Mark Twain

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Hermetic America – Our Critical Heritage:
James Fenimore Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Mark Twain
Presentation 12 of 13

Mark Twain
Western Travels and the Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The American Hero Transcends
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, June 20, 1985

Transcript:
The date is June 20, 1985. This is a 12th and next to the last lecture in the series of lectures by Roger Weir on Our Critical Heritage. Tonight's lecture is on Mark Twain, Western travels and The Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the American hero transcendence.
The second series is on alchemy and will be given at The Gnostic Society. And because of the importance of keeping in mind, strategically all the while, alchemical transformation while one is talking about Gnosticism. One cannot talk about Gnosticism in early Christianity without talking about transformation and transfiguration. It is absolutely essential. And so, this series on alchemy on Friday nights will complement the Wednesday night series. This is like the outrigger for the main body. And this is essential to keep in mind. And I'll be doing two lectures in this series also because it just happens to be an area that I have a little more background than, than others might have. I've had the time to go into it, that's all.
The first one is on July 12th, which will be about Roger Bacon and they alchemical revival. The way in which alchemy came back into the West. And it came back into the West in a very weird way, rather like William Blake's art. The Islamic mind had received an impressed of Christian transformational for medicine in the 7th century A.D. and all of this came Islamic mysticism. Finally, in its highest cyclic presentation we have the visionary recitals of a Osena, Iban Senna, and we have eventually the philosophies, the suphosies of Ibn Arabi. When that came back into the Christian mind, the Arab mystics delivered it just as it was given to them. But instead of coming out in a direct line, it came out in a reverse imprint. Or like William Blake's engraved works. And so, the message that the Christian West got was the same message with a hiatus of about nearly 500, 600 years in between. And so, we had in the early 1200's a magical revival of the mind of the late 600's. And this is the beginning of the Renaissance. The tradition was passed on almost as if there had never been a break whatsoever. And this is, Roger Bacon is the formative individual. He's the individual where all this came together. He is easily the most important figure in that whole era. And there are many great.
The second lecture is on Ficino. Because Ficino is the one who brought back into integration the alchemical transformative line into the context of philosophical religious transformation that then becomes cultural. Out of this comes art and poetry, architecture, sculpture and so forth. And Ficino and Bacon perform services for the West without which we simply would not have the civilization we have. They were the, the teachers of the civilization. The doctors and the civilization.
So, these two series you might not know about, and I just wanted to apprise you. Generally, I, I present things as seemingly mundane as Mark Twain. But you must understand that beneath all, this also is an esoteric structure. It's just that this material, which is every day to us, should be understood in the sense that our everydayness is very esoteric also. The old Rosicrucian motto was the life lived is the doctrine received. That's the high Dharma. The life lived.
And so, this is of course, something that we have been standing on our tiptoes at time to understand that the American tradition has a very peculiar flavor to it. Beginning with Benjamin Franklin, because it has this idea that one should not prematurely coagulate an authoritarian doctrine and then base oneself upon that map. That one is forming a new relational matrix, one has to start with a natural base and develop from the natural base, a whole new comportment to reality. And that what comes out of this is a different kind of an individual. A different species, if you will. No longer the same man. No longer the same woman. They're of a different order. A different species.
And we have seen where this achievement of Franklin rests not in any political doctrine of his, but in the personality of Franklin itself. That its motion while he was alive was a flowing mystery of continual development of the person. He lived to be Mr. Hall's age, 84. And he was developing and growing to the day that he died. Very few people understood Franklin as we have seen. And the only one who took him seriously on the grand scale was Jefferson. And Jefferson himself showed in his life and shows in his work, that there was no doctrine in his writings, **inaudible word** as they are. The collected writings of Jefferson or 20 volumes and they only go up to 1798. He lived to 1826. So that'd be 60 or 70 thick volumes of this work.
All those volumes like Franklins volumes are like the cycle of writings and events around the rim of a wheel, whose hub and focus is the person, the individual. And the American experience is primarily a reality that comes to focus and he who will live that. It is not a political doctrine. It is not a mythology, which is consciously differentiated. It is a wholeness, a wholesomeness, which can be individually lived and only discovered in that process, in that retrospect.
And we saw that there is a tremendous jump in the 1830's in the United States. That when we looked at Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau, we found somebody who was absolutely unconcerned with Franklin and Jefferson. Though Thoreau was born while Jefferson was still alive. But there was a jump. And yet in the themes of Thoreau, especially in his journal, we find exactly that kind of American individual. The person who is livingly there only in terms of the wholeness of the experience of that person. And so, Thoreau's 20 volumes of journals are really a re-presentation of that person. He lives in that journal.
And we will see at the beginning of the next lecture series, that the man who raises that to a cosmic level will be Walt Whitman. That Whitman's understanding of the individual, the American individual for whom there are democratic vistas that have never been seen by human beings yet. Because they have not occurred in the life of an individual who was able to explore those realms. And we'll see that Whitman will write for those future individuals who have not yet been born but having understood that it is possible to come this far, they will be born. Those lives will be lived. And they will need fresh horizons to give them shape. To give them models.
And we saw that one of the few individuals that carried on the direct lineage of Franklin and Jefferson was James Fenimore Cooper. And we saw how Cooper up until his European visit was extraordinarily natural in his outlook. And taken up with the themes of his childhood in upper New York state, Otsego Hall. And how after seven years in Europe, he came back to the United States and found that it had changed. That just in that seven-year period in the 1830's the United States had changed its complexion. It had in fact become a different entity. And what happened in the 1830's was what is called in American history as the Jacksonian Revolution. Because Jacksonian democracy was a conscious manipulation on a political basis, not a feeling toned participation on a natural basis. Instead of the mythology of Jefferson one then had the politics of Jackson. And this was the difference.
And those who have been coming to the Saturday lecture series that I'm giving you realize that in this process there is a transformation, an exchange. And the conscious form was that was their most poignantly in artistic expressive form sinks below the conscious level and becomes what we would call colloquially subconscious. And what rises to take its place is the mythic feeling images linked together by relationality, which were feeling tone. They were not differentiated in terms of thought. And when they come to the surface, they do not have the differentiable structure that art would have given them. They must then be held together by what eventually becomes a conscious mythology or a politics. And this is where politics is born. The need to link together feeling images, desires, purposes, which are not articulate and yet are definite and basically in a feeling tone. And they must be knit together. And a politics does that. In order to keep that then formed economic theory is born to replace a synthetic theory as it controlling shape for the matrix of experience.
All of this happened in the United States during the 1830's and from the 1830s on we see a different country emerging. But the old United States was still there. But it was not there in a physical sense, it was there in what we would recognize, and I hate to use this term now because it's an abhorrent term really. But it was there in a metaphysical sense and more and more these two currents in the United States through the 1840's and 1850's developed into a polarity. And it was that polarity that caused the civil war. And the issue in that polarity was the image of man. Because one side saw man as a population to be organized for the betterment of all. And if we manipulate you now it's just for your own good and things will be better down the line. This in fact will be one of the goads for Marxism. But it's flawed. It's a flawed mentality. It is in fact, an aberration of the development of consciousness on a very grand scale. The other polarity that developed saw every individual man as a possibility for that American cosmos. We don't know who is capable of growing into individuality, therefore, all men must have a chance. All human beings must have that viability of finding a way for themselves. And every man's Liberty is a guarantee for any man's Liberty. Those two polarities by 1860 reach such a tension that the civil war resulted.
But the United States in its development is like a fairy tale. It's overall structure and retrospect reads exactly like a classic fairy tale. And just as that polarity reached the breaking point, the Western hero, Abraham Lincoln, came out with the ville, vi…he had the vision of the unity of the country. Not the United States as a political entity but the United States as a unified experience of mankind. And it was this vision that allowed for the country to slowly come back together. The civil war was the, the violent thunder and lightning, but Lincoln's vision slowly brought the country back so that it was almost healed and together again.
Lincoln's death stopped that whole process and the polarities reestablished themselves in new terms, new sophistications, new problems. This time there was subterfuge instead of the polarities being recognized, they became filled with labyrinthine covers. And through the 1870's and 1880's it became more and more apparent to thinking individuals that the United States was stepping outside of history. That it was becoming something else. This same view was beginning to take hold in Europe because the American experience was so closely related, we saw with Jefferson, so closely related with the French revolution and the French experience. And in reaction to that, the British empire and the German experience, Europe itself was going through a similar kind of a transformation.
It is out of this period from the late 1880's that Mark Twain writes A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It is one of the most significant books of that whole era. One of the most significant books of the 19th century. It was justly compared by a man writing in The Yale Review about 25 years ago, justly compared to Herman Melville's book Pierre or The Ambiguities, which he wrote right after writing Moby Dick.
And as Melville and Pierre, Mark Twain and Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court faces the polarized experience of man and searches out for some way to bring it back together in the experience of an artist writing about it. And it is just this quality of searching, of questing, that is effective. On the surface Twain does not succeed and bringing those polarities back together. In fact, the book ends with a vast war, a battle where the technology introduced by the Connecticut Yankee ends up killing 25,000 Knights in one fierce battle. But there's another theme in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which is hidden. And which Twain himself never consciously saw but was such a great artist that he put it there anyway. And it was at the time of his writing it almost an afterthought. He didn't know quite how to close the book. And he exhausted in his mind by what he had written, by the times in which he was living. He entrusted the resolution of the book to his artistic intuition. And it was that artistic intuition, which is very, very high. One of the really greats of world literature that unerringly went to exactly the resolving issue and brought it out. And so, the book in spite of itself is one of the great classics of world literature. The resolving energy was that of chivalric love, which Twain despite himself came into contact with through his fictional hero. Something which had obtained in the 6th century A.D. which the 19th century had forgotten about almost. Almost.
Some of the origins of A Connecticut Yankee. It was written in 1889. Started in 1887 and it took about two years to write. In fact, the genesis of it was a speech that Mark Twain made late in 1886 to several thousand. I think there were five or 6,000 labor leaders that were collected together. And they were called the Knights of Labor. And this was a Knights of Labor day and Twain made a political speech to them. And he talked about how the working man now has come to bring some sense into civilization. That after the machinations of various aristocratic groups, including all the royalty lineages, including the organized religions, it was now the working man who was able to get together with fellow working men, put their sleeves up and get to work and get things done. We need housing for those who do not have it. We need a food, we need agriculture, we need everything so that men can live a decent life. And is the working man banding together that is going to be able to provide this. And Twain says, thank goodness here at the tail end of civilization we have finally learned the way to do things right. Out of that speech came the first beginnings of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
Some of Twain's reading at this time was Progress In Poverty by Henry George. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, a utopian Victorian novel set in the year 2000. Seeing what society had become from 1887 when it was written. But I think two British individuals influenced Twain more than anybody else. And they have never been mentioned in context with this novel. The first one was Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Tennyson was the poet Laureate of Victorian England. He was the most widely read and famous poet of the 19th century. Additions of Tennyson were alongside of additions of Shakespeare and The Bible and every Victorian literate family. Tennyson had worked from 1859 to 1885 writing a series of 12 long poetic cantos that were eventually collected together and published as Idols of the King. Cantos of the King, of King Arthur. And it was Tennyson's vision that what civilization needed most was to bring back the spiritual grandeur that was there and chivalry. That the new mechanical world was squeezing dry the nature of man. Yes, it was more efficient, but it was more efficient at squeezing him dry. And that we needed to reach back into the past, not just the century or several centuries past, but back to the origins of this whole code of civilization that lay in the Arthurian times. And this was a very powerful theme at that time. Many pre-Raphaelite artists were doing Arthurian illustrations at this time. They are theory and themes were in the air. And I think Mark Twain picked up the idea of doing an Arthurian theme from Tennyson.
But there was another individual. Twain how to visit just at the time he was beginning to write this book from Rudyard Kipling. Kipling had come from India and was traveling the world back to England. He was going to settle down in England. And in fact, Kipling postpone settling down in England. He settled down in Vermont and the United States for four years. And the high quality of Kipling's mind and artistic experience at that time are revealed most astoundingly in his novel Kim. And Kim is not a children's book. Kim is one of those beautiful spiritual autobiographies. And if you take a very high critical appreciative experience to Kim and read it straight through now in your maturity, you will see what a miraculous book this is. Kim comes out of the conversation that Kipling and Twain had. For two hours Kipling says in one of his letters, he and Twain smoked several cigars and he said he found Twain to be the most miraculous individual. That he had read Twain's works and admired the man through his works. But he said the man himself was of a different quality. That the man himself seemed to come out in the manly evenness of his voice, the direct cogitation of his mind. This blunt, but penetrating quality of his personality.
And what Twain talked about over and over again, was the nature of man. That in order for man to be what he really is, he must be capable of transforming. And that this transformation must have a basis in reality. It must have a basis where man lives in his everyday life. That if the transformational basis is made on a metaphysical level, very often those transformations are inverted. If it is made on any transcendental level, very often those transformations become exclusive to he who made that quest. That for the everyman to transform the basis needs to be here in everyday life. And for Kipling and for Twain in that conversation came these two-great works.
In the Connecticut Yankee Twain also carries forward the paradoxical comparisons that were discovered by Don Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes discovered late in the 16th century that the code of knighthood was a sham in his time. But that the Knight who lived that code was the only viable hero. And there was a discrepancy there. The Knight as a hero was still a heroic individual, but the code had become something of ridicule. And thus, the individual who lived that life was still heroic but if he talked about it, he was ridiculous. And this was exactly the weird, friendly tone of the late 16th century mind. We see the same qualities in Shakespeare's works. Cervantes and Shakespeare are contemporaries and in both of them have this, this tremendous respect for character, but this tremendous anathema towards doctrine.
Twain takes up this comparison, this irony. He has the author himself, as Cervantes very often puts himself into Don Quixote. The author himself begins and he tells us in a word of explanation that all of this started,
It was in Warwick castle that I came across the curious stranger who I'm going to talk about. He attracted me by three things. His candid simplicity. His marvelous familiarity with ancient armor. And the restfulness of his company, for he did all the talking. We fell together as modest people will. And the tail of the herd that was being shown through. And he at once began to say things which interested me.
And in fact, the two of them were talking and they came up and the guide was showing a suit of armor that dated back to the 6th century A.D. and was pointing out a curious hole around the heart. It looked very much like a bullet hole. But of course, in the 6th century there were no guns and so forth. So later on, Twain in talking with the individual, the man said yes, it was a bullet hole. I put it there, myself. And Twain got interested and began listening to the story of this man, Henry Morgan. And Morgan was thrown back into Arthurian times. Discovered himself in fact, up in a tree. Didn't know where he was. And Knight came riding along. It turned out to be the boat….the boasting Sir Kay and fetched him out of the tree with his Lance and marched him off to King Arthur's court. He of course, was unable to make sense of the situation. He was thrown in prison. And he realized that he must be back in the 6th century. And he realized that the only fact that he knew, he was sort of an engineer scientific man, the only fact that he really knew was that there was an eclipse of the sun on the summer solstice of the year 528. And it just so happens when he asked a young page who's was a come to gawk at him what day it is. He tells them that it is June 20th, 528. And he thinks to himself, there's going to be a solstice tomorrow. A full eclipse of the sun on the solstice and this is going to be my **inaudible word**, my magic. And he tells him to tell King Arthur that he is in fact, one of the greatest magicians of all time and that's why he's just appeared. And that if they don't let him out, he will cause the sun to be swallowed up.
And Twain makes a big thing out of the way in which there is no reason at this time. There's no reasoning. Everything is on the magical basis. A woman once giving directions in Twain says, what direction is such and such a castle? She says it cannot be computed because the road curves so many ways. There is no, no direction. The castle just occurred somewhere on this road. So, he says, this is the kind of mentality. So, he takes advantage of it. And of course, King Arthur fetches him right away the same day. And Merlin, the magician who Twain makes fun of him, says we would like to see this today because we're going to hang you in a few hours. And he thinks everything is gone. And then he realizes looking up that the eclipse has started and that the page has made a mistake. That is in fact the day it's not the 20th, but the 21st. And so, he called out a sacred curse. Makes up this language. He's very good at this. And Twain in this way is playing with the magical languages. Whenever Harry wants to impress people with the miracle, he makes up very long words. And usually because he can't string English together that way, he turns to German and he strings German words together so they're several lines long. And saying these magical words the eclipse starts.
He shames Merlin by this act and becomes then the right-hand man of King Arthur. But he's a Connecticut Yankee. And he realizes these people are unorganized. They don't have any facilities. They have no amenities. So, it is up to him to civilize these people. To bring 19th century your civilization to them. This is what they need. And so, he secretly figures out that what he needs first, he needs to have a series of schools set up so that he can educate young individuals to train their minds. That they're not going to be able to understand mechanics. He doesn't talk about technology. This is a 19th century. Mechanics. They won't be able to understand mechanics until they have had their minds trained. So, he looks for young pages between the ages of 12 and 14 and secretly enrolls them in his society. And he begins schooling them and training. And over the years then he builds up a population of trained individuals who know mechanics and mathematics and are able to help him. They help him lay telephone lines at night under the ground. They set up various agricultural projects. They even make armaments. He's very good at making dynamite. And several times impresses King Arthur by saving his life with dynamite.
In fact, this propensity for dynamite finally wins the day when Merlin challenges him and Twain and his little educated pages have lined Merlin's tower with dynamite, and they have hooked up a lightning rod as the key to this. And then a thunderstorm they're having a big argument and Merlin is going to work some magic on him, turn him into a toad or something. And Harry Morgan repeat some long phrase and the lightning strikes the tower and it completely blows up and this discredits Merlin.
The Connecticut Yankee on the surface is working magic and underneath is working civilizing these individuals. In this theme all of the background of Twain's conscious life was circulating. Henry George, Tennyson, Bellamy, the Knights of Labor. But another theme begins to creep in. And I say creep in because it wasn't consciously there at first. It was a story detail that had to be there. A young woman named Sandy creeps into the story. It turns out that Harry Morgan in making some exploits for himself so that he can be knighted, become sir Harry, has to have a fair Damsel. The code of chivalry requires this. And so, he happens to win a tournament. And this is his prize. She is his prize. And it turns out in fact, when he goes out to have his cycle of Knightly adventures, she goes with him. There was nowhere else for her to go. And Sandy turns out to be an interesting companion for him. He thinks nothing of it at the time.
He goes through several adventures with rescuing damsels from giants and various other medieval mythic adventures. And all this time the relationship that is built up between he and Sandy as one of very practical companionable conversation. Later on, this will become the transforming thread in Connecticut Yankee. In fact, we have an interesting way in which Twain puts it. Towards the end of the work when he is dying. They have had a child. They've gotten married and the child's name is Hello Central. The center of their telephone network was made about the time the child was born. He writes,
There was no answer, but I could still hear his voice. I peeped in. the man lay on his back in bed talking brokenly but with spirit. And punctuating with his arms, which he thrashed about restlessly as sick people do in delirium. I slipped in softly and bent over him. His mutterings and ejaculation went on. I spoke merely at word to call us attention. His glassy eyes and this ashen face where a light in an instant with pleasure, gratitude, gladness, welcome. Oh, Sandy, you have come at last. How I have longed for you. Sit by me. Do not leave me. Never leave me again.
You see his come back to the 19th century, but that real part of him is still there. And this, his body is dying his 19th century body as dying his 6th century personality, which came into a mystical focus because of Sandy, because the code of chivalry was real in the individual. It was ridiculable in the doctrine finally by the 19th century. But it's Hermetic efficacy still was still as true then as it ever was.
Never leave me again, Sandy. Never again. Where's your hand? Give it to me dear. Let me hold it. There now. All is well. All is peace and I am happy again. We are happy again. Isn't it so Sandy? So dim. So vague. You but a mist to cloud but you are here and that is blessedly sufficient. And I still have your hand. Don't take it away. Only for a little while. Was that the child asleep? There you are. I lost myself a moment I thought you were gone. Ah, such dreams. Strange and awful dreams Sandy. Dreams that were as real as reality. Delirium, of course, but so real. Well I thought the King was dead. I thought you were in Gall and couldn't get home. I thought I was a revolution in a fantastic frenzy of these dreams. I thought that the page Clarence and I, and a handful of my cadets fought and exterminated the whole chivalry of England. But even this was not the strangest. I seem to be a creature out of remote unborn age centuries hence. And even that was as real as the rest. Yet I seem to have flown back out of that age into this of ours. And then forward to it again and was set down the stranger and forlorn. And that strange England with an abyss of 13 centuries yawning between me and you. Between me and my home and my friends. Worth, worth the living. Between me and all that is dear. All that could make life worth the living. And that was awful. Awfuller than you can ever imagine Sandy. Stay by me every morning. Don't let me go out of my mind again. Death is nothing. Let it come but not those dreams. Not with the torture of those hideous dreams. I could not stand that again. He lay there muttering incoherently some little time. Then for a time he lay silent and apparently sinking away for a death. Presently his fingers began to pick visibly at the coverlet. And by that sign I knew that his end was at hand. With the first suggestion of the death rattle in his throat he stared up slightly and seemed to listen. And then he said a bugle. It is the King. The Drawbridge there. Man, the battlements. Turn out the…he was getting up his last effect, but he never finished it.
Twain portrays a hero who discovers the heroic presence in his capacity to live it. And his 19th century mind ridiculed chivalry. Wanted to reform it. But his human Hermetic center found the resonance of reality there because it was no longer there in the 19th century. It was there in the 6th century.
At the same time that Twain is writing, this discovering this, Henry Adams is writing Chartres and Mont Saint Michel. Discovering that the focus, the last real focus, in Western civilization was at the time of the building of Chartres. At the time of building Mont Saint Michel. That in fact, somewhere in the past, both Henry Adams and Mark Twain contemporaries discovered that the past was not a dead issue but in fact was alive. Was in fact the only focus of what we would call today, collective archetypal imagery. So that in its focus it was energized. And for that energy to be alive it was outside of time. That the progress of surface clock time was irrelevant to these energized levels. These archetype developments. And that of contemporary man wanted to revivify himself.

END OF SIDE ONE
He would have to learn to take himself back to those energized moments, those centers. And the problem then with how to bring that forward. Because very often on the surface the development of civilization had been in a polarized way. Had yielded no life at all. Was only a death image. Only something illusory. Delusional if one believed it. That the present moment, the late 19th century, the early 20th century, lacked a living livable realization. And that had to be recaptured from the past. It wouldn't be until later in the 20th century that the theme would be turned inside out, and the theme would be developed through the 1940's and 50's and 60's and 70's that the energy, the energized focus, must be in the future not in the past. And the great burgeoning of science fiction writing in the United States came out of that kind of a transformation. But early in the century it was the past.
Well, let's stop for a minute and have a break. And I'll read you some funny passages when we get back.
Nobody recalls the exact time?
What?
The solstice tomorrow. When does it occur? Is it about 10 in the evening? I'll have to look it up.
I celebrate the summer solstice because it was the real surprise in my life that such events have reality. That the, the events are, are true and that the ceremonies surrounding them, if they're, if they're naturally based, they become expressively real. And I discovered that in 1974 and it was a shock to me that that was so. Because I had always grown up with a very transcendental sort of a personality and that whole area of comportment with just unfamiliar. I mean it was intellectually familiar. But in 74 I realized that it was true. And one should celebrate such events. So, I do every year now.
Twain. There are about 200 illustrations to Connecticut Yankee. Sort of engravings. This one has a fat King being carried aloft by a bunch of ragged working men. That title underneath is Inherited Ideas are a Curious Thing. And the next illustration shows that bright sun called the divine right of Kings being eclipsed by something called the Earth belongs to the people. And the divine right of Kings is 6th century and the earth belongs to the people is a 19th century idea, eclipsing it. His protagonists predicting the eclipse takes on a title. You have to have a title when you're in the chips. So, he takes on the title of Sir Boss. He's the Boss. And Twain he says, he writes,
But to return to my anomalous position in King Arthur's kingdom. Here I was a giant among Pygmies. A man among children. A master intelligence among intellectual moles. By all rational measurement, the one and only actual great man in that whole British world. And yet there and then, just as in the remote England of my birth time, the sheep witted Earl could claim long descent from a Kingly men, acquired it secondhand from the slums of London was a better man than I was. Such a personage was fond upon an Arthur's realm and looked up to by everyone, even though his dispositions were as mean as his intelligence. And his morals as base as lineage. There were times when he could sit down in the King's presence, but I couldn't. I could have gotten a tithe easily enough, but that would have raised me a large step in everybody's eyes. Even in the Kings the giver of it, but I didn't ask for it. And they, and I declined it when it was offered. I just couldn't enjoy such a thing with my notions. And it wouldn't have been fair anyway. Because as far back as I could go on, our tribe had always been short of the bar sinister. I couldn't have felt really and satisfactorily fine and proud and set up over any title, except one that should come from the nation itself, the only legitimate source.
So, he's a man of the people. And he begins reorganizing. And he decides that what the 6th century really needs to get things going is a newspaper. And he says this is a wonderful thing because the newspaper is able to agitate people and get them going. And to make them dissatisfied with conditions. And then he discovers that nobody can read and write in the 6th century. And the newspaper is not going to do any good until they can read and write. So, he starts setting up little classes. Starts teaching his pages not only mechanics but reading and writing. And he finds a nosy priest who makes it very good reporter. And he says,
This guy was really great. He could get the low down on everybody. And as soon as he taught him to write, he said, well the priest did well considering. He got in all the details. And that is what a good local item should be. You see, he had kept books for the undertaker department of his church when he was younger. And there you know, the money's in the details. The more details, the more swag. The bearers, mutes, candles, prayers, everything counts. And if the bereaved don't buy prayers enough you mark up your candles with a fork pencil and your bill shows up all right. And he had a good knack at, in the complimentary thing here and there about a Knight that was likely to advertise. No, I mean a Knight that had influence. And he also had a neat gift for exaggeration. For in his time he had kept door for a pious hermit who lived in the sky and worked miracles.
And then Twain goes off because he mastered the Western tall tale. And he always develops a sidelight until the reader is far, far away. And he talks about the arrogance of those pious individuals who go in for the suffering. That they're all envious of each other because so and so has found a really good way to suffer and it's really effective. And why did they get to think of it first. And now you know he talked about as imitators. That so and so really has got down pat and he's going to get all the glory for having put up with the most agony. And so, his newspaper is reporting things like this.
He also discovers that he has open way of speaking, his Connecticut Yankee way of speaking, gets him in trouble. He's making comments all the way on a certain Knight Sir Sagamore falls off his horse and he hears Twain saying, through his character, I wish that he would get killed doing this. And Sir Sagamore challenges him to a duel. He says, I want to have a joust with you. But I have to go off to find the Holy grail first and when I come back in three or four years you and I are going to have it out. So, as Twain writes it, Sir Sagamore goes off for Grailing and his hero begins to prepare himself. Here's how he writes it.
Well, whenever one of those people got a thing in his head there was no getting it out again. I knew that so I saved my breath and offered no explanations. As soon as Sir Sagamore got well he notified me that there was a little account to settle between us and he named a day, three or four years in the future place of settlement, the list where the offense had been given. I said I would be ready when he got back. You see he was going for the Holy Grail. The boys all took a flyer at the Holy Grail now and then. It was a several years cruise. They always put in the long abstinence snooping around in the most conscientious way. Though none of them had any idea of what the Holy Grail really was. And I don't think any of them actually expected to find it. Or would have known what to do with it even if he had run across it. You see it was just what the Northwest passage wasn't our day. And that was all. Every year expeditions went out Holy Grailing and next year relief expeditions went out to hunt for them. Well, he says, why should I smile? Human nature is always the same.
So, he sets up what he calls a teacher factory, which we would call now a trade tech, where they learned to do things at the same time as they're learning their reading and writing. And he begins training individuals. And pretty soon he sets up the first factory in the 6th century. And he's so proud of it. We're going to have electric lights. We're going to have telephones. We're going to have a newspaper. He's going to reorganize society. But it has to do this covertly because he says he has a competitor. Oh no it's not King Arthur and his court. But the is the established church. And Twain writes this,
Well, it was a thing which could not be helped so I seldom fretted about it never many minutes at a time. It had never been my way to bother much about such things that you can't cure. But I did not like it for was just the sort of thing to keep people reconciled to an established church. We must have a religion it goes without saying. But my idea is to have it cut up into maybe 40 free sexts so that they will police each other as has been the case in the United States in my time with the various state. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad. And the established church is only a political machine. It was invented for that. It has nursed, cradle, preserved for that. It is an enemy to human Liberty. And it does no good when it could not do better in a split up and scattered condition. That wasn't law. It wasn't gospel. It was only an opinion, my opinion. And I was only one man, so it wasn't worth any more than the polls. But it wasn't worth any less for that matter.
And so, Dwayne…Twain brings in the things of the individual, which is reoccurring now again and again. In the American experience the individual is valuable because the individual in his life is the only way to test and get the character of the tone of the reality of the country. There are no statistics that can measure the country, only the individuals by the lives that they actually do live. Only that is real.
And Twain brings in this character, sets him down in the midst of King Arthur's court. And of course, he has to prove himself from time to time. There all these Knights around and they're attempting to have adventures, which prove that they're worthy of carrying the code of chivalry. And Twain is making fun of the code of chivalry all the time. In fact, he says the most important religious function in this time was a sacred valley, which had a fountain in it that people went to to get cured. Well this fountain got stopped up and would no longer give the healing waters. So, he said that his competitor Merlin dropped in the valley and began trying to work as hocus pocus and he couldn't do anything with it. And so, Merlin was giving it up and advising everybody to vacate the valley to look for another sacred well some other place, which for a fee he would be glad to find. Or try to find, it might take him several years. But Twain's hero lowers himself down in a bucket and he inspects the well and he sees that in the course of time many of the bricks have fallen out. So that the water is seeping out of the well. So, he brings his young pages that he's trained in masonry and they come in the dead of night and they hook up buckets and they go down and they re-mason the wall. And sure, enough within a couple of hours the water levels coming back up. But now he wants to take advantage of the situation. So, he brings in a load of fireworks and they set them up in the well. And the next day there is this whole acreage of pilgrims who have come, and Twain's hero decides that he is going to have a spectacular show. And he writes it this way,
The moment the bells stopped, those bank masses broke and poured over the line like a blast black wave. And for so much as a half hour it continued to flow and then it solidified itself and you could have walked upon a pavement of human heads to well **inaudible word**. We have a solemn stage weight now for about 20 minutes. This is for theatrical effect. A thing which I had counted on for effect. It is always good to let your audience have a chance to work up its expectancy. At length out of the silence a Nobel Latin chant, men's voices, broke and swelled up and rolled away into the night. A majestic tide of melody. I had put that up too and it was one of the best effects I ever invented. When it was finished, I stood up on the platform and extended by hands abroad for two minutes with my face uplifted. And that always produces a deadly hush. Then slowly pronounced this ghastly word with a kind of awfulness, which caused hundreds of tremble and many women to faint. Constantinople **inaudible few words strung together** ashellshaft. And just as I was moaning on the closing hunks of that word, I touched off one of my electric connections and all that murky world of people stood revealed in a hideous blue glare. It was immense that affect. Lots of people's shrieks. Why women curled up and quipped in every direction. Foundlings collapsed by platoon. The Abbott and the Mungs crossed themselves nimbly and their lips fluttered with agitated prayers. Merlin held his grip, but he was astonished clear down to this corns. He'd never seen anything to begin with like that before. And now the time to pile effect upon effect. I lifted my hands and groaned out this word as it were an agony.
And it's difficult to read it because it's high German print. But it looks like Nechlerstendermitttheaterchristianpregnansheehan, something under sunshine.
"And turned on the red fire. You should have heard that Atlantic of people moan and howl when that crimson hell joined the blue. And after 60 seconds I shouted" and it starts out as transalpinepropyleneimaging and it goes on for several lines. "And I lit up the green fire. And after waiting only 40 seconds this time I spread my arms abroad and thundered out the devastating syllables of this word of words." It takes three lines of prints and reads like meccamusclemenanmensuremention something mocker. it goes on.
And whirled on the purple glare. There they were all going at once, red, blue, green purple. Four furious volcanoes pouring vast clouds of radiant smoke aloft and spreading a blinding rainbow noonday to the furthest confines of the valley. In the distance one could see that fellow on the pillars standing rigid against the background of sky. His seesaw stopped for the first time in 20 years.
This is a pious dolma who is whose penance was to keep on bowing. And Twain had one of his pages measure the frequency to see if they could hook him up to a sewing machine. And like Simon **inaudible word** he was on a pillar to make it even harder for him to do.
He said, I knew the boys were at the pump now and ready and so I said to the Abbott, the time has come father. I am about to pronounce the dread name and command the spell to dissolve. You want to brace up and take hold of something now. Then I shouted to the people, behold in another minute the spell will be broken and no mortal can break it. If it break all will know it for you will see the sacred water gush from the chapel door.
They worked at pipes and pumps so that the water came out as a well and flow over the lintel of the chapel door. So, then he pronounces, he says,
I stood a few moments to let the heroes have a chance to spread my announcement to those who couldn't hear and so convey it to the furthest ranks. Then I made a grand exhibition of extra posturing and gesturing and shouted, Low I command the fell serpent that possesses the Holy fountain to now just gorge into the skies all the infernal fires that still remain in him. And straightaway dissolve this spell and **inaudible word or two** to the pit there to lie bound a thousand years by his own dread name. I command it be willdejerk. And then I touched off the hogs head of rockets and vast fountain of dazzling lances of fire vomited itself towards the zenith hissing rush and burst and mid sky and a storm of flashing jewels. One mighty groan of terror started up from the mass people. Then suddenly broke into a wild Hosanna of joy for there fair and plain in the uncanny glare they saw the freed water leaping forth. And the old Abbott could not speak a word for tears and choking his throat. Without utterance of any sort he folded me in his arms and mashed me.
And once they get the water flowing Twain follows it up with one of this wild West prime the pump of the old individual stories. He says that he realized that the thing that was wrong with all these monks in penitence that they never took that baths. He said, now how can you have a nice outlook on life when you don't take baths? So, he went to the Abbott and the Abbott said it's against religious orders to take baths. And Twain said, but this here is sacred water. It started to flow again and to be bathed in this water is sort of like a baptism again. And that's the only way to guarantee that the water is going to go. And the Abbott once being shown this reasoning, which is trained Scholastic mind could follow, Twain said he said I'm going to be the person to take a bath. And so, Twain gets all these pennants giving up their exercises and their absences, and they all start going off.
And then Twain says he brought a 19th century idea to the full cause he had a few boys start up with soaps concession. They brought in boxes of soap to sell. And he said everyone knows the church has plenty of money. So, they began hocking their soap to these penitents then to take their bags.
Well, the center of the round table was King Arthur and Twain has his hero work on King Arthur. And about a third of the book is spent when the hero convinces King Arthur that he will never understand his kingdom as long as he is seen as the King. This is a theme that Twain to developed about eight years before in another medieval tale called The Prince and the Pauper, where the two change identities.
So, he convinces King Arthur to cut his hair, his beautiful golden locks. He does it himself. And the boss says it was great to cut those royal locks off and get them down to basic working man's hairstyle. And then he asked the train the King not to walk with an arrogant walk, but to walk just like a regular factory worker. Tired and despairing and looking for his paycheck. And once he trains Arthur to this disguise, they both go out then on a series of journeys. The first salle forth was with his lady, Sandy.
But like Don Quixote there's a second salle for it. And there's a wider scope. It's like the difference between the first part of Faust and the second part. The first part of Don Quixote and the second part. The second part of Connecticut Yankee is his traveling companion, his Squire as it is, is King Arthur himself. And they go through a series of adventures and they end up because they're in disguise and they can't break disguise. They end up being sold as slaves. And Arthur is sorely pressed at this turn of events. And in fact, it almost goes too far because they're ready to string Arthur up because he's a bad slave. He's arrogant. He's mouthy. Twain says just like in our time they don't go for slaves that speak their mind. So, they're about to string up Arthur and then a message has gotten through because there was a telephone in town. And Twain and called long distance. And in fact, his pages had prepared people, a whole series of troops for this kind of event. And they had 500 Knights right in on bicycles with peanuts flapping and **inaudible word** tails on the, on the ribbons and everything. And you in rolled these 500 Knights on bicycles and rescued them. He said they got there in record times because they had laid these roads and they made these bicycles and this, he said it was the glory of 19th century mechanical genius to be able to have this happen. And he writes it this way,
There was a jerk in the sleigh slave hangs dangling second roads and other slave in the middle of the third was in the air was dreadful. And I turned back and I missed the King. They were blindfolding him. I was paralyzed. I couldn't move. I was choking. My tongue with petrified. They finished blindfolding him. They led him under the rope, and I couldn't shake off that clinging impotence. But when I saw them put the noose around his neck then everything let go on me and I made a spring to the rescue. And as I made it a shot one more glance abroad by George here, they came a tilting 500 mailed and belted Knights on bicycles. The grandest site that was ever seen. Lord how the plumes streamed. How the sun flamed and flashed with that endless procession of webby wheels. I waved my right arm as Lancelot swept in. He recognized my rag and I tore away the noose and bandage and shouted on your knees rascals. Salute the King. everyone who fails in this will suffer in hell tonight. He says, I always use the high style when I'm climaxing an effect. Well, it was noble to see Lancelot and the boys swarm up onto the scaffold and heave sheriffs and such overboard. And it was fine to see that astonished multitude go down on their knees and beg their lives from the King that moments before had been just a slave.
So, Arthur gains in a little humility. And the book is just about ready to come to a climax when Sir Sagamore reappears on the scene. And he's feeling mean because he hasn't found the Grail. and Arthur can do nothing. He says, I have to by all the laws of chivalry allow this tournament, this joust to happen. So, Sir Sagamore allows the boss to have his own weapons. And the boss comes out without any armor. on He describes it as a, a pair of silk and cream-colored tights and shirt with a piece of blue silk around the middle. And his only weapon is a lasso. Because he had been out West one time. And so, he gets this lasso going and sir Sagamore comes rushing by and because Twain has no armor his horse is a little more agile. He steps aside and lassos the Knight and pulls him off his horse. And of course, you can't get back on your horse once you're off in all that armor. But this is an afront to Knighthood. And other Knights start to take afront to this and challenge him on the spot. And he says all that afternoon I kept lassoing Knights off their horse. He said, I was pretty good at it. Finally, they were all laying on their backs and there wasn't anything they could do. I had achieved my thing.
Well, Merlin steals the lasso and he squeals. He goes to the church authorities and they say this man is really dangerous. He has been teaching people not to believe in the gods of the state. And been raising young men to question things and to think about things. This is just the charge that was leveled against Socrates, of course. And so, the church drums up an army of 25,000 Knights to put him away. And he decides that he will test his men to see how many have actually learned to be individuals all a 19th century. And he finds out that they're only 54 and that all the rest of them fall back into their superstitious ways. There are only 54 young men, all of them between the ages of 17 and 24 who have grown up in the meantime. All the rest of them have fallen back into the superstitious ways. So, they decide they're going to destroy all traces of the civilization that they have set up. Cut all the lines. Destroy all the places and fortify themselves with a series of 12 electric fences around the mouth of this cave. And they set up a bunch of Gatling guns. And they take on this huge army, which they defeat in a long drawn out battle.
And in this defeat is where Twain says that he has destroyed the army of chivalry. In saying this he's still on the surface equating chivalry with the doctrine of the church, but chivalry was not a doctrine of the church. In fact, she really was not a doctrine so much as a code that one lived. And the code was only as good as the individual that lived it. And it was only in the individual Knight that the code was real. And it is this quality that secretly penetrates into the character. The protagonist secretly has this. And that's why at the end he convinces himself that his 19th century self was a dream. And that his reality was in the 6th century. That somehow, he had only dreamed himself ahead into the future. And then when he had fallen ill, he went back in his delirium and had the same dream again. And now that he was waking up from the dream, dying in that dream, he was waking up to his own reality back in the 6th century again. Where his wife and his baby were. Where the King was. Where the round table was still in effect. And where he longed to be because he was real there and only a dream person in the 19th century.
This book when it came out, of course, was a best seller in its day. And it was banned for a while in England. It was banned because it said some very bad nasty things about the British empire. It was banned in some places in Europe because it criticized the established church. But it slowly made its way. But its effect was astonishing upon Mark Twain because after this Twain began to change from a wild West humorous into a very, very serious cosmic writer. And in fact, most of Twain's major productions after this were never published in his lifetime.
And we're going to look next week. And one of the most darling publications of Mark Twain that came out published by the University of California press, who are doing the Mark Twain papers now. And next week's lecture will be centered around a book that he never published in this time called The Fables of Man. In which we see the gloves off and we see the cosmic Mark Twain come forward. And we get an idea yet again, that the major individuals in our American tradition are really major in the world tradition. And they're fantastic. They deserve to be talked about, even though the universities teach only the surface. There's still room for individuals like ourselves to get together and look underneath and deeper in.

I hope that some of you make it next week. Thanks a lot.

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