Yet, at heart, no man loved his kind more genuinely, or with deeper compassion, than Mark Twain, perhaps for its very weaknesses. It was only that he had intervals --frequent intervals, and rather long ones--when he did not admire it, and was still more doubtful as to the ways of providence.
To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
March 14, '05. DEAR JOE,--I have a Puddn'head maxim:
"When a man is a pessimist before 48 he knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little."
It is with contentment, therefore, that I reflect that I am better and wiser than you. Joe, you seem to be dealing in "bulks," now; the "bulk" of the farmers and U. S. Senators are "honest." As regards purchase and sale with money? Who doubts it? Is that the only measure of honesty? Aren't there a dozen kinds of honesty which can't be measured by the money-standard? Treason is treason--and there's more than one form of it; the money-form is but one of them. When a person is disloyal to any confessed duty, he is plainly and simply dishonest, and knows it; knows it, and is privately troubled about it and not proud of himself. Judged by this standard--and who will challenge the validity of it?--there isn't an honest man in Connecticut, nor in the Senate, nor anywhere else. I do not even except myself, this time.
Am I finding fault with you and the rest of the populace? No--I assure you I am not. For I know the human race's limitations, and this makes it my duty--my pleasant duty--to be fair to it. Each person in it is honest in one or several ways, but no member of it is honest in all the ways required by--by what? By his own standard. Outside of that, as I look at it, there is no obligation upon him.
Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (private) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one. Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is. We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the world--though I have reason to think I am the only one whose black-list runs so light. Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude.
Yes, oh, yes, I am not overlooking the "steady progress from age to age of the coming of the kingdom of God and righteousness." "From age to age"--yes, it describes that giddy gait. I (and the rocks) will not live to see it arrive, but that is all right--it will arrive, it surely will. But you ought not to be always ironically apologizing for the Deity. If that thing is going to arrive, it is inferable that He wants it to arrive; and so it is not quite kind of you, and it hurts me, to see you flinging sarcasms at the gait of it. And yet it would not be fair in me not to admit that the sarcasms are deserved. When the Deity wants a thing, and after working at it for "ages and ages" can't show even a shade of progress toward its accomplishment, we--well, we don't laugh, but it is only because we dasn't. The source of "righteousness"--is in the heart? Yes. And engineered and directed by the brain? Yes. Well, history and tradition testify that the heart is just about what it was in the beginning; it has undergone no shade of change. Its good and evil impulses and their consequences are the same today that they were in Old Bible times, in Egyptian times, in Greek times, in Middle Age times, in Twentieth Century times. There has been no change.
Meantime, the brain has undergone no change. It is what it always was. There are a few good brains and a multitude of poor ones. It was so in Old Bible times and in all other times--Greek, Roman, Middle Ages and Twentieth Century. Among the savages--all the savages--the average brain is as competent as the average brain here or elsewhere. I will prove it to you, some time, if you like.