That night we went with him to Elmira, and next day--a somber day of rain--he lay in those stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and where Susy had lain, and Mrs. Clemens, and Jean, while Dr. Eastman spoke the words of peace which separate us from our mortal dead. Then in the quiet, steady rain of that Sunday afternoon we laid him beside those others, where he sleeps well, though some have wished that, like De Soto, he might have been laid to rest in the bed of that great river which must always be associated with his name.
CCXCV
MARK TWAIN'S RELIGION
There is such a finality about death; however interesting it may be as an experience, one cannot discuss it afterward with one's friends. I have thought it a great pity that Mark Twain could not discuss, with Howells say, or with Twichell, the sensations and the particulars of the change, supposing there be a recognizable change, in that transition of which we have speculated so much, with such slender returns. No one ever debated the undiscovered country more than he. In his whimsical, semi-serious fashion he had considered all the possibilities of the future state-- orthodox and otherwise--and had drawn picturesquely original conclusions. He had sent Captain Stormfield in a dream to report the aspects of the early Christian heaven. He had examined the scientific aspects of the more subtle philosophies. He had considered spiritualism, transmigration, the various esoteric doctrines, and in the end he had logically made up his mind that death concludes all, while with that less logical hunger which survives in every human heart he had never ceased to expect an existence beyond the grave. His disbelief and his pessimism were identical in their structure. They were of his mind; never of his heart.
Once a woman said to him:
"Mr. Clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are." And she might have added, with equal force and truth:
"You are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are."
Nothing could have conveyed more truly his attitude toward life and death. His belief in God, the Creator, was absolute; but it was a God far removed from the Creator of his early teaching. Every man builds his God according to his own capacities. Mark Twain's God was of colossal proportions--so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but molecules in His veins--a God as big as space itself.
Mark Twain had many moods, and he did not always approve of his own God; but when he altered his conception, it was likely to be in the direction of enlargement--a further removal from the human conception, and the problem of what we call our lives.
In 1906 he wrote:--[See also 1870, chap. lxxviii; 1899, chap. ccv; and various talks, 1906-07, etc.] Let us now consider the real God, the genuine God, the great God, the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only comets unto which incredible distant Neptune is merely an out post, a Sandy Hook to homeward-bound specters of the deeps of space that have not glimpsed it before for generations--a universe not made with hands and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the illimitable reaches of space by the flat of the real God just mentioned, by comparison with whom the gods whose myriads infest the feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky.
At an earlier period-the date is not exactly fixable, but the stationery used and the handwriting suggest the early eighties--he set down a few concisely written pages of conclusions--conclusions from which he did not deviate materially in after years. The document follows:
I believe in God the Almighty.
I do not believe He has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or delivered one to him by word of mouth, or made Himself visible to mortal eyes at any time in any place.