What Is Man?

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> What Is Man?


No one can tell me what is a good cigar--for me. I am the only judge.
People who claim to know say that I smoke the worst cigars in the world.
They bring their own cigars when they come to my house. They betray an
unmanly terror when I offer them a cigar; they tell lies and hurry away
to meet engagements which they have not made when they are threatened
with the hospitalities of my box. Now then, observe what superstition,
assisted by a man's reputation, can do. I was to have twelve personal
friends to supper one night. One of them was as notorious for costly and
elegant cigars as I was for cheap and devilish ones. I called at his
house and when no one was looking borrowed a double handful of his very
choicest; cigars which cost him forty cents apiece and bore red-and-gold
labels in sign of their nobility. I removed the labels and put the
cigars into a box with my favorite brand on it--a brand which those
people all knew, and which cowed them as men are cowed by an epidemic.
They took these cigars when offered at the end of the supper, and lit
them and sternly struggled with them--in dreary silence, for hilarity
died when the fell brand came into view and started around--but their
fortitude held for a short time only; then they made excuses and filed
out, treading on one another's heels with indecent eagerness; and in the
morning when I went out to observe results the cigars lay all between the
front door and the gate. All except one--that one lay in the plate of the
man from whom I had cabbaged the lot. One or two whiffs was all he could
stand. He told me afterward that some day I would get shot for giving
people that kind of cigars to smoke.

Am I certain of my own standard? Perfectly; yes, absolutely--unless
somebody fools me by putting my brand on some other kind of cigar; for no
doubt I am like the rest, and know my cigar by the brand instead of by
the flavor. However, my standard is a pretty wide one and covers a good
deal of territory. To me, almost any cigar is good that nobody else will
smoke, and to me almost all cigars are bad that other people consider
good. Nearly any cigar will do me, except a Havana. People think they
hurt my feelings when then come to my house with their life preservers
on--I mean, with their own cigars in their pockets. It is an error; I
take care of myself in a similar way. When I go into danger--that is,
into rich people's houses, where, in the nature of things, they will have
high-tariff cigars, red-and-gilt girded and nested in a rosewood box
along with a damp sponge, cigars which develop a dismal black ash and
burn down the side and smell, and will grow hot to the fingers, and will
go on growing hotter and hotter, and go on smelling more and more
infamously and unendurably the deeper the fire tunnels down inside below
the thimbleful of honest tobacco that is in the front end, the furnisher
of it praising it all the time and telling you how much the deadly thing
cost--yes, when I go into that sort of peril I carry my own defense
along; I carry my own brand--twenty-seven cents a barrel--and I live to
see my family again. I may seem to light his red-gartered cigar, but
that is only for courtesy's sake; I smuggle it into my pocket for the
poor, of whom I know many, and light one of my own; and while he praises
it I join in, but when he says it cost forty-five cents I say nothing,
for I know better.

However, to say true, my tastes are so catholic that I have never seen
any cigars that I really could not smoke, except those that cost a dollar
apiece. I have examined those and know that they are made of dog-hair,
and not good dog-hair at that.

I have a thoroughly satisfactory time in Europe, for all over the
Continent one finds cigars which not even the most hardened newsboys in
New York would smoke. I brought cigars with me, the last time; I will
not do that any more. In Italy, as in France, the Government is the only
cigar-peddler. Italy has three or four domestic brands: the Minghetti,
the Trabuco, the Virginia, and a very coarse one which is a modification
of the Virginia. The Minghettis are large and comely, and cost three
dollars and sixty cents a hundred; I can smoke a hundred in seven days
and enjoy every one of them. The Trabucos suit me, too; I don't remember
the price. But one has to learn to like the Virginia, nobody is born
friendly to it. It looks like a rat-tail file, but smokes better, some
think. It has a straw through it; you pull this out, and it leaves a
flue, otherwise there would be no draught, not even as much as there is
to a nail. Some prefer a nail at first. However, I like all the French,
Swiss, German, and Italian domestic cigars, and have never cared to
inquire what they are made of; and nobody would know, anyhow, perhaps.
There is even a brand of European smoking-tobacco that I like. It is a
brand used by the Italian peasants. It is loose and dry and black, and
looks like tea-grounds. When the fire is applied it expands, and climbs
up and towers above the pipe, and presently tumbles off inside of one's
vest. The tobacco itself is cheap, but it raises the insurance. It is
as I remarked in the beginning--the taste for tobacco is a matter of
superstition. There are no standards--no real standards. Each man's
preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can
accept, the only one which can command him.





THE BEE

It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee. I mean, in the
psychical and in the poetical way. I had had a business introduction
earlier. It was when I was a boy. It is strange that I should remember
a formality like that so long; it must be nearly sixty years.

Bee scientists always speak of the bee as she. It is because all the
important bees are of that sex. In the hive there is one married bee,
called the queen; she has fifty thousand children; of these, about one
hundred are sons; the rest are daughters. Some of the daughters are
young maids, some are old maids, and all are virgins and remain so.

Every spring the queen comes out of the hive and flies away with one of
her sons and marries him. The honeymoon lasts only an hour or two; then
the queen divorces her husband and returns home competent to lay two
million eggs. This will be enough to last the year, but not more than
enough, because hundreds of bees are drowned every day, and other
hundreds are eaten by birds, and it is the queen's business to keep the
population up to standard--say, fifty thousand. She must always have
that many children on hand and efficient during the busy season, which is
summer, or winter would catch the community short of food. She lays from
two thousand to three thousand eggs a day, according to the demand; and
she must exercise judgment, and not lay more than are needed in a slim
flower-harvest, nor fewer than are required in a prodigal one, or the
board of directors will dethrone her and elect a queen that has more
sense.

There are always a few royal heirs in stock and ready to take her
place--ready and more than anxious to do it, although she is their own
mother. These girls are kept by themselves, and are regally fed and
tended from birth. No other bees get such fine food as they get, or live
such a high and luxurious life. By consequence they are larger and longer
and sleeker than their working sisters. And they have a curved sting,
shaped like a scimitar, while the others have a straight one.

A common bee will sting any one or anybody, but a royalty stings
royalties only. A common bee will sting and kill another common bee, for
cause, but when it is necessary to kill the queen other ways are
employed. When a queen has grown old and slack and does not lay eggs
enough one of her royal daughters is allowed to come to attack her, the
rest of the bees looking on at the duel and seeing fair play. It is a
duel with the curved stings. If one of the fighters gets hard pressed
and gives it up and runs, she is brought back and must try again--once,
maybe twice; then, if she runs yet once more for her life, judicial death
is her portion; her children pack themselves into a ball around her
person and hold her in that compact grip two or three days, until she
starves to death or is suffocated. Meantime the victor bee is receiving
royal honors and performing the one royal function--laying eggs.

As regards the ethics of the judicial assassination of the queen, that is
a matter of politics, and will be discussed later, in its proper place.

During substantially the whole of her short life of five or six years the
queen lives in Egyptian darkness and stately seclusion of the royal
apartments, with none about her but plebeian servants, who give her empty
lip-affection in place of the love which her heart hungers for; who spy
upon her in the interest of her waiting heirs, and report and exaggerate
her defects and deficiencies to them; who fawn upon her and flatter her
to her face and slander her behind her back; who grovel before her in the
day of her power and forsake her in her age and weakness. There she
sits, friendless, upon her throne through the long night of her life, cut
off from the consoling sympathies and sweet companionship and loving
endearments which she craves, by the gilded barriers of her awful rank; a
forlorn exile in her own house and home, weary object of formal
ceremonies and machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to
the free air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the
splendid accident of her birth to trade this priceless heritage for a
black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life, with shame and
insult at the end and a cruel death--and condemned by the human instinct
in her to hold the bargain valuable!

Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck--in fact, all the great authorities--are
agreed in denying that the bee is a member of the human family. I do not
know why they have done this, but I think it is from dishonest motives.
Why, the innumerable facts brought to light by their own painstaking and
exhaustive experiments prove that if there is a master fool in the world,
it is the bee. That seems to settle it.

But that is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty years in
building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a certain
theory; then he is so happy in his achievement that as a rule he
overlooks the main chief fact of all--that his accumulation proves an
entirely different thing. When you point out this miscarriage to him he
does not answer your letters; when you call to convince him, the servant
prevaricates and you do not get in. Scientists have odious manners,
except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them.

To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one of them will
answer your letter, but when they do they avoid the issue--you cannot pin
them down. When I discovered that the bee was human I wrote about it to
all those scientists whom I have just mentioned. For evasions, I have
seen nothing to equal the answers I got.

After the queen, the personage next in importance in the hive is the
virgin. The virgins are fifty thousand or one hundred thousand in
number, and they are the workers, the laborers. No work is done, in the
hive or out of it, save by them. The males do not work, the queen does
no work, unless laying eggs is work, but it does not seem so to me.
There are only two million of them, anyway, and all of five months to
finish the contract in. The distribution of work in a hive is as
cleverly and elaborately specialized as it is in a vast American
machine-shop or factory. A bee that has been trained to one of the many
and various industries of the concern doesn't know how to exercise any
other, and would be offended if asked to take a hand in anything outside
of her profession. She is as human as a cook; and if you should ask the
cook to wait on the table, you know what will happen. Cooks will play
the piano if you like, but they draw the line there. In my time I have
asked a cook to chop wood, and I know about these things. Even the hired
girl has her frontiers; true, they are vague, they are ill-defined, even
flexible, but they are there. This is not conjecture; it is founded on
the absolute. And then the butler. You ask the butler to wash the dog.
It is just as I say; there is much to be learned in these ways, without
going to books. Books are very well, but books do not cover the whole
domain of esthetic human culture. Pride of profession is one of the
boniest bones in existence, if not the boniest. Without doubt it is so
in the hive.



TAMING THE BICYCLE

In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the old
high-wheel bicycles of that period. He wrote an account of his
experience, but did not offer it for publication. The form of bicycle he
rode long ago became antiquated, but in the humor of his pleasantry is a
quality which does not grow old.

A. B. P.



I

I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it. So I went down a
bought a barrel of Pond's Extract and a bicycle. The Expert came home
with me to instruct me. We chose the back yard, for the sake of privacy,
and went to work.

Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt--a fifty-inch, with
the pedals shortened up to forty-eight--and skittish, like any other
colt. The Expert explained the thing's points briefly, then he got on
its back and rode around a little, to show me how easy it was to do. He
said that the dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so
we would leave that to the last. But he was in error there. He found,
to his surprise and joy, that all that he needed to do was to get me on
to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself.
Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on
record. He was on that side, shoving up the machine; we all came down
with a crash, he at the bottom, I next, and the machine on top.

We examined the machine, but it was not in the least injured. This was
hardly believable. Yet the Expert assured me that it was true; in fact,
the examination proved it. I was partly to realize, then, how admirably
these things are constructed. We applied some Pond's Extract, and
resumed. The Expert got on the OTHER side to shove up this time, but I
dismounted on that side; so the result was as before.

The machine was not hurt. We oiled ourselves again, and resumed. This
time the Expert took up a sheltered position behind, but somehow or other
we landed on him again.

He was full of admiration; said it was abnormal. She was all right, not
a scratch on her, not a timber started anywhere. I said it was wonderful,
while we were greasing up, but he said that when I came to know these
steel spider-webs I would realize that nothing but dynamite could cripple
them. Then he limped out to position, and we resumed once more. This
time the Expert took up the position of short-stop, and got a man to
shove up behind. We got up a handsome speed, and presently traversed a
brick, and I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down,
on the instructor's back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air
between me and the sun. It was well it came down on us, for that broke
the fall, and it was not injured.

Five days later I got out and was carried down to the hospital, and found
the Expert doing pretty fairly. In a few more days I was quite sound. I
attribute this to my prudence in always dismounting on something soft.
Some recommend a feather bed, but I think an Expert is better.

The Expert got out at last, brought four assistants with him. It was a
good idea. These four held the graceful cobweb upright while I climbed
into the saddle; then they formed in column and marched on either side of
me while the Expert pushed behind; all hands assisted at the dismount.

The bicycle had what is called the "wabbles," and had them very badly.
In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and
in every instance the thing required was against nature. That is to say,
that whatever the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and breeding
moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected
law of physics required that it be done in just the other way. I
perceived by this how radically and grotesquely wrong had been the
life-long education of my body and members. They were steeped in
ignorance; they knew nothing--nothing which it could profit them to know.
For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I put the tiller
hard down the other way, by a quite natural impulse, and so violated a
law, and kept on going down. The law required the opposite thing--the
big wheel must be turned in the direction in which you are falling. It
is hard to believe this, when you are told it. And not merely hard to
believe it, but impossible; it is opposed to all your notions. And it is
just as hard to do it, after you do come to believe it. Believing it,
and knowing by the most convincing proof that it is true, does not help
it: you can't any more DO it than you could before; you can neither force
nor persuade yourself to do it at first. The intellect has to come to
the front, now. It has to teach the limbs to discard their old education
and adopt the new.

The steps of one's progress are distinctly marked. At the end of each
lesson he knows he has acquired something, and he also knows what that
something is, and likewise that it will stay with him. It is not like
studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for
thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring
the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No--and I see now, plainly
enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't
fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to
make you attend strictly to business. But I also see, by what I have
learned of bicycling, that the right and only sure way to learn German is
by the bicycling method. That is to say, take a grip on one villainy of
it at a time, leaving that one half learned.

When you have reached the point in bicycling where you can balance the
machine tolerably fairly and propel it and steer it, then comes your next
task--how to mount it. You do it in this way: you hop along behind it on
your right foot, resting the other on the mounting-peg, and grasping the
tiller with your hands. At the word, you rise on the peg, stiffen your
left leg, hang your other one around in the air in a general in
indefinite way, lean your stomach against the rear of the saddle, and
then fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other; but you fall off.
You get up and do it again; and once more; and then several times.

By this time you have learned to keep your balance; and also to steer
without wrenching the tiller out by the roots (I say tiller because it IS
a tiller; "handle-bar" is a lamely descriptive phrase). So you steer
along, straight ahead, a little while, then you rise forward, with a
steady strain, bringing your right leg, and then your body, into the
saddle, catch your breath, fetch a violent hitch this way and then that,
and down you go again.

But you have ceased to mind the going down by this time; you are getting
to light on one foot or the other with considerable certainty. Six more
attempts and six more falls make you perfect. You land in the saddle
comfortably, next time, and stay there--that is, if you can be content to
let your legs dangle, and leave the pedals alone a while; but if you grab
at once for the pedals, you are gone again. You soon learn to wait a
little and perfect your balance before reaching for the pedals; then the
mounting-art is acquired, is complete, and a little practice will make it
simple and easy to you, though spectators ought to keep off a rod or two
to one side, along at first, if you have nothing against them.

And now you come to the voluntary dismount; you learned the other kind
first of all. It is quite easy to tell one how to do the voluntary
dismount; the words are few, the requirement simple, and apparently
undifficult; let your left pedal go down till your left leg is nearly
straight, turn your wheel to the left, and get off as you would from a
horse. It certainly does sound exceedingly easy; but it isn't. I don't
know why it isn't but it isn't. Try as you may, you don't get down as
you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire.
You make a spectacle of yourself every time.

II

During the eight days I took a daily lesson an hour and a half. At the
end of this twelve working-hours' appreticeship I was graduated--in the
rough. I was pronounced competent to paddle my own bicycle without
outside help. It seems incredible, this celerity of acquirement. It
takes considerably longer than that to learn horseback-riding in the
rough.

Now it is true that I could have learned without a teacher, but it would
have been risky for me, because of my natural clumsiness. The
self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a
tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers;
and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless
people into going and doing as he himself has done. There are those who
imagine that the unlucky accidents of life--life's "experiences"--are in
some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of
them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch
you on your inexperienced side. If personal experience can be worth
anything as an education, it wouldn't seem likely that you could trip
Methuselah; and yet if that old person could come back here it is more
that likely that one of the first things he would do would be to take
hold of one of these electric wires and tie himself all up in a knot.
Now the surer thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask somebody
whether it was a good thing to take hold of. But that would not suit
him; he would be one of the self-taught kind that go by experience; he
would want to examine for himself. And he would find, for his
instruction, that the coiled patriarch shuns the electric wire; and it
would be useful to him, too, and would leave his education in quite a
complete and rounded-out condition, till he should come again, some day,
and go to bouncing a dynamite-can around to find out what was in it.

But we wander from the point. However, get a teacher; it saves much time
and Pond's Extract.

Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired concerning my
physical strength, and I was able to inform him that I hadn't any. He
said that that was a defect which would make up-hill wheeling pretty
difficult for me at first; but he also said the bicycle would soon remove
it. The contrast between his muscles and mine was quite marked. He
wanted to test mine, so I offered my biceps--which was my best. It
almost made him smile. He said, "It is pulpy, and soft, and yielding,
and rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers; in
the dark a body might think it was an oyster in a rag." Perhaps this made
me look grieved, for he added, briskly: "Oh, that's all right, you
needn't worry about that; in a little while you can't tell it from a
petrified kidney. Just go right along with your practice; you're all
right."

Then he left me, and I started out alone to seek adventures. You don't
really have to seek them--that is nothing but a phrase--they come to
you.

I chose a reposeful Sabbath-day sort of a back street which was about
thirty yards wide between the curbstones. I knew it was not wide enough;
still, I thought that by keeping strict watch and wasting no space
unnecessarily I could crowd through.

Of course I had trouble mounting the machine, entirely on my own
responsibility, with no encouraging moral support from the outside, no
sympathetic instructor to say, "Good! now you're doing well--good
again--don't hurry--there, now, you're all right--brace up, go ahead."
In place of this I had some other support. This was a boy, who was
perched on a gate-post munching a hunk of maple sugar.

He was full of interest and comment. The first time I failed and went
down he said that if he was me he would dress up in pillows, that's what
he would do. The next time I went down he advised me to go and learn to
ride a tricycle first. The third time I collapsed he said he didn't
believe I could stay on a horse-car. But the next time I succeeded, and
got clumsily under way in a weaving, tottering, uncertain fashion, and
occupying pretty much all of the street. My slow and lumbering gait
filled the boy to the chin with scorn, and he sung out, "My, but don't he
rip along!" Then he got down from his post and loafed along the
sidewalk, still observing and occasionally commenting. Presently he
dropped into my wake and followed along behind. A little girl passed by,
balancing a wash-board on her head, and giggled, and seemed about to make
a remark, but the boy said, rebukingly, "Let him alone, he's going to a
funeral."