What Is Man?

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


If the road-pegging scheme had not succeeded I should have lodged the
kings in the children's heads by means of pictures--that is, I should
have tried. It might have failed, for the pictures could only be
effective WHEN MADE BY THE PUPIL; not the master, for it is the work put
upon the drawing that makes the drawing stay in the memory, and my
children were too little to make drawings at that time. And, besides,
they had no talent for art, which is strange, for in other ways they are
like me.

But I will develop the picture plan now, hoping that you will be able to
use it. It will come good for indoors when the weather is bad and one
cannot go outside and peg a road. Let us imagine that the kings are a
procession, and that they have come out of the Ark and down Ararat for
exercise and are now starting back again up the zigzag road. This will
bring several of them into view at once, and each zigzag will represent
the length of a king's reign.

And so on. You will have plenty of space, for by my project you will use
the parlor wall. You do not mark on the wall; that would cause trouble.
You only attach bits of paper to it with pins or thumb-tacks. These will
leave no mark.

Take your pen now, and twenty-one pieces of white paper, each two inches
square, and we will do the twenty-one years of the Conqueror's reign. On
each square draw a picture of a whale and write the dates and term of
service. We choose the whale for several reasons: its name and William's
begin with the same letter; it is the biggest fish that swims, and
William is the most conspicuous figure in English history in the way of a
landmark; finally, a whale is about the easiest thing to draw. By the
time you have drawn twenty-one wales and written "William
I.--1066-1087--twenty-one years" twenty-one times, those details will be
your property; you cannot dislodge them from your memory with anything
but dynamite. I will make a sample for you to copy: (Fig. 3).

I have got his chin up too high, but that is no matter; he is looking for
Harold. It may be that a whale hasn't that fin up there on his back, but
I do not remember; and so, since there is a doubt, it is best to err on
the safe side. He looks better, anyway, than he would without it.

Be very careful and ATTENTIVE while you are drawing your first whale from
my sample and writing the word and figures under it, so that you will not
need to copy the sample any more. Compare your copy with the sample;
examine closely; if you find you have got everything right and can shut
your eyes and see the picture and call the words and figures, then turn
the sample and copy upside down and make the next copy from memory; and
also the next and next, and so on, always drawing and writing from memory
until you have finished the whole twenty-one. This will take you twenty
minutes, or thirty, and by that time you will find that you can make a
whale in less time than an unpracticed person can make a sardine; also,
up to the time you die you will always be able to furnish William's dates
to any ignorant person that inquires after them.

You will now take thirteen pieces of BLUE paper, each two inches square,
and do William II. (Fig. 4.)

Make him spout his water forward instead of backward; also make him
small, and stick a harpoon in him and give him that sick look in the eye.
Otherwise you might seem to be continuing the other William, and that
would be confusing and a damage. It is quite right to make him small; he
was only about a No. 11 whale, or along there somewhere; there wasn't
room in him for his father's great spirit. The barb of that harpoon
ought not to show like that, because it is down inside the whale and
ought to be out of sight, but it cannot be helped; if the barb were
removed people would think some one had stuck a whip-stock into the
whale. It is best to leave the barb the way it is, then every one will
know it is a harpoon and attending to business. Remember--draw from the
copy only once; make your other twelve and the inscription from memory.

Now the truth is that whenever you have copied a picture and its
inscription once from my sample and two or three times from memory the
details will stay with you and be hard to forget. After that, if you
like, you may make merely the whale's HEAD and WATER-SPOUT for the
Conqueror till you end his reign, each time SAYING the inscription in
place of writing it; and in the case of William II. make the HARPOON
alone, and say over the inscription each time you do it. You see, it
will take nearly twice as long to do the first set as it will to do the
second, and that will give you a marked sense of the difference in length
of the two reigns.

Next do Henry I. on thirty-five squares of RED paper. (Fig. 5.)

That is a hen, and suggests Henry by furnishing the first syllable. When
you have repeated the hen and the inscription until you are perfectly
sure of them, draw merely the hen's head the rest of the thirty-five
times, saying over the inscription each time. Thus: (Fig. 6).

You begin to understand how how this procession is going to look when it
is on the wall. First there will be the Conqueror's twenty-one whales
and water-spouts, the twenty-one white squares joined to one another and
making a white stripe three and one-half feet long; the thirteen blue
squares of William II. will be joined to that--a blue stripe two feet,
two inches long, followed by Henry's red stripe five feet, ten inches
long, and so on. The colored divisions will smartly show to the eye the
difference in the length of the reigns and impress the proportions on the
memory and the understanding. (Fig. 7.)

Stephen of Blois comes next. He requires nineteen two-inch squares of
YELLOW paper. (Fig. 8.)

That is a steer. The sound suggests the beginning of Stephen's name. I
choose it for that reason. I can make a better steer than that when I am
not excited. But this one will do. It is a good-enough steer for
history. The tail is defective, but it only wants straightening out.

Next comes Henry II. Give him thirty-five squares of RED paper. These
hens must face west, like the former ones. (Fig. 9.)

This hen differs from the other one. He is on his way to inquire what
has been happening in Canterbury.

How we arrive at Richard I., called Richard of the Lion-heart because he
was a brave fighter and was never so contented as when he was leading
crusades in Palestine and neglecting his affairs at home. Give him ten
squares of WHITE paper. (Fig. 10).

That is a lion. His office is to remind you of the lion-hearted Richard.
There is something the matter with his legs, but I do not quite know what
it is, they do not seem right. I think the hind ones are the most
unsatisfactory; the front ones are well enough, though it would be better
if they were rights and lefts.

Next comes King John, and he was a poor circumstance. He was called
Lackland. He gave his realm to the Pope. Let him have seventeen squares
of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 11.)

That creature is a jamboree. It looks like a trademark, but that is only
an accident and not intentional. It is prehistoric and extinct. It used
to roam the earth in the Old Silurian times, and lay eggs and catch fish
and climb trees and live on fossils; for it was of a mixed breed, which
was the fashion then. It was very fierce, and the Old Silurians were
afraid of it, but this is a tame one. Physically it has no
representative now, but its mind has been transmitted. First I drew it
sitting down, but have turned it the other way now because I think it
looks more attractive and spirited when one end of it is galloping. I
love to think that in this attitude it gives us a pleasant idea of John
coming all in a happy excitement to see what the barons have been
arranging for him at Runnymede, while the other one gives us an idea of
him sitting down to wring his hands and grieve over it.

We now come to Henry III.; RED squares again, of course--fifty-six of
them. We must make all the Henrys the same color; it will make their
long reigns show up handsomely on the wall. Among all the eight Henrys
there were but two short ones. A lucky name, as far as longevity goes.
The reigns of six of the Henrys cover 227 years. It might have been well
to name all the royal princes Henry, but this was overlooked until it was
too late. (Fig. 12.)

This is the best one yet. He is on his way (1265) to have a look at the
first House of Commons in English history. It was a monumental event,
the situation in the House, and was the second great liberty landmark
which the century had set up. I have made Henry looking glad, but this
was not intentional.

Edward I. comes next; LIGHT-BROWN paper, thirty-five squares. (Fig. 13.)

That is an editor. He is trying to think of a word. He props his feet
on a chair, which is the editor's way; then he can think better. I do
not care much for this one; his ears are not alike; still, editor
suggests the sound of Edward, and he will do. I could make him better if
I had a model, but I made this one from memory. But is no particular
matter; they all look alike, anyway. They are conceited and troublesome,
and don't pay enough. Edward was the first really English king that had
yet occupied the throne. The editor in the picture probably looks just
as Edward looked when it was first borne in upon him that this was so.
His whole attitude expressed gratification and pride mixed with
stupefaction and astonishment.

Edward II. now; twenty BLUE squares. (Fig. 14.)

Another editor. That thing behind his ear is his pencil. Whenever he
finds a bright thing in your manuscript he strikes it out with that.
That does him good, and makes him smile and show his teeth, the way he is
doing in the picture. This one has just been striking out a smart thing,
and now he is sitting there with his thumbs in his vest-holes, gloating.
They are full of envy and malice, editors are. This picture will serve
to remind you that Edward II. was the first English king who was DEPOSED.
Upon demand, he signed his deposition himself. He had found kingship a
most aggravating and disagreeable occupation, and you can see by the look
of him that he is glad he resigned. He has put his blue pencil up for
good now. He had struck out many a good thing with it in his time.

Edward III. next; fifty RED squares. (Fig. 15.)

This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his
tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for
breakfast. This one's arms are put on wrong. I did not notice it at
first, but I see it now. Somehow he has got his right arm on his left
shoulder, and his left arm on his right shoulder, and this shows us the
back of his hands in both instances. It makes him left-handed all
around, which is a thing which has never happened before, except perhaps
in a museum. That is the way with art, when it is not acquired but born
to you: you start in to make some simple little thing, not suspecting
that your genius is beginning to work and swell and strain in secret, and
all of a sudden there is a convulsion and you fetch out something
astonishing. This is called inspiration. It is an accident; you never
know when it is coming. I might have tried as much as a year to think of
such a strange thing as an all-around left-handed man and I could not
have done it, for the more you try to think of an unthinkable thing the
more it eludes you; but it can't elude inspiration; you have only to bait
with inspiration and you will get it every time. Look at Botticelli's
"Spring." Those snaky women were unthinkable, but inspiration secured
them for us, thanks to goodness. It is too late to reorganize this
editor-critic now; we will leave him as he is. He will serve to remind
us.

Richard II. next; twenty-two WHITE squares. (Fig. 16.)

We use the lion again because this is another Richard. Like Edward II.,
he was DEPOSED. He is taking a last sad look at his crown before they
take it away. There was not room enough and I have made it too small;
but it never fitted him, anyway.

Now we turn the corner of the century with a new line of monarchs--the
Lancastrian kings.

Henry IV.; fourteen squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 17.)

This hen has laid the egg of a new dynasty and realizes the magnitude of
the event. She is giving notice in the usual way. You notice I am
improving in the construction of hens. At first I made them too much
like other animals, but this one is orthodox. I mention this to
encourage you. You will find that the more you practice the more
accurate you will become. I could always draw animals, but before I was
educated I could not tell what kind they were when I got them done, but
now I can. Keep up your courage; it will be the same with you, although
you may not think it. This Henry died the year after Joan of Arc was
born.

Henry V.; nine BLUE squares. (Fig. 18)

There you see him lost in meditation over the monument which records the
amazing figures of the battle of Agincourt. French history says 20,000
Englishmen routed 80,000 Frenchmen there; and English historians say that
the French loss, in killed and wounded, was 60,000.

Henry VI.; thirty-nine RED squares. (Fig. 19)

This is poor Henry VI., who reigned long and scored many misfortunes and
humiliations. Also two great disasters: he lost France to Joan of Arc
and he lost the throne and ended the dynasty which Henry IV. had started
in business with such good prospects. In the picture we see him sad and
weary and downcast, with the scepter falling from his nerveless grasp.
It is a pathetic quenching of a sun which had risen in such splendor.

Edward IV.; twenty-two LIGHT-BROWN squares. (Fig. 20.)

That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs
crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies wear, so
that he can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than they
are and get bribes for it and become wealthy. That flower which he is
wearing in his buttonhole is a rose--a white rose, a York rose--and will
serve to remind us of the War of the Roses, and that the white one was
the winning color when Edward got the throne and dispossessed the
Lancastrian dynasty.

Edward V.; one-third of a BLACK square. (Fig. 21.)

His uncle Richard had him murdered in the tower. When you get the reigns
displayed upon the wall this one will be conspicuous and easily
remembered. It is the shortest one in English history except Lady Jane
Grey's, which was only nine days. She is never officially recognized as
a monarch of England, but if you or I should ever occupy a throne we
should like to have proper notice taken of it; and it would be only fair
and right, too, particularly if we gained nothing by it and lost our
lives besides.

Richard III.; two WHITE squares. (Fig. 22.)

That is not a very good lion, but Richard was not a very good king. You
would think that this lion has two heads, but that is not so; one is only
a shadow. There would be shadows for the rest of him, but there was not
light enough to go round, it being a dull day, with only fleeting
sun-glimpses now and then. Richard had a humped back and a hard heart,
and fell at the battle of Bosworth. I do not know the name of that
flower in the pot, but we will use it as Richard's trade-mark, for it is
said that it grows in only one place in the world--Bosworth Field--and
tradition says it never grew there until Richard's royal blood warmed its
hidden seed to life and made it grow.

Henry VII.; twenty-four BLUE squares. (Fig. 23.)

Henry VII. had no liking for wars and turbulence; he preferred peace and
quiet and the general prosperity which such conditions create. He liked
to sit on that kind of eggs on his own private account as well as the
nation's, and hatch them out and count up their result. When he died he
left his heir 2,000,000 pounds, which was a most unusual fortune for a
king to possess in those days. Columbus's great achievement gave him the
discovery-fever, and he sent Sebastian Cabot to the New World to search
out some foreign territory for England. That is Cabot's ship up there in
the corner. This was the first time that England went far abroad to
enlarge her estate--but not the last.

Henry VIII.; thirty-eight RED squares. (Fig. 24.)

That is Henry VIII. suppressing a monastery in his arrogant fashion.

Edward VI.; six squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 25.)

He is the last Edward to date. It is indicated by that thing over his
head, which is a LAST--shoemaker's last.

Mary; five squares of BLACK paper. (Fig. 26.)

The picture represents a burning martyr. He is in back of the smoke.
The first three letters of Mary's name and the first three of the word
martyr are the same. Martyrdom was going out in her day and martyrs were
becoming scarcer, but she made several. For this reason she is sometimes
called Bloody Mary.

This brings us to the reign of Elizabeth, after passing through a period
of nearly five hundred years of England's history--492 to be exact. I
think you may now be trusted to go the rest of the way without further
lessons in art or inspirations in the matter of ideas. You have the
scheme now, and something in the ruler's name or career will suggest the
pictorial symbol. The effort of inventing such things will not only help
your memory, but will develop originality in art. See what it has done
for me. If you do not find the parlor wall big enough for all of
England's history, continue it into the dining-room and into other rooms.
This will make the walls interesting and instructive and really worth
something instead of being just flat things to hold the house together.

----- 1. Summer of 1899.





THE MEMORABLE ASSASSINATION

Note.--The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva, September
10, 1898, occurred during Mark Twain's Austrian residence. The news came
to him at Kaltenleutgeben, a summer resort a little way out of Vienna.
To his friend, the Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, he wrote:

"That good and unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a madman, and
I am living in the midst of world-history again. The Queen's Jubilee
last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, and now this
murder, which will still be talked of and described and painted a
thousand a thousand years from now. To have a personal friend of the
wearer of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening
and say, in a voice broken with tears, 'My God! the Empress is murdered,'
and fly toward her home before we can utter a question--why, it brings
the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it and personally
interested; it is as if your neighbor, Antony, should come flying and
say, 'Caesar is butchered--the head of the world is fallen!'

"Of course there is no talk but of this. The mourning is universal and
genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being
draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday,
when the funeral cort`ege marches."

He was strongly moved by the tragedy, impelled to write concerning it.
He prepared the article which follows, but did not offer it for
publication, perhaps feeling that his own close association with the
court circles at the moment prohibited this personal utterance. There
appears no such reason for withholding its publication now.

A. B. P.

The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing and
tremendous the event becomes. The destruction of a city is a large
event, but it is one which repeats itself several times in a thousand
years; the destruction of a third part of a nation by plague and famine
is a large event, but it has happened several times in history; the
murder of a king is a large event, but it has been frequent.

The murder of an empress is the largest of all events. One must go back
about two thousand years to find an instance to put with this one. The
oldest family of unchallenged descent in Christendom lives in Rome and
traces its line back seventeen hundred years, but no member of it has
been present in the earth when an empress was murdered, until now. Many
a time during these seventeen centuries members of that family have been
startled with the news of extraordinary events--the destruction of
cities, the fall of thrones, the murder of kings, the wreck of dynasties,
the extinction of religions, the birth of new systems of government; and
their descendants have been by to hear of it and talk about it when all
these things were repeated once, twice, or a dozen times--but to even
that family has come news at last which is not staled by use, has no
duplicates in the long reach of its memory.

It is an event which confers a curious distinction upon every individual
now living in the world: he has stood alive and breathing in the presence
of an event such as has not fallen within the experience of any traceable
or untraceable ancestor of his for twenty centuries, and it is not likely
to fall within the experience of any descendant of his for twenty more.

Time has made some great changes since the Roman days. The murder of an
empress then--even the assassination of Caesar himself--could not
electrify the world as this murder has electrified it. For one reason,
there was then not much of a world to electrify; it was a small world, as
to known bulk, and it had rather a thin population, besides; and for
another reason, the news traveled so slowly that its tremendous initial
thrill wasted away, week by week and month by month, on the journey, and
by the time it reached the remoter regions there was but little of it
left. It was no longer a fresh event, it was a thing of the far past; it
was not properly news, it was history. But the world is enormous now,
and prodigiously populated--that is one change; and another is the
lightning swiftness of the flight of tidings, good and bad. "The Empress
is murdered!" When those amazing words struck upon my ear in this
Austrian village last Saturday, three hours after the disaster, I knew
that it was already old news in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, San
Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta,
and that the entire globe with a single voice, was cursing the
perpetrator of it. Since the telegraph first began to stretch itself
wider and wider about the earth, larger and increasingly larger areas of
the world have, as time went on, received simultaneously the shock of a
great calamity; but this is the first time in history that the entire
surface of the globe has been swept in a single instant with the thrill
of so gigantic an event.

And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world this
spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the answer. He is at the
bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates of degree and value
go: a soiled and patched young loafer, without gifts, without talents,
without education, without morals, without character, without any born
charm or any acquired one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a
single grace of mind or heart or hand that any tramp or prostitute could
envy him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent
stone-cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy, offensive,
empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking, human polecat.
And it was within the privileges and powers of this sarcasm upon the
human race to reach up--up--up--and strike from its far summit in the
social skies the world's accepted ideal of Glory and Might and Splendor
and Sacredness! It realizes to us what sorry shows and shadows we are.
Without our clothes and our pedestals we are poor things and much of a
size; our dignities are not real, our pomps are shams. At our best and
stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but
only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.

And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often
forget--or try to: that no man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in one
way or another all men are mad. Many are mad for money. When this
madness is in a mild form it is harmless and the man passes for sane; but
when it develops powerfully and takes possession of the man, it can make
him cheat, rob, and kill; and when he has got his fortune and lost it
again it can land him in the asylum or the suicide's coffin. Love is a
madness; if thwarted it develops fast; it can grow to a frenzy of despair
and make an otherwise sane and highly gifted prince, like Rudolph, throw
away the crown of an empire and snuff out his own life. All the whole
list of desires, predilections, aversions, ambitions, passions, cares,
griefs, regrets, remorses, are incipient madness, and ready to grow,
spread, and consume, when the occasion comes. There are no healthy
minds, and nothing saves any man but accident--the accident of not having
his malady put to the supreme test.

One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the
pleasure derived from being noticed. Perhaps it is not merely common,
but universal. In its mildest form it doubtless is universal. Every
child is pleased at being noticed; many intolerable children put in their
whole time in distressing and idiotic effort to attract the attention of
visitors; boys are always "showing off"; apparently all men and women are
glad and grateful when they find that they have done a thing which has
lifted them for a moment out of obscurity and caused wondering talk.
This common madness can develop, by nurture, into a hunger for notoriety
in one, for fame in another. It is this madness for being noticed and
talked about which has invented kingship and the thousand other
dignities, and tricked them out with pretty and showy fineries; it has
made kings pick one another's pockets, scramble for one another's crowns
and estates, slaughter one another's subjects; it has raised up
prize-fighters, and poets, and villages mayors, and little and big
politicians, and big and little charity-founders, and bicycle champions,
and banditti chiefs, and frontier desperadoes, and Napoleons. Anything to
get notoriety; anything to set the village, or the township, or the city,
or the State, or the nation, or the planet shouting, "Look--there he
goes--that is the man!" And in five minutes' time, at no cost of brain,
or labor, or genius this mangy Italian tramp has beaten them all,
transcended them all, outstripped them all, for in time their names will
perish; but by the friendly help of the insane newspapers and courts and
kings and historians, his is safe and live and thunder in the world all
down the ages as long as human speech shall endure! Oh, if it were not
so tragic how ludicrous it would be!