A number of articles in this volume, even the more important, have not
heretofore appeared in print. Mark Twain was nearly always
writing--busily trying to keep up with his imagination and enthusiasm: A
good many of his literary undertakings remained unfinished or were held
for further consideration, in time to be quite forgotten. Few of these
papers were unimportant, and a fresh interest attaches to them to-day in
the fact that they present some new detail of the author’s devious
wanderings, some new point of observation, some hitherto unexpressed
angle of his indefatigable thought.
The present collection opens with a chapter from a book that was never
written, a book about England, for which the author made some
preparation, during his first visit to that country, in 1872. He filled
several notebooks with brief comments, among which appears this single
complete episode, the description of a visit to Westminster Abbey by
night. As an example of what the book might have been we may be sorry
that it went no farther.
It was not, however, quite in line with his proposed undertaking, which
had been to write a more or less satirical book on English manners and
customs. Arriving there, he found that he liked the people and their
country too well for that, besides he was so busy entertaining, and
being entertained, that he had little time for critical observation. In
a letter home he wrote:
I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven’t done much but
attend dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I
do hate to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel
entirely at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to
make after-dinner speeches here.
England at this time gave Mark Twain an even fuller appreciation than he
had thus far received in his own country. To hunt out and hold up to
ridicule the foibles of hosts so hospitable would have been quite
foreign to his nature. The notes he made had little satire in them,
being mainly memoranda of the moment....
“Down the Rhône,” written some twenty years later, is a chapter from
another book that failed of completion. Mark Twain, in Europe partly for
his health, partly for financial reasons, had agreed to write six
letters for the New York _Sun_, two of which--those from Aix and
Marienbad--appear in this volume. Six letters would not make a book of
sufficient size and he thought he might supplement them by making a
drifting trip down the Rhône, the “river of angels,” as Stevenson called
it, and turning it into literature.
The trip itself proved to be one of the most delightful excursions of
his life, and his account of it, so far as completed, has interest and
charm. But he was alone, with only his boatman (the “Admiral”) and his
courier, Joseph Very, for company, a monotony of human material that was
not inspiring. He made some attempt to introduce fictitious characters,
but presently gave up the idea. As a whole the excursion was too drowsy
and comfortable to stir him to continuous effort; neither the notes nor
the article, attempted somewhat later, ever came to conclusion.
Three articles in this volume, beginning with “To the Person Sitting in
Darkness,” were published in the _North American Review_ during 1901-02,
at a period when Mark Twain had pretty well made up his mind on most
subjects, and especially concerning the interference of one nation with
another on matters of religion and government. He had recently returned
from a ten years’ sojourn in Europe and his opinion was eagerly sought
on all public questions, especially upon those of international aspect.
He was no longer regarded merely as a humorist, but as a sort of Solon
presiding over a court of final conclusions. A writer in the _Evening
Mail_ said of this later period:
Things have reached the point where, if Mark Twain is not at a public
meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his
inimitable letters of advice and encouragement.
His old friend, W. D. Howells, expressed an amused fear that Mark
Twain’s countrymen, who in former years had expected him to be merely a
humorist, should now, in the light of his wider acceptance abroad,
demand that he be mainly serious.
He was serious enough, and fiercely humorous as well, in his article “To
the Person Sitting in Darkness” and in those which followed it. It
seemed to him that the human race, always a doubtful quantity, was
behaving even worse than usual. On New Year’s Eve, 1900-01, he wrote:
A GREETING FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning,
bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in
Kiao-Chau, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul
full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of
pious hypocracies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the
looking-glass.
Certain missionary activities in China, in particular, invited his
attention, and in the first of the _Review_ articles he unburdened
himself. A masterpiece of pitiless exposition and sarcasm, its
publication stirred up a cyclone. Periodicals more or less orthodox
heaped upon him denunciation and vituperation. “To My Missionary
Critics,” published in the _Review_ for April, was his answer. He did
not fight alone, but was upheld by a vast following of liberal-minded
readers, both in and out of the Church. Edward S. Martin wrote him:
How gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us who
understands the rarity of plain truth, and who delights to utter it,
and has the gift of doing so without cant, and with not too much
seriousness.
The principals of the primal human drama, our biblical parents of Eden,
play a considerable part in Mark Twain’s imaginative writings. He wrote
“Diaries” of both Adam and Eve, that of the latter being among his
choicest works. He was generally planning something that would include
one or both of the traditional ancestors, and results of this tendency
express themselves in the present volume. Satan, likewise, the
picturesque angel of rebellion and defeat, the Satan of _Paradise Lost_,
made a strong appeal and in no less than three of the articles which
follow the prince of error variously appears. For the most part these
inventions offer an aspect of humor; but again the figure of the outcast
angel is presented to us in an attitude of sorrowful kinship with the
great human tragedy.