by Mark Twain
Marlow, the architect and builder of the stone pediment I was speaking of, was the favorite pupil of the lamented Hugh Miller, and worked in the same quarry with him.
Specimens of the stone, for the cabinet, can be easily chipped off by the tourist with his hammer, in the customary way. I will observe that the stone was brought from a quarry on the Surrey side, near London. You can go either by Blackfriars Bridge, or Westminster Bridge or the Thames tunnel -- fare, two shillings in a cab. It is best seen at sunrise, though many prefer moonlight.
The front yard of Saint Paul's is just like the back yard, except that it is adorned with a very noble and imposing statue of a black woman which is said to have resembled Queen Anne, in some respects. It is five feet four inches high from the top of the figure to the pedestal, and nine feet seven inches from the top of the figure to the ground, the pedestal being four feet three inches high -- all of solid stone. The figure measures eleven inches around the arm, and fifty-three inches around the body. The rigidity of the drapery has been much admired.
I will not make any description of the rest of Old Saint Paul's, for that has already been done in every book upon London that has thus far been written, and therefore the reader must be measurably familiar with it. My only object is to instruct the reader upon matters which have been strangely neglected by other tourists, and if I have supplied a vacuum which must often have been painfully felt, my reward is sufficient. I have endeavored to furnish the exact dimensions of everything in feet and inches, in the customary exciting way, and likewise to supply names and dates and gushings upon art which will instruct the future tourist how to feel and what to think, and how to tell it when he gets home.
Ill THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Saturdays the great reading room of the British Museum is full of preachers stealing sermons for next day! So said Mr. Woodward, chief of the geological department. We were looking down from a gallery upon the busy scene -- it looked busy, for there were one or two people scribbling and referring at every table, almost.
But Mr. W. said, "You ought to see it Saturdays!" They not only copy sermons, but tear them bodily out of the books. And Vandals of other kinds tear leaves out of valuable books for other purposes, although the Museum furnishes every possible convenience for its visitors.
As usual, Mr. Lee* took me to headquarters and told the Museum people who I was, and straightway they treated me with every kindness and courtesy -- and straightway, also, Mr. Woodward took us into the gold room -- one of those jealously guarded places which one must usually go through some red tape to get into. Lee went to his business and Mr. W. showed me through some eighteen miles of tall bookcases --
a labyrinth of circles and galleries. We have put off the rest of the library for the present.
* A businessman, “fellow in several royal societies,” who bad befriended Clemens. [B. DV.]
But I (upon recommendation of two householders of London) am provided with a ticket to the Reading Room, and this is always open, whereas the rest of the Museum is only open three days in the week.
What a place it is!
Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature -- a something which you have read about somewhere but never seen -- they show you a dozen! They show you all the possible varieties of that thing! They show you curiously wrought and jeweled necklaces of beaten gold worn by the Ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks, Britons -- every people, of the forgotten ages, indeed. They show you the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did live. Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell's face in death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of Xerxes; then you drift into some other room and stumble upon a world of the flint hatchets of prehistoric days; and reindeer horn handles; and pieces of bone with figures of animals delicately carved upon them; and long rows of bone fishhooks and needles of the period -- everything, indeed, connected with the household economy of the cave and lake dwellers -- and every object too, so repeated, and multiplied, and remultiplied that they suddenly whisk away your doubts and you find yourself accepting as a fact that these implements and ornaments are not scattered accidents, but deliberately designed and tediously wrought, and in very common use in some queer age of the world or other. And the fact that many of them are found in ruined habitations in.the bottoms of Swiss lakes, and many in caverns in other parts of Europe (buried under slowly created and very thick layers of limestone), does not encourage one to try to claim these parties as very recent kin. And then you pass along and perhaps you ask if they have got such a thing as a mummy about their clothes -- and bless your heart and they rush you into a whole Greenwood Cemetery of them -- old mummies, young mummies, he mummies, she mummies, high-toned mummies, ragged mummies, old slouches, mummies in good whole coffins, mummies on the half-shell, mummies with money, mummies that are "busted," kings and emperors, loafers and bummers, all straightened out as comfortable and happy in a Christian museum as if they had brought their knitting with them and this was the very hotel they had been hunting for, for four thousand years and upwards. And while you are wondering if these defunct had human feelings, human sympathies, human emotions like your own, you turn pensively about and find an eloquent answer: an Egyptian woman's enormous chignon and the box she carried it in when she went out to a party! You want to kiss that poor old half-bushel of curled and plaited hair; you want to uncover the glass case and shed some tears on it. You recognize the fact that in the old, old times, woman was the same quaint, fascinating, eccentric muggins she is in these.
They were strange, strange people in those old forgotten times. But I wonder how the mummies walked, with all those bandages on.
I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum. Nobody comes bothering around me -- nobody elbows me -- all the room and all the light I want under this huge dome -- no disturbing noises -- and people standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever was printed under the sun -- and if I choose to go wandering about the long corridors and galleries of the great building, the secrets of all the earth and all the age are laid open to me. I am not capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum -- it seems as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones.
From the Manuscript of
"A Tramp Abroad" (1879): The
French and the Comanches
NOW as to cruelty, savagery, and the spirit of massacre. These do not add a grace to the world's partly civilized races, yet at the same time they can hardly be called defects. They grow naturally out of the social system; the system could not be perfect without them. It is hard to draw a line here, with any great degree of exactness, between the French, the Comanches, and the several other nations existing upon the same moral and social level. It must in candor be admitted that in one point the Comanches rank higher than the French, in that they do not fight among themselves, whereas a favorite pastime with the French, from time immemorial, has been the burning and slaughtering of each other. No weapon has drunk such rivers of French blood as the French sword. No hatred has been so implacable as the Frenchman's hatred of his brother. No other creature's religion has wrought such marvels of murderous atrocity as the meek and lowly religion of the Frenchman. However, the last sentence is in a sense unfair, in the present comparison, since the Comanche has had no religion, and hence no pressing motive to reform his brother by killing him.
The Turks have fought among themselves, sometimes, so have many others among the inferior nations, but in truth civil war has never reached the entire perfection of bitterness, effectiveness, and immortal activity and perseverance in any but two communal organizations, those of the French and of the Kilkenny cats.
I very much doubt if the French are more cruel than the Comanches; I think they are only more ingenious in their methods. If this can be established as a fact, it will be evidence that the Frenchman is a higher being than the Comanche. The French nobility invented several striking and remarkable customs, and preserved them, through the i
ntelligent docility of the people, for a thousand years. One was the right, after renting a farm to a man, to ride down the man's crops, in chase after game, without having to pay for the destruction caused. Another right was to forbid the man to enclose his farm with walls or fences to keep out predatory wild animals -- for fences obstructed the chase.
Another was the lord's right to keep a dovecote, and not have to pay for the crops which the doves ate up, yet be free to punish any victim who killed one of the creatures.
Another was the lord's right to keep an oven and a mill, and compel the commoner to take his baking and grinding there, and pay double price. Another was the lord's right to seize the lands and goods of widows and orphans when the head of the family died intestate. Another was the lord's right to take about a fifth part of the sale-money when lands within his jurisdiction changed hands. But these are minor cruelties -- any partly civilized community could invent them and endure them. Higher in the scale are these others -- namely, the lord's right to make the peasants, after working all day, sit up and whip the ponds all night with boughs, to prevent the frogs' music from disturbing my lord's slumbers; the lord's right to cut open a peasant and warm his feet in him, as in a foot muff, when the chase had wearied my lord and made him cold; and, finally, comes le droit du seigneur -- let it go in French, it would soil the English language to describe it in that tongue. The Comanches might beat these last three rights, possibly, but they could not beat them much. However, French ingenuity struck its supremest altitude during the Revolution, when the revolutionists tied naked men to naked women, and threw them into the river. This was a step beyond the invention of the Comanche.
Therefore here the Comanche fails and the Frenchman takes the precedence. As this thing occurred less than a hundred years ago, we are able to believe that the Frenchman has not yet lost his inventive art, nor possibly the disposition to exercise it.
In one thing the French stand almost alone. The spirit of massacre seems to be theirs by divine right. No other nation has had it so conspicuously. The French have almost monopolized it during ages. Long before St. Bartholomew's, they had learned to know and love the deep pleasures of the massacre. St. Bartholomew's is so monumental that its vast shadow hides the noble array of massacres that lie behind it; we see them so dimly that we scarcely note them -- but they are there, just the same. If certain of the greater ones had been done in England, they would blacken the sun of her history like an eclipse; but being done in the native home of massacre, they seem as natural and proper as the splotches on a leper, and provoke as little attention.
St. Bartholomew's was unquestionably the finest thing of the kind ever devised and accomplished in the world. All the best people took a hand in it, the King and the Queen Mother included. The time was 1572. There was a misunderstanding on a religious point. The Frenchman is nothing if not pious. He is not content to be pious all by himself, he requires his neighbor to be pious also -- otherwise he will kill him and make him so. Yes, if that neighbor declines to lead a holy life, he will take an ax and convert him. The Frenchman is a social being, and does not wish to occupy heaven in solitude -- therefore he provides company for himself. At the time I speak of, it was not merely one neighbor who had gone astray as to religion, but a full half of the nation.
This was a bad business. The Catholic chiefs were grieved to see this sorrowful sinfulness, and took counsel concerning the best way to cure it. The Queen Mother, whose wisdom and holiness were perfect, suggested the usual national remedy, a massacre. The idea was approved and the massacre was ordered, just as other people would order a breakfast. The midnight between two August days was appointed for the beginning of the good work, and notice was sent out to the various towns and cities.
The truly pious prepared their arms, preserved their secret, and waited; they visited and were visited by their sinful and unsuspecting neighbors as usual, and the doom that was in the air gave no token. The King held the kindliest communion with the leader of the sinners; and if this latter had been of an observant turn he could have seen there the very gun with which his majesty was going to cripple him from the palace windows a little later.
The appointed hour came, and the midnight tocsin burst upon the stillness with its clangor. The pious were ready, the sinful were taken by surprise. Houses were invaded, men and women were slaughtered in their chambers or on their stairs, children were brained against the walls. The devout work was kept up two days and three nights, the river was clogged with the bodies of the slain, the streets were piled with corpses, the air was foul with the decaying flesh of men who were martyrs to their own slowness of invention -- for they were Frenchmen, and if they had happened to think of the idea first, they would have massacred the others. Seventy thousand lives were taken in those two or three days in France, and the true religion retired from its exploit so much strengthened that the other side was never able to seriously threaten its supremacy afterward.
There have been French massacres since, of course. The Reign of Terror was one protracted and enjoyable one, and we have had some in our time, notably that of the 2nd December and several under the Commune toward the close of the Franco-Prussian War. But none of these are half such matters of pride to the French as their peerless St. Bartholomew's.
The most attractive feature of the French national character, and its most encouraging one to the missionary, is its admirable and unapproachable docility. We look upon rabbits as being meek. But what is the meekness of the rabbit to the meekness of the Frenchman? Are there any rabbits that would allow themselves to be abused, insulted and trodden under foot persistently and continuously for a thousand years and never offer to bite? Europe is freckled all over with daring little communities which have risen against powerful oppressors time and time again, and compelled redress. The list stretches out to weariness. William Tells and Wat Tylers have been common nearly everywhere but in France. Yet even France rose at last -- and would have retired to its warren again quite contented with a cuff and a bonbon if the foolish King had offered them, but it was not his style to do the needful thing at the needful time, so the chance went by. Then the nation cast its rabbit skin and put on its other national garment, the tiger skin; being closely pressed by Europe in arms, it went a step further and asserted its manhood, and was doubtless surprised to find how much it had of it. Napoleon, the great foreigner, brought the people's soldiership up to the last summit of perfection; and when he got ready he dressed the nation in their rabbit skins again and put his foot on their necks, and they glorified him for it. Napoleon III accommodated them in the same way, to their vast satisfaction.
The foreigner has been a great boon to France. France's great men have been rather usually foreign-born -- the present time is not an exception to the rule -- and these wise persons seem to have well understood how to please the average citizen.
The average citizen requires "glory" -- that is the main thing; plenty of glory, plenty of noise, plenty of show, plenty of equality and fraternity, plenty of masked balls and fantastic nonsense, plenty of gammon and brag; plenty of assurances that the world's eye is upon him, that his wife sets the fashion in clothes and he in skin-deep politeness; plenty of reminders that his tongue is the court language of the nations and that Paris is the sun and could robe the earth in intellectual darkness by going out; plenty of Vive la Republique today, Vive le Roi tomorrow, Vive la Commune next day and Vive the devil the day after; plenty of high-sounding painless duels to cock up his stricken honor again; plenty of piousness and indecency and massacre and hurrah -- these he requires in life, and a rattling funeral to end up with, with a priest and a lantern in the lead, an imitation major general on the hearse box, and a string of vacant mourning coaches tagging after -- then he is satisfied, and sails rejoicing up among the other angels to tell about it. These grandeurs are inexpensive, and the great foreigners who have ruled France have found their profit in furnishing them.
As I have said, the Frenchman's docility is the most beauti
ful trait in the national character, and will presently become his most useful endowment; for by it our missionaries will uplift him as one lifts a rabbit by the ears. The Frenchman is made up of the littlest littlenesses conceivable, and the greatest greatnesses.* The tiger that is in him -- the stealthy, blood-loving, massacring instinct -- fits him to become, through repression and careful training, the mightiest of soldiers. The rabbit-docility which has been bred in him by ages of meek putting-up with wrongs and indignities is the thing which will enable him to endure this repression and training without a murmur. His gigantic vanity will move him to attempt miracles in art, mechanics, statesmanship, and literature which would appall another, and his fervid and frantic imagination and his restless energy and diligence will enable him to carry them to a successful conclusion.