What Is Man?

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


I know how I came to be literary, and I will tell the steps that lead up
to it and brought it about.

The crossing of the Rubicon was not the first one, it was hardly even a
recent one; I should have to go back ages before Caesar's day to find the
first one. To save space I will go back only a couple of generations and
start with an incident of my boyhood. When I was twelve and a half years
old, my father died. It was in the spring. The summer came, and brought
with it an epidemic of measles. For a time a child died almost every
day. The village was paralyzed with fright, distress, despair. Children
that were not smitten with the disease were imprisoned in their homes to
save them from the infection. In the homes there were no cheerful faces,
there was no music, there was no singing but of solemn hymns, no voice
but of prayer, no romping was allowed, no noise, no laughter, the family
moved spectrally about on tiptoe, in a ghostly hush. I was a prisoner.
My soul was steeped in this awful dreariness--and in fear. At some time
or other every day and every night a sudden shiver shook me to the
marrow, and I said to myself, "There, I've got it! and I shall die."
Life on these miserable terms was not worth living, and at last I made up
my mind to get the disease and have it over, one way or the other. I
escaped from the house and went to the house of a neighbor where a
playmate of mine was very ill with the malady. When the chance offered I
crept into his room and got into bed with him. I was discovered by his
mother and sent back into captivity. But I had the disease; they could
not take that from me. I came near to dying. The whole village was
interested, and anxious, and sent for news of me every day; and not only
once a day, but several times. Everybody believed I would die; but on
the fourteenth day a change came for the worse and they were
disappointed.

This was a turning-point of my life. (Link number one.) For when I got
well my mother closed my school career and apprenticed me to a printer.
She was tired of trying to keep me out of mischief, and the adventure of
the measles decided her to put me into more masterful hands than hers.

I became a printer, and began to add one link after another to the chain
which was to lead me into the literary profession. A long road, but I
could not know that; and as I did not know what its goal was, or even
that it had one, I was indifferent. Also contented.

A young printer wanders around a good deal, seeking and finding work; and
seeking again, when necessity commands. N. B. Necessity is a
CIRCUMSTANCE; Circumstance is man's master--and when Circumstance
commands, he must obey; he may argue the matter--that is his privilege,
just as it is the honorable privilege of a falling body to argue with the
attraction of gravitation--but it won't do any good, he must OBEY. I
wandered for ten years, under the guidance and dictatorship of
Circumstance, and finally arrived in a city of Iowa, where I worked
several months. Among the books that interested me in those days was one
about the Amazon. The traveler told an alluring tale of his long voyage
up the great river from Para to the sources of the Madeira, through the
heart of an enchanted land, a land wastefully rich in tropical wonders, a
romantic land where all the birds and flowers and animals were of the
museum varieties, and where the alligator and the crocodile and the
monkey seemed as much at home as if they were in the Zoo. Also, he told
an astonishing tale about COCA, a vegetable product of miraculous powers,
asserting that it was so nourishing and so strength-giving that the
native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill and
down all day on a pinch of powdered coca and require no other sustenance.

I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon. Also with a longing to
open up a trade in coca with all the world. During months I dreamed that
dream, and tried to contrive ways to get to Para and spring that splendid
enterprise upon an unsuspecting planet. But all in vain. A person may
PLAN as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come
of it until the magician CIRCUMSTANCE steps in and takes the matter off
his hands. At last Circumstance came to my help. It was in this way.
Circumstance, to help or hurt another man, made him lose a fifty-dollar
bill in the street; and to help or hurt me, made me find it. I
advertised the find, and left for the Amazon the same day. This was
another turning-point, another link.

Could Circumstance have ordered another dweller in that town to go to the
Amazon and open up a world-trade in coca on a fifty-dollar basis and been
obeyed? No, I was the only one. There were other fools there--shoals
and shoals of them--but they were not of my kind. I was the only one of
my kind.

Circumstance is powerful, but it cannot work alone; it has to have a
partner. Its partner is man's TEMPERAMENT--his natural disposition. His
temperament is not his invention, it is BORN in him, and he has no
authority over it, neither is he responsible for its acts. He cannot
change it, nothing can change it, nothing can modify it--except
temporarily. But it won't stay modified. It is permanent, like the
color of the man's eyes and the shape of his ears. Blue eyes are gray in
certain unusual lights; but they resume their natural color when that
stress is removed.

A Circumstance that will coerce one man will have no effect upon a man of
a different temperament. If Circumstance had thrown the bank-note in
Caesar's way, his temperament would not have made him start for the
Amazon. His temperament would have compelled him to do something with
the money, but not that. It might have made him advertise the note--and
WAIT. We can't tell. Also, it might have made him go to New York and buy
into the Government, with results that would leave Tweed nothing to learn
when it came his turn.

Very well, Circumstance furnished the capital, and my temperament told me
what to do with it. Sometimes a temperament is an ass. When that is the
case of the owner of it is an ass, too, and is going to remain one.
Training, experience, association, can temporarily so polish him, improve
him, exalt him that people will think he is a mule, but they will be
mistaken. Artificially he IS a mule, for the time being, but at bottom
he is an ass yet, and will remain one.

By temperament I was the kind of person that DOES things. Does them, and
reflects afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and
without asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In
all that time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have
been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and
reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me; I
still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect
afterward. Always violently. When I am reflecting, on these occasions,
even deaf persons can hear me think.

I went by the way of Cincinnati, and down the Ohio and Mississippi. My
idea was to take ship, at New Orleans, for Para. In New Orleans I
inquired, and found there was no ship leaving for Para. Also, that there
never had BEEN one leaving for Para. I reflected. A policeman came and
asked me what I was doing, and I told him. He made me move on, and said
if he caught me reflecting in the public street again he would run me in.

After a few days I was out of money. Then Circumstance arrived, with
another turning-point of my life--a new link. On my way down, I had made
the acquaintance of a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he
consented. I became a pilot.

By and by Circumstance came again--introducing the Civil War, this time,
in order to push me ahead another stage or two toward the literary
profession. The boats stopped running, my livelihood was gone.

Circumstance came to the rescue with a new turning-point and a fresh
link. My brother was appointed secretary to the new Territory of Nevada,
and he invited me to go with him and help him in his office. I accepted.

In Nevada, Circumstance furnished me the silver fever and I went into the
mines to make a fortune, as I supposed; but that was not the idea. The
idea was to advance me another step toward literature. For amusement I
scribbled things for the Virginia City ENTERPRISE. One isn't a printer
ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature, and
learning--unconsciously at first, consciously later--to discriminate
between the two, within his mental limitations; and meantime he is
unconsciously acquiring what is called a "style." One of my efforts
attracted attention, and the ENTERPRISE sent for me and put me on its
staff.

And so I became a journalist--another link. By and by Circumstance and
the Sacramento UNION sent me to the Sandwich Islands for five or six
months, to write up sugar. I did it; and threw in a good deal of
extraneous matter that hadn't anything to do with sugar. But it was this
extraneous matter that helped me to another link.

It made me notorious, and San Francisco invited me to lecture. Which I
did. And profitably. I had long had a desire to travel and see the
world, and now Circumstance had most kindly and unexpectedly hurled me
upon the platform and furnished me the means. So I joined the "Quaker
City Excursion."

When I returned to America, Circumstance was waiting on the pier--with
the LAST link--the conspicuous, the consummating, the victorious link: I
was asked to WRITE A BOOK, and I did it, and called it THE INNOCENTS
ABROAD. Thus I became at last a member of the literary guild. That was
forty-two years ago, and I have been a member ever since. Leaving the
Rubicon incident away back where it belongs, I can say with truth that
the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles
when I was twelve years old.

III

Now what interests me, as regards these details, is not the details
themselves, but the fact that none of them was foreseen by me, none of
them was planned by me, I was the author of none of them. Circumstance,
working in harness with my temperament, created them all and compelled
them all. I often offered help, and with the best intentions, but it was
rejected--as a rule, uncourteously. I could never plan a thing and get
it to come out the way I planned it. It came out some other way--some
way I had not counted upon.

And so I do not admire the human being--as an intellectual marvel--as
much as I did when I was young, and got him out of books, and did not
know him personally. When I used to read that such and such a general
did a certain brilliant thing, I believed it. Whereas it was not so.
Circumstance did it by help of his temperament. The circumstances would
have failed of effect with a general of another temperament: he might see
the chance, but lose the advantage by being by nature too slow or too
quick or too doubtful. Once General Grant was asked a question about a
matter which had been much debated by the public and the newspapers; he
answered the question without any hesitancy. "General, who planned the
the march through Georgia?" "The enemy!" He added that the enemy
usually makes your plans for you. He meant that the enemy by neglect or
through force of circumstances leaves an opening for you, and you see
your chance and take advantage of it.

Circumstances do the planning for us all, no doubt, by help of our
temperaments. I see no great difference between a man and a watch,
except that the man is conscious and the watch isn't, and the man TRIES
to plan things and the watch doesn't. The watch doesn't wind itself and
doesn't regulate itself--these things are done exteriorly. Outside
influences, outside circumstances, wind the MAN and regulate him. Left
to himself, he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he
would keep would not be valuable. Some rare men are wonderful watches,
with gold case, compensation balance, and all those things, and some men
are only simple and sweet and humble Waterburys. I am a Waterbury. A
Waterbury of that kind, some say.

A nation is only an individual multiplied. It makes plans and
Circumstances comes and upsets them--or enlarges them. Some patriots
throw the tea overboard; some other patriots destroy a Bastille. The
PLANS stop there; then Circumstance comes in, quite unexpectedly, and
turns these modest riots into a revolution.

And there was poor Columbus. He elaborated a deep plan to find a new
route to an old country. Circumstance revised his plan for him, and he
found a new WORLD. And HE gets the credit of it to this day. He hadn't
anything to do with it.

Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of yours)
was the Garden of Eden. It was there that the first link was forged of
the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of me into the
literary guild. Adam's TEMPERAMENT was the first command the Deity ever
issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only command Adam
would NEVER be able to disobey. It said, "Be weak, be water, be
characterless, be cheaply persuadable." The latter command, to let the
fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by
his TEMPERAMENT--which he did not create and had no authority over. For
the TEMPERAMENT is the man; the thing tricked out with clothes and named
Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more. The law of the tiger's
temperament is, Thou shalt kill; the law of the sheep's temperament is
Thou shalt not kill. To issue later commands requiring the tiger to let
the fat stranger alone, and requiring the sheep to imbue its hands in the
blood of the lion is not worth while, for those commands CAN'T be obeyed.
They would invite to violations of the law of TEMPERAMENT, which is
supreme, and take precedence of all other authorities. I cannot help
feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve. That is, in their temperaments.
Not in THEM, poor helpless young creatures--afflicted with temperaments
made out of butter; which butter was commanded to get into contact with
fire and BE MELTED. What I cannot help wishing is, that Adam had been
postponed, and Martin Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place--that
splendid pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of
asbestos. By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell fire could Satan have
beguiled THEM to eat the apple. There would have been results! Indeed,
yes. The apple would be intact today; there would be no human race;
there would be no YOU; there would be no ME. And the old, old
creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild
would have been defeated.





HOW TO MAKE HISTORY DATES STICK

These chapters are for children, and I shall try to make the words large
enough to command respect. In the hope that you are listening, and that
you have confidence in me, I will proceed. Dates are difficult things to
acquire; and after they are acquired it is difficult to keep them in the
head. But they are very valuable. They are like the cattle-pens of a
ranch--they shut in the several brands of historical cattle, each within
its own fence, and keep them from getting mixed together. Dates are hard
to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously
unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold, they form no
pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures are the
thing. Pictures can make dates stick. They can make nearly anything
stick--particularly IF YOU MAKE THE PICTURES YOURSELF. Indeed, that is
the great point--make the pictures YOURSELF. I know about this from
experience. Thirty years ago I was delivering a memorized lecture every
night, and every night I had to help myself with a page of notes to keep
from getting myself mixed. The notes consisted of beginnings of
sentences, and were eleven in number, and they ran something like this:

"IN THAT REGION THE WEATHER--"

"AT THAT TIME IT WAS A CUSTOM--"

"BUT IN CALIFORNIA ONE NEVER HEARD--"

Eleven of them. They initialed the brief divisions of the lecture and
protected me against skipping. But they all looked about alike on the
page; they formed no picture; I had them by heart, but I could never with
certainty remember the order of their succession; therefore I always had
to keep those notes by me and look at them every little while. Once I
mislaid them; you will not be able to imagine the terrors of that
evening. I now saw that I must invent some other protection. So I got
ten of the initial letters by heart in their proper order--I, A, B, and
so on--and I went on the platform the next night with these marked in ink
on my ten finger-nails. But it didn't answer. I kept track of the
figures for a while; then I lost it, and after that I was never quite
sure which finger I had used last. I couldn't lick off a letter after
using it, for while that would have made success certain it also would
have provoked too much curiosity. There was curiosity enough without
that. To the audience I seemed more interested in my fingernails than I
was in my subject; one or two persons asked me afterward what was the
matter with my hands.

It was now that the idea of pictures occurred to me; then my troubles
passed away. In two minutes I made six pictures with a pen, and they did
the work of the eleven catch-sentences, and did it perfectly. I threw
the pictures away as soon as they were made, for I was sure I could shut
my eyes and see them any time. That was a quarter of a century ago; the
lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years ago, but I would
rewrite it from the pictures--for they remain. Here are three of them:
(Fig. 1).

The first one is a haystack--below it a rattlesnake--and it told me where
to begin to talk ranch-life in Carson Valley. The second one told me
where to begin the talk about a strange and violent wind that used to
burst upon Carson City from the Sierra Nevadas every afternoon at two
o'clock and try to blow the town away. The third picture, as you easily
perceive, is lightning; its duty was to remind me when it was time to
begin to talk about San Francisco weather, where there IS no
lightning--nor thunder, either--and it never failed me.

I will give you a valuable hint. When a man is making a speech and you
are to follow him don't jot down notes to speak from, jot down PICTURES.
It is awkward and embarrassing to have to keep referring to notes; and
besides it breaks up your speech and makes it ragged and non-coherent;
but you can tear up your pictures as soon as you have made them--they
will stay fresh and strong in your memory in the order and sequence in
which you scratched them down. And many will admire to see what a good
memory you are furnished with, when perhaps your memory is not any better
than mine.

Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the governess
was trying to hammer some primer histories into their heads. Part of
this fun--if you like to call it that--consisted in the memorizing of the
accession dates of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled England from
the Conqueror down. These little people found it a bitter, hard
contract. It was all dates, and all looked alike, and they wouldn't
stick. Day after day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and still the
kings held the fort; the children couldn't conquer any six of them.

With my lecture experience in mind I was aware that I could invent some
way out of the trouble with pictures, but I hoped a way could be found
which would let them romp in the open air while they learned the kings.
I found it, and they mastered all the monarchs in a day or two.

The idea was to make them SEE the reigns with their eyes; that would be a
large help. We were at the farm then. From the house-porch the grounds
sloped gradually down to the lower fence and rose on the right to the
high ground where my small work-den stood. A carriage-road wound through
the grounds and up the hill. I staked it out with the English monarchs,
beginning with the Conqueror, and you could stand on the porch and
clearly see every reign and its length, from the Conquest down to
Victoria, then in the forty-sixth year of her reign--EIGHT HUNDRED AND
SEVENTEEN YEARS OF English history under your eye at once!

English history was an unusually live topic in America just then. The
world had suddenly realized that while it was not noticing the Queen had
passed Henry VIII., passed Henry VI. and Elizabeth, and gaining in length
every day. Her reign had entered the list of the long ones; everybody
was interested now--it was watching a race. Would she pass the long
Edward? There was a possibility of it. Would she pass the long Henry?
Doubtful, most people said. The long George? Impossible! Everybody said
it. But we have lived to see her leave him two years behind.

I measured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing a year, and
at the beginning and end of each reign I drove a three-foot white-pine
stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote the name and dates on it.
Abreast the middle of the porch-front stood a great granite flower-vase
overflowing with a cataract of bright-yellow flowers--I can't think of
their name. The vase of William the Conqueror. We put his name on it
and his accession date, 1066. We started from that and measured off
twenty-one feet of the road, and drove William Rufus's state; then
thirteen feet and drove the first Henry's stake; then thirty-five feet
and drove Stephen's; then nineteen feet, which brought us just past the
summer-house on the left; then we staked out thirty-five, ten, and
seventeen for the second Henry and Richard and John; turned the curve and
entered upon just what was needed for Henry III.--a level, straight
stretch of fifty-six feet of road without a crinkle in it. And it lay
exactly in front of the house, in the middle of the grounds. There
couldn't have been a better place for that long reign; you could stand on
the porch and see those two wide-apart stakes almost with your eyes shut.
(Fig. 2.)

That isn't the shape of the road--I have bunched it up like that to save
room. The road had some great curves in it, but their gradual sweep was
such that they were no mar to history. No, in our road one could tell at
a glance who was who by the size of the vacancy between stakes--with
LOCALITY to help, of course.

Although I am away off here in a Swedish village [1] and those stakes did
not stand till the snow came, I can see them today as plainly as ever;
and whenever I think of an English monarch his stakes rise before me of
their own accord and I notice the large or small space which he takes up
on our road. Are your kings spaced off in your mind? When you think of
Richard III. and of James II. do the durations of their reigns seem about
alike to you? It isn't so to me; I always notice that there's a foot's
difference. When you think of Henry III. do you see a great long stretch
of straight road? I do; and just at the end where it joins on to Edward
I. I always see a small pear-bush with its green fruit hanging down.
When I think of the Commonwealth I see a shady little group of these
small saplings which we called the oak parlor; when I think of George
III. I see him stretching up the hill, part of him occupied by a flight
of stone steps; and I can locate Stephen to an inch when he comes into my
mind, for he just filled the stretch which went by the summer-house.
Victoria's reign reached almost to my study door on the first little
summit; there's sixteen feet to be added now; I believe that that would
carry it to a big pine-tree that was shattered by some lightning one
summer when it was trying to hit me.

We got a good deal of fun out of the history road; and exercise, too. We
trotted the course from the conqueror to the study, the children calling
out the names, dates, and length of reigns as we passed the stakes, going
a good gait along the long reigns, but slowing down when we came upon
people like Mary and Edward VI., and the short Stuart and Plantagenet, to
give time to get in the statistics. I offered prizes, too--apples. I
threw one as far as I could send it, and the child that first shouted the
reign it fell in got the apple.

The children were encouraged to stop locating things as being "over by
the arbor," or "in the oak parlor," or "up at the stone steps," and say
instead that the things were in Stephen, or in the Commonwealth, or in
George III. They got the habit without trouble. To have the long road
mapped out with such exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the
habit of leaving books and other articles lying around everywhere, and
had not previously been able to definitely name the place, and so had
often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and failure;
but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send the children.

Next I thought I would measure off the French reigns, and peg them
alongside the English ones, so that we could always have contemporaneous
French history under our eyes as we went our English rounds. We pegged
them down to the Hundred Years' War, then threw the idea aside, I do not
now remember why. After that we made the English pegs fence in European
and American history as well as English, and that answered very well.
English and alien poets, statesmen, artists, heroes, battles, plagues,
cataclysms, revolutions--we shoveled them all into the English fences
according to their dates. Do you understand? We gave Washington's birth
to George II.'s pegs and his death to George III.'s; George II. got the
Lisbon earthquake and George III. the Declaration of Independence.
Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Savonarola, Joan of Arc, the French
Revolution, the Edict of Nantes, Clive, Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey,
Patay, Cowpens, Saratoga, the Battle of the Boyne, the invention of the
logarithms, the microscope, the steam-engine, the telegraph--anything
and everything all over the world--we dumped it all in among the English
pegs according to it date and regardless of its nationality.