God’s Fool: The Dark Side of Mark Twain

“If I’m a fool, I’m God’s fool.” Mark Twain

Many years ago I read what purported to be a short story by Mark Twain. Or maybe I heard it read on the radio. It was called “The Mysterious Stranger. I can never forget the last line, “He had gone mad.”

The “Mysterious Stranger” was Satan, it was the village priest who had gone mad, and his madness was Satan’s way of making him happy for the rest of his life. The story was very simple. Satan befriends three boys, inseparable companions, who play together in the woods. One day he grants them a wish. The wish was for Father Peter, who lived alone with his sister and had a very hard life, to be happy.

“Done,” Says Satan. The boys go home and find the priest sitting out on his porch and laughing and laughing and laughing. “He had gone mad.”

Twain’s message was clear. You can only be happy in this mad, mad world if you are yourself mad. It is also a perfect illustration of the law of unintended consequences. I had planned to use this text for my sermon at the end of this mad mad year.

I happened to have “The Mysterious Stranger” in a collection of “The Complete Short Stories” of Mark Twain. But when I looked into it, I discovered

a) that it was not a short story at all; rather a novella. b) that originally I must have encountered a sort of Readers Digest version. c) Father Peter’s madness is not even near the end of the story d) And that that is not even the main dark and pessimistic message of this novella.

More on that anon.

I found an entire volume at the library devoted to Twain’s mysterious stranger manuscripts. The editor declares the text I possess to be a forgery perpetrated by Twain’s friend and biographer after Twain’s death. Mark Twain had tried to write the story many times; there were many different texts. All of these manuscripts are here collected. They all present the message I knew, using the image of “young Satan,” old fallen-angel Satan’s nephew. Twain uses this character and fantasy set in medieval Austria to present an extremely pessimistic view of humanity at the end of the nineteenth century. The published version is faithful to the spirit of Twain’s manuscripts and stitches together parts of Twain’s texts to make a book that could be given to young adults the same way as Huckleberry Finn.

He wrote many texts of various types that he didn’t publish. Some had been rejected; others were so extreme that he feared consequences.

1. 100 years ago the United States was involved in its first Asian war, a war of imperialist conquest. 2. As an old man by the standards of 1901, Mark Twain was very pessimistic and very angry about “the damned human race” (his phrase). Twain hated America’s embarking on an imperialist adventure in the Philippine-American war, a war that followed hard on the Spanish-American war. He was one of the organizers of the Anti-Imperialist League that lasted well into the 20th century. He lampooned president McKinley, whom he accused of the rankest hypocrisy—just a century ago. 3. Three aspects of Twain’s late-life genius: a) Savage exposure of humanity’s foibles, reaching its epitome in “The Mysterious Stranger” b) the enraged anti-imperialist, defender of the poor and dispossessed c) the philosopher 4. He used sarcasm and satire, but not the funny humor of Tom Sawyer, the Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and the like. As a result, many of his political polemics were published in magazines and newspapers—but many remained unpublished, either rejected or never submitted. a) Twain’s “hatred of cruelty (which would lead him to begin a book about lynching in the United States)…” b) In the spring and summer of 1900 Twain was increasingly angered by the role of the European powers in the Boxer Rebellion. He was particularly incensed by the suppression of Philippine democracy by the McKinley/Roosevelt administrations. c) He defended the poor, the victims of imperialism around the world, the Jews, the Negroes, Chinese laborers in America and Chinese in China…and prostitutes. He attacked Christian smugness and cruelty in particular. He satirized superstition and religious beliefs d) His essays were attacked as “not innocent, happy, ‘cheerful’ specimens of frontier humor.” Many of these were not published during Twain’s lifetime for fear of the consequences. e) In the summer of 1900 he was especially pessimistic: “The time is grave. The future is blacker than has been any future which any person now living has tried to peer into.” He could have written this today on the threshold of the next century.

1. “If Satan is around, and so much more intelligent and powerful than God, why doesn’t He write a Bible’ Twain wrote in his notebook in June, 1898.” 2. Unlike the truly mysterious stranger of The Man who Corrupted Hadleyburg, who disappears out of the story before it really begins, “[Twain] wanted to make his stranger both a boy and an angel, both a companion to Tom and Huck and a Prometheus figure who was to enlighten the citizens of St. Petersburg concerning the “damnable Moral Sense.” 3. There are two villains, Father Adolf and the Astrologer, their victim the impoverished and gentle Father Peters. 4. The narrator of the published work is Theodor Fischer, the hero—or anti-hero is Satan, an angel, and nephew of the fallen angel of the same name, who appears to be the spokesboy for Twain himself. He knows not right from wrong, has not eaten of the apple the way his uncle had. He has been everywhere, everywhere on earth and beyond, to other solar systems with strange people. He fascinates the three boys with magical tricks that just come naturally. And he is utterly without moral sense. 5. Once, to amuse the boys, he creates a race of miniature, Lilliputian characters, out of sand, and shows the boys how to make them too. But the boys are unskilled, and their characters are lopsided and misshapen. Theodor says “Our men and horses were a spectacle to see, they were so little like what they were intended for; for, of course, we had no art in making such things. Satan said they were the worst he had seen; and when he touched them and made them alive, it was just ridiculous the way they acted, on account of their legs not being of uniform lengths. They reeled and sprawled around as if they were drunk, and endangered everybody’s lives around them, and finally fell over and lay helpless and kicking. It made us all laugh, though it was a shameful thing to see.” Satan tires of his Lilliputians finally, and destroys all of them in a miniature earthquake. “The earthquake rent the ground wide, and the castle’s wreck and ruin tumbled into the chasm, which swallowed it from sight, and closed upon it, with all that innocent life, not one of the five hundred poor creatures escaping. Our hearts were broken; we could not keep from crying.

“Don’t cry,” Satan said; “they were of no value.’

“But they are gone to hell!”

“Oh, it is no matter; we can make plenty more.”

“…there was no sign that they were anything to him beyond mere entertainments. Those visions of hell, those poor babes and women and girls and lads and men shrieking and supplicating in anguish—why, we could hardly bear it, but he was as bland about it as if it had been so many imitation rats in an artificial fire.

6. Theodor says “And always when he was talking about men and women here on the earth and their doings—even their grandest and sublimest—we were secretly ashamed, for his manner showed that to him they and their doings were of paltry poor consequence; often you would think he was talking about flies, if you didn’t know. Once he even said, in so many words, that our people down here were quite interesting to him, notwithstanding that they were so dull and ignorant and trivial and conceited, and so diseased and rickety, and such a shabby, poor, worthless lot all around. He said it in a quite matter-of-course way and without bitterness, just as a person might talk about bricks or manure or any other thing that was of no consequence and hadn’t feelings. I could see that he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners.

“Manners!” he said, reading Theodor’s mind, “Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction….”

7. Once Theodor asks Satan “why he made so much difference between man and himself. He had to struggle with that a moment; he didn’t seem to understand how I could ask such a strange question. Then he said….Man is made of dirt—I saw him made. I am not made of dirt. Man is a museum of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes to-day and is gone tomorrow; he begins as dirt and departs as stench….And man has the Moral Sense. You understand? He has the Moral Sense. That would seem to be the difference enough between us, all by itself.” 8. Twain wanted to make Young Satan one of his thoroughly enjoyable young rascals; whenever Satan interferes with human events he really messes things up, but always manages to explain things away. 9. Because Twain has a philosophical/theological axe to grind, Young Satan has to make some pretty long speeches at the end of the novella. Here is its actual end.

The last chapter begins with Satan coming one last time. “I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more.”

“In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?”

“Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, ‘There is no other.’”

“A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said, ‘But—but—we have seen that future life—seen it in its actuality, and so—’

“ ‘It was a vision—it had no existence.’

“I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. ‘A vision?—a vi—’

“ ‘Life itself is only a vision, a dream.’

“It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!

“ ‘Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!’

“ ‘And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream—your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me….

“ ‘…In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

“ ‘…Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams; a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation; then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and, finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites the poor, abused slave to worship him!...

“ ‘You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker if it. The dream-marks are all present….

“ ‘It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among empty eternities!’

“He vanished, and left me appalled, for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.”

I cannot leave you with this bleak picture of Mark Twain’s negativity. In another work from this period, “What is Man?” Twain solved the nature/nurture controversy, even before it was clearly put by the psychologists. One hundred years ahead of his time he has people born endowed with their “characters;” what they become is the result of their actions, induced by their experiences, acting on those characters. With slight changes of terminology this is just what modern psychology has worked out; it has taken 100 years. It is too bad that What is Man?, first published posthumously, seems to have been ignored because one expects a humorist to publish only funny works. What is Man? does display Twain’s wry turns of phrase, but it is a serious philosophical/psychological work. I got my copy off the internet, via Amazon/Bibliofind. It also contains a lampoon of Christian Science and other gems.