In January 1870, writing with romantic eloquence to his fiancée, Olivia Langdon, Samuel L. Clemens exclaimed that “the world we are so proud of is to the universe of careening globes as is one mosquito to the winged & hoofed flocks & herds. . . .”1 He went on to ask: “Verily, What is Man, that he should be considered of God?” Soon after his marriage he was more sardonic:

Despite his attempts at piety during the recent courtship, Mark Twain reverted to an antagonism against Christianity he had already expressed. It had shown itself in San Francisco four years earlier, when he had assumed Bohemian attitudes of flippancy and disdain toward religious gentility (“Sabbath Reflections” and [begin page 2] “Reflections on the Sabbath,” 1866).3 A decade still earlier he had burlesqued conventional observances through the image of an insect congregation.4 Like Robert G. Ingersoll and many others with Calvinist backgrounds, this “Brevet Presbyterian” turned against Christianity as such in rejecting the stern form of it he had known as a child.

But until the 1880s Mark Twain's hostility was fitful, and the record of his opinions for the previous years indicates, on the whole, an easy tolerance concerning religion. Because of his agreement with the tenets and aims of American secular culture, he could admire missionaries who propagated it: “They have clothed the Sandwich Islanders, educated them, broken up the tyrannous authority of their chiefs. . . . the wonderful benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so prominent, so palpable and so unquestionable. . . .”5 And in 1870, immediately after denouncing “the God of the Bible,” he posited a “true God” whose “beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair. . . . ”6 At times what may seem to have been attacks on Christian institutions were really Mark Twain's attempts to discriminate the worst from the best in the national culture while he was establishing his own place as member and spokesman. His hatred of snobbish and sanctimonious clergymen in “Mr. Beecher and the Clergy” (1869), “About Smells” (1870), and “The Indignity Put upon the Remains of George Holland by the Rev. Mr. Sabine” (1871) was a response to their denials of democratic principles, especially offensive because of the clergy's elite status. While moving up in [begin page 3] his culture Mark Twain believed the best of it. Intolerance, superstition, and other religious vices were only deviations from an enlightenment he thought characteristic of America.

In the early 1880s Mark Twain set down his religious principles in a group of brief manifestos (“Three Statements of the Eighties”). He declared that there was a God, yet that He never communicated with man or intervened in human affairs through Special Providences. The idea of eternal punishment was incredible because such punishment could accomplish no good end; moral laws were the product of human experience, and human action whether good or bad could not affect God. Certain harsh and contradictory passages in the Bible indicated that it was not the work of God but of incompetent men, and although latter-day Protestantism had reared highly moral individuals on its humane passages, the Bible nevertheless still contained sanctions for atrocities. These three papers, together with many of Mark Twain's notebook entries, letters, and book acquisitions, show that throughout the decade he felt dismayed curiosity at the creeds and disciplines of Christianity. He took a contemptuous interest in the beliefs of other men, ranging from past theologians like Samuel Clarke and Cotton Mather to his contemporaries George Washington Cable and Andrew Langdon. He read books that supported skepticism, for instance The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, but he was more concerned with those he disapproved, such as Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana.7 Meanwhile he became fond of cosmological images that countered the egoistic myth of Christianity, particularly entertaining [begin page 4] the fancy that “we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood of some vast creature's veins, and it is that vast creature whom God concerns Himself about and not us.”8

In the 1880s Mark Twain also wrote preliminary statements of his psychological theories, which have been considered emergences of the old Calvinism in secular form. On 19 February 1883, before the Hartford Monday Evening Club, he delivered “What Is Happiness?,” which he later recalled as a harbinger of What Is Man? :

Later, in “The Character of Man” (1885), he stated these ideas more violently and added that man had instincts of malice, cruelty, servility, and nastiness. He once planned to read even this attack before the Monday Evening Club. At the end of the decade he made his tenets public through Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee:

In that decade, which he came to regard as the time of his enlightenment concerning human nature,10 Mark Twain used these notions for purposes of attack and reidentification. They were ways of measuring the illusoriness of a faith in man that he was giving up but that his culture continued to propagate. At the same time, his deterministic principles accounted for the pervasiveness of the opposite faith in a way that discredited it: where many men believed in human goodness, free will, and personal merit, they were directed by heredity and training toward their belief. In those early days of his theorizing Mark Twain thought his knowledge relocated him on the side of a superior consciousness, reserved for the honest few. Later, though he often enjoyed a grim satisfaction in his awareness, he would remind himself that there was no escape from the natural imprisonment, not even for someone who recognized it.

In his remaining years, especially from 1897 through 1909, Mark Twain enlarged upon his basic ideas in numerous works and fragments. His reluctance to disclose his opinions to the public led him to seek indirect ways of presenting them; yet he left many manuscripts incomplete, and he suppressed almost all that he finished, probably because he was unsure of the safety of his devices and doubted their power to persuade his unreceptive contemporaries. One of his devices of indirection was what may be termed the rhetorical occasion. He would often assume the pose that only the stimulus of recent events and current topics made him reveal his beliefs. The occasion of “Man's Place in the Animal World” (1896), war atrocities in Crete, allowed him to justify indictments he had already expressed in previous manuscripts. He introduced other occasions as if they were to be his subjects but then offhand, by what seemed to be accidents of his material, turned to his arguments on determinism or the “damned human [begin page 6] race.” The most deceptive of such pieces was “Macfarlane” (1894?), which Albert Bigelow Paine and critics after him read as a factual narrative about a man whose pessimistic philosophy influenced young Sam Clemens, rather than as an expression through this character of Mark Twain's own beliefs, formulated in maturity. If the manuscript is incomplete, as it seems, the resulting imbalance of narrative over argument may help account for the traditional interpretation.11 The opportunity to present what was probably the most effective of these arguments from occasion came in 1909, when he was asked to contribute to a series projected by Harper's Bazar in which famous people would discuss the turning points of their lives. In his contribution, “ ‘The Turning Point of My Life’ ” (1910), Mark Twain immediately disputed the notion of singular crises and then used well-known details of his early years to show that circumstances and temperament had made him a writer. The career was unplanned, he contended, and there were thousands of equally important turning points: “Circumstance furnished the capital, and my temperament told me what to do with it.” This article gave him his best opportunity to present his theories without fear of resentment, for they appeared to be both a common-sense response to the premise of the series and the engaging humility of a great man deprecating his accomplishments.

Another device of indirection, by far his favorite, was the use of spokesmen to deliver his arguments. These were generally characters who, often because of a remarkable superiority or inferiority, seemed outside of middle-class culture, in some cases alien to the human race. In 1882 he wrote a fragment of dialogue in which two Negroes argue about God's responsibility for man's sins. One of them reasons that if God made man capable of sin and yet holds him accountable, it shows:

In an 1887 notebook entry Mark Twain imagined a supernatural creature (Gahsh) with a gospel of his own, and his dimensions suggest that Gahsh was to be the “vast creature” whose veins man infested: “His foot-ball is suspended in front of his face, and every time he winks his eye, it is night on it. His speech is thunder and they run into their holes. His shoe-sole is 13 or 14,000 miles. So is his face.”13 Later, after putting aside “The Character of Man,” Mark Twain rephrased several of its accusations in “Letters from a Dog” (1889?), in which the philosophic Newfoundland Smith tells another dog about human vices. Verbal parallels show that this manuscript led in turn to the doctrinal part of “Macfarlane,” with only the change of spokesmen. Still other such vehicles were Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee, Philip Traum in the “Chronicle of Young Satan” version of “The Mysterious Stranger,” the slave Jerry in “Corn-Pone Opinions” (1901), Sol Bailey in “Which Was It?” and the Old Man in What Is Man? In 1898 his notes show that he even thought of using an ant as spokesman: “Visit to and talks with politicians and professors, soldiers and slaves among the ants. One had written a book on human beings—proves Selfishness, No Merit, &c.”14

Disguise of his own opinions was not Mark Twain's only motive for inventing spokesmen. He used his Negroes and other outsiders to remind middle-class readers that different perspectives could be wiser than their own, and often he used nonhuman or antihuman spokesmen to support condemnations of human nature. If man, the only creature with the Moral Sense, was selfish, cruel, bigoted, and slavish, and yet given to fantastic conceit, it would take an extrahuman morality to comprehend his viciousness. Thus he needed figures like Newfoundland Smith, the ant- [begin page 8] author of What Is Man? , and the discursive Satan of “The Mysterious Stranger” and “Letters from the Earth”—characters widely spaced on the scale of species but equal in their moral superiority to man. The rare human spokesmen who were comparably disengaged had weird manners and at times spectral appearances, like Macfarlane, “The Corpse” in the fragmentary “A Human Bloodhound,” and Orrin Lloyd Godkin in another fragment, “Indiantown.”

The use of such characters was also a way of reducing man to a trivial place in the range of existence. From “Captain Storm-field's Visit to Heaven” through “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,” Mark Twain invented myths and figures to shock human egoism with the spectacle of a universe inhabited at its telescopic, microscopic, and generic reaches by moral beings unconcerned about mankind.

After the 1880s the chief development in Mark Twain's religious opinions was that they became systematically contemptuous. In passages deleted from “The Character of Man” he had conceived religious motivation no less bitterly than he did in later years, but in the 1880s such conceptions required special impetus—in 1885, for example, his fury against Hartford Republicans who had opposed the Mugwumps. Otherwise his attacks were comparatively restrained. Even a work so heated by dislike as “Letter from the Recording Angel” (1887) did not become a diatribe on religion; it was at most a charge that there were self-righteous hypo- [begin page 9] crites among conventional believers, a charge that the most fervent Christian would not have denied. Similarly, his criticisms in “Bible Teaching and Religious Practice” (1890) admitted a progress of civilization beyond the ages of intolerance, superstition, and slavery; he was only reminding lay Christians that the clergy had opposed every advance and that the former sanctions of barbarity were still in the Bible. But as the 1890s wore on, he settled upon motives of conformism and selfishness to characterize believers. They were Christians or Muhammadans, Catholics or Baptists, chiefly because of training, and the personal forces that led to conversion or devoutness were all self-interested though in respectable disguise. In his last decade he ridiculed these motives through many examples—the biased reading of historical events by the light of supposed prophecy (“As Concerns Interpreting the Deity,” 1905); the acceptance of moral imperatives that ran counter to human nature (“In the Animal's Court,” 1905); the glorification of God for His creation though no one altogether admired it (“God,” 1905).

The severity of Mark Twain's views on religious motivation was part of the increasing cynicism of his last twenty years. He lost Hank Morgan's belief in “that one microscopic atom . . . that is truly me,” insofar as this meant a freedom from the determinisms of temperament and environment, and he added another and more sinister force, the Moral Sense. The Moral Sense became, for Mark Twain, a source of man's incorrigible depravity: it enabled man to distinguish right from wrong so as to choose the wrong, which he chose from a vicious disposition. In keeping with these traits, Mark Twain devised a dynamics and pattern of history. Men were moved by prospects of power and dominance, with the result that among individuals, classes, and nations the typical relation was a tyranny of the strong over the weak. Even fortunate countries like the United States, whose institutions provided a certain equilibrium and restraint, would degenerate into this condition. Those already in power would entrench themselves or, with a change of circumstances, the victims would become the [begin page 10] masters. Mark Twain often projected the second alternative. As early as the eighties he imagined “Negro supremacy—the whites underfoot” in a hundred years,16 and later he predicted shifts of religious power: “The Catholics are moving steadily and surely toward dominion”;17 by 1940 the Christian Scientists would become “the governing power in the Republic—to remain that, permanently.”18 Self-interested and therefore easily led, the masses would fall into line no matter how drastic the upheavals. From a need to seem rational and independent they would supply reasoned conviction for the beliefs imposed upon them, and with all the more zeal if the beliefs were absurd.

Mark Twain's conceptions of God changed accordingly. In “Three Statements of the Eighties” he could still say without irony that “the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God were manifested in His works,” for he believed the nature and condition of man were on the whole benign. But when he came to believe otherwise, he characterized God as the “Source of all inconsistency.”19 The creator of man was responsible for man—for his physical and mental agonies, for his vices and misfortunes. If He damned sinners, He was cruel. If He did not mean to train them to righteousness, “it proves one thing conclusively: if our Maker is all-powerful for good or evil, He is not in His right mind.”20 On the other hand, God would be petty to care about a creature so trivial as man. A truly superior being might create our world with all its tortures, but after the creation He should “turn His attention elsewhere and trouble Himself no further about the matter.”21 Through these conceptions Mark Twain offered more specific attacks on Christianity than he might have through the general denials of atheism. For his target was not so [begin page 11] much the Christian premises as their traditional conclusions; God was destructive rather than providential, contemptuous of man's sins rather than forgiving. Mark Twain's belief in these notions may be questioned because of their satiric convenience. But he claimed to believe in the God of his later views “with all his might,”22 and if he really did not, the reason behind his claim was probably that he confused a private urgency with belief. For his later views were the revelation of a disaster he could express and tolerate only by giving it cosmic involvement. That man was a minor phase of evolution was true but not enough. He had to be trivial in the eyes of a God who created billions of worlds, and the pointlessness of his misery had to imply a God who began it pointlessly. With the imagination of these vast circumstances Mark Twain pictured the career of man as both a farce and a tragedy. Though a part of the action, he kept an onlooker's distance sufficient to preserve his sensibilities of astonishment, disgust, and protest.

Mark Twain wrote the first draft of What Is Man? between April and July 1898 in Vienna and the nearby resort of Kaltenleutgeben.23 Much of it appeared without revision in the published book; it was a first draft in the sense that it covered only slightly more than half of the final text. As was typical of his writing, the draft shows few extensive changes made during original composition, and in this case the author was working with a form and an argument so familiar to him that composition was unusually congenial. He had experimented with the dialogue form as early as 1882, in the Negro fragment mentioned earlier, and as late as [begin page 12] 1897, in a draft of “The Moral Sense.” He tended toward this form when his material was controversial, for he liked to envision a masterfulness in speakers who represented his views, and sophistry and humiliation in their antagonists. In works like “Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” “Which Was It?” and “The Mysterious Stranger,” he inserted dialogues whose formal difference from What Is Man? consisted in little more than their narrative context.

All the controlling ideas appeared in the 1898 draft. Man is a machine in that his behavior is determined by heredity and temperament, environment and training. Thus he deserves no praise for good acts or blame for bad; every act is beyond his control, and he always seeks to please himself. One should not attempt to deny these facts by the conventional distinctions between men and animals. The superiority of human intelligence is a matter of degree rather than quality, and the Moral Sense does not raise man above the other creatures. In a chapter later deleted, Mark Twain argued that it placed man beneath them because it enabled him to do wrong. In two other deleted chapters he turned to considerations of God.24 Traditional accounts of heaven tell us, he contended, that only the devout and righteous are admitted, thus showing that God does not prize intellectual achievement. From experience and the Bible it is also obvious that He loathes mankind. He inflicts miseries as a matter of course and punishes man for sins He made him able to commit. But man deserves hardly more than God's indifference because man, like God, is cruel, vindictive, and tyrannical. Thus it seems absurd to believe that heaven is God's reward for righteousness, particularly if the “lower animals”—morally superior to man—are not admitted. And besides, the miseries of this life suggest that God furnishes greater ones in the hereafter.

Mark Twain did not add substantially to the 1898 draft until [begin page 13] late 1901 or early 1902, more than a year after his return to America in the fall of 1900. Other projects may have been more urgent, such as “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” probably begun in August 1898, or his first sustained commentary on Christian Science, begun in the fall of that year. But it is likely that he put the draft aside because he considered it done; indeed had he published it upon composition, he might never have touched it again. From 1898 through 1905, however, he regarded his “gospel” as a private interest to be shared only with his household and chosen acquaintances, too dangerous to his reputation for public knowledge. And so as time passed the manuscript became subject to elaborations and afterthoughts, which is all that the later additions contributed. The first were the segment “Instances in Point” (but not “Further Instances”) and another containing the “Admonition.” “Instances in Point” was chiefly a long example of self-interest based upon a novel Mark Twain happened to read. The “Admonition” segment has been judged contradictory, in that it appears to grant the possibility of deliberate moral action.25 But Mark Twain intended no compromise of his deterministic principles. He argued that even if a man could improve his character, he could not do so through resolution and could not transcend self-contentment as the motive for his action. He could at most follow the inevitable forces of training and pleasure to his moral advantage.

Mark Twain later said he completed What Is Man? in 1902.26 This was a typical misrecollection. In 1902 he had his daughter Jean prepare a typescript that incorporated the parts just mentioned, but he continued adding and revising at least through September 1905. Earlier that year he had Jean prepare a fresh typescript, which eventually became printer's copy. Among the additions was “After an Interval of Days,” the first half probably [begin page 14] written between 1902 and 1904 but not typed until 1905, the second half written and typed in 1905. “Free Will,” “A Difficult Question,” and the “Conclusion” were written and typed in 1905. “Further Instances,” “Not Two Values, but only One,” and “The Master Passion” were holograph insertions in the printer's copy. Another important change in the printer's copy was a reversal in the original order of chapters 1 and 2. The last revision of consequence, possibly made as late as 1906, was a systematic change in what had become chapter 2 of language relating to motivation. From the 1898 draft through the typing of the printer's copy, Mark Twain had used “selfishness” and allied terms to characterize the personal force behind all actions; indeed “Selfishness” was a provisional title in 1898.27 Over these terms he now inscribed “spiritual comfort” and similar expressions. Thus “Hamilton's act was thoroughly selfish” became “Hamilton's act was compelled by the inborn necessity of contenting his own spirit”; and “Love, Hate, Charity, etc. are all forms of Selfishness” became “They are all forms of self-contentment, self-gratification.” Such changes made the tone less opprobrious, and he may have thought of them only when editing the text for publication, as a way of appeasing his readers. Yet the revisions also affected meaning. Many passages in the original version implied selfishness in the ordinary sense, that is, as a deliberate choice of self-interest which one was free to refuse. The revisions expressed what Mark Twain meant all along: men were selfish in the sense that they had to satisfy their consciences and temperaments, regardless of consequences.

In March or April 1906 he decided to have What Is Man? printed privately.28 The book was set, corrected, and finally revised during May and June, and the manufacture completed by mid-August of a limited edition of 250 copies.29 The publication [begin page 15] was anonymous, and he took care to conceal his authorship from most people. He had his friend Frank N. Doubleday, of Doubleday, Page & Co., serve as liaison with the printer, the DeVinne Press of New York. The printer's copy went from Clemens through Doubleday to DeVinne, and Doubleday returned proofs to the author. Proof revisions and printer's queries went through the same channels.30 Beneath the preface in printer's copy his daughter Jean had typed “Mark Twain,” which her father cut out of the page realizing that even heavy cancellation lines could allow the compositor to discover his identity from impressions on the back. In proof he deleted an obsession and a recurrent dream which, though attributed to the Young Man, would probably have suggested Mark Twain to knowledgeable readers.31 He had Doubleday copyright the book in the name of J. W. Bothwell, DeVinne's superintendent,32 and drafted a statement to be sent out over Bothwell's signature: “By an early mail I am venturing to send you a copy of a small book entitled ‘What Is Man?’ 250 copies of which have been printed, for private circulation only. I am doing this by request of the author, who wishes to remain unknown.”33 The following year Clemens recalled presenting only four copies on his own—to “discreet persons”—but ten or twelve by Doubleday through Bothwell.34

The printing of What Is Man? was merely a convenience to the author. From the 1898 draft through 1905 he had tried the dialogue on many people, sometimes on those disposed to admire, [begin page 16] like his secretary Isabel V. Lyon, more often on gentle spirits and optimists who might venture to disagree, such as his wife and daughters, and such as his friends E. P. Parker and J. H. Twichell.35 Publication allowed him to reach others who were unavailable or whose beliefs he did not wish to affront in person, and by keeping his anonymity he could hope to discover responses without the misleading flattery or contention his name might arouse. His later thoughts on the publication suggest that what he wanted was resistance followed by a grudging conversion. If so, he was rarely satisfied. Archibald Henderson and Charles G. Norris, who knew he was the author, sent enthusiastic letters. Henderson said he was “startled to discover that your observations made from a close and direct study of man au naturel, so to speak, coincide at most points with the views of the greatest modern thinkers. . . .”36 Norris, a Canadian who espoused a Christian Masonry, wrote that he had made four typescript copies of the book which he was planning to circulate indefinitely, starting with Tolstoi, Edward Carpenter, and Elbert Hubbard.37 So far as is known, Mark Twain got the ideal reaction only once, from an academic woman writing to Ralph W. Ashcroft: “It is so new to me, that philosophy of his, that I rebelled at every page, and really fought my way through it all, but it was so damnably convincing that, by the time the end was reached, I sat dazed, but completely reconciled to his way of thinking. . . .”38

Otherwise those who resisted the argument found ways to [begin page 17] deny it. Andrew Carnegie, not knowing his friend was the author, said the book “will startle the ordinary man, but I don't see that it goes much deeper than we were before. . . . ‘All is well since all grows better.’ Our only duty is to obey the Judge within.”39 In the fall and winter of 1906 Mark Twain had copies sent to New York journals and newspapers, again without revealing his identity. The New York Sun read the dialogue as an attack on religion and claimed it tried “to demonstrate certain views, which the reader will consider, we fear, less daring and more obvious than the author does. Materialists will not need to be converted and religious persons will find no new argument to controvert.”40 The Sun praised the author's logic and clarity, and in introducing a mildly favorable summary of the book the New York Times noted his “skill, clarity, and wit.”41 But like the Sun, the Times thought the argument “no new one”—a remark that would become a cliché of disapproval in later years. This observation irritated Mark Twain even when it came as a compliment. To Henderson's discovery of analogies with Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Shaw he replied:

In 1908 he admitted that the publication was a mistake:

Personal confrontation had been the wiser course: “whenever I read the small book myself to a person of good intelligence . . . I always captured a disciple. Generally against the disciple's will. . . .”

Mark Twain's opinions, as well as his authorship, remained unknown to the general public until he died. Two days after his death, as though awaiting the occasion, the New York Tribune broke the secret in a feature article replete with long quotations, and the news was picked up by other papers and journals.44 Though the Tribune reporter apparently had seen the book, he described the argument as bearing particularly on “religious beliefs.” Probably from an informant, whose source may have been Mark Twain, he heard what became a common explanation of the secrecy: “the author, discouraged because the world always wanted to make a joke of whatever he wrote or spoke, took the anonymous method of putting his thoughts before them. . . .” Popular reaction to the disclosure was mixed but seldom warm. The Dial thought the meditations on necessity and free will “failed to produce any results of significance,” especially because they lacked “novelty.”45 Current Literature indulged in pathos: “It is surely one of the ironies of fate that Mark Twain, greatest of American humorists, should have been a sad-hearted man, a fatalist and a pessimist. He did not often reveal his philosophy. He almost seemed ashamed of it.”46 The journal included two late photos, one showing Clemens in bed, pen in hand, looking up sadly, with [begin page 19] a caption that read: “The Most Despairing of Humorists
By an irony of fate, Mark Twain, who made the whole world laugh, was at heart pessimistic and melancholy.” The other showed him regarding the landscape from his veranda at Redding, Connecticut with a caption that began: “His Last Look at the Sky.” This sentimentality did not accompany an endorsement of What Is Man? By fashioning Mark Twain as a romantic clown—humorous on the outside, somber on the inside—the journal suggested the refutation which later critics would make explicit, that his pessimism was a function of his personal griefs and disappointments.

The book did not altogether lack supporters. In 1910 the Rationalist Press Association, whose honorary members included Ernst Haeckel, Paul Carus, and Lester Frank Ward, sponsored the first English edition.47 In 1919 the British journal Athenaeum, though quite unfavorable, reported that the work had been “hailed with jubilation by the rebels. . . .”48 But by 1920 formulas of disapproval were set that have not much changed to the present day. Reviewing What Is Man? and Other Essays, the first American trade edition and the first edition to reach a wide audience, the New York Times complained:

The United States had just entered World War I when this edition came out in May 1917, and Mark Twain's arguments were [begin page 20] scarcely suited to the temper of the time. Yet objections after the war were equally intense and were based upon a similar preference for hopeful views. One critic, discounting Mark Twain's pessimism by his “intense sensitiveness to suffering and evil,” advised listening “to the real Mark Twain—the man who testifies to his thorough and unceasing happiness. . . .”50 Another critic, much like Brooks and DeVoto later, thought What Is Man? “the profane utterance of a defeated soul.”51 Although more recent critics have not openly been disturbed by Mark Twain's somberness, they have continued to dismiss the work because of its personal motives and its lack of novelty. The work refers us chiefly to his “private sorrows and apprehensions,” and “the kind of determinism Mark Twain was presenting had been presented many times before. . . .”52

Mark Twain wrote Christian Science in two stints, fall 1898 to May 1899 in Vienna, and summer or fall 1902 through February 1903 in the United States. If he began it only after completing “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” the earliest possible month was October 1898.53 In the first period he wrote what became book 1, chapters 1 through 8, originally planned as a series of articles. In America he completed book 1 in summer or fall 1902; and in January and February 1903 (at Riverdale, New York) he completed all of book 2—far more, and in much less time, than the initial phase. The manuscript and structure of the initial phase [begin page 21] suggest sporadic composition, with pauses after chapters 4 and 6. But there were several reasons for swift completion in 1903. He then had a book in mind, to consist of the earlier portion and the work in progress, which Harper & Brothers wanted to publish at once. In December 1902 he began communications with W. D. McCrackan and Frederick W. Peabody—the first a partisan, the other an enemy of Christian Science—which helped inspire his anger and zest during the next two months. Throughout that winter Livy was bedridden with heart disease and nervous prostration, and on Christmas Eve Jean contracted pneumonia.54 Clemens' resulting confinement was particularly suited to the lengthy disputations of book 2.

The publication of Christian Science was a more complicated matter than the writing. What became book 1, chapters 1 through 4, was published as “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy,” in Cosmopolitan for October 1899. The article was a popular success, for which the author received $200 as a bonus,55 yet he did not carry out his plan of a series. He may have changed his mind as soon as Henry Mills Alden, editor of Harper's Magazine, proposed a new collection of his short works to be issued by Harper, for on Alden's letter he jotted “Xn Science” as a possible item under the heading “Articles for new book of sketches.”56 Harper issued The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays the next year, but the Christian Science material appeared only in the English and German versions, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Sketches. In this, besides the original “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy,” Mark Twain included what became book 1, chapters 5 through 8, under the same title, dated 1 May 1899. He then apparently dropped the subject of further publication until summer [begin page 22] 1902, when he considered running a series in Cosmopolitan which Collier would later issue as a book.57 These ideas came to nothing, and in September he tried to place unspecified Christian Science material with Harper's Weekly.58 The items were probably those he succeeded in placing with the North American Review the following month59 and which appeared in December 1902 and January 1903 as “Christian Science” and “Christian Science—II.” These installments were slightly revised versions of what became book 1, chapters 5 through 8, already published in the English and German editions of Hadleyburg. “Christian Science—III,” in the February number, and “Mrs. Eddy in Error,” published in April, were excerpts from the work in progress. Minus the “Later Still” section, the former became book 1, chapter 9.

In early December 1902 Mark Twain was planning to use his old and new writings on Christian Science only as part, though a large part, of another miscellaneous volume.60 But by late January he had stipulated with Harper a book entirely on the subject. At this point the story becomes ironic. On 28 January Frederick A. Duneka, the Harper editor, wrote him that Harper wished to issue the book in the spring, and on 11 February he wrote again, pressing Mark Twain to finish the book for publication by the end of April.61 The author did as urged, despite a siege of bronchitis in February,62 and the book was set in type and proofread by the middle of March. Yet after all this rush the publishers suddenly changed their minds. In Publishers' Weekly for 21 March their advertisement included Christian Science in the spring list, but in the number for 11 April they announced that “Neither Harper & Brothers nor the North American Review will publish in book form Mark Twain's papers on ‘Christian Science.’ All orders for [begin page 23] the book now on file will be cancelled.”63 Mark Twain's explanation for this reversal was that Harper did not dare antagonize the Christian Scientists.64 There is reason to believe him. Harper had been the only publisher of three to omit “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy” from the Hadleyburg volume. In his letter of 28 January, immediately after urging the author to finish his book, Duneka called it “mighty strong meat”—and presumably he had seen none of book 2. Yet without known pressure from Mark Twain, who claimed indifference, Harper renewed interest as early as 1905 and finally issued the book in February 1907.65 They chose a propitious time: Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy were once again under strong attack in newspapers and periodicals, as they had not been in 1903.66 Harper apparently scrupled at offending the Christian Scientists only while the popular temper was calm.

The eccentric structure of the book was due mainly to these vagaries of composition and publication. While his articles ran in the North American Review, Mark Twain received corrections of factual errors from W. D. McCrackan and other correspondents. He corrected some in the main text; others he corrected in footnotes, as if supplements were appropriate for material written four years earlier. Thus the statement on the original title page—“With Notes Containing Corrections to Date”—referred only to the footnotes in book 1. A greater oddity was the location of the appendixes before the last two chapters. The reason for it was his decision to include “Mrs. Eddy in Error.” Originally this was part [begin page 24] of book 2, chapter 8, following “The Sanctum Sanctorum and the Sacred Chair”; later he had it follow chapter 9. After taking it out for the April North American Review, he apparently could not with ease insert it in either place, perhaps because that section was already set in type. But location after the appendixes gave “Mrs. Eddy in Error” the status of a conclusion, for which it was obviously unsuited, and so Mark Twain wrote another chapter to follow. The division into books 1 and 2 accommodated his shift in focus between 1899 and 1903. In the first part he treated Christian Science as a recent socio-religious development. Thus he covered its peculiarities of tenet and language, with humorous stress upon an outsider's difficulties in understanding them; the basis of its special attraction, with testimonials from believers; its prospects as a trust and an established church in view of its shrewd appeal to human needs. In 1903 his chief target was Mrs. Eddy. Though he had more to say about church tenets and organization, he regarded them as evidence of her rare gifts for gaining and consolidating power. He transposed to book 2 his charge in Cosmopolitan that she did not write Science and Health, and all his humor and ridicule in book 2 were at her expense.

Because of its diffuseness and its complexities of attitude Christian Science often confused early readers, not just believers and skeptics but moderate critics who wanted the author to take a clear-cut stand based on familiar points. His disfavor was qualified, and some of his arguments were uncommon. Though he might satirize the extravagances of faith-healing, he regarded it as legitimate treatment for certain ailments and on occasion recommended it to his family. Yet he despised Christian Science as a religious movement, with its prophet and disciples, its sacred texts, idols, and cultist vocabulary. He believed it was an exploitation, for the founder's own ends, of man's ability to cause and cure illness through acts of mind. The movement, he predicted, would expand until it became an established church, with full control over politics and culture in America, because it directed human credulity toward two most important goals, physical and [begin page 25] spiritual well-being. Euphoria as a treatment for dysphoria might confirm men in a cycle of illusion, but it was known to work, and when given a religious character it too well flattered their cosmic status for them to give it up. No other modern religion so appealed to this credulity as Christian Science, and thus the movement would prove irresistible. As early as December 1902, writing to Frederick W. Peabody, Mark Twain disowned all hope of persuasion:

Extremist reviewers on both sides did not like Mark Twain's articles or his book. Spokesmen for Christian Science disputed his facts and arguments but took greatest offense at his tone. One of them believed it “impossible to read Mark Twain's book . . . without coming to the conclusion that not only Christian Science but every other religious belief appeals to his sense of humor . . . and this gives rise to the question . . . whether the comic point of view is a valuable or even a reliable point of view in the consideration [begin page 26] of religious topics.”68 From Clemens' “pernicious habit” of “license or intemperance in expression” B. O. Flower inferred that his “sense of moral proportion at times seems seriously impaired.”69 The most violent review came earlier, and from the other side. In January 1903, considering only the first North American Review article, the Philadelphia Medical Journal contended that

The controversy over Christian Science was too severe and its parties too exclusive for either to take comfort in a marginal allegiance.

Reviewers with more composure were troubled by Mark Twain's irresolution. In December 1902 Harper's Weekly suspected that the reader of his recent North American Review article would “wonder where Mark Twain has left him; whether Mark approves Christian Science or not.”71 In 1907 the Dial, calling the book “curiously tempered,” traced the problem to a “mingling of caricature and sober attack” that made it difficult “to determine under which mask the part is going forward.”72 Similarly, the [begin page 27] Nation judged the work a “skimble-skamble” that could not “be regarded as either a serious or a humorous contribution to the discussion.”73 The mixture of modes, especially the addition of humor, was a common objection among moderate reviewers. The Spectator also believed readers would be “bewildered by the confused method,”74 and the Catholic World protested that the “national humorist” so often “had recourse to irreverence towards religious subjects . . . that no person of any religious belief could consider him a suitable candidate for the office of pronouncing a verdict on any cult or creed, even though it be one so grotesque and extravagant as Christian Science.”75 In view of this reaction Mark Twain was wise to suppress other humorous touches. Reminded of Mrs. Eddy's resemblance to Lydia Pinkham, he once planned to include portraits of Mrs. Pinkham in book 1 and Mrs. Eddy in book 2, with no name under either.76 He had also planned to include several satiric illustrations—his own drawings, crude as ever. One shows Mrs. Eddy as the Statue of Liberty, raising Science and Health in her right hand and a dollar in her left, with the faith-healer J. A. Dowie climbing up her side on a ladder. Another shows a stick figure holding Science and Health, from which three smaller volumes looking like butterflies are escaping. He labeled them Greek, Hebrew, and Latin in reference to Mrs. Eddy's claim of a youthful proficiency at languages.77

Some reviews were favorable. The New York Times found the author “vigorous” and “uncompromising,” and the Athenaeum believed it was “not easy to see how the subject itself could be more fairly dealt with.”78 But these were estimates of his position at least as much as of his performance. No one without animus toward Christian Science or Mrs. Eddy thought highly of [begin page 28] Mark Twain's book, and it has been generally ignored since these subjects ceased to be controversial. There is little evidence of Clemens' feelings about the reception. Drafts of answers to unfavorable letters indicate testiness, which can be explained by his belief that the correspondents had not read the book.79 Though he had professed not to care whether Harper issued it, he never regretted the publication. And whether or not he expected to persuade anyone, he must have been pleased at the responses of Christian Scientists. Their outrage merely confirmed his longstanding conviction that people who believed they had found the truth looked no further. For the same reason he could enjoy the dissatisfaction of those who thought his criticisms did not go far enough. He had roused in these people prejudices no less absurd than the illusions of Christian Science.

Mark Twain wrote “Letters from the Earth” in October and November 1909 at “Stormfield,” his home near Redding, Connecticut. It was his last writing of such length, almost the last of all his works. He may have left the manuscript incomplete—there is no contemporary typescript of it—but he clearly regarded the work as a major statement of his opinions. Like What Is Man? it warranted declamation among friends but was too dangerous for publication. “I've been writing ‘Letters from the Earth,’ ” he informed his young friend Elizabeth Wallace, “and if you will come here and see us, I'll read passages to you. This book will never be published. Paine likes it, but then, Paine is going to be damned anyhow.”80 Owing much to patterns adapted from Mark Twain's lectures and his Autobiographical Dictation, “Letters from the Earth” was a loose commentary on several of his favorite themes, [begin page 29] brought up during a running attack on Christian myths and interpretations.

Satan, the voice of the commentary, had fascinated Mark Twain for years.81 He was attracted by the image of a character rebelling against God, seeing energy and independence in this action, rather than evil. To indicate his liberation from traditional fears, he cast Satan in several works as a figure innocent and glamorous, at times indeed a supernatural Hank Morgan indulging his “circus side” in prodigies of creation and destruction (“The Mysterious Stranger”). For a number of reasons Satan was necessary in the countermyth of Mark Twain's late period. When Satan pitied mankind (for example, “That Day in Eden”), he expressed an awareness of man's original innocence and God's responsibility for man's degradation, a knowledge that could not be trusted if expounded by a merely human character. On the other hand, Satan loathed mankind for offenses that neither God nor man rightly appreciated: sins not against God but against man's best qualities. Mark Twain's Satan was a paragon of those qualities. He possessed the freedom, intelligence, and humor which men claimed for themselves yet denied in their actions and codes. And since he also represented the best in a deity—compassion and disdain where merited—Satan was a measure for the shortcomings of both God and man. By picking for this standard the evil figure in Christian myth, Mark Twain might show how far Western man's habituation in biblical morality had corrupted his moral judgment.

There were important differences between the Satans of “The Mysterious Stranger” and “Letters from the Earth.” In the earlier work he was an actor as well as a voice for arguments. Despite his air of unconcern, he interceded on behalf of the good characters and severely punished the bad. Though his wisdom was beyond human comprehension, he addressed the boy narrator with urgency, as if an effort at instruction was worthwhile. If Mark [begin page 30] Twain's notion of the character led to his choice of literary form, the Satan of “Letters from the Earth” showed a significant change in conception. The moral and philosophic paragon no longer acted or spoke with a human representative because there could be no profitable relations with mankind. Satan had nothing to do, whether for man or against God, and so his proper role was that of an observer, alien to all except members of his select species. Hence Mark Twain resorted to epistolary fantasy, a form he had used so long ago as 1889 when he wrote his “Letters from a Dog.” But the earlier work, spare and august, was a conventional rendering of the genre that tried to avoid the tone of human personality in the speaker. In “Letters from the Earth” the speaker's style, indeed many of his interests and examples, were obviously typical of the author. He no longer cared to aggrandize his opinions through the eloquence and marvels of a Philip Traum. His own style was fit for the arguments, and the arguments only needed expression.

Mark Twain's statement that the work would never be published was apparently only a way of classifying it among those manuscripts too shocking for general knowledge. He did not prohibit publication, and as early as 1912 Albert Bigelow Paine could include a passage in his biography of the author without making it seem a remarkable disclosure.82 But publication of the whole work was not contemplated until Bernard DeVoto became executor of the Mark Twain Papers following Paine's death in 1937.83 One of DeVoto's first projects was a miscellaneous volume with “Letters from the Earth” as its feature. He got his typescripts ready for the printer, only to have Clemens' daughter Clara protest the inclusion of certain items. The publication was postponed for more than twenty years, until she withdrew her objections. DeVoto's texts were issued posthumously by Harper & Row in September 1962, through the agency of Henry Nash Smith, then Literary Editor of the Mark Twain Papers. The publication was [begin page 31] greeted as an important event, for by the 1960s Mark Twain was counted among the classic American writers—and was one of the few with popular appeal. Life magazine printed several selections.84 The book was on best-seller lists for many weeks and soon gained wide circulation as an inexpensive paperback. Major newspapers and journals issued long reviews, some of them by eminent literary scholars.

“Letters from the Earth,” the title piece, received particular attention, and most of it was favorable. Reviewers liked the brilliance of the prose, characterizing it in such phrases as “compressed and savage” and “the real Twain effervescence.”85 But though enough time had passed for a later generation to enjoy the author's style, too much had passed for a serious concern with his opinions. One reviewer thought they would shock only “someone's Victorian aunt” and readers unacquainted with similar products of Mark Twain's late years.86 After describing Mark Twain's contempt for Christianity as “less likely to shock the modern reader than he imagined,” Time said that Mark Twain's “bleak outlook in his old age was shaped partly by personal tragedy” and that he was “a 19th century American romantic with a romantic's aversion . . . to organized religion.”87 His arguments had become so dated that the magazine could dismiss them with biographical and historical truisms. The most specific objection to the arguments was that they were too literal. As another reviewer put it, “Biblical scholarship has so radically altered the literalness Twain read into the Scriptures, his satire is likely to seem naive.”88 Noting the same characteristic, Time thought it a stratagem to make “the worst possible case for the Bible by interpreting it as literally as [begin page 32] possible.” The objection also appeared in a religious periodical. In the guise of “Luciferino” writing to Satan, a reviewer decided that “this isn't really the diabolical book we have been waiting for. If it had only come out in Bob Ingersoll's day I could have made fine tinder with it. Nowadays, about the only place to use it is with some naïve, rebelling kid brought up in literalism.”89 But this charge ignored an at least equal literalism in the Christianity Mark Twain was attacking, and thus indicated how foreign his issues had become in fifty-three years. He was trying to demonstrate the incompatibility of Christian faith with the earthly desires of men, the discrepancy between the Christian image of a benign God and the God of the Bible; and in the long run, a tendency in men to construct religions that flattered and abased them. Reviewers probably did not mean to avoid these issues. Their causal explanations and the charge of literalism suggest rather that they did not believe an individual could legitimately argue his convictions. The reviewers were living in an era when the literate public considered the religious disputes of individuals vulgar and pointless, in part because it doubted the claims of individuals to religious certitude, even a certitude of doubt.

But to Mark Twain, although there were prudential reasons for hiding his opinions, there was no arrogance in holding them, no naïveté in thinking they counted, and no futility in repeating them in the manuscripts he suppressed. In his age it was imperative to have religious convictions or, among unbelievers, convictions about religion. Church membership was not only a social convention and career advantage but a gauge of one's place in the culture, for distinctions among denominations followed ethnic and class lines. If one could not accept such distinctions, or if one became an agnostic, one laid claim to a higher wisdom that demanded at least a private formulation of principles. A man might hope to support his claim because in that transitional period he still trusted his own religious insights though he considered other [begin page 33] men's to be shaped by circumstance. For religious deviates like Mark Twain the negativity of their insights was an important test of truth. Believing that the general optimism represented a weakness for pleasant fancies, such men could respond to the concept of an inhospitable and destructive universe with somber jubilation because it seemed the hard-won object of a courageous understanding. Few men dared, like Ingersoll and Francis Newman, to be iconoclasts in public, but though there is relevance in the familiar charge of hypocrisy against secret skeptics, they thought they were honorable in maintaining their private beliefs while submitting to the compromise of an outer decorum. Far from being eccentric, Mark Twain's concern with his philosophical ideas was crucial to his dignity.

This volume includes Mark Twain's previously published philosophical writings. Fictional pieces (even some which develop arguments contained here) are ordinarily excluded, as are other works appropriate to different volumes in this edition. However “Letter from the Recording Angel,” “The Five Boons of Life,” and “Letters from the Earth,” although they are in a strict sense fictional, have been judged more relevant to the present volume than to the volumes of short fiction. “Things a Scotsman Wants to Know,” previously unpublished, is included by agreement with the editor of The Mark Twain Papers, as being especially relevant to themes of this volume. Other unpublished items appear as supplements because of their close relation to What Is Man? , Christian Science, and “ ‘The Turning Point of My Life.’ ”

The two works that break off with unfinished sentences, “Bible Teaching and Religious Practice” and the introductory section of “Letters from the Earth,” were abandoned by the author or else their endings have been lost. The order of works in this volume is according to date of publication or, for those unpub- [begin page 34] lished during the author's lifetime, date of composition. For works published during his lifetime, dates of first publication appear in roman type below titles; for works first published after his death, dates are in italics and indicate time of composition.