What Is Man?

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


I have been familiar with that street for years, and had always supposed
it was a dead level; but it was not, as the bicycle now informed me, to
my surprise. The bicycle, in the hands of a novice, is as alert and
acute as a spirit-level in the detecting the delicate and vanishing
shades of difference in these matters. It notices a rise where your
untrained eye would not observe that one existed; it notices any decline
which water will run down. I was toiling up a slight rise, but was not
aware of it. It made me tug and pant and perspire; and still, labor as I
might, the machine came almost to a standstill every little while. At
such times the boy would say: "That's it! take a rest--there ain't no
hurry. They can't hold the funeral without YOU."

Stones were a bother to me. Even the smallest ones gave me a panic when
I went over them. I could hit any kind of a stone, no matter how small,
if I tried to miss it; and of course at first I couldn't help trying to
do that. It is but natural. It is part of the ass that is put in us all,
for some inscrutable reason.

It was at the end of my course, at last, and it was necessary for me to
round to. This is not a pleasant thing, when you undertake it for the
first time on your own responsibility, and neither is it likely to
succeed. Your confidence oozes away, you fill steadily up with nameless
apprehensions, every fiber of you is tense with a watchful strain, you
start a cautious and gradual curve, but your squirmy nerves are all full
of electric anxieties, so the curve is quickly demoralized into a jerky
and perilous zigzag; then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in
its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, defying all prayers and
all your powers to change its mind--your heart stands still, your breath
hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight on you go, and there are
but a couple of feet between you and the curb now. And now is the
desperate moment, the last chance to save yourself; of course all your
instructions fly out of your head, and you whirl your wheel AWAY from the
curb instead of TOWARD it, and so you go sprawling on that granite-bound
inhospitable shore. That was my luck; that was my experience. I dragged
myself out from under the indestructible bicycle and sat down on the curb
to examine.

I started on the return trip. It was now that I saw a farmer's wagon
poking along down toward me, loaded with cabbages. If I needed anything
to perfect the precariousness of my steering, it was just that. The
farmer was occupying the middle of the road with his wagon, leaving
barely fourteen or fifteen yards of space on either side. I couldn't
shout at him--a beginner can't shout; if he opens his mouth he is gone;
he must keep all his attention on his business. But in this grisly
emergency, the boy came to the rescue, and for once I had to be grateful
to him. He kept a sharp lookout on the swiftly varying impulses and
inspirations of my bicycle, and shouted to the man accordingly:

"To the left! Turn to the left, or this jackass 'll run over you!" The
man started to do it. "No, to the right, to the right! Hold on! THAT
won't do!--to the left!--to the right!--to the LEFT--right! left--ri--
Stay where you ARE, or you're a goner!"

And just then I caught the off horse in the starboard and went down in a
pile. I said, "Hang it! Couldn't you SEE I was coming?"

"Yes, I see you was coming, but I couldn't tell which WAY you was coming.
Nobody could--now, COULD they? You couldn't yourself--now, COULD you?
So what could _I_ do?"

There was something in that, and so I had the magnanimity to say so. I
said I was no doubt as much to blame as he was.

Within the next five days I achieved so much progress that the boy
couldn't keep up with me. He had to go back to his gate-post, and
content himself with watching me fall at long range.

There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the street, a
measured yard apart. Even after I got so I could steer pretty fairly I
was so afraid of those stones that I always hit them. They gave me the
worst falls I ever got in that street, except those which I got from
dogs. I have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run over a
dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. I think that that
may be true: but I think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog was
because he was trying to. I did not try to run over any dog. But I ran
over every dog that came along. I think it makes a great deal of
difference. If you try to run over the dog he knows how to calculate,
but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how to calculate, and
is liable to jump the wrong way every time. It was always so in my
experience. Even when I could not hit a wagon I could hit a dog that
came to see me practice. They all liked to see me practice, and they all
came, for there was very little going on in our neighborhood to entertain
a dog. It took time to learn to miss a dog, but I achieved even that.

I can steer as well as I want to, now, and I will catch that boy one of
these days and run over HIM if he doesn't reform.

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.



IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

(from My Autobiography)

Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished manuscript
which constitute this formidable Autobiography and Diary of mine, certain
chapters will in some distant future be found which deal with
"Claimants"--claimants historically notorious: Satan, Claimant; the
Golden Calf, Claimant; the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, Claimant; Louis
XVII., Claimant; William Shakespeare, Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant;
Mary Baker G. Eddy, Claimant--and the rest of them. Eminent Claimants,
successful Claimants, defeated Claimants, royal Claimants, pleb
Claimants, showy Claimants, shabby Claimants, revered Claimants, despised
Claimants, twinkle star-like here and there and yonder through the mists
of history and legend and tradition--and, oh, all the darling tribe are
clothed in mystery and romance, and we read about them with deep interest
and discuss them with loving sympathy or with rancorous resentment,
according to which side we hitch ourselves to. It has always been so
with the human race. There was never a Claimant that couldn't get a
hearing, nor one that couldn't accumulate a rapturous following, no
matter how flimsy and apparently unauthentic his claim might be. Arthur
Orton's claim that he was the lost Tichborne baronet come to life again
was as flimsy as Mrs. Eddy's that she wrote SCIENCE AND HEALTH from the
direct dictation of the Deity; yet in England nearly forty years ago
Orton had a huge army of devotees and incorrigible adherents, many of
whom remained stubbornly unconvinced after their fat god had been proven
an impostor and jailed as a perjurer, and today Mrs. Eddy's following is
not only immense, but is daily augmenting in numbers and enthusiasm.
Orton had many fine and educated minds among his adherents, Mrs. Eddy has
had the like among hers from the beginning. Her Church is as well
equipped in those particulars as is any other Church. Claimants can
always count upon a following, it doesn't matter who they are, nor what
they claim, nor whether they come with documents or without. It was
always so. Down out of the long-vanished past, across the abyss of the
ages, if you listen, you can still hear the believing multitudes shouting
for Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.

A friend has sent me a new book, from England--THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM
RESTATED--well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty years'
interest in that matter--asleep for the last three years--is excited once
more. It is an interest which was born of Delia Bacon's book--away back
in the ancient day--1857, or maybe 1856. About a year later my
pilot-master, Bixby, transferred me from his own steamboat to the
PENNSYLVANIA, and placed me under the orders and instructions of George
Ealer--dead now, these many, many years. I steered for him a good many
months--as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice: stood a daylight
watch and spun the wheel under the severe superintendence and correction
of the master. He was a prime chess-player and an idolater of
Shakespeare. He would play chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost
his official dignity something to do that. Also--quite uninvited--he
would read Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it
was his watch and I was steering. He read well, but not profitably for
me, because he constantly injected commands into the text. That broke it
all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up--to that degree, in fact, that
if we were in a risky and difficult piece of river an ignorant person
couldn't have told, sometimes, which observations were Shakespeare's and
which were Ealer's. For instance:

What man dare, _I_ dare!

Approach thou WHAT are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of an
idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off! rugged Russian
bear, the armed rhinoceros or the THERE she goes! meet her, meet her!
didn't you KNOW she'd smell the reef if you crowded in like that? Hyrcan
tiger; take any ship but that and my firm nerves she'll be in the WOODS
the first you know! stop he starboard! come ahead strong on the larboard!
back the starboard! . . . NOW then, you're all right; come ahead on the
starboard; straighten up and go 'long, never tremble: or be alive again,
and dare me to the desert DAMNATION can't you keep away from that greasy
water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch her baldheaded! with thy sword;
if trembling I inhabit then, lay in the leads!--no, only with the
starboard one, leave the other alone, protest me the baby of a girl.
Hence horrible shadow! eight bells--that watchman's asleep again, I
reckon, go down and call Brown yourself, unreal mockery, hence!

He certainly was a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and stormy and
tragic, but it was a damage to me, because I have never since been able
to read Shakespeare in a calm and sane way. I cannot rid it of his
explosive interlardings, they break in everywhere with their irrelevant,
"What in hell are you up to NOW! pull her down! more! MORE!--there now,
steady as you go," and the other disorganizing interruptions that were
always leaping from his mouth. When I read Shakespeare now I can hear
them as plainly as I did in that long-departed time--fifty-one years ago.
I never regarded Ealer's readings as educational. Indeed, they were a
detriment to me.

His contributions to the text seldom improved it, but barring that detail
he was a good reader; I can say that much for him. He did not use the
book, and did not need to; he knew his Shakespeare as well as Euclid ever
knew his multiplication table.

Did he have something to say--this Shakespeare-adoring Mississippi
pilot--anent Delia Bacon's book?

Yes. And he said it; said it all the time, for months--in the morning
watch, the middle watch, and dog watch; and probably kept it going in his
sleep. He bought the literature of the dispute as fast as it appeared,
and we discussed it all through thirteen hundred miles of river four
times traversed in every thirty-five days--the time required by that
swift boat to achieve two round trips. We discussed, and discussed, and
discussed, and disputed and disputed and disputed; at any rate, HE did,
and I got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog and there was a
vacancy. He did his arguing with heat, with energy, with violence; and I
did mine with the reverse and moderation of a subordinate who does not
like to be flung out of a pilot-house and is perched forty feet above the
water. He was fiercely loyal to Shakespeare and cordially scornful of
Bacon and of all the pretensions of the Baconians. So was I--at first.
And at first he was glad that that was my attitude. There were even
indications that he admired it; indications dimmed, it is true, by the
distance that lay between the lofty boss-pilotical altitude and my lowly
one, yet perceptible to me; perceptible, and translatable into a
compliment--compliment coming down from about the snow-line and not well
thawed in the transit, and not likely to set anything afire, not even a
cub-pilot's self-conceit; still a detectable complement, and precious.

Naturally it flattered me into being more loyal to Shakespeare--if
possible--than I was before, and more prejudiced against Bacon--if
possible--that I was before. And so we discussed and discussed, both on
the same side, and were happy. For a while. Only for a while. Only for
a very little while, a very, very, very little while. Then the
atmosphere began to change; began to cool off.

A brighter person would have seen what the trouble was, earlier than I
did, perhaps, but I saw it early enough for all practical purposes. You
see, he was of an argumentative disposition. Therefore it took him but a
little time to get tired of arguing with a person who agreed with
everything he said and consequently never furnished him a provocative to
flare up and show what he could do when it came to clear, cold, hard,
rose-cut, hundred-faceted, diamond-flashing REASONING. That was his name
for it. It has been applied since, with complacency, as many as several
times, in the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle. On the Shakespeare side.

Then the thing happened which has happened to more persons than to me
when principle and personal interest found themselves in opposition to
each other and a choice had to be made: I let principle go, and went over
to the other side. Not the entire way, but far enough to answer the
requirements of the case. That is to say, I took this attitude--to wit,
I only BELIEVED Bacon wrote Shakespeare, whereas I KNEW Shakespeare
didn't. Ealer was satisfied with that, and the war broke loose. Study,
practice, experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled
me to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly
seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly;
finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly. After that I was welded to
my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I looked down with
compassion not unmixed with scorn upon everybody else's faith that didn't
tally with mine. That faith, imposed upon me by self-interest in that
ancient day, remains my faith today, and in it I find comfort, solace,
peace, and never-failing joy. You see how curiously theological it is.
The "rice Christian" of the Orient goes through the very same steps, when
he is after rice and the missionary is after HIM; he goes for rice, and
remains to worship.

Ealer did a lot of our "reasoning"--not to say substantially all of it.
The slaves of his cult have a passion for calling it by that large name.
We others do not call our inductions and deductions and reductions by any
name at all. They show for themselves what they are, and we can with
tranquil confidence leave the world to ennoble them with a title of its
own choosing.

Now and then when Ealer had to stop to cough, I pulled my
induction-talents together and hove the controversial lead myself: always
getting eight feet, eight and a half, often nine, sometimes even
quarter-less-twain--as _I_ believed; but always "no bottom," as HE said.

I got the best of him only once. I prepared myself. I wrote out a
passage from Shakespeare--it may have been the very one I quoted awhile
ago, I don't remember--and riddled it with his wild steamboatful
interlardings. When an unrisky opportunity offered, one lovely summer
day, when we had sounded and buoyed a tangled patch of crossings known as
Hell's Half Acre, and were aboard again and he had sneaked the
PENNSYLVANIA triumphantly through it without once scraping sand, and the
A. T. LACEY had followed in our wake and got stuck, and he was feeling
good, I showed it to him. It amused him. I asked him to fire it off
--READ it; read it, I diplomatically added, as only HE could read
dramatic poetry. The compliment touched him where he lived. He did read
it; read it with surpassing fire and spirit; read it as it will never be
read again; for HE know how to put the right music into those thunderous
interlardings and make them seem a part of the text, make them sound as
if they were bursting from Shakespeare's own soul, each one of them a
golden inspiration and not to be left out without damage to the massed
and magnificent whole.

I waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer; waited until he
brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet position, my pet
argument, the one which I was fondest of, the one which I prized far
above all others in my ammunition-wagon--to wit, that Shakespeare
couldn't have written Shakespeare's words, for the reason that the man
who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws, and the
law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways--and if
Shakespeare was possessed of the infinitely divided star-dust that
constituted this vast wealth, HOW did he get it, and WHERE and WHEN?

"From books."

From books! That was always the idea. I answered as my readings of the
champions of my side of the great controversy had taught me to answer:
that a man can't handle glibly and easily and comfortably and
successfully the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served.
He will make mistakes; he will not, and cannot, get the trade-phrasings
precisely and exactly right; and the moment he departs, by even a shade,
from a common trade-form, the reader who has served that trade will know
the writer HASN'T. Ealer would not be convinced; he said a man could
learn how to correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and
free-masonries of ANY trade by careful reading and studying. But when I
got him to read again the passage from Shakespeare with the
interlardings, he perceived, himself, that books couldn't teach a student
a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and perfectly that
he could talk them off in book and play or conversation and make no
mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover. It was a triumph
for me. He was silent awhile, and I knew what was happening--he was
losing his temper. And I knew he would presently close the session with
the same old argument that was always his stay and his support in time of
need; the same old argument, the one I couldn't answer, because I
dasn't--the argument that I was an ass, and better shut up. He delivered
it, and I obeyed.

O dear, how long ago it was--how pathetically long ago! And here am I,
old, forsaken, forlorn, and alone, arranging to get that argument out of
somebody again.

When a man has a passion for Shakespeare, it goes without saying that he
keeps company with other standard authors. Ealer always had several
high-class books in the pilot-house, and he read the same ones over and
over again, and did not care to change to newer and fresher ones. He
played well on the flute, and greatly enjoyed hearing himself play. So
did I. He had a notion that a flute would keep its health better if you
took it apart when it was not standing a watch; and so, when it was not
on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the compass-shelf under the
breastboard. When the PENNSYLVANIA blew up and became a drifting
rack-heap freighted with wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother
Henry among them), pilot Brown had the watch below, and was probably
asleep and never knew what killed him; but Ealer escaped unhurt. He and
his pilot-house were shot up into the air; then they fell, and Ealer sank
through the ragged cavern where the hurricane-deck and the boiler-deck
had been, and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on top of one
of the unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of scald and
deadly steam. But not for long. He did not lose his head--long
familiarity with danger had taught him to keep it, in any and all
emergencies. He held his coat-lapels to his nose with one hand, to keep
out the steam, and scrabbled around with the other till he found the
joints of his flute, then he took measures to save himself alive, and was
successful. I was not on board. I had been put ashore in New Orleans by
Captain Klinenfelter. The reason--however, I have told all about it in
the book called OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI, and it isn't important,
anyway, it is so long ago.

II

When I was a Sunday-school scholar, something more than sixty years ago,
I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I could about
him. I began to ask questions, but my class-teacher, Mr. Barclay, the
stone-mason, was reluctant about answering them, it seemed to me. I was
anxious to be praised for turning my thoughts to serious subjects when
there wasn't another boy in the village who could be hired to do such a
thing. I was greatly interested in the incident of Eve and the serpent,
and thought Eve's calmness was perfectly noble. I asked Mr. Barclay if
he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpeant,
would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber. He did not
answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my
age and comprehension. I will say for Mr. Barclay that he was willing to
tell me the facts of Satan's history, but he stopped there: he wouldn't
allow any discussion of them.

In the course of time we exhausted the facts. There were only five or
six of them; you could set them all down on a visiting-card. I was
disappointed. I had been meditating a biography, and was grieved to find
that there were no materials. I said as much, with the tears running
down. Mr. Barclay's sympathy and compassion were aroused, for he was a
most kind and gentle-spirited man, and he patted me on the head and
cheered me up by saying there was a whole vast ocean of materials! I can
still feel the happy thrill which these blessed words shot through me.

Then he began to bail out that ocean's riches for my encouragement and
joy. Like this: it was "conjectured"--though not established--that Satan
was originally an angel in Heaven; that he fell; that he rebelled, and
brought on a war; that he was defeated, and banished to perdition. Also,
"we have reason to believe" that later he did so and so; that "we are
warranted in supposing" that at a subsequent time he traveled
extensively, seeking whom he might devour; that a couple of centuries
afterward, "as tradition instructs us," he took up the cruel trade of
tempting people to their ruin, with vast and fearful results; that by and
by, "as the probabilities seem to indicate," he may have done certain
things, he might have done certain other things, he must have done still
other things.

And so on and so on. We set down the five known facts by themselves on a
piece of paper, and numbered it "page 1"; then on fifteen hundred other
pieces of paper we set down the "conjectures," and "suppositions," and
"maybes," and "perhapses," and "doubtlesses," and "rumors," and
"guesses," and "probabilities," and "likelihoods," and "we are permitted
to thinks," and "we are warranted in believings," and "might have beens,"
and "could have beens," and "must have beens," and "unquestionablys," and
"without a shadow of doubt"--and behold!

MATERIALS? Why, we had enough to build a biography of Shakespeare!

Yet he made me put away my pen; he would not let me write the history of
Satan. Why? Because, as he said, he had suspicions--suspicions that my
attitude in the matter was not reverent, and that a person must be
reverent when writing about the sacred characters. He said any one who
spoke flippantly of Satan would be frowned upon by the religious world
and also be brought to account.

I assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had wholly
misconceived my attitude; that I had the highest respect for Satan, and
that my reverence for him equaled, and possibly even exceeded, that of
any member of the church. I said it wounded me deeply to perceive by his
words that he thought I would make fun of Satan, and deride him, laugh at
him, scoff at him; whereas in truth I had never thought of such a thing,
but had only a warm desire to make fun of those others and laugh at THEM.
"What others?" "Why, the Supposers, the Perhapsers, the
Might-Have-Beeners, the Could-Have-Beeners, the Must-Have-Beeners, the
Without-a-Shadow-of-Doubters, the We-Are-Warranted-in-Believingers, and
all that funny crop of solemn architects who have taken a good solid
foundation of five indisputable and unimportant facts and built upon it a
Conjectural Satan thirty miles high."

What did Mr. Barclay do then? Was he disarmed? Was he silenced? No.
He was shocked. He was so shocked that he visibly shuddered. He said
the Satanic Traditioners and Perhapsers and Conjecturers were THEMSELVES
sacred! As sacred as their work. So sacred that whoso ventured to mock
them or make fun of their work, could not afterward enter any respectable
house, even by the back door.