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really a pessimist, but he had pessimistic intervals, such as come
to most of us in life's later years, and at such times he let
himself go without stint concerning "the damned human race," as he
called it, usually with a manifest sense of indignation that he
should be a member of it. In much of his later writing
--A Mysterious Stranger for example--he said his say with but small
restraint, and certainly in his purely intellectual moments he was
likely to be a pessimist of the most extreme type, capably damning
the race and the inventor of it. Yet, at heart, no man loved his
kind more genuinely, or with deeper compassion, than Mark Twain,
perhaps for its very weaknesses. It was only that he had intervals
--frequent intervals, and rather long ones--when he did not admire
it, and was still more doubtful as to the ways of providence.
*
****
To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
March 14, '05.
DEAR JOE,--I have a Puddn'head maxim:
"When a man is a pessimist before 48 he knows too much; if he is an
optimist after it, he knows too little."
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