Man incapable of originating a thought; simply receives suggestions from the outside—Note to Andrew Carnegie, asking for hymn-book—The pension for John T. Lewis—Mr. Rogers’s doubt as to the existence of John T. Lewis—Two letters from Lewis—Kipling comes to America—Visits Mr. Clemens in Elmira.
From the beginning of time, philosophers of all breeds and shades have been beguiled by the persuasions of man’s bulkiest attribute, vanity, into believing that a human being can originate a thought in his own head. I suppose I am the only person who knows he can’t. In my own person I have studied him most carefully these many years—indeed for a quarter of a century—and I now know beyond doubt or question that his mind is quite incapable of inventing a thought, and is strictly limited to receiving suggestions from the outside and manufacturing second-hand thoughts out of them. The expert in hypnotism takes pride in the notion that in powerfully moving his subject by suggestion, [begin page 172] he has discovered a new thing, whereas no human being has ever been moved to any act or idea by any force except suggestion. The reason that I can come to this dictation-industryⒶtextual note every morning unprepared with a text, is that I know quite well that somebody’s passing remark, or a paragraph in the newspaper, or a letter in the mail, will suggest something which will remind me of something in my life’s experiences and will surely furnish me, by this process, one or moreⒶtextual note texts.
The first thing I notice in this morning’s paper is a note which I wrote to Andrew Carnegie some years agoⒺexplanatory note, and which, for a certain reason, flashes John T. Lewis into my mind, although Lewis is not mentioned in the note.
MyⒶtextual note dear Mr. Carnegie,—I see by the papers that you are very prosperous. I want to get a hymn-book. It costs six shillings. I will bless you, GodⒶtextual note will bless you, and it will do a great deal of good.
Yours truly,
MarkⒶtextual note
P.S.—Don’t send me the hymn-book; send me the six shillings.Ⓐtextual note
The note suggests that fine old colored friend, John T. Lewis, because of the suspicious form of it. Many a stranger would think that the hymn-book was only a blind; that at bottom I didn’t really want the hymn-book, but only wanted to get my hands on the money. Such a suspicion would do me wrong. I only wanted the hymn-book. I was most anxious to get it, but I wanted to select it myself. If I had succeeded in getting the money I would have bought a hymn-book with it and not any other thing. Although I have no evidence but my own as to this, I believe it to be trustworthy and sufficient. I am speaking from my grave, and it is not likely that I would break through the sod with an untruth in my mouth.
It is a strange thing,Ⓐtextual note when you come to examine it—Andrew Carnegie has built a Peace Palace on the other side,Ⓐtextual note for the housing of that great and beneficent modern institution, the Hague Tribunal, at a cost of ten million dollars; he has built, and endowed with ten millions, that other most noble and inestimably valuable benefaction, the Carnegie Institute; he has established a permanent fund of fifteen million dollars for the dignified and respectable maintenance of veterans of both sexes who have devoted their long lives to the higher grades of teaching, and in their old age find themselves poor, forlorn, and without support—a benefaction of so fine and gracious a sort that it brings the moisture to one’s eyes to think of it; he has distributed eighty million dollars’ worth of free librariesⒺexplanatory note around about the planet for the intellectual elevation of men of all grades and creedsⒶtextual note and colors—and yet when he could save a tottering soul from destruction with six shillings’ worth of hymn-book, he turns coldly away and leaves that soul to perish. Truly there are a good many different kinds of people in the world, and Andrew Carnegie is one of them. If not several.
The unworded doubt which his silence cast upon the purity of my intentions was duplicated, in another way, by another man, Henry Rogers. In a previous chapter I have [begin page 173] told how John T. Lewis saved the lives of a richⒶtextual note man’s wife and daughterⒺexplanatory note, thirty years ago, when not another man in the State could have done it, and was rewarded with thanks—repeated thanks, lots of thanks, plenty of thanks. About five years ago the rheumatism took hold of him and he was not able to get a livelihood out of his farm. It took all the money he could make to pay the interest on the money he borrowed in that ancient day—a loan which I mentioned when I was speaking of it before. Something had to be done for his relief, thereforeⒶtextual note Susy Crane and Jean and I contributed a monthly sum, in the form of a pension, so that he might live the rest of his days without work.Ⓐtextual note I offered Henry RogersⒶtextual note a chance to enlargeⒶtextual note that pension, and he was quite willing, and said he would send his check to John T. Lewis on the first of every month.
I saidⒶtextual note no, I was not very busy, make the check to my order.
He said “Not on your life”—or words to that effect.
He did not stop with that injurious remark, but suggested that it was more than likely that there wasn’t any such colored man as John T. Lewis. I offered to bring witnesses, but he said he believed he could do better by getting some one else to select the witnesses. I think he is the stubbornest man, about some things, I have ever known—the stubbornest and the most suspicious. He was determined to draw the checks to John T. Lewis’s order, and it was only by tiring him out that at last I got him to draw them to mine. But he always disbelieved in John T. Lewis. I got myself spaciously photographed alongside of John T. LewisⒺexplanatory note, standing in front of the farm-house, at Susy Crane’s farm. It did not convince him; he merely looked sad, and framed it and hung it up in his private office at 26 Broadway,Ⓐtextual note and labeled it “The Imaginary John T. Lewis”—and there it hangs yet; hangs there looking so honest that it would convince any but an implacably prejudiced mind.
I pledge my honor I always sent the money to Lewis. Moreover, I sent it through Susy Crane, who delivered it to him, month by month, in person; and to this she will testify, knowing me well enough to know that if she declines I will make trouble.Ⓐtextual note The pension set Lewis up quite to his content; made a tranquilly care-free and happy man of him, and thenceforth he claimed that he was the only absolutely independent man in the county.
As you perceive, it is the Carnegie spirit over again—with this difference: John T. Lewis did get Henry Rogers’sⒶtextual note money, but I never got the hymn-book.
While I was taking a long and comfortable and unearned holiday at Fairhaven,Ⓐtextual note a few weeks ago, the following letter arrived at DublinⒶtextual note from Quarry Farm. It brought the news of Lewis’s death, and added certain particulars.Ⓐtextual note I call attention, with a just pride, to the title which it confers upon me. All who know me—except perhaps Henry Rogers and Andrew Carnegie—will grant that I deserve it. It is a matter of pride to me to reflect that I acquired it without the help of a hymn-book.Ⓐtextual note I do not know that I am surprised to find by the letterⒶtextual note that Lewis was a Dunker BaptistⒺexplanatory note. He was born one, in Maryland, but when I first knew him, something more than a generation ago, he had sampled every religion in the market, in turn, had found none of them equal to the task of saving a soul like his, and had at last joined the Free-Thinkers and found rest for his spirit. I think it quite likely that in the long lapse of years between that time and this he went back over his course, taking a bite out of each old friendly religion as he went, [begin page 174] and finally fetched up in Dunkerdom, whence in his childhood he had started out on his long and adventurous salvation-excursionⒶtextual note.
Quarry Farm.
Elmira, N.Y.
July
23, 1906.
Dear and Holy Samuel,
Several weeks ago I received a call from Lewis which should have fallen to your lot instead of mine;Ⓐtextual note for,Ⓐtextual note all the half hour, as I stood under the vines on the front porch visiting with Lewis, you were in my mind. He was half reclining in a low open wagon, into which he could climb, and out of which he could easily roll.
Lewis began by saying, “YouⒶtextual note have been very kind to me, and I thought it was not quite fair for me to slip away without telling you I was failing. And I wanted to talk with you about getting one of my own people to preach the funeral sermon. The nearest Dunker Baptist minister is in Brooklyn, a white man, and I want if possible to get him to come up here for a few days to learn about my character, so that he can speak intelligentlyⒶtextual note at the funeral. Would you be willing to give a little something toward it, and maybe some other friends would.”Ⓐtextual note
While a worldly ambition of this natureⒶtextual note did not strongly appeal to me, it was the request of a dying friend and I said yes, I would help bear the expense.
Lewis then said it would be a great comfort to talk with one of his own faith, which was easy to understand. He then said, “WouldⒶtextual note you be willing to give him a meal if he comes?”Ⓐtextual note “Certainly,”Ⓐtextual note I promised, and after a little talk about when I should pay the rent of his farm, he went on to get his mail, his precious checks, and see his Doctor.
The Doctor forbadeⒶtextual note his going to town, but after a few days of restⒶtextual note Lewis was again on the road, impressing all who saw him with his feebleness. Perhaps ten days ago he gave up the trips when I made all the calls, as he went steadily down. He was always cheerful, and seemed not to suffer much pain, told stories, and was able to eat almost everything.
Three days ago a new difficulty appeared, on account of whichⒶtextual note his Doctor said he must go to the Hospital for care, such as it was quite impossible to give in his home.
He died on the way there.
With love,
Susan L. Crane.Ⓐtextual note
After a few days the following interesting letter arrived:
FridayⒶtextual note, July 27.
Dear Holy Samuel,
Now that two days are passed, it seems hardly worth while to tell you of the funeral of Lewis, save that I promised.
At the hour named a goodly company of colored and white friends gathered at the parlors of the undertaker, where all the arrangements were made in good order.
There was a long silent wait, after which Mr. Harrington, the undertaker, said that Mr. Hough, of Brooklyn who was expected, failed to come—and Mrs. Harrington would read a paper prepared by Mr. Lewis which would explain why they did not secure the services of some one else.Ⓐtextual note
[begin page 175]There were factsⒶtextual note concerning Lewis’s birth, his life in various places, his joining the Dunker church, followed by the statement that unless some brother of his own denomination could preach his funeral sermon he wished his body to be buried without ceremony, as he did not recognize as Christians any who did not follow the explicit teaching of the Lord.
This was a surprise, there was a chill, a silence, and for an instant I felt excluded from all possibility of future rescue.Ⓐtextual note
A Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer closed the simple, suitable service.
Think of it! A will strong enough to exclude all but the Dunkers!Ⓐtextual note still, Lewis prayed for you and Mr. Rogers,Ⓐtextual note and you may be Dunkers yet.
He was deeply and sincerely grateful to you, and had this not been as true as it was, yours was a good, a beautiful thought, faithfully put into action, year after year when you were unable to see the comfort, the blessing you were conferring.Ⓐtextual note This has been my privilege, and I am thankful the struggles are ended for the lonely man.
The old hill folks are nearly all gone.
Most lovingly yours,
Susan L. Crane.Ⓐtextual note
I am glad he prayed for Henry Rogers;Ⓐtextual note and it would have been well enough if he had given Carnegie a lift,Ⓐtextual note too.
Lewis’s last estate reminds me of David Gray’sⒺexplanatory note, and is an impressive revelation of the strength and persistencyⒶtextual note of impressions made upon the human mind in the early years, when its feelings and emotions are fresh, young, and strong, and before it is capable of reasoning. At five years of age David Gray was a strenuous Presbyterian; at thirty-five he had long been a pronounced agnostic—not to put it stronger. He died as strenuous a Presbyterian as he had been when he was five years old and an expert theologian.
This morning’s cables contain a verse or two from Kipling, voicing his protest against a liberalizing new policy of the British Government which he fears will deliver the balance of power in South Africa into the hands of the conquered BoersⒺexplanatory note. Kipling’s name, and Kipling’s words always stir me now—stir me more than do any other living man’s. But I remember a time, seventeen or eighteen years back, when the name did not suggest anything to me, and only the words moved me. At that time Kipling’s name was beginning to be known here and there, in spots, in India, but had not traveled outside of that empire. He came over and traveled about America, maintaining himself by correspondence with Indian journals. He wrote dashing, free-handed, brilliant letters, but no one outside of India knew about it.
On his way through the State of New York, he stopped off at Elmira and made a tedious and blistering journey up to Quarry Farm in quest of meⒺexplanatory note. He ought to have telephoned the farm first; then he would have learned that I was at the Langdon homestead, hardly a quarter of a mile from his hotel. But he was only a lad of twenty-four, and properly impulsive—and he set out, without inquiring, on that dusty and roasting journey up the hill. He found Susy Crane and my little Susy there, and they came as near making him comfortable as the weather and the circumstances would permit——
in this morning’s paper is a note which I wrote to Andrew Carnegie some years ago] Clemens wrote this letter to Carnegie on 6 February 1901 (DLC), and it was soon widely printed in the newspapers. Carnegie replied two days later, “Nothing less than a two dollar & a half hymn book gilt will do for you. Your place in the Choir (celestial) demands that & you shall have it” (CU-MARK). If Hobby did indeed transcribe a clipping “from this morning’s newspaper,” it has not been found, but the present text corresponds closely to the one published in Everyday Housekeeping for August 1906 (23:1005). Whatever the exact source, its textual history must have included a British reprinting, for Clemens’s “dollar & a half” has been turned into “six shillings.”
Peace Palace . . . eighty million dollars’ worth of free libraries] The Palace of Peace, in The Hague, was funded by Carnegie to house the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the first global court for the settlement of international disputes; the building was completed in 1913, at a cost of $1.5 million. The Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, founded in 1896, comprised a group of cultural and educational departments, including a museum, a music hall, and several technical schools that ultimately developed into Carnegie Mellon University. By 1906 Carnegie’s gifts to the institute totaled more than $8 million. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was founded in 1905 as a pension fund for American and Canadian teachers aged sixty-five or over with at least twenty-five years of service; to his original $10 million gift Carnegie added $5 million in 1906. His expenditure on free public library buildings, by the end of his life, is estimated at over $60 million (Carnegie Endowment 1919, 3–8, 127–35, 274–77, 311; “Comment,” Harper’s Weekly 50 [11 Aug 1906]: 1123).
In a previous chapter I have told how John T. Lewis saved the lives of a rich man’s wife and daughter] There is no such “chapter” in the Autobiography, but the anecdote was one that Clemens was fond of recounting, as he had done three years earlier in the Ladies’ Home Journal (see the note at 173.19–20). John T. Lewis (1835–1906) was born in Carroll County, Maryland, where he lived as a black freeman. He settled in Elmira in 1864, working as a coachman for Jervis Langdon, then as a blacksmith, then as the tenant farmer at Quarry Farm. Clemens described the events of 23 August 1877 in a letter to the Howellses (the entire letter, written on 25 and 27 August, is in Letters 1876–1880 ):
Day before yesterday was a fine summer day away up here on the summit. Aunt Marsh & Cousin May Marsh were here visiting Susie Crane & Livy at our farm house. By & by mother Langdon came up the hill in the “high carriage” with Nora the nurse & little Jervis (Charley Langdon’s little boy)—Timothy the coachman driving. Behind these came Charley’s wife & little girl in the buggy, with the new, young, spry gray horse—a high-stepper. Theodore Crane arrived a little later.
The Bay & Susie were on hand with their nurse, Rosa. I was on hand, too. Susie Crane’s trio of colored servants ditto—these being Josie, housemaid; Aunty Cord, cook, aged 62, turbaned, very tall, very broad, very fine every way (see her portrait in “A True Story Just as I Heard It” in my Sketches); Chocklate (the laundress,) (as the Bay calls her—she can’t say Charlotte), still taller, still more majestic of proportions, turbaned, very black, straight as an Indian——age, 24. Then there was the farmer’s wife (colored) & her little girl, Susie.
Wasn’t it a good audience to get up an excitement before? Good excitable, inflammable material?
Lewis was still down town, three miles away, with his two-horse wagon, to get a load of manure. Lewis is the farmer (colored.) He is of mighty frame & muscle, stocky, stooping, ungainly, has a good manly face & a clear eye. Age about 45—& the most picturesque of men, when he sits in his fluttering work-day rags, humped forward into a bunch, with his aged slouch hat mashed down over his ears & neck. It is a spectacle to make the broken-hearted smile.
Lewis has worked mighty hard & remained mighty poor. At the end of each whole year’s toil he can’t show a gain of fifty dollars. He had borrowed money of the Cranes till he owed them $700—& he being conscientious & honest, imagine what it was to him to have to carry this stubborn, hopeless load year in & year out.
|Well, sunset came, & Ida the young & comely (Charley Langdon’s wife) & her little Julia & the nurse Nora, drove out at the gate behind the new gray horse & started down the long hill—the high carriage receiving its load under the porte cochère. Ida was seen to turn her face toward us across the fence & intervening lawn—Theodore waved goodbye to her, for he did not know that her sign was a speechless appeal for help.
The next moment Livy said, “Ida’s driving too fast down hill!” She followed it with a sort of scream, “Her horse is running away!”
We could see two hundred yards down that descent. The buggy seemed to fly. It would strike obstructions & apparently spring the height of a man from the ground.
Theodore & I left the shrieking crowd behind & ran down the hill bareheaded & shouting. A neighbor appeared at his gate—a tenth of a second too late!—the buggy vanished past him like a thought. My last glimpse showed it for one instant, far down the descent, springing high in the air out of a cloud of dust, & then it disappeared. As I flew down the road, my impulse was to shut my eyes as I turned them to the right or left, & so delay for a moment the ghastly spectacle of mutilation & death I was expecting.
I ran on & on, still spared this spectacle, but saying to myself “I shall see it at the turn of the road; they never can pass that turn alive.” When I came in sight of that turn I saw two wagons there bunched together—one of them full of people. I said, “Just so—they are staring petrified at the remains.”
But when I got amongst that bunch, there sat Ida in her buggy & nobody hurt, not even the horse or the vehicle. Ida was pale but serene. As I came tearing down she smiled back over her shoulder at me & said, “Well, you’re alive yet, aren’t you?” A miracle had been performed—nothing less.
You see, Lewis,-the-prodigious, humped upon his front seat, had been toiling up, on his load of manure; he saw the frantic horse plunging down the hill toward him, on a full gallop, throwing his heels as high as a man’s head at every jump. So Lewis turned his team diagonally across the road just at the “turn,” thus making a V with the fence—the running horse could not escape that but must enter it. Then Lewis sprang to the ground & stood in this V. He gathered his vast strength, and with a perfect Creedmoor aim he siezed the gray horse’s bit as he plunged by & fetched him up standing!
In recognition of Lewis’s deed, the Cranes made him gifts of money and forgave all of his debt to them, Ida Langdon bought him an engraved gold watch, and Clemens gave him some inscribed copies of his own works. By 1902, however, Lewis was again in financial difficulties, and Clemens arranged a pension for him, to which both he and Rogers contributed. In his fiction, Clemens reworked Lewis’s feat of rescue twice: in Pudd’nhead Wilson (in a passage omitted from the finished novel) and in chapter 52 of Life on the Mississippi (McKeithan 1961, 23–25; 9 Aug 1876 to Howells, n. 4, Letters 1876–1880; MTB, 2:599–600). “Creedmoor aim” refers to a famous long-range rifle match that took place in 1874 on the Creed farm in upstate New York.
I got myself spaciously photographed alongside of John T. Lewis] The photograph was taken in July 1903 by Thomas E. Marr as part of a pictorial article in the Ladies’ Home Journal, “Three Famous Authors Outdoors” (20 [Nov 1903]: 1, 36–37; 17 July 1903 to Bok, ViU). It is reproduced following page 300.
Lewis was a Dunker Baptist] The Church of the Brethren—known as the Dunkers—is an anabaptist church with origins in eighteenth-century Germany. Their distinctive theological tenet is baptism of adults by triple immersion (otherwise the faith resembles that of the Mennonites, who sprinkle). Never numerous, American Dunker congregations are found primarily in the mid-Atlantic and midwestern states.
This morning’s cables contain a verse or two from Kipling . . . the conquered Boers] Great Britain defeated the Boers in southern Africa in 1902 and annexed their lands (see AD, 23 June 1906, note at 137.40–138.21). The Boers still outnumbered the British, however, and when the Liberal party came to power in 1905, its decision to enfranchise them inflamed Kipling (see the note at 175.33–37). His poem “South Africa,” published in the London Standard on 27 July 1906, brands the government’s proposal as treachery (“A Kipling Political Poem,” New York Times, 27 July 1906, 1). Clemens is, however, unlikely to have seen the poem in “this morning’s cables,” as he claims here; it was news from two weeks earlier. A more probable source is the excerpt and comment in Harper’s Weekly of 11 August (Gilmour 2002, 196–99; “Comment,” Harper’s Weekly 50 [11 Aug 1906]: 1123).
He came over and traveled about America . . . up to Quarry Farm in quest of me] From March to October 1889, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), at the time an obscure journalist, traveled from India to Britain by an eastward route: crossing the Pacific to San Francisco, he made his way overland to Pennsylvania (to visit friends) before taking ship for Liverpool. Along the way he sent back travel letters to the Allahabad Pioneer, collected later in From Sea to Sea (1899). The day Kipling visited the Clemenses in Elmira was probably 15 August 1889; his article about the visit, however, was not published until a year later (New York Herald, 17 Aug 1890, 5, in Scharnhorst 2006, 117–26). By that time Kipling—still only twenty-four years old—had become well known in Britain and America for his stories and poems. Clemens frequently alluded to the sudden, overwhelming quality of Kipling’s rise to fame; in 1898 he wrote, “In those days you could have carried Kipling around in a lunch basket—now he fills the world” (Notebook 40, TS p. 62, CU-MARK). Clemens’s anti-imperialist commitments never kept him from reading and praising Kipling’s works. Isabel Lyon recorded that Clemens explained Kipling’s reactionary views as the result of “his training that makes him cling to his early beliefs; then he loves power & authority & Kingship” (Lyon 1907, entry for 22 Jan). See also the Autobiographical Dictation of 13 August 1906 (Graver 1992; Gilmour 2002, 87–97; Krauth 2003, 209, 248–57; Gribben 1980, 1:375–82).
Source documents.
TS1 ribbon (incomplete) Typescript, leaves numbered 1039–48 (part of 1048 and all of 1049 are missing), made from Hobby’s notes and revised: ‘Saturday . . . theologian.’ (171 title–175.25).TS1 carbon Typescript carbon, leaves numbered 1039–49.
TS1 ribbon was marked and abridged by Clemens for a projected NAR installment, but it was never published there; it has been mutilated as well (the anecdote of Kipling has been removed). TS1 carbon is complete; it has no authorial markings. Where TS1 ribbon is lacking, we draw on TS1 carbon, which unfortunately lacks the revisions which were presumably on the ribbon copy.
For Clemens’s letter to Carnegie on pages 1–2, dated 6 February 1901, the original manuscript survives in the Library of Congress (DLC). The text provided to Hobby, however, was evidently a clipping from a newspaper or magazine; this letter to Carnegie had a wide circulation in the press in the years after 1901. The version inserted by Clemens is supposed to be ‘from this morning’s paper’; it has not been found, but strongly resembles the text printed in Everyday Housekeeping 23 (August 1906): 1005. Whatever the exact source, it is obvious that the text of the letter as given in this dictation had, at some point, passed through the British press: Clemens’s actual letter asked not for ‘six shillings’ but (naturally) for ‘a dollar & a half’. Not being certain of the exact copy provided to Hobby, our text follows TS1 ribbon as revised by Clemens, except that we reject one revision, ‘Heaven’ for ‘God’ (172.11), as being intended specifically for the (proposed) NAR publication.
The inserted letters from Susan Crane survive only in the dictation text. Clemens apparently felt entitled to change her wording, for he revised ‘good’ to ‘rescue’ (175.7) on TS1.
Marginal Notes on TS1 ribbon Concerning Publication in NAR