This was in November, and he had broken all restrictions as to time. He declared that he had never had such a fight over any book before, and that he had told Osgood and everybody concerned that they must wait.
I have said with sufficient positiveness that I will finish the book
at no particular date; that I will not hurry it; that I will not
hurry myself; that I will take things easy and comfortably—write
when I choose to write, leave it alone when I do so prefer...
I have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where it
ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other
policy would be to make the book worse than it already is. I ought
to have finished it before showing it to anybody, and then sent it
across the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a
great many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if I had
thought of this thing earlier I would have acted upon it and taken
the tuck somewhat out of your joyousness.
It was a long, heartfelt letter. Near the end of it he said:
Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. He is a
marvelous talker on a deep subject. I do not see how even Spencer
could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in
cleaner, clearer, crisper English. He astounded Twichell with his
faculty. You know that when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid
innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the apostles were mere
policemen to Cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a
midnight dinner in Boston the other night, where we gathered around
the board of the Summerset Club: Osgood full, Boyle O'Reilly full,
Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and myself possessing the
floor and properly fortified. Cable told Mrs. Clemens, when he
returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with
horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to Boston in a
cattle-car. It was a very large time. He called it an orgy. And
no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint.
Osgood wanted Mark Twain to lecture that fall, as preliminary advertising for the book, with “Life on the Mississippi” as his subject. Osgood was careful to make this proposition by mail, and probably it was just as well; for if there was any single straw that could have broken the back of Clemens's endurance and made him violent at this particular time, it was a proposition to go back on the platform. His answer to Osgood has not been preserved.
Clemens spoke little that winter. In February he addressed the Monday Evening Club on “What is Happiness?” presenting a theory which in later years he developed as a part of his “gospel,” and promulgated in a privately printed volume, 'What is Man'? It is the postulate already mentioned in connection with his reading of Lecky, that every human action, bad or good, is the result of a selfish impulse; that is to say, the result of a desire for the greater content of spirit. It is not a new idea; philosophers in all ages have considered it, and accepted or rejected it, according to their temperament and teachings, but it was startling and apparently new to the Monday Evening Club. They scoffed and jeered at it; denounced it as a manifest falsity. They did not quite see then that there may be two sorts of selfishness—brutal and divine; that he who sacrifices others to himself exemplifies the first, whereas he who sacrifices himself for others personifies the second—the divine contenting of his soul by serving the happiness of his fellow-men. Mark Twain left this admonition in furtherance of that better sort:
“Diligently train your ideals upward, and still upward, toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure, in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community.”
It is a divine admonition, even if, in its suggested moral freedom, it does seem to conflict with that other theory—the inevitable sequence of cause and effect, descending from the primal atom. There is seeming irrelevance in introducing this matter here; but it has a chronological relation, and it presents a mental aspect of the time. Clemens was forty-eight, and becoming more and more the philosopher; also, in logic at least, a good deal of a pessimist. He made a birthday aphorism on the subject:
“The man who is a pessimist before he is forty-eight knows too much; the man who is an optimist after he is forty-eight knows too little.”
He was never more than a pessimist in theory at any time. In practice he would be a visionary; a builder of dreams and fortunes, a veritable Colonel Sellers to the end of his days.