She is getting along satisfactorily, now.
Lots of love to you all.
MARK
Mark Twain's religion had to do chiefly with humanity in its present incarnation, and concerned itself very little with any possible measure of reward or punishment in some supposed court of the hereafter.Nevertheless, psychic investigation always interested him, and he was good-naturedly willing to explore, even hoping, perhaps, to be convinced that individuality continues beyond death.
The letter which follows indicates his customary attitude in relation to spiritualistic research.The experiments here mentioned, however, were not satisfactory.
To Mrs.Charles McQuiston:
DOBBS FERRY, N.Y.
March 26, 1901.
DEAR MRS.McQUISTON,--I have never had an experience which moved me to believe the living can communicate with the dead, but my wife and I have experimented in the matter when opportunity offered and shall continue to do so.
I enclose a letter which came this morning--the second from the same source.Mrs.K---- is a Missourian, and lately she discovered, by accident, that she was a remarkable hypnotiser.Her best subject is a Missouri girl, Miss White, who is to come here soon and sustain strictly scientific tests before professors at Columbia University.Mrs.Clemens and I intend to be present.And we shall ask the pair to come to our house to do whatever things they can do.Meantime, if you thought well of it, you might write her and arrange a meeting, telling her it is by my suggestion and that I gave you her address.
Someone has told me that Mrs.Piper is discredited.I cannot be sure, but I think it was Mr.Myers, President of the London Psychical Research Society--we heard of his death yesterday.He was a spiritualist.I am afraid he was a very easily convinced man.We visited two mediums whom he and Andrew Lang considered quite wonderful, but they were quite transparent frauds.
Mrs.Clemens corrects me: One of those women was a fraud, the other not a fraud, but only an innocent, well-meaning, driveling vacancy.
Sincerely yours, S.L.CLEMENS.
In Mark Twain's Bermuda chapters entitled Idle Notes of an Idle Excursion he tells of an old sea captain, one Hurricane Jones, who explained biblical miracles in a practical, even if somewhat startling, fashion.In his story of the prophets of Baal, for instance, the old captain declared that the burning water was nothing more nor less than petroleum.Upon reading the "notes,"Professor Phelps of Yale wrote that the same method of explaining miracles had been offered by Sir Thomas Browne.
Perhaps it may be added that Captain Hurricane Jones also appears in Roughing It, as Captain Ned Blakely.
To Professor William Lyon Phelps;
YALE UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, April 24, 1901.
MY DEAR SIR,--I was not aware that old Sir Thomas had anticipated that story, and I am much obliged to you for furnishing me the paragraph.
t is curious that the same idea should leave entered two heads so unlike as the head of that wise old philosopher and that of Captain Ned Wakeman, a splendidly uncultured old sailor, but in his own opinion a thinker by divine right.He was an old friend of mine of many years' standing;I made two or three voyages with him, and found him a darling in many ways.The petroleum story was not told to me; he told it to Joe Twichell, who ran across him by accident on a sea voyage where I think the two were the only passengers.A delicious pair, and admirably mated, they took to each other at once and became as thick as thieves.Joe was passing under a fictitious name, and old Wakeman didn't suspect that he was a parson; so he gave his profanity full swing, and he was a master of that great art.You probably know Twichell, and will know that that is a kind of refreshment which he is very capable of enjoying.
Sincerely yours, S.L.CLEMENS.
For the summer Clemens and his family found a comfortable lodge in the Adirondacks--a log cabin called "The Lair"--on Saranac Lake.
Soon after his arrival there he received an invitation to attend the celebration of Missouri's eightieth anniversary.He sent the following letter:
To Edward L.Dimmitt, in St.Louis:
AMONG THE ADIRONDACK LAKES, July 19, 1901.
DEAR MR.DIMMITT,--By an error in the plans, things go wrong end first in this world, and much precious time is lost and matters of urgent importance are fatally retarded.Invitations which a brisk young fellow should get, and which would transport him with joy, are delayed and impeded and obstructed until they are fifty years overdue when they reach him.
It has happened again in this case.
When I was a boy in Missouri I was always on the lookout for invitations but they always miscarried and went wandering through the aisles of time;and now they are arriving when I am old and rheumatic and can't travel and must lose my chance.
I have lost a world of delight through this matter of delaying invitations.Fifty years ago I would have gone eagerly across the world to help celebrate anything that might turn up.IT would have made no difference to me what it was, so that I was there and allowed a chance to make a noise.
The whole scheme of things is turned wrong end to.Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.As things are now, when in youth a dollar would bring a hundred pleasures, you can't have it.When you are old, you get it and there is nothing worth buying with it then.
It's an epitome of life.The first half of it consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along.
I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142.This is no time to be flitting about the earth.I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way and imminent as indicated above.
