What Is Man? and Other Essays
suggests the sound of Edward, and he will do. I could make him better
if I had a model, but I made this one from memory. But it is no
particular matter; they all look alike, anyway. They are conceited and
troublesome, and don’t pay enough. Edward was the first really English
king that had yet occupied the throne. The editor in the picture
probably looks just as Edward looked when it was first borne in upon
him that this was so. His whole attitude expressed gratification and
pride mixed with stupefaction and astonishment.
Edward II. now; twenty _blue _squares. (Fig. 14.)
Another editor. That thing behind his ear is his pencil. Whenever he
finds a bright thing in your manuscript he strikes it out with that.
That does him good, and makes him smile and show his teeth, the way he
is doing in the picture. This one has just been striking out a smart
thing, and now he is sitting there with his thumbs in his vest-holes,
gloating. They are full of envy and malice, editors are. This picture
will serve to remind you that Edward II. was the first English king who
was _deposed_. Upon demand, he signed his deposition himself. He had
found kingship a most aggravating and disagreeable occupation, and you
can see by the look of him that he is glad he resigned. He has put his
blue pencil up for good now. He had struck out many a good thing with
it in his time.
Edward III. next; fifty _red _squares. (Fig. 15.)
This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his
tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for
breakfast. This one’s arms are put on wrong. I did not notice it at
first, but I see it now. Somehow he has got his right arm on his left
shoulder, and his left arm on the right shoulder, and this shows us the
back of his hands in both instances. It makes him left-handed all
around, which is a thing which has never happened before, except
perhaps in a museum. That is the way with art, when it is not acquired
but born to you: you start in to make some simple little thing, not
suspecting that your genius is beginning to work and swell and strain
in secret, and all of a sudden there is a convulsion and you fetch out
something astonishing. This is called inspiration. It is an accident;
you never know when it is coming. I might have tried as much as a year
to think of such a strange thing as an all-around left-handed man and I
could not have done it, for the more you try to think of an unthinkable
thing the more it eludes you; but it can’t elude inspiration; you have
only to bait with inspiration and you will get it every time. Look at
Botticelli’s “Spring.” Those snaky women were unthinkable, but
inspiration secured them for us, thanks to goodness. It is too late to
reorganize this editor-critic now; we will leave him as he is. He will
serve to remind us.
Richard II. next; twenty-two _white _squares. (Fig. 16.)
We use the lion again because this is another Richard. Like Edward II.,
he was _deposed_. He is taking a last sad look at his crown before they
take it away. There was not room enough and I have made it too small;
but it never fitted him, anyway.
Now we turn the corner of the century with a new line of monarchs—the
Lancastrian kings.
Henry IV.; fourteen squares of _yellow _paper. (Fig. 17.)
This hen has laid the egg of a new dynasty and realizes the imposing
magnitude of the event. She is giving notice in the usual way. You
notice I am improving in the construction of hens. At first I made them
too much like other animals, but this one is orthodox. I mention this
to encourage you. You will find that the more you practice the more
accurate you will become. I could always draw animals, but before I was
educated I could not tell what kind they were when I got them done, but
now I can. Keep up your courage; it will be the same with you, although
you may not think it. This Henry died the year after Joan of Arc was
born.
Henry V.; nine _blue _squares. (Fig. 18)
There you see him lost in meditation over the monument which records
the amazing figures of the battle of Agincourt. French history says
20,000 Englishmen routed 80,000 Frenchmen there; and English historians
say that the French loss, in killed and wounded, was 60,000.
Henry VI.; thirty-nine _red _squares. (Fig. 19)
This is poor Henry VI., who reigned long and scored many misfortunes
and humiliations. Also two great disasters: he lost France to Joan of
Arc and he lost the throne and ended the dynasty which Henry IV. had
started in business with such good prospects. In the picture we see him
sad and weary and downcast, with the scepter falling from his nerveless
grasp. It is a pathetic quenching of a sun which had risen in such
splendor.
Edward IV.; twenty-two _light-brown_ squares. (Fig. 20.)
That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his
legs crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies
wear, so that he can describe them for his paper and make them out
finer than they are and get bribes for it and become wealthy. That
flower which he is wearing in his buttonhole is a rose—a white rose, a
York rose—and will serve to remind us of the War of the Roses, and that
the white one was the winning color when Edward got the throne and
dispossessed the Lancastrian dynasty.
Edward V.; one-third of a _black _square. (Fig. 21.)
His uncle Richard had him murdered in the tower. When you get the
reigns displayed upon the wall this one will be conspicuous and easily
remembered. It is the shortest one in English history except Lady Jane
Grey’s, which was only nine days. She is never officially recognized as
a monarch of England, but if you or I should ever occupy a throne we
should like to have proper notice taken of it; and it would be only
fair and right, too, particularly if we gained nothing by it and lost
our lives besides.
Richard III.; two _white _squares. (Fig. 22.)
That is not a very good lion, but Richard was not a very good king. You
would think that this lion has two heads, but that is not so; one is
only a shadow. There would be shadows for the rest of him, but there
was not light enough to go round, it being a dull day, with only
fleeting sun-glimpses now and then. Richard had a humped back and a
hard heart, and fell at the battle of Bosworth. I do not know the name
of that flower in the pot, but we will use it as Richard’s trade-mark,
for it is said that it grows in only one place in the world—Bosworth
Field—and tradition says it never grew there until Richard’s royal
blood warmed its hidden seed to life and made it grow.
Henry VII.; twenty-four _blue _squares. (Fig. 23.)
Henry VII. had no liking for wars and turbulence; he preferred peace
and quiet and the general prosperity which such conditions create. He
liked to sit on that kind of eggs on his own private account as well as
the nation’s, and hatch them out and count up the result. When he died
he left his heir 2,000,000 pounds, which was a most unusual fortune for
a king to possess in those days. Columbus’s great achievement gave him
the discovery-fever, and he sent Sebastian Cabot to the New World to
search out some foreign territory for England. That is Cabot’s ship up
there in the corner. This was the first time that England went far
abroad to enlarge her estate—but not the last.
Henry VIII.; thirty-eight _red _squares. (Fig. 24.)
That is Henry VIII. suppressing a monastery in his arrogant fashion.
Edward VI.; six squares of _yellow _paper. (Fig. 25.)
He is the last Edward to date. It is indicated by that thing over his
head, which is a _last_—shoemaker’s last.
Mary; five squares of _black _paper. (Fig. 26.)
The picture represents a burning martyr. He is in back of the smoke.
The first three letters of Mary’s name and the first three of the word
martyr are the same. Martyrdom was going out in her day and martyrs
were becoming scarcer, but she made several. For this reason she is
sometimes called Bloody Mary.
This brings us to the reign of Elizabeth, after passing through a
period of nearly five hundred years of England’s history—492 to be
exact. I think you may now be trusted to go the rest of the way without
further lessons in art or inspirations in the matter of ideas. You have
the scheme now, and something in the ruler’s name or career will
suggest the pictorial symbol. The effort of inventing such things will
not only help your memory, but will develop originality in art. See
what it has done for me. If you do not find the parlor wall big enough
for all of England’s history, continue it into the dining-room and into
other rooms. This will make the walls interesting and instructive and
really worth something instead of being just flat things to hold the
house together.
THE MEMORABLE ASSASSINATION
Note.—The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva, September
10, 1898, occurred during Mark Twain’s Austrian residence. The news
came to him at Kaltenleutgeben, a summer resort a little way out of
Vienna. To his friend, the Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, he wrote:
“That good and unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a madman,
and I am living in the midst of world-history again. The Queen’s
Jubilee last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, and
now this murder, which will still be talked of and described and
painted a thousand years from now. To have a personal friend of the
wearer of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the
evening and say, in a voice broken with tears, ‘My God! the Empress is
murdered,’ and fly toward her home before we can utter a question—why,
it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it and
personally interested; it is as if your neighbor, Antony, should come
flying and say, ‘Caesar is butchered—the head of the world is fallen!’
“Of course there is no talk but of this. The mourning is universal and
genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being
draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday,
when the funeral cortege marches.”
He was strongly moved by the tragedy, impelled to write concerning it.
He prepared the article which here follows, but did not offer it for
publication, perhaps feeling that his own close association with the
court circles at the moment prohibited this personal utterance. There
appears no such reason for withholding its publication now.
A. B. P.
The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing and
tremendous the event becomes. The destruction of a city is a large
event, but it is one which repeats itself several times in a thousand
years; the destruction of a third part of a nation by plague and famine
is a large event, but it has happened several times in history; the
murder of a king is a large event, but it has been frequent.
The murder of an empress is the largest of all large events. One must
go back about two thousand years to find an instance to put with this
one. The oldest family of unchallenged descent in Christendom lives in
Rome and traces its line back seventeen hundred years, but no member of
it has been present in the earth when an empress was murdered, until
now. Many a time during these seventeen centuries members of that
family have been startled with the news of extraordinary events—the
destruction of cities, the fall of thrones, the murder of kings, the
wreck of dynasties, the extinction of religions, the birth of new
systems of government; and their descendants have been by to hear of it
and talk about it when all these things were repeated once, twice, or a
dozen times—but to even that family has come news at last which is not
staled by use, has no duplicates in the long reach of its memory.
It is an event which confers a curious distinction upon every