acquiring what is called a “style.” One of my efforts attracted
attention, and the ENTERPRISE sent for me and put me on its staff.
And so I became a journalist–another link. By and by Circumstance
and the Sacramento UNION sent me to the Sandwich Islands for five
or six months, to write up sugar. I did it; and threw in a good
deal of extraneous matter that hadn’t anything to do with sugar.
But it was this extraneous matter that helped me to another link.
It made me notorious, and San Francisco invited me to lecture.
Which I did. And profitably. I had long had a desire to travel
and see the world, and now Circumstance had most kindly and
unexpectedly hurled me upon the platform and furnished me the means.
So I joined the “Quaker City Excursion.”
When I returned to America, Circumstance was waiting on the pier–
with the LAST link–the conspicuous, the consummating, the
victorious link: I was asked to WRITE A BOOK, and I did it, and
called it THE INNOCENTS ABROAD. Thus I became at last a member
of the literary guild. That was forty-two years ago, and I have
been a member ever since. Leaving the Rubicon incident away back
where it belongs, I can say with truth that the reason I am in
the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was
twelve years old.
III
Now what interests me, as regards these details, is not the
details themselves, but the fact that none of them was foreseen
by me, none of them was planned by me, I was the author of none
of them. Circumstance, working in harness with my temperament,
created them all and compelled them all. I often offered help,
and with the best intentions, but it was rejected–as a rule,
uncourteously. I could never plan a thing and get it to come out
the way I planned it. It came out some other way–some way I had
not counted upon.
And so I do not admire the human being–as an intellectual
marvel–as much as I did when I was young, and got him out of
books, and did not know him personally. When I used to read that
such and such a general did a certain brilliant thing, I believed
it. Whereas it was not so. Circumstance did it by help of his
temperament. The circumstances would have failed of effect with
a general of another temperament: he might see the chance, but
lose the advantage by being by nature too slow or too quick or
too doubtful. Once General Grant was asked a question about a
matter which had been much debated by the public and the
newspapers; he answered the question without any hesitancy.
“General, who planned the the march through Georgia?” “The
enemy!” He added that the enemy usually makes your plans for
you. He meant that the enemy by neglect or through force of
circumstances leaves an opening for you, and you see your chance
and take advantage of it.
Circumstances do the planning for us all, no doubt, by help
of our temperaments. I see no great difference between a man and
a watch, except that the man is conscious and the watch isn’t,
and the man TRIES to plan things and the watch doesn’t. The
watch doesn’t wind itself and doesn’t regulate itself–these
things are done exteriorly. Outside influences, outside
circumstances, wind the MAN and regulate him. Left to himself,
he wouldn’t get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would
keep would not be valuable. Some rare men are wonderful watches,
with gold case, compensation balance, and all those things, and
some men are only simple and sweet and humble Waterburys. I am a
Waterbury. A Waterbury of that kind, some say.
A nation is only an individual multiplied. It makes plans
and Circumstances comes and upsets them–or enlarges them. Some
patriots throw the tea overboard; some other patriots destroy a
Bastille. The PLANS stop there; then Circumstance comes in,
quite unexpectedly, and turns these modest riots into a revolution.
And there was poor Columbus. He elaborated a deep plan to
find a new route to an old country. Circumstance revised his