I shall, not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him,
but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in
association with the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he
followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath,
or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then
hospitably lingered. Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from
the thread of thought in my mind. “I wonder why we hate the past so,”
and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness, “It’s so
damned humiliating,” which is what any man would say of his past if he
were honest; but honest men are few when it comes to themselves. Clemens
was one of the few, and the first of them among all the people I have
known. I have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so
absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. He could
lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was, not
stupidly truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and
everything that was in him. To those who can understand it will not be
contradictory of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not
ashamed for anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it. He
could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough
of in his life, but he was not ashamed in that mean way. What he had
done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was
rather amused than troubled as to the effect in your mind. He would not
obtrude the fact upon you, but if it were in the way of personal history
he would not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it.
He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it. In
one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of
his agnosticism, he declared that Christianity had done nothing to
improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan
civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian
influences. I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring
Brace’s ‘Gesta Christi’; or, ‘History of Humane Progress’, and I could
offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong. He did not like that
evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying he had not known those
things. Later he was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but
just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having
broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long. He
greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and
regarded as an evangel of a new gospel--the gospel of free thought. He
took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the time
as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, I suppose
that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He still loved his old
friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but he no longer went to hear him preach
his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater
loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to church,
and he groaned out: “Oh yes, I go. It ‘most kills me, but I go,” and I
did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his wife
wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had
finally come to her saying, “Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be
lost with you.” He could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice
and exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it. After they had
both ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved by his denial
of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic
lies, which for love’s sake he held above even the truth, and he went to
her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he
was convinced that the soul did live after death. It was too late. Her
keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he brought the
doctor who had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the heart,
and, after making him go over the facts of it again with her, made him
declare it merely functional.
To make an end of these records as to Clemens’s beliefs, so far as I knew
them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the
Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a
conscious divinity. It is best to be honest in this matter; he would
have hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can
hurt any one. At one period he argued that there must have been a cause,
a conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by
chance. I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or
his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again. But
the expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest,
and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness.
All his expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope
of living again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost. He suffered
terribly in their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his
grief. He knew that for this there were but two medicines; that it would
wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for
it but those respites in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber. I
remember that in a black hour of my own when I was called down to see
him, as he thought from sleep, he said with an infinite, an exquisite
compassion, “Oh, did I wake you, did I wake, you?” Nothing more, but the
look, the voice, were everything; and while I live they cannot pass from
my sense.