Samuel Langhorne
Clemens, later known as Mark Twain, November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910, was
born in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, the sixth child of John and Jane
Clemens. An adventurer and intellectual, Mark Twain wrote the classic American
novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn. His works are often marked by astute observations and witty comments.
He was also a riverboat pilot,
journalist, lecturer, humorist, entrepreneur and inventor. In the following
essay, a talk he delivered to a group of girls, he adopts a pragmatic approach unlike conventional moral lectures ridden with clichéd adages and platitudes.
Being told I would be expected to
talk here, I inquired what sort of talk I ought to make. They said it should be
something suitable to youth--something didactic, instructive, or something in
the nature of good advice. Very well. I have a few things in my mind which I
have often longed to say for the instruction of the young; for it is in one’s
tender early years that such things will best take root and be most enduring
and most valuable. First, then. I will say to you my young friends--and I say
it beseechingly, urgingly--
Always obey your parents, when they
are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don’t,
they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you
can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on
your own better judgment.
Be respectful to your superiors, if
you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others. If a person offend
you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not
resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick.
That will be sufficient. If you shall find that he had not intended any
offense, come out frankly and confess yourself in the wrong when you struck
him; acknowledge it like a man and say you didn’t mean to. Yes, always avoid
violence; in this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such
things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.
Go to bed early, get up early--this
is wise. Some authorities say get up with the sun; some say get up with one
thing, others with another. But a lark is really the best thing to get up with.
It gives you a splendid reputation with everybody to know that you get up with
the lark; and if you get the right kind of lark, and work at him right, you can
easily train him to get up at half past nine, every time--it’s no trick at all.
Now as to the matter of lying. You
want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get
caught. Once caught, you can never again be in the eyes to the good and the
pure, what you were before. Many a young person has injured himself permanently
through a single clumsy and ill finished lie, the result of carelessness born
of incomplete training. Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie
at all. That of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still
while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain, and I believe I am
right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until
practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance, and
precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable.
Patience, diligence, painstaking attention to detail--these are requirements;
these in time, will make the student perfect; upon these only, may he rely as
the sure foundation for future eminence. Think what tedious years of study,
thought, practice, experience, went to the equipment of that peerless old
master who was able to impose upon the whole world the lofty and sounding maxim
that “Truth is mighty and will prevail”--the most majestic compound fracture of
fact which any of woman born has yet achieved. For the history of our race, and
each individual’s experience, are sewn thick with evidences that a truth is not
hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal. There is in Boston a
monument of the man who discovered anesthesia; many people are aware, in these
latter days, that that man didn’t discover it at all, but stole the discovery
from another man. Is this truth mighty, and will it prevail? Ah no, my hearers,
the monument is made of hardy material, but the lie it tells will outlast it a
million years. An awkward, feeble, leaky lie is a thing which you ought to make
it your unceasing study to avoid; such a lie as that has no more real
permanence than an average truth. Why, you might as well tell the truth at once
and be done with it. A feeble, stupid, preposterous lie will not live two
years--except it be a slander upon somebody. It is indestructible, then of course,
but that is no merit of yours. A final word: begin your practice of this
gracious and beautiful art early--begin now. If I had begun earlier, I could
have learned how.
Never handle firearms carelessly. The
sorrow and suffering that have been caused through the innocent but heedless
handling of firearms by the young! Only four days ago, right in the next farm
house to the one where I am spending the summer, a grandmother, old and gray
and sweet, one of the loveliest spirits in the land, was sitting at her work,
when her young grandson crept in and got down an old, battered, rusty gun which
had not been touched for many years and was supposed not to be loaded, and
pointed it at her, laughing and threatening to shoot. In her fright she ran
screaming and pleading toward the door on the other side of the room; but as
she passed him he placed the gun almost against her very breast and pulled the
trigger! He had supposed it was not loaded. And he was right--it wasn’t. So
there wasn’t any harm done. It is the only case of that kind I ever heard of.
Therefore, just the same, don’t you meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are
the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You
don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest,
you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even.
No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A
youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three quarters
of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his grandmother every time,
at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been
boys armed with old muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had
been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it make one
shudder.
There are many sorts of books; but
good ones are the sort for the young to read. Remember that. They are a great,
an inestimable, and unspeakable means of improvement. Therefore be careful in
your selection, my young friends; be very careful; confine yourselves
exclusively to Robertson’s Sermons, Baxter’s Saint’s Rest, The
Innocents Abroad, and works of that kind.
But I have said enough. I hope you
will treasure up the instructions which I have given you, and make them a guide
to your feet and a light to your understanding. Build your character
thoughtfully and painstakingly upon these precepts, and by and by, when you
have got it built, you will be surprised and gratified to see how nicely and
sharply it resembles everybody else’s.
Mark Twain
(1882)
Photo Courtesy: http://www.smcm.edu/twain/
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