MY DEAR BRO.,--Yours has just arrived. I enclose a draft on Hartford for
$25. You will have abandoned the project you wanted it for, by the time
it arrives,--but no matter, apply it to your newer and present
project, whatever it is. You see I have an ineradicable faith in
your unsteadfastness,--but mind you, I didn't invent that faith, you
conferred it on me yourself. But fire away, fire away! I don't see why
a changeable man shouldn't get as much enjoyment out of his changes,
and transformations and transfigurations as a steadfast man gets out
of standing still and pegging at the same old monotonous thing all the
time. That is to say, I don't see why a kaleidoscope shouldn't enjoy
itself as much as a telescope, nor a grindstone have as good a time as
a whetstone, nor a barometer as good a time as a yardstick. I don't
feel like girding at you any more about fickleness of purpose, because I
recognize and realize at last that it is incurable; but before I learned
to accept this truth, each new weekly project of yours possessed the
power of throwing me into the most exhausting and helpless convulsions
of profanity. But fire away, now! Your magic has lost its might. I am
able to view your inspirations dispassionately and judicially, now, and
say “This one or that one or the other one is not up to your average
flight, or is above it, or below it.”
And so, without passion, or prejudice, or bias of any kind, I sit in
judgment upon your lecture project, and say it was up to your average,
it was indeed above it, for it had possibilities in it, and even
practical ones. While I was not sorry you abandoned it, I should not be
sorry if you had stuck to it and given it a trial. But on the whole you
did the wise thing to lay it aside, I think, because a lecture is a most
easy thing to fail in; and at your time of life, and in your own town,
such a failure would make a deep and cruel wound in your heart and in
your pride. It was decidedly unwise in you to think for a moment of
coming before a community who knew you, with such a course of lectures;
because Keokuk is not unaware that you have been a Swedenborgian, a
Presbyterian, a Congregationalist, and a Methodist (on probation), and
that just a year ago you were an infidel. If Keokuk had gone to your
lecture course, it would have gone to be amused, not instructed, for
when a man is known to have no settled convictions of his own he can't
convince other people. They would have gone to be amused and that would
have been a deep humiliation to you. It could have been safe for you
to appear only where you were unknown--then many of your hearers would
think you were in earnest. And they would be right. You are in earnest
while your convictions are new. But taking it by and large, you probably
did best to discard that project altogether. But I leave you to judge of
that, for you are the worst judge I know of.
(Unfinished.)
That Mark Twain in many ways was hardly less child-like than his
brother is now and again revealed in his letters. He was of
steadfast purpose, and he possessed the driving power which Orion
Clemens lacked; but the importance to him of some of the smaller
matters of life, as shown in a letter like the following, bespeaks a
certain simplicity of nature which he never outgrew:
*****
To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: