November 3. He said he could not sleep last night, for thinking what a fool he had been in his various investments.
"I have always been the victim of somebody," he said, "and always an idiot myself, doing things that even a child would not do. Never asking anybody's advice--never taking it when it was offered. I can't see how anybody could do the things I have done and have kept right on doing." I could see that the thought agitated him, and I suggested that we go to his room and read, which we did, and had a riotous time over the most recent chapters of the 'Letters from the Earth', and some notes he had made for future chapters on infant damnation and other distinctive features of orthodox creeds. He told an anecdote of an old minister who declared that Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag.
Somewhat on the defensive I said, "But we must admit that the so- called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive."
He answered, "Yes, but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the Christian religion was born.
"I have been reading Gibbon's celebrated Fifteenth Chapter," he said later, "and I don't see what Christians found against it. It is so mild--so gentle in its sarcasm." He added that he had been reading also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the saying of Darwin's father, "Unitarianism is a featherbed to catch falling Christians."
"I was glad to find and identify that saying," he said; "it is so good."
He finished the evening by reading a chapter from Carlyle's French Revolution--a fine pyrotechnic passage--the gathering at Versailles. I said that Carlyle somehow reminded me of a fervid stump-speaker who pounded his fists and went at his audience fiercely, determined to convince them.
"Yes," he said, "but he is the best one that ever lived."
November 10. This morning early he heard me stirring and called. I went in and found him propped up with a book, as usual. He said:
"I seldom read Christmas stories, but this is very beautiful. It has made me cry. I want you to read it." (It was Booth Tarkington's 'Beasley's Christmas Party'.) "Tarkington has the true touch," he said; "his work always satisfies me." Another book he has been reading with great enjoyment is James Branch Cabell's Chivalry. He cannot say enough of the subtle poetic art with which Cabell has flung the light of romance about dark and sordid chapters of history.
CCLXXVII
MARK TWAIN'S READING
Perhaps here one may speak of Mark Twain's reading in general. On the table by him, and on his bed, and in the billiard-room shelves he kept the books he read most. They were not many--not more than a dozen--but they were manifestly of familiar and frequent usage. All, or nearly all, had annotations--spontaneously uttered marginal notes, title prefatories, or concluding comments. They were the books he had read again and again, and it was seldom that he had not had something to say with each fresh reading.
There were the three big volumes by Saint-Simon--'The Memoirs'--which he once told me he had read no less than twenty times. On the fly-leaf of the first volume he wrote
This, & Casanova & Pepys, set in parallel columns, could afford a good coup d'oeil of French & English high life of that epoch.