What Is Man? And Other Stories

By

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

www.freeclassicebooks.com

CONTENTS:

WHAT IS MAN?. 4

I. 4

II. 21

III. 42

IV.. 58

VI. 98

THE DEATH OF JEAN.. 139

THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE.. 156

I. 156

II. 160

III. 167

HOW TO MAKE HISTORY DATES STICK.. 171

THE MEMORABLE ASSASSINATION.. 191

A SCRAP OF CURIOUS HISTORY.. 206

SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY.. 217

AT THE SHRINE OF ST. WAGNER.. 233

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.. 252

ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT.. 266

ON GIRLS.. 292

BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PHONOGRAPHIC SPELLING; THERE ISN'T ANY WAY.  299

AS CONCERNS INTERPRETING THE DEITY.. 302

I. 302

II. 307

CONCERNING TOBACCO.. 314

THE BEE.. 318

TAMING THE BICYCLE.. 323

I. 323

II. 329

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?. 336

I. 336

II. 346

III. 350

IV Conjectures. 357

V  "We May Assume". 364

VI. 367

VII. 373

VIII Shakespeare as a Lawyer (1). 381

IX Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Works? Nobody knows.. 396

X The Rest of the Equipment. 403

XI. 411

XII Irreverence.. 414

XIII. 418

WHAT IS MAN?

I

a. Man the Machine. b. Personal Merit

(The Old Man and the Young Man had been conversing. The Old Man had

asserted that the human being is merely a machine, and nothing more. The

Young Man objected, and asked him to go into particulars and furnish his

reasons for his position.)

Old Man. What are the materials of which a steam-engine is made?

Young Man. Iron, steel, brass, white-metal, and so on.

O.M. Where are these found?

Y.M. In the rocks.

O.M. In a pure state?

Y.M. No--in ores.

O.M. Are the metals suddenly deposited in the ores?

Y.M. No--it is the patient work of countless ages.

O.M. You could make the engine out of the rocks themselves?

Y.M. Yes, a brittle one and not valuable.

O.M. You would not require much, of such an engine as that?

Y.M. No--substantially nothing.

O.M. To make a fine and capable engine, how would you proceed?

Y.M. Drive tunnels and shafts into the hills; blast out the iron ore;

crush it, smelt it, reduce it to pig-iron; put some of it through

the Bessemer process and make steel of it. Mine and treat and combine

several metals of which brass is made.

O.M. Then?

Y.M. Out of the perfected result, build the fine engine.

O.M. You would require much of this one?

Y.M. Oh, indeed yes.

O.M. It could drive lathes, drills, planers, punches, polishers, in a

word all the cunning machines of a great factory?

Y.M. It could.

O.M. What could the stone engine do?

Y.M. Drive a sewing-machine, possibly--nothing more, perhaps.

O.M. Men would admire the other engine and rapturously praise it?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. But not the stone one?

Y.M. No.

O.M. The merits of the metal machine would be far above those of the

stone one?

Y.M. Of course.

O.M. Personal merits?

Y.M. PERSONAL merits? How do you mean?

O.M. It would be personally entitled to the credit of its own

performance?

Y.M. The engine? Certainly not.

O.M. Why not?

Y.M. Because its performance is not personal. It is the result of the

law of construction. It is not a MERIT that it does the things which it

is set to do--it can't HELP doing them.

O.M. And it is not a personal demerit in the stone machine that it does

so little?

Y.M. Certainly not. It does no more and no less than the law of its make

permits and compels it to do. There is nothing PERSONAL about it; it

cannot choose. In this process of "working up to the matter" is it your

idea to work up to the proposition that man and a machine are about the

same thing, and that there is no personal merit in the performance of

either?

O.M. Yes--but do not be offended; I am meaning no offense. What makes

the grand difference between the stone engine and the steel one? Shall

we call it training, education? Shall we call the stone engine a savage

and the steel one a civilized man? The original rock contained the stuff

of which the steel one was built--but along with a lot of sulphur and

stone and other obstructing inborn heredities, brought down from the old

geologic ages--prejudices, let us call them. Prejudices which nothing

within the rock itself had either POWER to remove or any DESIRE to

remove. Will you take note of that phrase?

Y.M. Yes. I have written it down; "Prejudices which nothing within the

rock itself had either power to remove or any desire to remove." Go on.

O.M. Prejudices must be removed by OUTSIDE INFLUENCES or not at all. Put

that down.

Y.M. Very well; "Must be removed by outside influences or not at all."

Go on.

O.M. The iron's prejudice against ridding itself of the cumbering rock.

To make it more exact, the iron's absolute INDIFFERENCE as to whether

the rock be removed or not. Then comes the OUTSIDE INFLUENCE and grinds

the rock to powder and sets the ore free. The IRON in the ore is still

captive. An OUTSIDE INFLUENCE smelts it free of the clogging ore. The

iron is emancipated iron, now, but indifferent to further progress. An

OUTSIDE INFLUENCE beguiles it into the Bessemer furnace and refines it

into steel of the first quality. It is educated, now--its training is

complete. And it has reached its limit. By no possible process can it be

educated into GOLD. Will you set that down?

Y.M. Yes. "Everything has its limit--iron ore cannot be educated into

gold."

O.M. There are gold men, and tin men, and copper men, and leaden mean,

and steel men, and so on--and each has the limitations of his nature,

his heredities, his training, and his environment. You can build engines

out of each of these metals, and they will all perform, but you must

not require the weak ones to do equal work with the strong ones. In

each case, to get the best results, you must free the metal from its

obstructing prejudicial ones by education--smelting, refining, and so

forth.

Y.M. You have arrived at man, now?

O.M. Yes. Man the machine--man the impersonal engine. Whatsoever a man

is, is due to his MAKE, and to the INFLUENCES brought to bear upon it

by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed,

COMMANDED, by EXTERIOR influences--SOLELY. He ORIGINATES nothing, not even a thought.

Y.M. Oh, come! Where did I get my opinion that this which you are

talking is all foolishness?

O.M. It is a quite natural opinion--indeed an inevitable opinion--but

YOU did not create the materials out of which it is formed. They are

odds and ends of thoughts, impressions, feelings, gathered unconsciously

from a thousand books, a thousand conversations, and from streams of

thought and feeling which have flowed down into your heart and brain out

of the hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors. PERSONALLY you did

not create even the smallest microscopic fragment of the materials out

of which your opinion is made; and personally you cannot claim even the

slender merit of PUTTING THE BORROWED MATERIALS TOGETHER. That was done AUTOMATICALLY--by your mental machinery, in strict accordance with the law of that machinery's construction. And you not only did not make that machinery yourself, but you have NOT EVEN ANY COMMAND OVER IT.

Y.M. This is too much. You think I could have formed no opinion but that

one?

O.M. Spontaneously? No. And YOU DID NOT FORM THAT ONE; your machinery did it for you--automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it.

Y.M. Suppose I had reflected? How then?

O.M. Suppose you try?

Y.M. (AFTER A QUARTER OF AN HOUR.) I have reflected.

O.M. You mean you have tried to change your opinion--as an experiment?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. With success?

Y.M. No. It remains the same; it is impossible to change it.

O.M. I am sorry, but you see, yourself, that your mind is merely a

machine, nothing more. You have no command over it, it has no command

over itself--it is worked SOLELY FROM THE OUTSIDE. That is the law of

its make; it is the law of all machines.

Y.M. Can't I EVER change one of these automatic opinions?

O.M. No. You can't yourself, but EXTERIOR INFLUENCES can do it.

Y.M. And exterior ones ONLY?

O.M. Yes--exterior ones only.

Y.M. That position is untenable--I may say ludicrously untenable.

O.M. What makes you think so?

Y.M. I don't merely think it, I know it. Suppose I resolve to enter upon

a course of thought, and study, and reading, with the deliberate purpose

of changing that opinion; and suppose I succeed. THAT is not the work

of an exterior impulse, the whole of it is mine and personal; for I

originated the project.

O.M. Not a shred of it. IT GREW OUT OF THIS TALK WITH ME. But for that

it would not have occurred to you. No man ever originates anything. All

his thoughts, all his impulses, come FROM THE OUTSIDE.

Y.M. It's an exasperating subject. The FIRST man had original thoughts,

anyway; there was nobody to draw from.

O.M. It is a mistake. Adam's thoughts came to him from the outside. YOU

have a fear of death. You did not invent that--you got it from outside,

from talking and teaching. Adam had no fear of death--none in the world.

Y.M. Yes, he had.

O.M. When he was created?

Y.M. No.

O.M. When, then?

Y.M. When he was threatened with it.

O.M. Then it came from OUTSIDE. Adam is quite big enough; let us not try

to make a god of him. NONE BUT GODS HAVE EVER HAD A THOUGHT WHICH DID NOT COME FROM THE OUTSIDE. Adam probably had a good head, but it was of no sort of use to him until it was filled up FROM THE OUTSIDE. He was not able to invent the triflingest little thing with it. He had not a shadow of a notion of the difference between good and evil--he had to

get the idea FROM THE OUTSIDE. Neither he nor Eve was able to originate

the idea that it was immodest to go naked; the knowledge came in with

the apple FROM THE OUTSIDE. A man's brain is so constructed that IT CAN ORIGINATE NOTHING WHATSOEVER. It can only use material obtained OUTSIDE.

It is merely a machine; and it works automatically, not by will-power.

IT HAS NO COMMAND OVER ITSELF, ITS OWNER HAS NO COMMAND OVER IT.

Y.M. Well, never mind Adam: but certainly Shakespeare's creations--

O.M. No, you mean Shakespeare's IMITATIONS. Shakespeare created nothing.

He correctly observed, and he marvelously painted. He exactly portrayed

people whom GOD had created; but he created none himself. Let us spare

him the slander of charging him with trying. Shakespeare could not

create. HE WAS A MACHINE, AND MACHINES DO NOT CREATE.

Y.M. Where WAS his excellence, then?

O.M. In this. He was not a sewing-machine, like you and me; he was a

Gobelin loom. The threads and the colors came into him FROM THE OUTSIDE;

outside influences, suggestions, EXPERIENCES (reading, seeing plays,

playing plays, borrowing ideas, and so on), framed the patterns in

his mind and started up his complex and admirable machinery, and IT

AUTOMATICALLY turned out that pictured and gorgeous fabric which still

compels the astonishment of the world. If Shakespeare had been born and

bred on a barren and unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect

would have had no OUTSIDE MATERIAL to work with, and could have invented none; and NO OUTSIDE INFLUENCES, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations, of a valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would have produced nothing. In Turkey he would have

produced something--something up to the highest limit of Turkish

influences, associations, and training. In France he would have produced

something better--something up to the highest limit of the French

influences and training. In England he rose to the highest limit

attainable through the OUTSIDE HELPS AFFORDED BY THAT LAND'S IDEALS, INFLUENCES, AND TRAINING. You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out Gobelins.

Y.M. And so we are mere machines! And machines may not boast, nor

feel proud of their performance, nor claim personal merit for it, nor

applause and praise. It is an infamous doctrine.

O.M. It isn't a doctrine, it is merely a fact.

Y.M. I suppose, then, there is no more merit in being brave than in

being a coward?

O.M. PERSONAL merit? No. A brave man does not CREATE his bravery. He is entitled to no personal credit for possessing it. It is born to him. A

baby born with a billion dollars--where is the personal merit in that?

A baby born with nothing--where is the personal demerit in that? The

one is fawned upon, admired, worshiped, by sycophants, the other is

neglected and despised--where is the sense in it?

Y.M. Sometimes a timid man sets himself the task of conquering his

cowardice and becoming brave--and succeeds. What do you say to that?

O.M. That it shows the value of TRAINING IN RIGHT DIRECTIONS OVER

TRAINING IN WRONG ONES. Inestimably valuable is training, influence,

education, in right directions--TRAINING ONE'S SELF-APPROBATION TO

ELEVATE ITS IDEALS.

Y.M. But as to merit--the personal merit of the victorious coward's

project and achievement?

O.M. There isn't any. In the world's view he is a worthier man than he

was before, but HE didn't achieve the change--the merit of it is not

his.

Y.M. Whose, then?

O.M. His MAKE, and the influences which wrought upon it from the

outside.

Y.M. His make?

O.M. To start with, he was NOT utterly and completely a coward, or the

influences would have had nothing to work upon. He was not afraid of a

cow, though perhaps of a bull: not afraid of a woman, but afraid of a

man. There was something to build upon. There was a SEED. No seed, no

plant. Did he make that seed himself, or was it born in him? It was no

merit of HIS that the seed was there.

Y.M. Well, anyway, the idea of CULTIVATING it, the resolution to

cultivate it, was meritorious, and he originated that.

O.M. He did nothing of the kind. It came whence ALL impulses, good or

bad, come--from OUTSIDE. If that timid man had lived all his life in

a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had never

heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor express

envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more idea of

bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any possibility

have occurred to him to RESOLVE to become brave. He COULD NOT ORIGINATE THE IDEA--it had to come to him from the OUTSIDE. And so, when he heard bravery extolled and cowardice derided, it woke him up. He was ashamed.

Perhaps his sweetheart turned up her nose and said, "I am told that you

are a coward!" It was not HE that turned over the new leaf--she did it

for him. HE must not strut around in the merit of it--it is not his.

Y.M. But, anyway, he reared the plant after she watered the seed.

O.M. No. OUTSIDE INFLUENCES reared it. At the command--and trembling--he

marched out into the field--with other soldiers and in the daytime, not

alone and in the dark. He had the INFLUENCE OF EXAMPLE, he drew courage from his comrades' courage; he was afraid, and wanted to run, but he did not dare; he was AFRAID to run, with all those soldiers looking on. He was progressing, you see--the moral fear of shame had risen superior to

the physical fear of harm. By the end of the campaign experience will

have taught him that not ALL who go into battle get hurt--an outside

influence which will be helpful to him; and he will also have learned

how sweet it is to be praised for courage and be huzza'd at with

tear-choked voices as the war-worn regiment marches past the worshiping

multitude with flags flying and the drums beating. After that he will

be as securely brave as any veteran in the army--and there will not be a

shade nor suggestion of PERSONAL MERIT in it anywhere; it will all have

come from the OUTSIDE. The Victoria Cross breeds more heroes than--

Y.M. Hang it, where is the sense in his becoming brave if he is to get

no credit for it?

O.M. Your question will answer itself presently. It involves an

important detail of man's make which we have not yet touched upon.

Y.M. What detail is that?

O.M. The impulse which moves a person to do things--the only impulse

that ever moves a person to do a thing.

Y.M. The ONLY one! Is there but one?

O.M. That is all. There is only one.

Y.M. Well, certainly that is a strange enough doctrine. What is the sole

impulse that ever moves a person to do a thing?

O.M. The impulse to CONTENT HIS OWN SPIRIT--the NECESSITY of contenting

his own spirit and WINNING ITS APPROVAL.

Y.M. Oh, come, that won't do!

O.M. Why won't it?

Y.M. Because it puts him in the attitude of always looking out for his

own comfort and advantage; whereas an unselfish man often does a thing

solely for another person's good when it is a positive disadvantage to

himself.

O.M. It is a mistake. The act must do HIM good, FIRST; otherwise he will

not do it. He may THINK he is doing it solely for the other person's

sake, but it is not so; he is contenting his own spirit first--the

other's person's benefit has to always take SECOND place.

Y.M. What a fantastic idea! What becomes of self-sacrifice? Please

answer me that.

O.M. What is self-sacrifice?

Y.M. The doing good to another person where no shadow nor suggestion of

benefit to one's self can result from it.

II

Man's Sole Impulse--the Securing of His Own Approval

Old Man. There have been instances of it--you think?

Young Man. INSTANCES? Millions of them!

O.M. You have not jumped to conclusions? You have examined

them--critically?

Y.M. They don't need it: the acts themselves reveal the golden impulse

back of them.

O.M. For instance?

Y.M. Well, then, for instance. Take the case in the book here. The man

lives three miles up-town. It is bitter cold, snowing hard, midnight.

He is about to enter the horse-car when a gray and ragged old woman, a

touching picture of misery, puts out her lean hand and begs for rescue

from hunger and death. The man finds that he has a quarter in his

pocket, but he does not hesitate: he gives it her and trudges home

through the storm. There--it is noble, it is beautiful; its grace is

marred by no fleck or blemish or suggestion of self-interest.

O.M. What makes you think that?

Y.M. Pray what else could I think? Do you imagine that there is some

other way of looking at it?

O.M. Can you put yourself in the man's place and tell me what he felt

and what he thought?

Y.M. Easily. The sight of that suffering old face pierced his generous

heart with a sharp pain. He could not bear it. He could endure the

three-mile walk in the storm, but he could not endure the tortures his

conscience would suffer if he turned his back and left that poor old

creature to perish. He would not have been able to sleep, for thinking

of it.

O.M. What was his state of mind on his way home?

Y.M. It was a state of joy which only the self-sacrificer knows. His

heart sang, he was unconscious of the storm.

O.M. He felt well?

Y.M. One cannot doubt it.

O.M. Very well. Now let us add up the details and see how much he got

for his twenty-five cents. Let us try to find out the REAL why of his

making the investment. In the first place HE couldn't bear the pain

which the old suffering face gave him. So he was thinking of HIS

pain--this good man. He must buy a salve for it. If he did not succor

the old woman HIS conscience would torture him all the way home.

Thinking of HIS pain again. He must buy relief for that. If he didn't

relieve the old woman HE would not get any sleep. He must buy some

sleep--still thinking of HIMSELF, you see. Thus, to sum up, he bought

himself free of a sharp pain in his heart, he bought himself free of the

tortures of a waiting conscience, he bought a whole night's sleep--all

for twenty-five cents! It should make Wall Street ashamed of itself. On

his way home his heart was joyful, and it sang--profit on top of profit!

The impulse which moved the man to succor the old woman was--FIRST--to

CONTENT HIS OWN SPIRIT; secondly to relieve HER sufferings. Is it your

opinion that men's acts proceed from one central and unchanging and

inalterable impulse, or from a variety of impulses?

Y.M. From a variety, of course--some high and fine and noble, others

not. What is your opinion?

O.M. Then there is but ONE law, one source.

Y.M. That both the noblest impulses and the basest proceed from that one

source?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. Will you put that law into words?

O.M. Yes. This is the law, keep it in your mind. FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS

GRAVE A MAN NEVER DOES A SINGLE THING WHICH HAS ANY FIRST AND FOREMOST OBJECT BUT ONE--TO SECURE PEACE OF MIND, SPIRITUAL COMFORT, FOR HIMSELF.

Y.M. Come! He never does anything for any one else's comfort, spiritual

or physical?

O.M. No. EXCEPT ON THOSE DISTINCT TERMS--that it shall FIRST secure HIS OWN spiritual comfort. Otherwise he will not do it.

Y.M. It will be easy to expose the falsity of that proposition.

O.M. For instance?

Y.M. Take that noble passion, love of country, patriotism. A man who

loves peace and dreads pain, leaves his pleasant home and his weeping

family and marches out to manfully expose himself to hunger, cold,

wounds, and death. Is that seeking spiritual comfort?

O.M. He loves peace and dreads pain?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. Then perhaps there is something that he loves MORE than he loves

peace--THE APPROVAL OF HIS NEIGHBORS AND THE PUBLIC. And perhaps there is something which he dreads more than he dreads pain--the DISAPPROVAL of his neighbors and the public. If he is sensitive to shame he will go to the field--not because his spirit will be ENTIRELY comfortable there, but because it will be more comfortable there than it would be if he

remained at home. He will always do the thing which will bring him the

MOST mental comfort--for that is THE SOLE LAW OF HIS LIFE. He leaves the weeping family behind; he is sorry to make them uncomfortable, but not

sorry enough to sacrifice his OWN comfort to secure theirs.

Y.M. Do you really believe that mere public opinion could force a timid

and peaceful man to--

O.M. Go to war? Yes--public opinion can force some men to do ANYTHING.

Y.M. ANYTHING?

O.M. Yes--anything.

Y.M. I don't believe that. Can it force a right-principled man to do a

wrong thing?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. Can it force a kind man to do a cruel thing?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. Give an instance.

O.M. Alexander Hamilton was a conspicuously high-principled man.

He regarded dueling as wrong, and as opposed to the teachings of

religion--but in deference to PUBLIC OPINION he fought a duel. He deeply

loved his family, but to buy public approval he treacherously deserted

them and threw his life away, ungenerously leaving them to lifelong

sorrow in order that he might stand well with a foolish world. In the

then condition of the public standards of honor he could not have been

comfortable with the stigma upon him of having refused to fight. The

teachings of religion, his devotion to his family, his kindness of

heart, his high principles, all went for nothing when they stood in the

way of his spiritual comfort. A man will do ANYTHING, no matter what it

is, TO SECURE HIS SPIRITUAL COMFORT; and he can neither be forced nor

persuaded to any act which has not that goal for its object. Hamilton's

act was compelled by the inborn necessity of contenting his own spirit;

in this it was like all the other acts of his life, and like all the

acts of all men's lives. Do you see where the kernel of the matter lies?

A man cannot be comfortable without HIS OWN approval. He will secure the

largest share possible of that, at all costs, all sacrifices.

Y.M. A minute ago you said Hamilton fought that duel to get PUBLIC

approval.

O.M. I did. By refusing to fight the duel he would have secured his

family's approval and a large share of his own; but the public approval

was more valuable in his eyes than all other approvals put together--in

the earth or above it; to secure that would furnish him the MOST comfort

of mind, the most SELF-approval; so he sacrificed all other values to

get it.

Y.M. Some noble souls have refused to fight duels, and have manfully

braved the public contempt.

O.M. They acted ACCORDING TO THEIR MAKE. They valued their principles

and the approval of their families ABOVE the public approval. They took

the thing they valued MOST and let the rest go. They took what would

give them the LARGEST share of PERSONAL CONTENTMENT AND APPROVAL--a man ALWAYS does. Public opinion cannot force that kind of men to go to the wars. When they go it is for other reasons. Other spirit-contenting reasons.

Y.M. Always spirit-contenting reasons?

O.M. There are no others.

Y.M. When a man sacrifices his life to save a little child from a

burning building, what do you call that?

O.M. When he does it, it is the law of HIS make. HE can't bear to see

the child in that peril (a man of a different make COULD), and so he

tries to save the child, and loses his life. But he has got what he was

after--HIS OWN APPROVAL.

Y.M. What do you call Love, Hate, Charity, Revenge, Humanity,

Magnanimity, Forgiveness?

O.M. Different results of the one Master Impulse: the necessity of

securing one's self approval. They wear diverse clothes and are subject

to diverse moods, but in whatsoever ways they masquerade they are the

SAME PERSON all the time. To change the figure, the COMPULSION that

moves a man--and there is but the one--is the necessity of securing the

contentment of his own spirit. When it stops, the man is dead.

Y.M. That is foolishness. Love--

O.M. Why, love is that impulse, that law, in its most uncompromising

form. It will squander life and everything else on its object. Not

PRIMARILY for the object's sake, but for ITS OWN. When its object is

happy IT is happy--and that is what it is unconsciously after.

Y.M. You do not even except the lofty and gracious passion of

mother-love?

O.M. No, IT is the absolute slave of that law. The mother will go naked

to clothe her child; she will starve that it may have food; suffer

torture to save it from pain; die that it may live. She takes a living

PLEASURE in making these sacrifices. SHE DOES IT FOR THAT REWARD—that self-approval, that contentment, that peace, that comfort. SHE WOULD DO IT FOR YOUR CHILD IF SHE COULD GET THE SAME PAY.

Y.M. This is an infernal philosophy of yours.

O.M. It isn't a philosophy, it is a fact.

Y.M. Of course you must admit that there are some acts which--

O.M. No. There is NO act, large or small, fine or mean, which springs

from any motive but the one--the necessity of appeasing and contenting

one's own spirit.

Y.M. The world's philanthropists--

O.M. I honor them, I uncover my head to them--from habit and training;

and THEY could not know comfort or happiness or self-approval if they

did not work and spend for the unfortunate. It makes THEM happy to

see others happy; and so with money and labor they buy what they are

after--HAPPINESS, SELF-APPROVAL. Why don't miners do the same thing?

Because they can get a thousandfold more happiness by NOT doing it.

There is no other reason. They follow the law of their make.

Y.M. What do you say of duty for duty's sake?

O.M. That IS DOES NOT EXIST. Duties are not performed for duty's SAKE,

but because their NEGLECT would make the man UNCOMFORTABLE. A man performs but ONE duty--the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of

making himself agreeable to himself. If he can most satisfyingly perform

this sole and only duty by HELPING his neighbor, he will do it; if he

can most satisfyingly perform it by SWINDLING his neighbor, he will

do it. But he always looks out for Number One--FIRST; the effects upon

others are a SECONDARY matter. Men pretend to self-sacrifices, but this

is a thing which, in the ordinary value of the phrase, DOES NOT EXIST

AND HAS NOT EXISTED. A man often honestly THINKS he is sacrificing

himself merely and solely for some one else, but he is deceived; his

bottom impulse is to content a requirement of his nature and training,

and thus acquire peace for his soul.

Y.M. Apparently, then, all men, both good and bad ones, devote their

lives to contenting their consciences.

O.M. Yes. That is a good enough name for it: Conscience--that

independent Sovereign, that insolent absolute Monarch inside of a man

who is the man's Master. There are all kinds of consciences, because

there are all kinds of men. You satisfy an assassin's conscience in one

way, a philanthropist's in another, a miser's in another, a burglar's in

still another. As a GUIDE or INCENTIVE to any authoritatively prescribed

line of morals or conduct (leaving TRAINING out of the account), a man's

conscience is totally valueless. I know a kind-hearted Kentuckian whose

self-approval was lacking--whose conscience was troubling him, to phrase

it with exactness--BECAUSE HE HAD NEGLECTED TO KILL A CERTAIN MAN--a man whom he had never seen. The stranger had killed this man's friend in a fight, this man's Kentucky training made it a duty to kill the stranger for it. He neglected his duty--kept dodging it, shirking it, putting

it off, and his unrelenting conscience kept persecuting him for this

conduct. At last, to get ease of mind, comfort, self-approval, he

hunted up the stranger and took his life. It was an immense act of

SELF-SACRIFICE (as per the usual definition), for he did not want to do

it, and he never would have done it if he could have bought a contented

spirit and an unworried mind at smaller cost. But we are so made that we

will pay ANYTHING for that contentment--even another man's life.

Y.M. You spoke a moment ago of TRAINED consciences. You mean that we are not BORN with consciences competent to guide us aright?

O.M. If we were, children and savages would know right from wrong, and

not have to be taught it.

Y.M. But consciences can be TRAINED?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. Of course by parents, teachers, the pulpit, and books.

O.M. Yes--they do their share; they do what they can.

Y.M. And the rest is done by--

O.M. Oh, a million unnoticed influences--for good or bad: influences

which work without rest during every waking moment of a man's life, from

cradle to grave.

Y.M. You have tabulated these?

O.M. Many of them--yes.

Y.M. Will you read me the result?

O.M. Another time, yes. It would take an hour.

Y.M. A conscience can be trained to shun evil and prefer good?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. But will it for spirit-contenting reasons only?

O.M. It CAN'T be trained to do a thing for any OTHER reason. The thing

is impossible.

Y.M. There MUST be a genuinely and utterly self-sacrificing act recorded

in human history somewhere.

O.M. You are young. You have many years before you. Search one out.

Y.M. It does seem to me that when a man sees a fellow-being struggling

in the water and jumps in at the risk of his life to save him--

O.M. Wait. Describe the MAN. Describe the FELLOW-BEING. State if there

is an AUDIENCE present; or if they are ALONE.

Y.M. What have these things to do with the splendid act?

O.M. Very much. Shall we suppose, as a beginning, that the two are

alone, in a solitary place, at midnight?

Y.M. If you choose.

O.M. And that the fellow-being is the man's daughter?

Y.M. Well, n-no--make it someone else.

O.M. A filthy, drunken ruffian, then?

Y.M. I see. Circumstances alter cases. I suppose that if there was no

audience to observe the act, the man wouldn't perform it.

O.M. But there is here and there a man who WOULD. People, for instance,

like the man who lost his life trying to save the child from the fire;

and the man who gave the needy old woman his twenty-five cents and

walked home in the storm--there are here and there men like that who

would do it. And why? Because they couldn't BEAR to see a fellow-being

struggling in the water and not jump in and help. It would give THEM

pain. They would save the fellow-being on that account. THEY WOULDN'T

DO IT OTHERWISE. They strictly obey the law which I have been insisting

upon. You must remember and always distinguish the people who CAN'T

BEAR things from people who CAN. It will throw light upon a number of

apparently "self-sacrificing" cases.

Y.M. Oh, dear, it's all so disgusting.

O.M. Yes. And so true.

Y.M. Come--take the good boy who does things he doesn't want to do, in

order to gratify his mother.

O.M. He does seven-tenths of the act because it gratifies HIM to gratify

his mother. Throw the bulk of advantage the other way and the good boy

would not do the act. He MUST obey the iron law. None can escape it.

Y.M. Well, take the case of a bad boy who--

O.M. You needn't mention it, it is a waste of time. It is no matter

about the bad boy's act. Whatever it was, he had a spirit-contenting

reason for it. Otherwise you have been misinformed, and he didn't do it.

Y.M. It is very exasperating. A while ago you said that man's conscience

is not a born judge of morals and conduct, but has to be taught and

trained. Now I think a conscience can get drowsy and lazy, but I don't

think it can go wrong; if you wake it up--

A Little Story

O.M. I will tell you a little story:

Once upon a time an Infidel was guest in the house of a Christian widow

whose little boy was ill and near to death. The Infidel often watched

by the bedside and entertained the boy with talk, and he used these

opportunities to satisfy a strong longing in his nature--that desire

which is in us all to better other people's condition by having them

think as we think. He was successful. But the dying boy, in his last

moments, reproached him and said:

"I BELIEVED, AND WAS HAPPY IN IT; YOU HAVE TAKEN MY BELIEF AWAY, AND MY COMFORT. NOW I HAVE NOTHING LEFT, AND I DIE MISERABLE; FOR THE THINGS WHICH YOU HAVE TOLD ME DO NOT TAKE THE PLACE OF THAT WHICH I HAVE LOST."

And the mother, also, reproached the Infidel, and said:

"MY CHILD IS FOREVER LOST, AND MY HEART IS BROKEN. HOW COULD YOU DO THIS CRUEL THING? WE HAVE DONE YOU NO HARM, BUT ONLY KINDNESS; WE MADE OUR HOUSE YOUR HOME, YOU WERE WELCOME TO ALL WE HAD, AND THIS IS OUR REWARD."

The heart of the Infidel was filled with remorse for what he had done,

and he said:

"IT WAS WRONG--I SEE IT NOW; BUT I WAS ONLY TRYING TO DO HIM GOOD. IN MY VIEW HE WAS IN ERROR; IT SEEMED MY DUTY TO TEACH HIM THE TRUTH."

Then the mother said:

"I HAD TAUGHT HIM, ALL HIS LITTLE LIFE, WHAT I BELIEVED TO BE THE TRUTH, AND IN HIS BELIEVING FAITH BOTH OF US WERE HAPPY. NOW HE IS DEAD,--AND LOST; AND I AM MISERABLE. OUR FAITH CAME DOWN TO US THROUGH CENTURIES OF BELIEVING ANCESTORS; WHAT RIGHT HAD YOU, OR ANY ONE, TO DISTURB IT? WHERE WAS YOUR HONOR, WHERE WAS YOUR SHAME?"

Y.M. He was a miscreant, and deserved death!

O.M. He thought so himself, and said so.

Y.M. Ah--you see, HIS CONSCIENCE WAS AWAKENED!

O.M. Yes, his Self-Disapproval was. It PAINED him to see the mother

suffer. He was sorry he had done a thing which brought HIM pain. It did

not occur to him to think of the mother when he was misteaching the boy,

for he was absorbed in providing PLEASURE for himself, then. Providing

it by satisfying what he believed to be a call of duty.

Y.M. Call it what you please, it is to me a case of AWAKENED CONSCIENCE.

That awakened conscience could never get itself into that species of

trouble again. A cure like that is a PERMANENT cure.

O.M. Pardon--I had not finished the story. We are creatures of OUTSIDE

INFLUENCES--we originate NOTHING within. Whenever we take a new line of thought and drift into a new line of belief and action, the impulse is

ALWAYS suggested from the OUTSIDE. Remorse so preyed upon the Infidel

that it dissolved his harshness toward the boy's religion and made him

come to regard it with tolerance, next with kindness, for the boy's

sake and the mother's. Finally he found himself examining it. From that

moment his progress in his new trend was steady and rapid. He became a

believing Christian. And now his remorse for having robbed the dying boy

of his faith and his salvation was bitterer than ever. It gave him no

rest, no peace. He MUST have rest and peace--it is the law of nature.

There seemed but one way to get it; he must devote himself to saving

imperiled souls. He became a missionary. He landed in a pagan country

ill and helpless. A native widow took him into her humble home

and nursed him back to convalescence. Then her young boy was taken

hopelessly ill, and the grateful missionary helped her tend him. Here

was his first opportunity to repair a part of the wrong done to the

other boy by doing a precious service for this one by undermining his

foolish faith in his false gods. He was successful. But the dying boy in

his last moments reproached him and said:

"I BELIEVED, AND WAS HAPPY IN IT; YOU HAVE TAKEN MY BELIEF AWAY, AND MY COMFORT. NOW I HAVE NOTHING LEFT, AND I DIE MISERABLE; FOR THE THINGS WHICH YOU HAVE TOLD ME DO NOT TAKE THE PLACE OF THAT WHICH I HAVE LOST."

And the mother, also, reproached the missionary, and said:

"MY CHILD IS FOREVER LOST, AND MY HEART IS BROKEN. HOW COULD YOU DO THIS CRUEL THING? WE HAD DONE YOU NO HARM, BUT ONLY KINDNESS; WE MADE OUR HOUSE YOUR HOME, YOU WERE WELCOME TO ALL WE HAD, AND THIS IS OUR REWARD."

The heart of the missionary was filled with remorse for what he had

done, and he said:

"IT WAS WRONG--I SEE IT NOW; BUT I WAS ONLY TRYING TO DO HIM GOOD. IN MY VIEW HE WAS IN ERROR; IT SEEMED MY DUTY TO TEACH HIM THE TRUTH."

Then the mother said:

"I HAD TAUGHT HIM, ALL HIS LITTLE LIFE, WHAT I BELIEVED TO BE THE TRUTH, AND IN HIS BELIEVING FAITH BOTH OF US WERE HAPPY. NOW HE IS DEAD—AND LOST; AND I AM MISERABLE. OUR FAITH CAME DOWN TO US THROUGH CENTURIES OF BELIEVING ANCESTORS; WHAT RIGHT HAD YOU, OR ANY ONE, TO DISTURB IT? WHERE WAS YOUR HONOR, WHERE WAS YOUR SHAME?"

The missionary's anguish of remorse and sense of treachery were as

bitter and persecuting and unappeasable, now, as they had been in the

former case. The story is finished. What is your comment?

Y.M. The man's conscience is a fool! It was morbid. It didn't know right

from wrong.

O.M. I am not sorry to hear you say that. If you grant that ONE man's

conscience doesn't know right from wrong, it is an admission that there

are others like it. This single admission pulls down the whole doctrine

of infallibility of judgment in consciences. Meantime there is one thing

which I ask you to notice.

Y.M. What is that?

O.M. That in both cases the man's ACT gave him no spiritual discomfort,

and that he was quite satisfied with it and got pleasure out of it. But

afterward when it resulted in PAIN to HIM, he was sorry. Sorry it had

inflicted pain upon the others, BUT FOR NO REASON UNDER THE SUN EXCEPT THAT THEIR PAIN GAVE HIM PAIN. Our consciences take NO notice of pain inflicted upon others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to US. In ALL cases without exception we are absolutely indifferent to

another person's pain until his sufferings make us uncomfortable. Many

an infidel would not have been troubled by that Christian mother's

distress. Don't you believe that?

Y.M. Yes. You might almost say it of the AVERAGE infidel, I think.

O.M. And many a missionary, sternly fortified by his sense of duty,

would not have been troubled by the pagan mother's distress--Jesuit

missionaries in Canada in the early French times, for instance; see

episodes quoted by Parkman.

Y.M. Well, let us adjourn. Where have we arrived?

O.M. At this. That we (mankind) have ticketed ourselves with a number of

qualities to which we have given misleading names. Love, Hate, Charity,

Compassion, Avarice, Benevolence, and so on. I mean we attach misleading

MEANINGS to the names. They are all forms of self-contentment,

self-gratification, but the names so disguise them that they distract

our attention from the fact. Also we have smuggled a word into the

dictionary which ought not to be there at all--Self-Sacrifice. It

describes a thing which does not exist. But worst of all, we ignore and

never mention the Sole Impulse which dictates and compels a man's every

act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every

emergency and at all costs. To it we owe all that we are. It is our

breath, our heart, our blood. It is our only spur, our whip, our goad,

our only impelling power; we have no other. Without it we should be

mere inert images, corpses; no one would do anything, there would be

no progress, the world would stand still. We ought to stand reverently

uncovered when the name of that stupendous power is uttered.

Y.M. I am not convinced.

O.M. You will be when you think.

III

Instances in Point

Old Man. Have you given thought to the Gospel of Self-Approval since we

talked?

Young Man. I have.

O.M. It was I that moved you to it. That is to say an OUTSIDE INFLUENCE

moved you to it--not one that originated in your head. Will you try to

keep that in mind and not forget it?

Y.M. Yes. Why?

O.M. Because by and by in one of our talks, I wish to further impress

upon you that neither you, nor I, nor any man ever originates a thought

in his own head. THE UTTERER OF A THOUGHT ALWAYS UTTERS A SECOND-HAND ONE.

Y.M. Oh, now--

O.M. Wait. Reserve your remark till we get to that part of our

discussion--tomorrow or next day, say. Now, then, have you been

considering the proposition that no act is ever born of any but a

self-contenting impulse--(primarily). You have sought. What have you

found?

Y.M. I have not been very fortunate. I have examined many fine and

apparently self-sacrificing deeds in romances and biographies, but--

O.M. Under searching analysis the ostensible self-sacrifice disappeared?

It naturally would.

Y.M. But here in this novel is one which seems to promise. In the

Adirondack woods is a wage-earner and lay preacher in the lumber-camps

who is of noble character and deeply religious. An earnest and practical

laborer in the New York slums comes up there on vacation--he is leader

of a section of the University Settlement. Holme, the lumberman, is

fired with a desire to throw away his excellent worldly prospects and

go down and save souls on the East Side. He counts it happiness to make

this sacrifice for the glory of God and for the cause of Christ. He

resigns his place, makes the sacrifice cheerfully, and goes to the East

Side and preaches Christ and Him crucified every day and every night to

little groups of half-civilized foreign paupers who scoff at him. But he

rejoices in the scoffings, since he is suffering them in the great

cause of Christ. You have so filled my mind with suspicions that I was

constantly expecting to find a hidden questionable impulse back of all

this, but I am thankful to say I have failed. This man saw his duty, and

for DUTY'S SAKE he sacrificed self and assumed the burden it imposed.

O.M. Is that as far as you have read?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. Let us read further, presently. Meantime, in sacrificing

himself--NOT for the glory of God, PRIMARILY, as HE imagined, but

FIRST to content that exacting and inflexible master within him--DID HE

SACRIFICE ANYBODY ELSE?

Y.M. How do you mean?

O.M. He relinquished a lucrative post and got mere food and lodging in

place of it. Had he dependents?

Y.M. Well--yes.

O.M. In what way and to what extend did his self-sacrifice affect THEM?

Y.M. He was the support of a superannuated father. He had a young sister

with a remarkable voice--he was giving her a musical education, so that

her longing to be self-supporting might be gratified. He was furnishing

the money to put a young brother through a polytechnic school and

satisfy his desire to become a civil engineer.

O.M. The old father's comforts were now curtailed?

Y.M. Quite seriously. Yes.

O.M. The sister's music-lessens had to stop?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. The young brother's education--well, an extinguishing blight fell

upon that happy dream, and he had to go to sawing wood to support the

old father, or something like that?

Y.M. It is about what happened. Yes.

O.M. What a handsome job of self-sacrificing he did do! It seems to me

that he sacrificed everybody EXCEPT himself. Haven't I told you that no

man EVER sacrifices himself; that there is no instance of it upon record

anywhere; and that when a man's Interior Monarch requires a thing of its

slave for either its MOMENTARY or its PERMANENT contentment, that thing

must and will be furnished and that command obeyed, no matter who may

stand in the way and suffer disaster by it? That man RUINED HIS FAMILY

to please and content his Interior Monarch--

Y.M. And help Christ's cause.

O.M. Yes--SECONDLY. Not firstly. HE thought it was firstly.

Y.M. Very well, have it so, if you will. But it could be that he argued

that if he saved a hundred souls in New York--

O.M. The sacrifice of the FAMILY would be justified by that great profit

upon the--the--what shall we call it?

Y.M. Investment?

O.M. Hardly. How would SPECULATION do? How would GAMBLE do? Not

a solitary soul-capture was sure. He played for a possible

thirty-three-hundred-per-cent profit. It was GAMBLING--with his family

for "chips." However let us see how the game came out. Maybe we can

get on the track of the secret original impulse, the REAL impulse, that

moved him to so nobly self-sacrifice his family in the Savior's cause

under the superstition that he was sacrificing himself. I will read a

chapter or so.... Here we have it! It was bound to expose itself sooner

or later. He preached to the East-Side rabble a season, then went back

to his old dull, obscure life in the lumber-camps "HURT TO THE HEART,

HIS PRIDE HUMBLED." Why? Were not his efforts acceptable to the Savior,

for Whom alone they were made? Dear me, that detail is LOST SIGHT OF,

is not even referred to, the fact that it started out as a motive

is entirely forgotten! Then what is the trouble? The authoress quite

innocently and unconsciously gives the whole business away. The

trouble was this: this man merely PREACHED to the poor; that is not the

University Settlement's way; it deals in larger and better things than

that, and it did not enthuse over that crude Salvation-Army eloquence.

It was courteous to Holme--but cool. It did not pet him, did not take

him to its bosom. "PERISHED WERE ALL HIS DREAMS OF DISTINCTION, THE PRAISE AND GRATEFUL APPROVAL--" Of whom? The Savior? No; the Savior is not mentioned. Of whom, then? Of "His FELLOW-WORKERS." Why did he want that? Because the Master inside of him wanted it, and would not be content without it. That emphasized sentence quoted above, reveals the secret we have been seeking, the original impulse, the REAL impulse,

which moved the obscure and unappreciated Adirondack lumberman to

sacrifice his family and go on that crusade to the East Side--which said

original impulse was this, to wit: without knowing it HE WENT THERE TO

SHOW A NEGLECTED WORLD THE LARGE TALENT THAT WAS IN HIM, AND RISE TO DISTINCTION. As I have warned you before, NO act springs from any but the one law, the one motive. But I pray you, do not accept this law upon my say-so; but diligently examine for yourself. Whenever you read of a self-sacrificing act or hear of one, or of a duty done for DUTY'S SAKE,

take it to pieces and look for the REAL motive. It is always there.

Y.M. I do it every day. I cannot help it, now that I have gotten

started upon the degrading and exasperating quest. For it is hatefully

interesting!--in fact, fascinating is the word. As soon as I come across

a golden deed in a book I have to stop and take it apart and examine it,

I cannot help myself.

O.M. Have you ever found one that defeated the rule?

Y.M. No--at least, not yet. But take the case of servant-tipping in

Europe. You pay the HOTEL for service; you owe the servants NOTHING, yet

you pay them besides. Doesn't that defeat it?

O.M. In what way?

Y.M. You are not OBLIGED to do it, therefore its source is compassion

for their ill-paid condition, and--

O.M. Has that custom ever vexed you, annoyed you, irritated you?

Y.M. Well, yes.

O.M. Still you succumbed to it?

Y.M. Of course.

O.M. Why of course?

Y.M. Well, custom is law, in a way, and laws must be submitted

to--everybody recognizes it as a DUTY.

O.M. Then you pay for the irritating tax for DUTY'S sake?

Y.M. I suppose it amounts to that.

O.M. Then the impulse which moves you to submit to the tax is not ALL

compassion, charity, benevolence?

Y.M. Well--perhaps not.

O.M. Is ANY of it?

Y.M. I--perhaps I was too hasty in locating its source.

O.M. Perhaps so. In case you ignored the custom would you get prompt and

effective service from the servants?

Y.M. Oh, hear yourself talk! Those European servants? Why, you wouldn't

get any of all, to speak of.

O.M. Couldn't THAT work as an impulse to move you to pay the tax?

Y.M. I am not denying it.

O.M. Apparently, then, it is a case of for-duty's-sake with a little

self-interest added?

Y.M. Yes, it has the look of it. But here is a point: we pay that tax

knowing it to be unjust and an extortion; yet we go away with a pain at

the heart if we think we have been stingy with the poor fellows; and we

heartily wish we were back again, so that we could do the right thing,

and MORE than the right thing, the GENEROUS thing. I think it will be

difficult for you to find any thought of self in that impulse.

O.M. I wonder why you should think so. When you find service charged in

the HOTEL bill does it annoy you?

Y.M. No.

O.M. Do you ever complain of the amount of it?

Y.M. No, it would not occur to me.

O.M. The EXPENSE, then, is not the annoying detail. It is a fixed

charge, and you pay it cheerfully, you pay it without a murmur. When you

came to pay the servants, how would you like it if each of the men and

maids had a fixed charge?

Y.M. Like it? I should rejoice!

O.M. Even if the fixed tax were a shade MORE than you had been in the

habit of paying in the form of tips?

Y.M. Indeed, yes!

O.M. Very well, then. As I understand it, it isn't really compassion nor

yet duty that moves you to pay the tax, and it isn't the AMOUNT of the

tax that annoys you. Yet SOMETHING annoys you. What is it?

Y.M. Well, the trouble is, you never know WHAT to pay, the tax varies

so, all over Europe.

O.M. So you have to guess?

Y.M. There is no other way. So you go on thinking and thinking, and

calculating and guessing, and consulting with other people and getting

their views; and it spoils your sleep nights, and makes you distraught

in the daytime, and while you are pretending to look at the sights you

are only guessing and guessing and guessing all the time, and being

worried and miserable.

O.M. And all about a debt which you don't owe and don't have to pay

unless you want to! Strange. What is the purpose of the guessing?

Y.M. To guess out what is right to give them, and not be unfair to any

of them.

O.M. It has quite a noble look--taking so much pains and using up so

much valuable time in order to be just and fair to a poor servant to

whom you owe nothing, but who needs money and is ill paid.

Y.M. I think, myself, that if there is any ungracious motive back of it

it will be hard to find.

O.M. How do you know when you have not paid a servant fairly?

Y.M. Why, he is silent; does not thank you. Sometimes he gives you a

look that makes you ashamed. You are too proud to rectify your mistake

there, with people looking, but afterward you keep on wishing and

wishing you HAD done it. My, the shame and the pain of it! Sometimes you

see, by the signs, that you have it JUST RIGHT, and you go away mightily

satisfied. Sometimes the man is so effusively thankful that you know you

have given him a good deal MORE than was necessary.

O.M. NECESSARY? Necessary for what?

Y.M. To content him.

O.M. How do you feel THEN?

Y.M. Repentant.

O.M. It is my belief that you have NOT been concerning yourself in

guessing out his just dues, but only in ciphering out what would CONTENT

him. And I think you have a self-deluding reason for that.

Y.M. What was it?

O.M. If you fell short of what he was expecting and wanting, you would

get a look which would SHAME YOU BEFORE FOLK. That would give you PAIN.

YOU--for you are only working for yourself, not HIM. If you gave him too

much you would be ASHAMED OF YOURSELF for it, and that would give YOU

pain--another case of thinking of YOURSELF, protecting yourself, SAVING

YOURSELF FROM DISCOMFORT. You never think of the servant once—except to guess out how to get HIS APPROVAL. If you get that, you get your OWN approval, and that is the sole and only thing you are after. The Master

inside of you is then satisfied, contented, comfortable; there was NO

OTHER thing at stake, as a matter of FIRST interest, anywhere in the

transaction.

Further Instances

Y.M. Well, to think of it; Self-Sacrifice for others, the grandest thing

in man, ruled out! non-existent!

O.M. Are you accusing me of saying that?

Y.M. Why, certainly.

O.M. I haven't said it.

Y.M. What did you say, then?

O.M. That no man has ever sacrificed himself in the common meaning of

that phrase--which is, self-sacrifice for another ALONE. Men make daily

sacrifices for others, but it is for their own sake FIRST. The act must

content their own spirit FIRST. The other beneficiaries come second.

Y.M. And the same with duty for duty's sake?

O.M. Yes. No man performs a duty for mere duty's sake; the act must

content his spirit FIRST. He must feel better for DOING the duty than he

would for shirking it. Otherwise he will not do it.

Y.M. Take the case of the BERKELEY CASTLE.

O.M. It was a noble duty, greatly performed. Take it to pieces and

examine it, if you like.

Y.M. A British troop-ship crowded with soldiers and their wives and

children. She struck a rock and began to sink. There was room in the

boats for the women and children only. The colonel lined up his regiment

on the deck and said "it is our duty to die, that they may be saved."

There was no murmur, no protest. The boats carried away the women and

children. When the death-moment was come, the colonel and his officers

took their several posts, the men stood at shoulder-arms, and so, as on

dress-parade, with their flag flying and the drums beating, they went

down, a sacrifice to duty for duty's sake. Can you view it as other than

that?

O.M. It was something as fine as that, as exalted as that. Could

you have remained in those ranks and gone down to your death in that

unflinching way?

Y.M. Could I? No, I could not.

O.M. Think. Imagine yourself there, with that watery doom creeping

higher and higher around you.

Y.M. I can imagine it. I feel all the horror of it. I could not have

endured it, I could not have remained in my place. I know it.

O.M. Why?

Y.M. There is no why about it: I know myself, and I know I couldn't DO

it.

O.M. But it would be your DUTY to do it.

Y.M. Yes, I know--but I couldn't.

O.M. It was more than thousand men, yet not one of them flinched. Some

of them must have been born with your temperament; if they could do that

great duty for duty's SAKE, why not you? Don't you know that you could

go out and gather together a thousand clerks and mechanics and put them

on that deck and ask them to die for duty's sake, and not two dozen of

them would stay in the ranks to the end?

Y.M. Yes, I know that.

O.M. But you TRAIN them, and put them through a campaign or two; then

they would be soldiers; soldiers, with a soldier's pride, a soldier's

self-respect, a soldier's ideals. They would have to content a SOLDIER'S

spirit then, not a clerk's, not a mechanic's. They could not content

that spirit by shirking a soldier's duty, could they?

Y.M. I suppose not.

O.M. Then they would do the duty not for the DUTY'S sake, but for their

OWN sake--primarily. The DUTY was JUST THE SAME, and just as imperative, when they were clerks, mechanics, raw recruits, but they wouldn't perform it for that. As clerks and mechanics they had other ideals,

another spirit to satisfy, and they satisfied it. They HAD to; it is

the law. TRAINING is potent. Training toward higher and higher, and ever

higher ideals is worth any man's thought and labor and diligence.

Y.M. Consider the man who stands by his duty and goes to the stake

rather than be recreant to it.

O.M. It is his make and his training. He has to content the spirit that

is in him, though it cost him his life. Another man, just as sincerely

religious, but of different temperament, will fail of that duty, though

recognizing it as a duty, and grieving to be unequal to it: but he

must content the spirit that is in him--he cannot help it. He could

not perform that duty for duty's SAKE, for that would not content his

spirit, and the contenting of his spirit must be looked to FIRST. It

takes precedence of all other duties.

Y.M. Take the case of a clergyman of stainless private morals who votes

for a thief for public office, on his own party's ticket, and against an

honest man on the other ticket.

O.M. He has to content his spirit. He has no public morals; he has no

private ones, where his party's prosperity is at stake. He will always

be true to his make and training.

IV

Training

Young Man. You keep using that word--training. By it do you particularly

mean--

Old Man. Study, instruction, lectures, sermons? That is a part of

it--but not a large part. I mean ALL the outside influences. There are

a million of them. From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking

hours, the human being is under training. In the very first rank of

his trainers stands ASSOCIATION. It is his human environment which

influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets

him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find

himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose

approval he most values. He is a chameleon; by the law of his nature he

takes the color of his place of resort. The influences about him create

his preferences, his aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals,

his religion. He creates none of these things for himself. He THINKS he

does, but that is because he has not examined into the matter. You have

seen Presbyterians?

Y.M. Many.

O.M. How did they happen to be Presbyterians and not Congregationalists?

And why were the Congregationalists not Baptists, and the Baptists Roman

Catholics, and the Roman Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers,

and the Quakers Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and

the Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists

Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics

Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians

Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans

Salvation Warriors, and the Salvation Warriors Zoroastrians, and

the Zoroastrians Christian Scientists, and the Christian Scientists

Mormons--and so on?

Y.M. You may answer your question yourself.

O.M. That list of sects is not a record of STUDIES, searchings, seekings

after light; it mainly (and sarcastically) indicates what ASSOCIATION

can do. If you know a man's nationality you can come within a split

hair of guessing the complexion of his religion: English--Protestant;

American--ditto; Spaniard, Frenchman, Irishman, Italian, South

American--Roman Catholic; Russian--Greek Catholic; Turk--Mohammedan; and so on. And when you know the man's religious complexion, you know what sort of religious books he reads when he wants some more light, and

what sort of books he avoids, lest by accident he get more light than he

wants. In America if you know which party-collar a voter wears, you know

what his associations are, and how he came by his politics, and which

breed of newspaper he reads to get light, and which breed he diligently

avoids, and which breed of mass-meetings he attends in order to broaden

his political knowledge, and which breed of mass-meetings he doesn't

attend, except to refute its doctrines with brickbats. We are always

hearing of people who are around SEEKING AFTER TRUTH. I have never seen a (permanent) specimen. I think he had never lived. But I have seen

several entirely sincere people who THOUGHT they were (permanent)

Seekers after Truth. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully,

cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted

judgment--until they believed that without doubt or question they had

found the Truth. THAT WAS THE END OF THE SEARCH. The man spent the rest of his life hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the

weather. If he was seeking after political Truth he found it in one or

another of the hundred political gospels which govern men in the earth;

if he was seeking after the Only True Religion he found it in one or

another of the three thousand that are on the market. In any case, when

he found the Truth HE SOUGHT NO FURTHER; but from that day forth, with his soldering-iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors. There have been innumerable Temporary Seekers of Truth--have you ever heard of a permanent one? In the very nature of man such a person is impossible. However, to drop back to the text--training: all training is one from or another of OUTSIDE INFLUENCE, and ASSOCIATION is the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him. They train him downward or they train him upward--but they TRAIN him; they are at work upon him all the time.

Y.M. Then if he happen by the accidents of life to be evilly placed

there is no help for him, according to your notions--he must train

downward.

O.M. No help for him? No help for this chameleon? It is a mistake. It is

in his chameleonship that his greatest good fortune lies. He has only to

change his habitat--his ASSOCIATIONS. But the impulse to do it must come

from the OUTSIDE--he cannot originate it himself, with that purpose in

view. Sometimes a very small and accidental thing can furnish him the

initiatory impulse and start him on a new road, with a new idea. The

chance remark of a sweetheart, "I hear that you are a coward," may water

a seed that shall sprout and bloom and flourish, and ended in producing

a surprising fruitage--in the fields of war. The history of man is full

of such accidents. The accident of a broken leg brought a profane and

ribald soldier under religious influences and furnished him a new ideal.

From that accident sprang the Order of the Jesuits, and it has been

shaking thrones, changing policies, and doing other tremendous work for

two hundred years--and will go on. The chance reading of a book or of

a paragraph in a newspaper can start a man on a new track and make him

renounce his old associations and seek new ones that are IN SYMPATHY

WITH HIS NEW IDEAL: and the result, for that man, can be an entire

change of his way of life.

Y.M. Are you hinting at a scheme of procedure?

O.M. Not a new one--an old one. Old as mankind.

Y.M. What is it?

O.M. Merely the laying of traps for people. Traps baited with INITIATORY

IMPULSES TOWARD HIGH IDEALS. It is what the tract-distributor does. It

is what the missionary does. It is what governments ought to do.

Y.M. Don't they?

O.M. In one way they do, in another they don't. They separate the

smallpox patients from the healthy people, but in dealing with crime

they put the healthy into the pest-house along with the sick. That is to

say, they put the beginners in with the confirmed criminals. This would

be well if man were naturally inclined to good, but he isn't, and so

ASSOCIATION makes the beginners worse than they were when they went into captivity. It is putting a very severe punishment upon the comparatively

innocent at times. They hang a man--which is a trifling punishment; this

breaks the hearts of his family--which is a heavy one. They comfortably

jail and feed a wife-beater, and leave his innocent wife and family to

starve.

Y.M. Do you believe in the doctrine that man is equipped with an

intuitive perception of good and evil?

O.M. Adam hadn't it.

Y.M. But has man acquired it since?

O.M. No. I think he has no intuitions of any kind. He gets ALL his

ideas, all his impressions, from the outside. I keep repeating this, in

the hope that I may impress it upon you that you will be interested to

observe and examine for yourself and see whether it is true or false.

Y.M. Where did you get your own aggravating notions?

O.M. From the OUTSIDE. I did not invent them. They are gathered from a

thousand unknown sources. Mainly UNCONSCIOUSLY gathered.

Y.M. Don't you believe that God could make an inherently honest man?

O.M. Yes, I know He could. I also know that He never did make one.

Y.M. A wiser observer than you has recorded the fact that "an honest

man's the noblest work of God."

O.M. He didn't record a fact, he recorded a falsity. It is windy,

and sounds well, but it is not true. God makes a man with honest and

dishonest POSSIBILITIES in him and stops there. The man's ASSOCIATIONS develop the possibilities--the one set or the other. The result is accordingly an honest man or a dishonest one.

Y.M. And the honest one is not entitled to--

O.M. Praise? No. How often must I tell you that? HE is not the architect

of his honesty.

Y.M. Now then, I will ask you where there is any sense in training

people to lead virtuous lives. What is gained by it?

O.M. The man himself gets large advantages out of it, and that is the

main thing--to HIM. He is not a peril to his neighbors, he is not a

damage to them--and so THEY get an advantage out of his virtues. That is

the main thing to THEM. It can make this life comparatively comfortable

to the parties concerned; the NEGLECT of this training can make this

life a constant peril and distress to the parties concerned.

Y.M. You have said that training is everything; that training is the man

HIMSELF, for it makes him what he is.

O.M. I said training and ANOTHER thing. Let that other thing pass, for

the moment. What were you going to say?

Y.M. We have an old servant. She has been with us twenty-two years. Her

service used to be faultless, but now she has become very forgetful. We

are all fond of her; we all recognize that she cannot help the infirmity

which age has brought her; the rest of the family do not scold her for

her remissnesses, but at times I do--I can't seem to control myself.

Don't I try? I do try. Now, then, when I was ready to dress, this

morning, no clean clothes had been put out. I lost my temper; I lose it

easiest and quickest in the early morning. I rang; and immediately began

to warn myself not to show temper, and to be careful and speak gently.

I safe-guarded myself most carefully. I even chose the very word I would

use: "You've forgotten the clean clothes, Jane." When she appeared in

the door I opened my mouth to say that phrase--and out of it, moved by

an instant surge of passion which I was not expecting and hadn't time to

put under control, came the hot rebuke, "You've forgotten them again!"

You say a man always does the thing which will best please his Interior

Master. Whence came the impulse to make careful preparation to save the

girl the humiliation of a rebuke? Did that come from the Master, who is

always primarily concerned about HIMSELF?

O.M. Unquestionably. There is no other source for any impulse.

SECONDARILY you made preparation to save the girl, but PRIMARILY its

object was to save yourself, by contenting the Master.

Y.M. How do you mean?

O.M. Has any member of the family ever implored you to watch your temper

and not fly out at the girl?

Y.M. Yes. My mother.

O.M. You love her?

Y.M. Oh, more than that!

O.M. You would always do anything in your power to please her?

Y.M. It is a delight to me to do anything to please her!

O.M. Why? YOU WOULD DO IT FOR PAY, SOLELY--for PROFIT. What profit would

you expect and certainly receive from the investment?

Y.M. Personally? None. To please HER is enough.

O.M. It appears, then, that your object, primarily, WASN'T to save the

girl a humiliation, but to PLEASE YOUR MOTHER. It also appears that to

please your mother gives YOU a strong pleasure. Is not that the profit

which you get out of the investment? Isn't that the REAL profits and

FIRST profit?

Y.M. Oh, well? Go on.

O.M. In ALL transactions, the Interior Master looks to it that YOU GET

THE FIRST PROFIT. Otherwise there is no transaction.

Y.M. Well, then, if I was so anxious to get that profit and so intent

upon it, why did I threw it away by losing my temper?

O.M. In order to get ANOTHER profit which suddenly superseded it in

value.

Y.M. Where was it?

O.M. Ambushed behind your born temperament, and waiting for a chance.

Your native warm temper suddenly jumped to the front, and FOR THE MOMENT its influence was more powerful than your mother's, and abolished it. In that instance you were eager to flash out a hot rebuke and enjoy it. You did enjoy it, didn't you?

Y.M. For--for a quarter of a second. Yes--I did.

O.M. Very well, it is as I have said: the thing which will give you the

MOST pleasure, the most satisfaction, in any moment or FRACTION of a

moment, is the thing you will always do. You must content the Master's

LATEST whim, whatever it may be.

Y.M. But when the tears came into the old servant's eyes I could have

cut my hand off for what I had done.

O.M. Right. You had humiliated YOURSELF, you see, you had given yourself

PAIN. Nothing is of FIRST importance to a man except results which

damage HIM or profit him--all the rest is SECONDARY. Your Master was

displeased with you, although you had obeyed him. He required a prompt

REPENTANCE; you obeyed again; you HAD to--there is never any escape from his commands. He is a hard master and fickle; he changes his mind in the fraction of a second, but you must be ready to obey, and you will obey,

ALWAYS. If he requires repentance, you content him, you will always

furnish it. He must be nursed, petted, coddled, and kept contented, let

the terms be what they may.

Y.M. Training! Oh, what's the use of it? Didn't I, and didn't my mother

try to train me up to where I would no longer fly out at that girl?

O.M. Have you never managed to keep back a scolding?

Y.M. Oh, certainly--many times.

O.M. More times this year than last?

Y.M. Yes, a good many more.

O.M. More times last year than the year before?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. There is a large improvement, then, in the two years?

Y.M. Yes, undoubtedly.

O.M. Then your question is answered. You see there IS use in training.

Keep on. Keeping faithfully on. You are doing well.

Y.M. Will my reform reach perfection?

O.M. It will. UP to YOUR limit.

Y.M. My limit? What do you mean by that?

O.M. You remember that you said that I said training was EVERYTHING. I

corrected you, and said "training and ANOTHER thing." That other thing

is TEMPERAMENT--that is, the disposition you were born with. YOU

CAN'T ERADICATE YOUR DISPOSITION NOR ANY RAG OF IT--you can only put a pressure on it and keep it down and quiet. You have a warm temper?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. You will never get rid of it; but by watching it you can keep it

down nearly all the time. ITS PRESENCE IS YOUR LIMIT. Your reform will

never quite reach perfection, for your temper will beat you now and

then, but you come near enough. You have made valuable progress and can

make more. There IS use in training. Immense use. Presently you will

reach a new stage of development, then your progress will be easier;

will proceed on a simpler basis, anyway.

Y.M. Explain.

O.M. You keep back your scoldings now, to please YOURSELF by pleasing

your MOTHER; presently the mere triumphing over your temper will delight

your vanity and confer a more delicious pleasure and satisfaction upon

you than even the approbation of your MOTHER confers upon you now. You

will then labor for yourself directly and at FIRST HAND, not by the

roundabout way through your mother. It simplifies the matter, and it

also strengthens the impulse.

Y.M. Ah, dear! But I sha'n't ever reach the point where I will spare the

girl for HER sake PRIMARILY, not mine?

O.M. Why--yes. In heaven.

Y.M. (AFTER A REFLECTIVE PAUSE) Temperament. Well, I see one must

allow for temperament. It is a large factor, sure enough. My mother is

thoughtful, and not hot-tempered. When I was dressed I went to her room;

she was not there; I called, she answered from the bathroom. I heard the

water running. I inquired. She answered, without temper, that Jane had

forgotten her bath, and she was preparing it herself. I offered to

ring, but she said, "No, don't do that; it would only distress her to

be confronted with her lapse, and would be a rebuke; she doesn't deserve

that--she is not to blame for the tricks her memory serves her." I

say--has my mother an Interior Master?--and where was he?

O.M. He was there. There, and looking out for his own peace and pleasure

and contentment. The girl's distress would have pained YOUR MOTHER.

Otherwise the girl would have been rung up, distress and all. I know

women who would have gotten a No. 1 PLEASURE out of ringing Jane up--and

so they would infallibly have pushed the button and obeyed the law

of their make and training, which are the servants of their Interior

Masters. It is quite likely that a part of your mother's forbearance

came from training. The GOOD kind of training--whose best and highest

function is to see to it that every time it confers a satisfaction upon

its pupil a benefit shall fall at second hand upon others.

Y.M. If you were going to condense into an admonition your plan for the

general betterment of the race's condition, how would you word it?

Admonition

O.M. Diligently train your ideals UPWARD and STILL UPWARD toward a

summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct which,

while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor

and the community.

Y.M. Is that a new gospel?

O.M. No.

Y.M. It has been taught before?

O.M. For ten thousand years.

Y.M. By whom?

O.M. All the great religions--all the great gospels.

Y.M. Then there is nothing new about it?

O.M. Oh yes, there is. It is candidly stated, this time. That has not

been done before.

Y.M. How do you mean?

O.M. Haven't I put YOU FIRST, and your neighbor and the community

AFTERWARD?

Y.M. Well, yes, that is a difference, it is true.

O.M. The difference between straight speaking and crooked; the

difference between frankness and shuffling.

Y.M. Explain.

O.M. The others offer your a hundred bribes to be good, thus conceding

that the Master inside of you must be conciliated and contented first,

and that you will do nothing at FIRST HAND but for his sake; then they

turn square around and require you to do good for OTHER'S sake CHIEFLY;

and to do your duty for duty's SAKE, chiefly; and to do acts of

SELF-SACRIFICE. Thus at the outset we all stand upon the same

ground--recognition of the supreme and absolute Monarch that resides in

man, and we all grovel before him and appeal to him; then those others

dodge and shuffle, and face around and unfrankly and inconsistently and

illogically change the form of their appeal and direct its persuasions

to man's SECOND-PLACE powers and to powers which have NO EXISTENCE in him, thus advancing them to FIRST place; whereas in my Admonition I stick logically and consistently to the original position: I place the Interior Master's requirements FIRST, and keep them there.

Y.M. If we grant, for the sake of argument, that your scheme and the

other schemes aim at and produce the same result--RIGHT LIVING--has

yours an advantage over the others?

O.M. One, yes--a large one. It has no concealments, no deceptions. When

a man leads a right and valuable life under it he is not deceived as to

the REAL chief motive which impels him to it--in those other cases he

is.

Y.M. Is that an advantage? Is it an advantage to live a lofty life for

a mean reason? In the other cases he lives the lofty life under

the IMPRESSION that he is living for a lofty reason. Is not that an

advantage?

O.M. Perhaps so. The same advantage he might get out of thinking

himself a duke, and living a duke's life and parading in ducal fuss

and feathers, when he wasn't a duke at all, and could find it out if he

would only examine the herald's records.

Y.M. But anyway, he is obliged to do a duke's part; he puts his hand in

his pocket and does his benevolences on as big a scale as he can stand,

and that benefits the community.

O.M. He could do that without being a duke.

Y.M. But would he?

O.M. Don't you see where you are arriving?

Y.M. Where?

O.M. At the standpoint of the other schemes: That it is good morals

to let an ignorant duke do showy benevolences for his pride's sake, a

pretty low motive, and go on doing them unwarned, lest if he were made

acquainted with the actual motive which prompted them he might shut up

his purse and cease to be good?

Y.M. But isn't it best to leave him in ignorance, as long as he THINKS

he is doing good for others' sake?

O.M. Perhaps so. It is the position of the other schemes. They think

humbug is good enough morals when the dividend on it is good deeds and

handsome conduct.

Y.M. It is my opinion that under your scheme of a man's doing a good

deed for his OWN sake first-off, instead of first for the GOOD DEED'S

sake, no man would ever do one.

O.M. Have you committed a benevolence lately?

Y.M. Yes. This morning.

O.M. Give the particulars.

Y.M. The cabin of the old negro woman who used to nurse me when I was a

child and who saved my life once at the risk of her own, was burned last

night, and she came mourning this morning, and pleading for money to

build another one.

O.M. You furnished it?

Y.M. Certainly.

O.M. You were glad you had the money?

Y.M. Money? I hadn't. I sold my horse.

O.M. You were glad you had the horse?

Y.M. Of course I was; for if I hadn't had the horse I should have been

incapable, and my MOTHER would have captured the chance to set old Sally

up.

O.M. You were cordially glad you were not caught out and incapable?

Y.M. Oh, I just was!

O.M. Now, then--

Y.M. Stop where you are! I know your whole catalog of questions, and

I could answer every one of them without your wasting the time to ask

them; but I will summarize the whole thing in a single remark: I did

the charity knowing it was because the act would give ME a splendid

pleasure, and because old Sally's moving gratitude and delight would

give ME another one; and because the reflection that she would be happy

now and out of her trouble would fill ME full of happiness. I did the

whole thing with my eyes open and recognizing and realizing that I

was looking out for MY share of the profits FIRST. Now then, I have

confessed. Go on.

O.M. I haven't anything to offer; you have covered the whole ground.

Can you have been any MORE strongly moved to help Sally out of her

trouble--could you have done the deed any more eagerly--if you had been

under the delusion that you were doing it for HER sake and profit only?

Y.M. No! Nothing in the world could have made the impulse which moved

me more powerful, more masterful, more thoroughly irresistible. I played

the limit!

O.M. Very well. You begin to suspect--and I claim to KNOW--that when

a man is a shade MORE STRONGLY MOVED to do ONE of two things or of two

dozen things than he is to do any one of the OTHERS, he will infallibly

do that ONE thing, be it good or be it evil; and if it be good, not all

the beguilements of all the casuistries can increase the strength of the

impulse by a single shade or add a shade to the comfort and contentment

he will get out of the act.

Y.M. Then you believe that such tendency toward doing good as is in

men's hearts would not be diminished by the removal of the delusion that

good deeds are done primarily for the sake of No. 2 instead of for the

sake of No. 1?

O.M. That is what I fully believe.

Y.M. Doesn't it somehow seem to take from the dignity of the deed?

O.M. If there is dignity in falsity, it does. It removes that.

Y.M. What is left for the moralists to do?

O.M. Teach unreservedly what he already teaches with one side of his

mouth and takes back with the other: Do right FOR YOUR OWN SAKE, and be

happy in knowing that your NEIGHBOR will certainly share in the benefits

resulting.

Y.M. Repeat your Admonition.

O.M. DILIGENTLY TRAIN YOUR IDEALS UPWARD AND STILL UPWARD TOWARD A SUMMIT WHERE YOU WILL FIND YOUR CHIEFEST PLEASURE IN CONDUCT WHICH, WHILE CONTENTING YOU, WILL BE SURE TO CONFER BENEFITS UPON YOUR NEIGHBOR AND THE COMMUNITY.

Y.M. One's EVERY act proceeds from EXTERIOR INFLUENCES, you think?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. If I conclude to rob a person, I am not the ORIGINATOR of the

idea, but it comes in from the OUTSIDE? I see him handling money--for

instance--and THAT moves me to the crime?

O.M. That, by itself? Oh, certainly not. It is merely the LATEST outside

influence of a procession of preparatory influences stretching back over

a period of years. No SINGLE outside influence can make a man do a thing

which is at war with his training. The most it can do is to start his

mind on a new tract and open it to the reception of NEW influences--as

in the case of Ignatius Loyola. In time these influences can train him

to a point where it will be consonant with his new character to yield

to the FINAL influence and do that thing. I will put the case in a form

which will make my theory clear to you, I think. Here are two ingots of

virgin gold. They shall represent a couple of characters which have

been refined and perfected in the virtues by years of diligent

right training. Suppose you wanted to break down these strong and

well-compacted characters--what influence would you bring to bear upon

the ingots?

Y.M. Work it out yourself. Proceed.

O.M. Suppose I turn upon one of them a steam-jet during a long

succession of hours. Will there be a result?

Y.M. None that I know of.

O.M. Why?

Y.M. A steam-jet cannot break down such a substance.

O.M. Very well. The steam is an OUTSIDE INFLUENCE, but it is ineffective

because the gold TAKES NO INTEREST IN IT. The ingot remains as it was.

Suppose we add to the steam some quicksilver in a vaporized condition,

and turn the jet upon the ingot, will there be an instantaneous result?

Y.M. No.

O.M. The QUICKSILVER is an outside influence which gold (by its peculiar

nature--say TEMPERAMENT, DISPOSITION) CANNOT BE INDIFFERENT TO. It stirs up the interest of the gold, although we do not perceive it; but a

SINGLE application of the influence works no damage. Let us continue the

application in a steady stream, and call each minute a year. By the

end of ten or twenty minutes--ten or twenty years--the little ingot

is sodden with quicksilver, its virtues are gone, its character is

degraded. At last it is ready to yield to a temptation which it would

have taken no notice of, ten or twenty years ago. We will apply that

temptation in the form of a pressure of my finger. You note the result?

Y.M. Yes; the ingot has crumbled to sand. I understand, now. It is not

the SINGLE outside influence that does the work, but only the LAST one

of a long and disintegrating accumulation of them. I see, now, how my

SINGLE impulse to rob the man is not the one that makes me do it, but

only the LAST one of a preparatory series. You might illustrate with a

parable.

A Parable

O.M. I will. There was once a pair of New England boys--twins. They were

alike in good dispositions, feckless morals, and personal appearance.

They were the models of the Sunday-school. At fifteen George had the

opportunity to go as cabin-boy in a whale-ship, and sailed away for the

Pacific. Henry remained at home in the village. At eighteen George was

a sailor before the mast, and Henry was teacher of the advanced Bible

class. At twenty-two George, through fighting-habits and drinking-habits

acquired at sea and in the sailor boarding-houses of the European and

Oriental ports, was a common rough in Hong-Kong, and out of a job; and

Henry was superintendent of the Sunday-school. At twenty-six George was

a wanderer, a tramp, and Henry was pastor of the village church. Then

George came home, and was Henry's guest. One evening a man passed by and turned down the lane, and Henry said, with a pathetic smile, "Without

intending me a discomfort, that man is always keeping me reminded of my

pinching poverty, for he carries heaps of money about him, and goes

by here every evening of his life." That OUTSIDE INFLUENCE--that

remark--was enough for George, but IT was not the one that made him

ambush the man and rob him, it merely represented the eleven years'

accumulation of such influences, and gave birth to the act for which

their long gestation had made preparation. It had never entered the head

of Henry to rob the man--his ingot had been subjected to clean steam

only; but George's had been subjected to vaporized quicksilver.

V

More About the Machine

Note.--When Mrs. W. asks how can a millionaire give a single dollar to

colleges and museums while one human being is destitute of bread, she

has answered her question herself. Her feeling for the poor shows

that she has a standard of benevolence; there she has conceded the

millionaire's privilege of having a standard; since she evidently

requires him to adopt her standard, she is by that act requiring herself

to adopt his. The human being always looks down when he is examining

another person's standard; he never find one that he has to examine by

looking up.

The Man-Machine Again

Young Man. You really think man is a mere machine?

Old Man. I do.

Y.M. And that his mind works automatically and is independent of his

control--carries on thought on its own hook?

O.M. Yes. It is diligently at work, unceasingly at work, during every

waking moment. Have you never tossed about all night, imploring,

beseeching, commanding your mind to stop work and let you go to

sleep?--you who perhaps imagine that your mind is your servant and must

obey your orders, think what you tell it to think, and stop when you

tell it to stop. When it chooses to work, there is no way to keep it

still for an instant. The brightest man would not be able to supply it

with subjects if he had to hunt them up. If it needed the man's help it

would wait for him to give it work when he wakes in the morning.

Y.M. Maybe it does.

O.M. No, it begins right away, before the man gets wide enough awake to

give it a suggestion. He may go to sleep saying, "The moment I wake I

will think upon such and such a subject," but he will fail. His mind

will be too quick for him; by the time he has become nearly enough

awake to be half conscious, he will find that it is already at work upon

another subject. Make the experiment and see.

Y.M. At any rate, he can make it stick to a subject if he wants to.

O.M. Not if it find another that suits it better. As a rule it will

listen to neither a dull speaker nor a bright one. It refuses all

persuasion. The dull speaker wearies it and sends it far away in idle

dreams; the bright speaker throws out stimulating ideas which it goes

chasing after and is at once unconscious of him and his talk. You cannot

keep your mind from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.

After an Interval of Days

O.M. Now, dreams--but we will examine that later. Meantime, did you

try commanding your mind to wait for orders from you, and not do any

thinking on its own hook?

Y.M. Yes, I commanded it to stand ready to take orders when I should

wake in the morning.

O.M. Did it obey?

Y.M. No. It went to thinking of something of its own initiation, without

waiting for me. Also--as you suggested--at night I appointed a theme for

it to begin on in the morning, and commanded it to begin on that one and

no other.

O.M. Did it obey?

Y.M. No.

O.M. How many times did you try the experiment?

Y.M. Ten.

O.M. How many successes did you score?

Y.M. Not one.

O.M. It is as I have said: the mind is independent of the man. He has

no control over it; it does as it pleases. It will take up a subject

in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite of him; it will throw it

aside in spite of him. It is entirely independent of him.

Y.M. Go on. Illustrate.

O.M. Do you know chess?

Y.M. I learned it a week ago.

O.M. Did your mind go on playing the game all night that first night?

Y.M. Don't mention it!

O.M. It was eagerly, unsatisfiably interested; it rioted in the

combinations; you implored it to drop the game and let you get some

sleep?

Y.M. Yes. It wouldn't listen; it played right along. It wore me out and

I got up haggard and wretched in the morning.

O.M. At some time or other you have been captivated by a ridiculous

rhyme-jingle?

Y.M. Indeed, yes!

"I saw Esau kissing Kate, And she saw I saw Esau; I saw Esau, he saw

Kate, And she saw--"

And so on. My mind went mad with joy over it. It repeated it all day

and all night for a week in spite of all I could do to stop it, and it

seemed to me that I must surely go crazy.

O.M. And the new popular song?

Y.M. Oh yes! "In the Swee-eet By and By"; etc. Yes, the new popular song

with the taking melody sings through one's head day and night, asleep

and awake, till one is a wreck. There is no getting the mind to let it

alone.

O.M. Yes, asleep as well as awake. The mind is quite independent. It is

master. You have nothing to do with it. It is so apart from you that

it can conduct its affairs, sing its songs, play its chess, weave its

complex and ingeniously constructed dreams, while you sleep. It has

no use for your help, no use for your guidance, and never uses either,

whether you be asleep or awake. You have imagined that you could

originate a thought in your mind, and you have sincerely believed you

could do it.

Y.M. Yes, I have had that idea.

O.M. Yet you can't originate a dream-thought for it to work out, and get

it accepted?

Y.M. No.

O.M. And you can't dictate its procedure after it has originated a

dream-thought for itself?

Y.M. No. No one can do it. Do you think the waking mind and the dream

mind are the same machine?

O.M. There is argument for it. We have wild and fantastic day-thoughts?

Things that are dream-like?

Y.M. Yes--like Mr. Wells's man who invented a drug that made him

invisible; and like the Arabian tales of the Thousand Nights.

O.M. And there are dreams that are rational, simple, consistent, and

unfantastic?

Y.M. Yes. I have dreams that are like that. Dreams that are just like

real life; dreams in which there are several persons with distinctly

differentiated characters--inventions of my mind and yet strangers

to me: a vulgar person; a refined one; a wise person; a fool; a

cruel person; a kind and compassionate one; a quarrelsome person; a

peacemaker; old persons and young; beautiful girls and homely ones. They

talk in character, each preserves his own characteristics. There are

vivid fights, vivid and biting insults, vivid love-passages; there are

tragedies and comedies, there are griefs that go to one's heart, there

are sayings and doings that make you laugh: indeed, the whole thing is

exactly like real life.

O.M. Your dreaming mind originates the scheme, consistently and

artistically develops it, and carries the little drama creditably

through--all without help or suggestion from you?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. It is argument that it could do the like awake without help or

suggestion from you--and I think it does. It is argument that it is the

same old mind in both cases, and never needs your help. I think the

mind is purely a machine, a thoroughly independent machine, an automatic

machine. Have you tried the other experiment which I suggested to you?

Y.M. Which one?

O.M. The one which was to determine how much influence you have over

your mind--if any.

Y.M. Yes, and got more or less entertainment out of it. I did as you

ordered: I placed two texts before my eyes--one a dull one and barren

of interest, the other one full of interest, inflamed with it, white-hot

with it. I commanded my mind to busy itself solely with the dull one.

O.M. Did it obey?

Y.M. Well, no, it didn't. It busied itself with the other one.

O.M. Did you try hard to make it obey?

Y.M. Yes, I did my honest best.

O.M. What was the text which it refused to be interested in or think

about?

Y.M. It was this question: If A owes B a dollar and a half, and B owes

C two and three-quarter, and C owes A thirty-five cents, and D and A

together owe E and B three-sixteenths of--of--I don't remember the rest,

now, but anyway it was wholly uninteresting, and I could not force my

mind to stick to it even half a minute at a time; it kept flying off to

the other text.

O.M. What was the other text?

Y.M. It is no matter about that.

O.M. But what was it?

Y.M. A photograph.

O.M. Your own?

Y.M. No. It was hers.

O.M. You really made an honest good test. Did you make a second trial?

Y.M. Yes. I commanded my mind to interest itself in the morning paper's

report of the pork-market, and at the same time I reminded it of an

experience of mine of sixteen years ago. It refused to consider the pork

and gave its whole blazing interest to that ancient incident.

O.M. What was the incident?

Y.M. An armed desperado slapped my face in the presence of twenty

spectators. It makes me wild and murderous every time I think of it.

O.M. Good tests, both; very good tests. Did you try my other suggestion?

Y.M. The one which was to prove to me that if I would leave my mind to

its own devices it would find things to think about without any of my

help, and thus convince me that it was a machine, an automatic machine,

set in motion by exterior influences, and as independent of me as it

could be if it were in some one else's skull. Is that the one?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. I tried it. I was shaving. I had slept well, and my mind was very

lively, even gay and frisky. It was reveling in a fantastic and joyful

episode of my remote boyhood which had suddenly flashed up in my

memory--moved to this by the spectacle of a yellow cat picking its

way carefully along the top of the garden wall. The color of this

cat brought the bygone cat before me, and I saw her walking along the

side-step of the pulpit; saw her walk on to a large sheet of sticky

fly-paper and get all her feet involved; saw her struggle and fall

down, helpless and dissatisfied, more and more urgent, more and more

unreconciled, more and more mutely profane; saw the silent congregation

quivering like jelly, and the tears running down their faces. I saw

it all. The sight of the tears whisked my mind to a far distant and a

sadder scene--in Terra del Fuego--and with Darwin's eyes I saw a naked

great savage hurl his little boy against the rocks for a trifling fault;

saw the poor mother gather up her dying child and hug it to her breast

and weep, uttering no word. Did my mind stop to mourn with that nude

black sister of mine? No--it was far away from that scene in an instant,

and was busying itself with an ever-recurring and disagreeable dream of

mine. In this dream I always find myself, stripped to my shirt, cringing

and dodging about in the midst of a great drawing-room throng of finely

dressed ladies and gentlemen, and wondering how I got there. And so on

and so on, picture after picture, incident after incident, a drifting

panorama of ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind

without any help from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name

the multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen

minutes, let alone describe them to you.

O.M. A man's mind, left free, has no use for his help. But there is one

way whereby he can get its help when he desires it.

Y.M. What is that way?

O.M. When your mind is racing along from subject to subject and

strikes an inspiring one, open your mouth and begin talking upon that

matter--or--take your pen and use that. It will interest your mind and

concentrate it, and it will pursue the subject with satisfaction. It

will take full charge, and furnish the words itself.

Y.M. But don't I tell it what to say?

O.M. There are certainly occasions when you haven't time. The words leap

out before you know what is coming.

Y.M. For instance?

O.M. Well, take a "flash of wit"--repartee. Flash is the right word.

It is out instantly. There is no time to arrange the words. There is no

thinking, no reflecting. Where there is a wit-mechanism it is automatic

in its action and needs no help. Where the wit-mechanism is lacking, no

amount of study and reflection can manufacture the product.

Y.M. You really think a man originates nothing, creates nothing.

The Thinking-Process

O.M. I do. Men perceive, and their brain-machines automatically combine

the things perceived. That is all.

Y.M. The steam-engine?

O.M. It takes fifty men a hundred years to invent it. One meaning of

invent is discover. I use the word in that sense. Little by little they

discover and apply the multitude of details that go to make the perfect

engine. Watt noticed that confined steam was strong enough to lift the

lid of the teapot. He didn't create the idea, he merely discovered the

fact; the cat had noticed it a hundred times. From the teapot he evolved

the cylinder--from the displaced lid he evolved the piston-rod. To

attach something to the piston-rod to be moved by it, was a simple

matter--crank and wheel. And so there was a working engine. (1)

One by one, improvements were discovered by men who used their eyes,

not their creating powers--for they hadn't any--and now, after a hundred

years the patient contributions of fifty or a hundred observers stand

compacted in the wonderful machine which drives the ocean liner.

Y.M. A Shakespearean play?

O.M. The process is the same. The first actor was a savage. He

reproduced in his theatrical war-dances, scalp-dances, and so on,

incidents which he had seen in real life. A more advanced civilization

produced more incidents, more episodes; the actor and the story-teller

borrowed them. And so the drama grew, little by little, stage by stage.

It is made up of the facts of life, not creations. It took centuries to

develop the Greek drama. It borrowed from preceding ages; it lent to the

ages that came after. Men observe and combine, that is all. So does a

rat.

Y.M. How?

O.M. He observes a smell, he infers a cheese, he seeks and finds.

The astronomer observes this and that; adds his this and that to the

this-and-thats of a hundred predecessors, infers an invisible planet,

seeks it and finds it. The rat gets into a trap; gets out with trouble;

infers that cheese in traps lacks value, and meddles with that trap no

more. The astronomer is very proud of his achievement, the rat is proud

of his. Yet both are machines; they have done machine work, they have

originated nothing, they have no right to be vain; the whole credit

belongs to their Maker. They are entitled to no honors, no praises, no

monuments when they die, no remembrance. One is a complex and elaborate machine, the other a simple and limited machine, but they are alike in principle, function, and process, and neither of them works otherwise than automatically, and neither of them may righteously claim a PERSONAL superiority or a personal dignity above the other.

Y.M. In earned personal dignity, then, and in personal merit for what he

does, it follows of necessity that he is on the same level as a rat?

O.M. His brother the rat; yes, that is how it seems to me. Neither of

them being entitled to any personal merit for what he does, it follows

of necessity that neither of them has a right to arrogate to himself

(personally created) superiorities over his brother.

Y.M. Are you determined to go on believing in these insanities? Would

you go on believing in them in the face of able arguments backed by

collated facts and instances?

O.M. I have been a humble, earnest, and sincere Truth-Seeker.

Y.M. Very well?

O.M. The humble, earnest, and sincere Truth-Seeker is always convertible

by such means.

Y.M. I am thankful to God to hear you say this, for now I know that your

conversion--

O.M. Wait. You misunderstand. I said I have BEEN a Truth-Seeker.

Y.M. Well?

O.M. I am not that now. Have your forgotten? I told you that there

are none but temporary Truth-Seekers; that a permanent one is a human

impossibility; that as soon as the Seeker finds what he is thoroughly

convinced is the Truth, he seeks no further, but gives the rest of his

days to hunting junk to patch it and caulk it and prop it with, and

make it weather-proof and keep it from caving in on him. Hence the

Presbyterian remains a Presbyterian, the Mohammedan a Mohammedan, the Spiritualist a Spiritualist, the Democrat a Democrat, the Republican a

Republican, the Monarchist a Monarchist; and if a humble, earnest, and

sincere Seeker after Truth should find it in the proposition that the

moon is made of green cheese nothing could ever budge him from that

position; for he is nothing but an automatic machine, and must obey the

laws of his construction.

Y.M. After so--

O.M. Having found the Truth; perceiving that beyond question man has but

one moving impulse--the contenting of his own spirit--and is merely a

machine and entitled to no personal merit for anything he does, it is

not humanly possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will

be spent in patching and painting and puttying and caulking my priceless

possession and in looking the other way when an imploring argument or a

damaging fact approaches.

1.  The Marquess of Worcester had done all of this more than a

century earlier.

VI

Instinct and Thought

Young Man. It is odious. Those drunken theories of yours, advanced a

while ago--concerning the rat and all that--strip Man bare of all his

dignities, grandeurs, sublimities.

Old Man. He hasn't any to strip--they are shams, stolen clothes. He

claims credits which belong solely to his Maker.

Y.M. But you have no right to put him on a level with a rat.

O.M. I don't--morally. That would not be fair to the rat. The rat is

well above him, there.

Y.M. Are you joking?

O.M. No, I am not.

Y.M. Then what do you mean?

O.M. That comes under the head of the Moral Sense. It is a large

question. Let us finish with what we are about now, before we take it

up.

Y.M. Very well. You have seemed to concede that you place Man and the

rat on A level. What is it? The intellectual?

O.M. In form--not a degree.

Y.M. Explain.

O.M. I think that the rat's mind and the man's mind are the same

machine, but of unequal capacities--like yours and Edison's; like the

African pygmy's and Homer's; like the Bushman's and Bismarck's.

Y.M. How are you going to make that out, when the lower animals have no

mental quality but instinct, while man possesses reason?

O.M. What is instinct?

Y.M. It is merely unthinking and mechanical exercise of inherited habit.

O.M. What originated the habit?

Y.M. The first animal started it, its descendants have inherited it.

O.M. How did the first one come to start it?

Y.M. I don't know; but it didn't THINK it out.

O.M. How do you know it didn't?

Y.M. Well--I have a right to suppose it didn't, anyway.

O.M. I don't believe you have. What is thought?

Y.M. I know what you call it: the mechanical and automatic putting

together of impressions received from outside, and drawing an inference

from them.

O.M. Very good. Now my idea of the meaningless term "instinct" is, that

it is merely PETRIFIED THOUGHT; solidified and made inanimate by habit;

thought which was once alive and awake, but it become unconscious--walks

in its sleep, so to speak.

Y.M. Illustrate it.

O.M. Take a herd of cows, feeding in a pasture. Their heads are all

turned in one direction. They do that instinctively; they gain nothing

by it, they have no reason for it, they don't know why they do it. It

is an inherited habit which was originally thought--that is to say,

observation of an exterior fact, and a valuable inference drawn from

that observation and confirmed by experience. The original wild ox

noticed that with the wind in his favor he could smell his enemy in time

to escape; then he inferred that it was worth while to keep his nose

to the wind. That is the process which man calls reasoning. Man's

thought-machine works just like the other animals', but it is a better

one and more Edisonian. Man, in the ox's place, would go further, reason

wider: he would face part of the herd the other way and protect both

front and rear.

Y.M. Did you stay the term instinct is meaningless?

O.M. I think it is a bastard word. I think it confuses us; for as a rule

it applies itself to habits and impulses which had a far-off origin in

thought, and now and then breaks the rule and applies itself to habits

which can hardly claim a thought-origin.

Y.M. Give an instance.

O.M. Well, in putting on trousers a man always inserts the same old leg

first--never the other one. There is no advantage in that, and no sense

in it. All men do it, yet no man thought it out and adopted it of set

purpose, I imagine. But it is a habit which is transmitted, no doubt,

and will continue to be transmitted.

Y.M. Can you prove that the habit exists?

O.M. You can prove it, if you doubt. If you will take a man to a

clothing-store and watch him try on a dozen pairs of trousers, you will

see.

Y.M. The cow illustration is not--

O.M. Sufficient to show that a dumb animal's mental machine is just the

same as a man's and its reasoning processes the same? I will illustrate

further. If you should hand Mr. Edison a box which you caused to fly

open by some concealed device he would infer a spring, and would hunt

for it and find it. Now an uncle of mine had an old horse who used to

get into the closed lot where the corn-crib was and dishonestly take

the corn. I got the punishment myself, as it was supposed that I had

heedlessly failed to insert the wooden pin which kept the gate closed.

These persistent punishments fatigued me; they also caused me to infer

the existence of a culprit, somewhere; so I hid myself and watched the

gate. Presently the horse came and pulled the pin out with his teeth and

went in. Nobody taught him that; he had observed--then thought it out

for himself. His process did not differ from Edison's; he put this and

that together and drew an inference--and the peg, too; but I made him

sweat for it.

Y.M. It has something of the seeming of thought about it. Still it is

not very elaborate. Enlarge.

O.M. Suppose Mr. Edison has been enjoying some one's hospitalities. He

comes again by and by, and the house is vacant. He infers that his host

has moved. A while afterward, in another town, he sees the man enter

a house; he infers that that is the new home, and follows to inquire.

Here, now, is the experience of a gull, as related by a naturalist. The

scene is a Scotch fishing village where the gulls were kindly treated.

This particular gull visited a cottage; was fed; came next day and was

fed again; came into the house, next time, and ate with the family; kept

on doing this almost daily, thereafter. But, once the gull was away on

a journey for a few days, and when it returned the house was vacant.

Its friends had removed to a village three miles distant. Several months

later it saw the head of the family on the street there, followed him

home, entered the house without excuse or apology, and became a daily

guest again. Gulls do not rank high mentally, but this one had memory

and the reasoning faculty, you see, and applied them Edisonially.

Y.M. Yet it was not an Edison and couldn't be developed into one.

O.M. Perhaps not. Could you?

Y.M. That is neither here nor there. Go on.

O.M. If Edison were in trouble and a stranger helped him out of it and

next day he got into the same difficulty again, he would infer the wise

thing to do in case he knew the stranger's address. Here is a case of a

bird and a stranger as related by a naturalist. An Englishman saw a bird

flying around about his dog's head, down in the grounds, and uttering

cries of distress. He went there to see about it. The dog had a young

bird in his mouth--unhurt. The gentleman rescued it and put it on a bush

and brought the dog away. Early the next morning the mother bird came

for the gentleman, who was sitting on his veranda, and by its maneuvers

persuaded him to follow it to a distant part of the grounds--flying a

little way in front of him and waiting for him to catch up, and so on;

and keeping to the winding path, too, instead of flying the near way

across lots. The distance covered was four hundred yards. The same dog

was the culprit; he had the young bird again, and once more he had

to give it up. Now the mother bird had reasoned it all out: since the

stranger had helped her once, she inferred that he would do it

again; she knew where to find him, and she went upon her errand with

confidence. Her mental processes were what Edison's would have been. She

put this and that together--and that is all that thought IS--and out of

them built her logical arrangement of inferences. Edison couldn't have

done it any better himself.

Y.M. Do you believe that many of the dumb animals can think?

O.M. Yes--the elephant, the monkey, the horse, the dog, the parrot, the

macaw, the mocking-bird, and many others. The elephant whose mate fell

into a pit, and who dumped dirt and rubbish into the pit till bottom was

raised high enough to enable the captive to step out, was equipped with

the reasoning quality. I conceive that all animals that can learn things

through teaching and drilling have to know how to observe, and put this

and that together and draw an inference--the process of thinking. Could

you teach an idiot of manuals of arms, and to advance, retreat, and go

through complex field maneuvers at the word of command?

Y.M. Not if he were a thorough idiot.

O.M. Well, canary-birds can learn all that; dogs and elephants learn all

sorts of wonderful things. They must surely be able to notice, and to

put things together, and say to themselves, "I get the idea, now: when I

do so and so, as per order, I am praised and fed; when I do differently

I am punished." Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman

can.

Y.M. Granting, then, that dumb animals are able to think upon a low

plane, is there any that can think upon a high one? Is there one that is

well up toward man?

O.M. Yes. As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage

race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is

the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental

qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!

Y.M. Oh, come! you are abolishing the intellectual frontier which

separates man and beast.

O.M. I beg your pardon. One cannot abolish what does not exist.

Y.M. You are not in earnest, I hope. You cannot mean to seriously say

there is no such frontier.

O.M. I do say it seriously. The instances of the horse, the gull, the

mother bird, and the elephant show that those creatures put their this's

and thats together just as Edison would have done it and drew the same

inferences that he would have drawn. Their mental machinery was just

like his, also its manner of working. Their equipment was as inferior

to the Strasburg clock, but that is the only difference--there is no

frontier.

Y.M. It looks exasperatingly true; and is distinctly offensive. It

elevates the dumb beasts to--to--

O.M. Let us drop that lying phrase, and call them the Unrevealed

Creatures; so far as we can know, there is no such thing as a dumb

beast.

Y.M. On what grounds do you make that assertion?

O.M. On quite simple ones. "Dumb" beast suggests an animal that has no

thought-machinery, no understanding, no speech, no way of communicating

what is in its mind. We know that a hen HAS speech. We cannot understand

everything she says, but we easily learn two or three of her phrases.

We know when she is saying, "I have laid an egg"; we know when she is

saying to the chicks, "Run here, dears, I've found a worm"; we know

what she is saying when she voices a warning: "Quick! hurry! gather

yourselves under mamma, there's a hawk coming!" We understand the cat

when she stretches herself out, purring with affection and contentment

and lifts up a soft voice and says, "Come, kitties, supper's ready"; we

understand her when she goes mourning about and says, "Where can they

be? They are lost. Won't you help me hunt for them?" and we understand

the disreputable Tom when he challenges at midnight from his shed, "You

come over here, you product of immoral commerce, and I'll make your fur

fly!" We understand a few of a dog's phrases and we learn to understand

a few of the remarks and gestures of any bird or other animal that we

domesticate and observe. The clearness and exactness of the few of the

hen's speeches which we understand is argument that she can communicate

to her kind a hundred things which we cannot comprehend--in a word, that

she can converse. And this argument is also applicable in the case of

others of the great army of the Unrevealed. It is just like man's vanity

and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull

perceptions. Now as to the ant--

Y.M. Yes, go back to the ant, the creature that--as you seem to

think--sweeps away the last vestige of an intellectual frontier between

man and the Unrevealed.

O.M. That is what she surely does. In all his history the aboriginal

Australian never thought out a house for himself and built it. The ant

is an amazing architect. She is a wee little creature, but she builds a

strong and enduring house eight feet high--a house which is as large

in proportion to her size as is the largest capitol or cathedral in the

world compared to man's size. No savage race has produced architects

who could approach the air in genius or culture. No civilized race has

produced architects who could plan a house better for the uses proposed

than can hers. Her house contains a throne-room; nurseries for her

young; granaries; apartments for her soldiers, her workers, etc.; and

they and the multifarious halls and corridors which communicate with

them are arranged and distributed with an educated and experienced eye

for convenience and adaptability.

Y.M. That could be mere instinct.

O.M. It would elevate the savage if he had it. But let us look further

before we decide. The ant has soldiers--battalions, regiments, armies;

and they have their appointed captains and generals, who lead them to

battle.

Y.M. That could be instinct, too.

O.M. We will look still further. The ant has a system of government; it

is well planned, elaborate, and is well carried on.

Y.M. Instinct again.

O.M. She has crowds of slaves, and is a hard and unjust employer of

forced labor.

Y.M. Instinct.

O.M. She has cows, and milks them.

Y.M. Instinct, of course.

O.M. In Texas she lays out a farm twelve feet square, plants it, weeds

it, cultivates it, gathers the crop and stores it away.

Y.M. Instinct, all the same.

O.M. The ant discriminates between friend and stranger. Sir John Lubbock

took ants from two different nests, made them drunk with whiskey and

laid them, unconscious, by one of the nests, near some water. Ants from

the nest came and examined and discussed these disgraced creatures, then

carried their friends home and threw the strangers overboard. Sir John

repeated the experiment a number of times. For a time the sober ants

did as they had done at first--carried their friends home and threw the

strangers overboard. But finally they lost patience, seeing that

their reformatory efforts went for nothing, and threw both friends and

strangers overboard. Come--is this instinct, or is it thoughtful

and intelligent discussion of a thing new--absolutely new--to their

experience; with a verdict arrived at, sentence passed, and judgment

executed? Is it instinct?--thought petrified by ages of habit--or

isn't it brand-new thought, inspired by the new occasion, the new

circumstances?

Y.M. I have to concede it. It was not a result of habit; it has all

the look of reflection, thought, putting this and that together, as you

phrase it. I believe it was thought.

O.M. I will give you another instance of thought. Franklin had a cup

of sugar on a table in his room. The ants got at it. He tried several

preventives; and ants rose superior to them. Finally he contrived one

which shut off access--probably set the table's legs in pans of water,

or drew a circle of tar around the cup, I don't remember. At any

rate, he watched to see what they would do. They tried various

schemes--failures, every one. The ants were badly puzzled. Finally they

held a consultation, discussed the problem, arrived at a decision--and

this time they beat that great philosopher. They formed in procession,

cross the floor, climbed the wall, marched across the ceiling to a point

just over the cup, then one by one they let go and fell down into it!

Was that instinct--thought petrified by ages of inherited habit?

Y.M. No, I don't believe it was. I believe it was a newly reasoned

scheme to meet a new emergency.

O.M. Very well. You have conceded the reasoning power in two instances.

I come now to a mental detail wherein the ant is a long way the superior

of any human being. Sir John Lubbock proved by many experiments that an

ant knows a stranger ant of her own species in a moment, even when the

stranger is disguised--with paint. Also he proved that an ant knows

every individual in her hive of five hundred thousand souls. Also, after

a year's absence one of the five hundred thousand she will straightway

recognize the returned absentee and grace the recognition with a

affectionate welcome. How are these recognitions made? Not by color,

for painted ants were recognized. Not by smell, for ants that had been

dipped in chloroform were recognized. Not by speech and not by antennae

signs nor contacts, for the drunken and motionless ants were recognized

and the friend discriminated from the stranger. The ants were all of

the same species, therefore the friends had to be recognized by form and

feature--friends who formed part of a hive of five hundred thousand! Has

any man a memory for form and feature approaching that?

Y.M. Certainly not.

O.M. Franklin's ants and Lubbuck's ants show fine capacities of putting

this and that together in new and untried emergencies and deducting

smart conclusions from the combinations--a man's mental process exactly.

With memory to help, man preserves his observations and reasonings,

reflects upon them, adds to them, recombines, and so proceeds, stage

by stage, to far results--from the teakettle to the ocean greyhound's

complex engine; from personal labor to slave labor; from wigwam to

palace; from the capricious chase to agriculture and stored food; from

nomadic life to stable government and concentrated authority; from

incoherent hordes to massed armies. The ant has observation, the

reasoning faculty, and the preserving adjunct of a prodigious memory;

she has duplicated man's development and the essential features of his

civilization, and you call it all instinct!

Y.M. Perhaps I lacked the reasoning faculty myself.

O.M. Well, don't tell anybody, and don't do it again.

Y.M. We have come a good way. As a result--as I understand it--I am

required to concede that there is absolutely no intellectual frontier

separating Man and the Unrevealed Creatures?

O.M. That is what you are required to concede. There is no such

frontier--there is no way to get around that. Man has a finer and more

capable machine in him than those others, but it is the same machine and

works in the same way. And neither he nor those others can command the

machine--it is strictly automatic, independent of control, works when it

pleases, and when it doesn't please, it can't be forced.

Y.M. Then man and the other animals are all alike, as to mental

machinery, and there isn't any difference of any stupendous magnitude

between them, except in quality, not in kind.

O.M. That is about the state of it--intellectuality. There are

pronounced limitations on both sides. We can't learn to understand much

of their language, but the dog, the elephant, etc., learn to understand

a very great deal of ours. To that extent they are our superiors. On the

other hand, they can't learn reading, writing, etc., nor any of our fine

and high things, and there we have a large advantage over them.

Y.M. Very well, let them have what they've got, and welcome; there is

still a wall, and a lofty one. They haven't got the Moral Sense; we have

it, and it lifts us immeasurably above them.

O.M. What makes you think that?

Y.M. Now look here--let's call a halt. I have stood the other infamies

and insanities and that is enough; I am not going to have man and the

other animals put on the same level morally.

O.M. I wasn't going to hoist man up to that.

Y.M. This is too much! I think it is not right to jest about such

things.

O.M. I am not jesting, I am merely reflecting a plain and simple

truth--and without uncharitableness. The fact that man knows right from

wrong proves his INTELLECTUAL superiority to the other creatures;

but the fact that he can DO wrong proves his MORAL inferiority to

any creature that CANNOT. It is my belief that this position is not

assailable.

Free Will

Y.M. What is your opinion regarding Free Will?

O.M. That there is no such thing. Did the man possess it who gave the

old woman his last shilling and trudged home in the storm?

Y.M. He had the choice between succoring the old woman and leaving her

to suffer. Isn't it so?

O.M. Yes, there was a choice to be made, between bodily comfort on the

one hand and the comfort of the spirit on the other. The body made a

strong appeal, of course--the body would be quite sure to do that; the

spirit made a counter appeal. A choice had to be made between the two

appeals, and was made. Who or what determined that choice?

Y.M. Any one but you would say that the man determined it, and that in

doing it he exercised Free Will.

O.M. We are constantly assured that every man is endowed with Free

Will, and that he can and must exercise it where he is offered a choice

between good conduct and less-good conduct. Yet we clearly saw that

in that man's case he really had no Free Will: his temperament, his

training, and the daily influences which had molded him and made

him what he was, COMPELLED him to rescue the old woman and thus

save HIMSELF--save himself from spiritual pain, from unendurable

wretchedness. He did not make the choice, it was made FOR him by forces

which he could not control. Free Will has always existed in WORDS, but

it stops there, I think--stops short of FACT. I would not use those

words--Free Will--but others.

Y.M. What others?

O.M. Free Choice.

Y.M. What is the difference?

O.M. The one implies untrammeled power to ACT as you please, the other

implies nothing beyond a mere MENTAL PROCESS: the critical ability to

determine which of two things is nearest right and just.

Y.M. Make the difference clear, please.

O.M. The mind can freely SELECT, CHOOSE, POINT OUT the right and just

one--its function stops there. It can go no further in the matter. It

has no authority to say that the right one shall be acted upon and the

wrong one discarded. That authority is in other hands.

Y.M. The man's?

O.M. In the machine which stands for him. In his born disposition

and the character which has been built around it by training and

environment.

Y.M. It will act upon the right one of the two?

O.M. It will do as it pleases in the matter. George Washington's machine

would act upon the right one; Pizarro would act upon the wrong one.

Y.M. Then as I understand it a bad man's mental machinery calmly and

judicially points out which of two things is right and just--

O.M. Yes, and his MORAL machinery will freely act upon the other or the

other, according to its make, and be quite indifferent to the MIND'S

feeling concerning the matter--that is, WOULD be, if the mind had any

feelings; which it hasn't. It is merely a thermometer: it registers the

heat and the cold, and cares not a farthing about either.

Y.M. Then we must not claim that if a man KNOWS which of two things is

right he is absolutely BOUND to do that thing?

O.M. His temperament and training will decide what he shall do, and he

will do it; he cannot help himself, he has no authority over the mater.

Wasn't it right for David to go out and slay Goliath?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. Then it would have been equally RIGHT for any one else to do it?

Y.M. Certainly.

O.M. Then it would have been RIGHT for a born coward to attempt it?

Y.M. It would--yes.

O.M. You know that no born coward ever would have attempted it, don't

you?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. You know that a born coward's make and temperament would be an

absolute and insurmountable bar to his ever essaying such a thing, don't

you?

Y.M. Yes, I know it.

O.M. He clearly perceives that it would be RIGHT to try it?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. His mind has Free Choice in determining that it would be RIGHT to

try it?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. Then if by reason of his inborn cowardice he simply can NOT essay

it, what becomes of his Free Will? Where is his Free Will? Why claim

that he has Free Will when the plain facts show that he hasn't? Why

content that because he and David SEE the right alike, both must ACT

alike? Why impose the same laws upon goat and lion?

Y.M. There is really no such thing as Free Will?

O.M. It is what I think. There is WILL. But it has nothing to do with

INTELLECTUAL PERCEPTIONS OF RIGHT AND WRONG, and is not under their

command. David's temperament and training had Will, and it was a

compulsory force; David had to obey its decrees, he had no choice. The

coward's temperament and training possess Will, and IT is compulsory;

it commands him to avoid danger, and he obeys, he has no choice. But

neither the Davids nor the cowards possess Free Will--will that may do

the right or do the wrong, as their MENTAL verdict shall decide.

Not Two Values, But Only One

Y.M. There is one thing which bothers me: I can't tell where you draw

the line between MATERIAL covetousness and SPIRITUAL covetousness.

O.M. I don't draw any.

Y.M. How do you mean?

O.M. There is no such thing as MATERIAL covetousness. All covetousness

is spiritual.

Y.M. ALL longings, desires, ambitions SPIRITUAL, never material?

O.M. Yes. The Master in you requires that in ALL cases you shall content

his SPIRIT--that alone. He never requires anything else, he never

interests himself in any other matter.

Y.M. Ah, come! When he covets somebody's money--isn't that rather

distinctly material and gross?

O.M. No. The money is merely a symbol--it represents in visible and

concrete form a SPIRITUAL DESIRE. Any so-called material thing that you

want is merely a symbol: you want it not for ITSELF, but because it will

content your spirit for the moment.

Y.M. Please particularize.

O.M. Very well. Maybe the thing longed for is a new hat. You get it

and your vanity is pleased, your spirit contented. Suppose your friends

deride the hat, make fun of it: at once it loses its value; you are

ashamed of it, you put it out of your sight, you never want to see it

again.

Y.M. I think I see. Go on.

O.M. It is the same hat, isn't it? It is in no way altered. But it

wasn't the HAT you wanted, but only what it stood for--a something to

please and content your SPIRIT. When it failed of that, the whole of its

value was gone. There are no MATERIAL values; there are only spiritual

ones. You will hunt in vain for a material value that is ACTUAL,

REAL--there is no such thing. The only value it possesses, for even a

moment, is the spiritual value back of it: remove that end and it is at

once worthless--like the hat.

Y.M. Can you extend that to money?

O.M. Yes. It is merely a symbol, it has no MATERIAL value; you think

you desire it for its own sake, but it is not so. You desire it for the

spiritual content it will bring; if it fail of that, you discover that

its value is gone. There is that pathetic tale of the man who labored

like a slave, unresting, unsatisfied, until he had accumulated a

fortune, and was happy over it, jubilant about it; then in a single week

a pestilence swept away all whom he held dear and left him desolate. His

money's value was gone. He realized that his joy in it came not from

the money itself, but from the spiritual contentment he got out of his

family's enjoyment of the pleasures and delights it lavished upon them.

Money has no MATERIAL value; if you remove its spiritual value nothing

is left but dross. It is so with all things, little or big, majestic

or trivial--there are no exceptions. Crowns, scepters, pennies, paste

jewels, village notoriety, world-wide fame--they are all the same, they

have no MATERIAL value: while they content the SPIRIT they are precious,

when this fails they are worthless.

A Difficult Question

Y.M. You keep me confused and perplexed all the time by your elusive

terminology. Sometimes you divide a man up into two or three

separate personalities, each with authorities, jurisdictions, and

responsibilities of its own, and when he is in that condition I can't

grasp it. Now when I speak of a man, he is THE WHOLE THING IN ONE, and

easy to hold and contemplate.

O.M. That is pleasant and convenient, if true. When you speak of "my

body" who is the "my"?

Y.M. It is the "me."

O.M. The body is a property then, and the Me owns it. Who is the Me?

Y.M. The Me is THE WHOLE THING; it is a common property; an undivided

ownership, vested in the whole entity.

O.M. If the Me admires a rainbow, is it the whole Me that admires it,

including the hair, hands, heels, and all?

Y.M. Certainly not. It is my MIND that admires it.

O.M. So YOU divide the Me yourself. Everybody does; everybody must.

What, then, definitely, is the Me?

Y.M. I think it must consist of just those two parts--the body and the

mind.

O.M. You think so? If you say "I believe the world is round," who is the

"I" that is speaking?

Y.M. The mind.

O.M. If you say "I grieve for the loss of my father," who is the "I"?

Y.M. The mind.

O.M. Is the mind exercising an intellectual function when it examines

and accepts the evidence that the world is round?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. Is it exercising an intellectual function when it grieves for the

loss of your father?

Y.M. That is not cerebration, brain-work, it is a matter of FEELING.

O.M. Then its source is not in your mind, but in your MORAL territory?

Y.M. I have to grant it.

O.M. Is your mind a part of your PHYSICAL equipment?

Y.M. No. It is independent of it; it is spiritual.

O.M. Being spiritual, it cannot be affected by physical influences?

Y.M. No.

O.M. Does the mind remain sober with the body is drunk?

Y.M. Well--no.

O.M. There IS a physical effect present, then?

Y.M. It looks like it.

O.M. A cracked skull has resulted in a crazy mind. Why should it happen

if the mind is spiritual, and INDEPENDENT of physical influences?

Y.M. Well--I don't know.

O.M. When you have a pain in your foot, how do you know it?

Y.M. I feel it.

O.M. But you do not feel it until a nerve reports the hurt to the brain.

Yet the brain is the seat of the mind, is it not?

Y.M. I think so.

O.M. But isn't spiritual enough to learn what is happening in the

outskirts without the help of the PHYSICAL messenger? You perceive that

the question of who or what the Me is, is not a simple one at all. You

say "I admire the rainbow," and "I believe the world is round," and in

these cases we find that the Me is not speaking, but only the MENTAL

part. You say, "I grieve," and again the Me is not all speaking, but

only the MORAL part. You say the mind is wholly spiritual; then you say

"I have a pain" and find that this time the Me is mental AND spiritual

combined. We all use the "I" in this indeterminate fashion, there is no

help for it. We imagine a Master and King over what you call The Whole

Thing, and we speak of him as "I," but when we try to define him we

find we cannot do it. The intellect and the feelings can act quite

INDEPENDENTLY of each other; we recognize that, and we look around for

a Ruler who is master over both, and can serve as a DEFINITE AND

INDISPUTABLE "I," and enable us to know what we mean and who or what we

are talking about when we use that pronoun, but we have to give it up

and confess that we cannot find him. To me, Man is a machine, made up

of many mechanisms, the moral and mental ones acting automatically in

accordance with the impulses of an interior Master who is built out of

born-temperament and an accumulation of multitudinous outside influences

and trainings; a machine whose ONE function is to secure the spiritual

contentment of the Master, be his desires good or be they evil; a

machine whose Will is absolute and must be obeyed, and always IS obeyed.

Y.M. Maybe the Me is the Soul?

O.M. Maybe it is. What is the Soul?

Y.M. I don't know.

O.M. Neither does any one else.

The Master Passion

Y.M. What is the Master?--or, in common speech, the Conscience? Explain

it.

O.M. It is that mysterious autocrat, lodged in a man, which compels the

man to content its desires. It may be called the Master Passion--the

hunger for Self-Approval.

Y.M. Where is its seat?

O.M. In man's moral constitution.

Y.M. Are its commands for the man's good?

O.M. It is indifferent to the man's good; it never concerns itself about

anything but the satisfying of its own desires. It can be TRAINED to

prefer things which will be for the man's good, but it will prefer them

only because they will content IT better than other things would.

Y.M. Then even when it is trained to high ideals it is still looking out

for its own contentment, and not for the man's good.

O.M. True. Trained or untrained, it cares nothing for the man's good,

and never concerns itself about it.

Y.M. It seems to be an IMMORAL force seated in the man's moral

constitution.

O.M. It is a COLORLESS force seated in the man's moral constitution. Let

us call it an instinct--a blind, unreasoning instinct, which cannot and

does not distinguish between good morals and bad ones, and cares nothing

for results to the man provided its own contentment be secured; and it

will ALWAYS secure that.

Y.M. It seeks money, and it probably considers that that is an advantage

for the man?

O.M. It is not always seeking money, it is not always seeking power,

nor office, nor any other MATERIAL advantage. In ALL cases it seeks a

SPIRITUAL contentment, let the MEANS be what they may. Its desires

are determined by the man's temperament--and it is lord over that.

Temperament, Conscience, Susceptibility, Spiritual Appetite, are, in

fact, the same thing. Have you ever heard of a person who cared nothing

for money?

Y.M. Yes. A scholar who would not leave his garret and his books to take

a place in a business house at a large salary.

O.M. He had to satisfy his master--that is to say, his temperament, his

Spiritual Appetite--and it preferred books to money. Are there other

cases?

Y.M. Yes, the hermit.

O.M. It is a good instance. The hermit endures solitude, hunger, cold,

and manifold perils, to content his autocrat, who prefers these things,

and prayer and contemplation, to money or to any show or luxury that

money can buy. Are there others?

Y.M. Yes. The artist, the poet, the scientist.

O.M. Their autocrat prefers the deep pleasures of these occupations,

either well paid or ill paid, to any others in the market, at any

price. You REALIZE that the Master Passion--the contentment of the

spirit--concerns itself with many things besides so-called material

advantage, material prosperity, cash, and all that?

Y.M. I think I must concede it.

O.M. I believe you must. There are perhaps as many Temperaments that

would refuse the burdens and vexations and distinctions of public office

as there are that hunger after them. The one set of Temperaments seek

the contentment of the spirit, and that alone; and this is exactly the

case with the other set. Neither set seeks anything BUT the contentment

of the spirit. If the one is sordid, both are sordid; and equally so,

since the end in view is precisely the same in both cases. And in both

cases Temperament decides the preference--and Temperament is BORN, not

made.

Conclusion

O.M. You have been taking a holiday?

Y.M. Yes; a mountain tramp covering a week. Are you ready to talk?

O.M. Quite ready. What shall we begin with?

Y.M. Well, lying abed resting up, two days and nights, I have thought

over all these talks, and passed them carefully in review. With this

result: that... that... are you intending to publish your notions about

Man some day?

O.M. Now and then, in these past twenty years, the Master inside of me

has half-intended to order me to set them to paper and publish them.

Do I have to tell you why the order has remained unissued, or can you

explain so simply a thing without my help?

Y.M. By your doctrine, it is simplicity itself: outside influences moved

your interior Master to give the order; stronger outside influences

deterred him. Without the outside influences, neither of these impulses

could ever have been born, since a person's brain is incapable or

originating an idea within itself.

O.M. Correct. Go on.

Y.M. The matter of publishing or withholding is still in your Master's

hands. If some day an outside influence shall determine him to publish,

he will give the order, and it will be obeyed.

O.M. That is correct. Well?

Y.M. Upon reflection I have arrived at the conviction that the

publication of your doctrines would be harmful. Do you pardon me?

O.M. Pardon YOU? You have done nothing. You are an instrument--a

speaking-trumpet. Speaking-trumpets are not responsible for what is said

through them. Outside influences--in the form of lifelong teachings,

trainings, notions, prejudices, and other second-hand importations--have

persuaded the Master within you that the publication of these doctrines

would be harmful. Very well, this is quite natural, and was to be

expected; in fact, was inevitable. Go on; for the sake of ease and

convenience, stick to habit: speak in the first person, and tell me what

your Master thinks about it.

Y.M. Well, to begin: it is a desolating doctrine; it is not inspiring,

enthusing, uplifting. It takes the glory out of man, it takes the pride

out of him, it takes the heroism out of him, it denies him all personal

credit, all applause; it not only degrades him to a machine, but allows

him no control over the machine; makes a mere coffee-mill of him, and

neither permits him to supply the coffee nor turn the crank, his sole

and piteously humble function being to grind coarse or fine, according

to his make, outside impulses doing the rest.

O.M. It is correctly stated. Tell me--what do men admire most in each

other?

Y.M. Intellect, courage, majesty of build, beauty of countenance,

charity, benevolence, magnanimity, kindliness, heroism, and--and--

O.M. I would not go any further. These are ELEMENTALS. Virtue,

fortitude, holiness, truthfulness, loyalty, high ideals--these, and all

the related qualities that are named in the dictionary, are MADE OF THE

ELEMENTALS, by blendings, combinations, and shadings of the elementals,

just as one makes green by blending blue and yellow, and makes several

shades and tints of red by modifying the elemental red. There are

several elemental colors; they are all in the rainbow; out of them we

manufacture and name fifty shades of them. You have named the elementals of the human rainbow, and also one BLEND--heroism, which is made out of courage and magnanimity. Very well, then; which of these elements does the possessor of it manufacture for himself? Is it intellect?

Y.M. No.

O.M. Why?

Y.M. He is born with it.

O.M. Is it courage?

Y.M. No. He is born with it.

O.M. Is it majesty of build, beauty of countenance?

Y.M. No. They are birthrights.

O.M. Take those others--the elemental moral qualities--charity,

benevolence, magnanimity, kindliness; fruitful seeds, out of which

spring, through cultivation by outside influences, all the manifold

blends and combinations of virtues named in the dictionaries: does man

manufacture any of those seeds, or are they all born in him?

Y.M. Born in him.

O.M. Who manufactures them, then?

Y.M. God.

O.M. Where does the credit of it belong?

Y.M. To God.

O.M. And the glory of which you spoke, and the applause?

Y.M. To God.

O.M. Then it is YOU who degrade man. You make him claim glory, praise,

flattery, for every valuable thing he possesses--BORROWED finery, the

whole of it; no rag of it earned by himself, not a detail of it produced

by his own labor. YOU make man a humbug; have I done worse by him?

Y.M. You have made a machine of him.

O.M. Who devised that cunning and beautiful mechanism, a man's hand?

Y.M. God.

O.M. Who devised the law by which it automatically hammers out of a

piano an elaborate piece of music, without error, while the man is

thinking about something else, or talking to a friend?

Y.M. God.

O.M. Who devised the blood? Who devised the wonderful machinery which

automatically drives its renewing and refreshing streams through the

body, day and night, without assistance or advice from the man? Who

devised the man's mind, whose machinery works automatically, interests

itself in what it pleases, regardless of its will or desire, labors

all night when it likes, deaf to his appeals for mercy? God devised all

these things. I have not made man a machine, God made him a machine.

I am merely calling attention to the fact, nothing more. Is it wrong to

call attention to the fact? Is it a crime?

Y.M. I think it is wrong to EXPOSE a fact when harm can come of it.

O.M. Go on.

Y.M. Look at the matter as it stands now. Man has been taught that he is

the supreme marvel of the Creation; he believes it; in all the ages

he has never doubted it, whether he was a naked savage, or clothed in

purple and fine linen, and civilized. This has made his heart buoyant,

his life cheery. His pride in himself, his sincere admiration of

himself, his joy in what he supposed were his own and unassisted

achievements, and his exultation over the praise and applause which they

evoked--these have exalted him, enthused him, ambitioned him to higher

and higher flights; in a word, made his life worth the living. But by

your scheme, all this is abolished; he is degraded to a machine, he is

a nobody, his noble prides wither to mere vanities; let him strive as

he may, he can never be any better than his humblest and stupidest

neighbor; he would never be cheerful again, his life would not be worth

the living.

O.M. You really think that?

Y.M. I certainly do.

O.M. Have you ever seen me uncheerful, unhappy.

Y.M. No.

O.M. Well, I believe these things. Why have they not made me unhappy?

Y.M. Oh, well--temperament, of course! You never let THAT escape from

your scheme.

O.M. That is correct. If a man is born with an unhappy temperament,

nothing can make him happy; if he is born with a happy temperament,

nothing can make him unhappy.

Y.M. What--not even a degrading and heart-chilling system of beliefs?

O.M. Beliefs? Mere beliefs? Mere convictions? They are powerless. They

strive in vain against inborn temperament.

Y.M. I can't believe that, and I don't.

O.M. Now you are speaking hastily. It shows that you have not studiously

examined the facts. Of all your intimates, which one is the happiest?

Isn't it Burgess?

Y.M. Easily.

O.M. And which one is the unhappiest? Henry Adams?

Y.M. Without a question!

O.M. I know them well. They are extremes, abnormals; their temperaments

are as opposite as the poles. Their life-histories are about alike--but

look at the results! Their ages are about the same--about around fifty.

Burgess had always been buoyant, hopeful, happy; Adams has always been

cheerless, hopeless, despondent. As young fellows both tried country

journalism--and failed. Burgess didn't seem to mind it; Adams couldn't

smile, he could only mourn and groan over what had happened and torture

himself with vain regrets for not having done so and so instead of so

and so--THEN he would have succeeded. They tried the law--and failed.

Burgess remained happy--because he couldn't help it. Adams was

wretched--because he couldn't help it. From that day to this, those two

men have gone on trying things and failing: Burgess has come out happy

and cheerful every time; Adams the reverse. And we do absolutely know

that these men's inborn temperaments have remained unchanged through all the vicissitudes of their material affairs. Let us see how it is with

their immaterials. Both have been zealous Democrats; both have been

zealous Republicans; both have been zealous Mugwumps. Burgess has always found happiness and Adams unhappiness in these several political

beliefs and in their migrations out of them. Both of these men have been

Presbyterians, Universalists, Methodists, Catholics--then Presbyterians

again, then Methodists again. Burgess has always found rest in these

excursions, and Adams unrest. They are trying Christian Science, now,

with the customary result, the inevitable result. No political or

religious belief can make Burgess unhappy or the other man happy.

I assure you it is purely a matter of temperament. Beliefs are

ACQUIREMENTS, temperaments are BORN; beliefs are subject to change,

nothing whatever can change temperament.

Y.M. You have instanced extreme temperaments.

O.M. Yes, the half-dozen others are modifications of the extremes.

But the law is the same. Where the temperament is two-thirds happy, or

two-thirds unhappy, no political or religious beliefs can change the

proportions. The vast majority of temperaments are pretty equally

balanced; the intensities are absent, and this enables a nation to learn

to accommodate itself to its political and religious circumstances and

like them, be satisfied with them, at last prefer them. Nations do not

THINK, they only FEEL. They get their feelings at second hand through

their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought--by force

of circumstances, not argument--to reconcile itself to ANY KIND OF

GOVERNMENT OR RELIGION THAT CAN BE DEVISED; in time it will fit itself

to the required conditions; later, it will prefer them and will fiercely

fight for them. As instances, you have all history: the Greeks, the

Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Russians, the Germans, the

French, the English, the Spaniards, the Americans, the South Americans,

the Japanese, the Chinese, the Hindus, the Turks--a thousand wild and

tame religions, every kind of government that can be thought of, from

tiger to house-cat, each nation KNOWING it has the only true religion

and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others,

each an ass and not suspecting it, each proud of its fancied supremacy,

each perfectly sure it is the pet of God, each without undoubting

confidence summoning Him to take command in time of war, each surprised

when He goes over to the enemy, but by habit able to excuse it and

resume compliments--in a word, the whole human race content, always

content, persistently content, indestructibly content, happy, thankful,

proud, NO MATTER WHAT ITS RELIGION IS, NOR WHETHER ITS MASTER BE TIGER OR HOUSE-CAT. Am I stating facts? You know I am. Is the human race cheerful? You know it is. Considering what it can stand, and be happy, you do me too much honor when you think that I can place before it

a system of plain cold facts that can take the cheerfulness out of it.

Nothing can do that. Everything has been tried. Without success. I beg

you not to be troubled.

THE DEATH OF JEAN

The death of Jean Clemens occurred early in the morning of December 24,

1909. Mr. Clemens was in great stress of mind when I first saw him, but

a few hours later I found him writing steadily.

"I am setting it down," he said, "everything. It is a relief to me to

write it. It furnishes me an excuse for thinking." At intervals during

that day and the next I looked in, and usually found him writing. Then

on the evening of the 26th, when he knew that Jean had been laid to rest

in Elmira, he came to my room with the manuscript in his hand.

"I have finished it," he said; "read it. I can form no opinion of it

myself. If you think it worthy, some day--at the proper time--it can end

my autobiography. It is the final chapter."

Four months later--almost to the day--(April 21st) he was with Jean.

Albert Bigelow Paine.

Stormfield, Christmas Eve, 11 A.M., 1909.

JEAN IS DEAD!

Has any one ever tried to put upon paper all the little happenings

connected with a dear one--happenings of the twenty-four hours preceding

the sudden and unexpected death of that dear one? Would a book contain

them? Would two books contain them? I think not. They pour into the mind

in a flood. They are little things that have been always happening every

day, and were always so unimportant and easily forgettable before--but

now! Now, how different! how precious they are, now dear, how

unforgettable, how pathetic, how sacred, how clothed with dignity!

Last night Jean, all flushed with splendid health, and I the same, from

the wholesome effects of my Bermuda holiday, strolled hand in hand from

the dinner-table and sat down in the library and chatted, and planned,

and discussed, cheerily and happily (and how unsuspectingly!)--until

nine--which is late for us--then went upstairs, Jean's friendly German

dog following. At my door Jean said, "I can't kiss you good night,

father: I have a cold, and you could catch it." I bent and kissed her

hand. She was moved--I saw it in her eyes--and she impulsively kissed my

hand in return. Then with the usual gay "Sleep well, dear!" from both,

we parted.

At half past seven this morning I woke, and heard voices outside my

door. I said to myself, "Jean is starting on her usual horseback flight

to the station for the mail." Then Katy (1) entered, stood quaking and

gasping at my bedside a moment, then found her tongue:

"MISS JEAN IS DEAD!"

Possibly I know now what the soldier feels when a bullet crashes through

his heart.

In her bathroom there she lay, the fair young creature, stretched upon

the floor and covered with a sheet. And looking so placid, so natural,

and as if asleep. We knew what had happened. She was an epileptic: she

had been seized with a convulsion and heart failure in her bath. The

doctor had to come several miles. His efforts, like our previous ones,

failed to bring her back to life.

It is noon, now. How lovable she looks, how sweet and how tranquil! It

is a noble face, and full of dignity; and that was a good heart that

lies there so still.

In England, thirteen years ago, my wife and I were stabbed to the heart

with a cablegram which said, "Susy was mercifully released today." I

had to send a like shot to Clara, in Berlin, this morning. With the

peremptory addition, "You must not come home." Clara and her husband

sailed from here on the 11th of this month. How will Clara bear it?

Jean, from her babyhood, was a worshiper of Clara.

Four days ago I came back from a month's holiday in Bermuda in perfected

health; but by some accident the reporters failed to perceive this. Day

before yesterday, letters and telegrams began to arrive from friends

and strangers which indicated that I was supposed to be dangerously

ill. Yesterday Jean begged me to explain my case through the Associated

Press. I said it was not important enough; but she was distressed and

said I must think of Clara. Clara would see the report in the German

papers, and as she had been nursing her husband day and night for four

months (2) and was worn out and feeble, the shock might be disastrous.

There was reason in that; so I sent a humorous paragraph by telephone to

the Associated Press denying the "charge" that I was "dying," and saying

"I would not do such a thing at my time of life."

Jean was a little troubled, and did not like to see me treat the matter

so lightly; but I said it was best to treat it so, for there was nothing

serious about it. This morning I sent the sorrowful facts of this day's

irremediable disaster to the Associated Press. Will both appear in this

evening's papers?--the one so blithe, the other so tragic?

I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother--her incomparable

mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in

Europe; and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich!

Seven months ago Mr. Roger died--one of the best friends I ever had, and

the nearest perfect, as man and gentleman, I have yet met among my race;

within the last six weeks Gilder has passed away, and Laffan--old, old

friends of mine. Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under

our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night--and

it was forever, we never suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit

here--writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How

dazzlingly the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a

mockery.

Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days ago. Seventy-four years old

yesterday. Who can estimate my age today?

I have looked upon her again. I wonder I can bear it. She looks just

as her mother looked when she lay dead in that Florentine villa so long

ago. The sweet placidity of death! it is more beautiful than sleep.

I saw her mother buried. I said I would never endure that horror again;

that I would never again look into the grave of any one dear to me. I

have kept to that. They will take Jean from this house tomorrow, and

bear her to Elmira, New York, where lie those of us that have been

released, but I shall not follow.

Jean was on the dock when the ship came in, only four days ago. She

was at the door, beaming a welcome, when I reached this house the next

evening. We played cards, and she tried to teach me a new game called

"Mark Twain." We sat chatting cheerily in the library last night, and

she wouldn't let me look into the loggia, where she was making Christmas

preparations. She said she would finish them in the morning, and then

her little French friend would arrive from New York--the surprise would

follow; the surprise she had been working over for days. While she was

out for a moment I disloyally stole a look. The loggia floor was clothed

with rugs and furnished with chairs and sofas; and the uncompleted

surprise was there: in the form of a Christmas tree that was drenched

with silver film in a most wonderful way; and on a table was prodigal

profusion of bright things which she was going to hang upon it today.

What desecrating hand will ever banish that eloquent unfinished surprise

from that place? Not mine, surely. All these little matters have

happened in the last four days. "Little." Yes--THEN. But not now.

Nothing she said or thought or did is little now. And all the lavish

humor!--what is become of it? It is pathos, now. Pathos, and the thought

of it brings tears.

All these little things happened such a few hours ago--and now she

lies yonder. Lies yonder, and cares for nothing any more.

Strange--marvelous--incredible! I have had this experience before; but

it would still be incredible if I had had it a thousand times.

"MISS JEAN IS DEAD!"

That is what Katy said. When I heard the door open behind the bed's head

without a preliminary knock, I supposed it was Jean coming to kiss me

good morning, she being the only person who was used to entering without

formalities.

And so--

I have been to Jean's parlor. Such a turmoil of Christmas presents for

servants and friends! They are everywhere; tables, chairs, sofas, the

floor--everything is occupied, and over-occupied. It is many and many a

year since I have seen the like. In that ancient day Mrs. Clemens and

I used to slip softly into the nursery at midnight on Christmas Eve and

look the array of presents over. The children were little then. And now

here is Jean's parlor looking just as that nursery used to look. The

presents are not labeled--the hands are forever idle that would have

labeled them today. Jean's mother always worked herself down with her

Christmas preparations. Jean did the same yesterday and the preceding

days, and the fatigue has cost her her life. The fatigue caused the

convulsion that attacked her this morning. She had had no attack for

months.

Jean was so full of life and energy that she was constantly is danger

of overtaxing her strength. Every morning she was in the saddle by

half past seven, and off to the station for her mail. She examined the

letters and I distributed them: some to her, some to Mr. Paine, the

others to the stenographer and myself. She dispatched her share and then

mounted her horse again and went around superintending her farm and

her poultry the rest of the day. Sometimes she played billiards with me

after dinner, but she was usually too tired to play, and went early to

bed.

Yesterday afternoon I told her about some plans I had been devising

while absent in Bermuda, to lighten her burdens. We would get a

housekeeper; also we would put her share of the secretary-work into Mr.

Paine's hands.

No--she wasn't willing. She had been making plans herself. The matter

ended in a compromise, I submitted. I always did. She wouldn't audit the

bills and let Paine fill out the checks--she would continue to attend to

that herself. Also, she would continue to be housekeeper, and let Katy

assist. Also, she would continue to answer the letters of personal

friends for me. Such was the compromise. Both of us called it by that

name, though I was not able to see where my formidable change had been

made.

However, Jean was pleased, and that was sufficient for me. She was proud

of being my secretary, and I was never able to persuade her to give up

any part of her share in that unlovely work.

In the talk last night I said I found everything going so smoothly

that if she were willing I would go back to Bermuda in February and get

blessedly out of the clash and turmoil again for another month. She was

urgent that I should do it, and said that if I would put off the trip

until March she would take Katy and go with me. We struck hands upon

that, and said it was settled. I had a mind to write to Bermuda by

tomorrow's ship and secure a furnished house and servants. I meant to

write the letter this morning. But it will never be written, now.

For she lies yonder, and before her is another journey than that.

Night is closing down; the rim of the sun barely shows above the

sky-line of the hills.

I have been looking at that face again that was growing dearer and

dearer to me every day. I was getting acquainted with Jean in these last

nine months. She had been long an exile from home when she came to us

three-quarters of a year ago. She had been shut up in sanitariums,

many miles from us. How eloquent glad and grateful she was to cross her

father's threshold again!

Would I bring her back to life if I could do it? I would not. If a word

would do it, I would beg for strength to withhold the word. And I would

have the strength; I am sure of it. In her loss I am almost bankrupt,

and my life is a bitterness, but I am content: for she has been enriched

with the most precious of all gifts--that gift which makes all other

gifts mean and poor--death. I have never wanted any released friend of

mine restored to life since I reached manhood. I felt in this way when

Susy passed away; and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers. When Clara

met me at the station in New York and told me Mr. Rogers had

died suddenly that morning, my thought was, Oh, favorite of

fortune--fortunate all his long and lovely life--fortunate to his

latest moment! The reporters said there were tears of sorrow in my eyes.

True--but they were for ME, not for him. He had suffered no loss. All

the fortunes he had ever made before were poverty compared with this

one.

Why did I build this house, two years ago? To shelter this vast

emptiness? How foolish I was! But I shall stay in it. The spirits of

the dead hallow a house, for me. It was not so with other members of the

family. Susy died in the house we built in Hartford. Mrs. Clemens would

never enter it again. But it made the house dearer to me. I have entered

it once since, when it was tenantless and silent and forlorn, but to me

it was a holy place and beautiful. It seemed to me that the spirits of

the dead were all about me, and would speak to me and welcome me if

they could: Livy, and Susy, and George, and Henry Robinson, and Charles

Dudley Warner. How good and kind they were, and how lovable their lives!

In fancy I could see them all again, I could call the children back

and hear them romp again with George--that peerless black ex-slave and

children's idol who came one day--a flitting stranger--to wash windows,

and stayed eighteen years. Until he died. Clara and Jean would never

enter again the New York hotel which their mother had frequented in

earlier days. They could not bear it. But I shall stay in this house. It

is dearer to me tonight than ever it was before. Jean's spirit will make

it beautiful for me always. Her lonely and tragic death--but I will not

think of that now.

Jean's mother always devoted two or three weeks to Christmas shopping,

and was always physically exhausted when Christmas Eve came. Jean was

her very own child--she wore herself out present-hunting in New York

these latter days. Paine has just found on her desk a long list of

names--fifty, he thinks--people to whom she sent presents last night.

Apparently she forgot no one. And Katy found there a roll of bank-notes,

for the servants.

Her dog has been wandering about the grounds today, comradeless and

forlorn. I have seen him from the windows. She got him from Germany. He

has tall ears and looks exactly like a wolf. He was educated in Germany,

and knows no language but the German. Jean gave him no orders save

in that tongue. And so when the burglar-alarm made a fierce clamor at

midnight a fortnight ago, the butler, who is French and knows no German,

tried in vain to interest the dog in the supposed burglar. Jean wrote

me, to Bermuda, about the incident. It was the last letter I was ever to

receive from her bright head and her competent hand. The dog will not be

neglected.

There was never a kinder heart than Jean's. From her childhood up she

always spent the most of her allowance on charities of one kind or

another. After she became secretary and had her income doubled she spent

her money upon these things with a free hand. Mine too, I am glad and

grateful to say.

She was a loyal friend to all animals, and she loved them all, birds,

beasts, and everything--even snakes--an inheritance from me. She knew

all the birds; she was high up in that lore. She became a member of

various humane societies when she was still a little girl--both here and

abroad--and she remained an active member to the last. She founded two

or three societies for the protection of animals, here and in Europe.

She was an embarrassing secretary, for she fished my correspondence out

of the waste-basket and answered the letters. She thought all letters

deserved the courtesy of an answer. Her mother brought her up in that

kindly error.

She could write a good letter, and was swift with her pen. She had but

an indifferent ear music, but her tongue took to languages with an easy

facility. She never allowed her Italian, French, and German to get rusty

through neglect.

The telegrams of sympathy are flowing in, from far and wide, now, just

as they did in Italy five years and a half ago, when this child's mother

laid down her blameless life. They cannot heal the hurt, but they take

away some of the pain. When Jean and I kissed hands and parted at

my door last, how little did we imagine that in twenty-two hours the

telegraph would be bringing words like these:

"From the bottom of our hearts we send out sympathy, dearest of

friends."

For many and many a day to come, wherever I go in this house,

remembrancers of Jean will mutely speak to me of her. Who can count the

number of them?

She was in exile two years with the hope of healing her malady--epilepsy. There are no words to express how grateful I am that she did not meet her fate in the hands of strangers, but in the loving shelter of her own home.

"MISS JEAN IS DEAD!"

It is true. Jean is dead.

A month ago I was writing bubbling and hilarious articles for magazines

yet to appear, and now I am writing--this.

CHRISTMAS DAY. NOON.--Last night I went to Jean's room at intervals, and

turned back the sheet and looked at the peaceful face, and kissed the

cold brow, and remembered that heartbreaking night in Florence so long

ago, in that cavernous and silent vast villa, when I crept downstairs so

many times, and turned back a sheet and looked at a face just like this

one--Jean's mother's face--and kissed a brow that was just like this

one. And last night I saw again what I had seen then--that strange and

lovely miracle--the sweet, soft contours of early maidenhood restored

by the gracious hand of death! When Jean's mother lay dead, all trace of

care, and trouble, and suffering, and the corroding years had vanished

out of the face, and I was looking again upon it as I had known and

worshipped it in its young bloom and beauty a whole generation before.

About three in the morning, while wandering about the house in the deep

silences, as one does in times like these, when there is a dumb sense

that something has been lost that will never be found again, yet must

be sought, if only for the employment the useless seeking gives, I came

upon Jean's dog in the hall downstairs, and noted that he did not

spring to greet me, according to his hospitable habit, but came slow and

sorrowfully; also I remembered that he had not visited Jean's apartment

since the tragedy. Poor fellow, did he know? I think so. Always when

Jean was abroad in the open he was with her; always when she was in the

house he was with her, in the night as well as in the day. Her parlor

was his bedroom. Whenever I happened upon him on the ground floor he

always followed me about, and when I went upstairs he went too--in a

tumultuous gallop. But now it was different: after patting him a little

I went to the library--he remained behind; when I went upstairs he did

not follow me, save with his wistful eyes. He has wonderful eyes--big,

and kind, and eloquent. He can talk with them. He is a beautiful

creature, and is of the breed of the New York police-dogs. I do not like

dogs, because they bark when there is no occasion for it; but I have

liked this one from the beginning, because he belonged to Jean, and

because he never barks except when there is occasion--which is not

oftener than twice a week.

In my wanderings I visited Jean's parlor. On a shelf I found a pile of

my books, and I knew what it meant. She was waiting for me to come home

from Bermuda and autograph them, then she would send them away. If I

only knew whom she intended them for! But I shall never know. I will

keep them. Her hand has touched them--it is an accolade--they are noble,

now.

And in a closet she had hidden a surprise for me--a thing I have often

wished I owned: a noble big globe. I couldn't see it for the tears.

She will never know the pride I take in it, and the pleasure. Today the

mails are full of loving remembrances for her: full of those old, old

kind words she loved so well, "Merry Christmas to Jean!" If she could

only have lived one day longer!

At last she ran out of money, and would not use mine. So she sent to

one of those New York homes for poor girls all the clothes she could

spare--and more, most likely.

CHRISTMAS NIGHT.--This afternoon they took her away from her room. As

soon as I might, I went down to the library, and there she lay, in her

coffin, dressed in exactly the same clothes she wore when she stood at

the other end of the same room on the 6th of October last, as Clara's

chief bridesmaid. Her face was radiant with happy excitement then; it

was the same face now, with the dignity of death and the peace of God

upon it.

They told me the first mourner to come was the dog. He came uninvited,

and stood up on his hind legs and rested his fore paws upon the trestle,

and took a last long look at the face that was so dear to him, then went

his way as silently as he had come. HE KNOWS.

At mid-afternoon it began to snow. The pity of it--that Jean could not

see it! She so loved the snow.

The snow continued to fall. At six o'clock the hearse drew up to the

door to bear away its pathetic burden. As they lifted the casket, Paine

began playing on the orchestrelle Schubert's "Impromptu," which was

Jean's favorite. Then he played the Intermezzo; that was for Susy;

then he played the Largo; that was for their mother. He did this at my

request. Elsewhere in my Autobiography I have told how the Intermezzo

and the Largo came to be associated in my heart with Susy and Livy in

their last hours in this life.

From my windows I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road

and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and presently

disappear. Jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any

more. Jervis, the cousin she had played with when they were babies

together--he and her beloved old Katy--were conducting her to her

distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's side once

more, in the company of Susy and Langdon.

DECEMBER 26TH. The dog came to see me at eight o'clock this morning.

He was very affectionate, poor orphan! My room will be his quarters

hereafter.

The storm raged all night. It has raged all the morning. The snow drives

across the landscape in vast clouds, superb, sublime--and Jean not here

to see.

2:30 P.M.--It is the time appointed. The funeral has begun. Four hundred

miles away, but I can see it all, just as if I were there. The scene

is the library in the Langdon homestead. Jean's coffin stands where her

mother and I stood, forty years ago, and were married; and where Susy's

coffin stood thirteen years ago; where her mother's stood five years and

a half ago; and where mine will stand after a little time.

FIVE O'CLOCK.--It is all over.

When Clara went away two weeks ago to live in Europe, it was hard, but I

could bear it, for I had Jean left. I said WE would be a family. We said

we would be close comrades and happy--just we two. That fair dream was

in my mind when Jean met me at the steamer last Monday; it was in my

mind when she received me at the door last Tuesday evening. We were

together; WE WERE A FAMILY! the dream had come true--oh, precisely true,

contentedly, true, satisfyingly true! and remained true two whole days.

And now? Now Jean is in her grave!

In the grave--if I can believe it. God rest her sweet spirit!

1.  Katy Leary, who had been in the service of the Clemens

family for twenty-nine years.

2.  Mr. Gabrilowitsch had been operated on for appendicitis.

THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE

I

If I understand the idea, the BAZAR invites several of us to write upon

the above text. It means the change in my life's course which introduced

what must be regarded by me as the most IMPORTANT condition of my

career. But it also implies--without intention, perhaps--that that

turning-point ITSELF was the creator of the new condition. This gives it

too much distinction, too much prominence, too much credit. It is only

the LAST link in a very long chain of turning-points commissioned to

produce the cardinal result; it is not any more important than the

humblest of its ten thousand predecessors. Each of the ten thousand did

its appointed share, on its appointed date, in forwarding the scheme,

and they were all necessary; to have left out any one of them would have

defeated the scheme and brought about SOME OTHER result. It know we have

a fashion of saying "such and such an event was the turning-point in my

life," but we shouldn't say it. We should merely grant that its place

as LAST link in the chain makes it the most CONSPICUOUS link; in real

importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors.

Perhaps the most celebrated turning-point recorded in history was the

crossing of the Rubicon. Suetonius says:

Coming up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, he halted for a

while, and, revolving in his mind the importance of the step he was

on the point of taking, he turned to those about him and said, "We may

still retreat; but if we pass this little bridge, nothing is left for us

but to fight it out in arms."

This was a stupendously important moment. And all the incidents, big and

little, of Caesar's previous life had been leading up to it, stage by

stage, link by link. This was the LAST link--merely the last one, and no

bigger than the others; but as we gaze back at it through the inflating

mists of our imagination, it looks as big as the orbit of Neptune.

You, the reader, have a PERSONAL interest in that link, and so have

I; so has the rest of the human race. It was one of the links in your

life-chain, and it was one of the links in mine. We may wait, now, with

bated breath, while Caesar reflects. Your fate and mine are involved in

his decision.

While he was thus hesitating, the following incident occurred. A person

remarked for his noble mien and graceful aspect appeared close at hand,

sitting and playing upon a pipe. When not only the shepherds, but a

number of soldiers also, flocked to listen to him, and some trumpeters

among them, he snatched a trumpet from one of them, ran to the river

with it, and, sounding the advance with a piercing blast, crossed to the

other side. Upon this, Caesar exclaimed: "Let us go whither the omens of

the gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. THE DIE IS CAST."

So he crossed--and changed the future of the whole human race, for all

time. But that stranger was a link in Caesar's life-chain, too; and a

necessary one. We don't know his name, we never hear of him again; he

was very casual; he acts like an accident; but he was no accident, he

was there by compulsion of HIS life-chain, to blow the electrifying

blast that was to make up Caesar's mind for him, and thence go piping

down the aisles of history forever.

If the stranger hadn't been there! But he WAS. And Caesar crossed.

With such results! Such vast events--each a link in the HUMAN RACE'S

life-chain; each event producing the next one, and that one the next

one, and so on: the destruction of the republic; the founding of the

empire; the breaking up of the empire; the rise of Christianity upon

its ruins; the spread of the religion to other lands--and so on; link

by link took its appointed place at its appointed time, the discovery of

America being one of them; our Revolution another; the inflow of English

and other immigrants another; their drift westward (my ancestors among

them) another; the settlement of certain of them in Missouri, which

resulted in ME. For I was one of the unavoidable results of the crossing

of the Rubicon. If the stranger, with his trumpet blast, had stayed away

(which he COULDN'T, for he was the appointed link) Caesar would not have

crossed. What would have happened, in that case, we can never guess. We

only know that the things that did happen would not have happened. They

might have been replaced by equally prodigious things, of course, but

their nature and results are beyond our guessing. But the matter that

interests me personally is that I would not be HERE now, but somewhere

else; and probably black--there is no telling. Very well, I am glad he

crossed. And very really and thankfully glad, too, though I never cared

anything about it before.

II

To me, the most important feature of my life is its literary feature. I

have been professionally literary something more than forty years. There

have been many turning-points in my life, but the one that was the link

in the chain appointed to conduct me to the literary guild is the most

CONSPICUOUS link in that chain. BECAUSE it was the last one. It was not

any more important than its predecessors. All the other links have an

inconspicuous look, except the crossing of the Rubicon; but as factors

in making me literary they are all of the one size, the crossing of the

Rubicon included.

I know how I came to be literary, and I will tell the steps that lead up

to it and brought it about.

The crossing of the Rubicon was not the first one, it was hardly even

a recent one; I should have to go back ages before Caesar's day to find

the first one. To save space I will go back only a couple of generations

and start with an incident of my boyhood. When I was twelve and a half

years old, my father died. It was in the spring. The summer came, and

brought with it an epidemic of measles. For a time a child died almost

every day. The village was paralyzed with fright, distress, despair.

Children that were not smitten with the disease were imprisoned in

their homes to save them from the infection. In the homes there were no

cheerful faces, there was no music, there was no singing but of solemn

hymns, no voice but of prayer, no romping was allowed, no noise, no

laughter, the family moved spectrally about on tiptoe, in a

ghostly hush. I was a prisoner. My soul was steeped in this awful

dreariness--and in fear. At some time or other every day and every night

a sudden shiver shook me to the marrow, and I said to myself, "There,

I've got it! and I shall die." Life on these miserable terms was not

worth living, and at last I made up my mind to get the disease and have

it over, one way or the other. I escaped from the house and went to

the house of a neighbor where a playmate of mine was very ill with the

malady. When the chance offered I crept into his room and got into bed

with him. I was discovered by his mother and sent back into captivity.

But I had the disease; they could not take that from me. I came near to

dying. The whole village was interested, and anxious, and sent for news

of me every day; and not only once a day, but several times. Everybody

believed I would die; but on the fourteenth day a change came for the

worse and they were disappointed.

This was a turning-point of my life. (Link number one.) For when I got

well my mother closed my school career and apprenticed me to a printer.

She was tired of trying to keep me out of mischief, and the adventure of

the measles decided her to put me into more masterful hands than hers.

I became a printer, and began to add one link after another to the chain

which was to lead me into the literary profession. A long road, but I

could not know that; and as I did not know what its goal was, or even

that it had one, I was indifferent. Also contented.

A young printer wanders around a good deal, seeking and finding work;

and seeking again, when necessity commands. N. B. Necessity is a

CIRCUMSTANCE; Circumstance is man's master--and when Circumstance

commands, he must obey; he may argue the matter--that is his privilege,

just as it is the honorable privilege of a falling body to argue with

the attraction of gravitation--but it won't do any good, he must OBEY.

I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and dictatorship of

Circumstance, and finally arrived in a city of Iowa, where I worked

several months. Among the books that interested me in those days was one

about the Amazon. The traveler told an alluring tale of his long voyage

up the great river from Para to the sources of the Madeira, through the

heart of an enchanted land, a land wastefully rich in tropical wonders,

a romantic land where all the birds and flowers and animals were of

the museum varieties, and where the alligator and the crocodile and the

monkey seemed as much at home as if they were in the Zoo. Also, he

told an astonishing tale about COCA, a vegetable product of miraculous

powers, asserting that it was so nourishing and so strength-giving that

the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill

and down all day on a pinch of powdered coca and require no other

sustenance.

I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon. Also with a longing to

open up a trade in coca with all the world. During months I dreamed

that dream, and tried to contrive ways to get to Para and spring that

splendid enterprise upon an unsuspecting planet. But all in vain. A

person may PLAN as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is

likely to come of it until the magician CIRCUMSTANCE steps in and takes

the matter off his hands. At last Circumstance came to my help. It was

in this way. Circumstance, to help or hurt another man, made him lose

a fifty-dollar bill in the street; and to help or hurt me, made me find

it. I advertised the find, and left for the Amazon the same day. This

was another turning-point, another link.

Could Circumstance have ordered another dweller in that town to go to

the Amazon and open up a world-trade in coca on a fifty-dollar basis

and been obeyed? No, I was the only one. There were other fools

there--shoals and shoals of them--but they were not of my kind. I was

the only one of my kind.

Circumstance is powerful, but it cannot work alone; it has to have a

partner. Its partner is man's TEMPERAMENT--his natural disposition.

His temperament is not his invention, it is BORN in him, and he has no

authority over it, neither is he responsible for its acts. He cannot

change it, nothing can change it, nothing can modify it--except

temporarily. But it won't stay modified. It is permanent, like the

color of the man's eyes and the shape of his ears. Blue eyes are gray

in certain unusual lights; but they resume their natural color when that

stress is removed.

A Circumstance that will coerce one man will have no effect upon a man

of a different temperament. If Circumstance had thrown the bank-note

in Caesar's way, his temperament would not have made him start for the

Amazon. His temperament would have compelled him to do something with

the money, but not that. It might have made him advertise the note--and

WAIT. We can't tell. Also, it might have made him go to New York and

buy into the Government, with results that would leave Tweed nothing to

learn when it came his turn.

Very well, Circumstance furnished the capital, and my temperament told

me what to do with it. Sometimes a temperament is an ass. When that is

the case of the owner of it is an ass, too, and is going to remain

one. Training, experience, association, can temporarily so polish him,

improve him, exalt him that people will think he is a mule, but they

will be mistaken. Artificially he IS a mule, for the time being, but at

bottom he is an ass yet, and will remain one.

By temperament I was the kind of person that DOES things. Does them, and

reflects afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and

without asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all

that time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have

been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and

reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me;

I still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and

reflect afterward. Always violently. When I am reflecting, on these

occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think.

I went by the way of Cincinnati, and down the Ohio and Mississippi.

My idea was to take ship, at New Orleans, for Para. In New Orleans I

inquired, and found there was no ship leaving for Para. Also, that there

never had BEEN one leaving for Para. I reflected. A policeman came and

asked me what I was doing, and I told him. He made me move on, and said

if he caught me reflecting in the public street again he would run me

in.

After a few days I was out of money. Then Circumstance arrived, with

another turning-point of my life--a new link. On my way down, I had made

the acquaintance of a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he

consented. I became a pilot.

By and by Circumstance came again--introducing the Civil War, this

time, in order to push me ahead another stage or two toward the literary

profession. The boats stopped running, my livelihood was gone.

Circumstance came to the rescue with a new turning-point and a fresh

link. My brother was appointed secretary to the new Territory of Nevada,

and he invited me to go with him and help him in his office. I accepted.

In Nevada, Circumstance furnished me the silver fever and I went into

the mines to make a fortune, as I supposed; but that was not the idea.

The idea was to advance me another step toward literature. For amusement

I scribbled things for the Virginia City ENTERPRISE. One isn't a printer

ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature, and

learning--unconsciously at first, consciously later--to discriminate

between the two, within his mental limitations; and meantime he is

unconsciously acquiring what is called a "style." One of my efforts

attracted attention, and the ENTERPRISE sent for me and put me on its

staff.

And so I became a journalist--another link. By and by Circumstance and

the Sacramento UNION sent me to the Sandwich Islands for five or

six months, to write up sugar. I did it; and threw in a good deal of

extraneous matter that hadn't anything to do with sugar. But it was this

extraneous matter that helped me to another link.

It made me notorious, and San Francisco invited me to lecture. Which

I did. And profitably. I had long had a desire to travel and see the

world, and now Circumstance had most kindly and unexpectedly hurled me

upon the platform and furnished me the means. So I joined the "Quaker

City Excursion."

When I returned to America, Circumstance was waiting on the pier--with

the LAST link--the conspicuous, the consummating, the victorious link:

I was asked to WRITE A BOOK, and I did it, and called it THE INNOCENTS

ABROAD. Thus I became at last a member of the literary guild. That was

forty-two years ago, and I have been a member ever since. Leaving the

Rubicon incident away back where it belongs, I can say with truth that

the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles

when I was twelve years old.

III

Now what interests me, as regards these details, is not the details

themselves, but the fact that none of them was foreseen by me, none of

them was planned by me, I was the author of none of them. Circumstance,

working in harness with my temperament, created them all and compelled

them all. I often offered help, and with the best intentions, but it was

rejected--as a rule, uncourteously. I could never plan a thing and get

it to come out the way I planned it. It came out some other way--some

way I had not counted upon.

And so I do not admire the human being--as an intellectual marvel--as

much as I did when I was young, and got him out of books, and did not

know him personally. When I used to read that such and such a general

did a certain brilliant thing, I believed it. Whereas it was not so.

Circumstance did it by help of his temperament. The circumstances would

have failed of effect with a general of another temperament: he might

see the chance, but lose the advantage by being by nature too slow or

too quick or too doubtful. Once General Grant was asked a question about

a matter which had been much debated by the public and the newspapers;

he answered the question without any hesitancy. "General, who planned

the the march through Georgia?" "The enemy!" He added that the enemy

usually makes your plans for you. He meant that the enemy by neglect or

through force of circumstances leaves an opening for you, and you see

your chance and take advantage of it.

Circumstances do the planning for us all, no doubt, by help of our

temperaments. I see no great difference between a man and a watch,

except that the man is conscious and the watch isn't, and the man TRIES

to plan things and the watch doesn't. The watch doesn't wind itself

and doesn't regulate itself--these things are done exteriorly. Outside

influences, outside circumstances, wind the MAN and regulate him. Left

to himself, he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he

would keep would not be valuable. Some rare men are wonderful watches,

with gold case, compensation balance, and all those things, and some

men are only simple and sweet and humble Waterburys. I am a Waterbury. A

Waterbury of that kind, some say.

A nation is only an individual multiplied. It makes plans and

Circumstances comes and upsets them--or enlarges them. Some patriots

throw the tea overboard; some other patriots destroy a Bastille. The

PLANS stop there; then Circumstance comes in, quite unexpectedly, and

turns these modest riots into a revolution.

And there was poor Columbus. He elaborated a deep plan to find a new

route to an old country. Circumstance revised his plan for him, and he

found a new WORLD. And HE gets the credit of it to this day. He hadn't

anything to do with it.

Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of

yours) was the Garden of Eden. It was there that the first link was

forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of me

into the literary guild. Adam's TEMPERAMENT was the first command the

Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only

command Adam would NEVER be able to disobey. It said, "Be weak, be

water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable." The latter command, to

let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself,

but by his TEMPERAMENT--which he did not create and had no authority

over. For the TEMPERAMENT is the man; the thing tricked out with clothes

and named Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more. The law of the tiger's

temperament is, Thou shalt kill; the law of the sheep's temperament is

Thou shalt not kill. To issue later commands requiring the tiger to let

the fat stranger alone, and requiring the sheep to imbue its hands in

the blood of the lion is not worth while, for those commands CAN'T be

obeyed. They would invite to violations of the law of TEMPERAMENT, which

is supreme, and take precedence of all other authorities. I cannot help

feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve. That is, in their temperaments.

Not in THEM, poor helpless young creatures--afflicted with temperaments

made out of butter; which butter was commanded to get into contact with

fire and BE MELTED. What I cannot help wishing is, that Adam had been

postponed, and Martin Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place--that

splendid pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of

asbestos. By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell fire could Satan

have beguiled THEM to eat the apple. There would have been results!

Indeed, yes. The apple would be intact today; there would be no human

race; there would be no YOU; there would be no ME. And the old, old

creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild

would have been defeated.

HOW TO MAKE HISTORY DATES STICK

These chapters are for children, and I shall try to make the words large

enough to command respect. In the hope that you are listening, and that

you have confidence in me, I will proceed. Dates are difficult things to

acquire; and after they are acquired it is difficult to keep them in

the head. But they are very valuable. They are like the cattle-pens of a

ranch--they shut in the several brands of historical cattle, each within

its own fence, and keep them from getting mixed together. Dates are hard

to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously

unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold, they form no

pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures are the

thing. Pictures can make dates stick. They can make nearly anything

stick--particularly IF YOU MAKE THE PICTURES YOURSELF. Indeed, that

is the great point--make the pictures YOURSELF. I know about this from

experience. Thirty years ago I was delivering a memorized lecture every

night, and every night I had to help myself with a page of notes to

keep from getting myself mixed. The notes consisted of beginnings of

sentences, and were eleven in number, and they ran something like this:

"IN THAT REGION THE WEATHER--"

"AT THAT TIME IT WAS A CUSTOM--"

"BUT IN CALIFORNIA ONE NEVER HEARD--"

Eleven of them. They initialed the brief divisions of the lecture and

protected me against skipping. But they all looked about alike on the

page; they formed no picture; I had them by heart, but I could never

with certainty remember the order of their succession; therefore I

always had to keep those notes by me and look at them every little

while. Once I mislaid them; you will not be able to imagine the terrors

of that evening. I now saw that I must invent some other protection. So

I got ten of the initial letters by heart in their proper order--I,

A, B, and so on--and I went on the platform the next night with these

marked in ink on my ten finger-nails. But it didn't answer. I kept track

of the figures for a while; then I lost it, and after that I was never

quite sure which finger I had used last. I couldn't lick off a letter

after using it, for while that would have made success certain it also

would have provoked too much curiosity. There was curiosity enough

without that. To the audience I seemed more interested in my fingernails

than I was in my subject; one or two persons asked me afterward what was

the matter with my hands.

It was now that the idea of pictures occurred to me; then my troubles

passed away. In two minutes I made six pictures with a pen, and they did

the work of the eleven catch-sentences, and did it perfectly. I threw

the pictures away as soon as they were made, for I was sure I could shut

my eyes and see them any time. That was a quarter of a century ago; the

lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years ago, but I would

rewrite it from the pictures--for they remain. Here are three of them:

(Fig. 1).

The first one is a haystack--below it a rattlesnake--and it told me

where to begin to talk ranch-life in Carson Valley. The second one told

me where to begin the talk about a strange and violent wind that used

to burst upon Carson City from the Sierra Nevadas every afternoon at two

o'clock and try to blow the town away. The third picture, as you easily

perceive, is lightning; its duty was to remind me when it was time

to begin to talk about San Francisco weather, where there IS no

lightning--nor thunder, either--and it never failed me.

I will give you a valuable hint. When a man is making a speech and you

are to follow him don't jot down notes to speak from, jot down PICTURES.

It is awkward and embarrassing to have to keep referring to notes; and

besides it breaks up your speech and makes it ragged and non-coherent;

but you can tear up your pictures as soon as you have made them--they

will stay fresh and strong in your memory in the order and sequence in

which you scratched them down. And many will admire to see what a good

memory you are furnished with, when perhaps your memory is not any

better than mine.

Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the governess

was trying to hammer some primer histories into their heads. Part of

this fun--if you like to call it that--consisted in the memorizing of

the accession dates of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled England

from the Conqueror down. These little people found it a bitter, hard

contract. It was all dates, and all looked alike, and they wouldn't

stick. Day after day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and still the

kings held the fort; the children couldn't conquer any six of them.

With my lecture experience in mind I was aware that I could invent some

way out of the trouble with pictures, but I hoped a way could be found

which would let them romp in the open air while they learned the kings.

I found it, and they mastered all the monarchs in a day or two.

The idea was to make them SEE the reigns with their eyes; that would be

a large help. We were at the farm then. From the house-porch the grounds

sloped gradually down to the lower fence and rose on the right to the

high ground where my small work-den stood. A carriage-road wound through

the grounds and up the hill. I staked it out with the English monarchs,

beginning with the Conqueror, and you could stand on the porch and

clearly see every reign and its length, from the Conquest down to

Victoria, then in the forty-sixth year of her reign--EIGHT HUNDRED AND

SEVENTEEN YEARS OF English history under your eye at once!

English history was an unusually live topic in America just then. The

world had suddenly realized that while it was not noticing the Queen

had passed Henry VIII., passed Henry VI. and Elizabeth, and gaining

in length every day. Her reign had entered the list of the long ones;

everybody was interested now--it was watching a race. Would she pass

the long Edward? There was a possibility of it. Would she pass the

long Henry? Doubtful, most people said. The long George? Impossible!

Everybody said it. But we have lived to see her leave him two years

behind.

I measured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing a year, and

at the beginning and end of each reign I drove a three-foot white-pine

stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote the name and dates on it.

Abreast the middle of the porch-front stood a great granite flower-vase

overflowing with a cataract of bright-yellow flowers--I can't think of

their name. The vase of William the Conqueror. We put his name on it

and his accession date, 1066. We started from that and measured off

twenty-one feet of the road, and drove William Rufus's state; then

thirteen feet and drove the first Henry's stake; then thirty-five feet

and drove Stephen's; then nineteen feet, which brought us just past

the summer-house on the left; then we staked out thirty-five, ten, and

seventeen for the second Henry and Richard and John; turned the curve

and entered upon just what was needed for Henry III.--a level, straight

stretch of fifty-six feet of road without a crinkle in it. And it lay

exactly in front of the house, in the middle of the grounds. There

couldn't have been a better place for that long reign; you could stand

on the porch and see those two wide-apart stakes almost with your eyes

shut. (Fig. 2.)

That isn't the shape of the road--I have bunched it up like that to save

room. The road had some great curves in it, but their gradual sweep was

such that they were no mar to history. No, in our road one could tell

at a glance who was who by the size of the vacancy between stakes--with

LOCALITY to help, of course.

Although I am away off here in a Swedish village (1) and those stakes

did not stand till the snow came, I can see them today as plainly as

ever; and whenever I think of an English monarch his stakes rise before

me of their own accord and I notice the large or small space which he

takes up on our road. Are your kings spaced off in your mind? When you

think of Richard III. and of James II. do the durations of their reigns

seem about alike to you? It isn't so to me; I always notice that there's

a foot's difference. When you think of Henry III. do you see a great

long stretch of straight road? I do; and just at the end where it joins

on to Edward I. I always see a small pear-bush with its green fruit

hanging down. When I think of the Commonwealth I see a shady little

group of these small saplings which we called the oak parlor; when

I think of George III. I see him stretching up the hill, part of him

occupied by a flight of stone steps; and I can locate Stephen to an inch

when he comes into my mind, for he just filled the stretch which went

by the summer-house. Victoria's reign reached almost to my study door on

the first little summit; there's sixteen feet to be added now; I believe

that that would carry it to a big pine-tree that was shattered by some

lightning one summer when it was trying to hit me.

We got a good deal of fun out of the history road; and exercise, too. We

trotted the course from the conqueror to the study, the children calling

out the names, dates, and length of reigns as we passed the stakes,

going a good gait along the long reigns, but slowing down when we

came upon people like Mary and Edward VI., and the short Stuart and

Plantagenet, to give time to get in the statistics. I offered prizes,

too--apples. I threw one as far as I could send it, and the child that

first shouted the reign it fell in got the apple.

The children were encouraged to stop locating things as being "over by

the arbor," or "in the oak parlor," or "up at the stone steps," and say

instead that the things were in Stephen, or in the Commonwealth, or in

George III. They got the habit without trouble. To have the long road

mapped out with such exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the

habit of leaving books and other articles lying around everywhere, and

had not previously been able to definitely name the place, and so had

often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and failure;

but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send the children.

Next I thought I would measure off the French reigns, and peg them

alongside the English ones, so that we could always have contemporaneous

French history under our eyes as we went our English rounds. We pegged

them down to the Hundred Years' War, then threw the idea aside, I do not

now remember why. After that we made the English pegs fence in European

and American history as well as English, and that answered very well.

English and alien poets, statesmen, artists, heroes, battles, plagues,

cataclysms, revolutions--we shoveled them all into the English fences

according to their dates. Do you understand? We gave Washington's birth

to George II.'s pegs and his death to George III.'s; George II. got

the Lisbon earthquake and George III. the Declaration of Independence.

Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Savonarola, Joan of Arc, the French

Revolution, the Edict of Nantes, Clive, Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey,

Patay, Cowpens, Saratoga, the Battle of the Boyne, the invention of the

logarithms, the microscope, the steam-engine, the telegraph--anything

and everything all over the world--we dumped it all in among the English

pegs according to it date and regardless of its nationality.

If the road-pegging scheme had not succeeded I should have lodged the

kings in the children's heads by means of pictures--that is, I should

have tried. It might have failed, for the pictures could only be

effective WHEN MADE BY THE PUPIL; not the master, for it is the work

put upon the drawing that makes the drawing stay in the memory, and my

children were too little to make drawings at that time. And, besides,

they had no talent for art, which is strange, for in other ways they are

like me.

But I will develop the picture plan now, hoping that you will be able

to use it. It will come good for indoors when the weather is bad and one

cannot go outside and peg a road. Let us imagine that the kings are a

procession, and that they have come out of the Ark and down Ararat for

exercise and are now starting back again up the zigzag road. This will

bring several of them into view at once, and each zigzag will represent

the length of a king's reign.

And so on. You will have plenty of space, for by my project you will use

the parlor wall. You do not mark on the wall; that would cause trouble.

You only attach bits of paper to it with pins or thumb-tacks. These will

leave no mark.

Take your pen now, and twenty-one pieces of white paper, each two inches

square, and we will do the twenty-one years of the Conqueror's reign.

On each square draw a picture of a whale and write the dates and term of

service. We choose the whale for several reasons: its name and William's

begin with the same letter; it is the biggest fish that swims, and

William is the most conspicuous figure in English history in the way of

a landmark; finally, a whale is about the easiest thing to draw. By

the time you have drawn twenty-one wales and written "William

I.--1066-1087--twenty-one years" twenty-one times, those details will be

your property; you cannot dislodge them from your memory with anything

but dynamite. I will make a sample for you to copy: (Fig. 3).

I have got his chin up too high, but that is no matter; he is looking

for Harold. It may be that a whale hasn't that fin up there on his back,

but I do not remember; and so, since there is a doubt, it is best to err

on the safe side. He looks better, anyway, than he would without it.

Be very careful and ATTENTIVE while you are drawing your first whale

from my sample and writing the word and figures under it, so that you

will not need to copy the sample any more. Compare your copy with the

sample; examine closely; if you find you have got everything right and

can shut your eyes and see the picture and call the words and figures,

then turn the sample and copy upside down and make the next copy from

memory; and also the next and next, and so on, always drawing and

writing from memory until you have finished the whole twenty-one. This

will take you twenty minutes, or thirty, and by that time you will find

that you can make a whale in less time than an unpracticed person can

make a sardine; also, up to the time you die you will always be able to

furnish William's dates to any ignorant person that inquires after them.

You will now take thirteen pieces of BLUE paper, each two inches square,

and do William II. (Fig. 4.)

Make him spout his water forward instead of backward; also make him

small, and stick a harpoon in him and give him that sick look in the

eye. Otherwise you might seem to be continuing the other William, and

that would be confusing and a damage. It is quite right to make him

small; he was only about a No. 11 whale, or along there somewhere;

there wasn't room in him for his father's great spirit. The barb of that

harpoon ought not to show like that, because it is down inside the whale

and ought to be out of sight, but it cannot be helped; if the barb were

removed people would think some one had stuck a whip-stock into the

whale. It is best to leave the barb the way it is, then every one will

know it is a harpoon and attending to business. Remember--draw from the

copy only once; make your other twelve and the inscription from memory.

Now the truth is that whenever you have copied a picture and its

inscription once from my sample and two or three times from memory the

details will stay with you and be hard to forget. After that, if you

like, you may make merely the whale's HEAD and WATER-SPOUT for the

Conqueror till you end his reign, each time SAYING the inscription in

place of writing it; and in the case of William II. make the HARPOON

alone, and say over the inscription each time you do it. You see, it

will take nearly twice as long to do the first set as it will to do

the second, and that will give you a marked sense of the difference in

length of the two reigns.

Next do Henry I. on thirty-five squares of RED paper. (Fig. 5.)

That is a hen, and suggests Henry by furnishing the first syllable. When

you have repeated the hen and the inscription until you are perfectly

sure of them, draw merely the hen's head the rest of the thirty-five

times, saying over the inscription each time. Thus: (Fig. 6).

You begin to understand how how this procession is going to look when

it is on the wall. First there will be the Conqueror's twenty-one whales

and water-spouts, the twenty-one white squares joined to one another and

making a white stripe three and one-half feet long; the thirteen blue

squares of William II. will be joined to that--a blue stripe two feet,

two inches long, followed by Henry's red stripe five feet, ten inches

long, and so on. The colored divisions will smartly show to the eye the

difference in the length of the reigns and impress the proportions on

the memory and the understanding. (Fig. 7.)

Stephen of Blois comes next. He requires nineteen two-inch squares of

YELLOW paper. (Fig. 8.)

That is a steer. The sound suggests the beginning of Stephen's name. I

choose it for that reason. I can make a better steer than that when I

am not excited. But this one will do. It is a good-enough steer for

history. The tail is defective, but it only wants straightening out.

Next comes Henry II. Give him thirty-five squares of RED paper. These

hens must face west, like the former ones. (Fig. 9.)

This hen differs from the other one. He is on his way to inquire what

has been happening in Canterbury.

How we arrive at Richard I., called Richard of the Lion-heart because

he was a brave fighter and was never so contented as when he was leading

crusades in Palestine and neglecting his affairs at home. Give him ten

squares of WHITE paper. (Fig. 10).

That is a lion. His office is to remind you of the lion-hearted Richard.

There is something the matter with his legs, but I do not quite know

what it is, they do not seem right. I think the hind ones are the most

unsatisfactory; the front ones are well enough, though it would be

better if they were rights and lefts.

Next comes King John, and he was a poor circumstance. He was called

Lackland. He gave his realm to the Pope. Let him have seventeen squares

of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 11.)

That creature is a jamboree. It looks like a trademark, but that is only

an accident and not intentional. It is prehistoric and extinct. It used

to roam the earth in the Old Silurian times, and lay eggs and catch fish

and climb trees and live on fossils; for it was of a mixed breed, which

was the fashion then. It was very fierce, and the Old Silurians

were afraid of it, but this is a tame one. Physically it has no

representative now, but its mind has been transmitted. First I drew it

sitting down, but have turned it the other way now because I think it

looks more attractive and spirited when one end of it is galloping. I

love to think that in this attitude it gives us a pleasant idea of

John coming all in a happy excitement to see what the barons have been

arranging for him at Runnymede, while the other one gives us an idea of

him sitting down to wring his hands and grieve over it.

We now come to Henry III.; RED squares again, of course--fifty-six of

them. We must make all the Henrys the same color; it will make their

long reigns show up handsomely on the wall. Among all the eight Henrys

there were but two short ones. A lucky name, as far as longevity goes.

The reigns of six of the Henrys cover 227 years. It might have been well

to name all the royal princes Henry, but this was overlooked until it

was too late. (Fig. 12.)

This is the best one yet. He is on his way (1265) to have a look at the

first House of Commons in English history. It was a monumental event,

the situation in the House, and was the second great liberty landmark

which the century had set up. I have made Henry looking glad, but this

was not intentional.

Edward I. comes next; LIGHT-BROWN paper, thirty-five squares. (Fig. 13.)

That is an editor. He is trying to think of a word. He props his feet on

a chair, which is the editor's way; then he can think better. I do not

care much for this one; his ears are not alike; still, editor suggests

the sound of Edward, and he will do. I could make him better if I had

a model, but I made this one from memory. But is no particular matter;

they all look alike, anyway. They are conceited and troublesome, and

don't pay enough. Edward was the first really English king that had yet

occupied the throne. The editor in the picture probably looks just as

Edward looked when it was first borne in upon him that this was so. His

whole attitude expressed gratification and pride mixed with stupefaction

and astonishment.

Edward II. now; twenty BLUE squares. (Fig. 14.)

Another editor. That thing behind his ear is his pencil. Whenever he

finds a bright thing in your manuscript he strikes it out with that.

That does him good, and makes him smile and show his teeth, the way he

is doing in the picture. This one has just been striking out a smart

thing, and now he is sitting there with his thumbs in his vest-holes,

gloating. They are full of envy and malice, editors are. This picture

will serve to remind you that Edward II. was the first English king who

was DEPOSED. Upon demand, he signed his deposition himself. He had found

kingship a most aggravating and disagreeable occupation, and you can

see by the look of him that he is glad he resigned. He has put his blue

pencil up for good now. He had struck out many a good thing with it in

his time.

Edward III. next; fifty RED squares. (Fig. 15.)

This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his

tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for

breakfast. This one's arms are put on wrong. I did not notice it at

first, but I see it now. Somehow he has got his right arm on his left

shoulder, and his left arm on his right shoulder, and this shows us

the back of his hands in both instances. It makes him left-handed all

around, which is a thing which has never happened before, except perhaps

in a museum. That is the way with art, when it is not acquired but born

to you: you start in to make some simple little thing, not suspecting

that your genius is beginning to work and swell and strain in secret,

and all of a sudden there is a convulsion and you fetch out something

astonishing. This is called inspiration. It is an accident; you never

know when it is coming. I might have tried as much as a year to think

of such a strange thing as an all-around left-handed man and I could not

have done it, for the more you try to think of an unthinkable thing the

more it eludes you; but it can't elude inspiration; you have only

to bait with inspiration and you will get it every time. Look at

Botticelli's "Spring." Those snaky women were unthinkable, but

inspiration secured them for us, thanks to goodness. It is too late to

reorganize this editor-critic now; we will leave him as he is. He will

serve to remind us.

Richard II. next; twenty-two WHITE squares. (Fig. 16.)

We use the lion again because this is another Richard. Like Edward II.,

he was DEPOSED. He is taking a last sad look at his crown before they

take it away. There was not room enough and I have made it too small;

but it never fitted him, anyway.

Now we turn the corner of the century with a new line of monarchs--the

Lancastrian kings.

Henry IV.; fourteen squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 17.)

This hen has laid the egg of a new dynasty and realizes the magnitude

of the event. She is giving notice in the usual way. You notice I am

improving in the construction of hens. At first I made them too

much like other animals, but this one is orthodox. I mention this

to encourage you. You will find that the more you practice the more

accurate you will become. I could always draw animals, but before I was

educated I could not tell what kind they were when I got them done, but

now I can. Keep up your courage; it will be the same with you, although

you may not think it. This Henry died the year after Joan of Arc was

born.

Henry V.; nine BLUE squares. (Fig. 18)

There you see him lost in meditation over the monument which records the

amazing figures of the battle of Agincourt. French history says 20,000

Englishmen routed 80,000 Frenchmen there; and English historians say

that the French loss, in killed and wounded, was 60,000.

Henry VI.; thirty-nine RED squares. (Fig. 19)

This is poor Henry VI., who reigned long and scored many misfortunes and

humiliations. Also two great disasters: he lost France to Joan of Arc

and he lost the throne and ended the dynasty which Henry IV. had started

in business with such good prospects. In the picture we see him sad and

weary and downcast, with the scepter falling from his nerveless grasp.

It is a pathetic quenching of a sun which had risen in such splendor.

Edward IV.; twenty-two LIGHT-BROWN squares. (Fig. 20.)

That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs

crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies wear,

so that he can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than

they are and get bribes for it and become wealthy. That flower which he

is wearing in his buttonhole is a rose--a white rose, a York rose--and

will serve to remind us of the War of the Roses, and that the white one

was the winning color when Edward got the throne and dispossessed the

Lancastrian dynasty.

Edward V.; one-third of a BLACK square. (Fig. 21.)

His uncle Richard had him murdered in the tower. When you get the

reigns displayed upon the wall this one will be conspicuous and easily

remembered. It is the shortest one in English history except Lady Jane

Grey's, which was only nine days. She is never officially recognized

as a monarch of England, but if you or I should ever occupy a throne we

should like to have proper notice taken of it; and it would be only fair

and right, too, particularly if we gained nothing by it and lost our

lives besides.

Richard III.; two WHITE squares. (Fig. 22.)

That is not a very good lion, but Richard was not a very good king. You

would think that this lion has two heads, but that is not so; one is

only a shadow. There would be shadows for the rest of him, but there was

not light enough to go round, it being a dull day, with only fleeting

sun-glimpses now and then. Richard had a humped back and a hard heart,

and fell at the battle of Bosworth. I do not know the name of that

flower in the pot, but we will use it as Richard's trade-mark, for it is

said that it grows in only one place in the world--Bosworth Field--and

tradition says it never grew there until Richard's royal blood warmed

its hidden seed to life and made it grow.

Henry VII.; twenty-four BLUE squares. (Fig. 23.)

Henry VII. had no liking for wars and turbulence; he preferred peace and

quiet and the general prosperity which such conditions create. He liked

to sit on that kind of eggs on his own private account as well as the

nation's, and hatch them out and count up their result. When he died he

left his heir 2,000,000 pounds, which was a most unusual fortune for a

king to possess in those days. Columbus's great achievement gave him the

discovery-fever, and he sent Sebastian Cabot to the New World to search

out some foreign territory for England. That is Cabot's ship up there

in the corner. This was the first time that England went far abroad to

enlarge her estate--but not the last.

Henry VIII.; thirty-eight RED squares. (Fig. 24.)

That is Henry VIII. suppressing a monastery in his arrogant fashion.

Edward VI.; six squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 25.)

He is the last Edward to date. It is indicated by that thing over his

head, which is a LAST--shoemaker's last.

Mary; five squares of BLACK paper. (Fig. 26.)

The picture represents a burning martyr. He is in back of the smoke.

The first three letters of Mary's name and the first three of the word

martyr are the same. Martyrdom was going out in her day and martyrs were

becoming scarcer, but she made several. For this reason she is sometimes

called Bloody Mary.

This brings us to the reign of Elizabeth, after passing through a period

of nearly five hundred years of England's history--492 to be exact. I

think you may now be trusted to go the rest of the way without further

lessons in art or inspirations in the matter of ideas. You have the

scheme now, and something in the ruler's name or career will suggest the

pictorial symbol. The effort of inventing such things will not only help

your memory, but will develop originality in art. See what it has

done for me. If you do not find the parlor wall big enough for all

of England's history, continue it into the dining-room and into other

rooms. This will make the walls interesting and instructive and really

worth something instead of being just flat things to hold the house

together.

1.  Summer of 1899.

THE MEMORABLE ASSASSINATION

Note.--The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva, September

10, 1898, occurred during Mark Twain's Austrian residence. The news came

to him at Kaltenleutgeben, a summer resort a little way out of Vienna.

To his friend, the Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, he wrote:

"That good and unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a madman,

and I am living in the midst of world-history again. The Queen's Jubilee

last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, and now this

murder, which will still be talked of and described and painted a

thousand a thousand years from now. To have a personal friend of the

wearer of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the

evening and say, in a voice broken with tears, 'My God! the Empress is

murdered,' and fly toward her home before we can utter a question--why,

it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it and

personally interested; it is as if your neighbor, Antony, should come

flying and say, 'Caesar is butchered--the head of the world is fallen!'

"Of course there is no talk but of this. The mourning is universal and

genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being

draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday,

when the funeral cortege marches."

He was strongly moved by the tragedy, impelled to write concerning

it. He prepared the article which follows, but did not offer it for

publication, perhaps feeling that his own close association with the

court circles at the moment prohibited this personal utterance. There

appears no such reason for withholding its publication now.

A. B. P.

The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing and

tremendous the event becomes. The destruction of a city is a large

event, but it is one which repeats itself several times in a thousand

years; the destruction of a third part of a nation by plague and famine

is a large event, but it has happened several times in history; the

murder of a king is a large event, but it has been frequent.

The murder of an empress is the largest of all events. One must go back

about two thousand years to find an instance to put with this one. The

oldest family of unchallenged descent in Christendom lives in Rome and

traces its line back seventeen hundred years, but no member of it has

been present in the earth when an empress was murdered, until now. Many

a time during these seventeen centuries members of that family have

been startled with the news of extraordinary events--the destruction

of cities, the fall of thrones, the murder of kings, the wreck of

dynasties, the extinction of religions, the birth of new systems of

government; and their descendants have been by to hear of it and talk

about it when all these things were repeated once, twice, or a dozen

times--but to even that family has come news at last which is not staled

by use, has no duplicates in the long reach of its memory.

It is an event which confers a curious distinction upon every individual

now living in the world: he has stood alive and breathing in the

presence of an event such as has not fallen within the experience of any

traceable or untraceable ancestor of his for twenty centuries, and it

is not likely to fall within the experience of any descendant of his for

twenty more.

Time has made some great changes since the Roman days. The murder of

an empress then--even the assassination of Caesar himself--could not

electrify the world as this murder has electrified it. For one reason,

there was then not much of a world to electrify; it was a small world,

as to known bulk, and it had rather a thin population, besides; and for

another reason, the news traveled so slowly that its tremendous initial

thrill wasted away, week by week and month by month, on the journey, and

by the time it reached the remoter regions there was but little of it

left. It was no longer a fresh event, it was a thing of the far past;

it was not properly news, it was history. But the world is enormous

now, and prodigiously populated--that is one change; and another is the

lightning swiftness of the flight of tidings, good and bad. "The Empress

is murdered!" When those amazing words struck upon my ear in this

Austrian village last Saturday, three hours after the disaster, I knew

that it was already old news in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, San

Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras,

Calcutta, and that the entire globe with a single voice, was cursing

the perpetrator of it. Since the telegraph first began to stretch itself

wider and wider about the earth, larger and increasingly larger areas of

the world have, as time went on, received simultaneously the shock of

a great calamity; but this is the first time in history that the entire

surface of the globe has been swept in a single instant with the thrill

of so gigantic an event.

And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world this

spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the answer. He is at the

bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates of degree and

value go: a soiled and patched young loafer, without gifts, without

talents, without education, without morals, without character, without

any born charm or any acquired one that wins or beguiles or attracts;

without a single grace of mind or heart or hand that any tramp or

prostitute could envy him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an

incompetent stone-cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy,

offensive, empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking,

human polecat. And it was within the privileges and powers of this

sarcasm upon the human race to reach up--up--up--and strike from its far

summit in the social skies the world's accepted ideal of Glory and Might

and Splendor and Sacredness! It realizes to us what sorry shows and

shadows we are. Without our clothes and our pedestals we are poor things

and much of a size; our dignities are not real, our pomps are shams. At

our best and stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and

believe, but only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.

And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often

forget--or try to: that no man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in

one way or another all men are mad. Many are mad for money. When this

madness is in a mild form it is harmless and the man passes for sane;

but when it develops powerfully and takes possession of the man, it can

make him cheat, rob, and kill; and when he has got his fortune and lost

it again it can land him in the asylum or the suicide's coffin. Love

is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast; it can grow to a frenzy

of despair and make an otherwise sane and highly gifted prince, like

Rudolph, throw away the crown of an empire and snuff out his own life.

All the whole list of desires, predilections, aversions, ambitions,

passions, cares, griefs, regrets, remorses, are incipient madness, and

ready to grow, spread, and consume, when the occasion comes. There are

no healthy minds, and nothing saves any man but accident--the accident

of not having his malady put to the supreme test.

One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the

pleasure derived from being noticed. Perhaps it is not merely common,

but universal. In its mildest form it doubtless is universal. Every

child is pleased at being noticed; many intolerable children put in

their whole time in distressing and idiotic effort to attract the

attention of visitors; boys are always "showing off"; apparently all

men and women are glad and grateful when they find that they have done

a thing which has lifted them for a moment out of obscurity and caused

wondering talk. This common madness can develop, by nurture, into a

hunger for notoriety in one, for fame in another. It is this madness

for being noticed and talked about which has invented kingship and the

thousand other dignities, and tricked them out with pretty and showy

fineries; it has made kings pick one another's pockets, scramble for one

another's crowns and estates, slaughter one another's subjects; it has

raised up prize-fighters, and poets, and villages mayors, and little

and big politicians, and big and little charity-founders, and bicycle

champions, and banditti chiefs, and frontier desperadoes, and Napoleons.

Anything to get notoriety; anything to set the village, or the township,

or the city, or the State, or the nation, or the planet shouting,

"Look--there he goes--that is the man!" And in five minutes' time, at no

cost of brain, or labor, or genius this mangy Italian tramp has beaten

them all, transcended them all, outstripped them all, for in time their

names will perish; but by the friendly help of the insane newspapers and

courts and kings and historians, his is safe and live and thunder in the

world all down the ages as long as human speech shall endure! Oh, if it

were not so tragic how ludicrous it would be!

She was so blameless, the Empress; and so beautiful, in mind and heart,

in person and spirit; and whether with a crown upon her head or without

it and nameless, a grace to the human race, and almost a justification

of its creation; WOULD be, indeed, but that the animal that struck her

down re-establishes the doubt.

In her character was every quality that in woman invites and engages

respect, esteem, affection, and homage. Her tastes, her instincts, and

her aspirations were all high and fine and all her life her heart and

brain were busy with activities of a noble sort. She had had bitter

griefs, but they did not sour her spirit, and she had had the highest

honors in the world's gift, but she went her simple way unspoiled. She

knew all ranks, and won them all, and made them her friends. An English

fisherman's wife said, "When a body was in trouble she didn't send

her help, she brought it herself." Crowns have adorned others, but she

adorned her crowns.

It was a swift celebrity the assassin achieved. And it is marked by some

curious contrasts. At noon last, Saturday there was no one in the

world who would have considered acquaintanceship with him a thing

worth claiming or mentioning; no one would have been vain of such an

acquaintanceship; the humblest honest boot-black would not have valued

the fact that he had met him or seen him at some time or other; he was

sunk in abysmal obscurity, he was away beneath the notice of the bottom

grades of officialdom. Three hours later he was the one subject

of conversation in the world, the gilded generals and admirals and

governors were discussing him, all the kings and queens and emperors had

put aside their other interests to talk about him. And wherever there

was a man, at the summit of the world or the bottom of it, who by chance

had at some time or other come across that creature, he remembered it

with a secret satisfaction, and MENTIONED it--for it was a distinction,

now! It brings human dignity pretty low, and for a moment the thing is

not quite realizable--but it is perfectly true. If there is a king who

can remember, now, that he once saw that creature in a time past, he has

let that fact out, in a more or less studiedly casual and indifferent

way, some dozens of times during the past week. For a king is merely

human; the inside of him is exactly like the inside of any other person;

and it is human to find satisfaction in being in a kind of personal

way connected with amazing events. We are all privately vain of such a

thing; we are all alike; a king is a king by accident; the reason the

rest of us are not kings is merely due to another accident; we are all

made out of the same clay, and it is a sufficient poor quality.

Below the kings, these remarks are in the air these days; I know it well

as if I were hearing them:

THE COMMANDER: "He was in my army."

THE GENERAL: "He was in my corps."

THE COLONEL: "He was in my regiment. A brute. I remember him well."

THE CAPTAIN: "He was in my company. A troublesome scoundrel. I remember him well."

THE SERGEANT: "Did I know him? As well as I know you. Why, every morning I used to--" etc., etc.; a glad, long story, told to devouring ears.

THE LANDLADY: "Many's the time he boarded with me. I can show you his

very room, and the very bed he slept in. And the charcoal mark there

on the wall--he made that. My little Johnny saw him do it with his own

eyes. Didn't you, Johnny?"

It is easy to see, by the papers, that the magistrate and the constables

and the jailer treasure up the assassin's daily remarks and doings

as precious things, and as wallowing this week in seas of blissful

distinction. The interviewer, too; he tried to let on that he is not

vain of his privilege of contact with this man whom few others are

allowed to gaze upon, but he is human, like the rest, and can no more

keep his vanity corked in than could you or I.

Some think that this murder is a frenzied revolt against the criminal

militarism which is impoverishing Europe and driving the starving poor

mad. That has many crimes to answer for, but not this one, I think. One

may not attribute to this man a generous indignation against the wrongs

done the poor; one may not dignify him with a generous impulse of any

kind. When he saw his photograph and said, "I shall be celebrated,"

he laid bare the impulse that prompted him. It was a mere hunger for

notoriety. There is another confessed case of the kind which is as old

as history--the burning of the temple of Ephesus.

Among the inadequate attempts to account for the assassination we must

concede high rank to the many which have described it as a "peculiarly

brutal crime" and then added that it was "ordained from above." I think

this verdict will not be popular "above." If the deed was ordained from

above, there is no rational way of making this prisoner even partially

responsible for it, and the Genevan court cannot condemn him without

manifestly committing a crime. Logic is logic, and by disregarding

its laws even the most pious and showy theologian may be beguiled into

preferring charges which should not be ventured upon except in the

shelter of plenty of lightning-rods.

I witnessed the funeral procession, in company with friends, from the

windows of the Krantz, Vienna's sumptuous new hotel. We came into town

in the middle of the forenoon, and I went on foot from the station.

Black flags hung down from all the houses; the aspects were Sunday-like;

the crowds on the sidewalks were quiet and moved slowly; very few people

were smoking; many ladies wore deep mourning, gentlemen were in black

as a rule; carriages were speeding in all directions, with footmen and

coachmen in black clothes and wearing black cocked hats; the shops were

closed; in many windows were pictures of the Empress: as a beautiful

young bride of seventeen; as a serene and majestic lady with added

years; and finally in deep black and without ornaments--the costume she

always wore after the tragic death of her son nine years ago, for her

heart broke then, and life lost almost all its value for her. The people

stood grouped before these pictures, and now and then one saw women and

girls turn away wiping the tears from their eyes.

In front of the Krantz is an open square; over the way was the church

where the funeral services would be held. It is small and old and

severely plain, plastered outside and whitewashed or painted, and with

no ornament but a statue of a monk in a niche over the door, and above

that a small black flag. But in its crypt lie several of the great dead

of the House of Habsburg, among them Maria Theresa and Napoleon's son,

the Duke of Reichstadt. Hereabouts was a Roman camp, once, and in it the

Emperor Marcus Aurelius died a thousand years before the first Habsburg

ruled in Vienna, which was six hundred years ago and more.

The little church is packed in among great modern stores and houses,

and the windows of them were full of people. Behind the vast plate-glass

windows of the upper floors of the house on the corner one glimpsed

terraced masses of fine-clothed men and women, dim and shimmery, like

people under water. Under us the square was noiseless, but it was full

of citizens; officials in fine uniforms were flitting about on errands,

and in a doorstep sat a figure in the uttermost raggedness of poverty,

the feet bare, the head bent humbly down; a youth of eighteen or twenty,

he was, and through the field-glass one could see that he was tearing

apart and munching riffraff that he had gathered somewhere. Blazing

uniforms flashed by him, making a sparkling contrast with his drooping

ruin of moldy rags, but he took not notice; he was not there to grieve

for a nation's disaster; he had his own cares, and deeper. From two

directions two long files of infantry came plowing through the pack and

press in silence; there was a low, crisp order and the crowd vanished,

the square save the sidewalks was empty, the private mourner was gone.

Another order, the soldiers fell apart and enclosed the square in a

double-ranked human fence. It was all so swift, noiseless, exact--like a

beautifully ordered machine.

It was noon, now. Two hours of stillness and waiting followed. Then

carriages began to flow past and deliver the two and three hundred court

personages and high nobilities privileged to enter the church. Then the

square filled up; not with civilians, but with army and navy officers in

showy and beautiful uniforms. They filled it compactly, leaving only a

narrow carriage path in front of the church, but there was no civilian

among them. And it was better so; dull clothes would have marred the

radiant spectacle. In the jam in front of the church, on its steps, and

on the sidewalk was a bunch of uniforms which made a blazing splotch

of color--intense red, gold, and white--which dimmed the brilliancies

around them; and opposite them on the other side of the path was a bunch

of cascaded bright-green plumes above pale-blue shoulders which made

another splotch of splendor emphatic and conspicuous in its glowing

surroundings. It was a sea of flashing color all about, but these two

groups were the high notes. The green plumes were worn by forty or fifty

Austrian generals, the group opposite them were chiefly Knights of Malta

and knights of a German order. The mass of heads in the square were

covered by gilt helmets and by military caps roofed with a mirror-like

gaze, and the movements of the wearers caused these things to catch the

sun-rays, and the effect was fine to see--the square was like a garden

of richly colored flowers with a multitude of blinding and flashing

little suns distributed over it.

Think of it--it was by command of that Italian loafer yonder on his

imperial throne in the Geneva prison that this splendid multitude was

assembled there; and the kings and emperors that were entering the

church from a side street were there by his will. It is so strange, so

unrealizable.

At three o'clock the carriages were still streaming by in single

file. At three-five a cardinal arrives with his attendants; later some

bishops; then a number of archdeacons--all in striking colors that add

to the show. At three-ten a procession of priests passed along, with

crucifix. Another one, presently; after an interval, two more; at

three-fifty another one--very long, with many crosses, gold-embroidered

robes, and much white lace; also great pictured banners, at intervals,

receding into the distance.

A hum of tolling bells makes itself heard, but not sharply. At

three-fifty-eight a waiting interval. Presently a long procession of

gentlemen in evening dress comes in sight and approaches until it is

near to the square, then falls back against the wall of soldiers at the

sidewalk, and the white shirt-fronts show like snowflakes and are very

conspicuous where so much warm color is all about.

A waiting pause. At four-twelve the head of the funeral procession comes

into view at last. First, a body of cavalry, four abreast, to widen the

path. Next, a great body of lancers, in blue, with gilt helmets. Next,

three six-horse mourning-coaches; outriders and coachmen in black, with

cocked hats and white wigs. Next, troops in splendid uniforms, red,

gold, and white, exceedingly showy.

Now the multitude uncover. The soldiers present arms; there is a low

rumble of drums; the sumptuous great hearse approaches, drawn at a

walk by eight black horses plumed with black bunches of nodding ostrich

feathers; the coffin is borne into the church, the doors are closed.

The multitude cover their heads, and the rest of the procession moves

by; first the Hungarian Guard in their indescribably brilliant and

picturesque and beautiful uniform, inherited from the ages of barbaric

splendor, and after them other mounted forces, a long and showy array.

Then the shining crown in the square crumbled apart, a wrecked rainbow,

and melted away in radiant streams, and in the turn of a wrist the three

dirtiest and raggedest and cheerfulest little slum-girls in Austria were

capering about in the spacious vacancy. It was a day of contrasts.

Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state. The first time was in 1854,

when she was a bride of seventeen, and then she rode in measureless

pomp and with blare of music through a fluttering world of gay flags and

decorations, down streets walled on both hands with a press of shouting

and welcoming subjects; and the second time was last Wednesday, when she

entered the city in her coffin and moved down the same streets in the

dead of the night under swaying black flags, between packed human walls

again; but everywhere was a deep stillness, now--a stillness emphasized,

rather than broken, by the muffled hoofbeats of the long cavalcade over

pavements cushioned with sand, and the low sobbing of gray-headed women

who had witnessed the first entry forty-four years before, when she and

they were young--and unaware!

A character in Baron von Berger's recent fairy drama "Habsburg" tells

about the first coming of the girlish Empress-Queen, and in his history

draws a fine picture: I cannot make a close translation of it, but will

try to convey the spirit of the verses:

I saw the stately pageant pass:

In her high place I saw the Empress-Queen:

I could not take my eyes away

From that fair vision, spirit-like and pure,

That rose serene, sublime, and figured to my sense

A noble Alp far lighted in the blue,

That in the flood of morning rends its veil of cloud

And stands a dream of glory to the gaze

Of them that in the Valley toil and plod.

A SCRAP OF CURIOUS HISTORY

Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri--a

village; time, 1845. La Bourboule-les-Bains, France--a village; time,

the end of June, 1894. I was in the one village in that early time; I

am in the other now. These times and places are sufficiently wide

apart, yet today I have the strange sense of being thrust back into that

Missourian village and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived

there so long ago.

Last Saturday night the life of the President of the French Republic

was taken by an Italian assassin. Last night a mob surrounded our hotel,

shouting, howling, singing the "Marseillaise," and pelting our windows

with sticks and stones; for we have Italian waiters, and the mob

demanded that they be turned out of the house instantly--to be drubbed,

and then driven out of the village. Everybody in the hotel remained up

until far into the night, and experienced the several kinds of terror

which one reads about in books which tell of nigh attacks by Italians

and by French mobs: the growing roar of the oncoming crowd; the arrival,

with rain of stones and a crash of glass; the withdrawal to rearrange

plans--followed by a silence ominous, threatening, and harder to bear

than even the active siege and the noise. The landlord and the two

village policemen stood their ground, and at last the mob was

persuaded to go away and leave our Italians in peace. Today four of

the ringleaders have been sentenced to heavy punishment of a public

sort--and are become local heroes, by consequence.

That is the very mistake which was at first made in the Missourian

village half a century ago. The mistake was repeated and repeated--just

as France is doing in these later months.

In our village we had our Ravochals, our Henrys, our Vaillants; and in

a humble way our Cesario--I hope I have spelled this name wrong. Fifty

years ago we passed through, in all essentials, what France has been

passing through during the past two or three years, in the matter of

periodical frights, horrors, and shudderings.

In several details the parallels are quaintly exact. In that day, for a

man to speak out openly and proclaim himself an enemy of negro slavery

was simply to proclaim himself a madman. For he was blaspheming against

the holiest thing known to a Missourian, and could NOT be in his right

mind. For a man to proclaim himself an anarchist in France, three years

ago, was to proclaim himself a madman--he could not be in his right

mind.

Now the original first blasphemer against any institution profoundly

venerated by a community is quite sure to be in earnest; his followers

and imitators may be humbugs and self-seekers, but he himself is

sincere--his heart is in his protest.

Robert Hardy was our first ABOLITIONIST--awful name! He was a journeyman cooper, and worked in the big cooper-shop belonging to the great pork-packing establishment which was Marion City's chief pride and sole source of prosperity. He was a New-Englander, a stranger. And, being a

stranger, he was of course regarded as an inferior person--for that has

been human nature from Adam down--and of course, also, he was made

to feel unwelcome, for this is the ancient law with man and the other

animals. Hardy was thirty years old, and a bachelor; pale, given to

reverie and reading. He was reserved, and seemed to prefer the isolation

which had fallen to his lot. He was treated to many side remarks by

his fellows, but as he did not resent them it was decided that he was a

coward.

All of a sudden he proclaimed himself an abolitionist--straight out

and publicly! He said that negro slavery was a crime, an infamy. For a

moment the town was paralyzed with astonishment; then it broke into a

fury of rage and swarmed toward the cooper-shop to lynch Hardy. But

the Methodist minister made a powerful speech to them and stayed their

hands. He proved to them that Hardy was insane and not responsible for

his words; that no man COULD be sane and utter such words.

So Hardy was saved. Being insane, he was allowed to go on talking.

He was found to be good entertainment. Several nights running he made

abolition speeches in the open air, and all the town flocked to hear and

laugh. He implored them to believe him sane and sincere, and have pity

on the poor slaves, and take measurements for the restoration of their

stolen rights, or in no long time blood would flow--blood, blood, rivers

of blood!

It was great fun. But all of a sudden the aspect of things changed. A

slave came flying from Palmyra, the county-seat, a few miles back,

and was about to escape in a canoe to Illinois and freedom in the dull

twilight of the approaching dawn, when the town constable seized

him. Hardy happened along and tried to rescue the negro; there was a

struggle, and the constable did not come out of it alive. Hardly crossed

the river with the negro, and then came back to give himself up. All

this took time, for the Mississippi is not a French brook, like the

Seine, the Loire, and those other rivulets, but is a real river nearly

a mile wide. The town was on hand in force by now, but the Methodist

preacher and the sheriff had already made arrangements in the interest

of order; so Hardy was surrounded by a strong guard and safely conveyed

to the village calaboose in spite of all the effort of the mob to get

hold of him. The reader will have begun to perceive that this Methodist

minister was a prompt man; a prompt man, with active hands and a good

headpiece. Williams was his name--Damon Williams; Damon Williams in

public, Damnation Williams in private, because he was so powerful on

that theme and so frequent.

The excitement was prodigious. The constable was the first man who

had ever been killed in the town. The event was by long odds the most

imposing in the town's history. It lifted the humble village into sudden

importance; its name was in everybody's mouth for twenty miles around.

And so was the name of Robert Hardy--Robert Hardy, the stranger, the

despised. In a day he was become the person of most consequence in the

region, the only person talked about. As to those other coopers, they

found their position curiously changed--they were important people, or

unimportant, now, in proportion as to how large or how small had been

their intercourse with the new celebrity. The two or three who had

really been on a sort of familiar footing with him found themselves

objects of admiring interest with the public and of envy with their

shopmates.

The village weekly journal had lately gone into new hands. The new man

was an enterprising fellow, and he made the most of the tragedy. He

issued an extra. Then he put up posters promising to devote his whole

paper to matters connected with the great event--there would be a full

and intensely interesting biography of the murderer, and even a portrait

of him. He was as good as his word. He carved the portrait himself, on

the back of a wooden type--and a terror it was to look at. It made a

great commotion, for this was the first time the village paper had ever

contained a picture. The village was very proud. The output of the paper

was ten times as great as it had ever been before, yet every copy was

sold.

When the trial came on, people came from all the farms around, and from

Hannibal, and Quincy, and even from Keokuk; and the court-house could

hold only a fraction of the crowd that applied for admission. The trial

was published in the village paper, with fresh and still more trying

pictures of the accused.

Hardy was convicted, and hanged--a mistake. People came from miles

around to see the hanging; they brought cakes and cider, also the women

and children, and made a picnic of the matter. It was the largest crowd

the village had ever seen. The rope that hanged Hardy was eagerly bought

up, in inch samples, for everybody wanted a memento of the memorable

event.

Martyrdom gilded with notoriety has its fascinations. Within one week

afterward four young lightweights in the village proclaimed themselves

abolitionists! In life Hardy had not been able to make a convert;

everybody laughed at him; but nobody could laugh at his legacy. The four

swaggered around with their slouch-hats pulled down over their faces,

and hinted darkly at awful possibilities. The people were troubled

and afraid, and showed it. And they were stunned, too; they could

not understand it. "Abolitionist" had always been a term of shame and

horror; yet here were four young men who were not only not ashamed to

bear that name, but were grimly proud of it. Respectable young men they

were, too--of good families, and brought up in the church. Ed Smith, the

printer's apprentice, nineteen, had been the head Sunday-school boy,

and had once recited three thousand Bible verses without making a break.

Dick Savage, twenty, the baker's apprentice; Will Joyce,

twenty-two, journeyman blacksmith; and Henry Taylor, twenty-four,

tobacco-stemmer--were the other three. They were all of a sentimental

cast; they were all romance-readers; they all wrote poetry, such as

it was; they were all vain and foolish; but they had never before been

suspected of having anything bad in them.

They withdrew from society, and grew more and more mysterious and

dreadful. They presently achieved the distinction of being denounced by

names from the pulpit--which made an immense stir! This was grandeur,

this was fame. They were envied by all the other young fellows now. This

was natural. Their company grew--grew alarmingly. They took a name. It

was a secret name, and was divulged to no outsider; publicly they were

simply the abolitionists. They had pass-words, grips, and signs; they

had secret meetings; their initiations were conducted with gloomy pomps

and ceremonies, at midnight.

They always spoke of Hardy as "the Martyr," and every little while

they moved through the principal street in procession--at midnight,

black-robed, masked, to the measured tap of the solemn drum--on

pilgrimage to the Martyr's grave, where they went through with some

majestic fooleries and swore vengeance upon his murderers. They gave

previous notice of the pilgrimage by small posters, and warned everybody

to keep indoors and darken all houses along the route, and leave the

road empty. These warnings were obeyed, for there was a skull and

crossbones at the top of the poster.

When this kind of thing had been going on about eight weeks, a quite

natural thing happened. A few men of character and grit woke up out of

the nightmare of fear which had been stupefying their faculties, and

began to discharge scorn and scoffings at themselves and the community

for enduring this child's-play; and at the same time they proposed to

end it straightway. Everybody felt an uplift; life was breathed into

their dead spirits; their courage rose and they began to feel like

men again. This was on a Saturday. All day the new feeling grew and

strengthened; it grew with a rush; it brought inspiration and cheer with

it. Midnight saw a united community, full of zeal and pluck, and with

a clearly defined and welcome piece of work in front of it. The best

organizer and strongest and bitterest talker on that great Saturday was

the Presbyterian clergyman who had denounced the original four from his

pulpit--Rev. Hiram Fletcher--and he promised to use his pulpit in the

public interest again now. On the morrow he had revelations to make, he

said--secrets of the dreadful society.

But the revelations were never made. At half past two in the morning the

dead silence of the village was broken by a crashing explosion, and

the town patrol saw the preacher's house spring in a wreck of whirling

fragments into the sky. The preacher was killed, together with a negro

woman, his only slave and servant.

The town was paralyzed again, and with reason. To struggle against a

visible enemy is a thing worth while, and there is a plenty of men who

stand always ready to undertake it; but to struggle against an invisible

one--an invisible one who sneaks in and does his awful work in the dark

and leaves no trace--that is another matter. That is a thing to make the

bravest tremble and hold back.

The cowed populace were afraid to go to the funeral. The man who was

to have had a packed church to hear him expose and denounce the common

enemy had but a handful to see him buried. The coroner's jury had

brought in a verdict of "death by the visitation of God," for no witness

came forward; if any existed they prudently kept out of the way. Nobody

seemed sorry. Nobody wanted to see the terrible secret society provoked

into the commission of further outrages. Everybody wanted the tragedy

hushed up, ignored, forgotten, if possible.

And so there was a bitter surprise and an unwelcome one when Will

Joyce, the blacksmith's journeyman, came out and proclaimed himself the

assassin! Plainly he was not minded to be robbed of his glory. He made

his proclamation, and stuck to it. Stuck to it, and insisted upon

a trial. Here was an ominous thing; here was a new and peculiarly

formidable terror, for a motive was revealed here which society could

not hope to deal with successfully--VANITY, thirst for notoriety. If

men were going to kill for notoriety's sake, and to win the glory of

newspaper renown, a big trial, and a showy execution, what possible

invention of man could discourage or deter them? The town was in a sort

of panic; it did not know what to do.

However, the grand jury had to take hold of the matter--it had no

choice. It brought in a true bill, and presently the case went to the

county court. The trial was a fine sensation. The prisoner was the

principal witness for the prosecution. He gave a full account of the

assassination; he furnished even the minutest particulars: how he

deposited his keg of powder and laid his train--from the house to

such-and-such a spot; how George Ronalds and Henry Hart came along just

then, smoking, and he borrowed Hart's cigar and fired the train with it,

shouting, "Down with all slave-tyrants!" and how Hart and Ronalds made

no effort to capture him, but ran away, and had never come forward to

testify yet.

But they had to testify now, and they did--and pitiful it was to see

how reluctant they were, and how scared. The crowded house listened to

Joyce's fearful tale with a profound and breathless interest, and in a

deep hush which was not broken till he broke it himself, in concluding,

with a roaring repetition of his "Death to all slave-tyrants!"--which

came so unexpectedly and so startlingly that it made everyone present

catch his breath and gasp.

The trial was put in the paper, with biography and large portrait,

with other slanderous and insane pictures, and the edition sold beyond

imagination.

The execution of Joyce was a fine and picturesque thing. It drew a vast

crowd. Good places in trees and seats on rail fences sold for half a

dollar apiece; lemonade and gingerbread-stands had great prosperity.

Joyce recited a furious and fantastic and denunciatory speech on the

scaffold which had imposing passages of school-boy eloquence in it, and

gave him a reputation on the spot as an orator, and his name, later,

in the society's records, of the "Martyr Orator." He went to his death

breathing slaughter and charging his society to "avenge his murder." If

he knew anything of human nature he knew that to plenty of young fellows

present in that great crowd he was a grand hero--and enviably situated.

He was hanged. It was a mistake. Within a month from his death the

society which he had honored had twenty new members, some of them

earnest, determined men. They did not court distinction in the same way,

but they celebrated his martyrdom. The crime which had been obscure and

despised had become lofty and glorified.

Such things were happening all over the country. Wild-brained martyrdom

was succeeded by uprising and organization. Then, in natural order,

followed riot, insurrection, and the wrack and restitutions of war. It

was bound to come, and it would naturally come in that way. It has been

the manner of reform since the beginning of the world.

SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY

Interlaken, Switzerland, 1891.

It is a good many years since I was in Switzerland last. In that remote

time there was only one ladder railway in the country. That state of

things is all changed. There isn't a mountain in Switzerland now that

hasn't a ladder railroad or two up its back like suspenders; indeed,

some mountains are latticed with them, and two years hence all will

be. In that day the peasant of the high altitudes will have to carry a

lantern when he goes visiting in the night to keep from stumbling over

railroads that have been built since his last round. And also in that

day, if there shall remain a high-altitude peasant whose potato-patch

hasn't a railroad through it, it would make him as conspicuous as

William Tell.

However, there are only two best ways to travel through Switzerland. The

first best is afloat. The second best is by open two-horse carriage. One

can come from Lucerne to Interlaken over the Brunig by ladder railroad

in an hour or so now, but you can glide smoothly in a carriage in ten,

and have two hours for luncheon at noon--for luncheon, not for rest.

There is no fatigue connected with the trip. One arrives fresh in spirit

and in person in the evening--no fret in his heart, no grime on his

face, no grit in his hair, not a cinder in his eye. This is the right

condition of mind and body, the right and due preparation for the solemn

event which closed the day--stepping with metaphorically uncovered head

into the presence of the most impressive mountain mass that the globe

can show--the Jungfrau. The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly

confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud

of snow, is breath-taking astonishment. It is as if heaven's gates had

swung open and exposed the throne.

It is peaceful here and pleasant at Interlaken. Nothing going on--at

least nothing but brilliant life-giving sunshine. There are floods and

floods of that. One may properly speak of it as "going on," for it is

full of the suggestion of activity; the light pours down with energy,

with visible enthusiasm. This is a good atmosphere to be in, morally

as well as physically. After trying the political atmosphere of the

neighboring monarchies, it is healing and refreshing to breathe air that

has known no taint of slavery for six hundred years, and to come among

a people whose political history is great and fine, and worthy to be

taught in all schools and studied by all races and peoples. For the

struggle here throughout the centuries has not been in the interest of

any private family, or any church, but in the interest of the whole body

of the nation, and for shelter and protection of all forms of belief.

This fact is colossal. If one would realize how colossal it is, and

of what dignity and majesty, let him contrast it with the purposes and

objects of the Crusades, the siege of York, the War of the Roses, and

other historic comedies of that sort and size.

Last week I was beating around the Lake of Four Cantons, and I saw Rutli

and Altorf. Rutli is a remote little patch of meadow, but I do not know

how any piece of ground could be holier or better worth crossing oceans

and continents to see, since it was there that the great trinity of

Switzerland joined hands six centuries ago and swore the oath which set

their enslaved and insulted country forever free; and Altorf is also

honorable ground and worshipful, since it was there that William,

surnamed Tell (which interpreted means "The foolish talker"--that is to

say, the too-daring talker), refused to bow to Gessler's hat. Of late

years the prying student of history has been delighting himself beyond

measure over a wonderful find which he has made--to wit, that Tell did

not shoot the apple from his son's head. To hear the students jubilate,

one would suppose that the question of whether Tell shot the apple or

didn't was an important matter; whereas it ranks in importance exactly

with the question of whether Washington chopped down the cherry-tree or

didn't. The deeds of Washington, the patriot, are the essential thing;

the cherry-tree incident is of no consequence. To prove that Tell did

shoot the apple from his son's head would merely prove that he had

better nerve than most men and was skillful with a bow as a million

others who preceded and followed him, but not one whit more so. But Tell

was more and better than a mere marksman, more and better than a mere

cool head; he was a type; he stands for Swiss patriotism; in his person

was represented a whole people; his spirit was their spirit--the spirit

which would bow to none but God, the spirit which said this in words

and confirmed it with deeds. There have always been Tells in

Switzerland--people who would not bow. There was a sufficiency of them

at Rutli; there were plenty of them at Murten; plenty at Grandson; there

are plenty today. And the first of them all--the very first, earliest

banner-bearer of human freedom in this world--was not a man, but a

woman--Stauffacher's wife. There she looms dim and great, through the

haze of the centuries, delivering into her husband's ear that gospel of

revolt which was to bear fruit in the conspiracy of Rutli and the birth

of the first free government the world had ever seen.

From this Victoria Hotel one looks straight across a flat of trifling

width to a lofty mountain barrier, which has a gateway in it shaped like

an inverted pyramid. Beyond this gateway arises the vast bulk of the

Jungfrau, a spotless mass of gleaming snow, into the sky. The gateway,

in the dark-colored barrier, makes a strong frame for the great picture.

The somber frame and the glowing snow-pile are startlingly contrasted.

It is this frame which concentrates and emphasizes the glory of the

Jungfrau and makes it the most engaging and beguiling and fascinating

spectacle that exists on the earth. There are many mountains of snow

that are as lofty as the Jungfrau and as nobly proportioned, but they

lack the fame. They stand at large; they are intruded upon and elbowed

by neighboring domes and summits, and their grandeur is diminished and

fails of effect.

It is a good name, Jungfrau--Virgin. Nothing could be whiter; nothing

could be purer; nothing could be saintlier of aspect. At six yesterday

evening the great intervening barrier seen through a faint bluish

haze seemed made of air and substanceless, so soft and rich it was, so

shimmering where the wandering lights touched it and so dim where the

shadows lay. Apparently it was a dream stuff, a work of the imagination,

nothing real about it. The tint was green, slightly varying shades of

it, but mainly very dark. The sun was down--as far as that barrier was

concerned, but not for the Jungfrau, towering into the heavens beyond

the gateway. She was a roaring conflagration of blinding white.

It is said the Fridolin (the old Fridolin), a new saint, but formerly a

missionary, gave the mountain its gracious name. He was an Irishman, son

of an Irish king--there were thirty thousand kings reigning in County

Cork alone in his time, fifteen hundred years ago. It got so that they

could not make a living, there was so much competition and wages got cut

so. Some of them were out of work months at a time, with wife and little

children to feed, and not a crust in the place. At last a particularly

severe winter fell upon the country, and hundreds of them were reduced

to mendicancy and were to be seen day after day in the bitterest

weather, standing barefoot in the snow, holding out their crowns for

alms. Indeed, they would have been obliged to emigrate or starve but for

a fortunate idea of Prince Fridolin's, who started a labor-union, the

first one in history, and got the great bulk of them to join it. He thus

won the general gratitude, and they wanted to make him emperor--emperor

over them all--emperor of County Cork, but he said, No, walking delegate

was good enough for him. For behold! he was modest beyond his years,

and keen as a whip. To this day in Germany and Switzerland, where

St. Fridolin is revered and honored, the peasantry speak of him

affectionately as the first walking delegate.

The first walk he took was into France and Germany, missionarying--for

missionarying was a better thing in those days than it is in ours. All

you had to do was to cure the savage's sick daughter by a "miracle"--a

miracle like the miracle of Lourdes in our day, for instance--and

immediately that head savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes

with a new convert's enthusiasm. You could sit down and make yourself

easy, now. He would take an ax and convert the rest of the nation

himself. Charlemagne was that kind of a walking delegate.

Yes, there were great missionaries in those days, for the methods were

sure and the rewards great. We have no such missionaries now, and no

such methods.

But to continue the history of the first walking delegate, if you are

interested. I am interested myself because I have seen his relics in

Sackingen, and also the very spot where he worked his great miracle--the

one which won him his sainthood in the papal court a few centuries

later. To have seen these things makes me feel very near to him,

almost like a member of the family, in fact. While wandering about the

Continent he arrived at the spot on the Rhine which is now occupied by

Sackingen, and proposed to settle there, but the people warned him off.

He appealed to the king of the Franks, who made him a present of the

whole region, people and all. He built a great cloister there for women

and proceeded to teach in it and accumulate more land. There were two

wealthy brothers in the neighborhood, Urso and Landulph. Urso died and

Fridolin claimed his estates. Landulph asked for documents and papers.

Fridolin had none to show. He said the bequest had been made to him by

word of mouth. Landulph suggested that he produce a witness and said

it in a way which he thought was very witty, very sarcastic. This shows

that he did not know the walking delegate. Fridolin was not disturbed.

He said:

"Appoint your court. I will bring a witness."

The court thus created consisted of fifteen counts and barons. A day was

appointed for the trial of the case. On that day the judges took their

seats in state, and proclamation was made that the court was ready for

business. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and yet

no Fridolin appeared. Landulph rose, and was in the act of claiming

judgment by default when a strange clacking sound was heard coming up

the stairs. In another moment Fridolin entered at the door and came

walking in a deep hush down the middle aisle, with a tall skeleton

stalking in his rear.

Amazement and terror sat upon every countenance, for everybody suspected

that the skeleton was Urso's. It stopped before the chief judge and

raised its bony arm aloft and began to speak, while all the assembled

shuddered, for they could see the words leak out between its ribs. It

said:

"Brother, why dost thou disturb my blessed rest and withhold by robbery

the gift which I gave thee for the honor of God?"

It seems a strange thing and most irregular, but the verdict was

actually given against Landulph on the testimony of this wandering

rack-heap of unidentified bones. In our day a skeleton would not be

allowed to testify at all, for a skeleton has no moral responsibility,

and its word could not be believed on oath, and this was probably one

of them. However, the incident is valuable as preserving to us a curious

sample of the quaint laws of evidence of that remote time--a time so

remote, so far back toward the beginning of original idiocy, that the

difference between a bench of judges and a basket of vegetables was as

yet so slight that we may say with all confidence that it didn't really

exist.

During several afternoons I have been engaged in an interesting, maybe

useful, piece of work--that is to say, I have been trying to make the

mighty Jungfrau earn her living--earn it in a most humble sphere, but on

a prodigious scale, on a prodigious scale of necessity, for she couldn't

do anything in a small way with her size and style. I have been trying

to make her do service on a stupendous dial and check off the hours as

they glide along her pallid face up there against the sky, and tell the

time of day to the populations lying within fifty miles of her and to

the people in the moon, if they have a good telescope there.

Until late in the afternoon the Jungfrau's aspect is that of a spotless

desert of snow set upon edge against the sky. But by mid-afternoon some

elevations which rise out of the western border of the desert, whose

presence you perhaps had not detected or suspected up to that time,

began to cast black shadows eastward across the gleaming surface. At

first there is only one shadow; later there are two. Toward 4 P.M. the

other day I was gazing and worshiping as usual when I chanced to notice

that shadow No. 1 was beginning to take itself something of the shape of

the human profile. By four the back of the head was good, the military

cap was pretty good, the nose was bold and strong, the upper lip

sharp, but not pretty, and there was a great goatee that shot straight

aggressively forward from the chin.

At four-thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably, and the

altered slant of the sun had revealed and made conspicuous a huge

buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so located as to answer

very well for a shoulder or coat-collar to this swarthy and indiscreet

sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his

head on the Virgin's white breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to

her in the sensuous music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and

thunder of the passing avalanche--music very familiar to his ear, for

he had heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came

courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that day

is far, yes--for he was at this pleasant sport before the Middle Ages

drifted by him in the valley; before the Romans marched past, and

before the antique and recordless barbarians fished and hunted here and

wondered who he might be, and were probably afraid of him; and before

primeval man himself, just emerged from his four-footed estate, stepped

out upon this plain, first sample of his race, a thousand centuries ago,

and cast a glad eye up there, judging he had found a brother human being

and consequently something to kill; and before the big saurians wallowed

here, still some eons earlier. Oh yes, a day so far back that the

eternal son was present to see that first visit; a day so far back that

neither tradition nor history was born yet and a whole weary eternity

must come and go before the restless little creature, of whose face this

stupendous Shadow Face was the prophecy, would arrive in the earth and

begin his shabby career and think of a big thing. Oh, indeed yes;

when you talk about your poor Roman and Egyptian day-before-yesterday

antiquities, you should choose a time when the hoary Shadow Face of the

Jungfrau is not by. It antedates all antiquities known or imaginable;

for it was here the world itself created the theater of future

antiquities. And it is the only witness with a human face that was there

to see the marvel, and remains to us a memorial of it.

By 4:40 P.M. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is beautiful. It is

black and is powerfully marked against the upright canvas of glowing

snow, and covers hundreds of acres of that resplendent surface.

Meantime shadow No. 2 has been creeping out well to the rear of the face

west of it--and at five o'clock has assumed a shape that has rather a

poor and rude semblance of a shoe.

Meantime, also, the great Shadow Face has been gradually changing for

twenty minutes, and now, 5 P.M., it is becoming a quite fair portrait of

Roscoe Conkling. The likeness is there, and is unmistakable. The goatee

is shortened, now, and has an end; formerly it hadn't any, but ran off

eastward and arrived nowhere.

By 6 P.M. the face has dissolved and gone, and the goatee has become

what looks like the shadow of a tower with a pointed roof, and the shoe

had turned into what the printers call a "fist" with a finger pointing.

If I were now imprisoned on a mountain summit a hundred miles northward

of this point, and was denied a timepiece, I could get along well enough

from four till six on clear days, for I could keep trace of the time by

the changing shapes of these mighty shadows of the Virgin's front, the

most stupendous dial I am acquainted with, the oldest clock in the world

by a couple of million years.

I suppose I should not have noticed the forms of the shadows if I hadn't

the habit of hunting for faces in the clouds and in mountain crags--a

sort of amusement which is very entertaining even when you don't find

any, and brilliantly satisfying when you do. I have searched through

several bushels of photographs of the Jungfrau here, but found only one

with the Face in it, and in this case it was not strictly recognizable

as a face, which was evidence that the picture was taken before four

o'clock in the afternoon, and also evidence that all the photographers

have persistently overlooked one of the most fascinating features of

the Jungfrau show. I say fascinating, because if you once detect a human

face produced on a great plan by unconscious nature, you never get tired

of watching it. At first you can't make another person see it at all,

but after he has made it out once he can't see anything else afterward.

The King of Greece is a man who goes around quietly enough when off

duty. One day this summer he was traveling in an ordinary first-class

compartment, just in his other suit, the one which he works the realm

in when he is at home, and so he was not looking like anybody in

particular, but a good deal like everybody in general. By and by a

hearty and healthy German-American got in and opened up a frank and

interesting and sympathetic conversation with him, and asked him a

couple of thousand questions about himself, which the king answered

good-naturedly, but in a more or less indefinite way as to private

particulars.

"Where do you live when you are at home?"

"In Greece."

"Greece! Well, now, that is just astonishing! Born there?"

"No."

"Do you speak Greek?"

"Yes."

"Now, ain't that strange! I never expected to live to see that. What

is your trade? I mean how do you get your living? What is your line of

business?"

"Well, I hardly know how to answer. I am only a kind of foreman, on a

salary; and the business--well, is a very general kind of business."

"Yes, I understand--general jobbing--little of everything--anything that

there's money in."

"That's about it, yes."

"Are you traveling for the house now?"

"Well, partly; but not entirely. Of course I do a stroke of business if

it falls in the way--"

"Good! I like that in you! That's me every time. Go on."

"I was only going to say I am off on my vacation now."

"Well that's all right. No harm in that. A man works all the better

for a little let-up now and then. Not that I've been used to having it

myself; for I haven't. I reckon this is my first. I was born in Germany,

and when I was a couple of weeks old shipped to America, and I've been

there ever since, and that's sixty-four years by the watch. I'm

an American in principle and a German at heart, and it's the boss

combination. Well, how do you get along, as a rule--pretty fair?"

"I've a rather large family--"

"There, that's it--big family and trying to raise them on a salary. Now,

what did you go to do that for?"

"Well, I thought--"

"Of course you did. You were young and confident and thought you could

branch out and make things go with a whirl, and here you are, you see!

But never mind about that. I'm not trying to discourage you. Dear me!

I've been just where you are myself! You've got good grit; there's good

stuff in you, I can see that. You got a wrong start, that's the whole

trouble. But you hold your grip, and we'll see what can be done. Your

case ain't half as bad as it might be. You are going to come out all

right--I'm bail for that. Boys and girls?"

"My family? Yes, some of them are boys--"

"And the rest girls. It's just as I expected. But that's all right, and

it's better so, anyway. What are the boys doing--learning a trade?"

"Well, no--I thought--"

"It's a big mistake. It's the biggest mistake you ever made. You see

that in your own case. A man ought always to have a trade to fall back

on. Now, I was harness-maker at first. Did that prevent me from becoming

one of the biggest brewers in America? Oh no. I always had the harness

trick to fall back on in rough weather. Now, if you had learned how to

make harness--However, it's too late now; too late. But it's no good

plan to cry over spilt milk. But as to the boys, you see--what's to

become of them if anything happens to you?"

"It has been my idea to let the eldest one succeed me--"

"Oh, come! Suppose the firm don't want him?"

"I hadn't thought of that, but--"

"Now, look here; you want to get right down to business and stop

dreaming. You are capable of immense things--man. You can make a perfect

success in life. All you want is somebody to steady you and boost you

along on the right road. Do you own anything in the business?"

"No--not exactly; but if I continue to give satisfaction, I suppose I

can keep my--"

"Keep your place--yes. Well, don't you depend on anything of the kind.

They'll bounce you the minute you get a little old and worked out;

they'll do it sure. Can't you manage somehow to get into the firm?

That's the great thing, you know."

"I think it is doubtful; very doubtful."

"Um--that's bad--yes, and unfair, too. Do you suppose that if I should

go there and have a talk with your people--Look here--do you think you

could run a brewery?"

"I have never tried, but I think I could do it after a little

familiarity with the business."

The German was silent for some time. He did a good deal of thinking,

and the king waited curiously to see what the result was going to be.

Finally the German said:

"My mind's made up. You leave that crowd--you'll never amount to

anything there. In these old countries they never give a fellow a show.

Yes, you come over to America--come to my place in Rochester; bring the

family along. You shall have a show in the business and the foremanship,

besides. George--you said your name was George?--I'll make a man of you.

I give you my word. You've never had a chance here, but that's all going

to change. By gracious! I'll give you a lift that'll make your hair

curl!"

AT THE SHRINE OF ST. WAGNER

Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891

It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-mad strangers

that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been long since we had

seen such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a good

half-hour to pack them and pair them into the train--and it was the

longest train we have yet seen in Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing

this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks.

It gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial

pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the

very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in his

own Mecca.

If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or anywhere

else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May, that you would

like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a half later, you must

use the cable and get about it immediately or you will get no seats,

and you must cable for lodgings, too. Then if you are lucky you will

get seats in the last row and lodgings in the fringe of the town. If

you stop to write you will get nothing. There were plenty of people

in Nuremberg when we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without

first securing seats and lodgings. They had found neither in Bayreuth;

they had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone to

Nuremberg and found neither beds nor standing room, and had walked those

quaint streets all night, waiting for the hotels to open and empty their

guests into trains, and so make room for these, their defeated brethren

and sisters in the faith. They had endured from thirty to forty hours'

railroading on the continent of Europe--with all which that implies of

worry, fatigue, and financial impoverishment--and all they had got

and all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking

themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two

towns when other people were in bed; for back they must go over

that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled. These

humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and apologetic look of

wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with drowsiness, their bodies were

adroop from crown to sole, and all kind-hearted people refrained from

asking them if they had been to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as

knowing they would lie.

We reached here (Bayreuth) about mid-afternoon of a rainy Saturday. We

were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and opera seats months in

advance.

I am not a musical critic, and did not come here to write essays about

the operas and deliver judgment upon their merits. The little

children of Bayreuth could do that with a finer sympathy and a broader

intelligence than I. I only care to bring four or five pilgrims to the

operas, pilgrims able to appreciate them and enjoy them. What I write

about the performance to put in my odd time would be offered to the

public as merely a cat's view of a king, and not of didactic value.

Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house--that is to say,

the Wagner temple--a little after the middle of the afternoon. The

great building stands all by itself, grand and lonely, on a high ground

outside the town. We were warned that if we arrived after four o'clock

we should be obliged to pay two dollars and a half extra by way of

fine. We saved that; and it may be remarked here that this is the only

opportunity that Europe offers of saving money. There was a big crowd

in the grounds about the building, and the ladies' dresses took the sun

with fine effect. I do not mean to intimate that the ladies were in full

dress, for that was not so. The dresses were pretty, but neither sex was

in evening dress.

The interior of the building is simple--severely so; but there is no

occasion for color and decoration, since the people sit in the dark.

The auditorium has the shape of a keystone, with the stage at the narrow

end. There is an aisle on each side, but no aisle in the body of the

house. Each row of seats extends in an unbroken curve from one side of

the house to the other. There are seven entrance doors on each side of

the theater and four at the butt, eighteen doors to admit and emit 1,650

persons. The number of the particular door by which you are to enter the

house or leave it is printed on your ticket, and you can use no door but

that one. Thus, crowding and confusion are impossible. Not so many as

a hundred people use any one door. This is better than having the usual

(and useless) elaborate fireproof arrangements. It is the model theater

of the world. It can be emptied while the second hand of a watch makes

its circuit. It would be entirely safe, even if it were built of lucifer

matches.

If your seat is near the center of a row and you enter late you must

work your way along a rank of about twenty-five ladies and gentlemen to

get to it. Yet this causes no trouble, for everybody stands up until

all the seats are full, and the filling is accomplished in a very few

minutes. Then all sit down, and you have a solid mass of fifteen hundred

heads, making a steep cellar-door slant from the rear of the house down

to the stage.

All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation sat in a

deep and solemn gloom. The funereal rustling of dresses and the low buzz

of conversation began to die swiftly down, and presently not the ghost

of a sound was left. This profound and increasingly impressive stillness

endured for some time--the best preparation for music, spectacle, or

speech conceivable. I should think our show people would have invented

or imported that simple and impressive device for securing and

solidifying the attention of an audience long ago; instead of which

there continue to this day to open a performance against a deadly

competition in the form of noise, confusion, and a scattered interest.

Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose

upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to

weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his

enchantments. There was something strangely impressive in the fancy

which kept intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his grave

of what was going on here, and that these divine souls were the clothing

of thoughts which were at this moment passing through his brain, and

not recognized and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former

time.

The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with

the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway

thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that

nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to

the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a

Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely

orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the

bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb

acting couldn't mar these pleasures, because there isn't often anything

in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as

acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people,

one of them standing still, the other catching flies. Of course I do not

really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual

operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out into

the air and then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if the

operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.

This present opera was "Parsifal." Madame Wagner does not permit its

representation anywhere but in Bayreuth. The first act of the three

occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing.

I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one of the most

entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of all the vehicles

invented by man for the conveying of feeling; but it seems to me that

the chief virtue in song is melody, air, tune, rhythm, or what you

please to call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is

a picture with the color left out. I was not able to detect in the vocal

parts of "Parsifal" anything that might with confidence be called rhythm

or tune or melody; one person performed at a time--and a long time,

too--often in a noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only

pulled out long notes, then some short ones, then another long one, then

a sharp, quick, peremptory bark or two--and so on and so on; and when

he was done you saw that the information which he had conveyed had not

compensated for the disturbance. Not always, but pretty often. If two of

them would but put in a duet occasionally and blend the voices; but no,

they don't do that. The great master, who knew so well how to make

a hundred instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in

mingled and melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in barren

solos when he puts in the vocal parts. It may be that he was deep, and

only added the singing to his operas for the sake of the contrast it

would make with the music. Singing! It does seem the wrong name to

apply to it. Strictly described, it is a practicing of difficult and

unpleasant intervals, mainly. An ignorant person gets tired of listening

to gymnastic intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may

be. In "Parsifal" there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the

stage in one spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then

another character of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires

to die.

During the evening there was an intermission of three-quarters of an

hour after the first act and one an hour long after the second. In both

instances the theater was totally emptied. People who had previously

engaged tables in the one sole eating-house were able to put in their

time very satisfactorily; the other thousand went hungry. The opera was

concluded at ten in the evening or a little later. When we reached home

we had been gone more than seven hours. Seven hours at five dollars a

ticket is almost too much for the money.

While browsing about the front yard among the crowd between the acts I

encountered twelve or fifteen friends from different parts of America,

and those of them who were most familiar with Wagner said that

"Parsifal" seldom pleased at first, but that after one had heard

it several times it was almost sure to become a favorite. It seemed

impossible, but it was true, for the statement came from people whose

word was not to be doubted.

And I gathered some further information. On the ground I found part of

a German musical magazine, and in it a letter written by Uhlic

thirty-three years ago, in which he defends the scorned and abused

Wagner against people like me, who found fault with the comprehensive

absence of what our kind regards as singing. Uhlic says Wagner despised

"JENE PLAPPERUDE MUSIC," and therefore "runs, trills, and SCHNORKEL are

discarded by him." I don't know what a SCHNORKEL is, but now that I know

it has been left out of these operas I never have missed so much in

my life. And Uhlic further says that Wagner's song is true: that it

is "simply emphasized intoned speech." That certainly describes it--in

"Parsifal" and some of the operas; and if I understand Uhlic's elaborate

German he apologizes for the beautiful airs in "Tannhauser." Very well;

now that Wagner and I understand each other, perhaps we shall get along

better, and I shall stop calling Waggner, on the American plan, and

thereafter call him Waggner as per German custom, for I feel entirely

friendly now. The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing

we are to throw aside little needless punctilios and pronounce his name

right!

Of course I came home wondering why people should come from all corners

of America to hear these operas, when we have lately had a season or two

of them in New York with these same singers in the several parts,

and possibly this same orchestra. I resolved to think that out at all

hazards.

TUESDAY.--Yesterday they played the only operatic favorite I have ever

had--an opera which has always driven me mad with ignorant delight

whenever I have heard it--"Tannhauser." I heard it first when I was a

youth; I heard it last in the last German season in New York. I was

busy yesterday and I did not intend to go, knowing I should have another

"Tannhauser" opportunity in a few days; but after five o'clock I found

myself free and walked out to the opera-house and arrived about the

beginning of the second act. My opera ticket admitted me to the grounds

in front, past the policeman and the chain, and I thought I would take a

rest on a bench for an hour and two and wait for the third act.

In a moment or so the first bugles blew, and the multitude began to

crumble apart and melt into the theater. I will explain that this

bugle-call is one of the pretty features here. You see, the theater

is empty, and hundreds of the audience are a good way off in the

feeding-house; the first bugle-call is blown about a quarter of an

hour before time for the curtain to rise. This company of buglers, in

uniform, march out with military step and send out over the landscape

a few bars of the theme of the approaching act, piercing the distances

with the gracious notes; then they march to the other entrance and

repeat. Presently they do this over again. Yesterday only about two

hundred people were still left in front of the house when the second

call was blown; in another half-minute they would have been in the

house, but then a thing happened which delayed them--the only solitary

thing in this world which could be relied on with certainty to

accomplish it, I suppose--an imperial princess appeared in the balcony

above them. They stopped dead in their tracks and began to gaze in a

stupor of gratitude and satisfaction. The lady presently saw that she

must disappear or the doors would be closed upon these worshipers, so

she returned to her box. This daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty;

she had a kind face; she was without airs; she is known to be full of

common human sympathies. There are many kinds of princesses, but this

kind is the most harmful of all, for wherever they go they reconcile

people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress. The valuable

princes, the desirable princes, are the czars and their sort. By their

mere dumb presence in the world they cover with derision every argument

that can be invented in favor of royalty by the most ingenious casuist.

In his time the husband of this princess was valuable. He led a degraded

life, he ended it with his own hand in circumstances and surroundings of

a hideous sort, and was buried like a god.

In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the audience, a kind of

open gallery, in which princes are displayed. It is sacred to them;

it is the holy of holies. As soon as the filling of the house is

about complete the standing multitude turn and fix their eyes upon

the princely layout and gaze mutely and longingly and adoringly

and regretfully like sinners looking into heaven. They become rapt,

unconscious, steeped in worship. There is no spectacle anywhere that is

more pathetic than this. It is worth crossing many oceans to see. It

is somehow not the same gaze that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo,

or Niagara, or the bones of the mastodon, or the guillotine of the

Revolution, or the great pyramid, or distant Vesuvius smoking in the

sky, or any man long celebrated to you by his genius and achievements,

or thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and

pictures--no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense curiosity, interest,

wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts that taste good all

the way down and appease and satisfy the thirst of a lifetime. Satisfy

it--that is the word. Hugo and the mastodon will still have a degree

of intense interest thereafter when encountered, but never anything

approaching the ecstasy of that first view. The interest of a prince is

different. It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless it is a mixture

of both--and it does not satisfy its thirst with one view, or even

noticeably diminish it. Perhaps the essence of the thing is the value

which men attach to a valuable something which has come by luck and not

been earned. A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you

than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for, and money won at

faro or in stocks snuggles into your heart in the same way. A prince

picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support by

a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before

the grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental representative of

luck. And then--supremest value of all-his is the only high fortune

on the earth which is secure. The commercial millionaire may become

a beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital mistake and be

dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can lose a decisive

battle and with it the consideration of men; but once a prince always a

prince--that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard fortune nor

an infamous character nor an addled brain nor the speech of an ass can

undeify him. By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the

most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved

or undeserved. It follows without doubt or question, then, that the most

desirable position possible is that of a prince. And I think it also

follows that the so-called usurpations with which history is littered

are the most excusable misdemeanors which men have committed. To usurp a usurpation--that is all it amounts to, isn't it?

A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course. We have

not been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good look at him is

likely to so nearly appease our curiosity as to make him an object of

no greater interest the next time. We want a fresh one. But it is not so

with the European. I am quite sure of it. The same old one will answer;

he never stales. Eighteen years ago I was in London and I called at an

Englishman's house on a bleak and foggy and dismal December afternoon

to visit his wife and married daughter by appointment. I waited half an

hour and then they arrived, frozen. They explained that they had

been delayed by an unlooked-for circumstance: while passing in the

neighborhood of Marlborough House they saw a crowd gathering and were

told that the Prince of Wales was about to drive out, so they stopped

to get a sight of him. They had waited half an hour on the sidewalk,

freezing with the crowd, but were disappointed at last--the Prince had

changed his mind. I said, with a good deal of surprise, "Is it possible

that you two have lived in London all your lives and have never seen the

Prince of Wales?"

Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they exclaimed: "What

an idea! Why, we have seen him hundreds of times."

They had seem him hundreds of times, yet they had waited half an hour

in the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a jam of patients from

the same asylum, on the chance of seeing him again. It was a stupefying

statement, but one is obliged to believe the English, even when they say

a thing like that. I fumbled around for a remark, and got out this one:

"I can't understand it at all. If I had never seen General Grant I doubt

if I would do that even to get a sight of him." With a slight emphasis

on the last word.

Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the parallel came in.

Then they said, blankly: "Of course not. He is only a President."

It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent interest, an

interest not subject to deterioration. The general who was never

defeated, the general who never held a council of war, the only general

who ever commanded a connected battle-front twelve hundred miles long,

the smith who welded together the broken parts of a great republic and

re-established it where it is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies

present and to come, was really a person of no serious consequence to

these people. To them, with their training, my General was only a man,

after all, while their Prince was clearly much more than that--a being

of a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, and being of no

more blood and kinship with men than are the serene eternal lights of

the firmament with the poor dull tallow candles of commerce that sputter

and die and leave nothing behind but a pinch of ashes and a stink.

I saw the last act of "Tannhauser." I sat in the gloom and the deep

stillness, waiting--one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how

long--then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its

rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the

drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing

the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl

praying and a man standing near. Presently that noble chorus of men's

voices was heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing

of the curtain it was music, just music--music to make one drunk with

pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round

the globe to hear it.

To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season next year I

wish to say, bring your dinner-pail with you. If you do, you will never

cease to be thankful. If you do not, you will find it a hard fight to

save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth. Bayreuth is merely a large

village, and has no very large hotels or eating-houses. The principal

inns are the Golden Anchor and the Sun. At either of these places you

can get an excellent meal--no, I mean you can go there and see other

people get it. There is no charge for this. The town is littered with

restaurants, but they are small and bad, and they are overdriven with

custom. You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often when you

arrive you will find somebody occupying it. We have had this experience.

We have had a daily scramble for life; and when I say we, I include

shoals of people. I have the impression that the only people who do

not have to scramble are the veterans--the disciples who have been here

before and know the ropes. I think they arrive about a week before the

first opera, and engage all the tables for the season. My tribe had

tried all kinds of places--some outside of the town, a mile or two--and

have captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any instance

a complete and satisfying meal. Digestible? No, the reverse. These odds

and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth, and in that regard

their value is not to be overestimated. Photographs fade, bric-a-brac

gets lost, busts of Wagner get broken, but once you absorb a

Bayreuth-restaurant meal it is your possession and your property until

the time comes to embalm the rest of you. Some of these pilgrims here

become, in effect, cabinets; cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth. It is

believed among scientists that you could examine the crop of a dead

Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came from.

But I like this ballast. I think a "Hermitage" scrap-up at eight in the

evening, when all the famine-breeders have been there and laid in their

mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing you can lay on your keelson

except gravel.

THURSDAY.--They keep two teams of singers in stock for the chief roles,

and one of these is composed of the most renowned artists in the

world, with Materna and Alvary in the lead. I suppose a double team is

necessary; doubtless a single team would die of exhaustion in a week,

for all the plays last from four in the afternoon till ten at night.

Nearly all the labor falls upon the half-dozen head singers, and

apparently they are required to furnish all the noise they can for

the money. If they feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are

required to open out and let the public know it. Operas are given only

on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of

ostensible rest per week, and two teams to do the four operas; but the

ostensible rest is devoted largely to rehearsing. It is said that the

off days are devoted to rehearsing from some time in the morning till

ten at night. Are there two orchestras also? It is quite likely, since

there are one hundred and ten names in the orchestra list.

Yesterday the opera was "Tristan and Isolde." I have seen all sorts

of audiences--at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons,

funerals--but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth

for fixed and reverential attention. Absolute attention and petrified

retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning

of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders.

You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that they

are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when

they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation,

and times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a

relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not

one utterance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains

have slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with one impulse and

shake the building with their applause. Every seat is full in the

first act; there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man would be

conspicuous, let him come here and retire from the house in the midst of

an act. It would make him celebrated.

This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing

I have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the

inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after

centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which they

last knew in life. Here the Wagner audience dress as they please, and

sit in the dark and worship in silence. At the Metropolitan in New York

they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum airs,

they squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time. In some

of the boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to divide the

attention of the house with the stage. In large measure the Metropolitan

is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained in Wagnerian

music and have no reverence for it, but who like to promote art and show

their clothes.

Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music

produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator is a very

deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands consecrated

things, and the partaking of them with eye and ear a sacred solemnity?

Manifestly, no. Then, perhaps the temporary expatriation, the tedious

traversing of seas and continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands

explained. These devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion.

It is only here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any

worldly pollution. In this remote village there are no sights to see,

there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant world,

there is nothing going on, it is always Sunday. The pilgrim wends to his

temple out of town, sits out his moving service, returns to his bed with

his heart and soul and his body exhausted by long hours of tremendous

emotion, and he is in no fit condition to do anything but to lie torpid

and slowly gather back life and strength for the next service. This

opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all

witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of

many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel

strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a

community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all

others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and

always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.

But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one

of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen

anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine

and real as this devotion.

FRIDAY.--Yesterday's opera was "Parsifal" again. The others went and

they show marked advance in appreciation; but I went hunting for relics

and reminders of the Margravine Wilhelmina, she of the imperishable

"Memoirs." I am properly grateful to her for her (unconscious) satire

upon monarchy and nobility, and therefore nothing which her hand touched

or her eye looked upon is indifferent to me. I am her pilgrim; the rest

of this multitude here are Wagner's.

TUESDAY.--I have seen my last two operas; my season is ended, and we

cross over into Bohemia this afternoon. I was supposing that my musical

regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both

of these operas, singing and all, and, moreover, one of them was

"Parsifal," but the experts have disenchanted me. They say:

"Singing! That wasn't singing; that was the wailing, screeching of

third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the interest of economy."

Well, I ought to have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has

never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it

means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has

saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many

a chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I

was the only man out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on

those two operas.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

Is it true that the sun of a man's mentality touches noon at forty and

then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor Osler is charged with saying

so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't; I don't know which it is. But if

he said it, I can point him to a case which proves his rule. Proves it

by being an exception to it. To this place I nominate Mr. Howells.

I read his VENETIAN DAYS about forty years ago. I compare it with his

paper on Machiavelli in a late number of HARPER, and I cannot find that

his English has suffered any impairment. For forty years his English

has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained

exhibition of certain great qualities--clearness, compression,

verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of

phrasing--he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing

world. SUSTAINED. I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There

are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but

only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches

of veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails

cloudless skies all night and all the nights.

In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I

suppose. He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and

shifty grain of gold, the RIGHT WORD. Others have to put up with

approximations, more or less frequently; he has better luck. To me, the

others are miners working with the gold-pan--of necessity some of the

gold washes over and escapes; whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver

raiding down a riffle--no grain of the metal stands much chance of

eluding him. A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's

way and makes it plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and

much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do

not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE right

one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right

words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well

as spiritual, and electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around

through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good

as the autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry. One has no time to

examine the word and vote upon its rank and standing, the automatic

recognition of its supremacy is so immediate. There is a plenty of

acceptable literature which deals largely in approximations, but it may

be likened to a fine landscape seen through the rain; the right word

would dismiss the rain, then you would see it better. It doesn't rain

when Howells is at work.

And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and

its cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its architectural felicities

of construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of

compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good

order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just

as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear

and use. He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I think his

English of today--his perfect English, I wish to say--can throw down the

glove before his English of that antique time and not be afraid.

I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to

examine this passage from it which I append. I do not mean examine it

in a bird's-eye way; I mean search it, study it. And, of course, read it

aloud. I may be wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get out

of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it mutely:

Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by

Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a

political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that

Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he

is the first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who

involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like

the visionary issues of reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does

not cease to be politically a republican and socially a just man because

he holds up an atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for

rulers. What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder

in which there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt without

patriotism. When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the scene and

reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he might very

well seem to such a dreamer the savior of society whom a certain sort of

dreamers are always looking for. Machiavelli was no less honest when he

honored the diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times

he extolled the strong man who destroys liberty in creating order. But

Carlyle has only just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer, while it is

still Machiavelli's hard fate to be so trammeled in his material that

his name stands for whatever is most malevolent and perfidious in human

nature.

You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,

clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and--so far as you or I can

make out--unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable,

how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly

unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley; and how

compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal hung out anywhere

to call attention to it.

There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage. After reading it

several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter is crowded

into that small space. I think it is a model of compactness. When I take

its materials apart and work them over and put them together in my way,

I find I cannot crowd the result back into the same hole, there not

being room enough. I find it a case of a woman packing a man's trunk: he

can get the things out, but he can't ever get them back again.

The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest of the

article is as compact as it is; there are no waste words. The sample is

just in other ways: limpid, fluent, graceful, and rhythmical as it is,

it holds no superiority in these respects over the rest of the essay.

Also, the choice phrasing noticeable in the sample is not lonely; there

is a plenty of its kin distributed through the other paragraphs. This is

claiming much when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like

the one in the middle sentence: "an idealist immersed in realities who

involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like

the visionary issues of reverie." With a hundred words to do it with,

the literary artisan could catch that airy thought and tie it down and

reduce it to a concrete condition, visible, substantial, understandable

and all right, like a cabbage; but the artist does it with twenty, and

the result is a flower.

The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come from the same

source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse which take hold of

us and stay in our memories, we do not understand why, at first: all the

words being the right words, none of them is conspicuous, and so they

all seem inconspicuous, therefore we wonder what it is about them that

makes their message take hold.

The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has prest

In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear

Have been carved for many a year

On the tomb.

It is like a dreamy strain of moving music, with no sharp notes in it.

The words are all "right" words, and all the same size. We do not notice

it at first. We get the effect, it goes straight home to us, but we

do not know why. It is when the right words are conspicuous that they

thunder:

The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!

When I got back from Howells old to Howells young I find him arranging

and clustering English words well, but not any better than now. He

is not more felicitous in concreting abstractions now than he was in

translating, then, the visions of the eyes of flesh into words that

reproduced their forms and colors:

In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once

shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked FACCHINI; and now in

St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon my ear; and

I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it engaged the elements in a

struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But the snow continued to

fall, and through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil

and encountered looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when

the most determined industry seems only to renew the task. The lofty

crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and

I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked

at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark's Church was

perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snowfall

were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around the structure that

always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be

anything but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated

the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains

and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the

builder--or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There

was marvelous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches

of the facade, and all that gracious harmony into which the temple

rises, or marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the

statues of the saints, was a hundred times etherealized by the purity

and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden

gloves that tremble like peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and

plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it

danced over all its works, as if exulting in its beauty--beauty

which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such evanescent

loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole life, and with

despair to think that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be

fairly reflected in picture or poem.

Through the wavering snowfall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the

granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is,

and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so

gentle and mild he looked by the tender light of the storm. The towers

of the island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the

sailors in the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like

phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque

distance more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost

palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world.

The spirit of Venice is there: of a city where Age and Decay, fagged

with distributing damage and repulsiveness among the other cities of the

planet in accordance with the policy and business of their profession,

come for rest and play between seasons, and treat themselves to the

luxury and relaxation of sinking the shop and inventing and squandering

charms all about, instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their

habit when not on vacation.

In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes, and a

character in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY takes accurate note of pathetic effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street of once dignified and elegant homes whose occupants have moved away and left them a prey to neglect and gradual ruin and progressive degradation; a descent which reaches bottom at last, when the street becomes a roost for humble professionals of the faith-cure and fortune-telling sort.

What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy street! I don't

think I was ever in a street before when quite so many professional

ladies, with English surnames, preferred Madam to Mrs. on their

door-plates. And the poor old place has such a desperately conscious

air of going to the deuce. Every house seems to wince as you go by,

and button itself up to the chin for fear you should find out it had

no shirt on--so to speak. I don't know what's the reason, but these

material tokens of a social decay afflict me terribly; a tipsy woman

isn't dreadfuler than a haggard old house, that's once been a home, in a

street like this.

Mr. Howells's pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate photographs;

they are photographs with feeling in them, and sentiment, photographs

taken in a dream, one might say.

As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I would try,

if I had the words that might approximately reach up to its high place.

I do not think any one else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully

and delicately and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with,

nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing

themselves and he was not aware that they were at it. For they are

unobtrusive, and quiet in their ways, and well conducted. His is a humor

which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the

page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and

no more noise than does the circulation of the blood.

There is another thing which is contentingly noticeable in Mr. Howells's

books. That is his "stage directions"--those artifices which authors

employ to throw a kind of human naturalness around a scene and a

conversation, and help the reader to see the one and get at meanings in

the other which might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the

bare words of the talk. Some authors overdo the stage directions, they

elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time and

take up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing and how he

looked and acted when he said it that we get tired and vexed and wish he

hadn't said it all. Other authors' directions are brief enough, but it

is seldom that the brevity contains either wit or information. Writers

of this school go in rags, in the matter of state directions; the

majority of them having nothing in stock but a cigar, a laugh, a blush,

and a bursting into tears. In their poverty they work these sorry things

to the bone. They say:

"... replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar." (This explains

nothing; it only wastes space.)

"... responded Richard, with a laugh." (There was nothing to laugh

about; there never is. The writer puts it in from habit--automatically;

he is paying no attention to his work; or he would see that there is

nothing to laugh at; often, when a remark is unusually and poignantly

flat and silly, he tries to deceive the reader by enlarging the stage

direction and making Richard break into "frenzies of uncontrollable

laughter." This makes the reader sad.)

"... murmured Gladys, blushing." (This poor old shop-worn blush is a

tiresome thing. We get so we would rather Gladys would fall out of the

book and break her neck than do it again. She is always doing it, and

usually irrelevantly. Whenever it is her turn to murmur she hangs out

her blush; it is the only thing she's got. In a little while we hate

her, just as we do Richard.)

"... repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears." (This kind keep a book damp

all the time. They can't say a thing without crying. They cry so much

about nothing that by and by when they have something to cry ABOUT they

have gone dry; they sob, and fetch nothing; we are not moved. We are

only glad.)

They gavel me, these stale and overworked stage directions, these carbon

films that got burnt out long ago and cannot now carry any faintest

thread of light. It would be well if they could be relieved from duty

and flung out in the literary back yard to rot and disappear along

with the discarded and forgotten "steeds" and "halidomes" and similar

stage-properties once so dear to our grandfathers. But I am friendly to

Mr. Howells's stage directions; more friendly to them than to any one

else's, I think. They are done with a competent and discriminating art,

and are faithful to the requirements of a state direction's proper and

lawful office, which is to inform. Sometimes they convey a scene and

its conditions so well that I believe I could see the scene and get the

spirit and meaning of the accompanying dialogue if some one would read

merely the stage directions to me and leave out the talk. For instance,

a scene like this, from THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY:

"... and she laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on her father's

shoulder."

"... she answered, following his gesture with a glance."

"... she said, laughing nervously."

"... she asked, turning swiftly upon him that strange, searching

glance."

"... she answered, vaguely."

"... she reluctantly admitted."

"... but her voice died wearily away, and she stood looking into his

face with puzzled entreaty."

Mr. Howells does not repeat his forms, and does not need to; he can

invent fresh ones without limit. It is mainly the repetition over and

over again, by the third-rates, of worn and commonplace and juiceless

forms that makes their novels such a weariness and vexation to us, I

think. We do not mind one or two deliveries of their wares, but as we

turn the pages over and keep on meeting them we presently get tired of

them and wish they would do other things for a change.

"... replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar."

"... responded Richard, with a laugh."

"... murmured Gladys, blushing."

"... repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears."

"... replied the Earl, flipping the ash from his cigar."

"... responded the undertaker, with a laugh."

"... murmured the chambermaid, blushing."

"... repeated the burglar, bursting into tears."

"... replied the conductor, flipping the ash from his cigar."

"... responded Arkwright, with a laugh."

"... murmured the chief of police, blushing."

"... repeated the house-cat, bursting into tears."

And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite. I always notice

stage directions, because they fret me and keep me trying to get out

of their way, just as the automobiles do. At first; then by and by they

become monotonous and I get run over.

Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as beautiful

as the make of it. I have held him in admiration and affection so many

years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now;

but his heart isn't, nor his pen; and years do not count. Let him have

plenty of them; there is profit in them for us.

ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT

In the appendix to Croker's Boswell's Johnson one finds this anecdote:

CATO'S SOLILOQUY.--One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat to

him (Dr. Samuel Johnson) Cato's Soliloquy, which she went through very

correctly. The Doctor, after a pause, asked the child:

"What was to bring Cato to an end?"

She said it was a knife.

"No, my dear, it was not so."

"My aunt Polly said it was a knife."

"Why, Aunt Polly's knife MAY DO, but it was a DAGGER, my dear."

He then asked her the meaning of "bane and antidote," which she was

unable to give. Mrs. Gastrel said:

"You cannot expect so young a child to know the meaning of such words."

He then said:

"My dear, how many pence are there in SIXPENCE?"

"I cannot tell, sir," was the half-terrified reply.

On this, addressing himself to Mrs. Gastrel, he said:

"Now, my dear lady, can anything be more ridiculous than to teach a

child Cato's Soliloquy, who does not know how many pence there are in a

sixpence?"

In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society Professor Ravenstein

quoted the following list of frantic questions, and said that they had

been asked in an examination:

Mention all names of places in the world derived from Julius Caesar or

Augustus Caesar.

Where are the following rivers: Pisuerga, Sakaria, Guadalete, Jalon,

Mulde?

All you know of the following: Machacha, Pilmo, Schebulos, Crivoscia,

Basces, Mancikert, Taxhem, Citeaux, Meloria, Zutphen.

The highest peaks of the Karakorum range.

The number of universities in Prussia.

Why are the tops of mountains continually covered with snow (sic)?

Name the length and breadth of the streams of lava which issued from the

Skaptar Jokul in the eruption of 1783.

That list would oversize nearly anybody's geographical knowledge. Isn't

it reasonably possible that in our schools many of the questions in all

studies are several miles ahead of where the pupil is?--that he is set

to struggle with things that are ludicrously beyond his present reach,

hopelessly beyond his present strength? This remark in passing, and by

way of text; now I come to what I was going to say.

I have just now fallen upon a darling literary curiosity. It is a little

book, a manuscript compilation, and the compiler sent it to me with the

request that I say whether I think it ought to be published or not. I

said, Yes; but as I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious; and so,

now that the publication is imminent, it has seemed to me that I should

feel more comfortable if I could divide up this responsibility with the

public by adding them to the court. Therefore I will print some extracts

from the book, in the hope that they may make converts to my judgment

that the volume has merit which entitles it to publication.

As to its character. Every one has sampled "English as She is Spoke"

and "English as She is Wrote"; this little volume furnishes us an

instructive array of examples of "English as She is Taught"--in the

public schools of--well, this country. The collection is made by a

teacher in those schools, and all the examples in it are genuine; none

of them have been tampered with, or doctored in any way. From time to

time, during several years, whenever a pupil has delivered himself

of anything peculiarly quaint or toothsome in the course of his

recitations, this teacher and her associates have privately set that

thing down in a memorandum-book; strictly following the original, as

to grammar, construction, spelling, and all; and the result is this

literary curiosity.

The contents of the book consist mainly of answers given by the boys

and girls to questions, said answers being given sometimes verbally,

sometimes in writing. The subjects touched upon are fifteen in

number: I. Etymology; II. Grammar; III. Mathematics; IV. Geography;

V. "Original"; VI. Analysis; VII. History; VIII. "Intellectual"; IX.

Philosophy; X. Physiology; XI. Astronomy; XII. Politics; XIII. Music;

XIV. Oratory; XV. Metaphysics.

You perceive that the poor little young idea has taken a shot at a good

many kinds of game in the course of the book. Now as to results. Here

are some quaint definitions of words. It will be noticed that in all of

these instances the sound of the word, or the look of it on paper, has

misled the child:

ABORIGINES, a system of mountains.

ALIAS, a good man in the Bible.

AMENABLE, anything that is mean.

AMMONIA, the food of the gods.

ASSIDUITY, state of being an acid.

AURIFEROUS, pertaining to an orifice.

CAPILLARY, a little caterpillar.

CORNIFEROUS, rocks in which fossil corn is found.

EMOLUMENT, a headstone to a grave.

EQUESTRIAN, one who asks questions.

EUCHARIST, one who plays euchre.

FRANCHISE, anything belonging to the French.

IDOLATER, a very idle person.

IPECAC, a man who likes a good dinner.

IRRIGATE, to make fun of.

MENDACIOUS, what can be mended.

MERCENARY, one who feels for another.

PARASITE, a kind of umbrella.

PARASITE, the murder of an infant.

PUBLICAN, a man who does his prayers in public.

TENACIOUS, ten acres of land.

Here is one where the phrase "publicans and sinners" has got mixed up

in the child's mind with politics, and the result is a definition which

takes one in a sudden and unexpected way:

REPUBLICAN, a sinner mentioned in the Bible.

Also in Democratic newspapers now and then. Here are two where the

mistake has resulted from sound assisted by remote fact:

PLAGIARIST, a writer of plays.

DEMAGOGUE, a vessel containing beer and other liquids.

I cannot quite make out what it was that misled the pupil in the

following instances; it would not seem to have been the sound of the

word, nor the look of it in print:

ASPHYXIA, a grumbling, fussy temper.

QUARTERNIONS, a bird with a flat beak and no bill, living in New

Zealand.

QUARTERNIONS, the name given to a style of art practiced by the

Phoenicians.

QUARTERNIONS, a religious convention held every hundred years.

SIBILANT, the state of being idiotic.

CROSIER, a staff carried by the Deity.

In the following sentences the pupil's ear has been deceiving him again:

The marriage was illegible.

He was totally dismasted with the whole performance.

He enjoys riding on a philosopher.

She was very quick at repertoire.

He prayed for the waters to subsidize.

The leopard is watching his sheep.

They had a strawberry vestibule.

Here is one which--well, now, how often we do slam right into the truth

without ever suspecting it:

The men employed by the Gas Company go around and speculate the meter.

Indeed they do, dear; and when you grow up, many and many's the time you

will notice it in the gas bill. In the following sentences the little

people have some information to convey, every time; but in my case they

fail to connect: the light always went out on the keystone word:

The coercion of some things is remarkable; as bread and molasses.

Her hat is contiguous because she wears it on one side.

He preached to an egregious congregation.

The captain eliminated a bullet through the man's heart.

You should take caution and be precarious.

The supercilious girl acted with vicissitude when the perennial time

came.

The last is a curiously plausible sentence; one seems to know what it

means, and yet he knows all the time that he doesn't. Here is an odd

(but entirely proper) use of a word, and a most sudden descent from

a lofty philosophical altitude to a very practical and homely

illustration:

We should endeavor to avoid extremes--like those of wasps and bees.

And here--with "zoological" and "geological" in his mind, but not ready

to his tongue--the small scholar has innocently gone and let out

a couple of secrets which ought never to have been divulged in any

circumstances:

There are a good many donkeys in theological gardens.

Some of the best fossils are found in theological gardens.

Under the head of "Grammar" the little scholars furnish the following

information:

Gender is the distinguishing nouns without regard to sex.

A verb is something to eat.

Adverbs should always be used as adjectives and adjectives as adverbs.

Every sentence and name of God must begin with a caterpillar.

"Caterpillar" is well enough, but capital letter would have been

stricter. The following is a brave attempt at a solution, but it failed

to liquify:

When they are going to say some prose or poetry before they say the

poetry or prose they must put a semicolon just after the introduction of

the prose or poetry.

The chapter on "Mathematics" is full of fruit. From it I take a few

samples--mainly in an unripe state:

A straight line is any distance between two places.

Parallel lines are lines that can never meet until they run together.

A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.

Things which are equal to each other are equal to anything else.

To find the number of square feet in a room you multiply the room by the

number of the feet. The product is the result.

Right you are. In the matter of geography this little book is

unspeakably rich. The questions do not appear to have applied the

microscope to the subject, as did those quoted by Professor Ravenstein;

still, they proved plenty difficult enough without that. These pupils

did not hunt with a microscope, they hunted with a shot-gun; this is

shown by the crippled condition of the game they brought in:

America is divided into the Passiffic slope and the Mississippi valey.

North America is separated by Spain.

America consists from north to south about five hundred miles.

The United States is quite a small country compared with some other

countrys, but it about as industrious.

The capital of the United States is Long Island.

The five seaports of the U.S. are Newfunlan and Sanfrancisco.

The principal products of the U.S. is earthquakes and volcanoes.

The Alaginnies are mountains in Philadelphia.

The Rocky Mountains are on the western side of Philadelphia.

Cape Hateras is a vast body of water surrounded by land and flowing into

the Gulf of Mexico.

Mason and Dixon's line is the Equator.

One of the leading industries of the United States is mollasses,

book-covers, numbers, gas, teaching, lumber, manufacturers,

paper-making, publishers, coal.

In Austria the principal occupation is gathering Austrich feathers.

Gibraltar is an island built on a rock.

Russia is very cold and tyrannical.

Sicily is one of the Sandwich Islands.

Hindoostan flows through the Ganges and empties into the Mediterranean

Sea.

Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so beautiful and

green.

The width of the different zones Europe lies in depend upon the

surrounding country.

The imports of a country are the things that are paid for, the exports

are the things that are not.

Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.

The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.

The chapter headed "Analysis" shows us that the pupils in our public

schools are not merely loaded up with those showy facts about geography,

mathematics, and so on, and left in that incomplete state; no, there's

machinery for clarifying and expanding their minds. They are required to

take poems and analyze them, dig out their common sense, reduce them

to statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous prose translation which

shall tell you at a glance what the poet was trying to get at. One

sample will do. Here is a stanza from "The Lady of the Lake," followed

by the pupil's impressive explanation of it:

Alone, but with unbated zeal, The horseman plied with scourge and steel;

For jaded now and spent with toil, Embossed with foam and dark with

soil, While every gasp with sobs he drew, The laboring stag strained

full in view.

The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made

of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from

the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant

with weariness, while every breath for labor he drew with cries full or

sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight.

I see, now, that I never understood that poem before. I have had

glimpses of its meaning, it moments when I was not as ignorant with

weariness as usual, but this is the first time the whole spacious idea

of it ever filtered in sight. If I were a public-school pupil I would

put those other studies aside and stick to analysis; for, after all, it

is the thing to spread your mind.

We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one might say. As

one turns the pages he is impressed with the depth to which one date has

been driven into the American child's head--1492. The date is there, and

it is there to stay. And it is always at hand, always deliverable at

a moment's notice. But the Fact that belongs with it? That is quite

another matter. Only the date itself is familiar and sure: its vast

Fact has failed of lodgment. It would appear that whenever you ask a

public-school pupil when a thing--anything, no matter what--happened,

and he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492. He applies it to

everything, from the landing of the ark to the introduction of the

horse-car. Well, after all, it is our first date, and so it is right

enough to honor it, and pay the public schools to teach our children to

honor it:

George Washington was born in 1492.

Washington wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1492.

St. Bartholemew was massacred in 1492.

The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492 under Julius

Caesar.

The earth is 1492 miles in circumference.

To proceed with "History"

Christopher Columbus was called the Father of his Country.

Queen Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so

that Columbus could discover America.

The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.

The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then

scalping them.

Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life

was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.

The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.

The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should

be null and void.

Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted. His remains were taken

to the cathedral in Havana.

Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.

John Brown was a very good insane man who tried to get fugitives

slaves into Virginia. He captured all the inhabitants, but was finally

conquered and condemned to his death. The confederasy was formed by the

fugitive slaves.

Alfred the Great reigned 872 years. He was distinguished for letting

some buckwheat cakes burn, and the lady scolded him.

Henry Eight was famous for being a great widower haveing lost several

wives.

Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded after a few

days.

John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.

Lord James Gordon Bennet instigated the Gordon Riots.

The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.

Luther introduced Christianity into England a good many thousand years

ago. His birthday was November 1883. He was once a Pope. He lived at the

time of the Rebellion of Worms.

Julius Caesar is noted for his famous telegram dispatch I came I saw I

conquered.

Julius Caesar was really a very great man. He was a very great soldier

and wrote a book for beginners in the Latin.

Cleopatra was caused by the death of an asp which she dissolved in a

wine cup.

The only form of government in Greece was a limited monkey.

The Persian war lasted about 500 years.

Greece had only 7 wise men.

Socrates... destroyed some statues and had to drink Shamrock.

Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with

such ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon to convey

misinformation every time it is uncarefully unread:

By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could occupy the

throne.

To show how far a child can travel in history with judicious and

diligent boosting in the public school, we select the following mosaic:

Abraham Lincoln was born in Wales in 1599.

In the chapter headed "Intellectual" I find a great number of most

interesting statements. A sample or two may be found not amiss:

Bracebridge Hall was written by Henry Irving.

Show Bound was written by Peter Cooper.

The House of the Seven Gables was written by Lord Bryant.

Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.

Cotton Mather was a writer who invented the cotten gin and wrote

histories.

Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.

Ben Johnson survived Shakspeare in some respects.

In the Canterbury Tale it gives account of King Alfred on his way to the

shrine of Thomas Bucket.

Chaucer was the father of English pottery.

Chaucer was a bland verse writer of the third century.

Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow an American Writer. His

writings were chiefly prose and nearly one hundred years elapsed.

Shakspere translated the Scriptures and it was called St. James because

he did it.

In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of information concerning

Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel

Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope,

Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge,

Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray,

Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli--a fact which shows that

into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is shoveled every

year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic literature, and the

same is there digested and disposed of in a most successful and

characteristic and gratifying public-school way. I have space for but a

trifling few of the results:

Lord Byron was the son of an heiress and a drunken man.

Wm. Wordsworth wrote the Barefoot Boy and Imitations on Immortality.

Gibbon wrote a history of his travels in Italy. This was original.

George Eliot left a wife and children who mourned greatly for his

genius.

George Eliot Miss Mary Evans Mrs. Cross Mrs. Lewis was the greatest

female poet unless George Sands is made an exception of.

Bulwell is considered a good writer.

Sir Walter Scott Charles Bronte Alfred the Great and Johnson were the

first great novelists.

Thomas Babington Makorlay graduated at Harvard and then studied law, he

was raised to the peerage as baron in 1557 and died in 1776.

Here are two or three miscellaneous facts that may be of value, if taken

in moderation:

Homer's writings are Homer's Essays Virgil the Aenid and Paradise

lost some people say that these poems were not written by Homer but by

another man of the same name.

A sort of sadness kind of shone in Bryant's poems.

Holmes is a very profligate and amusing writer.

When the public-school pupil wrestles with the political features of the

Great Republic, they throw him sometimes:

A bill becomes a law when the President vetoes it.

The three departments of the government is the President rules the

world, the governor rules the State, the mayor rules the city.

The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia.

The Constitution of the United States was established to ensure domestic

hostility.

Truth crushed to earth will rise again. As follows:

The Constitution of the United States is that part of the book at the

end which nobody reads.

And here she rises once more and untimely. There should be a limit to

public-school instruction; it cannot be wise or well to let the young

find out everything:

Congress is divided into civilized half civilized and savage.

Here are some results of study in music and oratory:

An interval in music is the distance on the keyboard from one piano to

the next.

A rest means you are not to sing it.

Emphasis is putting more distress on one word than another.

The chapter on "Physiology" contains much that ought not to be lost to

science:

Physillogigy is to study about your bones stummick and vertebry.

Occupations which are injurious to health are cabolic acid gas which is

impure blood.

We have an upper and lower skin. The lower skin moves all the time and

the upper skin moves when we do.

The body is mostly composed of water and about one half is avaricious

tissue.

The stomach is a small pear-shaped bone situated in the body.

The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.

The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches the heart

where it meets the oxygen and is purified.

The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.

In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane sugar to sugar

cane.

The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is developed into

the special sense of hearing.

The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and extends to the

stomach.

If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train would

deafen our ears so that we couldn't see to get off the track.

If, up to this point, none of my quotations have added flavor to the

Johnsonian anecdote at the head of this article, let us make another

attempt:

The theory that intuitive truths are discovered by the light of nature

originated from St. John's interpretation of a passage in the Gospel of

Plato.

The weight of the earth is found by comparing a mass of known lead with

that of a mass of unknown lead.

To find the weight of the earth take the length of a degree on a

meridian and multiply by 6 1/2 pounds.

The spheres are to each other as the squares of their homologous sides.

A body will go just as far in the first second as the body will go plus

the force of gravity and that's equal to twice what the body will go.

Specific gravity is the weight to be compared weight of an equal volume

of or that is the weight of a body compared with the weight of an equal

volume.

The law of fluid pressure divide the different forms of organized bodies

by the form of attraction and the number increased will be the form.

Inertia is that property of bodies by virtue of which it cannot change

its own condition of rest or motion. In other words it is the negative

quality of passiveness either in recoverable latency or insipient

latescence.

If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, nor the unintelligent

teacher--or rather the unintelligent Boards, Committees, and

Trustees--are the proper target for it. All through this little book one

detects the signs of a certain probable fact--that a large part of the

pupil's "instruction" consists in cramming him with obscure and wordy

"rules" which he does not understand and has no time to understand. It

would be as useful to cram him with brickbats; they would at least stay.

In a town in the interior of New York, a few years ago, a gentleman

set forth a mathematical problem and proposed to give a prize to every

public-school pupil who should furnish the correct solution of it.

Twenty-two of the brightest boys in the public schools entered the

contest. The problem was not a very difficult one for pupils of their

mathematical rank and standing, yet they all failed--by a hair--through

one trifling mistake or another. Some searching questions were asked,

when it turned out that these lads were as glib as parrots with the

"rules," but could not reason out a single rule or explain the

principle underlying it. Their memories had been stocked, but not their

understandings. It was a case of brickbat culture, pure and simple.

There are several curious "compositions" in the little book, and we

must make room for one. It is full of naivete, brutal truth, and

unembarrassed directness, and is the funniest (genuine) boy's

composition I think I have ever seen:

ON GIRLS

Girls are very stuck up and dignefied in their maner and be have your.

They think more of dress than anything and like to play with dowls and

rags. They cry if they see a cow in a far distance and are afraid of

guns. They stay at home all the time and go to church on Sunday. They

are al-ways sick. They are always funy and making fun of boy's hands

and they say how dirty. They cant play marbels. I pity them poor things.

They make fun of boys and then turn round and love them. I dont beleave

they ever kiled a cat or anything. They look out every nite and say oh

ant the moon lovely. Thir is one thing I have not told and that is they

al-ways now their lessons bettern boys.

From Mr. Edward Channing's recent article in SCIENCE:

The marked difference between the books now being produced by French,

English, and American travelers, on the one hand, and German explorers,

on the other, is too great to escape attention. That difference is due

entirely to the fact that in school and university the German is taught,

in the first place to see, and in the second place to understand what he

does see.

A SIMPLIFIED ALPHABET

(This article, written during the autumn of 1899, was about the last

writing done by Mark Twain on any impersonal subject.)

I have had a kindly feeling, a friendly feeling, a cousinly feeling

toward Simplified Spelling, from the beginning of the movement three

years ago, but nothing more inflamed than that. It seemed to me to

merely propose to substitute one inadequacy for another; a sort of

patching and plugging poor old dental relics with cement and gold and

porcelain paste; what was really needed was a new set of teeth. That is

to say, a new ALPHABET.

The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet. It doesn't

know how to spell, and can't be taught. In this it is like all other

alphabets except one--the phonographic. This is the only competent

alphabet in the world. It can spell and correctly pronounce any word in

our language.

That admirable alphabet, that brilliant alphabet, that inspired

alphabet, can be learned in an hour or two. In a week the student

can learn to write it with some little facility, and to read it with

considerable ease. I know, for I saw it tried in a public school in

Nevada forty-five years ago, and was so impressed by the incident that

it has remained in my memory ever since.

I wish we could adopt it in place of our present written (and printed)

character. I mean SIMPLY the alphabet; simply the consonants and the

vowels--I don't mean any REDUCTIONS or abbreviations of them, such as

the shorthand writer uses in order to get compression and speed. No, I

would SPELL EVERY WORD OUT.

I will insert the alphabet here as I find it in Burnz's PHONIC

SHORTHAND. (Figure 1) It is arranged on the basis of Isaac Pitman's

PHONOGRAPHY. Isaac Pitman was the originator and father of scientific

phonography. It is used throughout the globe. It was a memorable

invention. He made it public seventy-three years ago. The firm of Isaac

Pitman & Sons, New York, still exists, and they continue the master's

work.

What should we gain?

First of all, we could spell DEFINITELY--and correctly--any word you

please, just by the SOUND of it. We can't do that with our present

alphabet. For instance, take a simple, every-day word PHTHISIS. If we

tried to spell it by the sound of it, we should make it TYSIS, and be

laughed at by every educated person.

Secondly, we should gain in REDUCTION OF LABOR in writing.

Simplified Spelling makes valuable reductions in the case of several

hundred words, but the new spelling must be LEARNED. You can't spell

them by the sound; you must get them out of the book.

But even if we knew the simplified form for every word in the language,

the phonographic alphabet would still beat the Simplified Speller "hands

down" in the important matter of economy of labor. I will illustrate:

PRESENT FORM: through, laugh, highland.

SIMPLIFIED FORM: thru, laff, hyland.

PHONOGRAPHIC FORM: (Figure 2)

To write the word "through," the pen has to make twenty-one strokes.

To write the word "thru," then pen has to make twelve strokes--a good

saving.

To write that same word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to

make only THREE strokes.

To write the word "laugh," the pen has to make FOURTEEN strokes.

To write "laff," the pen has to make the SAME NUMBER of strokes--no

labor is saved to the penman.

To write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to

make only THREE strokes.

To write the word "highland," the pen has to make twenty-two strokes.

To write "hyland," the pen has to make eighteen strokes.

To write that word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make

only FIVE strokes. (Figure 3)

To write the words "phonographic alphabet," the pen has to make

fifty-three strokes.

To write "fonografic alfabet," the pen has to make fifty strokes. To the

penman, the saving in labor is insignificant.

To write that word (with vowels) with the phonographic alphabet, the pen

has to make only SEVENTEEN strokes.

Without the vowels, only THIRTEEN strokes. (Figure 4) The vowels are

hardly necessary, this time.

We make five pen-strokes in writing an m. Thus: (Figure 5) a stroke

down; a stroke up; a second stroke down; a second stroke up; a final

stroke down. Total, five. The phonographic alphabet accomplishes the

m with a single stroke--a curve, like a parenthesis that has come home

drunk and has fallen face down right at the front door where everybody

that goes along will see him and say, Alas!

When our written m is not the end of a word, but is otherwise located,

it has to be connected with the next letter, and that requires another

pen-stroke, making six in all, before you get rid of that m. But never

mind about the connecting strokes--let them go. Without counting them,

the twenty-six letters of our alphabet consumed about eighty pen-strokes

for their construction--about three pen-strokes per letter.

It is THREE TIMES THE NUMBER required by the phonographic alphabet. It

requires but ONE stroke for each letter.

My writing-gait is--well, I don't know what it is, but I will time

myself and see. Result: it is twenty-four words per minute. I don't mean

composing; I mean COPYING. There isn't any definite composing-gait.

Very well, my copying-gait is 1,440 words per hour--say 1,500. If I

could use the phonographic character with facility I could do the 1,500

in twenty minutes. I could do nine hours' copying in three hours; I

could do three years' copying in one year. Also, if I had a typewriting

machine with the phonographic alphabet on it--oh, the miracles I could

do!

I am not pretending to write that character well. I have never had a

lesson, and I am copying the letters from the book. But I can accomplish

my desire, at any rate, which is, to make the reader get a good and

clear idea of the advantage it would be to us if we could discard our

present alphabet and put this better one in its place--using it in

books, newspapers, with the typewriter, and with the pen.

(Figure 6)--MAN DOG HORSE. I think it is graceful and would look comely

in print. And consider--once more, I beg--what a labor-saver it is! Ten

pen-strokes with the one system to convey those three words above, and

thirty-three by the other! (Figure 6) I mean, in SOME ways, not in all.

I suppose I might go so far as to say in most ways, and be within the

facts, but never mind; let it go at SOME. One of the ways in which

it exercises this birthright is--as I think--continuing to use our

laughable alphabet these seventy-three years while there was a rational

one at hand, to be had for the taking.

It has taken five hundred years to simplify some of Chaucer's rotten

spelling--if I may be allowed to use to frank a term as that--and it

will take five hundred years more to get our exasperating new Simplified

Corruptions accepted and running smoothly. And we sha'n't be any better

off then than we are now; for in that day we shall still have the

privilege the Simplifiers are exercising now: ANYBODY can change the

spelling that wants to.

BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PHONOGRAPHIC SPELLING; THERE ISN'T ANY WAY.

It will always follow the SOUND. If you want to change the spelling, you

have to change the sound first.

Mind, I myself am a Simplified Speller; I belong to that unhappy

guild that is patiently and hopefully trying to reform our drunken old

alphabet by reducing his whiskey. Well, it will improve him. When they

get through and have reformed him all they can by their system he will

be only HALF drunk. Above that condition their system can never lift

him. There is no competent, and lasting, and real reform for him but

to take away his whiskey entirely, and fill up his jug with Pitman's

wholesome and undiseased alphabet.

One great drawback to Simplified Spelling is, that in print a simplified

word looks so like the very nation! and when you bunch a whole squadron

of the Simplified together the spectacle is very nearly unendurable.

The da ma ov koars kum when the publik ma be expektd to get rekonsyled

to the bezair asspekt of the Simplified Kombynashuns, but--if I may be

allowed the expression--is it worth the wasted time? (Figure 7)

To see our letters put together in ways to which we are not accustomed

offends the eye, and also takes the EXPRESSION out of the words.

La on, Makduf, and damd be he hoo furst krys hold, enuf!

It doesn't thrill you as it used to do. The simplifications have sucked

the thrill all out of it.

But a written character with which we are NOT ACQUAINTED does not

offend us--Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, and the others--they have an

interesting look, and we see beauty in them, too. And this is true of

hieroglyphics, as well. There is something pleasant and engaging about

the mathematical signs when we do not understand them. The mystery

hidden in these things has a fascination for us: we can't come across a

printed page of shorthand without being impressed by it and wishing we

could read it.

Very well, what I am offering for acceptance and adopting is not

shorthand, but longhand, written with the SHORTHAND ALPHABET UNREACHED.

You can write three times as many words in a minute with it as you can

write with our alphabet. And so, in a way, it IS properly a shorthand.

It has a pleasant look, too; a beguiling look, an inviting look. I will

write something in it, in my rude and untaught way: (Figure 8)

Even when I do it it comes out prettier than it does in Simplified

Spelling. Yes, and in the Simplified it costs one hundred and

twenty-three pen-strokes to write it, whereas in the phonographic it

costs only twenty-nine.

(Figure 9) is probably (Figure 10).

Let us hope so, anyway.

AS CONCERNS INTERPRETING THE DEITY

I

This line of hieroglyphics was for fourteen years the despair of all the

scholars who labored over the mysteries of the Rosetta stone: (Figure 1)

After five years of study Champollion translated it thus:

Therefore let the worship of Epiphanes be maintained in all the temples,

this upon pain of death.

That was the twenty-forth translation that had been furnished by

scholars. For a time it stood. But only for a time. Then doubts began to

assail it and undermine it, and the scholars resumed their labors. Three

years of patient work produced eleven new translations; among them,

this, by Grunfeldt, was received with considerable favor:

The horse of Epiphanes shall be maintained at the public expense; this

upon pain of death.

But the following rendering, by Gospodin, was received by the learned

world with yet greater favor:

The priest shall explain the wisdom of Epiphanes to all these people,

and these shall listen with reverence, upon pain of death.

Seven years followed, in which twenty-one fresh and widely varying

renderings were scored--none of them quite convincing. But now, at last,

came Rawlinson, the youngest of all the scholars, with a translation

which was immediately and universally recognized as being the correct

version, and his name became famous in a day. So famous, indeed, that

even the children were familiar with it; and such a noise did the

achievement itself make that not even the noise of the monumental

political event of that same year--the flight from Elba--was able to

smother it to silence. Rawlinson's version reads as follows:

Therefore, walk not away from the wisdom of Epiphanes, but turn and

follow it; so shall it conduct thee to the temple's peace, and soften

for thee the sorrows of life and the pains of death.

Here is another difficult text: (Figure 2)

It is demotic--a style of Egyptian writing and a phase of the language

which has perished from the knowledge of all men twenty-five hundred

years before the Christian era.

Our red Indians have left many records, in the form of pictures, upon

our crags and boulders. It has taken our most gifted and painstaking

students two centuries to get at the meanings hidden in these pictures;

yet there are still two little lines of hieroglyphics among the

figures grouped upon the Dighton Rocks which they have not succeeds in

interpreting to their satisfaction. These: (Figure 3)

The suggested solutions are practically innumerable; they would fill a

book.

Thus we have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries; it is only

when we set out to discover the secret of God that our difficulties

disappear. It was always so. In antique Roman times it was the custom of

the Deity to try to conceal His intentions in the entrails of birds,

and this was patiently and hopefully continued century after century,

although the attempted concealment never succeeded, in a single recorded

instance. The augurs could read entrails as easily as a modern child

can read coarse print. Roman history is full of the marvels of

interpretation which these extraordinary men performed. These strange

and wonderful achievements move our awe and compel our admiration.

Those men could pierce to the marrow of a mystery instantly. If the

Rosetta-stone idea had been introduced it would have defeated them,

but entrails had no embarrassments for them. Entrails have gone out,

now--entrails and dreams. It was at last found out that as hiding-places

for the divine intentions they were inadequate.

A part of the wall of Valletri in former times been struck with thunder,

the response of the soothsayers was, that a native of that town would

some time or other arrive at supreme power. --BOHN'S SUETONIUS, p. 138.

"Some time or other." It looks indefinite, but no matter, it happened,

all the same; one needed only to wait, and be patient, and keep watch,

then he would find out that the thunder-stroke had Caesar Augustus in

mind, and had come to give notice.

There were other advance-advertisements. One of them appeared just

before Caesar Augustus was born, and was most poetic and touching and

romantic in its feelings and aspects. It was a dream. It was dreamed by

Caesar Augustus's mother, and interpreted at the usual rates:

Atia, before her delivery, dreamed that her bowels stretched to

the stars and expanded through the whole circuit of heaven and

earth.--SUETONIUS, p. 139.

That was in the augur's line, and furnished him no difficulties, but it

would have taken Rawlinson and Champollion fourteen years to make sure

of what it meant, because they would have been surprised and dizzy. It

would have been too late to be valuable, then, and the bill for service

would have been barred by the statute of limitation.

In those old Roman days a gentleman's education was not complete until

he had taken a theological course at the seminary and learned how to

translate entrails. Caesar Augustus's education received this final

polish. All through his life, whenever he had poultry on the menu he

saved the interiors and kept himself informed of the Deity's plans by

exercising upon those interiors the arts of augury.

In his first consulship, while he was observing the auguries, twelve

vultures presented themselves, as they had done to Romulus. And when he

offered sacrifice, the livers of all the victims were folded inward in

the lower part; a circumstance which was regarded by those present who

had skill in things of that nature, as an indubitable prognostic of

great and wonderful fortune.--SUETONIUS, p. 141.

"Indubitable" is a strong word, but no doubt it was justified, if the

livers were really turned that way. In those days chicken livers were

strangely and delicately sensitive to coming events, no matter how far

off they might be; and they could never keep still, but would curl and

squirm like that, particularly when vultures came and showed interest in

that approaching great event and in breakfast.

II

We may now skip eleven hundred and thirty or forty years, which brings

us down to enlightened Christian times and the troubled days of King

Stephen of England. The augur has had his day and has been long ago

forgotten; the priest had fallen heir to his trade.

King Henry is dead; Stephen, that bold and outrageous person, comes

flying over from Normandy to steal the throne from Henry's daughter.

He accomplished his crime, and Henry of Huntington, a priest of high

degree, mourns over it in his Chronicle. The Archbishop of Canterbury

consecrated Stephen: "wherefore the Lord visited the Archbishop with the

same judgment which he had inflicted upon him who struck Jeremiah the

great priest: he died with a year."

Stephen's was the greater offense, but Stephen could wait; not so the

Archbishop, apparently.

The kingdom was a prey to intestine wars; slaughter, fire, and rapine

spread ruin throughout the land; cries of distress, horror, and woe rose

in every quarter.

That was the result of Stephen's crime. These unspeakable conditions

continued during nineteen years. Then Stephen died as comfortably as

any man ever did, and was honorably buried. It makes one pity the poor

Archbishop, and with that he, too, could have been let off as leniently.

How did Henry of Huntington know that the Archbishop was sent to his

grave by judgment of God for consecrating Stephen? He does not explain.

Neither does he explain why Stephen was awarded a pleasanter death than

he was entitled to, while the aged King Henry, his predecessor, who

had ruled England thirty-five years to the people's strongly worded

satisfaction, was condemned to close his life in circumstances most

distinctly unpleasant, inconvenient, and disagreeable. His was probably

the most uninspiring funeral that is set down in history. There is not

a detail about it that is attractive. It seems to have been just the

funeral for Stephen, and even at this far-distant day it is matter of

just regret that by an indiscretion the wrong man got it.

Whenever God punishes a man, Henry of Huntington knows why it was done, and tells us; and his pen is eloquent with admiration; but when a man

has earned punishment, and escapes, he does not explain. He is evidently

puzzled, but he does not say anything. I think it is often apparent that

he is pained by these discrepancies, but loyally tries his best not

to show it. When he cannot praise, he delivers himself of a silence

so marked that a suspicious person could mistake it for suppressed

criticism. However, he has plenty of opportunities to feel contented

with the way things go--his book is full of them.

King David of Scotland... under color of religion caused his followers

to deal most barbarously with the English. They ripped open women,

tossed children on the points of spears, butchered priests at the

altars, and, cutting off the heads from the images on crucifixes, placed

them on the bodies of the slain, while in exchange they fixed on the

crucifixes the heads of their victims. Wherever the Scots came, there

was the same scene of horror and cruelty: women shrieking, old men

lamenting, amid the groans of the dying and the despair of the living.

But the English got the victory.

Then the chief of the men of Lothian fell, pierced by an arrow, and all

his followers were put to flight. For the Almighty was offended at them

and their strength was rent like a cobweb.

Offended at them for what? For committing those fearful butcheries? No,

for that was the common custom on both sides, and not open to criticism.

Then was it for doing the butcheries "under cover of religion"? No, that

was not it; religious feeling was often expressed in that fervent way

all through those old centuries. The truth is, He was not offended at

"them" at all; He was only offended at their king, who had been false to

an oath. Then why did not He put the punishment upon the king instead

of upon "them"? It is a difficult question. One can see by the Chronicle

that the "judgments" fell rather customarily upon the wrong person, but

Henry of Huntington does not explain why. Here is one that went true;

the chronicler's satisfaction in it is not hidden:

In the month of August, Providence displayed its justice in a remarkable

manner; for two of the nobles who had converted monasteries into

fortifications, expelling the monks, their sin being the same, met with

a similar punishment. Robert Marmion was one, Godfrey de Mandeville the

other. Robert Marmion, issuing forth against the enemy, was slain under

the walls of the monastery, being the only one who fell, though he was

surrounded by his troops. Dying excommunicated, he became subject to

death everlasting. In like manner Earl Godfrey was singled out among

his followers, and shot with an arrow by a common foot-soldier. He

made light of the wound, but he died of it in a few days, under

excommunication. See here the like judgment of God, memorable through

all ages!

The exaltation jars upon me; not because of the death of the men, for

they deserved that, but because it is death eternal, in white-hot fire

and flame. It makes my flesh crawl. I have not known more than three

men, or perhaps four, in my whole lifetime, whom I would rejoice to see

writhing in those fires for even a year, let alone forever. I believe

I would relent before the year was up, and get them out if I could.

I think that in the long run, if a man's wife and babies, who had not

harmed me, should come crying and pleading, I couldn't stand it; I

know I should forgive him and let him go, even if he had violated a

monastery. Henry of Huntington has been watching Godfrey and Marmion for

nearly seven hundred and fifty years, now, but I couldn't do it, I

know I couldn't. I am soft and gentle in my nature, and I should have

forgiven them seventy-and-seven times, long ago. And I think God has;

but this is only an opinion, and not authoritative, like Henry of

Huntington's interpretations. I could learn to interpret, but I have

never tried; I get so little time.

All through his book Henry exhibits his familiarity with the intentions

of God, and with the reasons for his intentions. Sometimes--very often,

in fact--the act follows the intention after such a wide interval of

time that one wonders how Henry could fit one act out of a hundred to

one intention out of a hundred and get the thing right every time when

there was such abundant choice among acts and intentions. Sometimes a

man offends the Deity with a crime, and is punished for it thirty years

later; meantime he was committed a million other crimes: no matter,

Henry can pick out the one that brought the worms. Worms were generally

used in those days for the slaying of particularly wicked people.

This has gone out, now, but in old times it was a favorite. It always

indicated a case of "wrath." For instance:

... the just God avenging Robert Fitzhilderbrand's perfidy, a worm grew

in his vitals, which gradually gnawing its way through his intestines

fattened on the abandoned man till, tortured with excruciating

sufferings and venting himself in bitter moans, he was by a fitting

punishment brought to his end.--(P. 400.)

It was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only know it was a

particular breed, and only used to convey wrath. Some authorities think

it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is much doubt.

However, one thing we do know; and that is that that worm had been

due years and years. Robert F. had violated a monastery once; he had

committed unprintable crimes since, and they had been permitted--under

disapproval--but the ravishment of the monastery had not been forgotten

nor forgiven, and the worm came at last.

Why were these reforms put off in this strange way? What was to be

gained by it? Did Henry of Huntington really know his facts, or was he

only guessing? Sometimes I am half persuaded that he is only a guesser,

and not a good one. The divine wisdom must surely be of the better

quality than he makes it out to be.

Five hundred years before Henry's time some forecasts of the Lord's

purposes were furnished by a pope, who perceived, by certain perfectly

trustworthy signs furnished by the Deity for the information of His

familiars, that the end of the world was

... about to come. But as this end of the world draws near many things

are at hand which have not before happened, as changes in the air,

terrible signs in the heavens, tempests out of the common order of the

seasons, wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes in various places; all

which will not happen in our days, but after our days all will come to

pass.

Still, the end was so near that these signs were "sent before that we

may be careful for our souls and be found prepared to meet the impending

judgment."

That was thirteen hundred years ago. This is really no improvement on

the work of the Roman augurs.

CONCERNING TOBACCO

As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions. And the chiefest is

this--that there is a STANDARD governing the matter, whereas there is

nothing of the kind. Each man's own preference is the only standard for

him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command

him. A congress of all the tobacco-lovers in the world could not elect

a standard which would be binding upon you or me, or would even much

influence us.

The next superstition is that a man has a standard of his own. He

hasn't. He thinks he has, but he hasn't. He thinks he can tell what he

regards as a good cigar from what he regards as a bad one--but he can't.

He goes by the brand, yet imagines he goes by the flavor. One may palm

off the worst counterfeit upon him; if it bears his brand he will smoke

it contentedly and never suspect.

Children of twenty-five, who have seven years experience, try to tell me

what is a good cigar and what isn't. Me, who never learned to smoke, but

always smoked; me, who came into the world asking for a light.

No one can tell me what is a good cigar--for me. I am the only judge.

People who claim to know say that I smoke the worst cigars in the world.

They bring their own cigars when they come to my house. They betray an

unmanly terror when I offer them a cigar; they tell lies and hurry away

to meet engagements which they have not made when they are threatened

with the hospitalities of my box. Now then, observe what superstition,

assisted by a man's reputation, can do. I was to have twelve personal

friends to supper one night. One of them was as notorious for costly

and elegant cigars as I was for cheap and devilish ones. I called at his

house and when no one was looking borrowed a double handful of his very

choicest; cigars which cost him forty cents apiece and bore red-and-gold

labels in sign of their nobility. I removed the labels and put the

cigars into a box with my favorite brand on it--a brand which those

people all knew, and which cowed them as men are cowed by an epidemic.

They took these cigars when offered at the end of the supper, and lit

them and sternly struggled with them--in dreary silence, for hilarity

died when the fell brand came into view and started around--but their

fortitude held for a short time only; then they made excuses and filed

out, treading on one another's heels with indecent eagerness; and in the

morning when I went out to observe results the cigars lay all between

the front door and the gate. All except one--that one lay in the plate

of the man from whom I had cabbaged the lot. One or two whiffs was all

he could stand. He told me afterward that some day I would get shot for

giving people that kind of cigars to smoke.

Am I certain of my own standard? Perfectly; yes, absolutely--unless

somebody fools me by putting my brand on some other kind of cigar; for

no doubt I am like the rest, and know my cigar by the brand instead of

by the flavor. However, my standard is a pretty wide one and covers a

good deal of territory. To me, almost any cigar is good that nobody

else will smoke, and to me almost all cigars are bad that other people

consider good. Nearly any cigar will do me, except a Havana. People

think they hurt my feelings when then come to my house with their life

preservers on--I mean, with their own cigars in their pockets. It is

an error; I take care of myself in a similar way. When I go into

danger--that is, into rich people's houses, where, in the nature of

things, they will have high-tariff cigars, red-and-gilt girded and

nested in a rosewood box along with a damp sponge, cigars which develop

a dismal black ash and burn down the side and smell, and will grow hot

to the fingers, and will go on growing hotter and hotter, and go on

smelling more and more infamously and unendurably the deeper the fire

tunnels down inside below the thimbleful of honest tobacco that is in

the front end, the furnisher of it praising it all the time and telling

you how much the deadly thing cost--yes, when I go into that sort of

peril I carry my own defense along; I carry my own brand--twenty-seven

cents a barrel--and I live to see my family again. I may seem to light

his red-gartered cigar, but that is only for courtesy's sake; I smuggle

it into my pocket for the poor, of whom I know many, and light one of

my own; and while he praises it I join in, but when he says it cost

forty-five cents I say nothing, for I know better.

However, to say true, my tastes are so catholic that I have never seen

any cigars that I really could not smoke, except those that cost a

dollar apiece. I have examined those and know that they are made of

dog-hair, and not good dog-hair at that.

I have a thoroughly satisfactory time in Europe, for all over the

Continent one finds cigars which not even the most hardened newsboys in

New York would smoke. I brought cigars with me, the last time; I will

not do that any more. In Italy, as in France, the Government is the only

cigar-peddler. Italy has three or four domestic brands: the Minghetti,

the Trabuco, the Virginia, and a very coarse one which is a modification

of the Virginia. The Minghettis are large and comely, and cost three

dollars and sixty cents a hundred; I can smoke a hundred in seven days

and enjoy every one of them. The Trabucos suit me, too; I don't remember

the price. But one has to learn to like the Virginia, nobody is born

friendly to it. It looks like a rat-tail file, but smokes better, some

think. It has a straw through it; you pull this out, and it leaves a

flue, otherwise there would be no draught, not even as much as there is

to a nail. Some prefer a nail at first. However, I like all the French,

Swiss, German, and Italian domestic cigars, and have never cared to

inquire what they are made of; and nobody would know, anyhow, perhaps.

There is even a brand of European smoking-tobacco that I like. It is a

brand used by the Italian peasants. It is loose and dry and black, and

looks like tea-grounds. When the fire is applied it expands, and climbs

up and towers above the pipe, and presently tumbles off inside of one's

vest. The tobacco itself is cheap, but it raises the insurance. It is

as I remarked in the beginning--the taste for tobacco is a matter of

superstition. There are no standards--no real standards. Each man's

preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can

accept, the only one which can command him.

THE BEE

It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee. I mean, in the

psychical and in the poetical way. I had had a business introduction

earlier. It was when I was a boy. It is strange that I should remember a

formality like that so long; it must be nearly sixty years.

Bee scientists always speak of the bee as she. It is because all the

important bees are of that sex. In the hive there is one married bee,

called the queen; she has fifty thousand children; of these, about one

hundred are sons; the rest are daughters. Some of the daughters are

young maids, some are old maids, and all are virgins and remain so.

Every spring the queen comes out of the hive and flies away with one of

her sons and marries him. The honeymoon lasts only an hour or two; then

the queen divorces her husband and returns home competent to lay two

million eggs. This will be enough to last the year, but not more than

enough, because hundreds of bees are drowned every day, and other

hundreds are eaten by birds, and it is the queen's business to keep the

population up to standard--say, fifty thousand. She must always have

that many children on hand and efficient during the busy season, which

is summer, or winter would catch the community short of food. She lays

from two thousand to three thousand eggs a day, according to the demand;

and she must exercise judgment, and not lay more than are needed in a

slim flower-harvest, nor fewer than are required in a prodigal one, or

the board of directors will dethrone her and elect a queen that has more

sense.

There are always a few royal heirs in stock and ready to take her

place--ready and more than anxious to do it, although she is their own

mother. These girls are kept by themselves, and are regally fed and

tended from birth. No other bees get such fine food as they get, or

live such a high and luxurious life. By consequence they are larger and

longer and sleeker than their working sisters. And they have a curved

sting, shaped like a scimitar, while the others have a straight one.

A common bee will sting any one or anybody, but a royalty stings

royalties only. A common bee will sting and kill another common bee,

for cause, but when it is necessary to kill the queen other ways are

employed. When a queen has grown old and slack and does not lay eggs

enough one of her royal daughters is allowed to come to attack her, the

rest of the bees looking on at the duel and seeing fair play. It is a

duel with the curved stings. If one of the fighters gets hard pressed

and gives it up and runs, she is brought back and must try again--once,

maybe twice; then, if she runs yet once more for her life, judicial

death is her portion; her children pack themselves into a ball around

her person and hold her in that compact grip two or three days, until

she starves to death or is suffocated. Meantime the victor bee is

receiving royal honors and performing the one royal function--laying

eggs.

As regards the ethics of the judicial assassination of the queen, that

is a matter of politics, and will be discussed later, in its proper

place.

During substantially the whole of her short life of five or six years

the queen lives in Egyptian darkness and stately seclusion of the royal

apartments, with none about her but plebeian servants, who give her

empty lip-affection in place of the love which her heart hungers for;

who spy upon her in the interest of her waiting heirs, and report and

exaggerate her defects and deficiencies to them; who fawn upon her and

flatter her to her face and slander her behind her back; who grovel

before her in the day of her power and forsake her in her age and

weakness. There she sits, friendless, upon her throne through the long

night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies and sweet

companionship and loving endearments which she craves, by the gilded

barriers of her awful rank; a forlorn exile in her own house and home,

weary object of formal ceremonies and machine-made worship, winged child

of the sun, native to the free air and the blue skies and the flowery

fields, doomed by the splendid accident of her birth to trade this

priceless heritage for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a

loveless life, with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death--and

condemned by the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable!

Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck--in fact, all the great authorities--are

agreed in denying that the bee is a member of the human family. I do not

know why they have done this, but I think it is from dishonest motives.

Why, the innumerable facts brought to light by their own painstaking

and exhaustive experiments prove that if there is a master fool in the

world, it is the bee. That seems to settle it.

But that is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty years in

building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a

certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievement that as a rule

he overlooks the main chief fact of all--that his accumulation proves an

entirely different thing. When you point out this miscarriage to him he

does not answer your letters; when you call to convince him, the servant

prevaricates and you do not get in. Scientists have odious manners,

except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them.

To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one of them will

answer your letter, but when they do they avoid the issue--you cannot

pin them down. When I discovered that the bee was human I wrote about it

to all those scientists whom I have just mentioned. For evasions, I have

seen nothing to equal the answers I got.

After the queen, the personage next in importance in the hive is the

virgin. The virgins are fifty thousand or one hundred thousand in

number, and they are the workers, the laborers. No work is done, in the

hive or out of it, save by them. The males do not work, the queen does

no work, unless laying eggs is work, but it does not seem so to me.

There are only two million of them, anyway, and all of five months

to finish the contract in. The distribution of work in a hive is

as cleverly and elaborately specialized as it is in a vast American

machine-shop or factory. A bee that has been trained to one of the many

and various industries of the concern doesn't know how to exercise any

other, and would be offended if asked to take a hand in anything outside

of her profession. She is as human as a cook; and if you should ask the

cook to wait on the table, you know what will happen. Cooks will play

the piano if you like, but they draw the line there. In my time I have

asked a cook to chop wood, and I know about these things. Even the hired

girl has her frontiers; true, they are vague, they are ill-defined, even

flexible, but they are there. This is not conjecture; it is founded on

the absolute. And then the butler. You ask the butler to wash the dog.

It is just as I say; there is much to be learned in these ways, without

going to books. Books are very well, but books do not cover the whole

domain of esthetic human culture. Pride of profession is one of the

boniest bones in existence, if not the boniest. Without doubt it is so

in the hive.

TAMING THE BICYCLE

In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the old

high-wheel bicycles of that period. He wrote an account of his

experience, but did not offer it for publication. The form of bicycle he

rode long ago became antiquated, but in the humor of his pleasantry is a

quality which does not grow old.

A. B. P.

I

I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it. So I went down

a bought a barrel of Pond's Extract and a bicycle. The Expert came home

with me to instruct me. We chose the back yard, for the sake of privacy,

and went to work.

Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt--a fifty-inch, with

the pedals shortened up to forty-eight--and skittish, like any other

colt. The Expert explained the thing's points briefly, then he got on

its back and rode around a little, to show me how easy it was to do. He

said that the dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so

we would leave that to the last. But he was in error there. He found, to

his surprise and joy, that all that he needed to do was to get me on to

the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself. Although

I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on record. He

was on that side, shoving up the machine; we all came down with a crash,

he at the bottom, I next, and the machine on top.

We examined the machine, but it was not in the least injured. This was

hardly believable. Yet the Expert assured me that it was true; in fact,

the examination proved it. I was partly to realize, then, how admirably

these things are constructed. We applied some Pond's Extract, and

resumed. The Expert got on the OTHER side to shove up this time, but I

dismounted on that side; so the result was as before.

The machine was not hurt. We oiled ourselves again, and resumed. This

time the Expert took up a sheltered position behind, but somehow or

other we landed on him again.

He was full of admiration; said it was abnormal. She was all right,

not a scratch on her, not a timber started anywhere. I said it was

wonderful, while we were greasing up, but he said that when I came to

know these steel spider-webs I would realize that nothing but dynamite

could cripple them. Then he limped out to position, and we resumed once

more. This time the Expert took up the position of short-stop, and got

a man to shove up behind. We got up a handsome speed, and presently

traversed a brick, and I went out over the top of the tiller and landed,

head down, on the instructor's back, and saw the machine fluttering in

the air between me and the sun. It was well it came down on us, for that

broke the fall, and it was not injured.

Five days later I got out and was carried down to the hospital, and

found the Expert doing pretty fairly. In a few more days I was quite

sound. I attribute this to my prudence in always dismounting on

something soft. Some recommend a feather bed, but I think an Expert is

better.

The Expert got out at last, brought four assistants with him. It was a

good idea. These four held the graceful cobweb upright while I climbed

into the saddle; then they formed in column and marched on either

side of me while the Expert pushed behind; all hands assisted at the

dismount.

The bicycle had what is called the "wabbles," and had them very badly.

In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me,

and in every instance the thing required was against nature. That is

to say, that whatever the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and

breeding moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and

unsuspected law of physics required that it be done in just the other

way. I perceived by this how radically and grotesquely wrong had been

the life-long education of my body and members. They were steeped in

ignorance; they knew nothing--nothing which it could profit them to

know. For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I put the

tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural impulse, and so

violated a law, and kept on going down. The law required the opposite

thing--the big wheel must be turned in the direction in which you are

falling. It is hard to believe this, when you are told it. And not

merely hard to believe it, but impossible; it is opposed to all your

notions. And it is just as hard to do it, after you do come to believe

it. Believing it, and knowing by the most convincing proof that it is

true, does not help it: you can't any more DO it than you could before;

you can neither force nor persuade yourself to do it at first. The

intellect has to come to the front, now. It has to teach the limbs to

discard their old education and adopt the new.

The steps of one's progress are distinctly marked. At the end of each

lesson he knows he has acquired something, and he also knows what that

something is, and likewise that it will stay with him. It is not like

studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for

thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring

the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No--and I see now, plainly

enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't

fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to

make you attend strictly to business. But I also see, by what I have

learned of bicycling, that the right and only sure way to learn German

is by the bicycling method. That is to say, take a grip on one villainy

of it at a time, leaving that one half learned.

When you have reached the point in bicycling where you can balance the

machine tolerably fairly and propel it and steer it, then comes your

next task--how to mount it. You do it in this way: you hop along behind

it on your right foot, resting the other on the mounting-peg, and

grasping the tiller with your hands. At the word, you rise on the

peg, stiffen your left leg, hang your other one around in the air in

a general in indefinite way, lean your stomach against the rear of the

saddle, and then fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other;

but you fall off. You get up and do it again; and once more; and then

several times.

By this time you have learned to keep your balance; and also to steer

without wrenching the tiller out by the roots (I say tiller because it

IS a tiller; "handle-bar" is a lamely descriptive phrase). So you steer

along, straight ahead, a little while, then you rise forward, with a

steady strain, bringing your right leg, and then your body, into the

saddle, catch your breath, fetch a violent hitch this way and then that,

and down you go again.

But you have ceased to mind the going down by this time; you are getting

to light on one foot or the other with considerable certainty. Six more

attempts and six more falls make you perfect. You land in the saddle

comfortably, next time, and stay there--that is, if you can be content

to let your legs dangle, and leave the pedals alone a while; but if you

grab at once for the pedals, you are gone again. You soon learn to wait

a little and perfect your balance before reaching for the pedals; then

the mounting-art is acquired, is complete, and a little practice will

make it simple and easy to you, though spectators ought to keep off

a rod or two to one side, along at first, if you have nothing against

them.

And now you come to the voluntary dismount; you learned the other kind

first of all. It is quite easy to tell one how to do the voluntary

dismount; the words are few, the requirement simple, and apparently

undifficult; let your left pedal go down till your left leg is nearly

straight, turn your wheel to the left, and get off as you would from a

horse. It certainly does sound exceedingly easy; but it isn't. I don't

know why it isn't but it isn't. Try as you may, you don't get down as

you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire.

You make a spectacle of yourself every time.

II

During the eight days I took a daily lesson an hour and a half. At the

end of this twelve working-hours' apprenticeship I was graduated--in

the rough. I was pronounced competent to paddle my own bicycle without

outside help. It seems incredible, this celerity of acquirement. It

takes considerably longer than that to learn horseback-riding in the

rough.

Now it is true that I could have learned without a teacher, but it

would have been risky for me, because of my natural clumsiness. The

self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know

a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers;

and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless

people into going and doing as he himself has done. There are those who

imagine that the unlucky accidents of life--life's "experiences"--are in

some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of

them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch

you on your inexperienced side. If personal experience can be worth

anything as an education, it wouldn't seem likely that you could trip

Methuselah; and yet if that old person could come back here it is more

that likely that one of the first things he would do would be to take

hold of one of these electric wires and tie himself all up in a knot.

Now the surer thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask somebody

whether it was a good thing to take hold of. But that would not suit

him; he would be one of the self-taught kind that go by experience;

he would want to examine for himself. And he would find, for his

instruction, that the coiled patriarch shuns the electric wire; and it

would be useful to him, too, and would leave his education in quite a

complete and rounded-out condition, till he should come again, some day,

and go to bouncing a dynamite-can around to find out what was in it.

But we wander from the point. However, get a teacher; it saves much time

and Pond's Extract.

Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired concerning my

physical strength, and I was able to inform him that I hadn't any. He

said that that was a defect which would make up-hill wheeling pretty

difficult for me at first; but he also said the bicycle would soon

remove it. The contrast between his muscles and mine was quite marked.

He wanted to test mine, so I offered my biceps--which was my best. It

almost made him smile. He said, "It is pulpy, and soft, and yielding,

and rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers; in

the dark a body might think it was an oyster in a rag." Perhaps this

made me look grieved, for he added, briskly: "Oh, that's all right, you

needn't worry about that; in a little while you can't tell it from a

petrified kidney. Just go right along with your practice; you're all

right."

Then he left me, and I started out alone to seek adventures. You don't

really have to seek them--that is nothing but a phrase--they come to

you.

I chose a reposeful Sabbath-day sort of a back street which was about

thirty yards wide between the curbstones. I knew it was not wide enough;

still, I thought that by keeping strict watch and wasting no space

unnecessarily I could crowd through.

Of course I had trouble mounting the machine, entirely on my own

responsibility, with no encouraging moral support from the outside,

no sympathetic instructor to say, "Good! now you're doing well--good

again--don't hurry--there, now, you're all right--brace up, go ahead."

In place of this I had some other support. This was a boy, who was

perched on a gate-post munching a hunk of maple sugar.

He was full of interest and comment. The first time I failed and went

down he said that if he was me he would dress up in pillows, that's what

he would do. The next time I went down he advised me to go and learn

to ride a tricycle first. The third time I collapsed he said he didn't

believe I could stay on a horse-car. But the next time I succeeded, and

got clumsily under way in a weaving, tottering, uncertain fashion, and

occupying pretty much all of the street. My slow and lumbering gait

filled the boy to the chin with scorn, and he sung out, "My, but don't

he rip along!" Then he got down from his post and loafed along the

sidewalk, still observing and occasionally commenting. Presently he

dropped into my wake and followed along behind. A little girl passed

by, balancing a wash-board on her head, and giggled, and seemed about to

make a remark, but the boy said, rebukingly, "Let him alone, he's going

to a funeral."

I have been familiar with that street for years, and had always supposed

it was a dead level; but it was not, as the bicycle now informed me,

to my surprise. The bicycle, in the hands of a novice, is as alert and

acute as a spirit-level in the detecting the delicate and vanishing

shades of difference in these matters. It notices a rise where your

untrained eye would not observe that one existed; it notices any decline

which water will run down. I was toiling up a slight rise, but was not

aware of it. It made me tug and pant and perspire; and still, labor as

I might, the machine came almost to a standstill every little while. At

such times the boy would say: "That's it! take a rest--there ain't no

hurry. They can't hold the funeral without YOU."

Stones were a bother to me. Even the smallest ones gave me a panic when

I went over them. I could hit any kind of a stone, no matter how small,

if I tried to miss it; and of course at first I couldn't help trying to

do that. It is but natural. It is part of the ass that is put in us all,

for some inscrutable reason.

It was at the end of my course, at last, and it was necessary for me to

round to. This is not a pleasant thing, when you undertake it for the

first time on your own responsibility, and neither is it likely to

succeed. Your confidence oozes away, you fill steadily up with nameless

apprehensions, every fiber of you is tense with a watchful strain, you

start a cautious and gradual curve, but your squirmy nerves are all full

of electric anxieties, so the curve is quickly demoralized into a jerky

and perilous zigzag; then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit

in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, defying all prayers

and all your powers to change its mind--your heart stands still, your

breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight on you go, and

there are but a couple of feet between you and the curb now. And now is

the desperate moment, the last chance to save yourself; of course all

your instructions fly out of your head, and you whirl your wheel AWAY

from the curb instead of TOWARD it, and so you go sprawling on that

granite-bound inhospitable shore. That was my luck; that was my

experience. I dragged myself out from under the indestructible bicycle

and sat down on the curb to examine.

I started on the return trip. It was now that I saw a farmer's wagon

poking along down toward me, loaded with cabbages. If I needed anything

to perfect the precariousness of my steering, it was just that. The

farmer was occupying the middle of the road with his wagon, leaving

barely fourteen or fifteen yards of space on either side. I couldn't

shout at him--a beginner can't shout; if he opens his mouth he is gone;

he must keep all his attention on his business. But in this grisly

emergency, the boy came to the rescue, and for once I had to be grateful

to him. He kept a sharp lookout on the swiftly varying impulses and

inspirations of my bicycle, and shouted to the man accordingly:

"To the left! Turn to the left, or this jackass 'll run over you!" The

man started to do it. "No, to the right, to the right! Hold on!

THAT won't do!--to the left!--to the right!--to the LEFT--right!

left--ri--Stay where you ARE, or you're a goner!"

And just then I caught the off horse in the starboard and went down in a

pile. I said, "Hang it! Couldn't you SEE I was coming?"

"Yes, I see you was coming, but I couldn't tell which WAY you was

coming. Nobody could--now, COULD they? You couldn't yourself--now, COULD

you? So what could I do?"

There was something in that, and so I had the magnanimity to say so. I

said I was no doubt as much to blame as he was.

Within the next five days I achieved so much progress that the boy

couldn't keep up with me. He had to go back to his gate-post, and

content himself with watching me fall at long range.

There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the street, a

measured yard apart. Even after I got so I could steer pretty fairly I

was so afraid of those stones that I always hit them. They gave me the

worst falls I ever got in that street, except those which I got from

dogs. I have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run over a

dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. I think that that

may be true: but I think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog

was because he was trying to. I did not try to run over any dog. But

I ran over every dog that came along. I think it makes a great deal of

difference. If you try to run over the dog he knows how to calculate,

but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how to calculate,

and is liable to jump the wrong way every time. It was always so in my

experience. Even when I could not hit a wagon I could hit a dog that

came to see me practice. They all liked to see me practice, and they

all came, for there was very little going on in our neighborhood to

entertain a dog. It took time to learn to miss a dog, but I achieved

even that.

I can steer as well as I want to, now, and I will catch that boy one of

these days and run over HIM if he doesn't reform.

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

(from My Autobiography)

I

Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished manuscript

which constitute this formidable Autobiography and Diary of mine,

certain chapters will in some distant future be found which deal with

"Claimants"--claimants historically notorious: Satan, Claimant; the

Golden Calf, Claimant; the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, Claimant; Louis

XVII., Claimant; William Shakespeare, Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant;

Mary Baker G. Eddy, Claimant--and the rest of them. Eminent Claimants,

successful Claimants, defeated Claimants, royal Claimants, pleb

Claimants, showy Claimants, shabby Claimants, revered Claimants,

despised Claimants, twinkle star-like here and there and yonder through

the mists of history and legend and tradition--and, oh, all the darling

tribe are clothed in mystery and romance, and we read about them with

deep interest and discuss them with loving sympathy or with rancorous

resentment, according to which side we hitch ourselves to. It has always

been so with the human race. There was never a Claimant that couldn't

get a hearing, nor one that couldn't accumulate a rapturous following,

no matter how flimsy and apparently unauthentic his claim might be.

Arthur Orton's claim that he was the lost Tichborne baronet come to life

again was as flimsy as Mrs. Eddy's that she wrote SCIENCE AND HEALTH

from the direct dictation of the Deity; yet in England nearly forty

years ago Orton had a huge army of devotees and incorrigible adherents,

many of whom remained stubbornly unconvinced after their fat god had

been proven an impostor and jailed as a perjurer, and today Mrs. Eddy's

following is not only immense, but is daily augmenting in numbers and

enthusiasm. Orton had many fine and educated minds among his adherents,

Mrs. Eddy has had the like among hers from the beginning. Her Church is

as well equipped in those particulars as is any other Church. Claimants

can always count upon a following, it doesn't matter who they are, nor

what they claim, nor whether they come with documents or without. It was

always so. Down out of the long-vanished past, across the abyss of

the ages, if you listen, you can still hear the believing multitudes

shouting for Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.

A friend has sent me a new book, from England--THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM

RESTATED--well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty years'

interest in that matter--asleep for the last three years--is excited

once more. It is an interest which was born of Delia Bacon's book--away

back in the ancient day--1857, or maybe 1856. About a year later my

pilot-master, Bixby, transferred me from his own steamboat to the

PENNSYLVANIA, and placed me under the orders and instructions of George

Ealer--dead now, these many, many years. I steered for him a good many

months--as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight

watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and

correction of the master. He was a prime chess-player and an idolater of

Shakespeare. He would play chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost

his official dignity something to do that. Also--quite uninvited--he

would read Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when

it was his watch and I was steering. He read well, but not profitably

for me, because he constantly injected commands into the text. That

broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up--to that degree,

in fact, that if we were in a risky and difficult piece of river an

ignorant person couldn't have told, sometimes, which observations were

Shakespeare's and which were Ealer's. For instance:

What man dare, I dare!

Approach thou WHAT are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of

an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off! rugged

Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the THERE she goes! meet her, meet

her! didn't you KNOW she'd smell the reef if you crowded in like that?

Hyrcan tiger; take any ship but that and my firm nerves she'll be in the

WOODS the first you know! stop he starboard! come ahead strong on the

larboard! back the starboard!... NOW then, you're all right; come ahead

on the starboard; straighten up and go 'long, never tremble: or be alive

again, and dare me to the desert DAMNATION can't you keep away from that

greasy water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch her baldheaded! with thy

sword; if trembling I inhabit then, lay in the leads!--no, only with

the starboard one, leave the other alone, protest me the baby of a girl.

Hence horrible shadow! eight bells--that watchman's asleep again, I

reckon, go down and call Brown yourself, unreal mockery, hence!

He certainly was a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and stormy and

tragic, but it was a damage to me, because I have never since been

able to read Shakespeare in a calm and sane way. I cannot rid it of his

explosive interlardings, they break in everywhere with their irrelevant,

"What in hell are you up to NOW! pull her down! more! MORE!--there now,

steady as you go," and the other disorganizing interruptions that were

always leaping from his mouth. When I read Shakespeare now I can hear

them as plainly as I did in that long-departed time--fifty-one years

ago. I never regarded Ealer's readings as educational. Indeed, they were

a detriment to me.

His contributions to the text seldom improved it, but barring that

detail he was a good reader; I can say that much for him. He did not use

the book, and did not need to; he knew his Shakespeare as well as Euclid

ever knew his multiplication table.

Did he have something to say--this Shakespeare-adoring Mississippi

pilot--anent Delia Bacon's book?

Yes. And he said it; said it all the time, for months--in the morning

watch, the middle watch, and dog watch; and probably kept it going

in his sleep. He bought the literature of the dispute as fast as it

appeared, and we discussed it all through thirteen hundred miles of

river four times traversed in every thirty-five days--the time required

by that swift boat to achieve two round trips. We discussed, and

discussed, and discussed, and disputed and disputed and disputed; at any

rate, HE did, and I got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog

and there was a vacancy. He did his arguing with heat, with energy,

with violence; and I did mine with the reverse and moderation of a

subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot-house and is

perched forty feet above the water. He was fiercely loyal to Shakespeare

and cordially scornful of Bacon and of all the pretensions of the

Baconians. So was I--at first. And at first he was glad that that was

my attitude. There were even indications that he admired it; indications

dimmed, it is true, by the distance that lay between the lofty

boss-pilotical altitude and my lowly one, yet perceptible to me;

perceptible, and translatable into a compliment--compliment coming down

from about the snow-line and not well thawed in the transit, and not

likely to set anything afire, not even a cub-pilot's self-conceit; still

a detectable complement, and precious.

Naturally it flattered me into being more loyal to Shakespeare--if

possible--than I was before, and more prejudiced against Bacon--if

possible--that I was before. And so we discussed and discussed, both on

the same side, and were happy. For a while. Only for a while. Only for a

very little while, a very, very, very little while. Then the atmosphere

began to change; began to cool off.

A brighter person would have seen what the trouble was, earlier than I

did, perhaps, but I saw it early enough for all practical purposes. You

see, he was of an argumentative disposition. Therefore it took him but

a little time to get tired of arguing with a person who agreed with

everything he said and consequently never furnished him a provocative

to flare up and show what he could do when it came to clear, cold, hard,

rose-cut, hundred-faceted, diamond-flashing REASONING. That was his name

for it. It has been applied since, with complacency, as many as several

times, in the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle. On the Shakespeare side.

Then the thing happened which has happened to more persons than to me

when principle and personal interest found themselves in opposition to

each other and a choice had to be made: I let principle go, and went

over to the other side. Not the entire way, but far enough to answer the

requirements of the case. That is to say, I took this attitude--to wit,

I only BELIEVED Bacon wrote Shakespeare, whereas I KNEW Shakespeare

didn't. Ealer was satisfied with that, and the war broke loose. Study,

practice, experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled

me to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly

seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly;

finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly. After that I was welded

to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I looked down

with compassion not unmixed with scorn upon everybody else's faith that

didn't tally with mine. That faith, imposed upon me by self-interest

in that ancient day, remains my faith today, and in it I find comfort,

solace, peace, and never-failing joy. You see how curiously theological

it is. The "rice Christian" of the Orient goes through the very same

steps, when he is after rice and the missionary is after HIM; he goes

for rice, and remains to worship.

Ealer did a lot of our "reasoning"--not to say substantially all of it.

The slaves of his cult have a passion for calling it by that large name.

We others do not call our inductions and deductions and reductions by

any name at all. They show for themselves what they are, and we can with

tranquil confidence leave the world to ennoble them with a title of its

own choosing.

Now and then when Ealer had to stop to cough, I pulled my

induction-talents together and hove the controversial lead myself:

always getting eight feet, eight and a half, often nine, sometimes even

quarter-less-twain--as I believed; but always "no bottom," as HE said.

I got the best of him only once. I prepared myself. I wrote out a

passage from Shakespeare--it may have been the very one I quoted

awhile ago, I don't remember--and riddled it with his wild steamboatful

interlardings. When an unrisky opportunity offered, one lovely summer

day, when we had sounded and buoyed a tangled patch of crossings known

as Hell's Half Acre, and were aboard again and he had sneaked the

PENNSYLVANIA triumphantly through it without once scraping sand, and the

A. T. LACEY had followed in our wake and got stuck, and he was feeling

good, I showed it to him. It amused him. I asked him to fire it

off--READ it; read it, I diplomatically added, as only HE could read

dramatic poetry. The compliment touched him where he lived. He did read

it; read it with surpassing fire and spirit; read it as it will never be

read again; for HE know how to put the right music into those thunderous

interlardings and make them seem a part of the text, make them sound as

if they were bursting from Shakespeare's own soul, each one of them a

golden inspiration and not to be left out without damage to the massed

and magnificent whole.

I waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer; waited until

he brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet position, my pet

argument, the one which I was fondest of, the one which I prized far

above all others in my ammunition-wagon--to wit, that Shakespeare

couldn't have written Shakespeare's words, for the reason that the

man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws, and the

law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways--and

if Shakespeare was possessed of the infinitely divided star-dust that

constituted this vast wealth, HOW did he get it, and WHERE and WHEN?

"From books."

From books! That was always the idea. I answered as my readings of the

champions of my side of the great controversy had taught me to

answer: that a man can't handle glibly and easily and comfortably and

successfully the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served.

He will make mistakes; he will not, and cannot, get the trade-phrasings

precisely and exactly right; and the moment he departs, by even a shade,

from a common trade-form, the reader who has served that trade will know

the writer HASN'T. Ealer would not be convinced; he said a man

could learn how to correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and

free-masonries of ANY trade by careful reading and studying. But when

I got him to read again the passage from Shakespeare with the

interlardings, he perceived, himself, that books couldn't teach a

student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and

perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation

and make no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover. It

was a triumph for me. He was silent awhile, and I knew what was

happening--he was losing his temper. And I knew he would presently close

the session with the same old argument that was always his stay and

his support in time of need; the same old argument, the one I couldn't

answer, because I dasn't--the argument that I was an ass, and better

shut up. He delivered it, and I obeyed.

O dear, how long ago it was--how pathetically long ago! And here am I,

old, forsaken, forlorn, and alone, arranging to get that argument out of

somebody again.

When a man has a passion for Shakespeare, it goes without saying that

he keeps company with other standard authors. Ealer always had several

high-class books in the pilot-house, and he read the same ones over and

over again, and did not care to change to newer and fresher ones. He

played well on the flute, and greatly enjoyed hearing himself play. So

did I. He had a notion that a flute would keep its health better if you

took it apart when it was not standing a watch; and so, when it was not

on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the compass-shelf under

the breastboard. When the PENNSYLVANIA blew up and became a drifting

rack-heap freighted with wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother

Henry among them), pilot Brown had the watch below, and was probably

asleep and never knew what killed him; but Ealer escaped unhurt. He and

his pilot-house were shot up into the air; then they fell, and Ealer

sank through the ragged cavern where the hurricane-deck and the

boiler-deck had been, and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck,

on top of one of the unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of

scald and deadly steam. But not for long. He did not lose his head--long

familiarity with danger had taught him to keep it, in any and all

emergencies. He held his coat-lapels to his nose with one hand, to keep

out the steam, and scrabbled around with the other till he found the

joints of his flute, then he took measures to save himself alive, and

was successful. I was not on board. I had been put ashore in New Orleans

by Captain Klinenfelter. The reason--however, I have told all about it

in the book called OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI, and it isn't important,

anyway, it is so long ago.

II

When I was a Sunday-school scholar, something more than sixty years ago,

I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I could about

him. I began to ask questions, but my class-teacher, Mr. Barclay, the

stone-mason, was reluctant about answering them, it seemed to me. I was

anxious to be praised for turning my thoughts to serious subjects when

there wasn't another boy in the village who could be hired to do such a

thing. I was greatly interested in the incident of Eve and the serpent,

and thought Eve's calmness was perfectly noble. I asked Mr. Barclay if

he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent,

would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber. He did not

answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my

age and comprehension. I will say for Mr. Barclay that he was willing to

tell me the facts of Satan's history, but he stopped there: he wouldn't

allow any discussion of them.

In the course of time we exhausted the facts. There were only five

or six of them; you could set them all down on a visiting-card. I was

disappointed. I had been meditating a biography, and was grieved to find

that there were no materials. I said as much, with the tears running

down. Mr. Barclay's sympathy and compassion were aroused, for he was

a most kind and gentle-spirited man, and he patted me on the head and

cheered me up by saying there was a whole vast ocean of materials! I can

still feel the happy thrill which these blessed words shot through me.

Then he began to bail out that ocean's riches for my encouragement and

joy. Like this: it was "conjectured"--though not established--that Satan

was originally an angel in Heaven; that he fell; that he rebelled, and

brought on a war; that he was defeated, and banished to perdition. Also,

"we have reason to believe" that later he did so and so; that "we

are warranted in supposing" that at a subsequent time he traveled

extensively, seeking whom he might devour; that a couple of centuries

afterward, "as tradition instructs us," he took up the cruel trade of

tempting people to their ruin, with vast and fearful results; that

by and by, "as the probabilities seem to indicate," he may have done

certain things, he might have done certain other things, he must have

done still other things.

And so on and so on. We set down the five known facts by themselves on a

piece of paper, and numbered it "page 1"; then on fifteen hundred other

pieces of paper we set down the "conjectures," and "suppositions,"

and "maybes," and "perhapses," and "doubtlesses," and "rumors," and

"guesses," and "probabilities," and "likelihoods," and "we are permitted

to thinks," and "we are warranted in believings," and "might

have beens," and "could have beens," and "must have beens," and

"unquestionablys," and "without a shadow of doubt"--and behold!

MATERIALS? Why, we had enough to build a biography of Shakespeare!

Yet he made me put away my pen; he would not let me write the history of

Satan. Why? Because, as he said, he had suspicions--suspicions that

my attitude in the matter was not reverent, and that a person must be

reverent when writing about the sacred characters. He said any one who

spoke flippantly of Satan would be frowned upon by the religious world

and also be brought to account.

I assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had wholly

misconceived my attitude; that I had the highest respect for Satan, and

that my reverence for him equaled, and possibly even exceeded, that of

any member of the church. I said it wounded me deeply to perceive by his

words that he thought I would make fun of Satan, and deride him, laugh

at him, scoff at him; whereas in truth I had never thought of such a

thing, but had only a warm desire to make fun of those others and

laugh at THEM. "What others?" "Why, the Supposers, the Perhapsers, the

Might-Have-Beeners, the Could-Have-Beeners, the Must-Have-Beeners, the

Without-a-Shadow-of-Doubters, the We-Are-Warranted-in-Believingers, and

all that funny crop of solemn architects who have taken a good solid

foundation of five indisputable and unimportant facts and built upon it

a Conjectural Satan thirty miles high."

What did Mr. Barclay do then? Was he disarmed? Was he silenced? No. He

was shocked. He was so shocked that he visibly shuddered. He said the

Satanic Traditioners and Perhapsers and Conjecturers were THEMSELVES

sacred! As sacred as their work. So sacred that whoso ventured to

mock them or make fun of their work, could not afterward enter any

respectable house, even by the back door.

How true were his words, and how wise! How fortunate it would have been

for me if I had heeded them. But I was young, I was but seven years of

age, and vain, foolish, and anxious to attract attention. I wrote the

biography, and have never been in a respectable house since.

III

How curious and interesting is the parallel--as far as poverty of

biographical details is concerned--between Satan and Shakespeare. It

is wonderful, it is unique, it stands quite alone, there is nothing

resembling it in history, nothing resembling it in romance, nothing

approaching it even in tradition. How sublime is their position, and how

over-topping, how sky-reaching, how supreme--the two Great Unknowns,

the two Illustrious Conjecturabilities! They are the best-known unknown

persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet.

For the instruction of the ignorant I will make a list, now, of those

details of Shakespeare's history which are FACTS--verified facts,

established facts, undisputed facts.

Facts

He was born on the 23d of April, 1564.

Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write, could

not sign their names.

At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby and

unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men charged

with the government of the town, thirteen had to "make their mark" in

attesting important documents, because they could not write their names.

Of the first eighteen years of his life NOTHING is known. They are a

blank.

On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out a license to

marry Anne Whateley.

Next day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry Anne Hathaway.

She was eight years his senior.

William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. In a hurry. By grace of a

reluctantly granted dispensation there was but one publication of the

banns.

Within six months the first child was born.

About two (blank) years followed, during which period NOTHING AT ALL

HAPPENED TO SHAKESPEARE, so far as anybody knows.

Then came twins--1585. February.

Two blank years follow.

Then--1587--he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family

behind.

Five blank years follow. During this period NOTHING HAPPENED TO HIM, as

far as anybody actually knows.

Then--1592--there is mention of him as an actor.

Next year--1593--his name appears in the official list of players.

Next year--1594--he played before the queen. A detail of no consequence:

other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five of her reign. And

remained obscure.

Three pretty full years follow. Full of play-acting. Then

In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford.

Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he accumulated

money, and also reputation as actor and manager.

Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become associated

with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly) author of the

same.

Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made no

protest.

Then--1610-11--he returned to Stratford and settled down for good and

all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in tithes, trading in

land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one shillings, borrowed by

his wife during his long desertion of his family; suing debtors for

shillings and coppers; being sued himself for shillings and coppers;

and acting as confederate to a neighbor who tried to rob the town of its

rights in a certain common, and did not succeed.

He lived five or six years--till 1616--in the joy of these elevated

pursuits. Then he made a will, and signed each of its three pages with

his name.

A thoroughgoing business man's will. It named in minute detail

every item of property he owned in the world--houses, lands, sword,

silver-gilt bowl, and so on--all the way down to his "second-best bed"

and its furniture.

It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the members

of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not even his wife:

the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry by urgent grace of a

special dispensation before he was nineteen; the wife whom he had left

husbandless so many years; the wife who had had to borrow forty-one

shillings in her need, and which the lender was never able to collect of

the prosperous husband, but died at last with the money still lacking.

No, even this wife was remembered in Shakespeare's will.

He left her that "second-best bed."

And NOT ANOTHER THING; not even a penny to bless her lucky widowhood

with.

It was eminently and conspicuously a business man's will, not a poet's.

It mentioned NOT A SINGLE BOOK.

Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and

second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned one he

gave it a high place in his will.

The will mentioned NOT A PLAY, NOT A POEM, NOT AN UNFINISHED LITERARY

WORK, NOT A SCRAP OF MANUSCRIPT OF ANY KIND.

Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that

has died THIS poor; the others all left literary remains behind. Also a

book. Maybe two.

If Shakespeare had owned a dog--but we not go into that: we know he

would have mentioned it in his will. If a good dog, Susanna would have

got it; if an inferior one his wife would have got a downer interest in

it. I wish he had had a dog, just so we could see how painstakingly he

would have divided that dog among the family, in his careful business

way.

He signed the will in three places.

In earlier years he signed two other official documents.

These five signatures still exist.

There are NO OTHER SPECIMENS OF HIS PENMANSHIP IN EXISTENCE. Not a line.

Was he prejudiced against the art? His granddaughter, whom he loved, was

eight years old when he died, yet she had had no teaching, he left no

provision for her education, although he was rich, and in her mature

womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't tell her husband's manuscript

from anybody else's--she thought it was Shakespeare's.

When Shakespeare died in Stratford, IT WAS NOT AN EVENT. It made no

more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten theater-actor

would have made. Nobody came down from London; there were no lamenting

poems, no eulogies, no national tears--there was merely silence, and

nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson,

and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh, and the other distinguished

literary folk of Shakespeare's time passed from life! No praiseful voice

was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven years

before he lifted his.

SO FAR AS ANYBODY ACTUALLY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of

Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.

SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS, HE RECEIVED ONLY ONE LETTER DURING HIS LIFE.

So far as any one KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of Stratford wrote

only one poem during his life. This one is authentic. He did write that

one--a fact which stands undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote

the whole of it out of his own head. He commanded that this work of art

be engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed. There it abides to this

day. This is it:

Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones And curst be he yt moves my bones.

In the list as above set down will be found EVERY POSITIVELY KNOWN fact

of Shakespeare's life, lean and meager as the invoice is. Beyond these

details we know NOT A THING about him. All the rest of his vast history,

as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course,

of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures--an Eiffel Tower

of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin

foundation of inconsequential facts.

IV Conjectures

The historians "suppose" that Shakespeare attended the Free School in

Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he was thirteen.

There is no EVIDENCE in existence that he ever went to school at all.

The historians "infer" that he got his Latin in that school--the school

which they "suppose" he attended.

They "suppose" his father's declining fortunes made it necessary for him

to leave the school they supposed he attended, and get to work and help

support his parents and their ten children. But there is no evidence

that he ever entered or returned from the school they suppose he

attended.

They "suppose" he assisted his father in the butchering business; and

that, being only a boy, he didn't have to do full-grown butchering, but

only slaughtering calves. Also, that whenever he killed a calf he made a

high-flown speech over it. This supposition rests upon the testimony

of a man who wasn't there at the time; a man who got it from a man

who could have been there, but did not say whether he was nor not; and

neither of them thought to mention it for decades, and decades, and

decades, and two more decades after Shakespeare's death (until old age

and mental decay had refreshed and vivified their memories). They hadn't

two facts in stock about the long-dead distinguished citizen, but only

just the one: he slaughtered calves and broke into oratory while he was

at it. Curious. They had only one fact, yet the distinguished citizen

had spent twenty-six years in that little town--just half his lifetime.

However, rightly viewed, it was the most important fact, indeed almost

the only important fact, of Shakespeare's life in Stratford. Rightly

viewed. For experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience

is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into

the book he writes. Rightly viewed, calf-butchering accounts for "Titus

Andronicus," the only play--ain't it?--that the Stratford Shakespeare

ever wrote; and yet it is the only one everybody tried to chouse him out

of, the Baconians included.

The historians find themselves "justified in believing" that the young

Shakespeare poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy's deer preserves and got haled

before that magistrate for it. But there is no shred of respectworthy

evidence that anything of the kind happened.

The historians, having argued the thing that MIGHT have happened into

the thing that DID happen, found no trouble in turning Sir Thomas Lucy

into Mr. Justice Shallow. They have long ago convinced the world--on

surmise and without trustworthy evidence--that Shallow IS Sir Thomas.

The next addition to the young Shakespeare's Stratford history comes

easy. The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-steeling, and

the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the surmised

vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play: result, the

young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh, SUCH a wild young scamp,

and that gratuitous slander is established for all time! It is the very

way Professor Osborn and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur

that stands fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural

History Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest

skeleton that exists on the planet. We had nine bones, and we built the

rest of him out of plaster of Paris. We ran short of plaster of Paris,

or we'd have built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford

Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or

contained the most plaster.

Shakespeare pronounced "Venus and Adonis" "the first heir of his

invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort at literary

composition. He should not have said it. It has been an embarrassment to

his historians these many, many years. They have to make him write that

graceful and polished and flawless and beautiful poem before he escaped

from Stratford and his family--1586 or '87--age, twenty-two, or along

there; because within the next five years he wrote five great plays, and

could not have found time to write another line.

It is sorely embarrassing. If he began to slaughter calves, and poach

deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the earliest likely

moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably wretched from that

school where he was supposably storing up Latin for future literary

use--he had his youthful hands full, and much more than full. He must

have had to put aside his Warwickshire dialect, which wouldn't be

understood in London, and study English very hard. Very hard indeed;

incredibly hard, almost, if the result of that labor was to be the

smooth and rounded and flexible and letter-perfect English of the "Venus

and Adonis" in the space of ten years; and at the same time learn great

and fine and unsurpassable literary FORM.

However, it is "conjectured" that he accomplished all this and more,

much more: learned law and its intricacies; and the complex procedure of

the law-courts; and all about soldiering, and sailoring, and the manners

and customs and ways of royal courts and aristocratic society; and

likewise accumulated in his one head every kind of knowledge the learned

then possessed, and every kind of humble knowledge possessed by the

lowly and the ignorant; and added thereto a wider and more intimate

knowledge of the world's great literatures, ancient and modern, than

was possessed by any other man of his time--for he was going to make

brilliant and easy and admiration-compelling use of these splendid

treasures the moment he got to London. And according to the surmisers,

that is what he did. Yes, although there was no one in Stratford able to

teach him these things, and no library in the little village to dig them

out of. His father could not read, and even the surmisers surmise that

he did not keep a library.

It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his

vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance

with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for

a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT; just as a bright lad like me,

reared in a village on the banks of the Mississippi, might become

perfect in knowledge of the Bering Strait whale-fishery and the

shop-talk of the veteran exercises of that adventure-bristling trade

through catching catfish with a "trot-line" Sundays. But the surmise

is damaged by the fact that there is no evidence--and not even

tradition--that the young Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law-court.

It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare accumulated his

law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn in London, through

"amusing himself" by learning book-law in his garret and by picking up

lawyer-talk and the rest of it through loitering about the law-courts

and listening. But it is only surmise; there is no EVIDENCE that he

ever did either of those things. They are merely a couple of chunks of

plaster of Paris.

There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding horses in

front of the London theaters, mornings and afternoons. Maybe he did.

If he did, it seriously shortened his law-study hours and his

recreation-time in the courts. In those very days he was writing great

plays, and needed all the time he could get. The horse-holding legend

ought to be strangled; it too formidably increases the historian's

difficulty in accounting for the young Shakespeare's erudition--an

erudition which he was acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk, every day in those strenuous times, and emptying each day's catch into next

day's imperishable drama.

He had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a knowledge

of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and talk; also a

knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages: for he was daily

emptying fluent streams of these various knowledges, too, into his

dramas. How did he acquire these rich assets?

In the usual way: by surmise. It is SURMISED that he traveled in Italy

and Germany and around, and qualified himself to put their scenic and

social aspects upon paper; that he perfected himself in French, Italian,

and Spanish on the road; that he went in Leicester's expedition to the

Low Countries, as soldier or sutler or something, for several months or

years--or whatever length of time a surmiser needs in his business--and

thus became familiar with soldiership and soldier-ways and soldier-talk

and generalship and general-ways and general-talk, and seamanship and

sailor-ways and sailor-talk.

Maybe he did all these things, but I would like to know who held the

horses in the mean time; and who studied the books in the garret;

and who frolicked in the law-courts for recreation. Also, who did the

call-boying and the play-acting.

For he became a call-boy; and as early as '93 he became a

"vagabond"--the law's ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in '94

a "regular" and properly and officially listed member of that (in those

days) lightly valued and not much respected profession.

Right soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two theaters, and

manager of them. Thenceforward he was a busy and flourishing business

man, and was raking in money with both hands for twenty years. Then in a

noble frenzy of poetic inspiration he wrote his one poem--his only poem,

his darling--and laid him down and died:

Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones And curst be he yt moves my bones.

He was probably dead when he wrote it. Still, this is only conjecture.

We have only circumstantial evidence. Internal evidence.

Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which constitute the

giant Biography of William Shakespeare? It would strain the Unabridged

Dictionary to hold them. He is a brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred

barrels of plaster of Paris.

V  "We May Assume"

In the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults are ransacting business. Two of these cults are known as the Shakespearites

and the Baconians, and I am the other one--the Brontosaurian.

The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's Works; the

Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the Brontosaurian

doesn't really know which of them did it, but is quite composedly and

contentedly sure that Shakespeare DIDN'T, and strongly suspects that

Bacon DID. We all have to do a good deal of assuming, but I am fairly

certain that in every case I can call to mind the Baconian assumers

have come out ahead of the Shakespearites. Both parties handle the same

materials, but the Baconians seem to me to get much more reasonable and

rational and persuasive results out of them than is the case with the

Shakespearites. The Shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a definite

principle, an unchanging and immutable law: which is: 2 and 8 and 7 and

14, added together, make 165. I believe this to be an error. No matter,

you cannot get a habit-sodden Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials

upon any other basis. With the Baconian it is different. If you place

before him the above figures and set him to adding them up, he will

never in any case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine cases out of

ten he will get just the proper 31.

Let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and homely way

calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the ignorant and

unintelligent. We will suppose a case: take a lap-bred, house-fed,

uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged old Tom that's scarred

from stem to rudder-post with the memorials of strenuous experience, and

is so cultured, so educated, so limitlessly erudite that one may say of

him "all cat-knowledge is his province"; also, take a mouse. Lock the

three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless prison-cell. Wait half an

hour, then open the cell, introduce a Shakespearite and a Baconian, and

let them cipher and assume. The mouse is missing: the question to be

decided is, where is it? You can guess both verdicts beforehand. One

verdict will say the kitten contains the mouse; the other will as

certainly say the mouse is in the tom-cat.

The Shakespearite will Reason like this--(that is not my word, it is

his). He will say the kitten MAY HAVE BEEN attending school when nobody

was noticing; therefore WE ARE WARRANTED IN ASSUMING that it did so;

also, it COULD HAVE BEEN training in a court-clerk's office when no

one was noticing; since that could have happened, WE ARE JUSTIFIED IN

ASSUMING that it did happen; it COULD HAVE STUDIED CATOLOGY IN A GARRET

when no one was noticing--therefore it DID; it COULD HAVE attended

cat-assizes on the shed-roof nights, for recreation, when no one was

noticing, and have harvested a knowledge of cat court-forms and cat

lawyer-talk in that way: it COULD have done it, therefore without a

doubt it DID; it COULD HAVE gone soldiering with a war-tribe when no one

was noticing, and learned soldier-wiles and soldier-ways, and what to do

with a mouse when opportunity offers; the plain inference, therefore,

is that that is what it DID. Since all these manifold things COULD have

occurred, we have EVERY RIGHT TO BELIEVE they did occur. These patiently

and painstakingly accumulated vast acquirements and competences needed

but one thing more--opportunity--to convert themselves into triumphal

action. The opportunity came, we have the result; BEYOND SHADOW OF

QUESTION the mouse is in the kitten.

It is proper to remark that when we of the three cults plant a "WE THINK

WE MAY ASSUME," we expect it, under careful watering and fertilizing and

tending, to grow up into a strong and hardy and weather-defying "THERE

ISN'T A SHADOW OF A DOUBT" at last--and it usually happens.

We know what the Baconian's verdict would be: "THERE IS NOT A RAG

OF EVIDENCE THAT THE KITTEN HAS HAD ANY TRAINING, ANY EDUCATION, ANY EXPERIENCE QUALIFYING IT FOR THE PRESENT OCCASION, OR IS INDEED EQUIPPED FOR ANY ACHIEVEMENT ABOVE LIFTING SUCH UNCLAIMED MILK AS COMES ITS WAY;

BUT THERE IS ABUNDANT EVIDENCE--UNASSAILABLE PROOF, IN FACT--THAT THE OTHER ANIMAL IS EQUIPPED, TO THE LAST DETAIL, WITH EVERY QUALIFICATION NECESSARY FOR THE EVENT. WITHOUT SHADOW OF DOUBT THE TOM-CAT CONTAINS THE MOUSE."

VI

When Shakespeare died, in 1616, great literary productions attributed

to him as author had been before the London world and in high favor for

twenty-four years. Yet his death was not an event. It made no stir, it

attracted no attention. Apparently his eminent literary contemporaries

did not realize that a celebrated poet had passed from their midst.

Perhaps they knew a play-actor of minor rank had disappeared, but

did not regard him as the author of his Works. "We are justified in

assuming" this.

His death was not even an event in the little town of Stratford. Does

this mean that in Stratford he was not regarded as a celebrity of ANY

kind?

"We are privileged to assume"--no, we are indeed OBLIGED to assume--that

such was the case. He had spent the first twenty-two or twenty-three

years of his life there, and of course knew everybody and was known by

everybody of that day in the town, including the dogs and the cats and

the horses. He had spent the last five or six years of his life there,

diligently trading in every big and little thing that had money in it;

so we are compelled to assume that many of the folk there in those said

latter days knew him personally, and the rest by sight and hearsay.

But not as a CELEBRITY? Apparently not. For everybody soon forgot to

remember any contact with him or any incident connected with him. The

dozens of townspeople, still alive, who had known of him or known

about him in the first twenty-three years of his life were in the same

unremembering condition: if they knew of any incident connected with

that period of his life they didn't tell about it. Would the if they had

been asked? It is most likely. Were they asked? It is pretty apparent

that they were not. Why weren't they? It is a very plausible guess that

nobody there or elsewhere was interested to know.

For seven years after Shakespeare's death nobody seems to have been

interested in him. Then the quarto was published, and Ben Jonson awoke

out of his long indifference and sang a song of praise and put it in the

front of the book. Then silence fell AGAIN.

For sixty years. Then inquiries into Shakespeare's Stratford life began

to be made, of Stratfordians. Of Stratfordians who had known Shakespeare

or had seen him? No. Then of Stratfordians who had seen people who

had known or seen people who had seen Shakespeare? No. Apparently the

inquires were only made of Stratfordians who were not Stratfordians of

Shakespeare's day, but later comers; and what they had learned had come

to them from persons who had not seen Shakespeare; and what they had

learned was not claimed as FACT, but only as legend--dim and fading and

indefinite legend; legend of the calf-slaughtering rank, and not worth

remembering either as history or fiction.

Has it ever happened before--or since--that a celebrated person who had

spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the village where he was

born and reared, was able to slip out of this world and leave that

village voiceless and gossipless behind him--utterly voiceless., utterly

gossipless? And permanently so? I don't believe it has happened in any

case except Shakespeare's. And couldn't and wouldn't have happened

in his case if he had been regarded as a celebrity at the time of his

death.

When I examine my own case--but let us do that, and see if it will not

be recognizable as exhibiting a condition of things quite likely to

result, most likely to result, indeed substantially SURE to result in

the case of a celebrated person, a benefactor of the human race. Like

me.

My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the

banks of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years old. I entered

school at five years of age, and drifted from one school to another in

the village during nine and a half years. Then my father died, leaving

his family in exceedingly straitened circumstances; wherefore my

book-education came to a standstill forever, and I became a printer's

apprentice, on board and clothes, and when the clothes failed I got a

hymn-book in place of them. This for summer wear, probably. I lived in

Hannibal fifteen and a half years, altogether, then ran away, according

to the custom of persons who are intending to become celebrated. I

never lived there afterward. Four years later I became a "cub" on a

Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade, and

after a year and a half of hard study and hard work the U.S. inspectors

rigorously examined me through a couple of long sittings and decided

that I knew every inch of the Mississippi--thirteen hundred miles--in

the dark and in the day--as well as a baby knows the way to its mother's

paps day or night. So they licensed me as a pilot--knighted me, so to

speak--and I rose up clothed with authority, a responsible servant of

the United States Government.

Now then. Shakespeare died young--he was only fifty-two. He had lived in

his native village twenty-six years, or about that. He died celebrated

(if you believe everything you read in the books). Yet when he died

nobody there or elsewhere took any notice of it; and for sixty years

afterward no townsman remembered to say anything about him or about

his life in Stratford. When the inquirer came at last he got but one

fact--no, LEGEND--and got that one at second hand, from a person who

had only heard it as a rumor and didn't claim copyright in it as a

production of his own. He couldn't, very well, for its date antedated

his own birth-date. But necessarily a number of persons were still

alive in Stratford who, in the days of their youth, had seen Shakespeare

nearly every day in the last five years of his life, and they would have

been able to tell that inquirer some first-hand things about him if

he had in those last days been a celebrity and therefore a person of

interest to the villagers. Why did not the inquirer hunt them up and

interview them? Wasn't it worth while? Wasn't the matter of sufficient

consequence? Had the inquirer an engagement to see a dog-fight and

couldn't spare the time?

It all seems to mean that he never had any literary celebrity, there or

elsewhere, and no considerable repute as actor and manager.

Now then, I am away along in life--my seventy-third year being already

well behind me--yet SIXTEEN of my Hannibal schoolmates are still

alive today, and can tell--and do tell--inquirers dozens and dozens of

incidents of their young lives and mine together; things that happened

to us in the morning of life, in the blossom of our youth, in the good

days, the dear days, "the days when we went gipsying, a long time ago."

Most of them creditable to me, too. One child to whom I paid court when

she was five years old and I eight still lives in Hannibal, and she

visited me last summer, traversing the necessary ten or twelve hundred

miles of railroad without damage to her patience or to her old-young

vigor. Another little lassie to whom I paid attention in Hannibal when

she was nine years old and I the same, is still alive--in

London--and hale and hearty, just as I am. And on the few surviving

steamboats--those lingering ghosts and remembrancers of great fleets

that plied the big river in the beginning of my water-career--which

is exactly as long ago as the whole invoice of the life-years of

Shakespeare numbers--there are still findable two or three river-pilots

who saw me do creditable things in those ancient days; and several

white-headed engineers; and several roustabouts and mates; and several

deck-hands who used to heave the lead for me and send up on the

still night the "Six--feet--SCANT!" that made me shudder, and the

"M-a-r-k--TWAIN!" that took the shudder away, and presently the darling

"By the d-e-e-p--FOUR!" that lifted me to heaven for joy. (1) They know

about me, and can tell. And so do printers, from St. Louis to New York;

and so do newspaper reporters, from Nevada to San Francisco. And so

do the police. If Shakespeare had really been celebrated, like me,

Stratford could have told things about him; and if my experience goes

for anything, they'd have done it.

1.  Four fathoms--twenty-four feet.

VII

If I had under my superintendence a controversy appointed to decide

whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or not, I believe I would place

before the debaters only the one question, WAS SHAKESPEARE EVER A

PRACTICING LAWYER? and leave everything else out.

It is maintained that the man who wrote the plays was not merely

myriad-minded, but also myriad-accomplished: that he not only knew some

thousands of things about human life in all its shades and grades, and

about the hundred arts and trades and crafts and professions which

men busy themselves in, but that he could TALK about the men and their

grades and trades accurately, making no mistakes. Maybe it is so, but

have the experts spoken, or is it only Tom, Dick, and Harry? Does the

exhibit stand upon wide, and loose, and eloquent generalizing--which is

not evidence, and not proof--or upon details, particulars, statistics,

illustrations, demonstrations?

Experts of unchallengeable authority have testified definitely as to

only one of Shakespeare's multifarious craft-equipments, so far as

my recollections of Shakespeare-Bacon talk abide with me--his

law-equipment. I do not remember that Wellington or Napoleon ever

examined Shakespeare's battles and sieges and strategies, and then

decided and established for good and all that they were militarily

flawless; I do not remember that any Nelson, or Drake, or Cook ever

examined his seamanship and said it showed profound and accurate

familiarity with that art; I don't remember that any king or prince

or duke has ever testified that Shakespeare was letter-perfect in

his handling of royal court-manners and the talk and manners of

aristocracies; I don't remember that any illustrious Latinist or Grecian

or Frenchman or Spaniard or Italian has proclaimed him a past-master in

those languages; I don't remember--well, I don't remember that there

is TESTIMONY--great testimony--imposing testimony--unanswerable and

unattackable testimony as to any of Shakespeare's hundred specialties,

except one--the law.

Other things change, with time, and the student cannot trace back

with certainty the changes that various trades and their processes and

technicalities have undergone in the long stretch of a century or two

and find out what their processes and technicalities were in those early

days, but with the law it is different: it is mile-stoned and documented

all the way back, and the master of that wonderful trade, that complex

and intricate trade, that awe-compelling trade, has competent ways of

knowing whether Shakespeare-law is good law or not; and whether his

law-court procedure is correct or not, and whether his legal shop-talk

is the shop-talk of a veteran practitioner or only a machine-made

counterfeit of it gathered from books and from occasional loiterings in

Westminster.

Richard H. Dana served two years before the mast, and had every

experience that falls to the lot of the sailor before the mast of our

day. His sailor-talk flows from his pen with the sure touch and the ease

and confidence of a person who has LIVED what he is talking about, not

gathered it from books and random listenings. Hear him:

Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt of each

sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the word the whole

canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the greatest rapidity possible

everything was sheeted home and hoisted up, the anchor tripped and

cat-headed, and the ship under headway.

Again:

The royal yards were all crossed at once, and royals and sky-sails

set, and, as we had the wind free, the booms were run out, and all were

aloft, active as cats, laying out on the yards and booms, reeving the

studding-sail gear; and sail after sail the captain piled upon her,

until she was covered with canvas, her sails looking like a great white

cloud resting upon a black speck.

Once more. A race in the Pacific:

Our antagonist was in her best trim. Being clear of the point, the

breeze became stiff, and the royal-masts bent under our sails, but we

would not take them in until we saw three boys spring into the rigging

of the CALIFORNIA; then they were all furled at once, but with orders

to our boys to stay aloft at the top-gallant mast-heads and loose them

again at the word. It was my duty to furl the fore-royal; and while

standing by to loose it again, I had a fine view of the scene. From

where I stood, the two vessels seemed nothing but spars and sails, while

their narrow decks, far below, slanting over by the force of the wind

aloft, appeared hardly capable of supporting the great fabrics

raised upon them. The CALIFORNIA was to windward of us, and had every

advantage; yet, while the breeze was stiff we held our own. As soon as

it began to slacken she ranged a little ahead, and the order was given

to loose the royals. In an instant the gaskets were off and the bunt

dropped. "Sheet home the fore-royal!"--"Weather sheet's home!"--"Lee

sheet's home!"--"Hoist away, sir!" is bawled from aloft. "Overhaul your

clew-lines!" shouts the mate. "Aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"Taut leech!

belay! Well the lee brace; haul taut to windward!" and the royals are

set.

What would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say to that?

He would say, "The man that wrote that didn't learn his trade out of a

book, he has BEEN there!" But would this same captain be competent to

sit in judgment upon Shakespeare's seamanship--considering the changes

in ships and ship-talk that have necessarily taken place, unrecorded,

unremembered, and lost to history in the last three hundred years? It

is my conviction that Shakespeare's sailor-talk would be Choctaw to him.

For instance--from "The Tempest":

MASTER. Boatswain!

BOATSWAIN. Here, master; what cheer?

MASTER. Good, speak to the mariners: fall to 't, yarely, or we run

ourselves to ground; bestir, bestir! (ENTER MARINERS.)

BOATSWAIN. Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare!

Take in the topsail. Tend to the master's whistle.... Down with the

topmast! yare! lower, lower! Bring her to try wi' the main course....

Lay her a-hold, a-hold! Set her two courses. Off to sea again; lay her

off.

That will do, for the present; let us yare a little, now, for a change.

If a man should write a book and in it make one of his characters

say, "Here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing galley and the

imposing-stone into the hell-box; assemble the comps around the frisket

and let them jeff for takes and be quick about it," I should recognize a

mistake or two in the phrasing, and would know that the writer was only

a printer theoretically, not practically.

I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty hard life; I

know all the palaver of that business: I know all about discovery

claims and the subordinate claims; I know all about lodes, ledges,

outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts, drifts, inclines, levels,

tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay casings, granite casings; quartz

mills and their batteries; arastras, and how to charge them with

quicksilver and sulphate of copper; and how to clean them up, and how to

reduce the resulting amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion

into pigs; and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to

hunt for something less robust to do, and find it. I know the argot and

the quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly; and so whenever Bret

Harte introduces that industry into a story, the first time one of his

miners opens his mouth I recognize from his phrasing that Harte got the

phrasing by listening--like Shakespeare--I mean the Stratford one--not

by experience. No one can talk the quartz dialect correctly without

learning it with pick and shovel and drill and fuse.

I have been a surface miner--gold--and I know all its mysteries, and

the dialects that belongs with them; and whenever Harte introduces that

industry into a story I know by the phrasing of his characters that

neither he nor they have ever served that trade.

I have been a "pocket" miner--a sort of gold mining not findable in any

but one little spot in the world, so far as I know. I know how, with

horn and water, to find the trail of a pocket and trace it step by step

and stage by stage up the mountain to its source, and find the compact

little nest of yellow metal reposing in its secret home under the

ground. I know the language of that trade, that capricious trade, that

fascinating buried-treasure trade, and can catch any writer who tries to

use it without having learned it by the sweat of his brow and the labor

of his hands.

I know several other trades and the argot that goes with them; and

whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them without

having learned it at its source I can trap him always before he gets far

on his road.

And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to superintend

a Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the matter down to a

single question--the only one, so far as the previous controversies

have informed me, concerning which illustrious experts of unimpeachable

competency have testified: WAS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS A

LAWYER?--a lawyer deeply read and of limitless experience? I would put

aside the guesses and surmises, and perhapses, and might-have-beens,

and could-have-beens, and must-have-beens, and,

we-are-justified-in-presumings,and the rest of those vague specters

and shadows and indefintenesses, and stand or fall, win or lose, by the

verdict rendered by the jury upon that single question. If the verdict

was Yes, I should feel quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare,

the actor, manager, and trader who died so obscure, so forgotten, so

destitute of even village consequence, that sixty years afterward no

fellow-citizen and friend of his later days remembered to tell anything

about him, did not write the Works.

Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED bears the heading "Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages of expert testimony, with comments thereon, and I will copy the first nine, as

being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to me, to settle

the question which I have conceived to be the master-key to the

Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.

VIII Shakespeare as a Lawyer (1)

The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply ample evidence that their

author not only had a very extensive and accurate knowledge of law, but

that he was well acquainted with the manners and customs of members of

the Inns of Court and with legal life generally.

"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to

the laws of marriage, of wills, of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law,

lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of

exceptions, nor writ of error." Such was the testimony borne by one of

the most distinguished lawyers of the nineteenth century who was raised

to the high office of Lord Chief Justice in 1850, and subsequently

became Lord Chancellor. Its weight will, doubtless, be more appreciated

by lawyers than by laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it is

for those who have not served an apprenticeship to the law to avoid

displaying their ignorance if they venture to employ legal terms and

to discuss legal doctrines. "There is nothing so dangerous," wrote Lord

Campbell, "as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry."

A layman is certain to betray himself by using some expression which a

lawyer would never employ. Mr. Sidney Lee himself supplies us with an

example of this. He writes (p. 164): "On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare

... obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the payment of

No. 6, and No. 1, 5s. 0d. costs." Now a lawyer would never have spoken

of obtaining "judgment from a jury," for it is the function of a jury

not to deliver judgment (which is the prerogative of the court), but to

find a verdict on the facts. The error is, indeed, a venial one, but it

is just one of those little things which at once enable a lawyer to know

if the writer is a layman or "one of the craft."

But when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal subjects, he

is naturally apt to make an exhibition of his incompetence. "Let a

non-professional man, however acute," writes Lord Campbell again,

"presume to talk law, or to draw illustrations from legal science in

discussing other subjects, and he will speedily fall into laughable

absurdity."

And what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare? He had "a

deep technical knowledge of the law," and an easy familiarity with "some

of the most abstruse proceedings in English jurisprudence." And again:

"Whenever he indulges this propensity he uniformly lays down good law."

Of "Henry IV.," Part 2, he says: "If Lord Eldon could be supposed to

have written the play, I do not see how he could be chargeable with

having forgotten any of his law while writing it." Charles and Mary

Cowden Clarke speak of "the marvelous intimacy which he displays with

legal terms, his frequent adoption of them in illustration, and his

curiously technical knowledge of their form and force." Malone, himself

a lawyer, wrote: "His knowledge of legal terms is not merely such

as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his

all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of technical skill."

Another lawyer and well-known Shakespearean, Richard Grant White, says:

"No dramatist of the time, not even Beaumont, who was the younger son of

a judge of the Common Pleas, and who after studying in the Inns of

Court abandoned law for the drama, used legal phrases with Shakespeare's

readiness and exactness. And the significance of this fact is heightened

by another, that is only to the language of the law that he exhibits

this inclination. The phrases peculiar to other occupations serve him

on rare occasions by way of description, comparison, or illustration,

generally when something in the scene suggests them, but legal phrases

flow from his pen as part of his vocabulary and parcel of his thought.

Take the word 'purchase' for instance, which, in ordinary use, means

to acquire by giving value, but applies in law to all legal modes

of obtaining property except by inheritance or descent, and in this

peculiar sense the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-four

plays, and only in one single instance in the fifty-four plays of

Beaumont and Fletcher. It has been suggested that it was in attendance

upon the courts in London that he picked up his legal vocabulary. But

this supposition not only fails to account for Shakespeare's peculiar

freedom and exactness in the use of that phraseology, it does not even

place him in the way of learning those terms his use of which is most

remarkable, which are not such as he would have heard at ordinary

proceedings at NISI PRIUS, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer

of real property, 'fine and recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,'

'indenture,' 'tenure,' 'double voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,'

'remainder,' 'reversion,' 'forfeiture,' etc. This conveyancer's jargon

could not have been picked up by hanging round the courts of law in

London two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title of

real property were comparatively rare. And besides, Shakespeare uses

his law just as freely in his first plays, written in his first London

years, as in those produced at a later period. Just as exactly, too; for

the correctness and propriety with which these terms are introduced have

compelled the admiration of a Chief Justice and a Lord Chancellor."

Senator Davis wrote: "We seem to have something more than a sciolist's

temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art. No legal

solecisms will be found. The abstrusest elements of the common law are

impressed into a disciplined service. Over and over again, where such

knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned in the law, Shakespeare

appears in perfect possession of it. In the law of real property, its

rules of tenure and descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries,

their vouchers and double vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the

method of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the

rules of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in

the principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the

distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the law of

attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites of a valid marriage, in the

presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of the law of prerogative,

in the inalienable character of the Crown, this mastership appears with

surprising authority."

To all this testimony (and there is much more which I have not cited)

may now be added that of a great lawyer of our own times, VIZ.: Sir

James Plaisted Wilde, Q.C. 1855, created a Baron of the Exchequer in

1860, promoted to the post of Judge-Ordinary and Judge of the Courts

of Probate and Divorce in 1863, and better known to the world as Lord

Penzance, to which dignity he was raised in 1869. Lord Penzance, as all

lawyers know, and as the late Mr. Inderwick, K.C., has testified,

was one of the first legal authorities of his day, famous for his

"remarkable grasp of legal principles," and "endowed by nature with a

remarkable facility for marshaling facts, and for a clear expression of

his views."

Lord Penzance speaks of Shakespeare's "perfect familiarity with not only

the principles, axioms, and maxims, but the technicalities of English

law, a knowledge so perfect and intimate that he was never incorrect

and never at fault.... The mode in which this knowledge was pressed

into service on all occasions to express his meaning and illustrate his

thoughts was quite unexampled. He seems to have had a special pleasure

in his complete and ready mastership of it in all its branches. As

manifested in the plays, this legal knowledge and learning had therefore

a special character which places it on a wholly different footing from

the rest of the multifarious knowledge which is exhibited in page after

page of the plays. At every turn and point at which the author required

a metaphor, simile, or illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the

law. He seems almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases, the commonest

of legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen in description or

illustration. That he should have descanted in lawyer language when

he had a forensic subject in hand, such as Shylock's bond, was to be

expected, but the knowledge of law in 'Shakespeare' was exhibited in a

far different manner: it protruded itself on all occasions, appropriate

or inappropriate, and mingled itself with strains of thought widely

divergent from forensic subjects." Again: "To acquire a perfect

familiarity with legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of the

technical terms and phrases not only of the conveyancer's office, but of

the pleader's chambers and the Courts at Westminster, nothing short

of employment in some career involving constant contact with legal

questions and general legal work would be requisite. But a continuous

employment involves the element of time, and time was just what the

manager of two theaters had not at his disposal. In what portion of

Shakespeare's (i.e., Shakspere's) career would it be possible to point

out that time could be found for the interposition of a legal employment

in the chambers or offices of practicing lawyers?"

Stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some possible

explanation of Shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of law, have made

the suggestion that Shakespeare might, conceivably, have been a clerk in

an attorney's office before he came to London. Mr. Collier wrote to Lord

Campbell to ask his opinion as to the probability of this being true.

His answer was as follows: "You require us to believe implicitly a

fact, of which, if true, positive and irrefragable evidence in his own

handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it. Not having been

actually enrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local court

at Stratford nor of the superior Court at Westminster would present

his name as being concerned in any suit as an attorney, but it might

reasonably have been expected that there would be deeds or wills

witnessed by him still extant, and after a very diligent search none

such can be discovered."

Upon this Lord Penzance commends: "It cannot be doubted that Lord

Campbell was right in this. No young man could have been at work in

an attorney's office without being called upon continually to act as a

witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work and

name." There is not a single fact or incident in all that is known of

Shakespeare, even by rumor or tradition, which supports this notion of

a clerkship. And after much argument and surmise which has been indulged

in on this subject, we may, I think, safely put the notion on one side,

for no less an authority than Mr. Grant White says finally that the idea

of his having been clerk to an attorney has been "blown to pieces."

It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that he,

nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth. "That Shakespeare was in early

life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office may be correct. At

Stratford there was by royal charter a Court of Record sitting every

fortnight, with six attorneys, besides the town clerk, belonging to it,

and it is certainly not straining probability to suppose that the young

Shakespeare may have had employment in one of them. There is, it is

true, no tradition to this effect, but such traditions as we have about

Shakespeare's occupation between the time of leaving school and going

to London are so loose and baseless that no confidence can be placed

in them. It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an

attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a high

style,' and making speeches over them."

This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument. There is, as

we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a butcher's

apprentice. John Dowdall, who made a tour of Warwickshire in 1693,

testifies to it as coming from the old clerk who showed him over

the church, and it is unhesitatingly accepted as true by Mr.

Halliwell-Phillipps. (Vol. I, p. 11, and Vol. II, pp. 71, 72.) Mr.

Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in it, and it is supported by Aubrey,

who must have written his account some time before 1680, when his

manuscript was completed. Of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on the

other hand, there is not the faintest vestige of a tradition. It

has been evolved out of the fertile imaginations of embarrassed

Stratfordians, seeking for some explanation of the Stratford rustic's

marvelous acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life. But

Mr. Churton Collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the

tradition which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in its

stead this ridiculous invention, for which not only is there no shred of

positive evidence, but which, as Lord Campbell and Lord Penzance pointed

out, is really put out of court by the negative evidence, since "no

young man could have been at work in an attorney's office without being

called upon continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways

leaving traces of his work and name." And as Mr. Edwards further points

out, since the day when Lord Campbell's book was published (between

forty and fifty years ago), "every old deed or will, to say nothing of

other legal papers, dated during the period of William Shakespeare's

youth, has been scrutinized over half a dozen shires, and not one

signature of the young man has been found."

Moreover, if Shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's office it

is clear that he must have served for a considerable period in order to

have gained (if, indeed, it is credible that he could have so gained)

his remarkable knowledge of the law. Can we then for a moment believe

that, if this had been so, tradition would have been absolutely silent

on the matter? That Dowdall's old clerk, over eighty years of age,

should have never heard of it (though he was sure enough about the

butcher's apprentice) and that all the other ancient witnesses should be

in similar ignorance!

But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy. Tradition is to be

scouted when it is found inconvenient, but cited as irrefragable truth

when it suits the case. Shakespeare of Stratford was the author of the

Plays and Poems, but the author of the Plays and Poems could not have

been a butcher's apprentice. Anyway, therefore, with tradition. But

the author of the Plays and Poems MUST have had a very large and a very

accurate knowledge of the law. Therefore, Shakespeare of Stratford

must have been an attorney's clerk! The method is simplicity itself. By

similar reasoning Shakespeare has been made a country schoolmaster, a

soldier, a physician, a printer, and a good many other things besides,

according to the inclination and the exigencies of the commentator. It

would not be in the least surprising to find that he was studying Latin

as a schoolmaster and law in an attorney's office at the same time.

However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that he has fully

recognized, what is indeed tolerable obvious, that Shakespeare must have

had a sound legal training. "It may, of course, be urged," he writes,

"that Shakespeare's knowledge of medicine, and particularly that branch

of it which related to morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and

that no one has ever contended that he was a physician. (Here Mr.

Collins is wrong; that contention also has been put forward.) It may be

urged that his acquaintance with the technicalities of other crafts

and callings, notably of marine and military affairs, was also

extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of being a sailor or

a soldier. (Wrong again. Why, even Messrs. Garnett and Gosse "suspect"

that he was a soldier!) This may be conceded, but the concession

hardly furnishes an analogy. To these and all other subjects he recurs

occasionally, and in season, but with reminiscences of the law his

memory, as is abundantly clear, was simply saturated. In season and out

of season now in manifest, now in recondite application, he presses it

into the service of expression and illustration. At least a third of his

myriad metaphors are derived from it. It would indeed be difficult to

find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them, a single

scene, the diction and imagery of which are not colored by it. Much of

his law may have been acquired from three books easily accessible to

him--namely, Tottell's PRECEDENTS (1572), Pulton's STATUTES (1578), and Fraunce's LAWIER'S LOGIKE (1588), works with which he certainly seems to have been familiar; but much of it could only have come from one who had an intimate acquaintance with legal proceedings. We quite agree with Mr. Castle that Shakespeare's legal knowledge is not what could have been picked up in an attorney's office, but could only have been learned

by an actual attendance at the Courts, at a Pleader's Chambers, and

on circuit, or by associating intimately with members of the Bench and

Bar."

This is excellent. But what is Mr. Collins's explanation? "Perhaps the

simplest solution of the problem is to accept the hypothesis that in

early life he was in an attorney's office (!), that he there contracted

a love for the law which never left him, that as a young man in London

he continued to study or dabble in it for his amusement, to stroll in

leisure hours into the Courts, and to frequent the society of lawyers.

On no other supposition is it possible to explain the attraction which

the law evidently had for him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy

in a subject where no layman who has indulged in such copious and

ostentatious display of legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in

keeping himself from tripping."

A lame conclusion. "No other supposition" indeed! Yes, there is another,

and a very obvious supposition--namely, that Shakespeare was himself a

lawyer, well versed in his trade, versed in all the ways of the courts,

and living in close intimacy with judges and members of the Inns of

Court.

One is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated the fact

that Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training, but I may

be forgiven if I do not attach quite so much importance to his

pronouncements on this branch of the subject as to those of Malone,

Lord Campbell, Judge Holmes, Mr. Castle, K.C., Lord Penzance, Mr. Grant

White, and other lawyers, who have expressed their opinion on the matter

of Shakespeare's legal acquirements....

Here it may, perhaps, be worth while to quote again from Lord Penzance's

book as to the suggestion that Shakespeare had somehow or other managed

"to acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles, and an accurate

and ready use of the technical terms and phrases, not only of the

conveyancer's office, but of the pleader's chambers and the Courts at

Westminster." This, as Lord Penzance points out, "would require nothing

short of employment in some career involving CONSTANT CONTACT with legal

questions and general legal work." But "in what portion of Shakespeare's

career would it be possible to point out that time could be found for

the interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of

practicing lawyers?... It is beyond doubt that at an early period he was

called upon to abandon his attendance at school and assist his father,

and was soon after, at the age of sixteen, bound apprentice to a trade.

While under the obligation of this bond he could not have pursued any

other employment. Then he leaves Stratford and comes to London. He has

to provide himself with the means of a livelihood, and this he did in

some capacity at the theater. No one doubts that. The holding of horses

is scouted by many, and perhaps with justice, as being unlikely and

certainly unproved; but whatever the nature of his employment was at

the theater, there is hardly room for the belief that it could have been

other than continuous, for his progress there was so rapid. Ere long he

had been taken into the company as an actor, and was soon spoken of as a

'Johannes Factotum.' His rapid accumulation of wealth speaks volumes for

the constancy and activity of his services. One fails to see when there

could be a break in the current of his life at this period of it, giving

room or opportunity for legal or indeed any other employment. 'In 1589,'

says Knight, 'we have undeniable evidence that he had not only a casual

engagement, was not only a salaried servant, as may players were, but

was a shareholder in the company of the Queen's players with other

shareholders below him on the list.' This (1589) would be within

two years after his arrival in London, which is placed by White and

Halliwell-Phillipps about the year 1587. The difficulty in supposing

that, starting with a state of ignorance in 1587, when he is supposed

to have come to London, he was induced to enter upon a course of most

extended study and mental culture, is almost insuperable. Still it was

physically possible, provided always that he could have had access to

the needful books. But this legal training seems to me to stand on a

different footing. It is not only unaccountable and incredible, but it

is actually negatived by the known facts of his career." Lord Penzance

then refers to the fact that "by 1592 (according to the best authority,

Mr. Grant White) several of the plays had been written. 'The Comedy

of Errors' in 1589, 'Love's Labour's Lost' in 1589, 'Two Gentlemen

of Verona' in 1589 or 1590," and so forth, and then asks, "with this

catalogue of dramatic work on hand... was it possible that he could have

taken a leading part in the management and conduct of two theaters,

and if Mr. Phillipps is to be relied upon, taken his share in the

performances of the provincial tours of his company--and at the same

time devoted himself to the study of the law in all its branches so

efficiently as to make himself complete master of its principles and

practice, and saturate his mind with all its most technical terms?"

I have cited this passage from Lord Penzance's book, because it

lay before me, and I had already quoted from it on the matter of

Shakespeare's legal knowledge; but other writers have still better set

forth the insuperable difficulties, as they seem to me, which beset the

idea that Shakespeare might have found them in some unknown period

of early life, amid multifarious other occupations, for the study of

classics, literature, and law, to say nothing of languages and a few

other matters. Lord Penzance further asks his readers: "Did you ever

meet with or hear of an instance in which a young man in this country

gave himself up to legal studies and engaged in legal employments,

which is the only way of becoming familiar with the technicalities of

practice, unless with the view of practicing in that profession? I do

not believe that it would be easy, or indeed possible, to produce

an instance in which the law has been seriously studied in all

its branches, except as a qualification for practice in the legal

profession."

This testimony is so strong, so direct, so authoritative; and so

uncheapened, unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and maybe-so's, and

might-have-beens, and could-have-beens, and must-have-beens, and the

rest of that ton of plaster of Paris out of which the biographers have

built the colossal brontosaur which goes by the Stratford actor's name,

that it quite convinces me that the man who wrote Shakespeare's Works

knew all about law and lawyers. Also, that that man could not have been

the Stratford Shakespeare--and WASN'T.

Who did write these Works, then?

I wish I knew.

1.  From Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED. By

George G. Greenwood, M.P. John Lane Company, publishers.

IX Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Works? Nobody knows.

We cannot say we KNOW a thing when that thing has not been proved.

KNOW is too strong a word to use when the evidence is not final

and absolutely conclusive. We can infer, if we want to, like those

slaves.... No, I will not write that word, it is not kind, it is not

courteous. The upholders of the Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call

US the hardest names they can think of, and they keep doing it all the

time; very well, if they like to descend to that level, let them do it,

but I will not so undignify myself as to follow them. I cannot call them

harsh names; the most I can do is to indicate them by terms reflecting

my disapproval; and this without malice, without venom.

To resume. What I was about to say was, those thugs have built their

entire superstition upon INFERENCES, not upon known and established

facts. It is a weak method, and poor, and I am glad to be able to say

our side never resorts to it while there is anything else to resort to.

But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of that

sort.... Since the Stratford Shakespeare couldn't have written the

Works, we infer that somebody did. Who was it, then? This requires some

more inferring.

Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a

tidal wave whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of admiration,

delight, and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up and claim the

authorship. Why a dozen, instead of only one or two? One reason is,

because there are a dozen that are recognizably competent to do that

poem. Do you remember "Beautiful Snow"? Do you remember "Rock Me to

Sleep, Mother, Rock Me to Sleep"? Do you remember "Backward, turn,

backward, O Time, in thy flight! Make me a child again just for

tonight"? I remember them very well. Their authorship was claimed

by most of the grown-up people who were alive at the time, and every

claimant had one plausible argument in his favor, at least--to wit, he

could have done the authoring; he was competent.

Have the Works been claimed by a dozen? They haven't. There was good

reason. The world knows there was but one man on the planet at the

time who was competent--not a dozen, and not two. A long time ago the

dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a procession of

prodigious footprints stretching across the plain--footprints that were

three miles apart, each footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong

deep, and with forests and villages mashed to mush in it. Was there any

doubt as to who made that mighty trail? Were there a dozen claimants?

Where there two? No--the people knew who it was that had been along

there: there was only one Hercules.

There has been only one Shakespeare. There couldn't be two; certainly

there couldn't be two at the same time. It takes ages to bring forth a

Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him. This one was not matched

before his time; nor during his time; and hasn't been matched since. The

prospect of matching him in our time is not bright.

The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not qualified

to write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was. They claim that Bacon

possessed the stupendous equipment--both natural and acquired--for the

miracle; and that no other Englishman of his day possessed the like; or,

indeed, anything closely approaching it.

Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor and

horizonless magnitude of that equipment. Also, he has synopsized Bacon's

history--a thing which cannot be done for the Stratford Shakespeare,

for he hasn't any history to synopsize. Bacon's history is open to the

world, from his boyhood to his death in old age--a history consisting

of known facts, displayed in minute and multitudinous detail; FACTS, not

guesses and conjectures and might-have-beens.

Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen, and had a

Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was "distinguished both

as a linguist and a theologian: she corresponded in Greek with Bishop

Jewell, and translated his APOLOGIA from the Latin so correctly that

neither he nor Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration." It

is the atmosphere we are reared in that determines how our inclinations

and aspirations shall tend. The atmosphere furnished by the parents to

the son in this present case was an atmosphere saturated with learning;

with thinkings and ponderings upon deep subjects; and with polite

culture. It had its natural effect. Shakespeare of Stratford was reared

in a house which had no use for books, since its owners, his parents,

were without education. This may have had an effect upon the son, but

we do not know, because we have no history of him of an informing sort.

There were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do

and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to

the dead languages. "All the valuable books then extant in all the

vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a single

shelf"--imagine it! The few existing books were in the Latin tongue

mainly. "A person who was ignorant of it was shut out from all

acquaintance--not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but with the most

interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of his own time"--a

literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for his fictitious

reputation's sake, since the writer of his Works would begin to use it

wholesale and in a most masterly way before the lad was hardly more than

out of his teens and into his twenties.

At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three years

there. Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English Ambassador,

and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured, the great, and

the aristocracy of fashion, during another three years. A total of six

years spent at the sources of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of

men. The three spent at the university were coeval with the second

and last three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school

supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with nothing

to infer from. The second three of the Baconian six were "presumably"

spent by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher. That is, the

thugs presume it--on no evidence of any kind. Which is their way, when

they want a historical fact. Fact and presumption are, for business

purposes, all the same to them. They know the difference, but they also

know how to blink it. They know, too, that while in history-building a

fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long

to bloom into a fact when THEY have the handling of it. They know by old

experience that when they get hold of a presumption-tadpole he is

not going to STAY tadpole in their history-tank; no, they know how to

develop him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of FACT, and make

him sit up on his hams, and puff out his chin, and look important

and insolent and come-to-stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure

authenticity with a thundering bellow that will convince everybody

because it is so loud. The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty

persons where reasoning convinces but one. I wouldn't be a thug, not

even if--but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the

argument, and it is not noble in spirit besides. If I am better than a

thug, is the merit mine? No, it is His. Then to Him be the praise. That

is the right spirit.

They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection with the

Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher. They also "presume"

that the butcher was his father. They don't know. There is no written

record of it, nor any other actual evidence. If it would have helped

their case any, they would have apprenticed him to thirty butchers,

to fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers--all by their patented

method "presumption." If it will help their case they will do it yet;

and if it will further help it, they will "presume" that all those

butchers were his father. And the week after, they will SAY it. Why, it

is just like being the past tense of the compound reflexive adverbial

incandescent hypodermic irregular accusative Noun of Multitude; which is

father to the expression which the grammarians call Verb. It is like a

whole ancestry, with only one posterity.

To resume. Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law, and mastered

that abstruse science. From that day to the end of his life he was daily

in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as a casual onlooker

in intervals between holding horses in front of a theater, but as

a practicing lawyer--a great and successful one, a renowned one, a

Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in the high brotherhood

of the legal Table Round; he lived in the law's atmosphere thenceforth,

all his years, and by sheer ability forced his way up its difficult

steeps to its supremest summit, the Lord-Chancellorship, leaving behind

him no fellow-craftsman qualified to challenge his divine right to that

majestic place.

When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other

illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses,

brilliances, profundities, and felicities so prodigally displayed in the

Plays, and try to fit them to the historyless Stratford stage-manager,

they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but when we put them in

the mouth of Bacon they do not sound strange, they seem in their natural

and rightful place, they seem at home there. Please turn back and read

them again. Attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford they are meaningless,

they are inebriate extravagancies--intemperate admirations of the dark

side of the moon, so to speak; attributed to Bacon, they are admirations

of the golden glories of the moon's front side, the moon at the

full--and not intemperate, not overwrought, but sane and right, and

justified. "At ever turn and point at which the author required a

metaphor, simile, or illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the

law; he seems almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases; the commonest

legal phrases, the commonest of legal expressions, were ever at the end

of his pen." That could happen to no one but a person whose TRADE was

the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it. Veteran mariners fill

their conversation with sailor-phrases and draw all their similes from

the ship and the sea and the storm, but no mere PASSENGER ever does it,

be he of Stratford or elsewhere; or could do it with anything resembling

accuracy, if he were hardy enough to try. Please read again what Lord

Campbell and the other great authorities have said about Bacon when they

thought they were saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford.

X The Rest of the Equipment

The author of the Plays was equipped, beyond every other man of his

time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind, grace,

and majesty of expression. Everyone one had said it, no one doubts it.

Also, he had humor, humor in rich abundance, and always wanting to

break out. We have no evidence of any kind that Shakespeare of Stratford

possessed any of these gifts or any of these acquirements. The only

lines he ever wrote, so far as we know, are substantially barren of

them--barren of all of them.

Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones And curst be he yt moves my bones.

Ben Jonson says of Bacon, as orator:

His language, WHERE HE COULD SPARE AND PASS BY A JEST, was nobly

censorious. No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weightily,

or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member

of his speech but consisted of his (its) own graces.... The fear of

every man that heard him was lest he should make an end.

From Macaulay:

He continued to distinguish himself in Parliament, particularly by his

exertions in favor of one excellent measure on which the King's heart

was set--the union of England and Scotland. It was not difficult for

such an intellect to discover many irresistible arguments in favor

of such a scheme. He conducted the great case of the POST NATI in

the Exchequer Chamber; and the decision of the judges--a decision the

legality of which may be questioned, but the beneficial effect of which

must be acknowledged--was in a great measure attributed to his dexterous

management.

Again:

While actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts of law,

he still found leisure for letters and philosophy. The noble treatise on

the ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, which at a later period was expanded into the DE AUGMENTIS, appeared in 1605.

The WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS, a work which, if it had proceeded from any other writer, would have been considered as a masterpiece of wit and

learning, was printed in 1609.

In the mean time the NOVUM ORGANUM was slowly proceeding. Several

distinguished men of learning had been permitted to see portions of that

extraordinary book, and they spoke with the greatest admiration of his

genius.

Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusing the COGITATA ET VISA, one of the

most precious of those scattered leaves out of which the great oracular

volume was afterward made up, acknowledged that "in all proposals and

plots in that book, Bacon showed himself a master workman"; and that "it

could not be gainsaid but all the treatise over did abound with

choice conceits of the present state of learning, and with worthy

contemplations of the means to procure it."

In 1612 a new edition of the ESSAYS appeared, with additions surpassing

the original collection both in bulk and quality.

Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon's attention from a work the most

arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful that even his mighty

powers could have achieved, "the reducing and recompiling," to use his

own phrase, "of the laws of England."

To serve the exacting and laborious offices of Attorney-General and

Solicitor-General would have satisfied the appetite of any other man

for hard work, but Bacon had to add the vast literary industries just

described, to satisfy his. He was a born worker.

The service which he rendered to letters during the last five years of

his life, amid ten thousand distractions and vexations, increase the

regret with which we think on the many years which he had wasted, to use

the words of Sir Thomas Bodley, "on such study as was not worthy such a

student."

He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a History of England

under the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of National History, a

Philosophical Romance. He made extensive and valuable additions to his

Essays. He published the inestimable TREATISE DE AUGMENTIS SCIENTIARUM.

Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment, and

quiet his appetite for work? Not entirely:

The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor

bore the mark of his mind. THE BEST JEST-BOOK IN THE WORLD is that which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a day on

which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.

Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw light

upon Bacon, and seem to indicate--and maybe demonstrate--that he was

competent to write the Plays and Poems:

With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of

comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other human

being.

The ESSAYS contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of character,

no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden, or a court-masque,

could escape the notice of one whose mind was capable of taking in the

whole world of knowledge.

His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave

to Prince Ahmed: fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a lady;

spread it, and the armies of the powerful Sultans might repose beneath

its shade.

The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of the

mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.

In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle, Lord

Burleigh, he said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province."

Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic, he

adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric.

The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like his wit,

so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason and to

tyrannize over the whole man.

There are too many places in the Plays where this happens. Poor old

dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name, is a

pathetic instance of it. "We may assume" that it is Bacon's fault, but

the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.

No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly subjugated.

It stopped at the first check from good sense.

In truth, much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world--amid

things as strange as any that are described in the ARABIAN TALES...

amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin, fountains more

wonderful than the golden water of Parizade, conveyances more rapid

than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more formidable than the lance of

Astolfo, remedies more efficacious than the balsam of Fierabras. Yet

in his magnificent day-dreams there was nothing wild--nothing but what

sober reason sanctioned.

Bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the NOVUM ORGANUM... .

Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is employed only to

illustrate and decorate truth. No book ever made so great a revolution

in the mode of thinking, overthrew so may prejudices, introduced so many

new opinions.

But what we most admire is the vast capacity of that intellect which,

without effort, takes in at once all the domains of science--all the

past, the present and the future, all the errors of two thousand years,

all the encouraging signs of the passing times, all the bright hopes of

the coming age.

He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and rendering it

portable.

His eloquence would alone have entitled him to a high rank in

literature.

It is evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts and

each and every one of the acquirements that are so prodigally displayed

in the Plays and Poems, and in much higher and richer degree than any

other man of his time or of any previous time. He was a genius without a

mate, a prodigy not matable. There was only one of him; the planet

could not produce two of him at one birth, nor in one age. He could have

written anything that is in the Plays and Poems. He could have written

this:

The cloud-cap'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Also, he could have written this, but he refrained:

Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.

When a person reads the noble verses about the cloud-cap'd towers,

he ought not to follow it immediately with Good friend for Iesus sake

forbeare, because he will find the transition from great poetry to

poor prose too violent for comfort. It will give him a shock. You never

notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel is until you bite into a

layer of it in a pie.

XI

Am I trying to convince anybody that Shakespeare did not write

Shakespeare's Works? Ah, now, what do you take me for? Would I be so

soft as that, after having known the human race familiarly for nearly

seventy-four years? It would grieve me to know that any one could think

so injuriously of me, so uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me. No,

no, I am aware that when even the brightest mind in our world has been

trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never

be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely,

dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance

which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition.

I doubt if I could do it myself. We always get at second hand our

notions about systems of government; and high tariff and low tariff;

and prohibition and anti-prohibition; and the holiness of peace and the

glories of war; and codes of honor and codes of morals; and approval of

the duel and disapproval of it; and our beliefs concerning the nature of

cats; and our ideas as to whether the murder of helpless wild animals

is base or is heroic; and our preferences in the matter of religious and

political parties; and our acceptance or rejection of the Shakespeares

and the Author Ortons and the Mrs. Eddys. We get them all at second

hand, we reason none of them out for ourselves. It is the way we are

made. It is the way we are all made, and we can't help it, we can't

change it. And whenever we have been furnished a fetish, and have been

taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and refrain from

examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong, that can

persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty and our devotion. In

morals, conduct, and beliefs we take the color of our environment and

associations, and it is a color that can safely be warranted to wash.

Whenever we have been furnished with a tar baby ostensibly stuffed

with jewels, and warned that it will be dishonorable and irreverent to

disembowel it and test the jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off

it. We submit, not reluctantly, but rather gladly, for we are privately

afraid we should find, upon examination that the jewels are of the sort

that are manufactured at North Adams, Mass.

I haven't any idea that Shakespeare will have to vacate his pedestal

this side of the year 2209. Disbelief in him cannot come swiftly,

disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby has never been known

to disintegrate swiftly; it is a very slow process. It took several

thousand years to convince our fine race--including every splendid

intellect in it--that there is no such thing as a witch; it has taken

several thousand years to convince the same fine race--including every

splendid intellect in it--that there is no such person as Satan; it has

taken several centuries to remove perdition from the Protestant Church's

program of post-mortem entertainments; it has taken a weary long time to

persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to

bear it the best they can; and it looks as if their Scotch brethren will

still be burning babies in the everlasting fires when Shakespeare comes

down from his perch.

We are The Reasoning Race. We can't prove it by the above examples,

and we can't prove it by the miraculous "histories" built by those

Stratfordolaters out of a hatful of rags and a barrel of sawdust, but

there is a plenty of other things we can prove it by, if I could think

of them. We are The Reasoning Race, and when we find a vague file of

chipmunk-tracks stringing through the dust of Stratford village, we know

by our reasoning bowers that Hercules has been along there. I feel that

our fetish is safe for three centuries yet. The bust, too--there in the

Stratford Church. The precious bust, the priceless bust, the calm bust,

the serene bust, the emotionless bust, with the dandy mustache, and the

putty face, unseamed of care--that face which has looked passionlessly

down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years and will still

look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more, with the deep, deep,

deep, subtle, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder.

XII Irreverence

One of the most trying defects which I find in these--these--what shall

I call them? for I will not apply injurious epithets to them, the way

they do to us, such violations of courtesy being repugnant to my nature

and my dignity. The farthest I can go in that direction is to call them

by names of limited reverence--names merely descriptive, never unkind,

never offensive, never tainted by harsh feeling. If THEY would do

like this, they would feel better in their hearts. Very well,

then--to proceed. One of the most trying defects which I find in these

Stratfordolaters, these Shakesperiods, these thugs, these bangalores,

these troglodytes, these herumfrodites, these blatherskites, these

buccaneers, these bandoleers, is their spirit of irreverence. It is

detectable in every utterance of theirs when they are talking about us.

I am thankful that in me there is nothing of that spirit. When a thing

is sacred to me it is impossible for me to be irreverent toward it. I

cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent,

except towards the things which were sacred to other people. Am I in

the right? I think so. But I ask no one to take my unsupported word;

no, look at the dictionary; let the dictionary decide. Here is the

definition:

IRREVERENCE. The quality or condition of irreverence toward God and

sacred things.

What does the Hindu say? He says it is correct. He says irreverence

is lack of respect for Vishnu, and Brahma, and Chrishna, and his other

gods, and for his sacred cattle, and for his temples and the things

within them. He endorses the definition, you see; and there are

300,000,000 Hindus or their equivalents back of him.

The dictionary had the acute idea that by using the capital G it could

restrict irreverence to lack of reverence for OUR Deity and our sacred

things, but that ingenious and rather sly idea miscarried: for by

the simple process of spelling HIS deities with capitals the Hindu

confiscates the definition and restricts it to his own sects, thus

making it clearly compulsory upon us to revere HIS gods and HIS sacred

things, and nobody's else. We can't say a word, for he had our own

dictionary at his back, and its decision is final.

This law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this: 1. Whatever is

sacred to the Christian must be held in reverence by everybody else; 2.

whatever is sacred to the Hindu must be held in reverence by everybody

else; 3. therefore, by consequence, logically, and indisputably,

whatever is sacred to ME must be held in reverence by everybody else.

Now then, what aggravates me is that these troglodytes and muscovites

and bandoleers and buccaneers are ALSO trying to crowd in and share the

benefit of the law, and compel everybody to revere their Shakespeare and

hold him sacred. We can't have that: there's enough of us already. If

you go on widening and spreading and inflating the privilege, it will

presently come to be conceded that each man's sacred things are the ONLY

ones, and the rest of the human race will have to be humbly reverent

toward them or suffer for it. That can surely happen, and when it

happens, the word Irreverence will be regarded as the most meaningless,

and foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and impudent, and

dictatorial word in the language. And people will say, "Whose business

is it what gods I worship and what things hold sacred? Who has the right

to dictate to my conscience, and where did he get that right?"

We cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us. We must save the

word from this destruction. There is but one way to do it, and that

is to stop the spread of the privilege and strictly confine it to its

present limits--that is, to all the Christian sects, to all the Hindu

sects, and me. We do not need any more, the stock is watered enough,

just as it is.

It would be better if the privilege were limited to me alone. I think so

because I am the only sect that knows how to employ it gently, kindly,

charitably, dispassionately. The other sects lack the quality of

self-restraint. The Catholic Church says the most irreverent things

about matters which are sacred to the Protestants, and the Protestant

Church retorts in kind about the confessional and other matters which

Catholics hold sacred; then both of these irreverencers turn upon Thomas

Paine and charge HIM with irreverence. This is all unfortunate, because

it makes it difficult for students equipped with only a low grade of

mentality to find out what Irreverence really IS.

It will surely be much better all around if the privilege of regulating

the irreverent and keeping them in order shall eventually be withdrawn

from all the sects but me. Then there will be no more quarreling, no

more bandying of disrespectful epithets, no more heartburnings.

There will then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-Shakespeare

controversy except what is sacred to me. That will simplify the whole

matter, and trouble will cease. There will be irreverence no longer,

because I will not allow it. The first time those criminals charge

me with irreverence for calling their Stratford myth an

Arthur-Orton-Mary-Baker-Thompson-Eddy-Louis-the-Seventeenth-Veiled-Prophet

-of-Khorassan will be the last. Taught by the methods found effective in

extinguishing earlier offenders by the Inquisition, of holy memory, I

shall know how to quiet them.

XIII

Isn't it odd, when you think of it, that you may list all the celebrated

Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the

first Tudors--a list containing five hundred names, shall we say?--and

you can go to the histories, biographies, and cyclopedias and learn the

particulars of the lives of every one of them. Every one of them except

one--the most famous, the most renowned--by far the most illustrious of

them all--Shakespeare! You can get the details of the lives of all the

celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated tragedians,

comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges, lawyers, poets,

dramatists, historians, biographers, editors, inventors, reformers,

statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers, prize-fighters, murderers,

pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys, bunco-steerers, misers,

swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land and sea, bankers, financiers,

astronomers, naturalists, claimants, impostors, chemists, biologists,

geologists, philologists, college presidents and professors, architects,

engineers, painters, sculptors, politicians, agitators, rebels,

revolutionists, patriots, demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks,

philosophers, burglars, highwaymen, journalists, physicians,

surgeons--you can get the life-histories of all of them but ONE.

Just ONE--the most extraordinary and the most celebrated of them

all--Shakespeare!

You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons furnished by the

rest of Christendom in the past four centuries, and you can find out

the life-histories of all those people, too. You will then have

listed fifteen hundred celebrities, and you can trace the authentic

life-histories of the whole of them. Save one--far and away the most

colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation--Shakespeare! About him you

can find out NOTHING. Nothing of even the slightest importance. Nothing

worth the trouble of stowing away in your memory. Nothing that even

remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly

commonplace person--a manager, an actor of inferior grade, a small

trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of any

consequence, and had forgotten all about him before he was fairly cold

in his grave. We can go to the records and find out the life-history of

every renowned RACE-HORSE of modern times--but not Shakespeare's! There

are many reasons why, and they have been furnished in cart-loads (of

guess and conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that

is worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly

sufficient all by itself--HE HADN'T ANY HISTORY TO RECORD. There is no

way of getting around that deadly fact. And no sane way has yet been

discovered of getting around its formidable significance.

Its quite plain significance--to any but those thugs (I do not use the

term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence while he lived,

and none until he had been dead two or three generations. The Plays

enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and if he wrote them it seems a

pity the world did not find it out. He ought to have explained that he

was the author, and not merely a NOM DE PLUME for another man to hide

behind. If he had been less intemperately solicitous about his bones,

and more solicitous about his Works, it would have been better for his

good name, and a kindness to us. The bones were not important. They will

moulder away, they will turn to dust, but the Works will endure until

the last sun goes down.

Mark Twain.

P.S. MARCH 25. About two months ago I was illuminating this

Autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the Bacon-Shakespeare

controversy, and I then took occasion to air the opinion that the

Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no public consequence or celebrity

during his lifetime, but was utterly obscure and unimportant. And not

only in great London, but also in the little village where he was born,

where he lived a quarter of a century, and where he died and was buried.

I argued that if he had been a person of any note at all, aged villagers

would have had much to tell about him many and many a year after his

death, instead of being unable to furnish inquirers a single fact

connected with him. I believed, and I still believe, that if he had been

famous, his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine has lasted in

my native village out in Missouri. It is a good argument, a prodigiously

strong one, and most formidable one for even the most gifted and

ingenious and plausible Stratfordolator to get around or explain away.

Today a Hannibal COURIER-POST of recent date has reached me, with an

article in it which reinforces my contention that a really celebrated

person cannot be forgotten in his village in the short space of sixty

years. I will make an extract from it:

Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but ingratitude

is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she has produced, and

as the years go by her greatest son, Mark Twain, or S. L. Clemens as a

few of the unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard of

the residents of the town he made famous and the town that made him

famous. His name is associated with every old building that is torn

down to make way for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly growing

city, and with every hill or cave over or through which he might by any

possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest which he wove

into his stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson's Island, or Mark

Twain Cave, are now monuments to his genius. Hannibal is glad of any

opportunity to do him honor as he had honored her.

So it has happened that the "old timers" who went to school with Mark

or were with him on some of his usual escapades have been honored

with large audiences whenever they were in a reminiscent mood and

condescended to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary boy who came to

be a very extraordinary humorist and whose every boyish act is now seen

to have been indicative of what was to come. Like Aunt Becky and Mrs.

Clemens, they can now see that Mark was hardly appreciated when he lived

here and that the things he did as a boy and was whipped for doing were

not all bad, after all. So they have been in no hesitancy about drawing

out the bad things he did as well as the good in their efforts to get

a "Mark Twain" story, all incidents being viewed in the light of his

present fame, until the volume of "Twainiana" is already considerable

and growing in proportion as the "old timers" drop away and the stories

are retold second and third hand by their descendants. With some

seventy-three years and living in a villa instead of a house, he is a

fair target, and let him incorporate, copyright, or patent himself as

he will, there are some of his "works" that will go swooping up Hannibal

chimneys as long as graybeards gather about the fires and begin with,

"I've heard father tell," or possibly, "Once when I." The Mrs. Clemens

referred to is my mother--WAS my mother.

And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper, of date twenty days

ago:

Miss Becca Blankenship died at the home of William Dickason, 408 Rock

Street, at 2.30 o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72 years. The deceased

was a sister of "Huckleberry Finn," one of the famous characters in Mark

Twain's TOM SAWYER. She had been a member of the Dickason family--the

housekeeper--for nearly forty-five years, and was a highly respected

lady. For the past eight years she had been an invalid, but was as

well cared for by Mr. Dickason and his family as if she had been a near

relative. She was a member of the Park Methodist Church and a Christian

woman.

I remember her well. I have a picture of her in my mind which was graven

there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three years ago. She was at that

time nine years old, and I was about eleven. I remember where she stood,

and how she looked; and I can still see her bare feet, her bare head,

her brown face, and her short tow-linen frock. She was crying. What it

was about I have long ago forgotten. But it was the tears that preserved

the picture for me, no doubt. She was a good child, I can say that for

her. She knew me nearly seventy years ago. Did she forget me, in

the course of time? I think not. If she had lived in Stratford in

Shakespeare's time, would she have forgotten him? Yes. For he was never

famous during his lifetime, he was utterly obscure in Stratford, and

there wouldn't be any occasion to remember him after he had been dead a

week.

"Injun Joe," "Jimmy Finn," and "General Gaines" were prominent and very

intemperate ne'er-do-weels in Hannibal two generations ago. Plenty of

grayheads there remember them to this day, and can tell you about them.

Isn't it curious that two "town drunkards" and one half-breed loafer

should leave behind them, in a remote Missourian village, a fame a

hundred times greater and several hundred times more particularized in

the matter of definite facts than Shakespeare left behind him in the

village where he had lived the half of his lifetime?