The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (101 page)

“
Nothing
exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence.
Nothing exists save empty space—and you!”

“I!”

“And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a
thought
. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream—your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me. . . .

“I am perishing already—I am failing—I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a
thought
, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons, ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . .

“You perceive,
now
, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a
thought
—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

1916

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¹
This glycerin catastrophe is borrowed from a floating newspaper item, whose author’s name I would give if I knew it.
M
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T
.
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²
California
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³
Hawaiian Islands
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⁴
Left out of
A Tramp Abroad,
because it was feared that some of the particulars had been exaggerated, and that others were not true. Before these suspicions had been proven groundless, the book had gone to press.
M
.
T
.
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⁵
A fact. The original fraud was ingeniously and fraudfully duplicated, and exhibited in New York as the “only genuine” Cardiff Giant (to the unspeakable disgust of the owners of the real colossus) at the very same time that the latter was drawing crowds at a museum in Albany.
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⁶
This is not a fancy sketch. I got it from a clergyman who was an instructor at Woolwich forty years ago, and who vouched for its truth.
M
.
T
.
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⁷
The text for this story is a touching incident mentioned in Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell.
M
.
T
.
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⁸
From the Springfield Republican, April 12, 1902.
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^*9
At West Point the bugle is supposed to be saying:
“I can’t get ’em up,
I can’t get ’em up,
I can’t get ’em up in the morning!”
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^*10
“Lights Out”
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¹¹
The Captain could not remember what this word was. He said it was in a foreign tongue.
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MARK TWAIN,
born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, led one of the most exciting and adventuresome of literary lives. Raised in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, Twain had to leave school at age twelve to seek work. He was successively a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a halfhearted Confederate soldier (for a few weeks), and a prospector, miner, and reporter in the western territories. His experiences furnished him with a wide knowledge of humanity, as well as with the perfect grasp of local customs and speech that manifests itself so well in his writing.

With the publication in 1865 of “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Twain gained national attention as a frontier humorist. Boasting of himself as “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” he turned out the lighthearted colorful tales of his early years: “A Day at Niagara” (1869), “A Curious Experience” (1881), “The Stolen White Elephant” (1882), and other such delightful pieces.

With the publication of
Life on the Mississippi
(1883), which includes some of the tales found in this anthology, and finally, the novel
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885), Twain was recognized by the literary establishment as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce.

For over forty-five years, books, stories, travelogues, and observations emerged from his fertile imagination. Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy and financial failure, Mark Twain grew more and more pessimistic—an outlook not alleviated by his natural skepticism and sarcasm. His later work reflects this darker turn of mind. During this last period, Twain produced such “fables” of a fallen mankind as the brilliant and bitter “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899) and “The Mysterious Stranger” (1916). Though his fame continued to widen—Yale and Oxford awarded him honorary degrees, and he was in demand as a lecturer—Twain spent his last years in gloom and exasperation, writing venomously about “the damned human race.”

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