Europe and elsewhere

by Mark Twain

As child and lad his health was delicate, capricious, insecure, and his eyesight affected by a malady which debarred him from book study and from reading. This was a bitter hardship for him, for he had a wonderful memory and a sharp hunger for knowledge. School was not for him, yet while still a little boy he acquired an education, and a good one. He managed it after a method of his own devising: he got permission to listen while the classes of the normal school recited their abstruse lessons and black-boarded their mathematics. By questioning the little chap it was found that he was keeping up with the star scholars of the school.

In those days he paid us a visit in Hartford. It was when he was about twelve years old. I was laboriously constructing an ancient-history game at the time, to be played by my wife and myself, and I was digging the dates and facts for it out of cyclopædias, a dreary and troublesome business. I had sweated blood over that work and was pardonably proud of the result, as far as I had gone. I showed the child my mass of notes, and he was at once as excited as I should have been over a Sunday-school picnic at his age. He wanted to help, he was eager to help, and I was as willing to let him as I should have been to give away an interest in a surgical operation that I was getting tired of. I made him free of the cyclopædias, but he never consulted them--he had their contents in his head. All alone he built and completed the game rapidly and without effort.

Away back in ’80 or ’81 when the grand eruption of Krakatoa, in the Straits of Sunda, occurred, the news reached San Francisco late in the night--too late for editors to hunt for information about that unknown volcano in cyclopædias and write it up exhaustively and learnedly in time for the first edition. The managing editor said, “Send to Moffett’s home; rout him out and fetch him; he will know all about it; he won’t need the cyclopædia.” Which was true. He came to the office and swiftly wrote it all up without having to refer to books.

I will take a few paragraphs from the article about him in Collier’s Weekly:

If you wanted to know any fact about any subject it was quicker to go to him than to books of reference. His good nature made him the martyr of interruptions. In the middle of a sentence, in a hurry hour, he would look up happily, and whether the thing you wanted was railroad statistics or international law, he would bring it out of one of the pigeonholes in his brain. A born dispenser of the light, he made the giving of information a privilege and a pleasure on all occasions.

This cyclopædic faculty was marvelous because it was only a small part of his equipment which became invaluable in association with other gifts. A student and a humanist, he delighted equally in books and in watching all the workings of a political convention.

For any one of the learned professions he had conspicuous ability. He chose that which, in the cloister of the editorial rooms, makes fame for others. Any judge or Cabinet Minister of our time may well be proud of a career of such usefulness as his. Men with such a quality of mind as Moffett’s are rare.

Anyone who discussed with him the things he advocated stood a little awed to discover that here was a man who had carefully thought out what would be best for all the people in the world two or three generations hence, and guided his work according to that standard. This was the one broad subject that covered all his interests; in detail they included the movement for universal peace about which he wrote repeatedly; so small a thing as a plan to place flowers on the window sills and fire escapes of New York tenement houses enlisted not only the advocacy of his pen, but his direct personal presence and co-operation; again and again, in his department in this paper, he gave indorsement and aid to similar movements, whether broad or narrow in their scope--the saving of the American forests, fighting tuberculosis, providing free meals for poor school children in New York, old-age pensions, safety appliances for protecting factory employees, the beautifying of American cities, the creation of inland waterways, industrial peace.

He leaves behind him wife, daughter, and son--inconsolable mourners. The son is thirteen, a beautiful human creature, with the broad and square face of his father and his grandfather, a face in which one reads high character and intelligence. This boy will be distinguished, by and by, I think.

In closing this slight sketch of Samuel E. Moffett I wish to dwell with lingering and especial emphasis upon the dignity of his character and ideals. In an age when we would rather have money than health, and would rather have another man’s money than our own, he lived and died unsordid; in a day when the surest road to national greatness and admiration is by showy and rotten demagoguery in politics and by giant crimes in finance, he lived and died a gentleman.