by Mark Twain
In 1853, which is “more than fifty years ago,” my brother was hit a staggering blow by a new idea—an idea that had never been thought of in the West by any person before—the idea of hiring a literary celebrity to write an original story for his Hannibal newspaper for pay! He wrote East and felt of the literary market, but he met with only sorrows and discouragements. He was obliged to keep within the limit of his purse, and that limit was narrowly circumscribed. What he wanted was an original story which could be continued through three issues of his weekly paper and cover a few columns of solid bourgeois each time. He offered a sum to all the American literary celebrities of that day, in turn, but, in turn, Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and all the others declined. At last a celebrity of about the third degree took him up—with a condition. This was a Philadelphian, Homer C. Wilbur, a regular and acceptable contributor to Sartain’s Magazine and the other first-class periodicals. He said he could not write an original story for the sum offered—which was five dollars—but would translate one from the French for that sum. My brother took him up, and sent the money—I don’t remember now where he got it. The story came. We made an immense noise over it. We bragged in double-great-primer capitals, readable at thirty yards without glasses, that we had bought it and paid for it—proudly naming the sum—and we ran it through four numbers of the paper, increasing the subscription list by thirty-eight copies, payable in turnips and cord-wood; and it took all of three months for the excitement to quiet down.
Important as this memorable enterprise was, no contract passed between the parties. The whole thing was done by letters—just mere ordinary letters—fourteen or fifteen I suppose; and each person paid the other person’s postage. It was a fashion of the day. Postage was ten cents, and we didn’t prepay because the letter might never arrive and the money would be wasted. Nothing passed but just letters—mere ordinary letters. My brother trusted the great author, the great author trusted my brother. Signed and sealed contracts for periodical literature have never been known in this country, nor heard of in any other, except in the one single instance which we have under consideration this morning. The elder Rees, professional affidaviter, had the monopoly of that novelty. He wouldn’t trust even an obscure child of nineteen in so stately a matter as a bucketful of literary slops, without a contract that would hold that lad and be good for fifty years.
According to the professional affidaviter, I was paid for those writings. If it was money, I wonder what the sum was. I know perfectly well, by the Wilbur case, and by the difference between Wilbur’s fame and my obscurity, it couldn’t have been over thirty cents for the bucketful, and I know also that it must have included the bucket. But if the pay was delivered in the universal currency of the Far West, it couldn’t have been cord-wood, because cord-wood was never hauled in smaller lots than half-cords, and a half-cord would have been worth a dollar and a quarter, and would have covered more literature than even a reckless and improvident Rees would have been willing to enter into a solemn contract for. If it was eggs, I got six dozen; if it was watermelons I got three; if it was bar-soap I got five bars; if it was tallow-candles I got thirty; if it was soda-water I got six glasses; if it was ice-cream I got three saucers—and the colic. I have no recollection of ever getting those riches. If I got any of them I know I got them in instalments, and wide apart; for in that day any so noble an irruption of wealth as three plates of cream, all paid down in one single instalment, would have been an event so electrifying and so exalting that it would stay caked in my memory three centuries.
The common human trait which the Reeses have laid bare for inspection—and which the rest of the nations of the earth carefully conceal for shame, and pretend that they do not possess it—is the trait which urges a man to sacrifice all his pride, all his delicacy, all his decency, when his eye falls upon an unprotected dollar—a spectacle which sometimes takes the manhood out of him and leaves behind it nothing but the animal. Affidavits are nothing to this kind of a person; they come cheap; he would make a hundred a day for thirty cents apiece. This kind of person is gratefully ready to dig up a crime or a foolishness that has been condoned and forgotten by the merciful for fifty years, if he can get a dollar and a half out of it. It is fatal for his kind to have the luck to trace home to an esteemed and respected white-headed woman a forgotten disgrace whereby she tarnished her good name in her girlhood, for he will remorselessly expose it if there is half a handful of soiled dollars in it for him. It is out of the breed of Reeses that the world gets its Burkes and Hares. But the Burkes and Hares are to be pitied, not reviled. They only obey the law of their nature. They did not make their nature; they are not responsible; and no humane person will permit himself to say harsh things about them. It would be impossible for me to say abusive things about these modern Burkes and Hares of the Middle West. They must have bread to eat, and their ways of acquiring it are limited. As is natural, they acquire it in those ways which give them the most pleasure, the most satisfaction, the most contentment. They dig up dead reputations and sell the rotten product for food, and eat the food. Their ancestors, Burke and Hare, dug up the dead in the cemeteries and sold the corpses for bread and ate the bread; which is another way of saying they fed upon the dead. The Reeses are only Burkes and Hares deprived of their natural trade by the obstructive modern legal conditions under which they exist.
I may have written those papers, but it is not at all likely that I did. In any case, I have no recollection of it, and must let it stand at that. But one thing I will quite confidently maintain, in spite of all the affidavits of all the Burkes and Hares, and that is that when the affidaviter says that there was a contract, and that I was paid for the work, those two statements are plain straightforward falsehoods; and what is more, and worse, they are poorly devised, unplausible, and inartistic. As works of art, even a Rees ought to be ashamed of them, I think.
Tuesday, October 2, 1906
Another stolen holiday, including banquet-speech in New York and visit to Norfolk, Connecticut—In a letter received this morning friend calls Mr. Clemens “the blessedest ‘accident’ I have yet met with in my life”—Mr. Clemens reviews the series of “accidents” during his life which have led up to meeting this friend.
I have been to New York and to Fairhaven again on another stolen holiday—sixteen or seventeen days, this time. My summer seems to have been passed mainly in stolen holidays; pretext-holidays. With the exception of a banquet-speech in New York on the 19th of September, and a visit to Norfolk, Connecticut, to witness my daughter Clara’s début as a singer, I believe these many weeks of holidays were secured to me by pretext alone. The pretexts were pretty thin, as a rule—however, I have no regrets. In all my seventy years I have not often had a holiday when I really wanted one.
The morning mail brings me a letter from a young woman in New York, in which I find the remark, “You are the blessedest ‘accident’ I have yet met with in my life.” This brings back to my mind a conversation which I had with her a week ago, and I wish to recall some of the details of it, because they illustrate a philosophy of mine—or a superstition of mine, if you prefer that word. I had been able to do for her what she regarded as a great service, and, frankly speaking, I realized that it was, although it was a service which had cost me so little in the way of effort that the time and labor involved did not entitle it to a compliment. She said:
“You have accomplished this for me, and I am not acquainted with another person who could have done it. It was a happy accident that I accidentally met you last April—no, not an accident, there being no such things as accidents—it was ordered.”
“Ordered by whom? Or by what?”
“By the Power that watches over us and commands all events.”
“Issuing the orders from day to day?”
“Perhaps so. Yes, I suppose that is the way.”
I said “I believe that only one command has ever been issued, and that that command was issued in the beginning of time—in the first second of
time; that that command resulted in an act; in Adam’s first act—if there was an Adam—and that from that act sprang another act as a natural and unavoidable consequence—let us say it was Eve’s act—and that from that act proceeded another act of one of these two persons as an unavoidable consequence; and that now the chain of natural and unavoidable happenings being started, there has never been a break in it from that day to this; and so, in my belief, Adam’s first act was the origin and cause of the service which I have been enabled to do for you, and I am quite sure that if Adam’s first act, howsoever trifling it may have been, had taken a different form, no matter how trifling a form, the entire chain of human events for all these thousands of years would have been changed; in which case it is most unlikely that you and I would ever have met. Indeed it is most unlikely that both of us would have been born in the same land. The very slightest change in Adam’s first act could have resulted in your being an Eskimo and I a Hottentot; and could also have resulted in your being born five centuries ago and in my birth being postponed until century after next.
“I am not jesting. I have studied these things a long time and I positively believe that the first circumstance that ever happened in this world was the parent of every circumstance that has happened in this world since; that God ordered that first circumstance and has never ordered another one from that day to this. Plainly, then, I am not able to conceive of such a thing as the thing which we call an accident—that is to say, an event without a cause. Each event has its own place in the eternal chain of circumstances, and whether it be big or little it will infallibly cause the next event, whether the next event be the breaking of a child’s toy or the destruction of a throne. According to this superstition of mine, the breaking of the toy is fully as important an event as the destruction of the throne, since without the breaking of the toy the destruction of the throne would not have happened.
“But I like that word accident, although it is, in my belief, absolutely destitute of meaning. I like it because it is short and handy, and because it answers so well and so conveniently, and so briefly, in designating happenings which we should otherwise have to describe as odd, curious, interesting, and so on, and then add some elaboration to help out our meaning. And so for convenience sake, let us say it was an accident that you and I met last April, and that out of that accident grew, in a quite natural way, the linked series of accidents which led up to and made possible the service which I have had the good fortune to render you. Accident is a word which I constantly make use of when I am talking to myself about the chain of incidents which has constituted my life.
“I will undertake to go back, now, and give name and date to some of these accidents. When I was six years old, and my brother Henry four, he had the erysipelas, and when he was getting well of it Nature provided him with a new skin. I liked the old one and I wished I could have it. I was prodigiously interested in the peeling process. The skin of one of his heels came off, and was tough and stiff and resembled a cup, and it hung by only a shred of skin. I wanted it to play with, but, young as I was, I had a good deal of judgment and I knew that I couldn’t get it by asking for it—therefore I must think up some more judicious way. When at last I was alone with him for a moment, there was my chance. The time was brief; there was no scissors handy, and I pulled that heel-cup loose by force. Henry was hurt by this operation and he cried—cried much louder than was necessary, as it seemed to me, considering how small was his loss and how great my gain; but I was mainly troubled because it attracted attention, and brought rebuke for me and punishment.
“If I had the kind of memory I would like to have, I could recall what the punishment produced in the way of a next link in my chain, and could then go on, link by link, all down my seventy years, and prove to my perfect satisfaction that nothing has ever happened to me in all that time which could have happened to me if I had let that heel-cup alone. I haven’t any idea what the links were that led down to the heel-cup event and produced it, neither can I supply from my memory the long series of events stretching down through the next six years and caused by it—but in my twelfth year another incident happened. My father died, and I was taken from school and put in a printing-office. I was likely to remain there forever. I had to have an accident in order to get out of it. My elder brother came up from St. Louis and furnished it by providing me an equally unpromising place in a printing-office of his own.
“Nothing but another accident could get me free and give me another start. Circumstances enabled me to furnish it myself. I ran away from home and was gone a year. A series of accidents—that is to say, circumstances—shipped me to St. Louis, then to New York, then to Philadelphia, then to Muscatine, Iowa, then to Keokuk; and by this time I was twenty-one years old. I was likely to remain in Keokuk forever, but another accident, decreed by Adam’s first act and thereby made unavoidable, came to my rescue. I had been longing to explore the Amazon River and open its head-waters to a great trade in coca, but I hadn’t any money to get to the Amazon with. But for the accident thrown in my way, at this time, by Adam’s first act, I should never have even got started toward the Amazon. That accident was a fifty-dollar bill. I found it in the street on a winter’s morning. I advertised it in order to find the owner, and then I immediately left for Cincinnati for fear I might succeed if I waited. At Cincinnati I took passage in the Paul Jones for New Orleans, on my way to the Amazon. When I had been in New Orleans a couple of days my money was all gone and I had found out that there was no ship leaving for the Amazon that year, nor any likelihood that a ship would be leaving for the Amazon during the next century.
“It was imperatively necessary that another accident should come to my help. Exactly at the moment foreordained by Adam’s first act it arrived. On the way down the river I had gotten acquainted with one of the pilots of the Paul Jones, and I went to him now and begged him to make a pilot of me. It was by accident that I had made his acquaintance. Ordinarily he would not have wanted my society in the pilot-house, and would have enabled me to find it out; but on the day that I entered it one of his accidents happened to be due. He was suffering from a malady, or a pain of some kind, and was hardly able to stand at the wheel, so he was grateful for my advent. He gave the wheel to me and sat on the high bench and superintended my efforts while I learned how to steer. Thenceforth to New Orleans I steered for him every day all through his watch. If he hadn’t had that pain I should not have made his acquaintance, and my entire career, down to this day, would have been changed, and by a new train of accidents I should have drifted into the ministry or the penitentiary, or the grave, or somewhere, and should not have been heard of again.
“When the war broke out, three or four years later, I had been a pilot a couple of years or more, and was receiving so sumptuous a wage that I regarded myself as a rich man. I was without occupation now; the river was closed to navigation; it was time for another accident to happen or I should be drifting toward the ministry and the penitentiary again. Of course the accident happened. My elder brother was appointed Secretary of the new Territory of Nevada, and as I had to pay his passage across the continent I went along with him to see if I could find something to do out there on the frontier. By and by I went out to the Humboldt mines. The expedition was a failure. In the middle of ’61 I went down to the Esmeralda mines and scored another failure. By and by I found myself shoveling sand in a quartz mill at ten dollars a week and board. I lasted two weeks and was obliged to quit, the labor was so intolerably heavy and my muscles so incompetent.
“Once more there was no outlook, and I stood upon the very verge of the ministry or the penitentiary—nothing could save me but a new accident. Of course it happened. In those days everybody that had a mining claim wrote descriptions of it and prophecies concerning its future richness, and published them in the Virginia City Enterprise, and I had been doing the like with my worthless mining claims. Now then, just as a new accident was imperatively necessary to save me from the ministry and the penitenti
ary, it happened. Chief Justice Turner came down there and delivered an oration. I was not present, but I knew his subject and I knew what he would say about it, and how he would say it, and that into it he would inject all his pet quotations. I knew that he would scatter through it the remark about somebody’s lips having been sweetened by ‘the honey of the bees of Hymettus,’ and the remark that ‘Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,’ and the one which says ‘Against the stupid, even the gods strive in vain.’ He had a dozen other pet prettinesses and I knew them all, for I had heard him orate a good many times. He had an exceedingly flowery style, and I knew how to imitate it. He could charm an audience an hour on a stretch without ever getting rid of an idea. Every now and then he would wind up an empty sentence with a flourish and say, ‘Again,’ and then go on with another emptiness which he pretended was a confirmation of the preceding one. At the end he would say, ‘To sum up’—and then go on and smoothly and eloquently sum up everything he hadn’t said, and his audience would go away enchanted.
“I didn’t hear his speech, as I have already said, but I made a report of it, anyway, and got in all the pet phrases; and although the burlesque was rather extravagant, it was easily recognizable by the whole Territory as being a smart imitation. It was published in the Enterprise, and just in the nick of time to save me. That paper’s city editor was going East for three months and by return mail I was offered his place for that interval.