Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  God’s army is on the march. You do not hear the trumpet-call, but God is the guide. . . . oppression is to be destroyed.

  All this noise about an army and a plow,—belated—all this inflamed jubilation over a mixed military and agricultural expedition which is only just now getting started when it is already three centuries overdue. It would not do for a person to praise me for being three centuries late at a fire with my hook and ladder company; I should not like it.

  In view of the fact that it takes the Rawlinsons, the Champollions and the Indian experts years and years to dig the meaning out of the modestest little batch of hieroglyphs; and that in interpreting the intentions of God the Roman augurs never scored a single demonstrable success; and that from their day to ours all attempts by men to lay bare to us the mind of the Deity have as signally failed, it seems to me that now is a good time for the interpreting-trade to take a rest. If it goes on trying (in its way) to magnify the wisdom of God, there will come a time by and by when there will not be any left to magnify.

  Mark Twain.

  * The reader will please skip what now follows. M.T.

  Tuesday, January 15, 1907

  The process which may turn our republic into a monarchy—We have the two Roman conditions: stupendous wealth, and the corn and oil pensions—that is to say, vote bribes—The amazing additions to the pension list commented upon; also, letter from “A Union Veteran.”

  The human race was always interesting, and we know, by its past, that it will always continue so. Monotonously. It is always the same; it never changes. Its circumstances change from time to time, for better or worse, but the race’s character is permanent, and never changes. In the course of the ages it has built up several great and worshipful civilizations, and has seen unlooked-for circumstances slyly emerge, bearing deadly gifts which looked like benefits, and were welcomed—whereupon the decay and destruction of each of these stately civilizations has followed. It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible. Whenever man makes a large stride in material prosperity and progress, he is sure to think that he has progressed, whereas he has not advanced an inch; nothing has progressed but his circumstances. He stands where he stood before. He knows more than his forebears knew, but his intellect is no better than theirs, and never will be. He is richer than his forebears, but his character is no improvement upon theirs. Riches and education are not a permanent possession; they will pass away, as in the case of Rome, and Greece, and Egypt, and Babylon; and a moral and mental midnight will follow—with a dull long sleep and a slow re-awakening. From time to time he makes what looks like a change in his character, but it is not a real change; and it is only transitory, anyway. He cannot even invent a religion and keep it intact; circumstances are stronger than he and all his works; circumstances and conditions are always changing, and they always compel him to modify his religions to harmonize with the new situation.

  For twenty-five or thirty years I have squandered a deal of my time—too much of it perhaps—in trying to guess what is going to be the process which will turn our republic into a monarchy, and how far off that event might be. Every man is a master and also a servant, a vassal. There is always some one who looks up to him and admires and envies him; there is always some one to whom he looks up and admires and envies. This is his nature; this is his character; and it is unchangeable, indestructible; therefore republics and democracies are not for such as he; they cannot satisfy the requirements of his nature. The inspirations of his character will always breed circumstances and conditions which must in time furnish him a king and an aristocracy to look up to and worship. In a democracy he will try, and honestly, to keep the crown away, but Circumstance is a powerful master, and will eventually defeat him.

  Republics have lived long, but monarchy lives forever. By our teaching, we learn that vast material prosperity always brings in its train conditions which debase the morals and enervate the manhood of a nation—then the country’s liberties come into the market and are bought, sold, squandered, thrown away, and a popular idol is carried to the throne upon the shields or shoulders of the worshiping people, and planted there in permanency. We are always being taught—no, formerly we were always being taught—to look at Rome, and beware. The teacher pointed to Rome’s stern virtue, incorruptibility, love of liberty, and all-sacrificing patriotism—this when she was young and poor; then he pointed to her later days, when her sun-bursts of material prosperity and spreading dominion came, and were exultingly welcomed by the people, they not suspecting that these were not fortunate glories, happy benefits, but were a disease, and freighted with death. The teacher reminded us that Rome’s liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched; later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor; later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sell—exactly our own history over again. At first we granted deserved pensions, righteously, and with a clean and honorable motive, to the disabled soldiers of the Civil War. The clean motive began and ended there. We have made many and amazing additions to the pension list, but with a motive which dishonors the uniform and the Congresses which have voted the additions—the sole purpose back of the additions being the purchase of votes. It is corn and oil over again, and promises to do its full share in the eventual subversion of the republic and the substitution of monarchy in its place. The monarchy would come, anyhow, without this, but this has a peculiar interest for us, in that it prodigiously hastens the day. We have the two Roman conditions: stupendous wealth, with its inevitable corruptions and moral blight, and the corn and oil pensions—that is to say, vote-bribes, which have taken away the pride of thousands of tempted men and turned them into willing alms-receivers and unashamed.

  It is curious—curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare. A year or two ago a veteran of the Civil War asked me if I did not sometimes have a longing to attend the annual great Convention of the Grand Army of the Republic and make a speech. I was obliged to confess that I wouldn’t have the necessary moral courage for the venture, for I would want to reproach the old soldiers for not rising up in indignant protest against our Government’s vote-purchasing additions to the pension list, which is making of the remnant of their brave lives one long blush. I might try to say the words, but would lack the grit and would fail. It would be one tottering moral coward trying to rebuke a housefull of like breed—men merely as timid as himself, but not any more so.

  Well, there it is—I am a moral coward, like the rest; and yet it is amazing to me that out of the hundreds and thousands of physically dauntless men who faced death without a quiver of the nerves on a hundred bloody fields, not one solitary individual of them all has had courage enough to rise up and bravely curse the Congresses which have degraded him to the level of the bounty-jumper and the bastards of the same. Everybody laughs at the grotesque additions to the pension fund; everybody laughs at the grotesquest of them all, the most shameless of them all, the most transparent of them all, the only frankly lawless one of them all—the immortal Executive Order 78. Everybody laughs—privately; everybody scoffs—privately; everybody is indignant—privately; everybody is ashamed to look a real soldier in the face; but none of them exposes his feelings publicly. This is perfectly natural, and wholly inevitable, for it is the nature of man to hate to say the disagreeable thing. It is his character; it has always been so; his character cannot change; while he continues to exist it will never change by a shade.

  I have been moved to these uncomfortable reflections by a communication in this morning’s Sun signed “A Union Veteran.” It begins with this remark:

  I see that the Senate has passed the service pension bill with no opposing votes. And I suppose that’s all right.

  Passed it unanimously—and doubtl
ess with enthusiasm. Evidently some one has invented a new excuse to bilk the Treasury, and at the same time further degrade the honorable calling of the real soldier. This veteran thinks it’s all right. It is a pity that he could say that, for the rest of his letter shows that he once had worthier notions, and that the pension plague has undermined them and brought them low. He says:

  Personally I don’t believe in service pensions. I think that if a man incurred any disability in the service he ought to get whatever pension is due him to the last cent. He is entitled to that by the contract; but a service pension strikes me differently.

  No one will doubt the soundness and sanity and fairness of his view. He continues:

  When Uncle Sam settled with me at the end of my term of service I felt that that closed our accounts definitely and finally. I had agreed on my part to serve for so much a month and a bounty of $100 when I was mustered out; and I got it all, and I considered that that was the end of it.

  And indeed it was the end of it, so far as cleanliness goes. After that, the vote-buying began. It continues to-day; it will continue to continue until the remains of every cat, with her descendants, that has been owned by a sutler or a soldier, from Bunker till the monarchy comes in, shall have been added to the pension list. Then there will be more pensioners than population, and we shall be ready for the monarchy as a relief, a refuge, a savior from our vote-buying, mendicant-creating politicians. He continues:

  A few years after the war Congress gave to all veteran soldiers an additional bounty of $100. Why it did this, I don’t know; politics, maybe; but it passed out $100 apiece all ’round—

  Then he adds: “and I took mine, though I didn’t feel I was entitled to it.” It was there that the undermining of his manhood began; it was a thing calculated to undermine any one’s manhood to whose not too plenty bread and butter a hundred dollars was an important matter. You would have taken it. I would have taken it. We should have felt ashamed; but we could have taken it next time, and afterward, with less and less sense of shame, and by and by we would begin to ask for it; then beg for it; then demand it, and insist upon it. By that time we should have irrevocably lost an inestimably valuable jewel from our character, and the Government would be to blame for it, not us.

  Hear him again—see his moral disintegration going on; notice his character decay and crumble under the temptations devised for it by a treacherous Government:

  But now comes the service pension. As I feel about it now I shall not take it. But you can’t tell. I took that $100 additional bounty, and I may take the service pension, but I don’t think so.

  He doesn’t think so, and it is to his credit, after the assaults which have been made in these twenty or thirty years upon his self-respect by a conscienceless Government—but when the new bribe comes, in the form of visible cash, he will fall again, just as you and I would; and again the Government will be to blame for it. Hear him once more:

  My service in the army never did me any harm. On the contrary it helped me in many ways and I am prouder of it than of anything else I ever did or ever could do. . . . . I have served in the army in my country’s defence in time of war, and I feel that by that service I have been raised to the highest rank of citizenship; and with that honor I am satisfied.

  Isn’t it a pity to degrade and demoralize a man with a character like that! What punishment can expiate such a crime committed by the Government and condoned—by silence—by the nation? Perhaps there will be no adequate punishment except the monarchy which it is inviting, and for which it is preparing the way in the sure and effective Roman fashion.

  I would never venture to talk like this if I were alive. It is only by keeping steadily in my mind that my Autobiography is not to be published until I am dead, that I am enabled to force myself to say the things I think, instead of merely saying the things which I wish the reader to think I think—which is the live man’s way, and is a part of every man’s character, and cannot be changed while he is alive.

  The veteran whom I have been quoting makes a suggestion. It is that the pensions be now extended to the Confederate soldiers. The Government will be grateful for that idea: it will now proceed to dicker for the South’s vote—and its manhood.

  January 17, 1907

  About Helen Keller, who dined with Mr. Clemens yesterday evening—Her wonderful intellect, etc.—Some lines written about her by Susan Coolidge.

  Helen Keller dined with us yesterday evening. She was accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Macy. Mrs. Macy became her first teacher in the neighborhood of twenty years ago, and has been at her side ever since. Helen Keller is the eighth wonder of the world; Mrs. Macy is the ninth. Mrs. Macy’s achievement seems to me to easily throw all previous miracles into the shade and take the importance out of them. Helen was a lump of clay, another Adam—deaf, dumb, blind, inert, dull, groping, almost unsentient: Miss Sullivan blew the breath of intelligence into her and woke the clay to life. But there the parallel ends. From that point onward there is no twinship between Adam and Helen; in fact the twinship does not reach quite that far, for neither light nor intelligence was blown into Adam’s clay, but only the breath of physical life. Adam began his career without an intellect, and there is no evidence that he ever acquired one. Helen is quite a different kind of Adam. She was born with a fine mind and a bright wit, and by help of Miss Sullivan’s amazing gifts as a teacher this mental endowment has been developed until the result is what we see to-day: a stone deaf, dumb, and blind girl who is equipped with a wide and various and complete university education—a wonderful creature who sees without eyes, hears without ears, and speaks with dumb lips. She stands alone in history. It has taken all the ages to produce a Helen Keller—and a Miss Sullivan. The names belong together; without Miss Sullivan there had been no Helen Keller.

  At dinner the stream of conversation flowed gaily along without let or hindrance, the deaf, dumb, and blind girl taking her full share in it, and contributing her full share of jest and repartee and laughter. Every remark made was reported to Helen by Mrs. Macy with the fingers of one hand, and so rapidly that by the time the utterer of it had reached his last word, Mrs. Macy had delivered that word into Helen’s hand, so there was no waiting, there were no intervals. This is a wonderful thing, for the reason that Mrs. Macy does not use shorthand forms, but spells each word out. Her fingers have to move as swiftly as do the fingers of a pianist. The eye of the witness is not quick enough to follow their movements.

  Helen’s talk sparkles. She is unusually quick and bright. The person who fires off smart felicities seldom has the luck to hit her in a dumb place; she is almost certain to send back as good as she gets, and almost as certainly with an improvement added.

  I had not met her for a long time. In the meantime, she has become a woman. By this I mean that whereas formerly she lived in a world which was unreal—a sort of half world, a moon with only its bright and beautiful side presented to her, and its dark and repulsive side concealed from her—I think she now lives in the world that the rest of us know. I think that this is not wholly a guess. I seemed to notice evidences all along that it is a fact. I think she is not now the Helen Keller whom Susan Coolidge knew, and about whom she wrote, with such subtle pathos and charm:

  Behind her triple prison-bars shut in She sits, the whitest soul on earth to-day. No shadowing stain, no whispered hint of sin, Into that sanctuary finds the way.

  That was all true in those earlier days. When I first knew Helen she was fourteen years old, and up to that time all soiling and sorrowful and unpleasant things had been carefully kept from her. The word death was not in her vocabulary, nor the word grave. She was indeed “the whitest soul on earth”—the poet’s words had said the truth. “To her mind—

  The world is not the sordid world we know; It is a happy and benignant spot Where kindness reigns, and jealousy is not.”

  I am sure she has lost that gracious world, and now inhabits the one we all know—and deplore. The poet’s description of Helen’s
face is vivid, and as exactly true as it is vivid:

  Like a strange alabaster mask her face, Rayless and sightless, set in patience dumb, Until like quick electric currents come The signals of life into her lonely place; Then, like a lamp just lit, an inward gleam Flashes within the mask’s opacity, The features glow and dimple suddenly, And fun and tenderness and sparkle seem To irradiate the lines once dull and blind, While the white slender fingers reach and cling With quick imploring gestures, questioning The mysteries and the meanings.

  Seen once, the moving and eloquent play of emotion in her face is forever unforgetable. I have not seen the like of it in any other face, and shall not, I know. One would suppose that delicate sound vibrations could not reach her save through some very favorable medium—like wood, for instance—but it is not so. Once yesterday evening, while she was sitting musing in a heavily tufted chair, my secretary began to play on the orchestrelle. Helen’s face flushed and brightened on the instant, and the waves of delighted emotion began to sweep across it. Her hands were resting upon the thick and cushion-like upholstery of her chair, but they sprang into action at once, like a conductor’s, and began to beat the time and follow the rhythm.

  Tuesday, January 22, 1907

  Authorship of the lines beginning “Love Came at Dawn”—Also authorship of lines inscribed on Susy’s gravestone—Mr. Clemens will try his billiard scheme for winning bets from Mr. Dooley when he comes to play billiards on Friday—Tells how he tried it on Mr. George Robinson, long ago.