The third act for which I have always felt deeply grateful to Mark Twain
is the apparently little known, yet beautiful and significant story
entitled 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' It contains, I believe, the moral
that had most meaning for Mark Twain throughout his entire life--the
bankruptcy of rigidly formal Puritanism in the face of erring human
nature, the tragic result of heedlessly holding to the letter, instead
of wisely conforming to the spirit, of moral law. No one doubts that
Mark Twain--as who would not?--believed, aye, knew, that this sweet,
human child went to a heaven of forgiveness and mercy, not to a hell of
fire and brimstone, for her innocently trivial transgression. The essay
on Harriet Shelley, the novel of 'Joan of Arc', and the story 'Was it
Heaven or Hell?' are all, as decisively as the philippic against King
Leopold, the diatribe against the Czar of Russia, essential vindications
of the moral principle. 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' in its simple pathos,
'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' in its morally salutary irony,
present vital evidence of that same transvaluation of current moral
values which marks the age of Nietzsche and Ibsen, of Tolstoy and Shaw.
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