MANY UNDERTAKINGS

To write a detailed biography of Mark Twain at this period would be to defy perusal.  Even to set down all the interesting matters, interesting to the public of his time, would mean not only to exhaust the subject, but the reader.  He lived at the top of his bent, and almost anything relating to him was regarded as news.  Daily and hourly he mingled with important matters or spoke concerning them.  A bare list of the interesting events of Mark Twain’s life would fill a large volume.

He was so busy, so deeply interested himself, so vitally alive to every human aspect.  He read the papers through, and there was always enough to arouse his indignation—­the doings of the human race at large could be relied upon to do that—­and he would write, and write, to relieve himself.  His mental Niagara was always pouring away, turning out articles, essays, communications on every conceivable subject, mainly with the idea of reform.  There were many public and private abuses, and he wanted to correct them all.  He covered reams of paper with lurid heresies—­political, religious, civic—­for most of which there was no hope of publication.

Now and then he was allowed to speak out:  An order from the Past-office Department at Washington concerning the superscription of envelopes seemed to him unwarranted.  He assailed it, and directly the nation was being entertained by a controversy between Mark Twain and the Postmaster-General’s private secretary, who subsequently receded from the field.  At another time, on the matter of postage rates he wrote a paper which began:  “Reader, suppose you were an idiot.  And suppose you were a member of Congress.  But I repeat myself.”

It is hardly necessary to add that the paper did not appear.

On the whole, Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print, and such of these papers as are preserved to-day form a curious collection of human documents.  Many of them could be printed to-day, without distress to any one.  The conditions that invited them are changed; the heresies are not heresies any more.  He may have had some thought of their publication in later years, for once he wrote: 

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can’t print the result.  I have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me entirely.  It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and admire the trouble it would make for me and the family.  I will leave it behind and utter it from the grave.  There is a free speech there, and no harm to the family.

It is too late and too soon to print most of these things; too late to print them for their salutary influence, too soon to print them as literature.