Mark Twain A Biography Part 190

Shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party?

Shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides? Oh no, you say; it does not demand that. But what if it produce that in spite of you? There is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought not to do when drunk, but most men will do them just the same; and so we hear no arguments about obligations in the matter--we only hear men warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can betray men into such things.

This is a funny business all around. The same men who enthusiastically preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and willing and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to desert his church or a fellow-American to desert his party. The man who deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful--apparently; the man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. This is Consistency--with a capital C.

With the daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist scoffs at the Independent--or as he calls him, with cutting irony, the Mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world about him. But--the Mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history at his back; stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty ancestry. He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls and bodies, the hearts and the brains of the children of this world, but a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory: And their names are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther, Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world-end never will.

APPENDIX S

ORIGINAL PREFACE FOR "A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT"

(See Chapter clxxii)

My object has been to group together some of the most odious laws which have had vogue in the Christian countries within the past eight or ten centuries, and ill.u.s.trate them by the incidents of a story.

There was never a time when America applied the death-penalty to more than fourteen crimes. But England, within the memory of men still living, had in her list of crimes 223 which were punishable by death!

And yet from the beginning of our existence down to a time within the memory of babes England has distressed herself piteously over the ungentleness of our Connecticut Blue Laws. Those Blue Laws should have been spared English criticism for two reasons:

1. They were so insipidly mild, by contrast with the b.l.o.o.d.y and atrocious laws of England of the same period, as to seem characterless and colorless when one brings them into that awful presence.

2. The Blue Laws never had any existence. They were the fancy-work of an English clergyman; they were never a part of any statute-book. And yet they could have been made to serve a useful and merciful purpose; if they had been injected into the English law the dilution would have given to the whole a less lurid aspect; or, to figure the effect in another way, they would have been coca mixed into vitriol.

I have drawn no laws and no ill.u.s.trations from the twin civilizations of h.e.l.l and Russia. To have entered into that atmosphere would have defeated my purpose, which was to show a great and genuine progress in Christendom in these few later generations toward mercifulness--a wide and general relaxing of the grip of the law. Russia had to be left out because exile to Siberia remains, and in that single punishment is gathered together and concentrated all the bitter inventions of all the black ages for the infliction of suffering upon human beings. Exile for life from one's hearthstone and one's idols--this is rack, thumb-screw, the water-drop, f.a.got and stake, tearing asunder by horses, flaying alive--all these in one; and not compact into hours, but drawn out into years, each year a century, and the whole a mortal immortality of torture and despair. While exile to Siberia remains one will be obliged to admit that there is one country in Christendom where the punishments of all the ages are still preserved and still inflicted, that there is one country in Christendom where no advance has been made toward modifying the medieval penalties for offenses against society and the State.

APPENDIX T

A TRIBUTE TO HENRY H. ROGERS

(See Chapter cc and earlier)

April 25, 1902. I owe more to Henry Rogers than to any other man whom I have known. He was born in Fairhaven, Connecticut, in 1839, and is my junior by four years. He was graduated from the high school there in 1853, when he was fourteen years old, and from that time forward he earned his own living, beginning at first as the bottom subordinate in the village store with hard-work privileges and a low salary. When he was twenty-four he went out to the newly discovered petroleum fields in Pennsylvania and got work; then returned home, with enough money to pay pa.s.sage, married a schoolmate, and took her to the oil regions. He prospered, and by and by established the Standard Oil Trust with Mr.

Rockefeller and others, and is still one of its managers and directors.

In 1893 we fell together by accident one evening in the Murray Hill Hotel, and our friendship began on the spot and at once. Ever since then he has added my business affairs to his own and carried them through, and I have had no further trouble with them. Obstructions and perplexities which would have driven me mad were simplicities to his master mind and furnished him no difficulties. He released me from my entanglements with Paige and stopped that expensive outgo; when Charles L. Webster & Company failed he saved my copyrights for Mrs. Clemens when she would have sacrificed them to the creditors although they were in no way ent.i.tled to them; he offered to lend me money wherewith to save the life of that worthless firm; when I started lecturing around the world to make the money to pay off the Webster debts he spent more than a year trying to reconcile the differences between Harper & Brothers and the American Publishing Company and patch up a working-contract between them and succeeded where any other man would have failed; as fast as I earned money and sent it to him he banked it at interest and held onto it, refusing to pay any creditor until he could pay all of the 96 alike; when I had earned enough to pay dollar for dollar he swept off the indebtedness and sent me the whole batch of complimentary letters which the creditors wrote in return; when I had earned $28,500 more, $18,500 of which was in his hands, I wrote him from Vienna to put the latter into Federal Steel and leave it there; he obeyed to the extent of $17,500, but sold it in two months at $25,000 profit, and said it would go ten points higher, but that it was his custom to "give the other man a chance" (and that was a true word--there was never a truer one spoken). That was at the end of '99 and beginning of 1900; and from that day to this he has continued to break up my bad schemes and put better ones in their place, to my great advantage. I do things which ought to try man's patience, but they never seem to try his; he always finds a colorable excuse for what I have done. His soul was born superhumanly sweet, and I do not think anything can sour it. I have not known his equal among men for lovable qualities. But for his cool head and wise guidance I should never have come out of the Webster difficulties on top; it was his good steering that enabled me to work out my salvation and pay a hundred cents on the dollar--the most valuable service any man ever did me.

His character is full of fine graces, but the finest is this: that he can load you down with crushing obligations and then so conduct himself that you never feel their weight. If he would only require something in return--but that is not in his nature; it would not occur to him. With the Harpers and the American Company at war those copyrights were worth but little; he engineered a peace and made them valuable. He invests $100,000 for me here, and in a few months returns a profit of $31,000.

I invest (in London and here) $66,000 and must wait considerably for results (in case there shall be any). I tell him about it and he finds no fault, utters not a sarcasm. He was born serene, patient, all-enduring, where a friend is concerned, and nothing can extinguish that great quality in him. Such a man is ent.i.tled to the high gift of humor: he has it at its very best. He is not only the best friend I have ever had, but is the best man I have known.

S. L. CLEMENS.

APPENDIX U

FROM MARK TWAIN'S LAST POEM

BEGUN AT RIVERDALE, NEW YORK. FINISHED AT YORK HARBOR, MAINE, AUGUST 18, 1902

(See Chapter ccxxiii)

(A bereft and demented mother speaks)

... O, I can see my darling yet: the little form In slip of flimsy stuff all creamy white, Pink-belted waist with ample bows, Blue shoes scarce bigger than the house-cat's ears--Capering in delight and choked with glee.

It was a summer afternoon; the hill Rose green above me and about, and in the vale below The distant village slept, and all the world Was steeped in dreams. Upon me lay this peace, And I forgot my sorrow in its spell. And now My little maid pa.s.sed by, and she Was deep in thought upon a solemn thing: A disobedience, and my reproof. Upon my face She must not look until the day was done; For she was doing penance... She?

O, it was I! What mother knows not that? And so she pa.s.sed, I worshiping and longing... It was not wrong? You do not think me wrong? I did it for the best. Indeed I meant it so.

She flits before me now: The peach-bloom of her gauzy crepe, The plaited tails of hair, The ribbons floating from the summer hat, The grieving face, dropp'd head absorbed with care. O, dainty little form! I see it move, receding slow along the path, By hovering b.u.t.terflies besieged; I see it reach The breezy top clear-cut against the sky,... Then pa.s.s beyond and sink from sight-forever!

Within, was light and cheer; without, A bl.u.s.tering winter's right. There was a play; It was her own; for she had wrought it out Unhelped, from her own head-and she But turned sixteen! A pretty play, All graced with cunning fantasies, And happy songs, and peopled all with fays, And sylvan G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, And shepherds, too, that piped and danced, And wore the guileless hours away In care-free romps and games.

Her girlhood mates played in the piece, And she as well: a G.o.ddess, she,--And looked it, as it seemed to me.

'Twas fairyland restored-so beautiful it was And innocent. It made us cry, we elder ones, To live our lost youth o'er again With these its happy heirs.

Slowly, at last, the curtain fell. Before us, there, she stood, all wreathed and draped In roses pearled with dew-so sweet, so glad, So radiant!--and flung us kisses through the storm Of praise that crowned her triumph.... O, Across the mists of time I see her yet, My G.o.ddess of the Flowers!

... The curtain hid her.... Do you comprehend? Till time shall end! Out of my life she vanished while I looked!

... Ten years are flown. O, I have watched so long, So long. But she will come no more. No, she will come no more.

It seems so strange... so strange... Struck down unwarned! In the unbought grace, of youth laid low--In the glory of her fresh young bloom laid low--In the morning of her life cut down! And I not by! Not by When the shadows fell, the night of death closed down The sun that lit my life went out. Not by to answer When the latest whisper pa.s.sed the lips That were so dear to me--my name! Far from my post! the world's whole breadth away. O, sinking in the waves of death she cried to me For mother-help, and got for answer Silence!

We that are old--we comprehend; even we That are not mad: whose grown-up scions still abide; Their tale complete: Their earlier selves we glimpse at intervals Far in the dimming past; We see the little forms as once they were, And whilst we ache to take them to our hearts, The vision fades. We know them lost to us--Forever lost; we cannot have them back; We miss them as we miss the dead, We mourn them as we mourn the dead.

APPENDIX V. SELECTIONS FROM AN UNFINISHED BOOK, "3,000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES"

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MICROBE, WHO, IN A FORMER EXISTENCE, HAD BEEN A MAN--HIS PRESENT HABITAT BEING THE ORGANISM OF A TRAMP, BLITZOWSKI.

(WRITTEN AT DUBLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1905)

(See Chapter ccx.x.xv)

Our world (the tramp) is as large and grand and awe-compelling to us microscopic creatures as is man's world to man. Our tramp is mountainous, there are vast oceans in him, and lakes that are sea-like for size, there are many rivers (veins and arteries) which are fifteen miles across, and of a length so stupendous as to make the Mississippi and the Amazon trifling little Rhode Island brooks by comparison. As for our minor rivers, they are mult.i.tudinous, and the dutiable commerce of disease which they carry is rich beyond the dreams of the American custom-house.

Take a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, and what secret of Nature can be hidden from him? He says: "A billion, that is a million millions,[??

Trillion D.W.] of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is still excessively minute. A portion of substance consisting, of a billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a microscope; and a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the naked eye, like a grain of lycopodium-dust, must be a million times bigger still."

The human eye could see it then--that dainty little speck. But with my microbe-eye I could see every individual of the whirling billions of atoms that compose the speck. Nothing is ever at rest--wood, iron, water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing as death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the bones of the crusader that perished before Jerusalem eight centuries ago. There are no vegetables, all things are animal; each electron is an animal, each molecule is a collection of animals, and each has an appointed duty to perform and a soul to be saved. Heaven was not made for man alone, and oblivion and neglect reserved for the rest of His creatures. He gave them life, He gave them humble services to perform, they have performed them, and they will not be forgotten, they will have their reward. Man-always vain, windy, conceited-thinks he will be in the majority there. He will be disappointed. Let him humble himself. But for the despised microbe and the persecuted bacillus, who needed a home and nourishment, he would not have been created. He has a mission, therefore a reason for existing: let him do the service he was made for, and keep quiet.

Three weeks ago I was a man myself, and thought and felt as men think and feel; I have lived 3,000 years since then [microbic time], and I see the foolishness of it now. We live to learn, and fortunate are we when we are wise enough to profit by it.