SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 72 (of 78)
Blood-Soaked Quill (1905)
Chapter 72
Blood-Soaked Quill (1905)
I haven’t any right to criticize the actions of others. And I don’t, except when I hate them.
In 1904, I joined the Congo Reform Association. When I was asked the next year to write something to expose King Leopold of Belgium—who fancied himself an absolute monarch, free to do whatever he wanted, without regard to justice or decency—for the atrocities he was committing in the Congo, I dipped my pen in perdition and poured forth the requested diatribe.
Compared with Leopold, such killers as Nero, Caligula, Attila, Torquemada, and Genghis Khan were mere amateurs. Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battlefields of this planet for the past thousand years. In this vast statement I am well within the mark, several millions of lives within the mark. It is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon should have the ghastly distinction of having produced this moldy and piety-mouthing hypocrite, this bloody monster whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere, and whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there—which will be soon, let us hope and trust.
In the meantime, I politely suggest to him that he should bathe in sulphur and molasses and let his finger nails grow. Further advice is unnecessary—instinct will prompt him to scratch.
Will the strong, those in power, never stop taking advantage of their subjects? No, they will not; I knew that already; bitter experience and observation and reading of history had taught me that. Still, I needed to express my vitriol. To stand by mute and say nothing would be tantamount to passive consent. I did not have the time, the energy, or the desire to write another “Huck Finn” in response to those things going on over there, though. Instead I wrote a shorter and more direct attack, entitled “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” to give the scoundrel down the banks and expose him for the evil tyrant that he is.
Two years ago, in 1908, the Belgian government took this personal fiefdom of Leopold’s away from him, and brought about a measure of relief to the oppressed people there.
Whatever part I played in bringing about the downfall of that devil incarnate is one of my proudest achievements.
EDITOR’S NOTES: The Leopold being spoken of here was Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909), who reigned from 1865 until his death.
At the time he wrote the above (in 1910), Twain was apparently unaware (or had forgotten) that Leopold had died the year before.
The polemic “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” is another prime example of what has been described as Twain’s “pen warmed up in hell” period. The “Moralist of the Main” did not hold back a jot, and let the person he considered a “poster child” for evil domination “have it” with the full force of all the scathing denunciation he could muster.
In his autobiography, Twain wrote about this situation:
The royal palace of Belgium is still what it has been for fourteen years, the den of a wild beast. King Leopold II, who for money’s sake mutilates, murders and starves half a million of friendless and helpless poor natives in the Congo State every year, and does it by the silent consent of all the Christian powers except England, none of them lifting a hand or a voice to stop these atrocities, although thirteen of them are by solemn treaty pledged to the protecting and uplifting of those wretched natives.
. . .
The conditions under which the poor lived in the Middle Ages were hard enough, but those conditions were heaven itself as compared with those which have obtained in the Congo State of these past fourteen years.
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Earlier in the same year of 1905, Twain had also written The Czar’s Soliloquy, another polemic, which takes Russian Czar Nicholas to task for having had his troops fire on striking workers in St. Petersburg (Russia) in January. In the soliloquy, published in February, Twain has the Czar musing on other evil deeds he had perpetrated against Finland and Poland, and wondering whether he would in the end get away with it all.
While Twain wrote here specifically against Czar Nicholas and King Leopold, he was also fundamentally anti-royalist. He expressed this quite plainly in his 1891 essay At the Shrine of St. Wagner, the relevant part of which describes a mass of people espying a princess on a balcony above them and goes on to opine:
This daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty; she had a kind face; she was without airs; she is known to be full of common human sympathies. There are many kinds of princesses, but this kind is the most harmful of all, for wherever they go they reconcile people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress. The valuable princes, the desirable princes, are the czars and their sort. By their mere dumb presence in the world they cover with derision every argument that can be invented in favor of royalty by the most ingenious casuist. In this time the husband of this princess was valuable. He led a degraded life, he ended it with his own hand in circumstances and surroundings of a hideous sort, and was buried like a god.
Twain elsewhere called monarchy “the grotesquest of all the swindles ever invented by man.”
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Even towards “civilization” in general Twain could be quite derogatory, as when, in a 1900 letter to Twichell, he wrote the following:
My idea of our civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs.
Biographer A.B. Paine astutely annotated one of Twain's such diatribes as follows:
One cannot help wondering what Mark Twain would have thought of human nature had he lived to see the great World War, fought mainly by the Christian nations who for nearly two thousand years had been preaching peace on earth and goodwill toward men. But his opinion of the race could hardly have been worse than it was. And nothing that human beings could do would have surprised him.
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Although often expressing outspoken animosity towards mankind as a whole, as regards individuals Twain could be almost exaggeratedly magnanimous. Near the beginning of 1906, Twain attended the funeral of a long-time servant of his. He spoke of this employee and friend as follows, while responding to a request for his definition of the word “gentleman”:
No, he was never old. Patrick came to us thirty-six years ago—a brisk, lithe young Irishman. He was as beautiful in his graces as he was in his spirit, and he was as honest a man as ever lived. For twenty-five years he was our coachman, and if I were going to describe a gentleman in detail I would describe Patrick.
At my own request, I was his pall bearer with our old gardener. He drove me and my bride so long ago. As the little children came along he drove them, too. He was all the world to them, and for all in my house he had the same feelings of honor, honesty, and affection.
He was sixty years old. Howells suggests he was old. He was not so old. He had the same gracious and winning ways to the end. Patrick was a gentleman, and to him I would apply the lines:
So may I be courteous to men, faithful to friends, True to my God, a fragrance of the path I trod
He was with us in New Hampshire, with us last summer, and his hair was just as black, his eyes were just as blue, his form just as straight, and his heart just as good as on the day we first met. In all the long years Patrick never made a mistake. He never needed an order, he never received a command. He knew. I have been asked for my idea of an ideal gentleman, and I give it to you—Patrick McAleer.
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In 1906, Twain wrote Eve’s Diary, a companion piece or book-end to Adam’s Diary.
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Toward the end of 1906, Twain addressed a congressional subcommittee on copyright; he also inaugurated there, for its dramatic effect (and because he had always hated wearing black), his brilliant white suit, which later became something of a trademark. Twain had been concerned about copyright protection for quite some time, and was happy with the extension of copyright. He said about this:
I like the bill, and I like that it proposed extension from the present limit of copyright life of forty-two years to the author’s life and fifty years after. I think that will satisfy any reasonable author, because it will take care of his children.
Twain knew he wouldn’t live much longer, and he was concerned about his daughters (both Clara and Jean were still alive at the time). In 1960, fifty years after Twain’s death and thus at the end of the copyright period of his latest works, Clara was his sole remaining child. She died two years later, in 1962. Twain’s only grandchild, Nina Gabrilowitsch, died in 1966, just four years after the death of her mother Clara.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.