feel entirely friendly now.

What are the materials of which a steam-engine is made?

MORE!--there now, steady as you go,"
and the other disorganizing interruptions that were always
leaping from his mouth.

Inestimably valuable is
training, influence, education, in right directions--TRAINING
ONE'S SELF-APPROBATION TO ELEVATE ITS IDEALS.

When the inquirer came at last he got but one fact--
no, LEGEND--and got that one at second hand, from a person who
had only heard it as a rumor and didn't claim copyright in it as
a production of his own.

They
had endured from thirty to forty hours' railroading on the
continent of Europe--with all which that implies of worry,
fatigue, and financial impoverishment--and all they had got and
all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking
themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two
towns when other people were in bed; for back they must go over
that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled.

Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon,
Savonarola, Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, the Edict of
Nantes, Clive, Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey, Patay, Cowpens,
Saratoga, the Battle of the Boyne, the invention of the
logarithms, the microscope, the steam-engine, the telegraph--
anything and everything all over the world--we dumped it all
in among the English pegs according to it date and regardless
of its nationality.

Could you teach an idiot of manuals of arms, and to advance,
retreat, and go through complex field maneuvers at the word of
command?

Perhaps they knew a
play-actor of minor rank had disappeared, but did not regard him
as the author of his Works.

The law
required the opposite thing--the big wheel must be turned in the
direction in which you are falling.

THE UTTERER OF A
THOUGHT ALWAYS UTTERS A SECOND-HAND ONE.

It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an
attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a
high style,' and making speeches over them."

I do not know the name of that flower in the
pot, but we will use it as Richard's trade-mark, for it is said
that it grows in only one place in the world--Bosworth Field--and
tradition says it never grew there until Richard's royal blood
warmed its hidden seed to life and made it grow.

He is about to enter the horse-car when
a gray and ragged old woman, a touching picture of misery, puts
out her lean hand and begs for rescue from hunger and death.

Sometimes a very small and accidental thing can furnish
him the initiatory impulse and start him on a new road, with a
new idea.

They
had endured from thirty to forty hours' railroading on the
continent of Europe--with all which that implies of worry,
fatigue, and financial impoverishment--and all they had got and
all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking
themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two
towns when other people were in bed; for back they must go over
that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled.

This was a boy, who was perched on a gate-post munching
a hunk of maple sugar.

The
original rock contained the stuff of which the steel one was
built--but along with a lot of sulphur and stone and other
obstructing inborn heredities, brought down from the old geologic
ages--prejudices, let us call them.

Hence the Presbyterian remains a
Presbyterian, the Mohammedan a Mohammedan, the Spiritualist a
Spiritualist, the Democrat a Democrat, the Republican a
Republican, the Monarchist a Monarchist; and if a humble,
earnest, and sincere Seeker after Truth should find it in the
proposition that the moon is made of green cheese nothing could
ever budge him from that position; for he is nothing but an
automatic machine, and must obey the laws of his construction.

I chose a reposeful Sabbath-day sort of a back street which
was about thirty yards wide between the curbstones.

Shall we call it training, education?

I know a kind-hearted Kentuckian whose
self-approval was lacking--whose conscience was troubling him, to
phrase it with exactness--BECAUSE HE HAD NEGLECTED TO KILL A
CERTAIN MAN--a man whom he had never seen.

Edward V.; one-third of a BLACK square.

When the trial came on, people came from all the farms
around, and from Hannibal, and Quincy, and even from Keokuk; and
the court-house could hold only a fraction of the crowd that
applied for admission.

Jean was so full of life and energy that she was constantly
is danger of overtaxing her strength.

We don't know his name, we
never hear of him again; he was very casual; he acts like an
accident; but he was no accident, he was there by compulsion of
HIS life-chain, to blow the electrifying blast that was to make
up Caesar's mind for him, and thence go piping down the aisles of
history forever.

IDOLATER, a very idle person.

We played cards, and she tried to teach
me a new game called "Mark Twain."

They are all forms of self-contentment, self-gratification, but
the names so disguise them that they distract our attention from
the fact.

If I needed anything to perfect the precariousness of my steering,
it was just that.

I think that the rat's mind and the man's mind are the
same machine, but of unequal capacities--like yours and Edison's;
like the African pygmy's and Homer's; like the Bushman's and Bismarck's.

Alexander Hamilton was a conspicuously high-principled
man.

You would not require much, of such an engine as that?

Whatsoever a man is, is due to his MAKE, and to the INFLUENCES
brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his
associations.

It is an event which confers a curious distinction upon
every individual now living in the world: he has stood alive and
breathing in the presence of an event such as has not fallen
within the experience of any traceable or untraceable ancestor of
his for twenty centuries, and it is not likely to fall within the
experience of any descendant of his for twenty more.

Now we turn the corner of the century with a new line of
monarchs--the Lancastrian kings.

This
conveyancer's jargon could not have been picked up by hanging
round the courts of law in London two hundred and fifty years
ago, when suits as to the title of real property were
comparatively rare.

If a man should write a book and in it make one of his
characters say, "Here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing
galley and the imposing-stone into the hell-box; assemble the
comps around the frisket and let them jeff for takes and be quick
about it," I should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing,
and would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically,
not practically.

Iron, steel, brass, white-metal, and so on.

Jean, from her babyhood,
was a worshiper of Clara.

For he was blaspheming against the holiest thing known to a
Missourian, and could NOT be in his right mind.

We pegged them down to the Hundred Years' War,
then threw the idea aside, I do not now remember why.

If you do not, you will
find it a hard fight to save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth.

Sir John Lubbock took ants from two different nests, made them
drunk with whiskey and laid them, unconscious, by one of the
nests, near some water.

For this reason she is sometimes called Bloody Mary.

You did not invent that--you
got it from outside, from talking and teaching.

These times
and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the
strange sense of being thrust back into that Missourian village
and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived there so long
ago.

Dreams that
are just like real life; dreams in which there are several
persons with distinctly differentiated characters--inventions of
my mind and yet strangers to me: a vulgar person; a refined one;
a wise person; a fool; a cruel person; a kind and compassionate
one; a quarrelsome person; a peacemaker; old persons and young;
beautiful girls and homely ones.

Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house--
that is to say, the Wagner temple--a little after the middle of
the afternoon.

The color of this cat brought the bygone cat before
me, and I saw her walking along the side-step of the pulpit; saw
her walk on to a large sheet of sticky fly-paper and get all her
feet involved; saw her struggle and fall down, helpless and
dissatisfied, more and more urgent, more and more unreconciled,
more and more mutely profane; saw the silent congregation
quivering like jelly, and the tears running down their faces.

It brought in a true bill, and presently the case
went to the county court.

III

Instances in Point


Old Man.

For it
is hatefully interesting!--in fact, fascinating is the word.

The traveler told an
alluring tale of his long voyage up the great river from Para to
the sources of the Madeira, through the heart of an enchanted
land, a land wastefully rich in tropical wonders, a romantic land
where all the birds and flowers and animals were of the museum
varieties, and where the alligator and the crocodile and the
monkey seemed as much at home as if they were in the Zoo.

So you go on thinking and
thinking, and calculating and guessing, and consulting with other
people and getting their views; and it spoils your sleep nights,
and makes you distraught in the daytime, and while you are
pretending to look at the sights you are only guessing and
guessing and guessing all the time, and being worried and
miserable.

It could drive lathes, drills, planers, punches,
polishers, in a word all the cunning machines of a great factory?

Shall we suppose, as a beginning, that the
two are alone, in a solitary place, at midnight?

To the
audience I seemed more interested in my fingernails than I was in
my subject; one or two persons asked me afterward what was the
matter with my hands.

But he has got what he was after--HIS OWN APPROVAL.

IPECAC, a man who likes a good dinner.

There is no written record of it, nor any other actual
evidence.

It was a state of joy which only the self-sacrificer
knows.

Isn't it curious that two
"town drunkards" and one half-breed loafer should leave behind
them, in a remote Missourian village, a fame a hundred times
greater and several hundred times more particularized in the
matter of definite facts than Shakespeare left behind him in the
village where he had lived the half of his lifetime?

Very well, what I am offering for acceptance and adopting is
not shorthand, but longhand, written with the SHORTHAND ALPHABET
UNREACHED.

I think a "Hermitage" scrap-up
at eight in the evening, when all the famine-breeders have been
there and laid in their mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing
you can lay on your keelson except gravel.

"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making
mistakes as to the laws of marriage, of wills, of inheritance, to
Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither
be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error."

And why were the Congregationalists not
Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman
Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the Quakers
Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the
Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists
Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics
Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians
Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans
Salvation ...

The spirit of Venice is there: of a city where Age and
Decay, fagged with distributing damage and repulsiveness among
the other cities of the planet in accordance with the policy and
business of their profession, come for rest and play between
seasons, and treat themselves to the luxury and relaxation of
sinking the shop and inventing and squandering charms all about,
instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their habit when
not on vacation.

At our best and stateliest we
are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but only
candles; and any bummer can blow us out.

And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his
speech? and its cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its
architectural felicities of construction, its graces of
expression, its pemmican quality of compression, and all that?

Drive tunnels and shafts into the hills; blast out the
iron ore; crush it, smelt it, reduce it to pig-iron; put some of
it through the Bessemer process and make steel of it.

You have many years before you.

keep two teams of singers in stock for the
chief roles, and one of these is composed of the most renowned
artists in the world, with Materna and Alvary in the lead.

It seemed to me that the spirits of the
dead were all about me, and would speak to me and welcome me if
they could: Livy, and Susy, and George, and Henry Robinson, and
Charles Dudley Warner.

Last night Jean, all flushed with splendid health, and I the
same, from the wholesome effects of my Bermuda holiday, strolled
hand in hand from the dinner-table and sat down in the library
and chatted, and planned, and discussed, cheerily and happily
(and how unsuspectingly!)--until nine--which is late for us--then
went upstairs, Jean's friendly German dog following.

His process did not
differ from Edison's; he put this and that together and drew an
inference--and the peg, too; but I made him sweat for it.

They are odds and ends of thoughts, impressions,
feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand books, a
thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling
which have flowed down into your heart and brain out of the
hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors.

Joyce recited a furious and fantastic and
denunciatory speech on the scaffold which had imposing passages
of school-boy eloquence in it, and gave him a reputation on the
spot as an orator, and his name, later, in the society's records,
of the "Martyr Orator."

It has taken five hundred years to simplify some of
Chaucer's rotten spelling--if I may be allowed to use to frank a
term as that--and it will take five hundred years more to get our
exasperating new Simplified Corruptions accepted and running
smoothly.

To me, the others are miners working with the
gold-pan--of necessity some of the gold washes over and escapes;
whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a riffle--no
grain of the metal stands much chance of eluding him.

SO FAR AS ANYBODY ACTUALLY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare
of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.

Love is a
madness; if thwarted it develops fast; it can grow to a frenzy of
despair and make an otherwise sane and highly gifted prince, like
Rudolph, throw away the crown of an empire and snuff out his own
life.

'The Comedy of
Errors' in 1589, 'Love's Labour's Lost' in 1589, 'Two Gentlemen
of Verona' in 1589 or 1590," and so forth, and then asks, "with
this catalogue of dramatic work on hand . . . was it possible
that he could have taken a leading part in the management and
conduct of two theaters, and if Mr. Phillipps is to be relied
upon, taken his share in the performances of the provincial tours
of his company--and at the same time devoted himself to the study
of the law in all it...

And on the few surviving steamboats--those lingering ghosts and
remembrancers of great fleets that plied the big river in the
beginning of my water-career--which is exactly as long ago as the
whole invoice of the life-years of Shakespeare numbers--there are
still findable two or three river-pilots who saw me do creditable
things in those ancient days; and several white-headed engineers;
and several roustabouts and mates; and several deck-hands who
used to heave the lead for me ...

It would be entirely safe, even if it were built of
lucifer matches.

In earlier years he signed two other official documents.

There isn't a
mountain in Switzerland now that hasn't a ladder railroad or two
up its back like suspenders; indeed, some mountains are latticed
with them, and two years hence all will be.

The color of this cat brought the bygone cat before
me, and I saw her walking along the side-step of the pulpit; saw
her walk on to a large sheet of sticky fly-paper and get all her
feet involved; saw her struggle and fall down, helpless and
dissatisfied, more and more urgent, more and more unreconciled,
more and more mutely profane; saw the silent congregation
quivering like jelly, and the tears running down their faces.

Columbus's great achievement gave him the
discovery-fever, and he sent Sebastian Cabot to the New World to
search out some foreign territory for England.

Why, it is just like being the past tense of the compound
reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic irregular
accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the expression
which the grammarians call Verb.

It is about what happened.

It is SURMISED that he
traveled in Italy and Germany and around, and qualified himself
to put their scenic and social aspects upon paper; that he
perfected himself in French, Italian, and Spanish on the road;
that he went in Leicester's expedition to the Low Countries, as
soldier or sutler or something, for several months or years--or
whatever length of time a surmiser needs in his business--and
thus became familiar with soldiership and soldier-ways and
soldier-talk and genera...

Then he played the
Intermezzo; that was for Susy; then he played the Largo; that was
for their mother.

Here is an odd (but entirely proper) use of a word, and
a most sudden descent from a lofty philosophical altitude to a
very practical and homely illustration:


We should endeavor to avoid extremes--like those of wasps and bees.

You can get the details of the lives of
all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated
tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges,
lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors,
inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers,
prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys,
bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land
and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists,
cla...

That can surely happen, and when it
happens, the word Irreverence will be regarded as the most
meaningless, and foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and
impudent, and dictatorial word in the language.

That could happen to no one but a person whose
TRADE was the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it.

------------------------------------------------------------------


THE BEE

It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee.

"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making
mistakes as to the laws of marriage, of wills, of inheritance, to
Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither
be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error."

To have the long road mapped out with such
exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the habit of leaving
books and other articles lying around everywhere, and had not
previously been able to definitely name the place, and so had
often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and
failure; but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send
the children.

Suppose you try?

Here are two where
the mistake has resulted from sound assisted by remote fact:


PLAGIARIST, a writer of plays.

Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days ago.

It could drive lathes, drills, planers, punches,
polishers, in a word all the cunning machines of a great factory?

Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with
such ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon to convey
misinformation every time it is uncarefully unread:


By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could
occupy the throne.

I have got his chin up too high, but that is no matter; he
is looking for Harold.

AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

(Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910)


WHAT IS MAN?

As soon as the
filling of the house is about complete the standing multitude
turn and fix their eyes upon the princely layout and gaze mutely
and longingly and adoringly and regretfully like sinners looking
into heaven.

It looks exasperatingly true; and is distinctly
offensive.

If you should hand Mr. Edison a box
which you caused to fly open by some concealed device he would
infer a spring, and would hunt for it and find it.

What I
cannot help wishing is, that Adam had been postponed, and Martin
Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place--that splendid pair
equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos.

Mason and Dixon's line is the Equator.

At last a particularly
severe winter fell upon the country, and hundreds of them were
reduced to mendicancy and were to be seen day after day in the
bitterest weather, standing barefoot in the snow, holding out
their crowns for alms.

Arthur
Orton's claim that he was the lost Tichborne baronet come to life
again was as flimsy as Mrs. Eddy's that she wrote SCIENCE AND
HEALTH from the direct dictation of the Deity; yet in England
nearly forty years ago Orton had a huge army of devotees and
incorrigible adherents, many of whom remained stubbornly
unconvinced after their fat god had been proven an impostor and
jailed as a perjurer, and today Mrs. Eddy's following is not only
immense, but is daily augmenting in ...

Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with
such ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon to convey
misinformation every time it is uncarefully unread:


By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could
occupy the throne.

When you find
service charged in the HOTEL bill does it annoy you?

He accomplished his crime, and Henry of
Huntington, a priest of high degree, mourns over it in his
Chronicle.

Bring her to
try wi' the main course.

The
second one told me where to begin the talk about a strange and
violent wind that used to burst upon Carson City from the Sierra
Nevadas every afternoon at two o'clock and try to blow the town
away.

I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty
hard life; I know all the palaver of that business: I know all
about discovery claims and the subordinate claims; I know all
about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts,
drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay
casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries;
arastras, and how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of
copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce ...

What is self-sacrifice?

As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of
any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several
arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or
two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man,
savage or civilized!

"Caterpillar" is well enough, but capital letter would have
been stricter.

In the law of real property, its rules of tenure and
descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries, their vouchers
and double vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the method
of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules
of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in the
principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the
distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the
law of attainder and forfeiture, in the requisite...

If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train
would deafen our ears so that we couldn't see to get off the track.

There is no
such frontier--there is no way to get around that.

In each case, to get the
best results, you must free the metal from its obstructing
prejudicial ones by education--smelting, refining, and so forth.

Now let us add up the details and see how
much he got for his twenty-five cents.

Robert F. had violated a monastery once;
he had committed unprintable crimes since, and they had been
permitted--under disapproval--but the ravishment of the monastery
had not been forgotten nor forgiven, and the worm came at last.

By the end of the campaign
experience will have taught him that not ALL who go into battle
get hurt--an outside influence which will be helpful to him; and
he will also have learned how sweet it is to be praised for
courage and be huzza'd at with tear-choked voices as the war-worn
regiment marches past the worshiping multitude with flags flying
and the drums beating.

From time to time, during several years,
whenever a pupil has delivered himself of anything peculiarly
quaint or toothsome in the course of his recitations, this
teacher and her associates have privately set that thing down in
a memorandum-book; strictly following the original, as to
grammar, construction, spelling, and all; and the result is this
literary curiosity.

We started from that and measured off twenty-one
feet of the road, and drove William Rufus's state; then thirteen
feet and drove the first Henry's stake; then thirty-five feet and
drove Stephen's; then nineteen feet, which brought us just past
the summer-house on the left; then we staked out thirty-five,
ten, and seventeen for the second Henry and Richard and John;
turned the curve and entered upon just what was needed for Henry
III.--a level, straight stretch of fifty-six feet...

WHAT IS MAN?

He and his pilot-house were shot up
into the air; then they fell, and Ealer sank through the ragged
cavern where the hurricane-deck and the boiler-deck had been, and
landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on top of one of the
unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of scald and
deadly steam.

We can't prove it by the above
examples, and we can't prove it by the miraculous "histories"
built by those Stratfordolaters out of a hatful of rags and a
barrel of sawdust, but there is a plenty of other things we can
prove it by, if I could think of them.

Robert F. had violated a monastery once;
he had committed unprintable crimes since, and they had been
permitted--under disapproval--but the ravishment of the monastery
had not been forgotten nor forgiven, and the worm came at last.

I have had a kindly feeling, a friendly feeling, a cousinly
feeling toward Simplified Spelling, from the beginning of the
movement three years ago, but nothing more inflamed than that.

Among the books that interested me in
those days was one about the Amazon.

Dates are
hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are
monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold,
they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to
help.

It is SURMISED that he
traveled in Italy and Germany and around, and qualified himself
to put their scenic and social aspects upon paper; that he
perfected himself in French, Italian, and Spanish on the road;
that he went in Leicester's expedition to the Low Countries, as
soldier or sutler or something, for several months or years--or
whatever length of time a surmiser needs in his business--and
thus became familiar with soldiership and soldier-ways and
soldier-talk and generalship a...

Well, in putting on trousers a man always inserts the same old
leg first--never the other one.

With some seventy-three years and living in a villa
instead of a house, he is a fair target, and let him incorporate,
copyright, or patent himself as he will, there are some of his
"works" that will go swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as
graybeards gather about the fires and begin with, "I've heard
father tell," or possibly, "Once when I."
The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother--WAS my mother.

There
were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do
and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to
the dead languages.

These girls are kept by themselves, and
are regally fed and tended from birth.

Some searching questions were asked, when it turned out
that these lads were as glib as parrots with the "rules," but
could not reason out a single rule or explain the principle
underlying it.

That position is untenable--I may say ludicrously
untenable.

And when he offered sacrifice, the livers of all
the victims were folded inward in the lower part; a circumstance
which was regarded by those present who had skill in things of
that nature, as an indubitable prognostic of great and wonderful
fortune.--SUETONIUS,

It said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless,
be cheaply persuadable."

Albert Bigelow Paine.

At
first; then by and by they become monotonous and I get run over.

Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon,
Savonarola, Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, the Edict of
Nantes, Clive, Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey, Patay, Cowpens,
Saratoga, the Battle of the Boyne, the invention of the
logarithms, the microscope, the steam-engine, the telegraph--
anything and everything all over the world--we dumped it all
in among the English pegs according to it date and regardless
of its nationality.

At the command--
and trembling--he marched out into the field--with other soldiers
and in the daytime, not alone and in the dark.

A striking
contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon,
and Spenser, and Raleigh, and the other distinguished literary
folk of Shakespeare's time passed from life!

For he became a call-boy; and as early as '93 he became a
"vagabond"--the law's ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in
'94 a "regular" and properly and officially listed member of that
(in those days) lightly valued and not much respected profession.

He ORIGINATES nothing, not even a thought.

Thus at the
outset we all stand upon the same ground--recognition of the
supreme and absolute Monarch that resides in man, and we all
grovel before him and appeal to him; then those others dodge and
shuffle, and face around and unfrankly and inconsistently and
illogically change the form of their appeal and direct its
persuasions to man's SECOND-PLACE powers and to powers which have
NO EXISTENCE in him, thus advancing them to FIRST place; whereas
in my Admonition I stick logic...

If the deed was ordained from above, there is
no rational way of making this prisoner even partially
responsible for it, and the Genevan court cannot condemn him
without manifestly committing a crime.

When your mind is racing along from subject to subject
and strikes an inspiring one, open your mouth and begin talking
upon that matter--or--take your pen and use that.

I cannot quite make out what it was that misled the pupil in
the following instances; it would not seem to have been the sound
of the word, nor the look of it in print:


ASPHYXIA, a grumbling, fussy temper.

Perhaps the essence of the
thing is the value which men attach to a valuable something which
has come by luck and not been earned.

Very hard indeed; incredibly hard,
almost, if the result of that labor was to be the smooth and
rounded and flexible and letter-perfect English of the "Venus and
Adonis" in the space of ten years; and at the same time learn
great and fine and unsurpassable literary FORM.

I
did as you ordered: I placed two texts before my eyes--one a
dull one and barren of interest, the other one full of interest,
inflamed with it, white-hot with it.

In other
words it is the negative quality of passiveness either in
recoverable latency or insipient latescence.

And why were the Congregationalists not
Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman
Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the Quakers
Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the
Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists
Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics
Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians
Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans
Salvation ...

Haven't
I told you that no man EVER sacrifices himself; that there is no
instance of it upon record anywhere; and that when a man's
Interior Monarch requires a thing of its slave for either its
MOMENTARY or its PERMANENT contentment, that thing must and will
be furnished and that command obeyed, no matter who may stand in
the way and suffer disaster by it?

Henry remained
at home in the village.

The world had suddenly realized that while it was not
noticing the Queen had passed Henry VIII., passed Henry VI. and
Elizabeth, and gaining in length every day.

But this supposition not only fails to account for
Shakespeare's peculiar freedom and exactness in the use of that
phraseology, it does not even place him in the way of learning
those terms his use of which is most remarkable, which are not
such as he would have heard at ordinary proceedings at NISI
PRIUS, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real
property, 'fine and recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,'
'indenture,' 'tenure,' 'double voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fe...

I should
think our show people would have invented or imported that simple
and impressive device for securing and solidifying the attention
of an audience long ago; instead of which there continue to this
day to open a performance against a deadly competition in the
form of noise, confusion, and a scattered interest.

"There is nothing so
dangerous," wrote Lord Campbell, "as for one not of the craft to
tamper with our freemasonry."

And, being a stranger, he was of course
regarded as an inferior person--for that has been human nature
from Adam down--and of course, also, he was made to feel
unwelcome, for this is the ancient law with man and the other
animals.

Dreams that
are just like real life; dreams in which there are several
persons with distinctly differentiated characters--inventions of
my mind and yet strangers to me: a vulgar person; a refined one;
a wise person; a fool; a cruel person; a kind and compassionate
one; a quarrelsome person; a peacemaker; old persons and young;
beautiful girls and homely ones.

This
daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty; she had a kind face;
she was without airs; she is known to be full of common human
sympathies.

I know how, with horn and water, to find the trail of a
pocket and trace it step by step and stage by stage up the
mountain to its source, and find the compact little nest of
yellow metal reposing in its secret home under the ground.

The missionary's anguish of remorse and sense of treachery
were as bitter and persecuting and unappeasable, now, as they had
been in the former case.

A dollar picked up in the
road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which
you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stocks snuggles
into your heart in the same way.

When I
go into danger--that is, into rich people's houses, where, in the
nature of things, they will have high-tariff cigars, red-and-gilt
girded and nested in a rosewood box along with a damp sponge,
cigars which develop a dismal black ash and burn down the side
and smell, and will grow hot to the fingers, and will go on
growing hotter and hotter, and go on smelling more and more
infamously and unendurably the deeper the fire tunnels down
inside below the thimbleful of honest...

These times
and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the
strange sense of being thrust back into that Missourian village
and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived there so long
ago.

There is one thing which bothers me: I can't tell
where you draw the line between MATERIAL covetousness and
SPIRITUAL covetousness.

It has no authority to say that the right
one shall be acted upon and the wrong one discarded.

They are
little things that have been always happening every day, and were
always so unimportant and easily forgettable before--but now!

He goes by the brand, yet imagines he goes
by the flavor.

Holme, the lumberman, is fired with a desire to
throw away his excellent worldly prospects and go down and save
souls on the East Side.

To struggle
against a visible enemy is a thing worth while, and there is a
plenty of men who stand always ready to undertake it; but to
struggle against an invisible one--an invisible one who sneaks in
and does his awful work in the dark and leaves no trace--that is
another matter.

Shakespeare pronounced "Venus and Adonis" "the first heir of
his invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort
at literary composition.

CROSIER, a staff carried by the Deity.

If a good dog,
Susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have
got a downer interest in it.

[1]

One by one, improvements were discovered by men who used
their eyes, not their creating powers--for they hadn't any--and
now, after a hundred years the patient contributions of fifty or
a hundred observers stand compacted in the wonderful machine
which drives the ocean liner.

Last night Jean, all flushed with splendid health, and I the
same, from the wholesome effects of my Bermuda holiday, strolled
hand in hand from the dinner-table and sat down in the library
and chatted, and planned, and discussed, cheerily and happily
(and how unsuspectingly!)--until nine--which is late for us--then
went upstairs, Jean's friendly German dog following.

I staked it out with the English monarchs, beginning with
the Conqueror, and you could stand on the porch and clearly see
every reign and its length, from the Conquest down to Victoria,
then in the forty-sixth year of her reign--EIGHT HUNDRED AND
SEVENTEEN YEARS OF English history under your eye at once!

Yes--the elephant, the monkey, the horse, the dog, the
parrot, the macaw, the mocking-bird, and many others.

The rest of my days will be spent in patching and painting and
puttying and caulking my priceless possession and in looking the
other way when an imploring argument or a damaging fact approaches.

In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane
sugar to sugar cane.

At four-thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably,
and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made
conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so
located as to answer very well for a shoulder or coat-collar to
this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there
right before everybody to pillow his head on the Virgin's white
breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to her in the sensuous
music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and thu...

Thenceforward he was a busy and
flourishing business man, and was raking in money with both hands
for twenty years.

It was reveling in a
fantastic and joyful episode of my remote boyhood which had
suddenly flashed up in my memory--moved to this by the spectacle
of a yellow cat picking its way carefully along the top of the
garden wall.

I am interested myself because I have
seen his relics in Sackingen, and also the very spot where he
worked his great miracle--the one which won him his sainthood in
the papal court a few centuries later.

By their mere dumb presence in the world they cover with
derision every argument that can be invented in favor of royalty
by the most ingenious casuist.

With memory to
help, man preserves his observations and reasonings, reflects
upon them, adds to them, recombines, and so proceeds, stage by
stage, to far results--from the teakettle to the ocean
greyhound's complex engine; from personal labor to slave labor;
from wigwam to palace; from the capricious chase to agriculture
and stored food; from nomadic life to stable government and
concentrated authority; from incoherent hordes to massed armies.

leech! belay!

Yes, a brittle one and not valuable.

As instances, you
have all history: the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the
Egyptians, the Russians, the Germans, the French, the English,
the Spaniards, the Americans, the South Americans, the Japanese,
the Chinese, the Hindus, the Turks--a thousand wild and tame
religions, every kind of government that can be thought of, from
tiger to house-cat, each nation KNOWING it has the only true
religion and the only sane system of government, each despising
all the others, each an ass an...

There is that
pathetic tale of the man who labored like a slave, unresting,
unsatisfied, until he had accumulated a fortune, and was happy
over it, jubilant about it; then in a single week a pestilence
swept away all whom he held dear and left him desolate.

Where are these found?

The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.

However, the grand jury had to take hold of the matter--it
had no choice.

And all the
incidents, big and little, of Caesar's previous life had been
leading up to it, stage by stage, link by link.

Politics; XIII.

They know
by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-
tadpole he is not going to STAY tadpole in their history-tank;
no, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged
bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on his hams, and puff out
his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; and
assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a thundering
bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud.

So does a rat.

assassination of the Empress of Austria at
Geneva, September 10, 1898, occurred during Mark Twain's Austrian
residence.

By the end of the campaign
experience will have taught him that not ALL who go into battle
get hurt--an outside influence which will be helpful to him; and
he will also have learned how sweet it is to be praised for
courage and be huzza'd at with tear-choked voices as the war-worn
regiment marches past the worshiping multitude with flags flying
and the drums beating.

A long time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and
then to find a procession of prodigious footprints stretching
across the plain--footprints that were three miles apart, each
footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong deep, and with
forests and villages mashed to mush in it.

THAT won't do!--to the left!--to the right!--to the
LEFT--right! left--ri-- Stay where you ARE, or you're a goner!"

The world had suddenly realized that while it was not
noticing the Queen had passed Henry VIII., passed Henry VI. and
Elizabeth, and gaining in length every day.

At noon last, Saturday there
was no one in the world who would have considered
acquaintanceship with him a thing worth claiming or mentioning;
no one would have been vain of such an acquaintanceship; the
humblest honest boot-black would not have valued the fact that he
had met him or seen him at some time or other; he was sunk in
abysmal obscurity, he was away beneath the notice of the bottom
grades of officialdom.

I don't merely think it, I know it.

You know that they are being
stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when
they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their
approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces,
and it would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or
screams; yet you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings
together and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died;
then the dead rise with one impulse and shake the building with
their applause.

In the talk last night I said I found everything going so
smoothly that if she were willing I would go back to Bermuda in
February and get blessedly out of the clash and turmoil again for
another month.

The House of the Seven Gables was written by Lord Bryant.

He liked to sit on that kind of eggs on his
own private account as well as the nation's, and hatch them out
and count up their result.

He
is at the bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates
of degree and value go: a soiled and patched young loafer,
without gifts, without talents, without education, without
morals, without character, without any born charm or any acquired
one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a single grace of
mind or heart or hand that any tramp or prostitute could envy
him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent stone-
cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a ma...

One of the ways in which it
exercises this birthright is--as I think--continuing to use our
laughable alphabet these seventy-three years while there was a
rational one at hand, to be had for the taking.

He may THINK he is doing it solely
for the other person's sake, but it is not so; he is contenting
his own spirit first--the other's person's benefit has to always
take SECOND place.

And why were the Congregationalists not
Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman
Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the Quakers
Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the
Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists
Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics
Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians
Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans
Salvation ...

Shakespeare pronounced "Venus and Adonis" "the first heir of
his invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort
at literary composition.

Reserve your remark till we get to that part of
our discussion--tomorrow or next day, say.

It has quite a noble look--taking so much pains and using up
so much valuable time in order to be just and fair to a poor servant
to whom you owe nothing, but who needs money and is ill paid.

From that day to the end of
his life he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges;
not as a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in
front of a theater, but as a practicing lawyer--a great and
successful one, a renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most
formidable lance in the high brotherhood of the legal Table
Round; he lived in the law's atmosphere thenceforth, all his
years, and by sheer ability forced his way up its difficult
steeps to its supremest su...

Good, speak to the mariners: fall to 't, yarely,
or we run ourselves to ground; bestir, bestir!

And he said it; said it all the time, for months--in
the morning watch, the middle watch, and dog watch; and probably
kept it going in his sleep.

One verdict will say the kitten contains
the mouse; the other will as certainly say the mouse is in the
tom-cat.

I honor them, I uncover my head to them--from habit
and training; and THEY could not know comfort or happiness or
self-approval if they did not work and spend for the unfortunate.

You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,
clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and--so far as you or I
can make out--unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable,
how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly
unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley;
and how compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal
hung out anywhere to call attention to it.

The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches
the heart where it meets the oxygen and is purified.

WAGNER


Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891


It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-
mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth.

At Stratford there was by royal charter a Court of
Record sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys, besides the
town clerk, belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining
probability to suppose that the young Shakespeare may have had
employment in one of them.

Prejudices must be removed by OUTSIDE INFLUENCES or
not at all.

I mean SIMPLY the alphabet; simply the
consonants and the vowels--I don't mean any REDUCTIONS or
abbreviations of them, such as the shorthand writer uses in order
to get compression and speed.

Here is one which--well, now, how often we do slam right
into the truth without ever suspecting it:


The men employed by the Gas Company go around and
speculate the meter.

Show Bound was written by Peter Cooper.

We sat chatting cheerily in
the library last night, and she wouldn't let me look into the
loggia, where she was making Christmas preparations.

The mother
will go naked to clothe her child; she will starve that it may
have food; suffer torture to save it from pain; die that it may
live.

NOW then, you're all right; come ahead on the
starboard; straighten up and go 'long, never tremble: or be
alive again, and dare me to the desert DAMNATION can't you keep
away from that greasy water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch
her baldheaded! with thy sword; if trembling I inhabit then, lay
in the leads!--no, only with the starboard one, leave the other
alone, protest me the baby of a girl.

By the end of the campaign
experience will have taught him that not ALL who go into battle
get hurt--an outside influence which will be helpful to him; and
he will also have learned how sweet it is to be praised for
courage and be huzza'd at with tear-choked voices as the war-worn
regiment marches past the worshiping multitude with flags flying
and the drums beating.

I think that the rat's mind and the man's mind are the
same machine, but of unequal capacities--like yours and Edison's;
like the African pygmy's and Homer's; like the Bushman's and Bismarck's.

Then
comes the OUTSIDE INFLUENCE and grinds the rock to powder and
sets the ore free.

But necessarily a number of
persons were still alive in Stratford who, in the days of their
youth, had seen Shakespeare nearly every day in the last five
years of his life, and they would have been able to tell that
inquirer some first-hand things about him if he had in those last
days been a celebrity and therefore a person of interest to the
villagers.

No, no, I am aware
that when even the brightest mind in our world has been trained
up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be
possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely,
dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any
circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity
of that superstition.

Nothing worth the
trouble of stowing away in your memory.

His
was probably the most uninspiring funeral that is set down in
history.

Every one has sampled "English as She
is Spoke" and "English as She is Wrote"; this little volume
furnishes us an instructive array of examples of "English as She
is Taught"--in the public schools of--well, this country.

The devotees come from the very
ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in
his own Mecca.

He deeply loved his family, but to buy public
approval he treacherously deserted them and threw his life away,
ungenerously leaving them to lifelong sorrow in order that he
might stand well with a foolish world.

The rest of my days will be spent in patching and painting and
puttying and caulking my priceless possession and in looking the
other way when an imploring argument or a damaging fact approaches.

2:30 P.M.--It is the time appointed.

You were young and confident and
thought you could branch out and make things go with a whirl, and
here you are, you see!

Sometimes she played billiards with me after
dinner, but she was usually too tired to play, and went early to
bed.

At
last, to get ease of mind, comfort, self-approval, he hunted up
the stranger and took his life.

For one reason, there was then not much of a
world to electrify; it was a small world, as to known bulk, and
it had rather a thin population, besides; and for another reason,
the news traveled so slowly that its tremendous initial thrill
wasted away, week by week and month by month, on the journey, and
by the time it reached the remoter regions there was but little
of it left.

And also in
that day, if there shall remain a high-altitude peasant whose
potato-patch hasn't a railroad through it, it would make him as
conspicuous as William Tell.

And why were the Congregationalists not
Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman
Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the Quakers
Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the
Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists
Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics
Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians
Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans
Salvation ...

Yesterday the opera was "Tristan and Isolde."

Teach unreservedly what he already teaches with one
side of his mouth and takes back with the other: Do right FOR
YOUR OWN SAKE, and be happy in knowing that your NEIGHBOR will
certainly share in the benefits resulting.

Everybody wanted the tragedy
hushed up, ignored, forgotten, if possible.

The deceased was a sister of "Huckleberry Finn," one of
the famous characters in Mark Twain's TOM SAWYER.

The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492
under Julius Caesar.

The horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it
too formidably increases the historian's difficulty in accounting
for the young Shakespeare's erudition--an erudition which he was
acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk, every day in those
strenuous times, and emptying each day's catch into next day's
imperishable drama.

Whenever we take a new line of thought and drift into a new line
of belief and action, the impulse is ALWAYS suggested from the
OUTSIDE.

And why were the Congregationalists not
Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman
Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the Quakers
Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the
Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists
Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics
Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians
Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans
Salvation ...

That position is untenable--I may say ludicrously
untenable.

day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to
repeat to him [Dr. Samuel Johnson] Cato's Soliloquy, which she
went through very correctly.

They are odds and ends of thoughts, impressions,
feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand books, a
thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling
which have flowed down into your heart and brain out of the
hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors.

You have seen
Presbyterians?

Yes, a brittle one and not valuable.

It does seem to me that when a man sees a fellow-being
struggling in the water and jumps in at the risk of his life to
save him--

O.M.

HE can't
bear to see the child in that peril (a man of a different make
COULD), and so he tries to save the child, and loses his life.

We may wait, now, with baited breath, while Caesar reflects.

Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.

Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads.

The impulse which moves a person to do things--the
only impulse that ever moves a person to do a thing.

At
twenty-two George, through fighting-habits and drinking-habits
acquired at sea and in the sailor boarding-houses of the European
and Oriental ports, was a common rough in Hong-Kong, and out of a
job; and Henry was superintendent of the Sunday-school.

A minute ago you said Hamilton fought that duel to get
PUBLIC approval.

For the Almighty was
offended at them and their strength was rent like a cobweb.

Next, a great body of lancers,
in blue, with gilt helmets.

It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that
he, nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth.

For instance, take a simple, every-day
word PHTHISIS.

However, it is "conjectured" that he accomplished all this
and more, much more: learned law and its intricacies; and the
complex procedure of the law-courts; and all about soldiering,
and sailoring, and the manners and customs and ways of royal
courts and aristocratic society; and likewise accumulated in his
one head every kind of knowledge the learned then possessed, and
every kind of humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the
ignorant; and added thereto a wider and more...

And why were the Congregationalists not
Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman
Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the Quakers
Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the
Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists
Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics
Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians
Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans
Salvation ...

We started from that and measured off twenty-one
feet of the road, and drove William Rufus's state; then thirteen
feet and drove the first Henry's stake; then thirty-five feet and
drove Stephen's; then nineteen feet, which brought us just past
the summer-house on the left; then we staked out thirty-five,
ten, and seventeen for the second Henry and Richard and John;
turned the curve and entered upon just what was needed for Henry
III.--a level, straight stretch of fifty-six feet...

In each case, to get the
best results, you must free the metal from its obstructing
prejudicial ones by education--smelting, refining, and so forth.

Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country.

You have many years before you.

One evening a man passed by and turned down the lane, and
Henry said, with a pathetic smile, "Without intending me a
discomfort, that man is always keeping me reminded of my pinching
poverty, for he carries heaps of money about him, and goes by
here every evening of his life."

In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of
information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and
those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson,
Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns,
Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott,
Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning,
Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli--a fact which shows that
into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is...

The gateway, in the dark-colored barrier,
makes a strong frame for the great picture.

A Shakespearean play?

Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded
after a few days.

To have the long road mapped out with such
exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the habit of leaving
books and other articles lying around everywhere, and had not
previously been able to definitely name the place, and so had
often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and
failure; but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send
the children.

There is one thing which bothers me: I can't tell
where you draw the line between MATERIAL covetousness and
SPIRITUAL covetousness.

They follow the law of their make.

They know
by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-
tadpole he is not going to STAY tadpole in their history-tank;
no, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged
bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on his hams, and puff out
his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; and
assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a thundering
bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud.

By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell fire could Satan have
beguiled THEM to eat the apple.

No--and I see now, plainly enough, that the
great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off
it and hurt yourself.

Can you have been any MORE strongly moved to help
Sally out of her trouble--could you have done the deed any more
eagerly--if you had been under the delusion that you were doing
it for HER sake and profit only?

For when I got well my mother closed my school career and
apprenticed me to a printer.

In England, thirteen years ago, my wife and I were stabbed
to the heart with a cablegram which said, "Susy was mercifully
released today."

Haven't
I told you that no man EVER sacrifices himself; that there is no
instance of it upon record anywhere; and that when a man's
Interior Monarch requires a thing of its slave for either its
MOMENTARY or its PERMANENT contentment, that thing must and will
be furnished and that command obeyed, no matter who may stand in
the way and suffer disaster by it?

But he rejoices in the scoffings, since he is
suffering them in the great cause of Christ.

The young brother's education--well, an extinguishing
blight fell upon that happy dream, and he had to go to sawing
wood to support the old father, or something like that?

I don't mean composing; I mean COPYING.

Iron, steel, brass, white-metal, and so on.

We trotted the course from the conqueror to the
study, the children calling out the names, dates, and length of
reigns as we passed the stakes, going a good gait along the long
reigns, but slowing down when we came upon people like Mary and
Edward VI., and the short Stuart and Plantagenet, to give time to
get in the statistics.

Will you take note of that phrase?

By and by Circumstance
and the Sacramento UNION sent me to the Sandwich Islands for five
or six months, to write up sugar.

We gave
Washington's birth to George II.'s pegs and his death to George
III.'s;

Yes, a brittle one and not valuable.

If Shakespeare had been born and bred
on a barren and unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect
would have had no OUTSIDE MATERIAL to work with, and could have
invented none; and NO OUTSIDE INFLUENCES, teachings, moldings,
persuasions, inspirations, of a valuable sort, and could have
invented none; and so Shakespeare would have produced nothing.

The
holding of horses is scouted by many, and perhaps with justice,
as being unlikely and certainly unproved; but whatever the nature
of his employment was at the theater, there is hardly room for
the belief that it could have been other than continuous, for his
progress there was so rapid.

They
had endured from thirty to forty hours' railroading on the
continent of Europe--with all which that implies of worry,
fatigue, and financial impoverishment--and all they had got and
all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking
themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two
towns when other people were in bed; for back they must go over
that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled.

It used to roam the earth in the Old Silurian
times, and lay eggs and catch fish and climb trees and live on
fossils; for it was of a mixed breed, which was the fashion then.

At
twenty-two George, through fighting-habits and drinking-habits
acquired at sea and in the sailor boarding-houses of the European
and Oriental ports, was a common rough in Hong-Kong, and out of a
job; and Henry was superintendent of the Sunday-school.

But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St.
Mark's Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting
threads of the snowfall were woven into a spell of novel
enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me too
exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the
creation of magic.

Also, it might have made him go to New York and buy into the
Government, with results that would leave Tweed nothing to learn
when it came his turn.

There is nothing
PERSONAL about it; it cannot choose.

Man the Machine. b.

Sometimes I am half persuaded that
he is only a guesser, and not a good one.

They always spoke of Hardy as "the Martyr," and every little
while they moved through the principal street in procession--at
midnight, black-robed, masked, to the measured tap of the solemn
drum--on pilgrimage to the Martyr's grave, where they went
through with some majestic fooleries and swore vengeance upon his
murderers.

Thus at the
outset we all stand upon the same ground--recognition of the
supreme and absolute Monarch that resides in man, and we all
grovel before him and appeal to him; then those others dodge and
shuffle, and face around and unfrankly and inconsistently and
illogically change the form of their appeal and direct its
persuasions to man's SECOND-PLACE powers and to powers which have
NO EXISTENCE in him, thus advancing them to FIRST place; whereas
in my Admonition I stick logic...

They had found neither in Bayreuth;
they had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone
to Nuremberg and found neither beds nor standing room, and had
walked those quaint streets all night, waiting for the hotels to
open and empty their guests into trains, and so make room for
these, their defeated brethren and sisters in the faith.

Therefore it took him but a little time to get
tired of arguing with a person who agreed with everything he said
and consequently never furnished him a provocative to flare up
and show what he could do when it came to clear, cold, hard,
rose-cut, hundred-faceted, diamond-flashing REASONING.

Hear him:


Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt
of each sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the
word the whole canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the
greatest rapidity possible everything was sheeted home and
hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under
headway.

The precious bust, the priceless bust, the
calm bust, the serene bust, the emotionless bust, with the dandy
mustache, and the putty face, unseamed of care--that face which
has looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred
and fifty years and will still look down upon the awed pilgrim
three hundred more, with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle,
subtle expression of a bladder.

The threads and the colors came into
him FROM THE OUTSIDE; outside influences, suggestions,
EXPERIENCES (reading, seeing plays, playing plays, borrowing
ideas, and so on), framed the patterns in his mind and started up
his complex and admirable machinery, and IT AUTOMATICALLY turned
out that pictured and gorgeous fabric which still compels the
astonishment of the world.

The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.

How we arrive at Richard I., called Richard of the Lion-
heart because he was a brave fighter and was never so contented
as when he was leading crusades in Palestine and neglecting his
affairs at home.

But not the stone one?

It seems a strange thing and most irregular, but the verdict
was actually given against Landulph on the testimony of this
wandering rack-heap of unidentified bones.

Go on.

Over
and over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers
unlearned in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession
of it.

EUCHARIST, one who plays euchre.

Because by and by in one of our talks, I wish to
further impress upon you that neither you, nor I, nor any man
ever originates a thought in his own head.