Autobiography of Mark Twain (119 page)

“It is better,” he said, “that we have a general discussion, and as many of us as possible express our views.”

Then Mr. Rockefeller raised a question calculated to give the members opportunity for discussion. He took up the Ten Commandments, and after dividing them into the first five as relating to man’s obligations to God and the second five as relating to man’s obligation to his neighbor, he said:

“We are so in the habit of following and obeying most of the Commandments that it is useless to take them up. Let us take the First and Fourth Commandments. Let us now consider the First Commandment, and see if we worship only one God. Many of us give our first thought to our pleasures, and it is very frequently the case to-day that our first thought is for worldly possessions. A stranger coming here would say that the God of New York was the God of Wealth. When we think of pleasure or of wealth before we think of God, then we violate the First Commandment.

“I do not mean to say that we should not be moved by ambition or be given to innocent pleasure, but I mean to say that when we put God second to these aims, we are then not worshipping Him as we should.

“When the rich young man was told to go and give all his possessions to the poor, it was because Christ realized that the rich young man was thinking first of his wealth and then of God, and violating the First Commandment.

“In the consideration of the Fourth Commandment, let us try to discover what is the proper way to observe the Sabbath. How far are we justified in violating the restrictions put down in that commandment?”

Several discussed Sabbath observance. Then Mr. Rockefeller said:

“The subject is one that should give rise to general and helpful discussion. Is it right for me to play golf, to ride a bicycle, or go to the country on Sunday? That is what we want to know. We are here seeking truth. Let us think it over during the week and next Sunday be prepared with our views. Then we may reach a just conclusion.”

Young John D., you see, has been dripping theology again, yesterday. I missed his reunion of the honorary membership of his Bible Class last Thursday night, through illness, and I was very sincerely sorry. I had to telephone him not to come for me. However, perhaps it was of profit to me to be obliged to stay away, for I was going to say some things about lying which would have been too nakedly true for Bible Class consumption. That Bible Class is so uninured to anything resembling either truth or sense that I think a clean straight truth falling in its midst would make as much havoc as a bombshell.

BABY ADVICE IN A CAR.

Old Man Got It, 5-Year-Old Gave It, Mother Said, “Shut Up.”

A benevolent-looking old man clung to a strap in a crowded Broadway car bound uptown Saturday afternoon. In a corner seat in front of him huddled a weak-looking little woman who clasped a baby to her breast. Beside her sat another child, a girl perhaps 5 years old, who seemed to be attracted by the old man’s kindly face, for she gazed at him and the baby with her bright, intelligent eyes opened wide. He smiled at her interest and said to her:

“My! What a nice baby! Just such a one as I was looking for. I am going to take it.”

“You can’t,” declared the little girl, quickly. “She’s my sister.”

“What! Won’t you give her to me?”

“No, I won’t.”

“But,” he insisted, and there was real wistfulness in his tones, “I haven’t a baby in my home.”

“Then write to God. He’ll send you one,” said the child, confidently.

The old man laughed. So did the other passengers. But the mother evidently scented blasphemy.

“Tillie,” said she, “shut up and behave yourself!”

That is a scrap which I have cut from this morning’s
Times
. It is very prettily done, charmingly done; done with admirable ease and grace—with the ease and grace that are born of feeling and sympathy, as well as of practice with the pen. Every now and then a newspaper reporter astonishes me with felicities like this. I was a newspaper reporter myself forty-four years ago, and during three subsequent years—but as I remember it I and my comrades never had time to cast our things in a fine literary mould. That scrap will be just as touching and just as beautiful three hundred years hence as it is now.

I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published, after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method—a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along like contact of flint with steel. Moreover, this autobiography of mine does not select from my life its showy episodes, but deals merely in the common experiences which go to make up the life of the average human being, and the narrative must interest the average human being because these episodes are of a sort which he is familiar with in his own life, and in which he sees his own life reflected and set down in print. The usual, conventional autobiographer seems to particularly hunt out those occasions in his career when he came into contact with celebrated persons, whereas his contacts with the uncelebrated were just as interesting to him, and would be to his reader, and were vastly more numerous than his collisions with the famous.

Howells was here yesterday afternoon, and I told him the whole scheme of this autobiography and its apparently systemless system—only apparently systemless, for it is not that. It is a deliberate system, and the law of the system is that I shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else the moment its interest for me is exhausted. It is a system which follows no charted course and is not going to follow any such course. It is a system which is a complete and purposed jumble—a course which begins nowhere, follows no specified route, and can never reach an end while I am alive, for the reason that if I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me in my lifetime. I told Howells that this autobiography of mine would live a couple of thousand years without any effort and would then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time.

He said he believed it would, and asked me if I meant to make a library of it.

I said that that was my design, but that if I should live long enough the set of volumes could not be contained merely in a city, it would require a State, and that there would not be any Rockefeller alive, perhaps, at any time during its existence who would be able to buy a full set, except on the instalment plan.

Howells applauded, and was full of praises and endorsement, which was wise in him and judicious. If he had manifested a different spirit I would have thrown him out of the window. I like criticism, but it must be my way.

Day before yesterday there was another of those happy literary efforts of the reporters, and I meant to cut it out and insert it to be read with a sad pleasure in future centuries, but I forgot and threw the paper away. It was a brief narrative, but well stated. A poor little starved girl of sixteen, clothed in a single garment, in mid-winter, (albeit properly speaking this is spring) was brought in her pendent rags before a magistrate by a policeman, and the charge against her was that she had been found trying to commit suicide. The Judge asked her why she was moved to that crime, and she told him, in a low voice broken by sobs, that her life had become a burden which she could no longer bear; that she worked sixteen hours a day in a sweat-shop; that the meagre wage she earned had to go toward the family support; that her parents were never able to give her any clothes or enough to eat; that she had worn this same ruined garment as long back as she could remember; that her poor companions were her envy because often they had a penny to spend for some pretty trifle for themselves; that she could not remember when she had had a penny for such a purpose. The court, the policemen, and the other spectators cried with her—a sufficient proof that she told her pitiful tale convincingly and well. And the fact that I also was moved by it, at second-hand, is proof that that reporter delivered it from his heart through his pen, and did his work well.

In the remote parts of the country the weekly village newspaper remains the same curious production it was when I was a boy, sixty years ago, on the banks of the Mississippi. The metropolitan daily of the great city tells us every day about the movements of Lieutenant General so and so and Rear-Admiral so and so, and what the Vanderbilts are doing, and what hedge beyond the frontiers of New York John D. Rockefeller is hiding behind to keep from being dragged into court and made to testify about alleged Standard Oil iniquities. These great dailies keep us informed of Mr. Carnegie’s movements and sayings; they tell us what President Roosevelt said yesterday and what he is going to do to-day. They tell us what the children of his family have been saying, just as the princelings of Europe are daily quoted—and we notice that the remarks of the Roosevelt children are distinctly princely in that the things they say are rather notably inane and not worth while. The great dailies kept us overwhelmed, for a matter of two months, with a daily and hourly and most minute and faithful account of everything Miss Alice and her fiancé were saying and doing and what they were going to say and what they were going to do, until at last, through God’s mercy they got married and went under cover and got quiet.

Now the court-circular of the remote village newspaper has always dealt, during these sixty years, with the comings and goings and sayings of
its
local princelings. They have told us during all those years, and they still tell us, what the principal grocery man is doing and how he has bought a new stock; they tell us that relatives are visiting the ice-cream man, that Miss Smith has arrived to spend a week with the Joneses, and so on, and so on. And all that record is just as intensely interesting to the villagers as is the record I have just been speaking of, of the doings and sayings of the colossally conspicuous personages of the United States. This shows that human nature is all alike; it shows that we like to know what the big people are doing, so that we can envy them. It shows that the big personage of a village bears the same proportion to the little people of the village that the President of the United States bears to the nation. It shows that
conspicuousness
is the only thing necessary in a person to command our interest
and, in a larger or smaller sense, our worship. We recognize that there are
no
trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them. In a village they are just as prodigious as they are when the subject is a personage of national importance.

The Swangos
.

From The Hazel Green (Ky.) Herald.

Dr. Bill Swango is able to be in the saddle again.

Aunt Rhod Swango visited Joseph Catron and wife Sunday.

Mrs. Shiloh Swango attended the auction at Maytown Saturday.

W. W. Swango has a nice bunch of cattle ready for the Mount Sterling market.

James Murphy bought ten head of cattle from W. W. Swango last week.

Mrs. John Swango of Montgomery County visited Shiloh Swango and family last week.

Mrs. Sarah Ellen Swango, wife of Wash, the noted turkey trader of Valeria, was the guest of Mrs. Ben Murphy Saturday and Sunday.

Now that is a very genuine and sincere and honest account of what the Swangos have been doing lately in the interior of Kentucky. We see at a glance what a large place that Swango tribe hold in the admiration and worship of the villagers of Hazel Green, Kentucky. In this account, change Swango to
Vanderbilt;
then change it to
Carnegie;
next time change it to
Rockefeller;
next time change it to the
President;
next time to the
Mayor of New York;
next time to Alice’s new husband. Last change of all, change
Mrs. Shiloh Swango
to
Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth
. Then it’s a court-circular, all complete and dignified.

CAPT. E. L. MARSH
.