Notes on "Innocents Aborad"
I will begin with a note upon the dedication1. I wrote the book in the months of March and April, 1868, in San Francisco. It was published in August, 1869. Three years afterward2 Mr. Goodman of Virginia City, Nevada, on whose newspaper I had served ten years before and of whom I have had much to say in the book called Roughing It--I seem to be overloading3 the sentence and I apologize--came East, and we were walking down Broadway one day when he said:
"How did you come to steal Oliver Wendell Holmes's dedication and put it in your book?"
I made a careless and inconsequential answer, for I supposed he was joking. But he assured me that he was in earnest. He said:
"I'm not discussing the question of whether you stole it or didn't--for that is a question that can be settled in the first bookstore we come to. I am only asking you how you came to steal it, for that is where my curiosity is focalized."
I couldn't accommodate him with this information, as I hadn't it in stock. I could have made oath that I had not stolen anything, therefore my vanity was not hurt nor my spirit troubled. At bottom I supposed that he had mistaken another book for mine, and was now getting himself into an untenable place and preparing sorrow for himself and triumph for me. We entered a bookstore and he asked for The Innocents Abroad and for the dainty little blue-and-gold edition of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's poems. He opened the books, exposed their dedications4, and said:
"Read them. It is plain that the author of the second one stole the first one, isn't it?"
I was very much ashamed and unspeakably astonished. We continued our walk, but I was not able to throw any gleam of light upon that original question of his. I could not remember ever having seen Doctor Holmes's dedication. I knew the poems, but the dedication was new to me.
I did not get hold of the key to that secret until months afterward; then it came in a curious way, and yet it was a natural way; for the natural way provided by nature and the construction of the human mind for the discovery of a forgotten event is to employ another forgotten event for its resurrection.
I received a letter from the Reverend Doctor Rising, who had been rector of the Episcopal church in Virginia City in my time, in which letter Doctor Rising made reference to certain things which had happened to us in the Sandwich Islands six years before; among other things he made casual mention of the Honolulu Hotel's poverty in the matter of literature. At first I did not see the bearing of the remark; it called nothing to my mind. But presently it did--with a flash! There was but one book in Mr. Kirchhof's hotel, and that was the first volume of Doctor Holmes's blue-and-gold series. I had had a fortnight's chance to get well acquainted with its contents, for I had ridden around the big island (Hawaii) on horseback and had brought back so many saddle boils that if there had been a duty on them it would have bankrupted me to pay it. They kept me in my room, unclothed and in persistent5 pain, for two weeks, with no company but cigars and the little volume of poems. Of course I read them almost constantly; I read them from beginning to end, then began in the middle and read them both ways. In a word, I read the book to rags, and was infinitely6 grateful to the hand that wrote it.
Here we have an exhibition of what repetition can do when persisted in daily and hourly over a considerable stretch of time, where one is merely reading for entertainment, without thought or intention of preserving in the memory that which is read. It is a process which in the course of years tries all the juice out of a familiar verse of Scripture7, leaving nothing but a dry husk behind. In that case you at least know the origin of the husk, but in the case in point I apparently8 preserved the husk, but presently forgot whence it came. It lay lost in some dim corner of my memory a year or two, then came forward when I needed a dedication, and was promptly9 mistaken by me as a child of my own happy fancy.
I was new, I was ignorant, the mysteries of the human mind were a sealed book to me as yet, and I stupidly looked upon myself as a tough and unforgivable criminal. I wrote to Doctor Holmes and told him the whole disgraceful affair, implored10 him in impassioned language to believe that I never intended to commit this crime, and was unaware11 that I had committed it until I was confronted with the awful evidence. I have lost his answer. I could better have afforded to lose an uncle. Of these I had a surplus, many of them of no real value to me, but that letter was beyond price and unsparable. In it Doctor Holmes laughed the kindest and healingest laugh over the whole matter, and at considerable length and in happy phrase assured me that there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism12; that I committed it every day, that he committed it every day, that every man alive on the earth who writes or speaks commits it every day, and not merely once or twice, but every time he opens his mouth; that all our phrasings are spiritualized shadows cast multitudinously from our readings: that no happy phrase of ours is ever quite original with us; there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament13, character, environment, teachings, and associations; that this slight change differentiates14 it from another man's manner of saying it, stamps it with our special style, and makes it our own for the time being; all the rest of it being old, moldy15, antique, and smelling of the breath of a thousand generations of them that have used it before!
In the thirty-odd years which have elapsed since then I have satisfied myself that what Doctor Holmes said was true.
I wish to make a note upon the preface of the Innocents. In the last paragraph of that brief preface I speak of the proprietors16 of the Daily Alta Californian having "waived18 their rights" in certain letters which I wrote for that journal while absent on the Quaker City trip. I was young then, I am white-headed now, but the insult of that word rankles19 yet, now that I am reading that paragraph for the first time in many years, reading that paragraph for the first time since it was written, perhaps. There were rights, it is true---such rights as the strong are able to acquire over the weak and the absent. Early in '66 George Barnes invited me to resign my reportership on his paper, the San Francisco Morning Call, and for some months thereafter I was without money or work; then I had a pleasant turn of fortune. The proprietors of the Sacramento Union, a great and influential20 daily journal, sent me to the Sandwich Islands to write four letters a month at twenty dollars apiece. I was there four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known man on the Pacific coast. Thomas McGuire, proprietor17 of several theaters, said that now was the time to make my fortune--strike while the iron was hot--break into the lecture field! I did it. I announced a lecture on the Sandwich Islands, closing the advertisement with the remark: "Admission one dollar; doors open at half past seven, the trouble begins at eight." A true prophecy. The trouble certainly did begin at eight, when I found myself in front of the only audience I had ever faced, for the fright which pervaded21 me from head to foot was paralyzing. It lasted two minutes and was as bitter as death; the memory of it is indestructible, but it had its compensations, for it made me immune from timidity before audiences for all time to come. I lectured in all the principal Californian towns and in Nevada, then lectured once or twice more in San Francisco, then retired22 from the field rich--for me--and laid out a plan to sail westward23 from San Francisco and go around the world. The proprietors of the Alta engaged me to write an account of the trip for that paper--fifty letters of a column and a half each, which would be about 2,000 words per letter, and the pay to be twenty dollars per letter.
I went east to St. Louis to say good-by to my mother, and then I was bitten by the prospectus24 of Captain Duncan of the Quaker City excursion, and I ended by joining it. During the trip I wrote and sent the fifty letters; six of them miscarried and I wrote six new ones to complete my contract. Then I put together a lecture on the trip and delivered it in San Francisco at great and satisfactory pecuniary25 profit; then I branched out into the country and was aghast at the result: I had been entirely26 forgotten, I never had people enough in my houses to sit as a jury of inquest on my lost reputation! I inquired into this curious condition of things and found that the thrifty27 owners of that prodigiously28 rich Alta newspaper had copyrighted all those poor little twenty-dollar letters and had threatened with prosecution29 any journal which should venture to copy a paragraph from them.
And there I was! I had contracted to furnish a large book, concerning the excursion, to the American Publishing Co. of Hartford, and I supposed I should need all those letters to fill it out with. I was in an uncomfortable situation--that is, if the proprietors of this stealthily acquired copyright should refuse to let me use the letters. That is what they did; Mr. Mac--something--I have forgotten the rest of his name1--said his firm were going to make a book out of the letters in order to get back the thousand dollars which they had paid for them. I said that if they had acted fairly and honorably, and had allowed the country press to use the letters or portions of them, my lecture skirmish on the coast would have paid me ten thousand dollars, whereas the Alta had lost me that amount. Then he offered a compromise: he would publish the book and allow me 10-per-cent royalty30 on it. The compromise did not appeal to me, and I said so. The book sale would be confined to San Francisco, and my royalty would not pay me enough to board me three months, whereas my Eastern contract, if carried out, could be profitable to me, for I had a sort of reputation on the Atlantic seaboard, acquired through the publication of six excursion letters in the New York Tribune and one or two in the Herald31.
May 20, 1906. I recall it now--MacCrellish.--M. T.
In the end Mr. Mac agreed to suppress his book, on certain conditions: in my preface I must thank the Alta for waiving32 its "rights" and granting me permission. I objected to the thanks. I could not with any large degree of sincerity33 thank the Alta for bankrupting my lecture raid. After considerable debate my point was conceded and the thanks left out.
Noah Brooks34 was editor of the Alta at the time, a man of sterling35 character and equipped with a right heart, also a good historian where facts were not essential. In biographical sketches36 of me written many years afterward (1902) he was quite eloquent37 in praises of the generosity38 of the Alta people in giving to me without compensation a book which, as history had afterward shown, was worth a fortune. After all the fuss, I did not levy39 heavily upon the Alta letters. I found that they were newspaper matter, not book matter. They had been written here and there and yonder, as opportunity had given me a chance working moment or two during our feverish40 flight around about Europe or in the furnace heat of my stateroom on board the Quaker City, therefore they were loosely constructed and needed to have some of the wind and water squeezed out of them. I used several of them--ten or twelve, perhaps. I wrote the rest of The Innocents Abroad in sixty days, and I could have added a fortnight's labor41 with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvelously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did 200,000 words in the sixty days the average was more than 3,000 words a day--nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me. In 1897, when we were living in Tedworth Square, London, and I was writing the book called Following the Equator, my average was 1,800 words a day; here in Florence (1904), my average seems to be 1,400 words per sitting of four or five hours(With the pen, I mean. This Autobiography42 is dictated43, not written).
I was deducing from the above that I have been slowing down steadily44 in these thirty-six years, but I perceive that my statistics have a defect: 3,000 words in the spring of 1868, when I was working seven or eight or nine hours at a sitting, has little or no advantage over the sitting of to-day, covering half the time and producing half the output. Figures often beguile45 me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force:
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
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1
dedication
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| n.奉献，献身，致力，题献，献辞 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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overloading
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| 过载，超载，过负载 | |
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dedications
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| 奉献( dedication的名词复数 )； 献身精神； 教堂的)献堂礼； （书等作品上的）题词 | |
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persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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scripture
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| n.经文，圣书，手稿；Scripture:(常用复数)《圣经》，《圣经》中的一段 | |
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8
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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implored
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| 恳求或乞求（某人）( implore的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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11
unaware
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| a.不知道的，未意识到的 | |
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12
plagiarism
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| n.剽窃，抄袭 | |
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13
temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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14
differentiates
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| 区分，区别，辨别( differentiate的第三人称单数 )； 区别对待； 表明…间的差别，构成…间差别的特征 | |
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15
moldy
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| adj.发霉的 | |
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proprietors
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| n.所有人，业主( proprietor的名词复数 ) | |
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17
proprietor
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| n.所有人；业主；经营者 | |
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18
waived
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| v.宣布放弃( waive的过去式和过去分词 )；搁置；推迟；放弃（权利、要求等） | |
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rankles
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| v.（使）痛苦不已，（使）怨恨不已( rankle的第三人称单数 ) | |
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influential
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| adj.有影响的，有权势的 | |
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pervaded
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| v.遍及，弥漫( pervade的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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westward
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| n.西方，西部；adj.西方的，向西的；adv.向西 | |
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prospectus
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| n.计划书；说明书；慕股书 | |
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pecuniary
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| adj.金钱的；金钱上的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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thrifty
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| adj.节俭的；兴旺的；健壮的 | |
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prodigiously
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| adv.异常地，惊人地，巨大地 | |
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29
prosecution
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| n.起诉，告发，检举，执行，经营 | |
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30
royalty
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| n.皇家，皇族 | |
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herald
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| vt.预示...的来临，预告，宣布，欢迎 | |
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waiving
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| v.宣布放弃( waive的现在分词 )；搁置；推迟；放弃（权利、要求等） | |
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33
sincerity
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| n.真诚，诚意；真实 | |
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brooks
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| n.小溪( brook的名词复数 ) | |
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sterling
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| adj.英币的(纯粹的，货真价实的)；n.英国货币(英镑) | |
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sketches
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| n.草图( sketch的名词复数 )；素描；速写；梗概 | |
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eloquent
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| adj.雄辩的，口才流利的；明白显示出的 | |
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generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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levy
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| n.征收税或其他款项，征收额 | |
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feverish
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| adj.发烧的，狂热的，兴奋的 | |
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labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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autobiography
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| n.自传 | |
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dictated
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| v.大声讲或读( dictate的过去式和过去分词 )；口授；支配；摆布 | |
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steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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45
beguile
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| vt.欺骗，消遣 | |
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