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Autobiographical Dictation, 8 April 1907 ❉ Textual Commentary

Source documents.

McElhinney to SLC       Typed letter, Mark G. McElhinney to SLC, 3 April 1907: ‘The Broader View . . . McElhinney’ (23.3–24.13).
TS1       Typescript carbon (the ribbon copy is lost), leaves numbered 1934–42, made from Hobby’s notes and McElhinney to SLC and revised.

The ribbon copy being lost, TS1 (a carbon copy), as revised by Clemens, is the only authoritative source for this dictation. McElhinney’s original typed letter, with his spelling errors, is the source for his portion of the text. The variants that were introduced by Hobby in typing TS1 are not reported.

Monday, April 8, 1907

The battles of Navarino and Lepanto and the princes of Montenegro: all an annoyance to Mr. Clemens—Mr. Williamtextual note T. Stead appoints Mr. Clemens a member of the International Peace Convention; he and Mr. Stead discuss the appointment—President Roosevelt the most popular human being that ever [begin page 21] sojourned in America—Copy of letter in form of essay bearing on subjects recently discussed by Mr. Clemens.

I note with satisfaction that the last survivor of the battle of Navarino is deadexplanatory note. Perhaps we shall now have a rest from that battle. I seem to be including everybody, but it is merely a manner of speech; I am meaning only myself. The battle of Navarino has been an annoyance to me all my life. I cannot remember back to the time when the mention of that battle did not irritate me. It is not that I had any grudge against the battle itself; it is only that I never could separate it from the battle of Lepanto. I know of nothing that is more troublesome than a confusion of that kind; we all have them; no one is free from them; they embitter life and make existence a weariness. I have always known that it was in one of these battles that Cervantes was wounded, but I never could tell which battle it was without consulting the Cyclopediatextual note again. I have worn out many and many a Cyclopediatextual note in settling which battle it was, but I never could make the information stay after I had acquired it. I have consulted the Cyclopediatextual note again, and this time I find, as usual, that it was in the Lepanto fight that Cervantes was woundedexplanatory note. It is the hundred and fiftieth time that I have found that out, and it is about the hundredth time that I have wished he had been wounded in both those battles; then I could keep his record clear and my own mind at rest. The fact that one of the battles was older than the other by about three centuries is of no help to me; in my muddled head they stick together, and I cannot separate them. But the thing that interests me is the curious fact that I should get a personal satisfaction out of the death of the last survivor of Navarino, for I had nothing against him; I was only tired of his battle. Now then—but never mind, let it go; it is not worth while to try to analyze my feeling; I should never be able to do it; it is like the feeling which I have harbored against the princes of Montenegro for forty years. That name always irritates me; still there is something like a definite reason for it—a trivial one, and yet, in effect, a reason. Forty years ago, when a party of us representing the Quaker City Excursion were examining the sights of Paris and arrived at the tomb of Napoleon, we were halted outside and informed that the Prince of Montenegro was visiting the tomb and we must wait until he was done with it. We were kept outside half an hour, and time was very precious to us cheap pilgrims. I had never heard of him before, but I inquired and found that he owned a farm in the neighborhood of Turkey somewhere, and raised rocks on it—not an important farm, but since it was a principality it made the Prince of Montenegro a person of consequence and set him up among the royalties. Years afterward, when I had acquired a family and we were traveling about Europe, I engaged rooms by telegraph in a hotel in Veniceexplanatory note and when we arrived there, tired and worn, we found our quarters occupied. The landlord explained that he had been obliged to give them to the Prince of Montenegro, who had arrived unexpectedly. These were the beginnings of a procession of interruptions of my comfort and repose, by the princes of Montenegro, which has extended down to the present time. I do not go to Europe any more, on account of the princes of Montenegro. They have stepped into my way as many as a dozen times; they have been one of the chief annoyances of my life; [begin page 22] their name is a perennial disturbance to me whenever and wherever I see it. Lepanto, Navarino, Montenegro: these have permanently embittered me against all names that end with o textual note. It seems a trivial thing that I should be affected by such small matters as these, and yet it is only natural, since all human concerns are trivial, and these are as large as any of them.

And this reminds me that I came across William T. Stead yesterday. He is over here to take part in an International Peace Convention which is to assemble a week or ten days from now. His project is to select one or two widely known men in each country and band them together in a commission, which shall visit all the presidents and crowned heads and persuade them to endorse and support a proposition to be laid before this year’s Hague Tribunal. The idea is to have that Tribunal pass an international law requiring quarreling States about to go to war to postpone overt action until thirty days after they shall have made up their minds to draw the sword. This is to give time for the other States of Christendom to try to pacify the belligerents and compromise the quarrel, and prevent the war. As one of the members of the American contingent of this roving commissionexplanatory note, Mr. Stead had nominated me, but I told him I could not serve; that my active days were over, and that even short journeys were a distress to me, and I could not think of venturing a long one. He said it was hardly my privilege to decline this great service; that it was my duty to do everything that in me lay to advance the human race, as long as the breath should remain in my body. But I said it was not worth while, for the reason that you can’t advance the human race and make it stay advanced; that every time you propped up its wobbling form on one side it toppled over on the other; that all its affairs are transitorytextual note and unstable, and none of them important, for that reason; that all ameliorations of the condition of the human race are impermanent; as soon as you reform them in one particular the race breaks out, in another place, worse than ever; that it is a weary and unprofitable enterprise to keep on calking a rickety old ship that springs a new leak every time you calk an old one—and so on, and so on, a long chapter of discussion between us without a result, he holding that the affairs of the human race are important, worth our best efforts for their improvement and our loyal belief in the proposition that the improvement can be made permanent, and I denying these things in detail and in mass. Stead has a large reverence for the human race and a strong belief in its far-reachingtextual note intelligence and wisdom; I don’t know where he got it, but that is his affair, not mine. Stead is a strong man and a good man, and I think he is almost always in the right. Stead is not popular in England, where he belongsexplanatory note. This is sufficiently good evidence that both his head and his heart are right—at least I look at it in that way. Presidenttextual note Roosevelt is to-day, by very long odds—overwhelming odds—the most popular being, human or divine, visible or invisible, that has ever sojourned in America. I think it is a very damaging fact, and ought to make the President distinctly uncomfortable.

In view of the things which I have just been saying, the following letter has an odd interest for me. It arrived this morning from Canada, and was written three days ago. [begin page 23] I will leave out the introductory remarksexplanatory note and present the meat of the letter, which is in the form of an essay.

The Broader View.

Calm, fearless, imperturbable, the observer of world history should stand amid the travail of events.

Knowing that all forms however dear and all ideas however cherished must change, he should behold their mutations without emotion.

Things were real to Alexander.textual note He had his social and political ideas and his gods.

He undoubtedly looked upon them as important enough to be permanent. To us these things are little more than names.

Caesar, we are taught, was a great military genius. He conquered a world. His time also possessed gods and social and political systems.

His gods we call mythological, his social arrangements we could not abide for he dressed and fed and otherwise lived like a barbarian. His language we call dead. We do not even know it’s accent. Things were very real to Caesar.

Napoleon, perhaps the greatest reservoir of human energy that ever existed, was here and is gone.

Although so recent, historians already differ materially regarding many of the events of his career.

History itself begins but a few thousand years back and in that time has shown kaliedescopic changes in every department of human affairs.

It has been stated by Mark Twain, the deepest philosopher America has produced, that “The altar-cloth of one age becomes the door-mat of the next.”explanatory note

We, that have no scarcity of door-mats yet cling trustingly to our altar-cloths.

We hope against all experience that our’s shall be the ones to cohere.

Does any really acute thinker believe that they shall? In it’s self-consciousness the present may be personified as a stupendous egotist as blind as big.

It is as though at each second the clock ticked out “I am THE second, I am eternity.”

The seconds grow into minutes, the minutes into hours, the hours into days, the days into years, the years into eons, the end is not yet.

Down the long procession, reaching into the dim mists beyond the beginning of history, march multitudes of errors of belief and practice. Those errors were solemn facts in their respective days.

Jahexplanatory note, Baal, Ra, Jove, Thor were names by which was called that infinite abstraction, God, source, power and director of the universe.

When the conceptions of today have taken their places in the march of centuries, shall they too be considered as in the dark catalog of errors?

With our lesson can we be so egotistic, so foolish, so ignorant as to believe otherwise?

From the crude stone phallus and the gilded sun, through every anthromorphic modification down to the intangible abstraction of the most diaphanous deist, there has not yet been discovered one iota of knowledge, one definite idea, however minute, or one useful relation between existence and that for which man has so diligently and so blindly searched.

Teachers of the people today, with an assurance that is astounding, pronounce [begin page 24] upon the great problems of existence forgetting that almost with the last echo of their voices, they are the uncatalogued clods of a forgotten race.

Ages ago men pronounced as positively what we now regard as arrant nonsense.

Augurs were employed to watch the flight of birds before the departure of an army of conquest. Omens were to them realities.

Later Cromwell began his battles with prayer. In our day, Chinese Gordonexplanatory note was deeply imbued with the idea of the personal management of the universe by a God.

Was any one more absurd than the others? All of our inventions, our arts and our sciences seem powerless to teach to the multitude the evanescence of any point in history.

All they have succeeded in doing has been to change the names of the fetishes as they carry them down the highway of time.

Mark G. McElhinneytextual note explanatory note

Textual Notes Monday, April 8, 1907
  William ●  Wm. (TS1) 
  Cyclopedia ●  Cyclopaedia (TS1) 
  Cyclopedia ●  Cyclopaedia (TS1) 
  Cyclopedia ●  Cyclopaedia (TS1) 
  o  ●  o ‘o’ underscored  (TS1-SLC) 
  transitory ●  evanescent transitory  (TS1-SLC) 
  far-reaching ●  far reaching (TS1) 
  way. President ●  way. [¶] President paragraph break deleted  (TS1-SLC) 
  Alexander. ●  Alexander, (McElhinney to SLC)  Alexander. (TS1) 
  McElhinney ●  McElhinney | [paraph] (McElhinney to SLC)  McElhimey. (TS1) 
Explanatory Notes Monday, April 8, 1907
 

the last survivor of the battle of Navarino is dead] In the Battle of Navarino, fought off the coast of southern Greece in 1827 during its War of Independence, the allied navies of Britain, France, and Russia defeated the Egyptian-Turkish fleet. The war ended in 1832 with the creation of the independent Kingdom of Greece. The March 1907 death of the battle’s “last survivor,” ninety-nine-year-old John Stainer, was widely reported in newspapers (“Last Survivor of Navarino,” Bendigo [Australia] Advertiser, 19 Apr 1907, 3).

 

it was in the Lepanto fight that Cervantes was wounded] The Spanish novelist and poet Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) received a wound in the Battle of Lepanto (1571), which permanently maimed his left hand. The battle, a major victory for the Hapsburg forces over the Ottomans, was—like the Battle of Navarino—fought off the coast of Greece. Cervantes also fought in a battle at Navarino (1572).

 

a party of us representing the Quaker City Excursion . . . a hotel in Venice] In 1867 Clemens traveled to Europe and the Holy Land on the Quaker City with about seventy-five passengers, only a handful being members of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, where the idea for the excursion had originated. Clemens revised his newspaper correspondence with the San Francisco Alta California and the New York Tribune and used it for more than half the text of The Innocents Abroad (1869). On 5 July he and two companions (Daniel Slote and Dr. Abraham Reeves Jackson) took the train from Marseilles to Paris, where they stayed for a week. At the time, Nicholas I (1841–1921), prince (and later king) of Montenegro, was in Paris visiting the International Exposition. Neither the newspaper correspondence nor the book mentions the encounter with Nicholas I, but it almost certainly occurred, since ten years later Clemens referred to it in an 1878 notebook. In the fall of 1878 Clemens stayed in Venice with his family (and Olivia’s friend Clara Spaulding). They arrived on the evening of 25 September after an exhausting day’s travel from Bellagio, on Lake Como. They stayed at the Grand Hôtel d’Italie, whose south side was on the Grand Canal. The preemption of their rooms at some other hotel by the Prince of Montenegro has not been confirmed, but in late September Clemens wrote in his notebook, “Ran across the Prince of Montenegro again to-day. At tomb of Napoleon in 67” ( N&J2 , 197).

 

William T. Stead . . . American contingent of this roving commission] Stead, an English political reformer, journalist, and spiritualist, had admired Clemens’s work since at least 1890, and had met him personally on a transatlantic voyage in 1894. As a longtime friend of Andrew Carnegie’s, he had come to America to attend the ceremony on 11 April at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in honor of Founder’s Day and the opening of the greatly enlarged library (“W. T. Stead Here to Talk of Peace,” New York Times, 4 Apr 1907, 7; see AutoMT2 , 541 n. 172.26–34, 604 n. 336.32–337.2). Stead was also scheduled to address the National Arbitration and Peace Congress in New York on 14–17 April, whose purpose was to decide on the position of the United States at the upcoming Second International Peace Conference at The Hague. Stead wanted to select twelve American “Pilgrims of Peace,” who would travel to London, Paris, and Rome to gather additional representatives from European nations, so that “100 would finally round up at The Hague to present their petition to the conference.” Stead’s primary objective was to establish an arbitration process so that “in case of a conflict being imminent between two countries neither of them can open hostilities until a period of 15 or 20 days has elapsed. During this period two friendly Powers will always have the right to intervene and to endeavour to settle the quarrel amicably” (“Mr. W. T. Stead and the Peace Conference,” London Times, 9 Jan 1907, 5; “Stead Unfolds His Idea,” Chicago Tribune, 8 Apr 1907, 3; James Brown Scott 1907). The Second International Peace Conference, which took place from 15 June to 18 October 1907, had first been proposed by President Roosevelt but was officially convened by Nicholas II of Russia. The delegates, representing forty-four countries, approved thirteen articles pertaining to the rules of warfare, including one to establish an International Prize Court, as well as a declaration in support of the principle of obligatory arbitration (on which the United States abstained from voting). Ultimately, however, the article creating the world court was not ratified (New York Times: “Peace Compromise Spurned by Choate,” 12 Oct 1907, 4; “Shelves Knox Peace Plan,” 3 Sept 1910, 4; Hull 1908).

 

Stead is not popular in England, where he belongs] Stead, an indefatigable crusader against vice, social injustice, and war, was considered a visionary by his supporters, but his critics objected to his extreme tactics (such as pretending to buy a child prostitute, for which he was imprisoned), and derided his belief in the spirit world. After he perished on the Titanic in 1912, his acts of heroism were reported by several survivors.

 

the following letter . . . I will leave out the introductory remarks] The essay transcribed here by Clemens’s stenographer, Josephine Hobby, was sent with the following cover letter (CU-MARK):

Ottawa, Canada, April 3rd. 1907

Samuel L. Clemens,

New Haven,

Conn.

Dear Sir,

At the outset I must apologise for intruding upon you. You will forgive me perhaps when I say that I am asking for nothing except the privilege of telling you how keenly I have enjoyed your writings, more especially your great satires.

Today, men laud your humor, in ages to come they shall stand uncovered in the memory of the Titanic force and directness of your philosophy.

That men do not think deeply is evidenced by the fact that “Gulliver’s Travels” is still classed as a book for children.

You are more fortunate because conditions permit the use of less disguised methods and in that there is a great element of hope.

I am sanguine enough to believe that our race will survive the crises and eventually win to intellectual freedom.

My belief is based on the existence of such men as Swift and yourself. That Swift is dead is a small matter, you have yourself attained honorable age yet so far as human needs are concerned you are both immortal and that is an element of continued hope.

I do not believe in personal immortality, it is an egoistic dream but when will Shakespeare die? Not while Man lives.

The real history of Mankind is the history of its thinkers and their thought.

The true kings of men have rarely found thrones and the true saviors have found the stake oftener than the altar and oblivion oftener than either. You are fortunate in that you have found none of these but bid fair to be well remembered.

I believe that good work is its own reward, you should be a happy man. In my small way I am happy also.

With kind wishes,

I remain,

Yours very truly,

Mark G. McElhinney

Lyon noted Clemens’s response on the bottom of the letter, “Thank him for his letter & say that by & by when his philosophy is printed he will send him a confidential copy.”

 

“The altar-cloth of one age becomes the door-mat of the next.”] Mark Twain used this maxim, a “Punjabi proverb” from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar,” as an epigraph for chapter 23 in More Tramps Abroad, the English edition of Following the Equator (SLC 1897b). It does not appear in the American edition, which also has different chapter breaks.

 

Jah] An element of “Yahweh,” one of the names of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible, traditionally represented by the tetragrammaton YHWH.

 

Chinese Gordon] Major General Charles George Gordon (1833–85), an officer in the British Army Corps of Engineers, earned the nickname “Chinese Gordon” for commanding a force of Chinese soldiers who in 1863–64 suppressed the Taiping Rebellion, a major uprising against the Qing imperial government. While serving as governor general of Sudan, he was killed by Muslim fundamentalists in revolt against Anglo-Egyptian rule, who stormed his palace at Khartoum after a thirty-one-day siege. Gordon was a popular hero in Britain because of his incorruptibility, his bravery, and his dedication to helping the poor.

 

Mark G. McElhinney] McElhinney (b. 1868) was originally from Nova Scotia. He became a dental surgeon who, according to a 1916 advertisement, treated “certain of the cognoscenti” (Ottawa Naturalist 30 [Apr 1916]: ii). He was also a writer, poet, and, in 1910, the inventor of a machine he called the “Telelectron,” which used electricity as a form of anesthesia (McElhinney 1922, 1927; “Invents Sleep Producer,” Manitoba Free Press, 10 Jan 1911, 1).