I Know This Monarchy Can Be Visionary Again
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The New York Times, April 24, 1910
Marking TWAIN --- PHILOSOPHER OF DEMOCRACY
The Serious Side of the Famous Humorist Whose Dominant Note Was Honey of Freedom and Hate of Shams.
"I am through with work for this life and this world." - Mark Twain to the reporters on his render from Bermuda, Dec. 1909.
Telephone call a philosopher a humorist, and for the rest of his life, though he live to be more than 70, people will grin expectantly whenever he heaves a sigh. There are humorists and humorists: there is Marshall P. Wilder, and there was Shakespeare. It might have perturbed Shakespeare a little if, when he returned to London, city editors had called the staff funny homo and said, "Bill Shakespeare, the humorist, got back today. Become and get him to spring a few jokes." Information technology might accept bellyaching him if people had eagerly bought his latest play, and subsequently reading it had said, disappointedly, "I don't see annihilation funny in this 'Hamlet.' Shakespeare isn't doing as skilful piece of work as he used to; at that place isn't a laugh in information technology anywhere."
But the characterization "humorist" was clapped on Marker Twain, the same label that is proudly worn by Marshall P. Wilder, and he passed into his seventies leaving a bang-up many Americans unaware that information technology was an inadequate a clarification as would exist the case if George Washington was described as a "surveyor." Washington was a surveyor, of class; yep, and Mark Twain a humorist.
Therefore it came to pass than an eminent British critic was able to read from cover to cover that terrific, blazing denunciation of monarchy, aristocracy, and class privilege called "A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur'south courtroom," looking laboriously for the joke. He constitute information technology, of course, just he remarked disappointedly that the joke of putting a Yankee at the Circular Tabular array was ane which was wearied in twenty pages, and to prolong information technology over 400 was to spread it pretty sparse. If some ane had told the Briton that looking for the joke was as featherbrained a proceeding in this case every bit it would have been in the case of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," he would never have understood it.
Some years ago a well-known American novelist published the story of how he and some of his friends got into a dispute adjoin what town information technology really was that had served as the model for "The Human being that Corrupted Hadleyburg." Some thought it was one city, some another. Finally, meeting Mark Twain on a train, they left it to him. Mark Twain listened to them and evaded the subject; the novelist could not imagine why.
It is like shooting fish in a barrel to understand what weariness of soul must have possessed Mark Twain when this homo - not an ordinary fool, but a man of messages - and his friends, presumably all men of intelligence, evinced and then complete a misunderstanding of him. For, of course, the place that was the model for Hadleyburg were the human race, the nineteen men of light and leading were the virtuous and untempted of all times and all places. What would John Bunyan have thought if some eminent men of his solar day had asked him, to settle a bet, what city he had in mind when he fabricated Christian flee from the Urban center of Destruction - London or Bristol?
And John Bunyan's purpose was no stronger than, in many of his works, was Marker Twain's. Things hidden from the wise and prudent are revealed to babes. It was a xiv-year-old child who first saw the truth - that astonishing petty Susy Clemens, who studied her father with the wise eyes of a critical childhood and then wrote down:
"He is known to the public as a humorist, simply he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous. ... His 'Prince and Pauper' is his well-nigh original and all-time production; it shows the near of any of his books what kind of pictures are in his listen, normally. Non that the pictures of England in the sixteenth century and the adventures of a little Prince and pauper are the kind of things he mainly thinks about, simply that that book and those pictures represent the train of thought and imagination he would be likely to be thinking of today, tomorrow, or next day, more nearly than those given in 'Tom Sawyer' or 'Huckleberry Finn.' "
"Information technology is so yet," commented Marking Twain, reading this comment over 20-ane years after when the little manus that wrote it had long been grit.
"When we are solitary," continued the keen little observer, "nine times out of ten he talks about some very earnest subjects, (with an occasional joke thrown in,) and he a good deal more ofttimes talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind.
"He is as much of a philosopher as anything, I recollect. I think he could take done a great bargain in this management if he had studied while young, for he seems to savor reasoning out things, no affair what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which accept made him famous."
By this judgment of his clairvoyant lilliputian critic Marker Twain stood. He felt that she understood him. "2 years after she passed out of my life," he said long afterward, "I wrote a philosophy. Of the 3 persons who have seen the manuscript but one understood it, and all three condemned it. If she could have read it she also would have condemned it - but she would take understood information technology."
"While I have been waiting here," said George Bernard Shaw, grasping Twain's hand every bit he stepped on English language shores two or 3 years agone, "the representatives of the press have been asking me whether you were really serious when you lot wrote 'The Jumping Frog.' " If they had asked him if Twain were just joking when he wrote "Eve's Diary," "The Homo That Corrupted Hadleyburg," "A Connecticut Yankee," or "The Prince and the Pauper," they would have committed a blunder in which they would have had plenty of company.
Every bit long as he used a humorous setting for his doctrines the mass of stupid people looked only at the setting and never saw the doctrine. When he dropped the comic mask and issued straight from the shoulder those barbarous denunciations of our Philippine policy and of the looting missionaries in Mainland china the aforementioned stupid people were shocked and grieved, and said it was regrettable to come across "the genial humorist" deserting his usual walk to enter into polemics. They actually did not know that what he was saying in those denunciations was what he had been proverb all forth in the works which they had laughed over for the "genial humor" contained in them.
"Marker Twain," said Shaw, "is by far the greatest American writer. I am speaking of him rather equally a sociologist than as a humorist. Of class he is in very much the same position as myself - he has to put things in such a manner every bit to make people who would otherwise hand him believe he is joking."
And to guess past the shrieks of rage which were aroused past Twain's assaults upon Gen. Funston and the American Lath of Strange Missions, Shaw was almost literally correct, fifty-fifty as to the hanging. Notwithstanding all Twain did in those cases was to take the comic mask off and say without information technology what he had been saying from behind information technology for years.
Never was there a more fantabulous democrat than Mark Twain. His democracy is the sort that searches below the forms and deceit words of the conventional commonwealth. Have, for instance, this view of "loyalty to the institutions of the land" - how Mark Twain's thought of it differs from that of the routine patriot:
"Y'all meet my kind of loyalty was loyalty to 1's state, non to its institutions or its office holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the matter to scout over, and treat, and be loyal to; institutions are inapplicable, they are its mere clothing, and wearable can clothing out, become ragged, finish to be comfortable, end to protect the body from Winter, illness, and death. To exist loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rages - that is loyalty to unreason; it is pure animal; information technology belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it."
When Mark Twain came out seriously - with the comic mask off - against our Philippine policy his denunciation was received with grieved pain and surprise, as something entirely new, by the very people who ten years before had read and laughed over the "Connecticut Yankee," in that volume, written long earlier the Philippine annexation, is this clear exposition of Mark Twain's doctrine on that signal:
"At that place is a phrase which has grown then common in the world's oral fissure that information technology has come up to seem to have sense and pregnant - the sense and pregnant implied when information technology is used: that this is the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation every bit peradventure being 'capable of self-government,' and the unsaid sense of it is that there has been a nation somewhere, sometime or other, which wasn't capable of it - wasn't equally able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern it."
When Elihu Root, in 1906, fabricated his speech pointing out the rapid centralization of Government at Washington, the rapid wiping out of State rights, Mark Twain commented in his autobiography:
"He did not say in and then many words that nosotros are proceeding in a steady march toward eventual and unavoidable replacement of the Republic by monarchy, but I suppose he was enlightened that that is the example. He notes the several steps, the customary steps, which in all ages have led to the consolidation of loose and scattered governmental forces into formidable centralizations of authority, but he stops there, and doesn't add up the sum.
"Human nature beingness what it is, I suppose nosotros must wait to migrate into monarchy by and by. It is a saddening thought; but we cannot change our nature; we are all alike, we human beings; and in our claret and bone, and ineradicable, nosotros carry the seeds out of which monarchies and aristocracies are grown: worship of gauds, titles, distinctions, power....We take to be despised by somebody whom nosotros regard as in a higher place us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content.
"In America nosotros manifest this in all the ancient and customary means. In public nosotros scoff at titles and hereditary privilege; merely privately we hanker afterward them and when we get a gamble we buy them for cash and a daughter....And when nosotros get them the whole nation publicly chaffs and scoffs - and privately envies - and also is proud of the honor which has been conferred upon us. We run over our listing of titled purchases every now and then in the newspapers, and discuss them and cuddle them, and are thankful and happy.
"Like all the other nations, we worship coin and the possessors of it - they being our aristocracy, and we take to have one. Nosotros similar to read almost rich people in the papers; the papers know information technology, and they exercise their best to proceed this appetite liberally fed. Then even get out out a football bullfight now and and so to become room for all the particulars of how, co-ordinate to the display heading, 'Rich Woman Savage Downward Cellar - Not Hurt.' The falling down the cellar is of no interest to us when the woman is not rich; but no rich adult female can autumn down cellar and we not yearn to know all most it and wish it was us...
"I suppose nosotros must expect that unavoidable and irresistible circumstances volition gradually take abroad the powers of the States and concentrate them in the central Regime, and that the Democracy will so echo the history of all time and become a monarchy, but I believe that if nosotros obstruct these encroachments and steadily resist them the monarchy can be postponed for a good while yet."
Marking Twain was an advocate of every reform which seemed to him in line with this fundamental republic of his - cutback of privilege, extension of human rights - the democracy which was e'er his passion. He was an advocate of woman's suffrage, for instance. When he returned from Bermuda last December he was asked his views on that question and replied that he had advocated information technology in his writings "for fifty years."
The reporters asked him: "That was earlier the recent demonstrations of the work of the militant suffragettes. Do you corroborate of their methods? And the sturdy democrat made this significant reply:
"The cause of freedom cannot be won without vigorous fighting. Militant methods have appeared necessary to the women who have adopted them. The women have the interests of a great cause at stake, and I approve of their using any methods which they run across fir for accomplishing the large results which they are fighting for. You may use one method to carry a cause to victory; I may apply another. Militant methods have appeared necessary in the fight of the suffragettes in many places where the cause finds its main supporters."
Here, from his autobiography, is a terrible visualization of some of those statistics which seem and so meaningless when we gaze blankly at printed tables. With his usual dramatic method, he introduces it with a reference to Tennyson'south verses forecasting "a future when air-borne vessels of war shall meet and fight above the clouds and redden the world below with a pelting of claret." And then he introduced his statistics - that on our 200,000 miles of railway we annually kill ten,000 persons outright and injure 80,000. Now for the moving picture:
"I had a dream terminal nighttime. It was an beauteous dream. What at that place was of it.
"In it I saw a funeral procession; I saw it from a mount superlative; I saw it crawling along and curving here and in that location, serpent similar, through a level, vast plain. I seemed to see a hundred miles of the procession; merely neither the beginning of it nor the end of it was inside the limits of my vision. The procession was in x divisions, each division marked past a sombre flag, and the whole represented ten years of our railway activities in the accident line. Each division was equanimous of 80,000 cripples, and was bearing its own year'south 10,000 mutilated corpses to the grave; in the aggregate 800,000 cripples, and 100,000 dead, drenched in claret."
Another quotation, showing the quality of Marking Twain'due south democracy - again from the "Connecticut Yankee":
"Why, it was like reading near France and the French earlier the ever-memorable and blest Revolution which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood - one; a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of claret for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery, the similar of which was non to be mated merely in hell.
"There were two 'Reigns of Terror,' if nosotros would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold claret; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the 1 inflicted expiry upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions, but our shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, and then to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death past the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by dull fire at the stake?
"A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled past that cursory Terror which we have all been and so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all French republic could hardly contain the coffins filled past that older and real Terror - that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."
Here is his view of an Established Church:
"Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political motorcar; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; is information technology an enemy to human freedom, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-upwards scattered condition."
"The Prince and the Pauper" is a beautiful story, but information technology is as well the plainest of parables. It is the parable of democracy, the equality of man - the Robert Burns commonwealth of "a homo's a man for a' that." Put the pauper in the Prince'south clothes, and afterwards he has go adjusted to his circumstances no one tin can tell the difference; indeed, no one does suspect it even earlier that adjustment is made. And the pauper rules the kingdom wisely as the King.
Who has analyzed the meaning of mobs, the psychology of lynching, the philosophy of hoodlumism, the truth of White Capping, as Mark Twain has in the speech which he puts into the oral fissure of Col. Sherburn, addressing the cowed Arkansas mob that has come up to lynch him, in "Huckleberry Finn"? And its biting analysis of sure phases of the Due south is all the more pregnant as coming from a born Missourian and ex-Confederate similar Marker Twain:
"The idea of yous thinking yous had pluck enough to lynch a MAN! Because y'all're brave enough to tar and plumage poor, friendless women that come along hither, did that make yous think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a Human being? Why, a MAN'S safe in the hands of ten g of your kind - as long every bit it's daytime and you're non behind him.
"Exercise I know you lot? I know you articulate through. I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average human being'south a coward. In the Northward he lets anybody walk over him that wants to and goes home and prays for a apprehensive spirit to bear it. In the Due south 1 man, all past himself, has stopped a stage total of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers telephone call y'all a dauntless people, so much that you lot think you are braver than whatever other people - whereas you're just as brave, and no braver. Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the human's friends volition shoot them in the back, in the nighttime - and information technology'south merely what they would practise.
"And then they ever comport, so a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at this back, and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is that you didn't bring a human being with you; that's one mistake, and the other is that you didn't come in the dark and fetch your masks...
"At present the matter for you to do is to droop your tails and go dwelling and crawl in a pigsty. If whatsoever existent lynching's going to be washed it will be washed in the night, Southern style, and when they come they'll bring their masks and fetch a Homo forth."
If any one wishes to know what Marking Twain though of women let him read "Eve'southward Diary" - but read information technology understandingly. Thousands have laughed over it; there must take been hundreds with sensibility enough to read it with a warming of the heart. How, throughout information technology, Marking Twain laughs at women with tears in his eyes! Information technology is a portrait of woman. Running through all of it is this dogma: Through woman alone can at that place be a sense of beauty in the earth.
The superiority of adult female to human is a tiresome and meaningless stock-in-trade after-dinner orators [sic]. Information technology is doubtful if everyone has e'er believed in information technology sincerely, or if he has information technology is certain that he never succeeded in explaining information technology. But Mark Twain, without maxim it at all, has deftly wrought, on every folio, the explanation of wherein this superiority consists - without discussing at all that other question, the superiority of homo to adult female. Contrasted with the sensitive, imaginative, eager creature is the unimaginative, materialistic Adam, who witting throughout of the things in which he is superior, never learns of the things in which she is superior - never, that is, until the lonely man writes this inscription on her grave:
"Wheresoever she was, there was Eden."
And with that the story closes.
In that location is much more than democracy in Marker Twain'southward philosophy, but the other features of it would require a affiliate by themselves. But his view of such matters as heredity, environment, and other catch words of the sort is never summed up better than in the "Connecticut Yankee":
"Training - training is everything; training is all there is to a person. Nosotros speak of nature; information technology is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what nosotros call by that misleading proper noun is but heredity and preparation. We accept no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to united states, trained into us.
"All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered upward and subconscious by the point of a cambric needle, all the residual being atoms contributed past, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clan or grasshopper or monkey from who our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably adult.
"And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift betwixt the eternities, is to expect out and humbly alive a pure and high and clean-living life, and save that i microscopic cantlet in me that is truly ME; the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care."
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