Mark Twain on Religion: What Is Man, the War Prayer, Thou Shalt Not Kill, the Fly, Letters From the Earth

by Mark Twain

  "Don't I know my trade, or am I only an apprentice to it? Have I sailed the seas for sixty years and commanded ships for thirty to be taught what to do in a difficulty by --

  by a damned carpenter?"

  He was talking in such a pleading way, such an earnest, and moving and appealing way that the men were not prepared for the close of his remark, and it caught them out and made some of them laugh. He had scored one -- and he knew it. The carpenter's back was turned -- he was playing indifference. He whirled around and covered the captain with his revolver. Everybody shrank together and caught his breath, except the captain, who said gently, "Don't be afraid -- pull the trigger; it isn't loaded."

  The carpenter pulled -- twice, thrice, and threw the pistol away. Then he shouted, "Fall back, men -- out of the wayl"

  They surged apart, and he fell back himself. The captain and the officers stood alone in the circle of light. "Gun 4, fire!" The officers threw themselves on their faces on the deck, but the captain remained in his place. The gunner spun the windlass around --

  there was no result. "Gun 3, fire!" The same thing happened again. The captain said,

  "Come back to your places, men." They obeyed, looking puzzled, surprised, and a good deal demoralized. The officers got up, looking astonished and rather ashamed.

  "Carpenter, come back to your place." He did it, but reluctantly, and swearing to himself.

  It was easy to see that the captain was contented with his dramatic effects. He resumed his speech, in his pleasantest manner:

  "You have mutinied two or three times, boys. It is all right -- up to now. I would have done it myself in my common-seaman days, I reckon, if my ship was bewitched and I didn't know where I was. Now then, can you be trusted with the facts? Are we rational men, manly men, men who can stand up and face hard luck and a big difficulty that has been brought about by nobody's fault, and say live or die, survive or perish, we are in for it, for good or bad, and we'll stand by the ship if she goes to hell!" [The men let go a hearty cheer.] "Are we men -- grown men -- salt-sea men -- men nursed upon dangers and cradled in storms -- men made in the image of God and ready to do when He commands and die when He calls -- or are we just sneaks and curs and carpenters!"

  [This brought both cheers and laughter, and the captain was happy.] "There -- that's the kind. And so I'll tell you how the thing stands. I don't know where this ship is, but she's in the hands of God, and that's enough for me, it's enough for you, and it's enough for anybody but a carpenter. If it is God's will that we pull through, we pull through --

  otherwise not. We haven't had an observation for four months, but we are going ahead, and do our best to fetch up somewhere."

  Eight pages of notes which accompany the manuscript show how Mark Twain intended to continue and end the story. I cannot always be sure which of alternative devices he intended to use, but the following summary rests on a thorough study of the notes in relation to the manuscript.

  The mutiny is settled by the captain's acceding to the crew's demand that they turn back.

  Secretly, however, they falsify the compass and steer by the telltale in Henry's cabin. A month or so later Bradshaw enters the cabin and discovers the fraud. When he brings the men to see it, however, the invisible Superintendent of Dreams holds the needle in the bearing that it should have (north), and the crew lose confidence in Bradshaw.

  Jack, the baby who is born just before the mutiny, is weaned at fourteen months. (He is called Harry in the story but Jack in the notes. Reasons for this and other discrepancies are given in my note at the end of this book.) Soon afterward the ship is becalmed. Another ship, the Two Darlings, drifts near.

  The crews and passengers visit one another. The Two Darlings has a large treasure aboard and Bradshaw, still a conspirator and a mutineer, plans to seize it. A sudden blinding snowstorm strikes, and when it clears the Two Darlings has disappeared. Little Jack and Lucy, the captain's daughter, are on it.

  Bradshaw, who has thus lost his treasure, demands that they pursue it. The captain and Phillips, Lucy's fiance, are glad to agree.

  The pursuit lasts ten years. Sometimes they sight phantom ships but can never overtake them nor make them see signals. On board people are aging, their hair turning gray, and Alice and Henry are broken by sorrow. Toward the end of the tenth year they come to a region of "disastrous bright light."

  (This is the Great White Glare which Alice has mentioned -- and in the scheme of the story it is the light shining from the microscope's reflector through the slide at which Henry is looking.) The heat causes intense suffering. (The reader will remember that Alice's father had been killed by the Glare, when the ship touched it earlier, and her mother driven to suicide.) And now the water changes color. (Outside the dream, Alice has put some Scotch whisky into the drop of water.) The terrible beasts, which swarm in the Glare, are maddened by the poison and attack one another and the ship as well. After a terrible fight they are driven off with the Gatling guns.

  Now the sea dries up. "[We] try to walk somewhither but ground too rough, weather too bad.. . .

  No shade but in the ship, where they pant and suffer and long for death." In the distance they see a ship.

  The crew are frantic to get the treasure, Alice to save Jack. Henry, Phillips, the captain, and Bradshaw set out over the rough ocean floor, carrying water and provisions. But they are too late. The Two Darlings had run out of provisions long before and everybody on board is dead, the corpses mummified by the heat.

  Jack is in Lucy's arms.

  Here the dream becomes nightmare. Phillips and the captain go mad from grief and Bradshaw, mad also but from thirst, rushes for the treasure: ". . . sits playing with it and blaspheming. Won't return; will have it all. Tell[s] the men so. Is armed and will kill any that approach." They leave him there and start back for the ship, carrying their dead with them. Meanwhile the crew have got drunk and had a brawl, during which some were killed. "Half-way back we find the survivors -- dying. They started without water."

  But worse has happened. "George [the colored servant] on lookout to prepare me. Stray shot hit Jessie [Henry's oldest child] -- she is dead. I find Alice watching by body. I beg her not to see Jack. She will. Her grief. Her hair streaked with gray, her face old with trouble -- she is failing fast. Bessie [the other daughter] too. My hair white. The others in deep gloom. Captain begins to grow violent when he finds his younger daughter dying, becomes furious with the dead one [Lucy?] -- says 'That is your work, with your cursed voyage.' Two days later all are dead but George and me, and we are sitting with our dead.

  "It is midnight. Alice and the children come to say goodnight. I think them dreams. Think I am back home in a dream."

  That final note brings the story back out of dream and makes the intended point: dream has triumphed over reality in Henry's mind. B.DV.

  Editor's Notes

  LETTERS FROM THE EARTH

  I omit six lines at the end of the first letter. The manuscript breaks off in the middle of a sentence and the omitted lines were preparing a transition to the second letter.

  The first letter was called "The Creation of Man," and Paine notes on the manuscript that "Letters from the Earth" (the remaining letters) though suggested by it were "not a continuation of it." Nevertheless the transition is direct and the continuation unmistakable; so I have canceled the first title.

  Mark Twain failed to number some of the succeeding letters and gave others fancifully large numbers to suggest, as in "Papers of the Adam Family," that only certain ones had been preserved. I have numbered them consecutively.

  Paine briefly discusses the "Letters" on pages 1531-1532 of his Biography and quotes something over a page from them.

  PAPERS OF THE ADAM FAMILY

  I have only my own authority for arranging these sketches in the order given them here and for giving the group the title it appears under. As my running comment indicates, they were written at widely separated times, and only the fourth, fifth, and sixth items have a
n expressed relationship. I cannot be sure that I have put these three items in the order Mark intended them to have. The manuscripts were in chaos; parts of them, in fact, had been wrongly identified and treated as entirely independent items.

  Like most of the things that Mark wrote during his last years, they were unfinished, both individually and as a series. They were also intended to have some (to an editor) maddening and altogether nebulous association with a different manuscript called "Book Second," which is too long and in my opinion too dull for inclusion in this book. "Book Second" is a wild fantasy and miscellaneous burlesques dated a thousand years after Mark's death, and it also is unfinished. Themes reappear in it that were sounded in Mark's treatment of the year 920 A.C., and I gather that if both had been developed to scale we should have had, among other things, a history of civilization exemplifying Reginald Selkirk's laws. When I had finally succeeded in piecing the Year 920 papers together it seemed simpler to combine them with sketches to which they are at least formally related than to add to them the inferior "Book Second," from which I take only the title, "Father of History," that is mentioned in my comments.

  LETTER TO THE EARTH

  The date implied by the sketch itself is the one I have given it, 1887, but it may have been written in the preceding year. Some time later, Mark Twain incorporated it in a manuscript of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, making a number of changes to adapt it to the scheme of that book. The changes lengthened and weakened it, however, and he discarded it. I print the earlier version but use the name given the coal dealer in the later one. I also give the sketch a title, Mark having left it without one.

  COOPER'S PROSE STYLE

  "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" was written late in 1893 or early in 1894

  and published in the North American Review for July, 1895. The manuscript supplies the interesting information that both this essay and the previously published one were lectures in a course "prepared for last term by Mark Twain, M.A., Professor of Belles Lettres in the Veterinary College of Arizona." The second lecture was to be preceded by the same quotations that stand at the head of the first: praise of Cooper quoted from Lounsbury, Brander Matthews, and Wilkie Coffins.

  Whether the Professor of Belles Lettres wrote a third lecture I do not know, but he began one which he numbered IV on Clark Russell's The Wreck of the Grosvenor.

  He abandoned it after writing about a thousand words.

  The second lecture was unfinished also, but I have rounded it out with what is unquestionably the original ending of the first one. The manuscript ends with the sentence on page 143, "And it would have almost doubled the effect if the more tempered Cora had done it some, too." What follows that sentence in my text was originally (with an indeterminable amount of lost matter) the original ending of "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." I do not know why this material was deleted, but assume that, since the essay was overlong for magazine publication, it was cut to make space.

  In the second paragraph of the published essay Mark alludes to the 114 offenses against literature out of a possible 115 which Cooper scores in a single passage. When he returned to that statement in his concluding paragraphs he gave the essay a unity and a climax that the published text lacks. If a definitive edition of Mark Twain's work is ever published these paragraphs should be restored to their original context.

  SIMPLIFIED SPELLING

  The date I assign this sketch, 1906, is the one when it was. interpolated in a dictation for Mark Twain's autobiography. It was certainly written before that day but how long before I have no way of knowing. In fact, I am not altogether sure that it has not been previously published. There is a memorandum of a pamphlet on simplified spelling which I cannot identify or trace.

  FROM AN ENGLISH NOTEBOOK

  The reader will find an account of Mark Twain's visit to England, of the notebooks made during it, and other extracts from them in Paine's Biography, pages 458-471. Paine prints part of the passage on the British Museum which I have thought sufficiently interesting to print in full. He appears to have had access either to another notebook than the one which remains in the Papers or to the original entries from it which Mark mailed to Mrs. Clemens from England, for I cannot find some of the items he quotes.

  THE FRENCH AND THE COMANCHES

  This sketch is one of several chapters on French civilization that were left out of the book, together with chapters on Heidelberg, Munich, and Switzerland and several unrelated sketches that had been interpolated. In all the French chapters Mark Twain conducts his inquiry as a study in comparative anthropology, defending France on the ground that it is fully as advanced as any other semicivilized nation. Although the other chapters are occasionally amusing and have some biographical importance, they seem to me too thin for inclusion in this book.

  FROM AN UNFINISHED BURLESQUE OF BOOKS

  ON ETIQUETTE

  Paine quotes a few passages (which I do not reprint) from this manuscript on pages 705-706 of his Biography. He seems not to have appreciated the intention of the burlesque, however. Mark was satirizing not manners but the manuals of deportment plentifully provided for the Plush Age. Paine dates the manuscript 1881 but its appearance suggests that Mark's interest was intermittent and that he returned to it several times. I print less than half of it here.

  THE DAMNED HUMAN RACE

  It has seemed desirable to include in this book representative specimens of the philosophical sketches which Mark Twain wrote during his last years as a kind of cumulative annotation of What Is Man? and The Mysterious Stranger. There are many such sketches in the Mark Twain Papers, some completed, more left unfinished. Not many of them treat material that will be new to a student of Mark's work but there are many passages of great force and charm. The first of my selections, for instance, is in his best vein.

  Three of these pieces, and probably all of them, belong to the period 1905-1909.

  The comment on Zola, however, may be several years earlier and, as my footnote says, the last selection may go back to 1897. Mr. Paine quotes from the first and fifth selections in his Biography, apparently following earlier texts than those preserved in the Papers. I have provided the titles of the last three.

  THE GREAT DARK

  Mark Twain did not give this story a title. Paine labeled the manuscript

  "Statement of the Edwardses," a title which seems to me not only inept but misrepresentative. Since it is not Mark's, I have felt free to substitute for it a phrase taken from one of his notes.

  A proper editorial comment on "The Great Dark" would require much more space than can be spared here. The various ideas that make up the story troubled Mark almost obsessively for two years, some of them go back many years in his notebooks, all of them were obviously important to him, and he tried to work them out in various ways. These facts and the story itself have important implications.

  The reader will have noticed several discrepancies in the story. I have already called attention to the confusion about the name of Henry's child. This was only a slight lapse but my summary of Mark's proposed ending (which is based on the last notes for the story, some of them probably made while Mark was writing it) indicates that he either had forgotten or was ignoring more important circumstances of the dream. For instance, Henry says at the beginning of Book II that the manuscript of Book I had been lost, whereas the whole scheme of the narrative requires it to be preserved, as in fact the story preserves it. Again, Henry is vague and even contradictory about the lapse of time between the two books and, what is more important, the whole orientation of the story changes between the two parts. And finally neither the story nor the notes answer a question which is crucial to Mark's conception; at what time, in relation to the dream, did Henry write his narrative? We are left to infer that he did so between the time when Alice broke the decanter and the "it is midnight" of the last note. But this inference, which is supported by the opening of Book I, renders incomprehensible the note "and I have finished writing thi
s," which is included within the dream.

  Such discrepancies must be regarded as vestiges left from earlier stages of three principal ideas and of the stories in which he tried to embody them. The ideas are: the confusion of dream and reality, the brief actual duration of dreams that may seem to last for many years, and the fate of a ship's company lost for years in the storms of a fabulous portion of the Antarctic. All three ideas are fused in "The Great Dark" but I cannot find that all three of them came together in any of the earlier, unfinished, and abandoned stories.

  On August 16, 1898 ( Letters page 644), Mark writes to Howells that he has at last found the right way to write a story which he had not found at the end of ten thousand words written the year before. It was a story which was to be called "Which Was the Dream?" and whose central idea he had told to Howells in confidence "three or four years ago." The letter implies but does not say clearly that he tried to write it during the summer of 1897 but had to abandon it. Now, however, he has found the right way to write it and it has begun "to slide from the pen with ease and confidence." But if Howells should see a little story called "My Platonic Sweetheart" (another dream story which, his notebook shows, was finished ten days before this letter) " that is not this one."

  Unhappily the story he is talking about does not seem to be "The Great Dark,"

  either, in any recognizable form. The title suggests the confusion of dream and reality and that idea is clearly adumbrated by the notes I have already quoted, but it does not seem to have entered into "The Great Dark" until six days before the letter to Howells nor to have been actually applied to a revision of the already existing story until five weeks after the letter. Whereas, though no manuscript called "Which Was the Dream?"

  is among the Mark Twain Papers, there is a note (to be dated only by conjecture) which indicates that there was once such a story or at least a well worked-out plan for it -- and the story described in that note is radically different from "The Great Dark" and has only a slight relationship to it.