Who Is Mark Twain?

by Mark Twain

  “Not a single one. Let me describe one of his performances. He conceived the idea of getting some pleasure out of deceiving, beguiling, swindling, pursuing, frightening, capturing, torturing, mutilating and murdering a child—”

  “Im-possible!”

  “A child that had never done him any harm; a child that was gratefully enjoying its innocent life and liberty, and not suspecting that any one would want to take them away from it—for any reason, least of all for the mere pleasure of it. And so—”

  “You are describing a Christian? There is no such Christian. You are describing a madman.”

  “No, a Christian—as good a one as lives. He sought out the child where it was playing, and offered it some dainties—offered them cunningly, persuasively, treacherously, cowardly, and the child, mistaking him for one who meant it a kindness, thankfully swallowed the dainties—then fled away in pain and terror, for the gift was poisoned. The man was full of joy at the success of his ingenious fraud, and chased the frightened child from one refuge to another for an hour, in a delirium of delight, and finally caught it and killed it; and by his eloquent enthusiasms one could see that he was as proud of his exploit as ever brave knight was, of deceiving, beguiling, betraying and destroying a cruel and wicked and pestilent giant thirty feet high. There—do you see? Is there any resemblance between this Christian and yours? This one was not brave, but the reverse of it; he was not fair and honorable, he was a deceiver, a beguiler, a swindler, he took advantage of ignorant trustfulness and betrayed it; he had no pity for distress and fright and pain, but took a frenzied delight in causing them, and watching the effects. He was no protector of threatened liberty and menaced life, but took them both. And did it for fun. Merely for fun. But you seem to doubt me. Here is his own account of it; read it yourself; I clipped it out of the Atlantic last night. For ‘fish’ in the text, read ‘child.’ There is no other difference. It is a Christian in both cases, and in both cases the human race is exposed for what it is—a self-admiring humbug.”

  As a point of departure, listen to a quotation from Dr. Henry van Dyke:—

  “Chrr! sings the reel. The line tightens. The little rod firmly gripped in my hands bends into a bow of beauty, and a hundred feet behind us a splendid silver salmon leaps into the air. ‘What is it?’ cries the gypsy, ‘a fish?’ It is a fish, indeed, a noble ouananiche, and well hooked. Now if the gulls were here who grab little fish suddenly and never give them a chance; and if the mealy-mouthed sentimentalists were here, who like their fish slowly strangled to death in nets, they should see a fairer method of angling.

  “The weight of the fish is twenty times that of the rod against which he matches himself. The tiny hook is caught painlessly in the gristle of his jaws. The line is long and light. He has the whole lake to play in, and he uses almost all of it, running, leaping, sounding the deep water, turning suddenly to get a slack line. The gypsy, tremendously excited, manages the boat with perfect skill, rowing this way and that way, advancing or backing water to meet the tactics of the fish, and doing the most important part of the work.

  “After half an hour the ouananiche begins to grow tired and can be reeled in near to the boat. We can see him distinctly as he gleams in the dark water. It is time to think of landing him. Then we remember with a flash of despair that we have no landing-net! To lift him from the water by this line would break it in an instant. There is not a foot of the rocky shore smooth enough to beach him on. Our caps are far too small to use as a net for such a fish. What to do? We must row around with him gently and quietly for another ten minutes, until he is quite weary and tame. Now let me draw him softly toward the boat, slip my fingers under his gills to give a firm hold, and lift him quickly over the gunwale before he can gasp or kick. A tap on the head with the empty rod-case,—here he is,—the prettiest land-locked salmon that I ever saw, plump, round, perfectly shaped and colored, and just six and a half pounds in weight, the record fish of Jordan Pond.”

  We had a very good time together for an hour. And didn’t agree about anything. But it was for this reason that we had a good time, disagreement being the salt of a talk. Van Dyke is a good instance of a certain fact: that outside of a man’s own specialty, his thinkings are poor and slipshod, and his conclusions not valuable. Van Dyke’s specialty is English literature; he has studied it with deep and eager interest, and with an alert and splendid intelligence. With the result that the soundness of his judgments upon it is not to be lightly challenged by anybody. But he doesn’t know any more about the human being than the President does, or the Pope, or the philosophers, or the cat. I wanted to give him a copy of my privately printed, unsigned, unacknowledged and unpublished gospel, “What is Man?” for his enlightenment, but thought better of it. He wouldn’t understand it.

  ON POSTAGE RATES ON AUTHORS’ MANUSCRIPT

  Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. Simply suppose you were a member of Congress. And suppose you started-up what you believed to be your faculties, and worked out the draft of a law to cover the needs of some industry or other which you did not know anything about. What would you do with that draft—submit it to somebody who did know something about it, and get instruction and advice? Yes?

  It is natural to think that; but the member of Congress proceeds differently. He drafts that law to cover a matter which he knows nothing about; he straightway submits it to the rest of the National Asylum, who are similarly ignorant concerning the thing; they amend-out any accidental clearnesses or coherences which may have escaped his notice; then they pass it, and it presently goes into effect. It goes into effect, and of course it begins to confuse and hamper interested parties, because they do not understand it. But this has been foreseen, and has also been provided for—in a most curious way. Each public department at Washington keeps a minor asylum of salaried inmates whose business it is to invent a meaning for laws that have no meaning; and to detect meanings, where any exist, and distort and confuse them. This process is called “interpreting.” And sublime and awe-inspiring is this art!

  Consider one specimen, then we will move along to the main purpose of this article: The law forbids the importation of pirated American books—intends to, at any rate; it certainly thought it forbade such importations. Well, Postmaster General Jewell entered into a convention with the Postmaster General of Canada which permits pirated American books to be sent into this country in the United States mail! and more than that, the United States government actually levies and pockets a duty on this contraband stuff! There, you see, is a law whose intent—though poorly and pitifully supported, as to penalties—was in the interest of the citizen; but the interpretation is wholly in the interest of the foreigner, and that foreigner a thief. And who gets any real benefit out of it? The thief makes a hundred dollars, the United States get a hundred dollars, and the American author loses a thousand, possibly ten thousand. How long will the thing remain in this way? Necessarily until a Congressman who is not a fool shall re-draft the copyright law; and have at his back a sufficiency of Congressmen also not fools, to pass it; and by luck hit upon an interval when they chance to be out of idiots in the interpretation-retreat of the Departments, and consequently no immediate way available to misconstrue its language and defeat its intent. Six hundred years, think? Or would you be frank, and say six hundred thousand?

  And now let us stop prefacing, and pass to the real subject of this article. In old times, postage was very high: ten, fifteen, twenty-five cents on a single letter. Take fifteen hundred pages of manuscript, for a book, and apply those rates to the package, and what is the result? We have a couple of historical illustrations. An American girl shipped her manuscript book across the ocean to get Sir Walter Scott’s “candid opinion” upon it—that is to say, a fulsome puff. She discreetly left him to pay the postage, which he did—twenty-five dollars! But, being afraid that that copy might chance to get lost, she shipped him a duplicate by the next vessel. He paid the posta
ge again—twenty-five dollars. In this case, Sir Walter paid; but if the girl had sent her book to a publisher, she would have been careful not to invite his prejudice—she would have prepaid. When the publisher declined it and sent it back—a thing which publishers usually did then, and usually do yet—he would be sure to leave her to pay again. So she would be out of pocket the probable value of the book and forty-nine dollars besides. The same with the friends who had been incautious enough to lend her the money. Would she stop there? No. We never do. She would go on shipping that MS. to publisher after publisher, until she had tried the whole thirteen then existing in this country—if her friends continued to believe in the immortal merit of the book; and they always do. Six hundred and fifty dollars gone for postage! No, let us call it six hundred and twenty-five, and consider, for the sake of argument, that the thirteenth publisher is a dare-devil, and accepts the book. He reads the rough proof, but sends a “revise” containing scattering markings, to her. The markings turn it into constructive manuscript, and so she has to pay letter postage on it—say a dollar a batch, twenty-five batches, in all. She corrects the revise, returns it with markings of her own—and pays another twenty-five on it. Now the sum total has really reached six hundred and fifty dollars for the item of postage on the book. When it is published will she get the money back? In most cases, no.

  Here was a very heavy burden laid upon a few individuals, and they of the recognized pauper class. In those days, forty-six books were accepted and published, per year, in the United States, and some fraction under fifteen hundred thousand rejected and returned. Please figure on that; I have lost my pencil. But any way it was somewhere along about seventy-five or eighty million dollars a year for book-postage, you see.

  The government finally took hold of the thing and passed a law which afforded an immense relief. It said that “Authors’ Manuscripts” should pass through the mails at the rate of a half cent per ounce—and I think it was still cheaper than that, at first. But even at that rate you could send a book manuscript clear across the country for half a dollar or a dollar. The law also allowed proof-sheets to come under the head of “Authors’ MS.”

  There was high rejoicing among the literary tribe. Such a mighty impulse was given to literature that—but, I must not venture to reveal how many billions of books were offered and rejected during the next few years, lest I be disbelieved. All went swimmingly for a time. Then the Department-idiot went to interpreting the law; possibly, also, the Asylum fell to amending it—as to that, I do not know. At first, everything designed for publication was Authors’ MS. Except, I believe, newspaper correspondence. I remember trying, a long time ago, to send a daily newspaper letter from San Francisco as Authors’ MS., and not succeeding. The lopping and barring-off began pretty early, and proceeded swiftly. Presently, one could send nothing but book and magazine MS., and proofs and revises. By and by magazine MS was shut off; and in 1871 I was refused permission to send a “Galaxy” article for other than letter postage, but was allowed to receive and return proof-sheets of it at the Authors’ MS. rate!

  But by that time, and even earlier, we had ceased to need the U.S. mail and its fickle and fluctuating charity, for the express companies had got into full swing, and their service was as cheap as the government’s, and rather prompter and surer. So the custom of sending MS. books by mail soon died; and inasmuch as nothing remained privileged except proof-sheets, the law presently became a dead and useless cumberer of the statute books.

  Eleven years winged their changeful flight—as the novels say. Eleven years winged their changeful flight, and last week came at last. I had been expressing book MS to Boston, a couple of chapters at a time, all summer, from a farm out in interior New York. One day I enveloped one of these thin batches; and just then I happened to think that twenty-five cents for it was bad economy; so I stuck a two-cent stamp on it, marked it “Authors’ MS.,” and sent it down by a friend. Whereupon ensued a conversation by telephone:

  “Postoffice authorities say it must be open at both ends.”

  “Very well, open it at both ends.”

  Silence for ten minutes. Then—

  “Authorities find no proof-sheets with it. Can’t send it.”

  “What do they want with proof-sheets?”

  “Law extends Author’s privilege to book manuscript only when accompanied by proof-sheets!”

  I sat down and waited for this piece of colossal idiocy to sink home and settle securely to its right place among my bric-a-brac collection of unpurchasable mental curiosities; then I said—

  “How in the world am I to furnish a proof-sheet of manuscript which has never been printed?”

  “I don’t know; but that is what the Post Office Department of the United States requires.”

  “The Post Office Department of the United States is an Ass.”

  “Second the motion. But the law—or at least the official interpretation of it—is as I have said.”

  “Please borrow the book for me. I wish to see the inspired words with my own eyes.”

  Here they are. United States Official Postal Guide, for January, 1882. “Ruling,” or interpretation No. 34, page 642:

  “Book manuscript, manuscript for magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and music manuscript, are now subject to full letter rates of postage, except they be accompanied by PROOF-SHEETS, or corrected proof-sheets, OF SUCH MANUSCRIPT, etc., etc.”

  There it is—read it for yourself. If that isn’t the very dregs of human imbecility and ignorance, where shall you go to find it? Is there another idiot asylum outside the Post Office Department of the United States that can fellow that?

  Look at it all around—inspect it in detail—for it is the gem-stupidity of all the ages. You see, they have admitted newspaper MS to the privilege, now; and have added music; and have restored the magazine and the periodical to their early place with book MS.—and by a simple turn of the wrist, and the most miraculous piece of leatherheadedness the world ever saw, the interpreter-idiot has shut every one of them out and made the law an absolute and hopeless nullity!

  You think that if you were a law-builder or a salaried law-tinker, and didn’t know anything about a matter which came officially before you, you would go and get advice and information from somebody who did know something about it, before you meddled with it. But I whisper in your ear, now, as I did in the outset, and say to you that those laborious and well-meaning, and complacent, but groping, and shell-headed and inadequate Washington tumble-bugs have not that useful habit.

  THE MISSIONARY IN WORLD-POLITICS

  To the Editor of the Times.

  SIR: I think you will grant that the source of religion and of patriotism is one and the same—the heart, not the head. It seems established by ages of history that none but the weakest and most valueless men can be persuaded to desert their flag or their religion. We regard as a base creature the man who deserts his flag and turns against his country, either when his country is in the right or when she is in the wrong. We hold in detestation the person who tries to beguile him to do it. We say loyalty is not matter of argument but of feeling—its seat is in the heart, not the brain. I do not know why we respect missionaries. Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children’s faith and winning them to the worship of alien gods. We have lacked the opportunity to find out how a parent feels to see his child deriding and blaspheming the religion of its ancestors. We have lacked the opportunity of hearing a foreign missionary who has been forced upon us against our will lauding his own saints and gods and saying harsh things about ours. If, some time or other, we shall have these experiences, it will probably go hard with the missionary.

  History teaches us that there is no capable missionary except fire and sword or the command of a king whose subjects have no voice in the government. Christianity, like Mohammedanism, has made its conquests by force, not persuasion. The Christendom of to-day is the result, solel
y, of the sword in some cases, and of royal mandate in the others. Since these two missionaries retired from the field the industry has stood still. Persuasion has accomplished nothing. Nothing, for the reason that for every convert it has made, more than a thousand pagans have been born to fill up his place. If the missionary trade had been a commercial enterprise, its sane and practical board of directors would have seen, two centuries ago, that there was no profit in it and no profit possible to it on this side of eternity, and they would have gone into liquidation, paid ha’pence in the pound, and taken in their sign; reporting to the stockholders that “the balance of trade being 1,000 to 1 against us we have considered it wise to retire from the enterprise and apply our energies to something worth while.” But mission-propagators are apparently not open to (business) logic. They have paid out millions upon millions of pounds to add an almost invisible Christian fringe around the globe’s massed heathen billions; they are aware that the body of the fabric increases in bulk a thousand times faster than the fringe; they know that a convert is by far the most expensive bric-a-brac in commerce; they know that if he is a grown-up convert he is as a rule a poor thing and always a traitor, and was not worth harvesting at any figure. And yet they are quite well satisfied with the triumphs they are achieving. That is the name they usually call it by.

  Still, if it amuses the missionary and his backer, should the man in the street object? Is it any of his affair? Is he in any way affected by it? Does it do him any harm? It is a question worth considering. Let him put himself in the pagan’s place, and examine some of the facts by that light. Wherever the missionary goes he not only proclaims that his religion is the best one, but that it is a true one while his hearer’s religion is a false one; that the pagan’s gods are inventions of the imagination; that the things and the names which are sacred to him are not worthy of his reverence; that his fathers are all in hell, and the dead darlings of his nursery also, because the word which saves had not been brought to them; that he must now desert his ancient religion and give allegiance to the new one or he will follow his fathers and his lost darlings to the eternal fires. The missionary must teach these things, for he has his orders; and there is no trick of language, there is no art of words, that can so phrase them that they are not an insult. In Fiji the old pagan said, “And all I loved are in hell? I am not a dog; I will follow them.” That a missionary ever survives his first exhibition of his samples shows that there is something very fine and patient and noble about the pagan. It seems a pity to ever missionary it out of him. When a French nun in Hong Kong proposed to send to France for money wherewith to establish an asylum for fatherless little foundlings where they might be fatted up physically and spiritually, the authorities said, “How kind of you to think of us—are you out of foundlings at home?” The missionary has no wish to be an insulter, but how is he to help it? All his propositions are insults, word them as he may. In an ignorant and bigoted Chinese village the mere sight of him is an insult—particularly when he is there by grace of foreign force. Two hundred years ago the Chinese hated him, ordered him away, and slaughtered him when he tarried. They have hated him ever since, and henceforth they will hate him more than ever.