The Portable Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  S. L. CLEMENS

  To Andrew Lang

  [EARLY 1890]

  . . . The little child is permitted to label its drawings “This is a cow—this is a horse” and so on. This protects the child. It saves it from the sorrow and wrong of hearing its cows and horses criticised as kangaroos and work-benches. A man who is whitewashing a fence is doing a useful thing, so also is the man who is adorning a rich man’s house with costly frescoes; and all of us are sane enough to judge these performances by standards proper to each. Now then, to be fair an author ought to be allowed to put upon his book an explanatory line: “This is written for the Belly and the Members.” And the critic ought to hold himself in honor bound to put away from his ancient habit of judging all books by one standard and thenceforth follow a fairer course.

  The critic assumes every time that if a book doesn’t meet the cultivated-class standard, it isn’t valuable. Let us apply his law all around: for if it is sound in the case of novels, narratives, pictures, and such things, it is certainly sound and applicable to all the steps which lead up to culture and make culture possible. It condemns the spelling book, for a spelling book is of no use to a person of culture; it condemns all school books and all schools which lie between the child’s primer and Greek, and between the infant school and the university; it condemns all the rounds of art which lie between the cheap terra cotta groups and the Venus de Medici, and between the chromo and the Transfiguration; it requires Whitcomb Riley to sing no more till he can sing like Shakespeare, and it forbids all amateur music and will grant its sanction to nothing below the “classic.”

  Is this an extravagant statement? No, it is a mere statement of fact. It is the fact itself that is extravagant and grotesque. And what is the result? This, and it is sufficiently curious: the critic has actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers’ singing society; and Homer than the little everybody’s-poet whose rhymes are in all mouths to-day and will be in nobody’s mouth next generation; and the Latin classics than Kipling’s far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation Army; and the Venus di Medici than the plaster-cast peddler; the superstition, in a word, that the vast and awful comet that trails its cold lustre through the remote abysses of space once a century and interests and instructs a cultivated handful of astronomers is worth more to the world than the sun which warms and cheers all the nations every day and makes the crops to grow.

  If a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but to convert angels, and they wouldn’t need it. The thin top crust of humanity—the cultivated—are worth pacifying, worth pleasing, worth coddling, worth nourishing and preserving with dainties and delicacies, it is true; but to be caterer to that little faction is no very dignified or valuable occupation, it seems to me; it is merely feeding the over-fed and there must be small satisfaction in that. It is not that little minority who are already saved that are best worth lifting at, I should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are underneath. That mass will never see the Old Masters—that sight is for the few; but the chromo maker can lift them all one step upward toward appreciation of art; they cannot have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and the singing class lift them a little way toward that far light; they will never know Homer, but the passing rhymester of their day leaves them higher than he found them; they may never hear of the Latin classics but they will strike step with Kipling’s drum-beat, and they will march; for all Jonathan Edwards’s help they would die in their slums, but the Salvation Army will beguile some of them up to pure air and a cleaner life; they know no sculpture, the Venus is not even a name to them, but they are a grade higher in the scale of civilization by the ministrations of the plaster-cast than they were before it took its place upon their mantel and made it beautiful to their unexacting eyes.

  Indeed I have been misjudged from the very first. I have never tried in even one single little instance to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them but have done my best to entertain them. To simply amuse them would have satisfied my dearest ambition at any time; for they could get instruction elsewhere and I had two chances to help to the teacher’s one: for amusement is a good preparation for study and a good healer of fatigue after it. My audience is dumb, it has no voice in print, and so I cannot know whether I have won its approbation or only got its censure.

  Yes, you see, I have always catered for the Belly and the Members but have been served like the others—criticized from the culture-standard—to my sorrow and pain; because, honestly, I never cared what became of the cultured classes; they could go to the theatre and the opera, they had no use for me and the melodeon.

  And now at last I arrive at my object and tender my petition, making supplication to this effect: that the critics adopt a rule recognizing the Belly and the Members and formulate a standard whereby work done for them shall be judged. Help me, Mr. Lang; no voice can reach further than yours in a case of this kind, or carry greater weight of authority.

  Fragment of Letter to—, 1891:

  . . . I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when pretending to portray life. But I confined myself to the boy-life out on the Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other phases of life. I was a soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself hasn’t a more burnt-in, hard-baked and unforgettable familiarity with that death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which is a raw soldier’s first fortnight in the field—and which, without any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is ever going to see.

  Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple of weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that direction. And I’ve done “pocket-mining” during three months in the one little patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals gold in pockets—or did, before we robbed all of those pockets and exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature ever indulged in. There are not thirty men left alive who, being told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain, would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest idea of how to set about it; but I am one of the possible 20 or 30 who possess the secret, and I could go and put my hand on that hidden treasure with a most deadly precision.

  And I’ve been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find it—just with a touch of the tongue. And I’ve been a silver miner and know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast. And so I know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte knows them exteriorly.

  And I was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two sessions and the same in Congress one session, and thus learned to know personally three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.

  And I was some years a Mississippi pilot, and familiarly knew all the different kinds of steamboatmen—a race apart, and not like other folk.

  And I was for some years a traveling “jour” printer, and wandered from city to city—and so I know that sect familiarly.

  And I was a lecturer on the public platform a number of seasons and was a responder to toasts at all the different kinds of banquets—and so I know a great many secrets about audiences—secrets not to be got out of books, but only acquirable by experience.

  And I watched over one dear project of mine for years, spent a fortune on it, and failed to make it go—and the history of that would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves as in a mirror; and they would testify and say
, Verily, this is not imagination; this fellow has been there—and after would cast dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming.

  And I am a publisher and did pay to one author’s widow (General Grant’s) the largest copyright checks this world has seen—aggregating more the £80,000 in the first year.

  And I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.

  Now then; as the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience, I ought to be well equipped for that trade.

  I surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real, none of it artificial, for I don’t know anything about books.

  [NO SIGNATURE.]

  From a letter to Susan Crane, March 19, 1893, Florence,

  Italy

  Susy dear, this is Susy [Clemens]’s birth day & she is 21—facts which will be drifting through your mind as you sit at your breakfast three hours from now—& there will be pictures drifting with the facts,—& ghosts. Well-a-day!

  I dreamed I was born, & grew up, & was a pilot on the Mississippi, & a miner & journalist in Nevada, & a pilgrim in the Quaker City, & had a wife & children & went to live in a Villa out of Florence—& this dream goes on & on & sometimes seems so real that I almost believe it is real. I wonder if it is? But there is no way to tell, for if one applied tests, they would be part of the dream, too, & so would simply aid the deceit. I wish I knew whether it is a dream or real.

  Betty the perfect-tempered left last night for Bad-Nauheim—her mother is dying. It is only a dream, probably, & doubtless there is no Betty & no mother; but it all has the effect of reality. Jean cried a good deal. . . .

  Love to you & all.

  SAML.*

  To Major “Jack” Downing, in Middleport, Ohio:

  HOTEL KRANTZ, WEIN, I, NEUER MARKT 6,

  FEB. 26, 1899.

  DEAR MAJOR,—No; it was to Bixby that I was apprenticed. He was to teach me the river for a certain specified sum. I have forgotten what it was, but I paid it. I steered a trip for Bart Bowen, of Keokuk, on the A. T. Lacy, and I was partner with Will Bowen

  *Permission to publish from The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Connecticut. on the A. B. Chambers (one trip), and with Sam Bowen a whole summer on a small Memphis packet.

  The newspaper report you sent me is incorrect. Bixby is not 67: he is 97. I am 63 myself, and I couldn’t talk plain and had just begun to walk when I apprenticed myself to Bixby who was then passing himself off for 57—and successfully too, for he always looked 60 or 70 years younger than he really was. At that time he was piloting the Mississippi on a Potomac commission granted him by George Washington who was a personal friend of his before the Revolution. He has piloted every important river in America on that commission, he has also used it as a passport in Russia. I have never revealed these facts before. I notice, too, that you are deceiving the people concerning your age. The printed portrait which you have enclosed is not a portrait of you, but a portrait of me when I was 19. I remember very well when it was common for people to mistake Bixby for your grandson. Is it spreading, I wonder—this disposition of pilots to renew their youth by doubtful methods? Beck Jolly and Joe Bryan—they probably go to Sunday school now—but it will not deceive.

  Yes, it is as you say. All of the procession but a fraction has passed. It is time for us all to fall in.

  Sincerely yours,

  S. L. CLEMENS

  From a letter to W. D. Howells, in New York:

  HOTEL KRANTZ

  WIEN I. NEUER MARKT 6

  APRIL 2, ’99.

  DEAR HOWELLS,—I am waiting for the April Harper, which is about due now; waiting, and strongly interested. You are old enough to be a weary man, with paling interests, but you do not show it. You do your work in the same old delicate and delicious and forceful and searching and perfect way. I don’t know how you can—but I suspect. I suspect that to you there is still dignity in human life, and that Man is not a joke—a poor joke—the poorest that was ever contrived. Since I wrote my Bible, (last year)—which Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it, Man is not to me the respect-worthy person he was before; and so I have lost my pride in him, and can’t write gaily nor praise-fully about him any more. And I don’t intend to try. I mean to go on writing, for that is my best amusement, but I shan’t print much. (for I don’t wish to be scalped, any more than another.)

  April 5. The Harper has come. I have been in Leipzig with your party, and then went on to Karlsbad and saw Mrs. Marsh’s encounter with the swine with the toothpick and the other manners. —At this point Jean carried the magazine away.

  Is it imagination, or—Anyway I seem to get furtive and fleeting glimpses which I take to be the weariness and condolence of age; indifference to sights and things once brisk with interest; tasteless stale stuff which used to be champagne; the boredom of travel: the secret sigh behind the public smile, the private What-in-hell-did-I-come-for!

  But maybe that is your art. Maybe that is what you intend the reader to detect and think he has made a Columbus-discovery. Then it is well done, perfectly done. I wrote my last travel book—in hell; but I let on, the best I could, that it was an excursion through heaven. Some day I will read it, and if its lying cheerfulness fools me, then I shall believe it fooled the reader. How I did loathe that journey around the world!—except the sea-part and India. . . .

  Sincerely yours,

  S. L. CLEMENS

  To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

  RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON.

  FEB. ’02.

  DEAR JOE,—“After compliments.” From Bridgeport to New York; thence to home; and continuously until near midnight I wallowed and reeked with Jonathan [Edwards] in his insane debauch; rose immediately refreshed and fine at 10 this morning, but with a strange and haunting sense of having been on a three days’ tear with a drunken lunatic. It is years since I have known these sensations. All through the book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad—a marvelous spectacle. No, not all through the book—the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what I take to be Calvinism and its God begins to show up and shine red and hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment. By God I was ashamed to be in such company.

  Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Arminian position) that the Man (or his Soul or his Will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved to action by an impulse back of it. That’s sound!

  Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infalliably chooses the one which for the moment is most pleasing to ITSELF. Perfectly correct! An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane.

  Up to that point he could have written chapters III and IV of my suppressed “Gospel.” But there we seem to separate. He seems to concede the indisputable and unshakable dominion of Motive and Necessity (call them what he may, these are exterior forces and not under the man’s authority, guidance or even suggestion) —then he suddenly flies the logic track and (to all seeming) makes the man and not these exterior forces responsible to God for the man’s thoughts, words and acts. It is frank insanity.

  I think that when he conceded the autocratic dominion of Motive and Necessity he grants a third position of mine—that man’s mind is a mere machine—an automatic machine—which is handled entirely from the outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing: not an ounce of its fuel, and not so much as a bare suggestion to that exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do, nor how it shall do it nor when.

  After that concession, it was time for him to get alarmed and shirk—for he was pointing straight for the only rational and possible next-station on that piece of road: the irresponsibility of man to God.

  And so he shirked. Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result:

  Man is commanded to do so-and-so;

  It has been ordained from the beginning of time that some men shan’t and others can’t.

  These
are to be blamed: let them be damned.

  I enjoy the Colonel very much, and shall enjoy the rest of him with an obscene delight.

  Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you and yours!

  MARK

  To Miss Picard, in St.-Dié, France:

  RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON, FEBRUARY 22, 1902. DEAR MISS HELENE,—If you will let me call you so, considering that my head is white and that I have grown-up daughters. Your beautiful letter has given me such deep pleasure! I will make bold to claim you for a friend and lock you up with the rest of my riches; for I am a miser who counts his spoil every day and hoards it secretly and adds to it when he can, and is grateful to see it grow.

  Some of that gold comes, like yourself, in a sealed package, and I can’t see it and may never have the happiness; but I know its value without that, and by what sum it increases my wealth.

  I have a Club, a private Club, which is all my own. I appoint the Members myself, and they can’t help themselves, because I don’t allow them to vote on their own appointment and I don’t allow them to resign! They are all friends whom I have never seen (save one), but who have written friendly letters to me.