Mark Twain A Biography Part 175

In man's heaven everybody sings. There are no exceptions. The man who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on earth sings there. Thus universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on all day long and every day during a stretch of twelve hours. And everybody stays where on earth the place would be empty in two hours. The singing is of hymns alone. Nay, it is one hymn alone. The words are always the same in number--they are only about a dozen--there is no rhyme--there is no poetry. "Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna unto the highest!" and a few such phrases const.i.tute the whole service.

Meantime, every person is playing on a harp! Consider the deafening hurricane of sound. Consider, further, it is a praise service--a service of compliment, flattery, adulation. Do you ask who it is that is willing to endure this strange compliment, this insane compliment, and who not only endures it but likes it, enjoys it, requires it, commands it? Hold your breath: It is G.o.d! This race's G.o.d I mean--their own pet invention.

Most of the ideas presented in this his last commentary on human absurdities were new only as to phrasing. He had exhausted the topic long ago, in one way or another; but it was one of the themes in which he never lost interest. Many subjects became stale to him at last; but the curious invention called man remained a novelty to him to the end.

From my note-book:

October 25. I am constantly amazed at his knowledge of history--all history--religious, political, military. He seems to have read everything in the world concerning Rome, France, and England particularly.

Last night we stopped playing billiards while he reviewed, in the most vivid and picturesque phrasing, the reasons of Rome's decline.

Such a presentation would have enthralled any audience--I could not help feeling a great pity that he had not devoted some of his public effort to work of that sort. No one could have equaled him at it.

He concluded with some comments on the possibility of America following Rome's example, though he thought the vote of the people would always, or at least for a long period, prevent imperialism.

November 1. To-day he has been absorbed in his old interest in shorthand. "It is the only rational alphabet," he declared. "All this spelling reform is nonsense. What we need is alphabet reform, and shorthand is the thing. Take the letter M, for instance; it is made with one stroke in shorthand, while in longhand it requires at least three. The word Mephistopheles can be written in shorthand with one-sixth the number of strokes that is required in longhand.

I tell you shorthand should be adopted as the alphabet."

I said: "There is this objection: the characters are so slightly different that each writer soon forms a system of his own and it is seldom that two can read each other's notes."

"You are talking of stenographic reporting," he said, rather warmly.

"Nothing of the kind is true in the case of the regular alphabet.

It is perfectly clear and legible."

"Would you have it in the schools, then?"

"Yes, it should be taught in the schools, not for stenographic purposes, but only for use in writing to save time."

He was very much in earnest, and said he had undertaken an article on the subject.

November 3. He said he could not sleep last night, for thinking what a fool he had been in his various investments.

"I have always been the victim of somebody," he said, "and always an idiot myself, doing things that even a child would not do. Never asking anybody's advice--never taking it when it was offered. I can't see how anybody could do the things I have done and have kept right on doing."

I could see that the thought agitated him, and I suggested that we go to his room and read, which we did, and had a riotous time over the most recent chapters of the 'Letters from the Earth', and some notes he had made for future chapters on infant d.a.m.nation and other distinctive features of orthodox creeds. He told an anecdote of an old minister who declared that Presbyterianism without infant d.a.m.nation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag.

Somewhat on the defensive I said, "But we must admit that the so- called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive."

He answered, "Yes, but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse p.r.o.nounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superst.i.tion.

The Greeks surpa.s.sed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the Christian religion was born.

"I have been reading Gibbon's celebrated Fifteenth Chapter," he said later, "and I don't see what Christians found against it. It is so mild--so gentle in its sarcasm." He added that he had been reading also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the saying of Darwin's father, "Unitarianism is a featherbed to catch falling Christians."

"I was glad to find and identify that saying," he said; "it is so good."

He finished the evening by reading a chapter from Carlyle's French Revolution--a fine pyrotechnic pa.s.sage--the gathering at Versailles.

I said that Carlyle somehow reminded me of a fervid stump-speaker who pounded his fists and went at his audience fiercely, determined to convince them.

"Yes," he said, "but he is the best one that ever lived."

November 10. This morning early he heard me stirring and called. I went in and found him propped up with a book, as usual. He said:

"I seldom read Christmas stories, but this is very beautiful. It has made me cry. I want you to read it." (It was Booth Tarkington's 'Beasley's Christmas Party'.) "Tarkington has the true touch," he said; "his work always satisfies me." Another book he has been reading with great enjoyment is James Branch Cabell's Chivalry. He cannot say enough of the subtle poetic art with which Cabell has flung the light of romance about dark and sordid chapters of history.

CCLXXVII. MARK TWAIN'S READING

Perhaps here one may speak of Mark Twain's reading in general. On the table by him, and on his bed, and in the billiard-room shelves he kept the books he read most. They were not many--not more than a dozen--but they were manifestly of familiar and frequent usage. All, or nearly all, had annotations--spontaneously uttered marginal notes, t.i.tle prefatories, or concluding comments. They were the books he had read again and again, and it was seldom that he had not had something to say with each fresh reading.

There were the three big volumes by Saint-Simon--'The Memoirs'--which he once told me he had read no less than twenty times. On the fly-leaf of the first volume he wrote--

This, & Casanova & Pepys, set in parallel columns, could afford a good coup d'oeil of French & English high life of that epoch.

All through those finely printed volumes are his commentaries, sometimes no more than a word, sometimes a filled, closely written margin.

He found little to admire in the human nature of Saint-Simon's period--little to approve in Saint-Simon himself beyond his unrestrained frankness, which he admired without stint, and in one paragraph where the details of that early period are set down with startling fidelity he wrote: "Oh, incomparable Saint-Simon!"

Saint-Simon is always frank, and Mark Twain was equally so. Where the former tells one of the unspeakable compulsions of Louis XIV., the latter has commented:

We have to grant that G.o.d made this royal hog; we may also be permitted to believe that it was a crime to do so.

And on another page:

In her memories of this period the d.u.c.h.esse de St. Clair makes this striking remark: "Sometimes one could tell a gentleman, but it was only by his manner of using his fork."

His comments on the orthodox religion of Saint-Simon's period are not marked by gentleness. Of the author's reference to the Edict of Nantes, which he says depopulated half of the realm, ruined its commerce, and "authorized torments and punishments by which so many innocent people of both s.e.xes were killed by thousands," Clemens writes:

So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.

In the place where Saint-Simon describes the death of Monseigneur, son of the king, and the court hypocrites are wailing their extravagantly pretended sorrow, Clemens wrote:

It is all so true, all so human. G.o.d made these animals. He must have noticed this scene; I wish I knew how it struck Him.

There were not many notes in the Suetonius, nor in the Carlyle Revolution, though these were among the volumes he read oftenest.

Perhaps they expressed for him too completely and too richly their subject-matter to require anything at his hand. Here and there are marked pa.s.sages and occasional cross-references to related history and circ.u.mstance.

There was not much room for comment on the narrow margins of the old copy of Pepys, which he had read steadily since the early seventies; but here and there a few crisp words, and the underscoring and marked pa.s.sages are plentiful enough to convey his devotion to that quaint record which, perhaps next to Suetonius, was the book he read and quoted most.

Francis Parkman's Canadian Histories he had read periodically, especially the story of the Old Regime and of the Jesuits in North America. As late as January, 1908, he wrote on the t.i.tle-page of the Old Regime:

Very interesting. It tells how people religiously and otherwise insane came over from France and colonized Canada.

He was not always complimentary to those who undertook to Christianize the Indians; but he did not fail to write his admiration of their courage--their very willingness to endure privation and even the fiendish savage tortures for the sake of their faith. "What manner of men are these?" he wrote, apropos of the account of Bressani, who had undergone the most devilish inflictions which savage ingenuity could devise, and yet returned maimed and disfigured the following spring to "dare again the knives and fiery brand of the Iroquois." Clemens was likely to be on the side of the Indians, but hardly in their barbarism.

In one place he wrote:

That men should be willing to leave their happy homes and endure what the missionaries endured in order to teach these Indians the road to h.e.l.l would be rational, understandable, but why they should want to teach them a way to heaven is a thing which the mind somehow cannot grasp.

Other histories, mainly English and French, showed how he had read them--read and digested every word and line. There were two volumes of Lecky, much worn; Andrew D. White's 'Science and Theology'--a chief interest for at least one summer--and among the collection a well-worn copy of 'Modern English Literature--Its Blemishes and Defects', by Henry H. Breen. On the t.i.tle-page of this book Clemens had written:

HARTFORD, 1876. Use with care, for it is a scarce book. England had to be ransacked in order to get it--or the bookseller speaketh falsely.