 Section XIII of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part VI, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. April 24, 1910. French sneer at Mark Twain. Last glimpse here of Mark Twain. Mark Twain, Philosopher of Democracy. Mark Twain's first English critic. And— England all right, declares Mr. Brice. French sneer at Mark Twain. Ernest Schiles calls him the most loveliest emailist. Special cable to the New York Times, Paris, April 23. Almost all of the French journals have published appreciative notices of the value of Mark Twain's literary work. One must suppose, in reading these notices, an extraordinarily widespread knowledge of the subtleties of the English language among Frenchmen. A surprising exception is found in Ernest Schiles, a critic much in the public view, who in a short article on Mark Twain seems determined to convince every reader possessing any degree of penetration that the views which he expresses are the product of ignorance and anti-Americanism combined. This article is published in Gilles Blas, which has also been conspicuously unique in its sneering comments—not by any means witty—upon Theodore Roosevelt since his arrival in Paris. Mr. Schiles says in effect that Mark Twain did well to die and that it was not his fault, if while he was all his life the most laborious humorist, he was totally lacking in wit. Mark Twain's humil, Mr. Schiles adds, was painful, his fantasies dense and difficult to follow. By them one may estimate the exact distance which separates the Yankee country from the civilized world, but anyhow hurrah for Roosevelt. Last glimpse here of Mark Twain. They opened a coffin in the brick church and three thousand persons saw his dead face. A tramp in the throng. Dr. Van Dyke pays his tribute and the Reverend Joseph Twitchell chokes down his tears to pray. A short pause was made in the journey of Samuel Langhorne Clemens to his final resting place in Elmira yesterday, and he was brought to the brick church at Fifth Avenue and 37th Street, that those who knew him might not be deprived of opportunity to see his face for the last time. The reading from the scripture, a short address, and a prayer constituted the simple service. Then for an hour and a half a stream of people from all walks of life passed in front of the beer. The same spirit which had led to the unbarring of Stormfield, to breezes and sunshine on the day after the death, pervaded the church yesterday. There was no gloom, only the peace that Mark Twain would have desired. The people who passed by the coffin saw not so much the man, Samuel L. Clemens, a philosopher through the necessity for bearing misfortune, as Mark Twain, who was everything from Huckleberry Finn and Colonel Mulbury Sellers. Mr. and Mrs. Osev Gavrilievich, the latter heavily veiled, sat in the front pew on the left side of the church. With them were Mr. and Mrs. E. E. Loomis and William Dean Howells. Behind these sat the Albert Bigelow Paynes and Jarvis Langdon. In another pew were the widow and children of Samuel Moffat, a favorite nephew of Mr. Clemens, who died in California several years ago. The funeral party from Reading arrived in New York at noon, Mr. and Mrs. Gavrilievich going first to friends. The male members of the party accompanied the body to the brick church. At the Grand Central Station a few who knew the train on which the party was to arrive had gathered, and when the body was taken out a crowd collected and all heads were bared as the coffin was lifted into the hearse. Throng at the church. It was originally intended to open the church to the public at three o'clock after the holders of the four hundred tickets which had been distributed had taken their seats, but the crowd at thirty seventh street and fifth avenue threatened to block traffic on the avenue and at two thirty it was decided to let them in. The church was almost immediately filled. In fact several hundred persons who could not be accommodated remained on the streets during the service until it was time to view the body. Inside the church complete quiet was maintained even while the people were taking their seats. The effect was enhanced by the soft tones of the organ when Clarence Dickinson began playing Chopin's funeral march. As he changed to the death-chariot music of Grieg's Death of Assa, the Reverend Dr. Henry Van Dyke and Dr. Joseph H. Twitchel, both old friends of the author, came through the curtains into the pulpit. Dr. Van Dyke stepped forward and began to read the scriptural part of the Presbyterian funeral service. When he had finished he entered without a break on his address. It was a simple and dignified estimate of the worth of the work that Mark Twain's life had produced. Throughout it was evident that the speaker was making a strong effort to keep down his emotion and control his voice. There was a noticeable break in his voice when he said, Now he is gone. Dr. Van Dyke's address. In part Dr. Van Dyke said, Those who know the story of Mark Twain's career know how bravely he faced hardships and misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet a debt of conscience following the injunction of the New Testament to provide not only things honest, but things honourable in the sight of all men. Those who know the story of his friendships and his family life know that he was one who loved much and faithfully even unto the end. Those who know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and irrepressible humour which was his gift there was a foundation of serious thoughts and noble affections and desires. Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange incongruous world which must seem humorous even to the highest mind. Of these the Bible says, He that citeth in the heaven shall laugh, the Almighty shall hold them in derision. But the mark of this higher humour is that it does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent, only at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical. Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his humour was infallible, but we may say without doubt that he used his gift not for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work is clean and wholesome. He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world's false claimants out of court, and entangled many of the world's false witnesses in the net of ridicule. In his best books and stories, coloured with his own experience, he touched the absurdities of life with penetrating, but not unkindly mockery, and made us feel somehow the infinite pathos of life's realities. No one can say that he ever failed to reverence the purity, the frank, joyful, genuine nature of the little children of whom Christ said, of such is the kingdom of heaven. Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud. We are glad of his friendship, glad that he has expressed so richly one of the great elements in the temperament of America, glad that he has left such an honourable record as a man of letters, and glad also for his sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace, and we trust happy in the fuller light. Rest after toil, port after stormy seas, death after life, death greatly please. Bad news to Dr. Twitchell. Then the reverend Dr. Joseph H. Twitchell of Hartford came forward to deliver the prayer. Associated with the dead author from the middle and happiest part of his life, the minister who performed the marriage that brought so much happiness into Mr. Clemens' life and lived to hold the funeral services of not only the wife, but of three of the children born of the marriage. It was no wonder that when he came to deliver a prayer at the death of his friend, his voice should fail him. Throughout the short service he had sat with bowed head to conceal the fact that tears had found their way to the surface. Now he made a determined effort to control himself, and finally was able to say what he had to say. Although fully as old as Mark Twain, Mr. Twitchell carries his age well. He is a big, vigorous-looking man, with his mass of heavy white hair, he does not look unlike Mark Twain himself. His prayer, except for the benediction by Dr. Van Dyke, ended the service. When he left the pulpit and retired into the robing room he received a blow that was particularly sad owing to the circumstances under which it came, a telegram saying that his wife was seriously ill in Hartford and that he must return there at once. He left the church immediately and took the first train for his home. It was arranged that in his stead the Reverend Samuel E. Eastman, pastor of the Park Church, should officiate at the services in Elmira. 3,000 passed the coffin. The service in the Brick Church lasted only twenty minutes. It is estimated that fifteen hundred persons, crowded to hear it, at its conclusion it was announced that the coffin would be opened. The lines of those within the church began to pass around it, and the crowd from the street pushed in. This was at half-past three. There was no abatement in the stream for the next hour and a half. Finally at five o'clock it was found necessary to close the doors, as the body had to be taken to Hoboken and put aboard the special train for Elmira. More than three thousand persons meantime had passed in front of the coffin. Every walk of life was represented in the line, which filed slowly past the coffin. Before the doors were opened a score of brightly dressed little girls appeared in front of the church, each with flowers in her hand. They were disappointed at not being allowed to enter, but the ushers appeased them by taking their flowers and setting them near the beer. When the people had been filing past only a few moments it could be seen that almost every nationality was represented. There were several negroes, Jervis Langdon who was standing near the head of the coffin was much interested in one of the persons who passed him. He said that the man looked the very picture of Tramphood, but his bearing was easy and he seemed to be unconscious of his tattered clothes, stopping for a long look at the face of Mark Twain. Mr. Payne also saw him and said he was probably someone who had seen better days in which he had read Mark Twain and conceived a liking for his work. All religions were represented, some of those who passed crossed themselves as they did so. Bay Wreath on the Coffin. The idea of simplicity was carried out in all the arrangements. There were no pallbearers. Although surrounded by flowers there was nothing on the coffin except a wreath which Dan Beard had made of bay leaves, gathered the night before at the request of the family, on the hill behind the house where Mark Twain spent a good deal of his time. This was put on the coffin when it was taken out of Stormfield and will not be removed. A copper plate on the lid bore the inscription Samuel Langhorn Clemens, Mark Twain, 1910. All the persons of literary prominence who are in this part of the country were present yesterday, besides delegations from the better known clubs, Albert Bigelow Payne, biographer-to-be of the dead humorist, and Major Frederick Lee and Frederick A. Deneke of Harpers were in the vestibule of the church to receive. Other than these the ushers were the undertaker's men. Here are some of the prominent persons who were present. William Dean Howells, Miss Mildred Howells, Andrew and Mrs. Carnegie, Professor and Mrs. Brander Matthews, W. W. Ellsworth, and C. C. Bewell of the Century Company, David Bishman, Will N. Harbin, Peter Finley Dunn, Sidney Porter, O. Henry, James Lane Allen, Will Carlton, Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Collier, John B. Stanchfield, Phillip V. Meggels, Robert Underwood Johnson, Joseph H. Chote, J. Henry Harper, Miss Elizabeth Jordan, Robert Briggs, Dan Beard, Henry Holt, Don Sates, E. S. Martin, President John Finley, Colonel Daniel Appleton, Mrs. George Harvey, Joseph W. Harper, Mr. and Mrs. H. M. Alden, Ex-Governor Joseph W. Folk of Missouri, Julian Hawthorne, and Emma Thurston. There were also delegations from the Pilgrims, both American and English, the Authors Club, the Lotus Club, the Century Association, and the Players. Flowers came from the Aldine Association, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Booth Tarkenton, Mrs. H. H. Rogers, Mr. and Mrs. H. H. Rogers Jr., and Mr. and Mrs. William R. Coe, son-in-law and daughter of the late H. H. Rogers. Robertson Coe, Mr. and Mrs. Urban H. Broughton, Robert J. Collier, the Robert Fulton Memorial Association, Mr. and Mrs. Philip James McCook, Colonel and Mrs. George Harvey, Emily M. Burbank, the Pilgrims of both countries, and Harper Brothers. Last night the coffin was taken across the ferry and put aboard the private car, Lake Forest, owned by E. E. Loomis, whose wife is a niece of Mr. Clemens. Immediately after the service Mr. and Mrs. Gabrilevich went to the apartment of the Loomis' which they left late last night for Hoboken. The party accompanying the body to Elmira consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Gabrilevich, Mr. and Mrs. Loomis, Albert Bigelopane, Frederick Toneka, and Major Lee. Mark Twain, Philosopher of Democracy. The serious side of the famous humorist whose dominant note was Love of Liberty and Hate of Shams. I am through with work for this life and this world, Mark Twain, to the reporters on his return from Bermuda December 1909. Call a philosopher a humorist, and for the rest of his life, though he lived to be more than seventy, people will grin expectantly whenever he hews a sigh. There are humorists and humorists. There is Marshall P. Wilder, and there was Shakespeare. It might have perturbed Shakespeare a little if, when he returned to London, city editors had called the staff Funnyman and said, "'Bill Shakespeare, the humorist, got back to-day! Go and get him to spring a few jokes!' It might have annoyed him if people had eagerly bought his latest play, and after reading it had said disappointedly, "'I don't see anything funny in this hamlet. Shakespeare isn't doing as good work as he used to. There isn't a laugh in it anywhere!' But the label humorist was clapped on Mark Twain, the same label that is proudly worn by Marshall P. Wilder, and he passed into his seventies leaving a great many Americans unaware, that it was an inadequate a description as would be the case if George Washington was described as a surveyor. Washington was a surveyor, of course, yes, and Mark Twain a humorist. Therefore it came to pass that an eminent British critic was able to read from cover to cover that terrific blazing denunciation of monarchy, aristocracy, and class privilege called a kinetic Yankee at King Arthur's Court, looking laboriously for the joke. He found it, of course, but he remarked disappointedly that the joke of putting a Yankee at the round table was one of which was exhausted in twenty pages, and to prolong it over four hundred was to spread it pretty thin. If someone had told Britain that looking for the joke was as silly a proceeding in this case as it would have been in the case of Uncle Tom's cabin, he would never have understood it. Some years ago a well-known American novelist published the story of how he and some of his friends got into a dispute about what town it really was that had served as the model for the man that corrupted Hadleyburg. Some thought it was one city, some another. Finally meeting Mark Twain on a railroad train, they left it to him. Mark Twain listened to them and evaded the subject. The novelist could not imagine why. It is easy to understand what weariness of soul must have possessed Mark Twain when this man, not an ordinary fool but a man of letters, and his friends presumably all men of intelligence, evinced so complete a misunderstanding of him. For, of course, the place that was the model for Hadleyburg were the human race, the nineteen men of light and leading, were the virtuous and untempted of all times and all places. What would John Bunyan have thought if some eminent men of his day had asked him to settle a bet? What city he had in mind when he made Christian flee from the city of destruction? London or Bristol? And John Bunyan's purpose was no stronger than, in many of his works, was Mark Twain's. Things hidden from the wise and prudent are revealed to babes. It was a fourteen-year-old child who first saw the truth, that astonishing little Susie Clemens, who studied her father with the wise eyes of a critical childhood, and then wrote down, He is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous. His prince and pauper is his most original and best production. It shows the most of any of his books what kind of pictures are in his mind, usually. But that the pictures of England in the sixteenth century, and the adventures of a little prince and pauper, are the kind of things he mainly thinks about. But that that book and those pictures represent the train of thought and imagination he would be likely to be thinking of today, tomorrow, or next day, more nearly than those given in Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. It is so, yet," commented Mark Twain, reading this comment over twenty-one years later when the little hand that wrote it had long been dust, When we are alone, continued the keen little observer, nine times out of ten he talks about some very earnest subjects, with an occasional joke thrown in, and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. He is as much of a philosopher as anything, I think. I think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what. In a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous. By this judgment of his clear-sighted little critic, Mark Twain stood. He felt that she understood him. Two years after she passed out of my life, he said long afterward, I wrote a philosophy. Of the three persons who have seen the manuscript, only one understood it, and all three condemned it. If she could have read it, she also would have condemned it. But she would have understood it. While I have been waiting here, said George Bernard Shaw, grasping Twain's hand as he stepped on English shores two or three years ago, the representatives of the press have been asking me whether you were really serious when you wrote the Jumping Frog. If they had asked him if Twain were merely joking when he wrote Eve's Diary, the man that corrupted Hadley Berg, a Connecticut Yankee, or the Prince and the Pauper, they would have committed a blunder in which they would have had plenty of company. As long as he used a humorous setting for his doctrines, the mass of stupid people looked only at the setting and never saw the doctrine. When he dropped the comic mask and issued straight from the shoulder those savage denunciations of our Philippine policy and of the looting missionaries in China, the same stupid people were shocked and grieved and said it was regrettable to see the genial humorist deserting his usual walk to enter into polemics. They actually did not know that what he was saying in those denunciations was what he had been saying all along in the works which they had laughed over for the genial humor contained in them. Mark Twain, said Shaw, is by far the greatest American writer. I am speaking of him rather as a sociologist than as a humorist. Of course he is in very much the same position as myself. He has to put things in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking. And to judge by the shrieks of rage which were aroused by Twain's assaults upon General Funston and the American Board of Foreign Missions, Shaw was almost literally correct even as to the hanging. Yet all Twain did in those cases was to take the comic mask off and say without it what he had been saying from behind it for years. Never was there a more splendid Democrat than Mark Twain. His democracy is the sort that searches below the forms and cat words of the conventional democracy. Take, for instance, this view of loyalty to the institutions of the country, how Mark Twain's idea of it differs from that of the routine patriot. You see, my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing. It is the thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to. Institutions are extraneous. They are its mere clothing. And clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags, that is loyalty to unreason. It is pure animal. It belongs to monarchy. Was invented by monarchy. Let monarchy keep it. When Mark Twain came out seriously with the comic mask off against our Philippine policy, his denunciation was received with grieved pain and surprise, as something entirely new by the very people who ten years before had read and laughed over the Connecticut Yankee in that book, written long before the Philippine annexation, is this clear exposition of Mark Twain's doctrine on that point. There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world's mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and meaning. The sense and meaning implied, when it is used, that this is the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation as possibly being capable of self-government. And the implied sense of it is that there has been a nation somewhere, some time or other, which wasn't capable of it. Wasn't as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern it. When Elihi Root in 1906 made his speech pointing out the rapid centralization of government at Washington, the rapid wiping out of state rights, Mark Twain commented in his autobiography, He did not say, in so many words, that we are proceeding in a steady march toward eventual and unavoidable replacement of the republic by monarchy, but I suppose he was aware that that is the case. He notes the several steps, the customary steps, which in all ages have led to the consolidation of loose and scattered governmental forces into formidable centralizations of authority, but he stops there and doesn't add up the sum. Human nature being what it is, I suppose we must expect to drift into monarchy by and by. It is a saddening thought, but we cannot change our nature. We are all like we human beings, and in our blood and bone, and ineradicable, we carry the seeds out of which monarchies and aristocracies are grown. Worship of gods, titles, distinctions, power. We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy. We have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter, and when we get them the whole nation publicly chaffs and scoffs, and privately envies, and also is proud of the honour which has been conferred upon us. We run over our list of titled purchases every now and then in the newspapers, and discuss them and caress them, and are thankful and happy. Like all the other nations we worship money and the possessors of it, they being our aristocracy, and we have to have one. We like to read about rich people in the papers. The papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed. Then even leave out a football bullfight now and then, to get room for all the particulars of how, according to the display heading, rich woman fell down cellar, not hurt. The falling down the cellar is of no interest to us when the woman is not rich, but no rich woman can fall down cellar, and we not yearn to know all about it, and wish it was us. I suppose we must expect that unavoidable and irresistible circumstances will gradually take away the powers of the states and concentrate them in the central government, and that the Republic will then repeat the history of all time and become a monarchy. But I believe that if we obstruct these encroachments and steadily resist them, the monarchy can be postponed for a good while yet. Mark Twain was an advocate of every reform which seemed to him in line with this fundamental democracy of his, curtailment of privilege, extension of human rights, the democracy which was always his passion. He was an advocate of woman's suffrage, for instance. When he returned from Bermuda last December he was asked his views on that question and replied that he had advocated it in his writings for fifty years. The reporters asked him, that was before the recent demonstrations of the work of the militant suffragettes. Do you approve of their methods? And the sturdy Democrat made this significant reply. The cause of freedom cannot be one without vigorous fighting. Militant methods have appeared necessary to the women who have adopted them. The women have the interests of a great cause at stake, and I approve of their using any methods which they see fit for accomplishing the big results which they are fighting for. You may use one method to carry a cause to victory. I may use another. Militant methods have appeared necessary in the fight of the suffragettes in many places where the cause finds its main supporters. Here from his autobiography is a terrible visualization of some of those statistics which seem so meaningless when we gaze blankly at printed tables. With his usual dramatic method he introduces it with a reference to Tennyson's verses forecasting a future when airborne vessels of war shall meet and fight above the clouds and redden the earth below with a rain of blood. Then he introduced his statistics that on our two hundred thousand miles of railway we annually kill ten thousand persons outright and injure eighty thousand. Now for the picture. I had a dream last night. It was an admirable dream what there was of it. In it I saw a funeral procession. I saw it from a mountain peak. I saw it crawling along and curving here and there, serpent-like, through a level vast plain. I seemed to see a hundred miles of the procession, but neither the beginning of it nor the end of it was within the limits of my vision. The procession was in ten divisions. Each division marked by a somber flag, and the whole represented ten years of our railway activities in the accident line. Each division was composed of eighty thousand cripples and was bearing its own years ten thousand mutilated corpses to the grave. In the aggregate eight hundred thousand cripples and one hundred thousand dead drenched in blood. Another quotation showing the quality of Mark Twain's democracy again from Connecticut Yankee. Why it was like reading about France and the French before the ever memorable and blessed revolution which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood. One. A settlement of that horny debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hog's head of it that had been pressed by slow torture out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery, the like of which was not to be mated, but in hell. There were two rains of terror, if we would but remember it and consider it. The one wrought murder in heart passion, the other in heartless cold blood. The one lasted mere months. The other had lasted a thousand years. The one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons. The other upon a hundred millions. But our shutters are all for the horrors of the minor terror, the momentary terror, so to speak. Whereas what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning, compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over. But all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful terror, which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves. Here is his view on an established church. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad, and an established church is only a political machine. It was invented for that. It is nursed, cradled, preserved for that. It is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up, scattered condition. The Prince and the Pauper is a beautiful story, but it is also the plainest of parables. It is the parable of democracy, the equality of man, the Robert Burns democracy of, a man's a man, for all that. Put the pauper in the Prince's clothes, and after he has become adjusted to his circumstances no one can tell the difference. Indeed no one does suspect it even before that adjustment is made, and the pauper rules the kingdom wisely as the king, who has analyzed the meaning of mobs, the psychology of lynching, the philosophy of hoodlumism, the truth of white capping, as Mark Twain has in the speech which he puts into the mouth of Colonel Sherburn, addressing the cowed Arkansas mob that has come to lynch him in Huckleberry Finn. And its bitter analysis of certain phases of the South is all the more pregnant as coming from a born Missourian and ex-Confederate like Mark Twain. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man, because you're brave enough to tar and feather poor, friendless women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man's safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind, as long as it's daytime, and you're not behind him? Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North, so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man, all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the daytime and robbed a lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people, so much that you think you are braver than any other people, whereas you're just as brave and no braver. Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark, and it's just what they would do. So they always acquit, and then a man goes in the night with a hundred masked cowards at his back, and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is that you didn't bring a man with you. That's one mistake, and the other is that you didn't come in the dark and fetch your masks. Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching is going to be done, it will be done in the dark, southern fashion, and when they come they'll bring their masks and fetch a man along. If anyone wishes to know what Mark Twain thought of women, let him read Eve's Diary, but read it understandingly. Thousands have laughed over it. There must have been hundreds with sensibility enough to read it with a warming of the heart. How, throughout it, Mark Twain laughs at women with tears in his eyes. It is a portrait of woman. Running through all of it is this dogma. Through woman alone can there be a sense of beauty in the world. The superiority of woman to man is a tiresome and meaningless stock-and-trade after-dinner orators. Sick. Anybody has ever believed in it sincerely, or if he has, it is certain that he never succeeded in explaining it. But Mark Twain, without saying it at all, has deftly wrought on every page the explanation of wherein this superiority consists, without discussing at all that other question the superiority of man to woman. Contrasted with the sensitive, unimaginative, eager creature is the unimaginative, materialistic atom, who, conscious throughout of the things in which he is superior, never learns of the things in which she is superior. Never, that is, until the lonely man writes this inscription on her grave, where so ever she was, there was Eden. And with that the story closes. There is much more than democracy in Mark Twain's philosophy, but the other features of it would require a chapter by themselves. But his view of such matters as heredity, environment, and other catch words of this sort is never summed up better than in the Connecticut Yankee. Training. Training is everything. Training is all there is to a thing. We speak of nature. It is folly. There is no such thing as nature. What we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own. They are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us and therefore fairly creditable, or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambrick needle, all the rest being atoms, contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam clan, or grasshopper, or monkey, from who our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And, as for me, all that I think about in this plodding, sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me, that is truly me. The rest may land in shawl, and welcome for all I care. England all right, declares Mr. Bryce, his tribute to Mark Twain. One of the greatest writers, he says, at the St. George's Society dinner, Seth Lowe's warning. The members of the St. George's Society celebrated St. George's Day and the 124th anniversary of their own society last night with a dinner at the Waldorf Historia. Lloyd B. Sanderson, the President, was Toastmaster, and the Chief Orator was the Right Honourable James Bryce, the British Ambassador, who, after paying tribute to the admirable work done by the Society in relieving distress, spoke of the grief which Britons everywhere, no less than Americans, felt at the death of one who had adorned their common literature by his brilliant and varied gifts. Samuel Clemens, said the Ambassador, whom all the world, will continue to call Mark Twain, was one of the greatest writers of the generation now passing away. He was a great humorist, and also, when he dealt with serious themes, a master of pathos, a storyteller of inexhaustible inventive power, and at all times a profound student of human nature. His views were always profound and accurate. It has been my privilege to know Mr. Clemens personally, never intimately, but enough to appreciate the charm of his character, his kindness, his simplicity, his bright vivacity in talk, and his fine zeal and sympathy for all good causes. He was a man of whom America and indeed all the English-speaking race might well be proud, and whose sweet and noble memory those who knew him will ever cherish. End of Section 13, April 24, 1910, French sneer at Mark Twain, last glimpse here of Mark Twain, Mark Twain, philosopher of democracy, Mark Twain's first English critic, and England All Right, declares Mr. Brice, read by John Greenman. Section 14 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by John Greenman. April 25, 1910, Akkad calls Twain a seer. Pastor says he looked deep into the soul of things. The Reverend C. F. Akkad at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, last night, in a sermon on Mark Twain, said he was as great as any of the Hebrew prophets, and was not a humorist, as Americans felt, but a philosopher and a seer, as he was regarded in England. The text was First Samuel 9.9. For he that is now called a prophet was before time called a seer. A prophet, said Dr. Akkad, is a man who speaks for God. A seer is a man who sees into the very soul of things. Tonight I am going to talk about a great servant of humanity who was also a great seer of humanity, Mark Twain, a man who has deserved to be called as truly as any man of the Hebrew race a seer. He saw into the very depths of things, beneath the forms of things, deep into the soul. He refused to look through a guidebook, either when seeing Europe or looking through its art galleries. This was characteristic of the man from the first work he produced down to the last time he let the pen fall from his hand. This is why he was so much to the peoples beyond the seas. In this country Mark Twain is regarded as a humorist, but not so by the British people. Maybe of course the British can't appreciate humor. That is one of your most cherished delusions. Dr. Akkad then went on to tell of the dispatches quoting German and English papers on Mark Twain's death, all of which spoke of his deep passion for humanity and his wide sympathy and insight into the humanity. It was this, said Dr. Akkad, that made him so loved by the British. It was not the rollicking humor that took them. Here it was the great, rollicking, magnificent humor of Mark Twain that made him popular. He has added to the gaiety of nations. His humor was clean. I can't recall to mind one unclean jest of Mark Twain's. His humor was boisterous, extravagant, rollicking. It verged upon the profane, but isn't American humor always verging upon the profane? Without answering this, Dr. Akkad told an unpublished story of Mark Twain. It was told me by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, said Dr. Akkad. A young man was at a party at which Mark Twain was a guest. Mark Twain had at his service a long string of blasphemous oaths of his Mississippi pilot days. The young man said he would have to leave. Why? asked Mark Twain. Well, replied the young man, I don't like some of your language, and I'm sure my mother wouldn't like it. My boy, said Mark Twain, you'll never hear an oath while you're in this party. Thank you, said the young man. The story ended with Mark Twain living up to his word. Respect for women and reverence for womanhood is in everything Mark Twain ever wrote. He was pious beyond the meaning of his will, and he builded better than he knew this fine heart of gold. Dr. Akkad quoted from many of Mark Twain's books at length to illustrate his sermon. Mark Twain at rest. Buried beside wife. Simple ceremony held in the home of his brother-in-law, General Langdon. Schoolchildren's tribute. The five hundred boy pupils of Louisville High School send floral peace. Reverend Samuel Eastman officiated. Special to the New York Times. Elmira, New York, April 24. In a heavy downpour of rain, the body of Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain, was buried this afternoon in Woodlawn Cemetery beside that of his wife. The body was brought to the city at nine-thirty o'clock this morning in the private car of Vice President Loomis of the Lackawanna. In the party accompanying it were Mark Twain's daughter, Mrs. Osset Gabriilovitch, and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Loomis, Mr. and Mrs. Jervis Langdon, Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Collier, Mrs. Richard Watson Gilder, Major Fred T. Lee, and F. A. Donica. At three-thirty o'clock funeral services were conducted at the residence of General Langdon, brother of the departed wife of Mr. Clemens. The services were concluded in twenty-five minutes. The Reverend Samuel Eastman, who succeeded Thomas K. Beecher as pastor of the Park Congregational Church, officiated. In keeping with Mr. Clemens's wish, the ceremony was simple. There were no music, no honorary pallbearers, just the brief address and prayer by Dr. Eastman. The body lay in state in the very parlor where Mr. Clemens's marriage, of forty years ago, was held, and some of those who attended the wedding were there today to look for the last time upon the face of their friend. The services at the house were public, but the attendance was not large. Besides the funeral party which accompanied the body from Reading, the little gathering included only a few relatives and old friends. Dr. Eastman said in part, We are not here, at this time, to speak of the great man whose going hence the whole world mourns, nor to claim for him that place in the halls of fame which only time can give him. We are here to weep with those that weep, to give thanks with those whose own he was in the sacred bonds of human kinship and family affection. The last visit of Mr. Clemens till Myro was two years ago, when he came especially to be present at the dedication of the new organ in the Park Church. It was suggested then that he go to the old home on East Hill where he wrote many of his early stories, but he demurred, replying that such a visit would awaken sorrowful thoughts. He had not been to that former abode since before the death of his wife. It was recalled to-day that forty years ago Mr. Beecher held Sunday afternoon services at the Almyra Opera House, engaging a brass band, and thus shocking the Protestant Minister's Union which suspended Mr. Beecher from its roles. Mr. Clemens came to the defence of Mr. Beecher, and the methods he employed to elevate the masses, writing several articles on the subject for the local press. Just south of the Langdon residence in the Park stands the Beecher statue. On the occasion of his last visit here Mr. Clemens viewed the statue. Just before the hour of the funeral there arrived a large floral design with the following card attached. From five hundred boys of Louisville, Kentucky, male high school, in remembrance of Samuel L. Clemens who has brightened their lives with innocent laughter and taught them squareness and grit and compassion. The piece received a conspicuous place at the beer. Much sorrow was expressed when it was learned that the wife of the Reverend Mr. Twitchell, who officiated at the services yesterday, and who expected to assist Mr. Eastman here to-day, was dead. End of Section 14, April 25, 1910, Akkad calls Twain a seer, and Twain at rest, buried beside his wife. Red by John Greenman. Section 15 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, Red by John Greenman. May 1, 1910, Mark Twain's secret book gives startling views. The humorist wrote his serious thoughts on religion and life, and had them printed for private circulation among his intimates. A few years ago the man whom all the world knew as a humorist wrote a book the philosophical drift of which was thus characterized by the author in one of the closing chapters. It is a desolating doctrine. It is not inspiring, enthusing, uplifting. It takes the glory out of man. It takes the pride out of him. It takes the heroism out of him. It denies him all personal credit, all applause. It not only degrades him to a machine, but allows him no control over the machine. It makes a mere coffee mill of him, and neither permits him to supply the coffee, nor turn the crank. His whole and piteously humble function being to grind, course, or fine according to his make. Outside impulses doing all the rest. A strange philosophy for a humorist, but it represented Mark Twain's real view of life. Why did he keep it hidden during all the years that he was addressing, nearly always with a smile, the public? In a prefatory note to the book he answers the question in this wise. February 1905. The studies for these papers were begun twenty-five or twenty-seven years ago. The papers were written seven years ago. I have examined them once or twice per year since, and found them satisfactory. I have just examined them again, and am still satisfied that they speak the truth. Every thought in them has been thought, and accepted as unassailable truth, by millions upon millions of men, and concealed, kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded, and could not bear, the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I not published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no other. Mark Twain really never published the book. He had two hundred and fifty copies printed for private circulation only. The book was anonymous, the author distributing it only among his intimate friends. What is man is the title, and the only inscription on the book cover. On the second fly leaf are printed Copyright 1906 by J. W. Bothwell. Mr. Bothwell was at that time Mark Twain's private secretary, and printed by Devin Press 1906. The matter in the book fills up a hundred and forty pages. This is an illustration of how well the secret has been kept. The Times reporter interviewed a man who is an expert in Mark Twain's bibliography, said he, I had never even heard of the book until a few days ago, when I received a note from a man asking if I could give him any information about an alleged Clemens secret book, of which he had heard a rumor. I had to reply that I was even more in the dark than he. A few years ago Mr. Mitchell Kennerly of this city was a passenger on the ocean liner on which Mark Twain was traveling to England to receive his degree of Doctor of Laws from Oxford University. They had many conversations on the subject of man's moral and spiritual makeup, a subject that seemed to be very close to the humorous heart. At the close of their last conversation Mark Twain said, I have written down my thoughts on this subject and put them in book form. I have presented this book only to friends, and will be glad to give you a copy. When I am dead—well, when a man is dead, the public will forgive him most anything. It is through Mr. Kennerly's courtesy that the Times is able to give the following extracts from the book, which summarized Mark Twain's hitherto concealed philosophy of life. The book is in the form of a dialogue between an old man and a young man. The old man had asserted that a human being is merely a machine, and nothing more. The young man objected and asked him to go into particulars and furnish his reasons for this position. The article concludes with a lengthy extract from What Is Man? End of Section 15, May 1, 1910, Mark Twain's secret book gives startling views, read by John Greenman. Section 16 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. May 4, 1910, Mark Twain's will filed. Leaves everything to his daughter, Mrs. Gabriovitch. Reading Connecticut May 8. Under the will of Mark Twain, filed for probate at Reading today, all his property, save five percent in ready cash, is bequeathed in trust to his only daughter, Clara Clemens Gabriovitch. The five percent cash is given to her outright. Arrangements are made for quarterly payments of interest to Mrs. Gabriovitch by the trustees. Mr. Clemens remarked in his will that he took this method of bequeathing his estate to his daughter in order to leave the property free from any control or interference from any husband she may have. The home Stormfield is valued at $30,000 and there is thought to be about $150,000 on deposit in banks. No estimate has been made of the literary assets, but they will be ascertained by the trustees of the will later in the week. The will was dated August 17, 1909, and covers eight type-written pages. It was drawn in Reading and witnessed by Mr. Clemens' secretary, Albert Bigelow Payne, Henry Loonsbury, Superintendent of Mr. Clemens' estate, and Charles G. Sark of New York. The will appoints Jarvis Langdon of Elmira, New York, Zohet S. Freeman, and Edward E. Loomis of New York as trustees and executors. When the will was drawn, a second daughter, Jean Clemens, was alive, and by the terms of the will each daughter is to receive five percent of all money on deposit in the bank at once, the residue of the estate to be divided equally and invested by the trustees, and the income paid quarterly to the heirs. In case of the death of either heir, without leaving issue or will, the whole estate is to go to the next of kin. In case there is issue and no will, the estate is to go to that issue. The heirs are given the privilege of disposing of their shares by will as they may see fit. In case both heirs to estate die without issue or will, the estate is to go to the next of kin. The will further says that his daughter Clara and his biographer Mr. Payne know his desires as to his literary assets, and directs that the trustees be guided by them in their disposal. No bonds are required of the trustees. End of Section 16, May 4, 1910, Mark Twain's Will Filed Section 17 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. May 8, 1910, King Edward and Mark Twain To the editor of the New York Times, the death of King Edward VII, so soon following that of him whom English-speaking people termed America's Uncrowned King, the late Mark Twain, reminds me of an incident illustrating the pure Americanism of Twain. He was invited to a garden party given by the King at Buckingham Palace. I asked him how he enjoyed the garden party, and he answered in his well-known drawl, the King seemed to enjoy it. He told me that he was ushered to the front at the garden party where the King and Queen were receiving, which was a raised part of the garden. The people applauded as he neared the sovereign, and this is how he described what occurred. I knew we were the center of all eyes, and I felt my oats. When I approached King Edward, he extended his right hand, and as I took it he placed his other hand on my shoulder. I thought to myself, if the King could put his hand on my shoulder, I could put mine on his, and so I did. There we two great men stood, before all the people laying on of hands. Will it F. Cook? Canada, Harry, New York, May 6, 1910. End of Section 17, May 8, 1910, King Edward and Mark Twain. Read by John Greenman. Section 18 of Mark Twain and the New York Times Part 6. 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. May 14, 1910, Mark Twain's automaton. Points of resemblance between his secret book and John Stormfield's visit to heaven. The article in the New York Times of May 1st on Mark Twain's secret book opens up a subject that may be worth further thought. The extracts given from his book What His Man show that the author was satisfied with his product from the intellectual standpoint, that is, he made no attempt to better its conclusions, but that as a man, as a whole, he was not satisfied, is clear enough from the following paragraph which is quoted from one of the closing chapters of the book in the Times article. It is a desolating doctrine. It is not inspiring, enthusing, uplifting. It takes the glory out of man. It takes the pride out of him. It takes the heroism out of him. It denies him all personal credit, all applause. It not only degrades him to a machine, but allows him no control over the machine, makes a mere coffee mill of him, and neither permits him to supply the coffee nor turn the crank. His soul and piteously humble function being to grind coarse or fine, according to his make, outside impulses, doing all the rest. Mark Twain was not the first thoughtful man who got stranded on the rocky coast of the automaton. Among the writers in the 19th century belonging to the evolutionary school there were many such, in fact the kind of thinking that does not accept a sufficient cause before it goes travelling through worlds or parts of this world with the telescope and the microscope is logically bound, if it gets far enough, to say no to its own humanity and call itself a coffee mill, or a steam engine, or a sewing machine, as our friend Dr. Clemens did. But Mark Twain did not go to the length that most of the others did. Only a few moments with his Captain Stormfield, the hero of his last published work, will show this. Stormfield was given an automaton on which to reach heaven after his death, and at comet speed he travelled, but he remained the man nevertheless. He was given hymn-book and halo and harp and wings, but, like David of old, with Saul's armour he threw them aside, preferring to be himself, and free of such mechanisms, free to go where he would, to rejoice in his own way, with the one solitary hymn he could remember to be sung not from compulsion continuously, but from contentment when he would. At first thought some readers may have formed a harsh opinion of the secret book. But it is too much like Captain Stormfield's visit to heaven to be considered a finality. It is rather the attempt of a thoughtful mind to get to the bottom of things than the conclusions of denial, and this, in spite of some statements in the book that the author is no longer a humble, earnest, and sincere truth seeker. What he then goes on to say is perfectly true. A permanent truth seeker is a human impossibility. As soon as the seeker finds what he is thoroughly convinced is the truth, he seeks no further, but gives the rest of his days to hunting junk to patch it, and clock it, and prop it with, and make it weather-proof, and keep it from caving in on him. But this is true in the same sense that morning, noon, and night make a day, and that after one day has gone another comes. Every work done and every stage of work involves preparation, involves the moment, or condition when preparation ceases and action from a determined plan begins. Some small changes in an architect's plans are possible, but the drafting-room is the place for designing and the open air the place for the workman. The contractor and the builder may be called automatons by the draftsmen in a moment of elation at the plan, but the need for full manhood does not cease when materials are being shaped or assembled. A few moments ago reference was made to the need of a sufficient cause in order to true thinking. Let us think of the architect and his plan as that. Even when no alteration is made there is no degradation of the builders into automatons, for one and all are able to enter, each according to his general stock of intelligence, into the plans themselves, to criticize them perhaps, to learn much from them. Religion, the world over, is essentially teaching concerning a sufficient cause, concerning a power not ourselves that makes for righteousness. This is Matthew Arnold's well-known setting, not a complete statement, but to those who can unconsciously supply the lack it is very pleasing. For a power that makes for righteousness involves all that we call personality or humanity, and it therefore involves the affirmation of a cause sufficient to account for human rather than merely mechanical action on our part. In the Christian teaching concerning the incarnation there is a further forward step. The divine is not only related to orderly creation, but has become a teacher, and also the giver of the power to follow the teaching. In other words, although man may tend to become an automaton, to be the slave of routine, to be merely a Presbyterian, or a Baptist, or a Roman Catholic, or a Buddhist, or merely American, or English, or Irish, or German, or again merely a Democrat, or a mugwump, there is given by the Lord himself the power to be a man, and also a Christian, to deal with things not from the standpoints of the past, but from the present, because of the presence of the sufficient cause of true humanity in the individual today. This article is written at the suggestion of the Honourable John Bigelow. On May 3rd he wrote to a friend asking him to take up this subject of Mark Twain's secret book, and this gentleman handed it to the writer. Mr. Bigelow is a Swedenborg shin, and he wished that some of Swedenborg's clear statements on the subjects touched upon the Times article should be given to the public. Here are a few of them. Faith, or thought, without character, or kindness, is like the breathing of the lungs without a heart, which cannot exist in any living thing, but only in an automaton. A man who does not resist evil but stands like an automaton, seeing nothing and doing nothing, thinks from evil for evil, and not against it. Every man is free, not from himself, but from the Lord. The Lord loves man and wishes to dwell with him, but he cannot do so unless he is received and loved. For this reason the Lord has given man freedom and reason, freedom to think and will as from himself, and reason according thereto. The slavery and captivity in which the man of the church has been heretofore is taken away, and now from restored freedom he is better able to see truth if he wishes to. The Lord does not take away evil in a moment, but takes it away so silently and successively that the man does not know anything about it. This is done by allowing the man to act according to the thought which he makes to be of reason, and then by various means the Lord withdraws him, and thus so far as he can be withdrawn in freedom, he is withdrawn. The understanding adapts itself to the measure of freedom of uttering the thoughts. Should any Hebrews read this I am sure that Mr. Bigelow would wish to tell them that he does not allow any break in his thought of the unity of God. By the Lord he understands the one God of the universe who taught Moses, who is with us now. His Christian thought is that in order to fulfil the teachings given to the patriarchs the Lord spoke no longer through an angel, but put on the external of humanity, the body and sense life of man taken from Mary in the Holy Land, and used that to bring the divine thought and life nearer to mankind, so near that to all men now a conscious, sensible recognition of the existence and personality of God is possible, and as a consequence religion is no longer national but individual. One does not need to be a Jew to be in touch with the one God, one needs but to desire the wisdom and the character of the Lord, and by prayer his gifts come to us, by personal approach as real as that of a father and his children. The American Swedenborg Society's library is at 3 West 29th Street, New York City. Anyone desiring further information will receive every attention. Books may be borrowed or bought, and questions answered. FMB, New York, May 9th. End of Section 18, May 14, 1910, Mark Twain's Automaton, read by John Greenman. Section 19 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. May 22, 1910. Jubilee Story by Mark Twain for Private Circulation. Amusing account of the great procession in honor of Queen Victoria, printed in a little book for his friends. A little book of twenty-two pages was privately printed, but never published in 1897, bearing this title. Queen Victoria's Jubilee. The great procession of June 23, 1897 in the Queen's honor reported both in the light of history and as a spectacle, by Mark Twain, privately printed, for private distribution only. It consists, apparently, of letters describing the Jubilee procession, and one of them compares the parade of 1897 with that in honor of Henry V, after the Battle of Agincourt. It is illustrated by pictures which the author alleges he drew himself. He says, If you like to put in the pictures which I made and send to you herewith, very well. I mean the pictures of Henry V. The two French dukes is prisoners and myself. The king and the duke will be unfamiliar objects to the public and ought to be valuable. I copied them from the originals in the South Kensington Museum, the only authentic ones in existence. I have not finished learning how to draw yet, and cannot do feathers or armor well, so I did not attempt it. Besides, armor makes the portrait look stiff, and for that reason I do not think it is becoming. I like the easy and flexible grace which our modern clothes gives to the figure, and I do not like fierce and aggressive full beards. I like a mild and friendly moustache, so I have shaved these people. Those are all the changes I have made, otherwise I have made those men look just as they looked in life, and just as they would look if they were here today, taking a walk. You will find this representation of Henry V accurate and full of feeling, full of sublimity. I have pictured him looking out over the field of Agincourt and studying up where to begin. The President of the Royal Academy is quite frankly excited about this picture, and thinks it is different from anything that even Millet ever painted. I have represented the Duke of Bourbon in the act of trying to escape from the Tower of London disguised as a gentleman. I tried to make his handkerchief stick up a little more out of his breast pocket, so as to express horror and surprise, but there was not enough white paint left when I got to that part, but it is no matter. I got at it in another way. By striping his pants, I gave them that trembling look and got the same effect. The President of the Royal Academy thinks that if I should throw this picture up life-size and put it in the National Gallery, it would attract attention. I think he is always trying to flatter me, because I am a poor artist, so I think that the most of it is just his good heart. He is sorry to see me struggling along and earning so little. I have represented the Duke of Orleans on the battlefield. He is looking surprised at the way things are going. I got that look of regret, which you see in him, by putting those shoes on him which are too small for him. Some think he is my masterpiece. Others prefer Henry. The President cannot make up his mind which one he prefers. He thinks that no matter which one he owned it would not be the one he wanted. He is full of his flatteries. Still it is only his good heart, of course. I know that. I did my own portrait from life. It is a looking-glass portrait. It represents me thinking out a great work, a novel, I think, a sort of exalted prose poem. You can see that I have just caught the idea. I am in a kind of trance of sacred emotion. I got that effect by drinking. I had not caught the idea then, and so I had to represent it artificially. You cannot get an effect like that out of milk. I prefer milk because I am a prohibitionist, but I do not go to it for inspiration. Of the procession, the author says, so far as I can see, a procession has value in but two ways, as a show and as a symbol, its minor function being to delight the eye, its major one to compel thought, exalt the spirit, stir the heart, and inflame the imagination. As a mere show and meaningless, like a Mardi Gras march, a magnificent procession is worth the long journey to see. As a symbol, the most colorless and unpicturesque procession, if it have a moving history back of it, is worth a thousand of it. After the Civil War, ten regiments of bronzed New York veterans marched up Broadway in faded uniforms and faded battle flags that were mere shot riddled rags, and in each battalion, as it swung by, one noted a great gap, an eloquent vacancy, where had marched the comrades who had fallen and would march no more. Always, as this procession advanced between the massed multitudes, its approach was welcomed by each block of people with a burst of proud and grateful enthusiasm. Then the head of it passed and suddenly revealed those pathetic gaps, and silence fell upon that block, for every man in it had choked up and could not get command of his voice, and added to the storm again for many minutes. That was the most moving and tremendous effect that I have ever witnessed, those affecting silences falling between those hurricanes of worshiping enthusiasm. There was no costumery in that procession, no color, no tinsel, no brilliancy, yet it was the greatest spectacle and the most gracious and exalting and beautiful that has come within my experience. It was because it had history back of it, and because it was a symbol and stood for something, and because one viewed it with spiritual vision, not the physical, there was not much for the physical eye to see, but it revealed continental areas, limitless horizons to the eye of the imagination and the spirit. A procession to be valuable must do one thing or the other, clothe itself in splendors and charm the eye, or symbolize something sublime and uplifting and so appeal to the imagination. As a mere spectacle to look at, I suppose, that the queen's procession will not be as showy as the czar's late pageant, it will probably fall much short of the one in Tonhouser in the matter of rich and adorable costumery, in the number of renowned personages on view in it, it will probably fall short of some that have been seen in England before this, and yet, in its major function, its symbolic function, I think that if all the people in it wore their everyday clothes and marched without flags or music it would still be incomparably the most important procession that ever moved through the streets of London, for it will stand for English history, English growth, English achievement, the accumulated power and renown and dignity of 20 centuries of strenuous effort. Many things about it will set one to reflecting upon what a large feature of this world England is today, and this will in turn move one, even the least imaginative, to cast a glance down her long perspective and note the steps of her progress and insignificance of her first estate, which he thereupon proceeds to do. I suppose that London has always existed. One cannot easily imagine an England that had no London. No doubt there was a village here five thousand years ago. It was on the river somewhere west of where the tower is now. It was built of thatched mud huts, close to a couple of limpid brooks, and on every hand for miles and miles stretched rolling plains of fresh green grass, and here and there were groups and groves of trees. The tribes wore skins, sometimes merely their own, sometimes those of other animals. The chief was monarch and helped out his complexion with blue paint. His industry was the chase. His relaxation was war. Some of the English men who will view the procession today are carrying his ancient blood in their veins. It may be that the village remained about, as it began, a way down to Roman occupation a couple of thousand years ago. The procession of 1416 in honour of Agincourt is compared with that of 1897. At Agincourt, which he calls then and still the most colossal in England's history, eight thousand of the French nobility were slain and the remainder, fifteen hundred in number, taken prisoners. This wholesome depletion of the aristocracy, he remarks, made such a stringent scarcity in its ranks that when the young peasant girl, Joe Novak, came to undo Henry's might work of fourteen years later, she could hardly gather together nobles enough to man her staff. On the twenty-second of December all was ready. There were no cables, no correspondence, no newspapers then, a regrettable defect, but not irremediable. A young man who would have been a correspondent if he had been born five hundred years later was in London at the time, and he remembers the details. He has communicated them to me through a competent spirit medium, phrased in a troublesome mixture of obsolete English and moldy French, and I have thoroughly modernized his story and put it into straight English, and will here record it. I will explain that his Sir John Old Castle is a person whom we do not know very well by that name, nor much care for, but we know him well and adore him too under his other name, Sir John Falstaff. But before beginning the translation of the spirit communication, Mark pauses to rhapsodize over the vanished paraders of fourteen sixteen. Ah, where now are those long vanished forms, those unreturning feet? Let us not inquire too closely. Translated, he continues, this is the narrative of the spirit correspondent who is looking down upon me at this moment from his high home and admiring to see how the art and mystery of spelling has improved since his time. Then the correspondent begins his story of the procession of fourteen sixteen. All the way, says he, on both sides, all the windows, balconies, and roofs were crowded with people, and wherever there was a vacancy it had been built up in high tiers of seats covered with red cloth, and these seats were also filled with people in all cases in bright holiday attire. The women of fashion barring the view from all in the rear with those tiresome extinguisher hats which of late have grown to be a cloth-yard high. A place had been reserved for me on a fine and fanciful erection in St. Paul's Churchyard, and there I waited for the procession. It seemed a long time, but at last a dull booming sound arose in the distance, and after a while we saw the banners and the head of the procession come into view, and heard the muffled roar of voices that welcomed it. The roar moved continuously toward us, growing steadily louder and louder and stronger and stronger, and with it the bray and crash of music, and presently it was right with us and seemed to roll over us and submerge us and stun us, and deafen us, and behold, there was the hero of Agincourt passing by. All the multitude was standing up red-faced, frantic, bellowing, shouting, the tears running down their faces, and through the storm of waving hats and handkerchiefs, one glimpsed the battle-banners and the drifting host of marching men as through a dimming flurry of snow. Then comes a description of King Henry's appearance, and then that of the captive knights. More interesting is the author's description of the man whom Mark Twain supposes to be the original of Falstaff. The knights were a long time in passing. Then came five thousand Agincourt men at arms, and they were a long time. And at the very end, last of all, came that intolerable old ton of sack and godless ruffler, Sir John Old Castle, now risen from the dead for the third time, fat-faced, purple with the spirit of bygone and lamented drink, smiling his hospitable, wide smile upon all the world, leering at the women, wallowing about in his saddle, proclaiming his valorous deeds as fast as he could lie, taking the whole glory of Agincourt to his single self, measuring off the miles of his slain, and then multiplying them by five, seven, ten, fifteen, as inspiration after inspiration came to his help, the most inhuman spectacle in England, a living, breathing outrage, a slander upon the human race. And after him came mumming and blethering his infamous lieutenants, and after them his paladins, as he calls them, the mangiest lot of starvelings and cowards that was ever littered, the disgrace of the noblest pageant that England has ever seen. God rest their souls in the place appointed for all such. The report from heaven stops abruptly, Mark Twain explains the reason. That was as much of it as the spirit correspondent could let me have. He was obliged to stop there because he had an engagement to sing in the choir, and was already late. Next he moralizes about the progress of the world. British history is two thousand years old, and yet in a good many ways the world has moved further ahead since the Queen was born, than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together. Since the Queen first saw the light she has seen invented and brought into use, with the exception of the cotton gin, the spinning frames, and the steamboat, every one of the myriad of strictly modern inventions which, by their united powers, have created the bulk of the modern civilization and made life under it easy and difficult, convenient and awkward, happy and horrible, soothing and irritating, grand and trivial, an indispensable blessing and an unimaginable curse. She has seen all these miracles, these wonders, these marvels piled up in her time, and yet she is but seventy-eight years old. That is to say she has seen more things invented than any other monarch that ever lived, and more than the oldest old-time English commoner that ever lived, including old Paar, and more than Methuselah himself, five times over. He enumerates many of them. That was also done at the time by several hundred other persons, but some of Mark Twain's enumerations are characteristically phrased, such as, She has seen the public educator, the newspaper, created, and its teachings placed within the reach of the leanest purse. There was nothing properly describable as a newspaper until long after she was born. She has seen the world's literature set free through the institution of international copyright. She has seen America invent arbitration, the eventual substitute for that enslaver of nations, the standing army. And she has seen England pay the first bill under it, and America shirk the second, but only temporarily, of this we may be sure. She has seen a Hartford American, Dr. Wells, apply anesthetics in surgery for the first time in history, and for all time banish the terrors of the surgeon's knife. And she has seen the rest of the world ignore the discoverer and a Boston doctor steal the credit of his work. All this was written before he saw the procession. When he saw it, he wrote, I was not dreaming of so stunning a show. All the nations seemed to be filing by. They all seemed to be represented. It was a sort of allegorical suggestion of the last day. And some who live to see that day will probably recall this one, if they are not too much disturbed in mind at the time. He gives a description of the appearance presented by the various Oriental races, including this about those from India. Then there was an exhaustive exhibition of the hundred separate brown races of India, the most beautiful and satisfying of all the complexions that have been vouchsafe to man, and the one which best sets off colored clothes and best harmonizes with all tints. When Prince Rupert of Bavaria rode by, it excited Mark Twain to comment on the fact that the English legitimists are still paying unavailing homage to Rupert's mother, Princess Ludwig, as the rightful queen of England. The house of Stuart was formally and officially shelved nearly two centuries ago, but the microbe of Jacobite loyalty is a thing which is not exterminable by time, force, or argument. In his conclusion he says, It is over now. The British Empire has marched past under review and inspection. The procession stood for sixty years of progress and accumulation, moral, material, and political. It was made up rather of the beneficiaries of these prosperities than of the creators of them. The absence of the chief creators of these was perhaps not a serious disadvantage. One could supply the vacancies by imagination and thus fill out the procession very effectively. One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it. End of Section 19, May 22nd, 1910, Jubilee's story by Mark Twain for Private Circulation. Read by John Greenman. Section 20 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. July 2nd, 1910, Honesty of Men and Women Mark Twain was honored by multitudes for his qualities as a man and for nothing more than for his chivalric, almost quixotic, honesty. But this he disclaims for himself in an anecdote printed in the forum. In his own words, A man can be easily persuaded to step outside the strict moral line, but it is not so with a woman. It was my wife who said, No, you shall pay one hundred cents on the dollar, and I am with you all the time. She kept her word, and it is rather more due to her than to myself. Accordingly, instead of paying thirty cents on the dollar and getting illegal acquittance, he paid one hundred cents and died an honest man. But was it really necessary for him to be so very honest as to take away his own character and give it to his wife? And he phrased it so that he seems to have ranked masculine honesty below feminine. How about that very important matter? Is everybody agreed that women are more honest than men? How many women would have done what Mark Twain did, without or with the inspiration of their husbands? Or having done so, how many would have uttered words like Marx in his posthumous tribute to petticoat morals? To put matters concretely, let us suppose that a lady telephones to her grocer to send her a bottle of pyro, and that he sends old crow and charges for pyro. Would the ladies all pay the higher price? Or would they say that the grocer had made enough out of them in various grocers' ways and that the little windfall would be accepted? Are men or women honest about paying their car fares when the conductor does not make a personal demand? What is the proportion of male and female shoplifters? These exciting questions are doubtless better suited to cooler weather, but Mark Twain is posthumously responsible for throwing this apple of discord in this current week. End of Section 20, July 2, 1910, Honesty of Men and Women, Read by John Greenman. Section 21 of Mark Twain in The New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. July 7, 1910, Manly and Wifely Honesty. A letter to the editor. Manly and Wifely Honesty to the editor of The New York Times. Your editorial article entitled Honesty of Men and Women raises an interesting question, but it seems to me that a far greater interest would be honesty per se, regardless of sex. Mark Twain's honesty, when he paid one hundred cents on the dollar, while eighty cents would have cleared him from bankruptcy, one for him warm admirers everywhere. It was a simple, right, manly thing to do, just simply to see and so to act, that no one of his creditors suffered. Whether his action was dictated by the beautifully fine, moral sense of his wife, or by his own essentially sterling honesty of character, or by that gradual welding of sympathy between man and of Mark Twain's duty to his neighbour, then Mark Twain was again a gentleman, in chivalrously admitting the fact. Arthur E. Friswell, Akron, Ohio, July 4, 1910. End of Section 21, July 7, 1910, Manly and Wifely Honesty. Red by John Greenman. Section 22 of Mark Twain and the New York Times, Part 6. 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by John Greenman. July 10, 1910. Twain Books for Library. Humorous Daughter announces she will give two thousand five hundred to Reading Institution. Reading Connecticut, July 9. Mrs. Clara Clemens-Gabrilovich, daughter of the late Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain, has formally notified the directors of the Mark Twain Free Library here that she will present to that institution practically the entire library of her father, now in the Reading Residence, Stormfield. The gift includes nearly two thousand five hundred volumes. Mrs. Clemens drew a check for six thousand dollars in favor of the Reading Library a few days before his death, and the money will be used to erect a building for the institution. End of Section 22, July 10, 1910. Twain Books for Library. Red by John Greenman. Section 23 of Mark Twain and the New York Times, Part 6. 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by John Greenman. July 30, 1910. Twain Statue for Heidelberg. Heidelberg, July 29. The American colony here has decided to erect a statue of Mark Twain in Heidelberg where he conceived the idea of writing A Tramp Abroad. The necessary funds for the statue have already been subscribed. End of Section 23, July 30, 1910. Twain Statue for Heidelberg. Red by John Greenman. Section 24 of Mark Twain and the New York Times, Part 6. 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by John Greenman. August 6, 1910. Mark Twain Orator. One of the questions suggested to the reader by Mark Twain's speeches, Harper's, one of many, it is true, is, was he a spontaneous speaker? Henry Waterson, who was an intimate friend, as well as a relative, says that he could be spontaneous on occasion, and intimates that he generally was, and was at his best when he was. W. D. Howells, on the contrary, who also was an intimate friend for many years, frankly suggests that when Twain trusted to the spontaneity in which other speakers confide, or are believed to confide when they are on their feet, the result was near failures. And Howells gives an emphatic and eloquent account of the humorous, habitual method. He studied every word and syllable, and memorized them by a system of mnemonics peculiar to himself, consisting of an arbitrary arrangement of things on a table, knives, forks, salt cellars, ink stands, pens, boxes, or whatever was at hand, which stood for points and clauses and climaxes, and were at once indelible diction and constant suggestion. He studied every tone and every gesture, and he forecast the result with the real audience, from its results with that imagined audience. Therefore it was beautiful to see him and to hear him. He rejoiced in the pleasure he gave, and the blows of surprise that he dealt, and because he had his end in mind, he knew when to stop. The internal evidence is pretty strongly in favour of Mr. Howells' view. There are more than a hundred speeches, or parts of speeches, in this volume. The great body of them are funny, and of these, by far, the greater part give the impression of deliberate preparation. The blows of surprise are carefully aimed, and as carefully delivered. To the reader the impression, thus made, is not wholly pleasant. There seems to be vital incongruity in a predigested and accurately compounded joke, and still more in a series of jokes leading up to a climax. When the thing is heard and the speaker is seen, it may come off supremely well. It certainly did in every case recall by the present writer. The commanding personality, the persuasion of those keen eyes, the continuing charm of that drawing voice, the happy turning to one or another of the notable men sure to be present, all this absorbed the attention, and quite put to sleep any critical faculty the hearer might otherwise have been minded to apply. Even so the best of Mark Twain's amusing speeches were tame, compared to the best of his amusing talks. In the latter there was spontaneity, so to speak, to burn. His drollery gushed forth at the lightest tap of current suggestion, and the range, the variety, was as wonderful as the flow, nor was it essentially reminiscential, as the talk of very witty men often is. There was plenty of anecdote, but there was abundance also of flashing comment, and of repartee. Possibly it is the recollection of such talk that makes the collected speeches seem a little unfair to the author of them, causes them to fall short of the unique and telling effect of which he was known to be capable. We may practically avoid this unfairness by following the advice of Mr. Clemens as to the volume, and only seasoning our graver reading with it now and then, when the mind demands such relaxation. With that precaution any other is hardly necessary, as a book to take up, lightly, in a leisure moment, not hour, and as lightly to drop, the volume is admirable. It is so full of fun. Most often it is fun directed against someone, not seldom himself, and has the flavour of what is known as a practical joke, but the joke is as genial and without venom when someone else is the target, as when it is aimed at himself. It is the ludicrous, not the ridiculous, that he depicts, nine times in ten. He laughs and makes others laugh with the victim of the moment, not at him so that in a certain circle it was rather a privilege, a kind of honour to be selected by him as the protagonist of one of his sparkling attacks. Now that he is dead and we shall never again hear that strange, penetrating, sympathetic voice, or catch the confident gleams from beneath his bushy eyebrows, or share in the wild mirth he kindled in such varying company, it is good to have this record. To many it will be precious. To none, coming upon it anew, or coming back to it, will it bring pain. As Mr. Howell says, it is good matter, glad, honest, kind, just. Section 24 August 6, 1910, Mark Twain, orator, read by John Greenman. Section 25 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. August 20, 1910. Daughter born to Mrs. Gabrilevich. Reading Connecticut August 19. A daughter was born today to Mr. and Mrs. Osip Gabrilevich at Stormfield, the home of the late Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain. Mrs. Gabrilevich was before her marriage to Mr. Gabrilevich, Ms. Clara Clemens, eldest daughter of Mark Twain. End of Section 25 August 20, 1910. Daughter born to Mrs. Gabrilevich. Read by John Greenman.