He was serious enough, and fiercely humorous as well, in his article “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and in those which followed it. It seemed to him that the human race, always a doubtful quantity, was behaving even worse than usual. On New Year’s Eve, 1900-01, he wrote:
A GREETING FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chau, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocracies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.
Certain missionary activities in China, in particular, invited his attention, and in the first of the Review articles he unburdened himself. A masterpiece of pitiless exposition and sarcasm, its publication stirred up a cyclone. Periodicals more or less orthodox heaped upon him denunciation and vituperation. “To My Missionary Critics,” published in the Review for April, was his answer. He did not fight alone, but was upheld by a vast following of liberal-minded readers, both in and out of the Church. Edward S. Martin wrote him:
How gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us who understands the rarity of plain truth, and who delights to utter it, and has the gift of doing so without cant, and with not too much seriousness.
The principals of the primal human drama, our biblical parents of Eden, play a considerable part in Mark Twain’s imaginative writings. He wrote “Diaries” of both Adam and Eve, that of the latter being among his choicest works. He was generally planning something that would include one or both of the traditional ancestors, and results of this tendency express themselves in the present volume. Satan, likewise, the picturesque angel of rebellion and defeat, the Satan of Paradise Lost, made a strong appeal and in no less than three of the articles which follow the prince of error variously appears. For the most part these inventions offer an aspect of humor; but again the figure of the outcast angel is presented to us in an attitude of sorrowful kinship with the great human tragedy.
Albert Bigelow Paine
EUROPE AND ELSEWHERE