The year 1902 was an eventful one for Mark Twain. In April he received
a degree of LL.D. from the University of Missouri and returned to his
native State to accept it. This was his last journey to the Mississippi
River. During the summer Mrs. Clemens's health broke down and illnesses
of one sort or another visited other members of the family. Amid so much
stress and anxiety Clemens had little time or inclination for work.
He wrote not many letters and mainly somber ones. Once, by way
of diversion, he worked out the idea of a curious club--which he
formed--its members to be young girls--girls for the most part whom he
had never seen. They were elected without their consent from among those
who wrote to him without his consent, and it is not likely that any one
so chosen declined membership. One selection from his letters to the
French member, Miss Helene Picard, of St.-Die, France, will explain the
club and present a side of Mask Twain somewhat different from that found
in most of his correspondence.
*****
To Miss Picard, in St.-Die, France:
RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON, February 22, 1902.
DEAR MISS HELENE,--If you will let me call you so, considering that my
head is white and that I have grownup daughters. Your beautiful letter
has given me such deep pleasure! I will make bold to claim you for a
friend and lock you up with the rest of my riches; for I am a miser who
counts his spoil every day and hoards it secretly and adds to it when he
can, and is grateful to see it grow.
Some of that gold comes, like yourself, in a sealed package, and I can't
see it and may never have the happiness; but I know its value without
that, and by what sum it increases my wealth.
I have a Club, a private Club, which is all my own. I appoint the
Members myself, and they can't help themselves, because I don't allow
them to vote on their own appointment and I don't allow them to resign!
They are all friends whom I have never seen (save one), but who have
written friendly letters to me.
By the laws of my Club there can be only one Member in each country, and
there can be no male Member but myself. Some day I may admit males,
but I don't know--they are capricious and inharmonious, and their ways
provoke me a good deal. It is a matter which the Club shall decide.
I have made four appointments in the past three or four months: You
as Member for France, a young Highland girl as Member for Scotland, a
Mohammedan girl as Member for Bengal, and a dear and bright young
niece of mine as Member for the United States--for I do not represent a
country myself, but am merely Member at Large for the Human Race.
You must not try to resign, for the laws of the Club do not allow that.
You must console yourself by remembering that you are in the best of
company; that nobody knows of your membership except myself--that no
Member knows another's name, but only her country; that no taxes are
levied and no meetings held (but how dearly I should like to attend
one!).
One of my Members is a Princess of a royal house, another is the
daughter of a village book-seller on the continent of Europe. For the
only qualification for Membership is intellect and the spirit of good
will; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count.
May I send you the Constitution and Laws of the Club? I shall be so
pleased if I may. It is a document which one of my daughters typewrites
for me when I need one for a new Member, and she would give her eyebrows
to know what it is all about, but I strangle her curiosity by saying:
“There are much cheaper typewriters than you are, my dear, and if
you try to pry into the sacred mysteries of this Club one of your
prosperities will perish sure.”
My favorite? It is “Joan of Arc.” My next is “Huckleberry Finn,” but the
family's next is “The Prince and the Pauper.” (Yes, you are right--I
am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go
thrashing around in political questions.)
I wish you every good fortune and happiness and I thank you so much for
your letter.
Sincerely yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.
Early in the year Clemens paid a visit to Twichell in Hartford, and
after one of their regular arguments on theology and the moral
accountability of the human race, arguments that had been going on
between them for more than thirty years--Twichell lent his visitor
Freedom of the Will, by Jonathan Edwards, to read on the way home.
The next letter was the result.
*****
To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON.
Feb. '02.
DEAR JOE,--“After compliments.”--[Meaning “What a good time you gave
me; what a happiness it was to be under your roof again; etc., etc.”
See opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between Lord
Roberts and Indian princes and rulers.]--From Bridgeport to New York;
thence to home; and continuously until near midnight I wallowed and
reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immediately refreshed
and fine at 10 this morning, but with a strange and haunting sense of
having been on a three days' tear with a drunken lunatic. It is years
since I have known these sensations. All through the book is the glaze
of a resplendent intellect gone mad--a marvelous spectacle. No, not all
through the book--the drunk does not come on till the last third, where
what I take to be Calvinism and its God begins to show up and shine red
and hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and
proper adornment. By God I was ashamed to be in such company.
Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Arminian position) that the Man
(or his Soul or his Will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved
to action by an impulse back of it. That's sound!
Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses the
one which for the moment is most pleasing to ITSELF. Perfectly correct!
An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane.
Up to that point he could have written chapters III and IV of my
suppressed “Gospel.” But there we seem to separate. He seems to concede
the indisputable and unshakable dominion of Motive and Necessity (call
them what he may, these are exterior forces and not under the man's
authority, guidance or even suggestion)--then he suddenly flies the
logic track and (to all seeming) makes the man and not these exterior
forces responsible to God for the man's thoughts, words and acts. It is
frank insanity.
I think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of Motive and
Necessity he grants, a third position of mine--that a man's mind is a
mere machine--an automatic machine--which is handled entirely from the
outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing: not an ounce
of its fuel, and not so much as a bare suggestion to that exterior
engineer as to what the machine shall do, nor how it shall do it nor
when.
After that concession, it was time for him to get alarmed and shirk--for
he was pointing straight for the only rational and possible next-station
on that piece of road the irresponsibility of man to God.
And so he shirked. Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result:
Man is commanded to do so-and-so. It has been ordained from the
beginning of time that some men shan't and others can't.
These are to be blamed: let them be damned.
I enjoy the Colonel very much, and shall enjoy the rest of him with an
obscene delight.
Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you and yours!
MARK.
We have not heard of Joe Goodman since the trying days of '90 and
'91, when he was seeking to promote the fortunes of the type-setting
machine. Goodman, meantime, who had in turn been miner, printer,
publisher, and farmer; had been devoting his energies and genius to
something entirely new: he had been translating the prehistoric
Mayan inscriptions of Yucatan, and with such success that his work
was elaborately published by an association of British scientists.
In due time a copy of this publication came to Clemens, who was full
of admiration of the great achievement.
*****
To J. T. Goodman, in California:
RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON,
June 13, '02.
DEAR JOE,--I am lost in reverence and admiration! It is now twenty-four
hours that I have been trying to cool down and contemplate with quiet
blood this extraordinary spectacle of energy, industry, perseverance,
pluck, analytical genius, penetration, this irruption of thunders
and fiery splendors from a fair and flowery mountain that nobody had
supposed was a sleeping volcano, but I seem to be as excited as ever.
Yesterday I read as much as half of the book, not understanding a word
but enchanted nevertheless--partly by the wonder of it all, the study,
the erudition, the incredible labor, the modesty, the dignity, the
majestic exclusiveness of the field and its lofty remoteness from things
and contacts sordid and mean and earthy, and partly by the grace and
beauty and limpidity of the book's unsurpassable English. Science,
always great and worshipful, goes often in hodden grey, but you have
clothed her in garments meet for her high degree.
You think you get “poor pay” for your twenty years? No, oh no. You have
lived in a paradise of the intellect whose lightest joys were beyond
the reach of the longest purse in Christendom, you have had daily and
nightly emancipation from the world's slaveries and gross interests, you
have received a bigger wage than any man in the land, you have dreamed a
splendid dream and had it come true, and to-day you could not afford
to trade fortunes with anybody--not even with another scientist, for he
must divide his spoil with his guild, whereas essentially the world you
have discovered is your own and must remain so.