February – Sometime after Sam’s 24 hour stay with Joe Twichell, he wrote his reactions to the loaned copy of Freedom of Will :
DEAR JOE,—(“After compliments.”) [Meaning thanks for his hospitality] From Bridgeport to New York, thence to home, & continuously until near midnight I wallowed & reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immensely refreshed & fine at ten this morning, but with a strange & haunting sense of having been on a three days’ tear with a drunken lunatic. It is years since I have known these sensations. All through the book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad—a marvelous spectacle. No, not all through the book —the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what I take to be Calvinism & its God begins to show up & shine red & hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment.
Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Armenian position) that the man (or his soul or his will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved to action by an impulse back of it. That’s sound!
Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses the one which for the moment is most pleasing to ITSELF. Perfectly correct! An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane.
Up to that point he could have written Chapters III & IV of my suppressed Gospel. But there we seem to separate. He seems to concede the indisputable & unshaken dominion of Motive & Necessity (call them what he may, these are exterior forces & not under the man’s authority, guidance, or even suggestion); then he suddenly flies the logical track & (to all seeming) makes the man & not those exterior forces responsible to God for the man’s thoughts, words, & acts. It is frank insanity.
I think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of Motive and Necessity he grants a third position of mine—that a man’s mind is a mere machine—an automatic machine—which is handled entirely from the outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing; not an ounce of its fuel, & not so much as a bare suggestion to that exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do nor how it shall do it nor when.
After that concession it was time for him to get alarmed & shirk— for he was pointed straight for the only rational & possible next station on that piece of road—the irresponsibility of man to God. And so he shirked. Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result:
Man is commanded to do so & so.
It has been ordained from the beginning of time that some men shan’t & others can’t.
These are to blame: let them be damned.
I enjoy the Colonel very much, & shall enjoy the rest of him with an obscene delight.
Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you & yours! / MARK [MTB 1156-8]. Note: See Gribben 214.
Sam also wrote to the North Side Board of Trade.
I thank you very much for the invitation, but I am still booked for several dissipations this season and must not indulge my self with another
I am trying to disqualify a remark made by one of those Emperors there in Europe who had fallen into a kind of habit of not being at home when I called, and who said—apropos of nothing, so far as I could see— “You have talent, Clemens, but what you lack is discretion” [MTP: NY Times, Mar. 7, 1902, p.2 “North Side Board of Trade”].
Sam inscribed a copy of Francis Henry Bennett Skrine’s 1901 book, Life of Sir William Wilson Hunter:
“From Skrine, whom we all knew so pleasantly in Calcutta, S.L. Clemens, Riverdale, Feb. 1902” [Gribben 645].
Sam inscribed a copy of John Fiske’s 1900 book, A Century of Science and Other Essays: “S.L. Clemens /
Riverdale-on-Hudson / Feb. 1902” [Gribben 233]. Note: Fiske (1842-1901) historian who published several books and was a popular lecturer on the lyceum circuit. He knew Sam through William Dean Howells.
Sam inscribed a copy of Howard Hensman’s 1902 book, Cecil Rhodes: A Study of a Career: “All about the Empire Builder and Pirate… S.L. Clemens, Riverdale, Feb., 1902” [Gribben 233].
Sam inscribed a copy of Alexander Kelly McClure’s 1902 book, Our Presidents, and How We Make Them: “S.L. Clemens, Riverdale, Feb. 1902” [Gribben 439].
Sam inscribed a copy of Lile de Vaux Matthewman’s 1901 book, Crankisms, etc. “From the artist. / SL.
Clemens / Riverdale-on-Hudson / Feb. 1902” [Gribben 458].
The second of two segments of Sam’s story, “The Double-Barrelled Detective Story” ran in Harper’s Monthly. It was collected in The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1903).