Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  Dear Uncle,

  That’s one nice thing about me, I never bother any one, to offer me a good thing twice. You dont ask me to stay over Sunday, but then you dont ask me to leave Saturday night, and knowing the nobility of your nature as I do—thank you, I’ll stay till Monday morning.*

  Your’s and the dear familie’s

  George W. Cable.

  It seems a prodigious while ago! Two or three nights ago I dined at Andrew Carnegie’s with a score of other men, and at my side was Cable—actually an old man, really an old man, that once so young chap! Sixty-two years old, frost on his head, seven grandchildren in stock, and a brand-new wife to re-begin life with!

  * It is so yet. M.T.

  † She has said it well and correctly. Humor is a subject which has never had much interest for me. This is why I have never examined it, nor written about it nor used it as a topic for a speech. A hundred times it has been offered me as a topic in these past forty years, but in no case has it attracted me. M.T.

  * Cable never traveled Sundays.—M.T., Dec. 22, 1906.

  Wednesday, December 26, 1906

  Mr. Clemens’s experiments in phrenology with Fowler; also in palmistry—General verdict, he had no sense of humor—His speech before the copyright committees of Congress.

  I lately received a letter from England from a gentleman whose belief in phrenology is strong, and who wonders why phrenology has apparently never interested me enough to move me to write about it. I have explained, as follows:

  21 Fifth Avenue.

  Dec. 18, 1906.

  Dear Sir:

  I never did profoundly study phrenology; therefore I am neither qualified to express an opinion about it nor entitled to do so. In London, 33 or 34 years ago, I made a small test of phrenology for my better information. I went to Fowler under an assumed name, and he examined my elevations and depressions and gave me a chart which I carried home to the Langham Hotel and studied with great interest and amusement—the same interest and amusement which I should have found in the chart of an impostor who had been passing himself off for me, and who did not resemble me in a single sharply defined detail. I waited 3 months and went to Mr. Fowler again, heralding my arrival with a card bearing both my name and my nom de guerre. Again I carried away an elaborate chart. It contained several sharply defined details of my character, but it bore no recognizable resemblance to the earlier chart. These experiences gave me a prejudice against phrenology which has lasted until now. I am aware that the prejudice should have been against Fowler, instead of against the art; but I am human and that is not the way that prejudices act.

  In America, forty or fifty years ago, Fowler and Wells stood at the head of the phrenological industry, and the firm’s name was familiar in all ears. Their publications had a wide currency, and were read and studied and discussed by truth-seekers and by converts all over the land. One of the most frequent arrivals in our village of Hannibal was the peripatetic phrenologist, and he was popular, and always welcome. He gathered the people together and gave them a gratis lecture on the marvels of phrenology, then felt their bumps and made an estimate of the result, at twenty-five cents per head. I think the people were almost always satisfied with these translations of their characters—if one may properly use that word in this connection; and indeed the word is right enough, for the estimates really were translations, since they conveyed seeming facts out of apparent simplicities into unsimple technical forms of expression, although as a rule their meanings got left behind on the journey. Phrenology found many a bump on a man’s head, and it labeled each bump with a formidable and outlandish name of its own. The phrenologist took delight in mouthing these great names; they gurgled from his lips in an easy and unembarrassed stream, and this exhibition of cultivated facility compelled the envy and admiration of everybody. By and by the people became familiar with these strange names and addicted to the use of them, and they batted them back and forth in conversation with deep satisfaction—a satisfaction which could hardly have been more contenting if they had known for certain what the words meant.

  It is not at all likely, I think, that the traveling expert ever got any villager’s character quite right, but it is a safe guess that he was always wise enough to furnish his clients character-charts that would compare favorably with George Washington’s. It was a long time ago, and yet I think I still remember that no phrenologist ever came across a skull in our town that fell much short of the Washington standard. This general and close approach to perfection ought to have roused suspicion, perhaps, but I do not remember that it did. It is my impression that the people admired phrenology and believed in it, and that the voice of the doubter was not heard in the land.

  I was reared in this atmosphere of faith and belief and trust, and I think its influence was still upon me, so many years afterward, when I encountered Fowler’s advertisements in London. I was glad to see his name, and glad of an opportunity to personally test his art. The fact that I went to him under a fictitious name is an indication that not the whole bulk of the faith of my boyhood was still with me; it looks like circumstantial evidence that in some way my faith had suffered impairment in the course of the years. I found Fowler on duty, in the midst of the impressive symbols of his trade. On brackets, on tables, on shelves, all about the room, stood marble-white busts, hairless, every inch of the skull occupied by a shallow bump, and every bump labeled with its imposing name, in black letters.

  Fowler received me with indifference, fingered my head in an uninterested way, and named and estimated my qualities in a bored and monotonous voice. He said I possessed amazing courage, an abnormal spirit of daring, a pluck, a stern will, a fearlessness that were without limit. I was astonished at this, and gratified, too; I had not suspected it before; but then he foraged over on the other side of my skull and found a hump there which he called “caution.” This hump was so tall, so mountainous, that it reduced my courage-bump to a mere hillock by comparison, although the courage-bump had been so prominent, up to that time—according to his description of it—that it ought to have been a capable thing to hang my hat on; but it amounted to nothing, now, in the presence of that Matterhorn which he called my Caution. He explained that if that Matterhorn had been left out of my scheme of character, I would have been one of the bravest men that ever lived—possibly the bravest—but that my cautiousness was so prodigiously superior to it that it abolished my courage and made me almost spectacularly timid. He continued his discoveries, with the result that I came out safe and sound, at the end, with a hundred great and shining qualities; but which lost their value and amounted to nothing because each of the hundred was coupled up with an opposing defect which took the effectiveness all out of it. However, he found a cavity, in one place; a cavity where a bump would have been in anybody else’s skull. That cavity, he said, was all alone, all by itself, occupying a solitude, and had no opposing bump, however slight in elevation, to modify and ameliorate its perfect completeness and isolation. He startled me by saying that that cavity represented the total absence of the sense of humor! He now became almost interested. Some of his indifference disappeared. He almost grew eloquent over this America which he had discovered. He said he often found bumps of humor which were so small that they were hardly noticeable, but that in his long experience this was the first time he had ever come across a cavity where that bump ought to be.

  I was hurt, humiliated, resentful, but I kept these feelings to myself; at bottom I believed his diagnosis was wrong, but I was not certain. In order to make sure, I thought I would wait until he should have forgotten my face, and the peculiarities of my skull, and then come back and try again, and see if he had really known what he had been talking about, or had only been guessing. After three months I went to him again, but under my own names this time. Once more he made a striking discovery—the cavity was gone, and in its place was a Mount Everest—figuratively speaking—thirty-one thousand feet high, the loftiest bump of humor he had ever encountered in his life-l
ong experience! I went from his presence prejudiced against phrenology, but it may be, as I have said to the English gentleman, that I ought to have conferred the prejudice upon Fowler, and not upon the art which he was exploiting.*

  Eleven years ago, on board a ship bound for Europe, William T. Stead made a photograph of my right hand, and afterwards, in London, sent replicas of it to twelve palmists, concealing from them my name, and asking them to make and send to him estimates of the character of the owner of the hand. The estimates were furnished, and Stead published six or seven of them in his magazine. By those estimates I found that my make-up was about like anybody else’s; I did not seem to differ much from other people; certainly in no prominent and striking way—except in a single detail. In none of the estimates was the word humor mentioned—if my memory is not mistreating me—except in one; in that one the palmist said that the possessor of that hand was totally destitute of the sense of humor.

  Two years ago, Colonel Harvey took prints of my two hands and sent them to six professional palmists of distinguished reputation here in New York City; and he, also, withheld my name, and asked for estimates. History repeated itself. The word humor occurred only once in the six estimates, and then it was accompanied by the definite remark that the possessor of the hands was destitute of the sense of humor. Now then, I have Fowler’s estimate; I have the estimates of Stead’s six or seven palmists; I have the estimates of Harvey’s half-dozen: the evidence that I do not possess the sense of humor is overwhelming, satisfying, convincing, incontrovertible—and at last I believe it myself.

  The speech which I made before the copyright committees of Congress a week or two ago has arrived from Washington, in a Congressional document, and I will put it in here. It is pretty crazily reported, but no matter; it contains the points, and that is the essential thing.

  Statement of Mr. Samuel L. Clemens.

  Mr. Clemens. I have read the bill. At least I have read such portions of it as I could understand; and indeed I think no one but a practised legislator can read this bill and thoroughly understand it, and I am not a practised legislator.

  Necessarily I am interested particularly and especially in the part of the bill which concerns my trade. I like the bill, and I like that proposed extension from the present limit of copyright-life of forty-two years to the author’s life and fifty years after. I think that will satisfy any reasonable author, because it will take care of his children. Let the grandchildren take care of themselves. “Sufficient unto the day.” That would satisfy me very well. That would take care of my daughters, and after that I am not particular. I shall then long have been out of this struggle and independent of it. Like all the trades and occupations of the United States, ours is represented and protected in that bill. I like it. I want them to be represented and protected and encouraged. They are all worthy, all important, and if we can take them under our wing by copyright, I would like to see it done. I should like to have you encourage oyster culture in it, and anything else that comes into your minds. I have no illiberal feeling toward the bill. I think it is just, I think it is righteous, and I hope it will pass without reduction or amendment of any kind.

  I am aware that copyright must have a term, must have a limit, because that is required by the Constitution of the United States, which sets aside the earlier constitution, which we call the Decalogue. The Decalogue says that you shall not take away from any man his property. I do not like to use the harsher Scriptural phrase, “Thou shalt not steal.” But the laws of England and America do take away property from the owner. They select out the people who create the literature of the land. They always talk handsomely about the literature of the land; they always say what a monumental thing a great literature is. In the midst of their enthusiasm they turn around and do what they can to crush it, discourage it, and put it out of existence. I know that we must have that limit. But forty-two years is too much of a limit. I do not know why there should be a limit at all. I am quite unable to guess why there should be a limit to the possession of the product of a man’s labor. There is no limit to real estate. As Dr. Hale has just suggested, you might just as well, after you had discovered a coal mine and worked it forty-two years, have the Government step in and take it away—under what pretext?

  The excuse for a limited copyright in the United States is that an author who has produced a book and has had the benefit of it for that term has had the profit of it long enough, and therefore the Government takes the property, which does not belong to it, and generously gives it to the eighty-eight millions. That is the idea. If it did that, that would be one thing. But it does not do anything of the kind. It merely takes the author’s property, merely takes from his children the bread and profit of that book, and gives the publisher double profit. The publisher and some of his confederates who are in the conspiracy rear families in affluence, and they continue the enjoyment of these ill-gotten gains generation after generation. They live forever, the publishers do.

  As I say, this limit is quite satisfactory to me—for the author’s life, and fifty years after. In a few weeks, or months, or years I shall be out of it. I hope to get a monument. I hope I shall not be entirely forgotten. I shall subscribe to the monument myself. But I shall not be caring what happens if there is fifty years’ added life of my copyright. My copyrights produce to me annually a good deal more money than I have any use for. But those children of mine have use for it. I can take care of myself as long as I live. I know half a dozen trades, and I can invent half a dozen more. I can get along. But I like the fifty years’ extension, because that benefits my two daughters, who are not as competent to earn a living as I am, because I have carefully raised them as young ladies who don’t know anything and can’t do anything. So I hope Congress will extend to them that charity which they have failed to get from me.

  Why, if a man who is mad—not mad, but merely strenuous—about race suicide should come to me and try to get me to use my large political and ecclesiastical influence for the passage of a bill by this Congress limiting families to twenty-two children by one mother, I should try to calm him down. I should reason with him. I should say to him, ”That is the very parallel to the copyright limitation by statute. Leave it alone. Leave it alone and it will take care of itself.” There are only one or two couples at one time in the United States that can reach that limit. Now, if they reach that limit let them go on. Make the limit a thousand years. Let them have all the liberty they want. You are not going to hurt anybody in that way.

  The very same with copyright. One author per lustrum produces a book which can outlive the forty-two-year limit and that is all. This nation cannot produce three authors per lustrum who can create a book that will outlast forty-two years. The thing is demonstrably impossible. It cannot be done. To limit copyright is to take the bread out of the mouths of the children of that one author per lustrum, century in and century out. That is all you get of limiting copyright.

  I made an estimate once when I was to be called before the Copyright Committee of the House of Lords, as to the output of books, and by my estimate we had issued and published in this country since the Declaration of Independence two hundred and twenty thousand books. What was the use of protecting those books by copyright? They are all gone. They had all perished before they were ten years old. There is only about one book in a thousand that can outlive forty-two years of copyright. Therefore why put a limit at all? You might just as well limit a family to twenty-two. It will take care of itself. If you try to recall to your minds the number of men in the nineteenth century who wrote books in America which books lived forty-two years you will begin with Fenimore Cooper, follow that with Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar A. Poe, and you will not go far until you begin to find that the list is sharply limited. You come to Whittier and Holmes and Emerson, and you find Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and then the list gets pretty thin and you question if you can find twenty persons in the United States in a whole century who have produced b
ooks that could outlive or did outlive the forty-two-year limit. You can take all the authors in the United States whose books have outlived the forty-two-year limit and you can seat them on one of those benches there. Allow three children to each of them, and you certainly can put the result down at a hundred persons and seat them in three more benches. That is the insignificant number whose bread and butter are to be taken away. For what purpose? For what profit to anybody?

  Nobody can tell what that profit is. It is only those books that will outlast the forty-two- year limit that have any value after ten or fifteen years. The rest are all dead. Then you turn those few books into the hands of the pirate—into the hands of the legitimate publisher—and they go on and get the profit that properly should have gone to wife and children. I do not think that is quite right. I told you what the idea was in this country for a limited copyright.

  The English idea of copyright, as I found, was different, when I was before the committee of the House of Lords. The spokesman was a very able man, Lord Thwing, a man of great reputation, but he didn’t know anything about copyright and publishing. Naturally he didn’t, because he hadn’t been brought up to this trade. It is only people who have had intimate personal experience with the triumphs and griefs of an occupation who know how to treat it and get what is justly due.

  Now that gentleman had no purpose or desire in the world to rob anybody of anything, but this was the proposition—fifty years’ extension—and he asked me what I thought the limit of copyright ought to be.

  “Well,” I said, “perpetuity.” I thought it ought to last forever.

  Well he didn’t like that idea much. I could see some resentment in his manner, and he went on to say that the idea of a perpetual copyright was illogical, and so forth, and so on. And here was his reason: that it has long ago been decided that ideas are not property, that there can be no such thing as property in ideas.