dealt with infant damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to curl over infant damnation? How little he had observed the real changes in public opinion, this man who lived, instinctively, all his life long, in the atmosphere of the Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells Mr. Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of A. D. 2006—which I judge they won't"; and what he dictated was an indictment of the orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A. D. 2006," saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out," and even went so far as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs one hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk.
Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. He considered life a mistake and the human animal the contemptible machine he had found him: that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the depth and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues little else. The absurdity of man consisted, in Mark Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous conception of heaven and his conceit in believing himself the Creator's pet. But surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque," he wrote in one of those pseudo-Swiftian Letters from the Earth which he dictated with such fervour to Mr. Paine.
"I give you my word it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists—utterly and entirely—of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here in the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven. . . . Most men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. . . . All people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is like?"
