What Is Man? and Other Essays. Марк Твен
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got pleasure out of it. But afterward when it resulted in pain to him, he was sorry. Sorry it had inflicted pain upon the others, but for no reason under the sun except that their pain gave him pain. Our consciences take no notice of pain inflicted upon others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to us. In all cases without exception we are absolutely indifferent to another person's pain until his sufferings make us uncomfortable. Many an infidel would not have been troubled by that Christian mother's distress. Don't you believe that?
Y.M. Yes. You might almost say it of the average infidel, I think.
O.M. And many a missionary, sternly fortified by his sense of duty, would not have been troubled by the pagan mother's distress—Jesuit missionaries in Canada in the early French times, for instance; see episodes quoted by Parkman.
Y.M. Well, let us adjourn. Where have we arrived?
O.M. At this. That we (mankind) have ticketed ourselves with a number of qualities to which we have given misleading names. Love, Hate, Charity, Compassion, Avarice, Benevolence, and so on. I mean we attach misleading meanings to the names. They are all forms of self-contentment, self-gratification, but the names so disguise them that they distract our attention from the fact. Also we have smuggled a word into the dictionary which ought not to be there at all—Self-Sacrifice. It describes a thing which does not exist. But worst of all, we ignore and never mention the Sole Impulse which dictates and compels a man's every act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every emergency and at all costs. To it we owe all that we are. It is our breath, our heart, our blood. It is our only spur, our whip, our goad, our only impelling power; we have no other. Without it we should be mere inert images, corpses; no one would do anything, there would be no progress, the world would stand still. We ought to stand reverently uncovered when the name of that stupendous power is uttered.
Y.M. I am not convinced.
O.M. You will be when you think.
III
Instances in Point
Old Man. Have you given thought to the Gospel of Self—Approval since we talked?
Young Man. I have.
O.M. It was I that moved you to it. That is to say an outside influence moved you to it—not one that originated in your head. Will you try to keep that in mind and not forget it?
Y.M. Yes. Why?
O.M. Because by and by in one of our talks, I wish to further impress upon you that neither you, nor I, nor any man ever originates a thought in his own head. The utterer of a thought always utters a second-hand one.
Y.M. Oh, now—
O.M. Wait. Reserve your remark till we get to that part of our discussion—tomorrow or next day, say. Now, then, have you been considering the proposition that no act is ever born of any but a self-contenting impulse—(primarily). You have sought. What have you found?
Y.M. I have not been very fortunate. I have examined many fine and apparently self-sacrificing deeds in romances and biographies, but—
O.M. Under searching analysis the ostensible self-sacrifice disappeared? It naturally would.
Y.M. But here in this novel is one which seems to promise. In the Adirondack woods is a wage-earner and lay preacher in the lumber-camps who is of noble character and deeply religious. An earnest and practical laborer in the New York slums comes up there on vacation—he is leader of a section of the University Settlement. Holme, the lumberman, is fired with a desire to throw away his excellent worldly prospects and go down and save souls on the East Side. He counts it happiness to make this sacrifice for the glory of God and for the cause of Christ. He resigns his place, makes the sacrifice cheerfully, and goes to the East Side and preaches Christ and Him crucified every day and every night to little groups of half-civilized foreign paupers who scoff at him. But he rejoices in the scoffings, since he is suffering them in the great cause of Christ. You have so filled my mind with suspicions that I was constantly expecting to find a hidden questionable impulse back of all this, but I am thankful to say I have failed. This man saw his duty, and for duty's sake he sacrificed self and assumed the burden it imposed.
O.M. Is that as far as you have read?
Y.M. Yes.
O.M. Let us read further, presently. Meantime, in sacrificing himself—not for the glory of God, primarily, as he imagined, but first to content that exacting and inflexible master within him—did he sacrifice anybody else?
Y.M. How do you mean?
O.M. He relinquished a lucrative post and got mere food and lodging in place of it. Had he dependents?
Y.M. Well—yes.
O.M. In what way and to what extend did his self-sacrifice affect them?
Y.M. He was the support of a superannuated father. He had a young sister with a remarkable voice—he was giving her a musical education, so that her longing to be self-supporting might be gratified. He was furnishing the money to put a young brother through a polytechnic school and satisfy his desire to become a civil engineer.
O.M. The old father's comforts were now curtailed?
Y.M. Quite seriously. Yes.
O.M. The sister's music-lessens had to stop?
Y.M. Yes.
O.M. The young brother's education—well, an extinguishing blight fell upon that happy dream, and he had to go to sawing wood to support the old father, or something like that?
Y.M. It is about what happened. Yes.
O.M. What a handsome job of self-sacrificing he did do! It seems to me that he sacrificed everybody except himself. Haven't I told you that no man ever sacrifices himself; that there is no instance of it upon record anywhere; and that when a man's Interior Monarch requires a thing of its slave for either its momentary or its permanent contentment, that thing must and will be furnished and that command obeyed, no matter who may stand in the way and suffer disaster by it? That man ruined his family to please and content his Interior Monarch—
Y.M. And help Christ's cause.
O.M. Yes—secondly. Not firstly. He thought it was firstly.
Y.M. Very well, have it so, if you will. But it could be that he argued that if he saved a hundred souls in New York—
O.M. The sacrifice of the family would be justified by that great profit upon the—the—what shall we call it?
Y.M. Investment?
O.M. Hardly. How would speculation do? How would gamble do? Not a solitary soul-capture was sure. He played for a possible thirty-three-hundred-per-cent profit. It was gambling—with his family for “chips.” However let us see how the game came out. Maybe we can get on the track of the secret original impulse, the real impulse, that moved him to so nobly self—sacrifice his family in the Savior's cause under the superstition that he was sacrificing himself. I will read a chapter or so. … Here we have it! It was bound to expose itself sooner or later. He preached to the East-Side rabble a season, then went back to his old dull, obscure life in the lumber-camps “hurt to the heart, his pride humbled.” Why? Were not his efforts acceptable to the Savior, for Whom alone they were made? Dear me, that detail is lost sight of, is not even referred to, the fact that it started out as a motive is entirely forgotten! Then what is the trouble? The authoress quite innocently and unconsciously gives the whole business away. The trouble was this: this man merely preached to the poor; that is not the University Settlement's way; it deals in larger