“Our alphabet is pure insanity. It can hardly spell any large word in the English language with any degree of certainty. Its sillinesses are quite beyond enumeration. English orthography may need reforming and simplifying, but the English alphabet needs it a good many times as much.”
He would naturally favor simplicity in anything. I remember him reading, as an example of beautiful English, The Death of King Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory, and his verdict:
“That is one of the most beautiful things ever written in English, and written when we had no vocabulary.”
“A vocabulary, then, is sometimes a handicap?”
“It is indeed.”
Still I think it was never a handicap with him, but rather the plumage of flight. Sometimes, when just the right word did not come, he would turn his head a little at different angles, as if looking about him for the precise term. He would find it directly, and it was invariably the word needed. Most writers employ, now and again, phrases that do not sharply present the idea—that blur the picture like a poor opera-glass. Mark Twain's English always focused exactly.
CCXLVIII. “WHAT IS MAN?” AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Clemens decided to publish anonymously, or, rather, to print privately, the Gospel, which he had written in Vienna some eight years before and added to from time to time. He arranged with Frank Doubleday to take charge of the matter, and the De Vinne Press was engaged to do the work. The book was copyrighted in the name of J. W. Bothwell, the superintendent of the De Vinne company, and two hundred and fifty numbered copies were printed on hand-made paper, to be gradually distributed to intimate friends.—[In an introductory word (dated February, 1905) the author states that the studies for these papers had been made twenty-five or twenty-seven years before. He probably referred to the Monday Evening Club essay, “What Is Happiness?” (February, 1883). See chap. cxli.]—A number of the books were sent to newspaper reviewers, and so effectually had he concealed the personality of his work that no critic seems to have suspected the book's authorship. It was not over-favorably received. It was generally characterized as a clever, and even brilliant, expose of philosophies which were no longer startlingly new. The supremacy of self-interest and “man the irresponsible machine” are the main features of 'What Is Man' and both of these and all the rest are comprehended in his wider and more absolute doctrine of that inevitable life-sequence which began with the first created spark. There can be no training of the ideals, “upward and still upward,” no selfishness and unselfishness, no atom of voluntary effort within the boundaries of that conclusion. Once admitting the postulate, that existence is merely a sequence of cause and effect beginning with the primal atom, and we have a theory that must stand or fall as a whole. We cannot say that man is a creature of circumstance and then leave him free to select his circumstance, even in the minutest fractional degree. It was selected for him with his disposition; in that first instant of created life. Clemens himself repeatedly emphasized this doctrine, and once, when it was suggested to him that it seemed to “surround every thing, like the sky,” he answered:
“Yes, like the sky; you can't break through anywhere.”