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Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume II, Part 1: 1886-1900

by Albert Bigelow Paine · English · Gutenberg #2984 · 507,784 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume II, Part 1: 1886-1900

Author: Albert Bigelow Paine


        
Release date: December 1, 2001 [eBook #2984]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2984

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN: A BIOGRAPHY. VOLUME II, PART 1: 1886-1900 ***



Produced by David Widger





MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY

By Albert Bigelow Paine



VOLUME II, Part 1: 1875-1886



CV


MARK TWAIN AT FORTY

In conversation with John Hay, Hay said to Clemens:

"A man reaches the zenith at forty, the top of the hill. From that time
forward he begins to descend. If you have any great undertaking ahead,
begin it now. You will never be so capable again."

Of course this was only a theory of Hay's, a rule where rules do not
apply, where in the end the problem resolves itself into a question of
individualities. John Hay did as great work after forty as ever before,
so did Mark Twain, and both of them gained in intellectual strength and
public honor to the very end.

Yet it must have seemed to many who knew him, and to himself, like
enough, that Mark Twain at forty had reached the pinnacle of his fame and
achievement. His name was on every lip; in whatever environment
observation and argument were likely to be pointed with some saying or
anecdote attributed, rightly or otherwise, to Mark Twain. "As Mark Twain
says," or, "You know that story of Mark Twain's," were universal and
daily commonplaces. It was dazzling, towering fame, not of the best or
most enduring kind as yet, but holding somewhere within it the structure
of immortality.

He was in a constant state of siege, besought by all varieties and
conditions of humanity for favors such as only human need and abnormal
ingenuity can invent. His ever-increasing mail presented a marvelous
exhibition of the human species on undress parade. True, there were
hundreds of appreciative tributes from readers who spoke only out of a
heart's gratitude; but there were nearly as great a number who came with
a compliment, and added a petition, or a demand, or a suggestion, usually
unwarranted, often impertinent. Politicians, public speakers, aspiring
writers, actors, elocutionists, singers, inventors (most of them he had
never seen or heard of) cheerfully asked him for a recommendation as to
their abilities and projects.

Young men wrote requesting verses or sentiments to be inscribed in young
ladies' autograph albums; young girls wrote asking him to write the story
of his life, to be used as a school composition; men starting obscure
papers coolly invited him to lend them his name as editor, assuring him
that he would be put to no trouble, and that it would help advertise his
books; a fruitful humorist wrote that he had invented some five thousand
puns, and invited Mark Twain to father this terrific progeny in book form
for a share of the returns. But the list is endless. He said once:

"The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for
every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always
seeking the opportunity to grind it."

Even P. T. Barnum had an ax, the large ax of advertising, and he was
perpetually trying to grind it on Mark Twain's reputation; in other
words, trying to get him to write something that would help to popularize
"The Greatest Show on Earth."

There were a good many curious letters-letters from humorists, would-be
and genuine. A bright man in Duluth sent him an old Allen "pepper-box"
revolver with the statement that it had been found among a pile of bones
under a tree, from the limb of which was suspended a lasso and a buffalo
skull; this as evidence that the weapon was the genuine Allen which Bemis
had lost on that memorable Overland buffalo-hunt. Mark Twain enjoyed
that, and kept the old pepper-box as long as he lived. There were
letters from people with fads; letters from cranks of every description;
curious letters even from friends. Reginald Cholmondeley, that lovely
eccentric of Condover Hall, where Mr. and Mrs. Clemens had spent some
halcyon days in 1873, wrote him invitations to be at his castle on a
certain day, naming the hour, and adding that he had asked friends to
meet him. Cholmondeley had a fancy for birds, and spared nothing to
improve his collection. Once he wrote Clemens asking him to collect for
him two hundred and five American specimens, naming the varieties and the
amount which he was to pay for each. Clemens was to catch these birds
and bring them over to England, arriving at Condover on a certain day,
when there would be friends to meet him, of course.

Then there was a report which came now and then from another English
castle--the minutes of a certain "Mark Twain Club," all neatly and
elaborately written out, with the speech of each member and the
discussions which had followed--the work, he found out later, of another
eccentric; for there was no Mark Twain Club, the reports being just the
mental diversion of a rich young man, with nothing else to do.--[In
Following the Equator Clemens combined these two pleasant characters in
one story, with elaborations.]

Letters came queerly addressed. There is one envelope still in existence
which bears Clemens's name in elaborate design and a very good silhouette
likeness, the work of some talented artist. "Mark Twain, United States,"
was a common address; "Mark Twain, The World," was also used; "Mark
Twain, Somewhere," mailed in a foreign country, reached him promptly, and
"Mark Twain, Anywhere," found its way to Hartford in due season. Then
there was a letter (though this was later; he was abroad at the time),
mailed by Brander Matthews and Francis Wilson, addressed, "Mark Twain,
God Knows Where." It found him after traveling half around the world on
its errand, and in his answer he said, "He did." Then some one sent a
letter addressed, "The Devil Knows Where." Which also reached him, and
he answered, "He did, too."

Surely this was the farthest horizon of fame.

Countless Mark Twain anecdotes are told of this period, of every period,
and will be told and personally vouched for so long as the last soul of
his generation remains alive. For seventy years longer, perhaps, there
will be those who will relate "personal recollections" of Mark Twain.
Many of them will be interesting; some of them will be true; most of them
will become history at last. It is too soon to make history of much of
this drift now. It is only safe to admit a few authenticated examples.

It happens that one of the oftenest-told anecdotes has been the least
elaborated. It is the one about his call on Mrs. Stowe. Twichell's
journal entry, set down at the time, verifies it:

Mrs. Stowe was leaving for Florida one morning, and Clemens ran over
early to say good-by. On his return Mrs. Clemens regarded him
disapprovingly:

"Why, Youth," she said, "you haven't on any collar and tie."

He said nothing, but went up to his room, did up these items in a neat
package, and sent it over by a servant, with a line:

"Herewith receive a call from the rest of me."

Mrs. Stowe returned a witty note, in which she said that he had
discovered a new principle, the principle of making calls by instalments,
and asked whether, in extreme cases, a man might not send his hat, coat,
and boots and be otherwise excused.

Col. Henry Watterson tells the story of an after-theater supper at the
Brevoort House, where Murat Halstead, Mark Twain, and himself were
present. A reporter sent in a card for Colonel Watterson, who was about
to deny himself when Clemens said:

"Give it to me; I'll fix it." And left the table. He came back in a
moment and beckoned to Watterson.

"He is young and as innocent as a lamb," he said. "I represented myself
as your secretary. I said that you were not here, but if Mr. Halstead
would do as well I would fetch him out. I'll introduce you as Halstead,
and we'll have some fun."

Now, while Watterson and Halstead were always good friends, they were
political enemies. It was a political season and the reporter wanted
that kind of an interview. Watterson gave it to him, repudiating every
principle that Halstead stood for, reversing him in every expressed
opinion. Halstead was for hard money and given to flying the "bloody
shirt" of sectional prejudice; Watterson lowered the bloody shirt and
declared for greenbacks in Halstead's name. Then he and Clemens returned
to the table and told frankly what they had done. Of course, nobody
believed it. The report passed the World night-editor, and appeared,
next morning. Halstead woke up, then, and wrote a note to the World,
denying the interview throughout. The World printed his note with the
added line:

"When Mr. Halstead saw our reporter he had dined."

It required John Hay (then on the Tribune) to place the joke where it
belonged.

There is a Lotos Club anecdote of Mark Twain that carries the internal
evidence of truth. Saturday evening at the Lotos always brought a
gathering of the "wits," and on certain evenings--"Hens and chickens"
nights--each man had to tell a story, make a speech, or sing a song. On
one evening a young man, an invited guest, was called upon and recited a
very long poem.

One by one those who sat within easy reach of the various exits melted
away, until no one remained but Mark Twain. Perhaps he saw the
earnestness of the young man, and sympathized with it. He may have
remembered a time when he would have been grateful for one such attentive
auditor. At all events, he sat perfectly still, never taking his eyes
from the reader, never showing the least inclination toward discomfort or
impatience, but listening, as with rapt attention, to the very last line.
Douglas Taylor, one of the faithful Saturday-night members, said to him
later:

"Mark, how did you manage to sit through that dreary, interminable poem?"

"Well," he said, "that young man thought he had a divine message to
deliver, and I thought he was entitled to at least one auditor, so I
stayed with him."

We may believe that for that one auditor the young author was willing to
sacrifice all the others.

One might continue these anecdotes for as long as the young man's poem
lasted, and perhaps hold as large an audience. But anecdotes are not all
of history. These are set down because they reflect a phase of the man
and an aspect of his life at this period. For at the most we can only
present an angle here and there, and tell a little of the story, letting
each reader from his fancy construct the rest.




CVI

HIS FIRST STAGE APPEARANCE

Once that winter the Monday Evening Club met at Mark Twain's home, and
instead of the usual essay he read them a story: "The Facts Concerning
the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut." It was the story of a
man's warfare with a personified conscience--a sort of "William Wilson"
idea, though less weird, less somber, and with more actuality, more
verisimilitude. It was, in fact, autobiographical, a setting-down of the
author's daily self-chidings. The climax, where conscience is slain, is
a startling picture which appeals to most of humanity. So vivid is it
all, that it is difficult in places not to believe in the reality of the
tale, though the allegory is always present.

The club was deeply impressed by the little fictional sermon. One of its
ministerial members offered his pulpit for the next Sunday if Mark Twain
would deliver it to his congregation. Howells welcomed it for the
Atlantic, and published it in June. It was immensely successful at the
time, though for some reason it seems to be little known or remembered
to-day. Now and then a reader mentions it, always with enthusiasm.
Howells referred to it repeatedly in his letters, and finally persuaded
Clemens to let Osgood bring it out, with "A True Story," in dainty,
booklet form. If the reader does not already know the tale, it will pay
him to look it up and read it, and then to read it again.

Meantime Tom Sawyer remained unpublished.

"Get Bliss to hurry it up!" wrote Howells. "That boy is going to make a
prodigious hit."

But Clemens delayed the book, to find some means to outwit the Canadian
pirates, who thus far had laid hands on everything, and now were
clamoring at the Atlantic because there was no more to steal.

Moncure D. Conway was in America, and agreed to take the manuscript of
Sawyer to London and arrange for its publication and copyright. In
Conway's Memoirs he speaks of Mark Twain's beautiful home, comparing it
and its surroundings with the homes of Surrey, England. He tells of an
entertainment given to Harriet Beecher Stowe, a sort of animated jarley
wax-works. Clemens and Conway went over as if to pay a call, when
presently the old lady was rather startled by an invasion of costumed.
figures. Clemens rose and began introducing them in his gay, fanciful
fashion. He began with a knight in full armor, saying, as if in an
aside, "Bring along that tinshop," and went on to tell the romance of the
knight's achievements.

Conway read Tom Sawyer on the ship and was greatly excited over it.
Later, in London, he lectured on it, arranging meantime for its
publication with Chatto & Windus, thus establishing a friendly business
relation with that firm which Mark Twain continued during his lifetime.

Clemens lent himself to a number of institutional amusements that year,
and on the 26th of April, 1876, made his first public appearance on the
dramatic stage.

It was an amateur performance, but not of the usual kind. There was
genuine dramatic talent in Hartford, and the old play of the "Loan of the
Lover," with Mark Twain as Peter Spuyk and Miss Helen Smith--[Now Mrs.
William W. Ellsworth.]--as Gertrude, with a support sufficient for their
needs, gave a performance that probably furnished as much entertainment
as that pleasant old play is capable of providing. Mark Twain had in him
the making of a great actor. Henry Irving once said to him:

"You made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession. You would
have made even a greater actor than a writer."

Yet it is unlikely that he would ever have been satisfied with the stage.
He had too many original literary ideas. He would never have been
satisfied to repeat the same part over and over again, night after night
from week to month, and from month to year. He could not stick to the
author's lines even for one night. In his performance of the easy-going,
thick-headed Peter Spuyk his impromptu additions to the lines made it
hard on the company, who found their cues all at sixes and sevens, but it
delighted the audience beyond measure. No such impersonation of that.
character was ever given before, or ever will be given again. It was
repeated with new and astonishing variations on the part of Peter, and it
could have been put on for a long run. Augustin Daly wrote immediately,
offering the Fifth Avenue Theater for a "benefit" performance, and again,
a few days later, urging acceptance. "Not for one night, but for many."

Clemens was tempted, no doubt. Perhaps, if he had yielded, he would
today have had one more claim on immortality.




CVII

HOWELLS, CLEMENS, AND "GEORGE"

Howells and Clemens were visiting back and forth rather oftener just
then. Clemens was particularly fond of the Boston crowd--Aldrich,
Fields, Osgood, and the rest--delighting in those luncheons or dinners
which Osgood, that hospitable publisher, was always giving on one pretext
or another. No man ever loved company more than Osgood, or to play the
part of host and pay for the enjoyment of others. His dinners were
elaborate affairs, where the sages and poets and wits of that day (and
sometimes their wives) gathered. They were happy reunions, those
fore-gatherings, though perhaps a more intimate enjoyment was found at
the luncheons, where only two or three were invited, usually Aldrich,
Howells, and Clemens, and the talk continued through the afternoon and
into the deepening twilight, such company and such twilight as somehow
one seems never to find any more.

On one of the visits which Howells made to Hartford that year he took his
son John, then a small boy, with him. John was about six years old at
the time, with his head full of stories of Aladdin, and of other Arabian
fancies. On the way over his father said to him:

"Now, John, you will see a perfect palace."

They arrived, and John was awed into silence by the magnificence and
splendors of his surroundings until they went to the bath-room to wash
off the dust of travel. There he happened to notice a cake of pink soap.

"Why," he said, "they've even got their soap painted!" Next morning he
woke early--they were occupying the mahogany room on the ground floor
--and slipping out through the library, and to the door of the
dining-room, he saw the colored butler, George--the immortal
George--setting the breakfast-table. He hurriedly tiptoed back and
whispered to his father:

"Come quick! The slave is setting the table!"

This being the second mention of George, it seems proper here that he
should be formally presented. Clemens used to say that George came one
day to wash windows and remained eighteen years. He was precisely the
sort of character that Mark Twain loved. He had formerly been the
body-servant of an army general and was typically racially Southern, with
those delightful attributes of wit and policy and gentleness which go
with the best type of negro character. The children loved him no less
than did their father. Mrs. Clemens likewise had a weakness for George,
though she did not approve of him. George's morals were defective. He
was an inveterate gambler. He would bet on anything, though prudently
and with knowledge. He would investigate before he invested. If he
placed his money on a horse, he knew the horse's pedigree and the
pedigree of the horses against it, also of their riders. If he invested
in an election, he knew all about the candidates. He had agents among
his own race, and among the whites as well, to supply him with
information. He kept them faithful to him by lending them money--at
ruinous interest. He buttonholed Mark Twain's callers while he was
removing their coats concerning the political situation, much to the
chagrin of Mrs. Clemens, who protested, though vainly, for the men liked
George and his ways, and upheld him in his iniquities.

Mrs. Clemens's disapproval of George reached the point, now and then,
where she declared he could not remain.

She even discharged him once, but next morning George was at the
breakfast-table, in attendance, as usual. Mrs. Clemens looked at him
gravely:

"George," she said, "didn't I discharge you yesterday?"

"Yes, Mis' Clemens, but I knew you couldn't get along without me, so I
thought I'd better stay a while."

In one of the letters to Howells, Clemens wrote:

When George first came he was one of the most religious of men. He had
but one fault--young George Washington's. But I have trained him; and
now it fairly breaks Mrs. Clemens's heart to hear him stand at that front
door and lie to an unwelcome visitor.

George was a fine diplomat. He would come up to the billiard-room with a
card or message from some one waiting below, and Clemens would fling his
soul into a sultry denial which became a soothing and balmy subterfuge
before it reached the front door.

The "slave" must have been setting the table in good season, for the
Clemens breakfasts were likely to be late. They usually came along about
nine o'clock, by which time Howells and John were fairly clawing with
hunger.

Clemens did not have an early appetite, but when it came it was a good
one. Breakfast and dinner were his important meals. He seldom ate at
all during the middle of the day, though if guests were present he would
join them at luncheon-time and walk up and down while they were eating,
talking and gesticulating in his fervent, fascinating way. Sometimes
Mrs. Clemens would say:

"Oh, Youth, do come and sit down with us. We can listen so much better."

But he seldom did. At dinner, too, it was his habit, between the
courses, to rise from the table and walk up and down the room, waving his
napkin and talking!--talking in a strain and with a charm that he could
never quite equal with his pen. It's the opinion of most people who knew
Mark Twain personally that his impromptu utterances, delivered with that
ineffable quality of speech, manifested the culmination of his genius.

When Clemens came to Boston the Howells household was regulated, or
rather unregulated, without regard to former routine. Mark Twain's
personality was of a sort that unconsciously compelled the general
attendance of any household. The reader may recall Josh Billings's
remark on the subject. Howells tells how they kept their guest to
themselves when he visited their home in Cambridge, permitting him to
indulge in as many unconventions as he chose; how Clemens would take a
room at the Parker House, leaving the gas burning day and night, and
perhaps arrive at Cambridge, after a dinner or a reading, in evening
dress and slippers, and joyously remain with them for a day or more in
that guise, slipping on an overcoat and a pair of rubbers when they went
for a walk. Also, how he smoked continuously in every room of the house,
smoked during every waking moment, and how Howells, mindful of his
insurance, sometimes slipped in and removed the still-burning cigar after
he was asleep.

Clemens had difficulty in getting to sleep in that earlier day, and for a
time found it soothing to drink a little champagne on retiring. Once,
when he arrived in Boston, Howells said:

"Clemens, we've laid in a bottle of champagne for you."

But he answered:

"Oh, that's no good any more. Beer's the thing."

So Howells provided the beer, and always afterward had a vision of his
guest going up-stairs that night with a pint bottle under each arm.

He invented other methods of inducing slumber as the years went by, and
at one time found that this precious boon came more easily when he
stretched himself on the bath-room floor.

He was a perpetual joy to the Howells family when he was there, even
though the household required a general reorganization when he was gone.

Mildred Howells remembers how, as a very little girl, her mother
cautioned her not to ask for anything she wanted at the table when
company was present, but to speak privately of it to her. Miss Howells
declares that while Mark Twain was their guest she nearly starved because
it was impossible to get her mother's attention; and Mrs. Howells, after
one of those visits of hilarity and disorder, said:

"Well, it 'most kills me, but it pays," a remark which Clemens vastly
enjoyed. Howells himself once wrote:

Your visit was a perfect ovation for us; we never enjoy anything so much
as those visits of yours. The smoke and the Scotch and the late hours
almost kill us; but we look each other in the eyes when you are gone, and
say what a glorious time it was, and air the library, and begin sleeping
and longing to have you back again....




CVIII

SUMMER LABORS AT QUARRY FARM

They went to Elmira, that summer of '76, to be "hermits and eschew caves
and live in the sun," as Clemens wrote in a letter to Dr. Brown. They
returned to the place as to Paradise: Clemens to his study and the books
which he always called for, Mrs. Clemens to a blessed relief from social
obligations, the children to the shady play-places, the green, sloping
hill, where they could race and tumble, and to all their animal friends.

Susy was really growing up. She had had several birthdays, quite grand
affairs, when she had been brought down in the morning, decked, and with
proper ceremonies, with subsequent celebration. She was a strange,
thoughtful child, much given to reflecting on the power and presence of
infinity, for she was religiously taught. Down in the city, one night,
there was a grand display of fireworks, and the hilltop was a good place
from which to enjoy it; but it grew late after a little, and Susy was
ordered to bed. She said, thoughtfully:

"I wish I could sit up all night, as God does."

The baby, whom they still called "Bay," was a tiny, brown creature who
liked to romp in the sun and be rocked to sleep at night with a song.
Clemens often took them for extended' walks, pushing Bay in her carriage.
Once, in a preoccupied moment, he let go of the little vehicle and it
started downhill, gaining speed rapidly.

He awoke then, and set off in wild pursuit. Before he could overtake the
runaway carriage it had turned to the roadside and upset. Bay was lying
among the stones and her head was bleeding. Hastily binding the wound
with a handkerchief he started full speed with her up the hill toward the
house, calling for restoratives as he came. It was no serious matter.
The little girl was strong and did not readily give way to affliction.

The children were unlike: Susy was all contemplation and nerves; Bay
serene and practical. It was said, when a pet cat died--this was some
years later--that Susy deeply reflected as to its life here and
hereafter, while Bay was concerned only as to the style of its funeral.
Susy showed early her father's quaintness of remark. Once they bought
her a heavier pair of shoes than she approved of. She was not in the
best of humors during the day, and that night, when at prayer-time her
mother said, "Now, Susy, put your thoughts on God," she answered, "Mama,
I can't with those shoes."

Clemens worked steadily that summer and did a variety of things. He had
given up a novel, begun with much enthusiasm, but he had undertaken
another long manuscript. By the middle of August he had written several
hundred pages of a story which was to be a continuation of Tam Sawyer
--The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now, here is a curious phase of
genius. The novel which for a time had filled him with enthusiasm and
faith had no important literary value, whereas, concerning this new tale,
he says:

"I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have gone, and may possibly
pigeonhole or burn the manuscript when it is done"--this of the story
which, of his books of pure fiction, will perhaps longest survive. He
did, in fact, give the story up, and without much regret, when it was
about half completed, and let it lie unfinished for years.

He wrote one short tale, "The Canvasser's Story," a burlesque of no
special distinction, and he projected for the Atlantic a scheme of
"blindfold novelettes," a series of stories to be written by well-known
authors and others, each to be constructed on the same plot. One can
easily imagine Clemens's enthusiasm over a banal project like that; his
impulses were always rainbow-hued, whether valuable or not; but it is
curious that Howells should welcome and even encourage an enterprise so
far removed from all the traditions of art. It fell to pieces, at last,
of inherent misconstruction. The title was to be, "A Murder and a
Marriage." Clemens could not arrive at a logical climax that did not
bring the marriage and the hanging on the same day.

The Atlantic started its "Contributors' Club," and Howells wrote to
Clemens for a paragraph or more of personal opinion on any subject,
assuring him that he could "spit his spite" out at somebody or something
as if it were a passage from a letter. That was a fairly large
permission to give Mark Twain. The paragraph he sent was the sort of
thing he would write with glee, and hug himself over in the thought of
Howells's necessity of rejecting it. In the accompanying note he said:

Say, Boss, do you want this to lighten up your old freight-train with? I
suppose you won't, but then it won't take long to say, so.

He was always sending impossible offerings to the magazines; innocently
enough sometimes, but often out of pure mischievousness. Yet they were
constantly after him, for they knew they were likely to get a first-water
gem. Mary Mopes Dodge, of St. Nicholas, wrote time and again, and
finally said:

"I know a man who was persecuted by an editor till he went distracted."

In his reading that year at the farm he gave more than customary
attention to one of his favorite books, Pepys' Diary, that captivating
old record which no one can follow continuously without catching the
infection of its manner and the desire of imitation. He had been reading
diligently one day, when he determined to try his hand on an imaginary
record of conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the
phrase of the period. The result was Fireside Conversation in the Time
of Queen Elizabeth, or, as he later called it, 1601. The "conversation,"
recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the
outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside
sociabilities were limited only by the range of loosened fancy,
vocabulary, and physical performance, and not by any bounds of
convention. Howells has spoken of Mark Twain's "Elizabethan breadth of
parlance," and how he, Howells, was always hiding away in discreet holes
and corners the letters in which Clemens had "loosed his bold fancy to
stoop on rank suggestion." "I could not bear to burn them," he declares,
"and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them."

In the 1601 Mark Twain outdid himself in the Elizabethan field. It was
written as a letter to that robust divine, Rev. Joseph Twichell, who had
no special scruples concerning Shakespearian parlance and customs. Before
it was mailed it was shown to David Gray, who was spending a Sunday at
Elmira. Gray said:

"Print it and put your name to it, Mark. You have never done a greater
piece of work than that."

John Hay, whom it also reached in due time, pronounce it a classic--a
"most exquisite bit of old English morality." Hay surreptitiously
permitted some proofs to be made of it, and it has been circulated
privately, though sparingly, ever since. At one time a special font of
antique type was made for it and one hundred copies were taken on
hand-made paper. They would easily bring a hundred dollars each to-day.

1601 is a genuine classic, as classics of that sort go. It is better
than the gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps, in some day to come,
the taste that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this
literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writings
of Mark Twain. Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a
matter of environment and point of view.--[In a note-book of a later
period Clemens himself wrote: "It depends on who writes a thing whether
it is coarse or not. I once wrote a conversation between Elizabeth,
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir W. Raleigh, Lord Bacon, Sir
Nicholas Throckmorton, and a stupid old nobleman--this latter being
cup-bearer to the queen and ostensible reporter of the talk.

"There were four maids of honor present and a sweet young girl two years
younger than the boy Beaumont. I built a conversation which could have
happened--I used words such as were used at that time--1601. I sent it
anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the sender!
But that man was a praiser of Rabelais, and had been saying, 'O that we
had a Rabelais!' I judged that I could furnish him one."]

Eighteen hundred and seventy-six was a Presidential year--the year of the
Hayes-Tilden campaign. Clemens and Howells were both warm Republicans
and actively interested in the outcome, Clemens, as he confessed, for the
first time in his life. Before his return to Hartford he announced
himself publicly as a Hayes man, made so by Governor Hayes's letter of
acceptance, which, he said, "expresses my own political convictions." His
politics had not been generally known up to that time, and a Tilden and
Hendricks club in Jersey City had invited him to be present and give them
some political counsel, at a flag-raising. He wrote, declining
pleasantly enough, then added:

"You have asked me for some political counsel or advice: In view of Mr.
Tilden's Civil War record my advice is not to raise the flag."

He wrote Howells: "If Tilden is elected I think the entire country will
go pretty straight to--Mrs. Howells's bad place."

Howells was writing a campaign biography of Hayes, which he hoped would
have a large sale, and Clemens urged him to get it out quickly and save
the country. Howells, working like a beaver, in turn urged Clemens to
take the field in the cause. Returning to Hartford, Clemens presided at
a political rally and made a speech, the most widely quoted of the
campaign. All papers, without distinction as to party, quoted it, and
all readers, regardless of politics, read it with joy.

Yet conditions did not improve. When Howells's book had been out a
reasonable length of time he wrote that it had sold only two thousand
copies.

"There's success for you," he said. "It makes me despair of the
Republic, I can tell you."

Clemens, however, did not lose faith, and went on shouting for Hayes and
damning Tilden till the final vote was cast. In later life he changed
his mind about Tilden (as did many others) through sympathy. Sympathy
could make--Mark Twain change his mind any time. He stood for the right,
but, above all, for justice. He stood for the wronged, regardless of all
other things.




CIX

THE PUBLIC APPEARANCE OF "TOM SAWYER"

Clemens gave a few readings in Boston and Philadelphia, but when urged to
go elsewhere made the excuse that he was having his portrait painted and
could not leave home.

As a matter of fact, he was enjoying himself with Frank Millet, who had
been invited to the house to do the portrait and had captured the fervent
admiration of the whole family. Millet was young, handsome, and lively;
Clemens couldn't see enough of him, the children adored him and added his
name to the prayer which included each member of the household--the "Holy
Family," Clemens called it.

Millet had brought with him but one piece of canvas for the portrait, and
when the first sketch was finished Mrs. Clemens was so delighted with it
that she did not wish him to touch it again. She was afraid of losing
some particular feeling in it which she valued. Millet went to the city.
for another canvas and Clemens accompanied him. While Millet was doing
his shopping it happened to occur to Clemens that it would be well to
fill in the time by having his hair cut. He left word with a clerk to
tell Millet that he had gone across the street. By and by the artist
came over, and nearly wept with despair when he saw his subject sheared
of the auburn, gray-sprinkled aureola that had made his first sketch a
success. He tried it again, and the result was an excellent likeness,
but it never satisfied Millet.

The 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' appeared late in December (1876), and
immediately took its place as foremost of American stories of boy life, a
place which it unquestionably holds to this day. We have already
considered the personal details of this story, for they were essentially
nothing more than the various aspects of Mark Twain's own boyhood. It is
only necessary to add a word concerning the elaboration of this period in
literary form.

From every point it is a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a
little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general
disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable, formless,
elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely to be boy
terror and a latent instinct of manliness. These things are so truly
portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting into his
own remembered years, as if it had grown there. Every boy has played off
sick to escape school; every boy has reflected in his heart Tom's picture
of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over the stricken
consciences of those who had blighted his young life; every boy--of that
day, at least--every normal, respectable boy, grew up to "fear God and
dread the Sunday-school," as Howells puts it in his review.

As for the story itself, the narrative of it, it is pure delight. The
pirate camp on the island is simply boy heaven. What boy, for instance,
would not change any other glory or boon that the world holds for this:

    They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty
    steps within the somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some
    bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn
    "pone" stock they had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be
    feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an
    unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and
    they said they never would return to civilization. The climbing
    fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared
    tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage
    and the festooning vines.

There is a magic in it. Mark Twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed in
him all the old fascination of those days and nights with Tom
Blankenship, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys on Glasscock's Island.
Everywhere in Tom Sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the
humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook.
No one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our early
reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces it:

    The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms
    filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was
    green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a
    delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.

Tom's night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of Dr.
Robinson; the adventures of Tom and Becky in the cave--these are all
marvelously invented. Literary thrill touches the ultimate in one
incident of the cave episode. Brander Matthews has written:

    Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment
    in the cave when the boy and girl are lost in the darkness, and when
    Tom suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that
    the hand is the hand of Indian Joe, his one mortal enemy. I have
    always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in Tom Sawyer
    was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure
    since Robinson Crusoe first saw a single footprint in the sand of
    the sea-shore.

Mark Twain's invention was not always a reliable quantity, but with that
eccentricity which goes with any attribute of genius, it was likely at
any moment to rise supreme. If to the critical, hardened reader the tale
seems a shade overdone here and there, a trifle extravagant in its
delineations, let him go back to his first long-ago reading of it and see
if he recalls anything but his pure delight in it then. As a boy's story
it has not been equaled.

Tom Sawyer has ranked in popularity with Roughing It.

Its sales go steadily on from year to year, and are likely to continue so
long as boys and girls do not change, and men and women remember.

--[Col. Henry Watterson, when he finished Tom Sawyer, wrote: "I have
just laid down Tom Sawyer, and cannot resist the pressure. It is
immense! I read every word of it, didn't skip a line, and nearly
disgraced myself several times in the presence of a sleeping-car full of
honorable and pious people. Once I had to get to one side and have a
cry, and as for an internal compound of laughter and tears there was no
end to it.... The 'funeral' of the boys, the cave business, and the hunt
for the hidden treasure are as dramatic as anything I know of in fiction,
while the pathos--particularly everything relating to Huck and Aunt
Polly--makes a cross between Dickens's skill and Thackeray's nature,
which, resembling neither, is thoroughly impressive and original."]




CX

MARK TWAIN AND BRET HARTE WRITE A PLAY

It was the fall and winter of '76 that Bret Harte came to Hartford and
collaborated with Mark Twain on the play "Ah Sin," a comedy-drama, or
melodrama, written for Charles T. Parsloe, the great impersonator of
Chinese character. Harte had written a successful play which
unfortunately he had sold outright for no great sum, and was eager for
another venture. Harte had the dramatic sense and constructive
invention. He also had humor, but he felt the need of the sort of humor
that Mark Twain could furnish. Furthermore, he believed that a play
backed by both their reputations must start with great advantages.
Clemens also realized these things, and the arrangement was made.
Speaking of their method of working, Clemens once said:

"Well, Bret came down to Hartford and we talked it over, and then Bret
wrote it while I played billiards, but of course I had to go over it to
get the dialect right. Bret never did know anything about dialect."
Which is hardly a fair statement of the case. They both worked on the
play, and worked hard.

During the period of its construction Harte had an order for a story
which he said he must finish at once, as he needed the money. It must be
delivered by the following night, and he insisted that he must be getting
at it without a moment's delay. Still he seemed in no haste to begin.
The evening passed; bedtime came. Then he asked that an open fire might
be made in his room and a bottle of whisky sent up, in case he needed.
something to keep him awake. George attended to these matters, and
nothing more was heard of Harte until very early next morning, when he
rang for George and asked for a fresh fire and an additional supply of
whisky. At breakfast-time he appeared, fresh, rosy, and elate, with the
announcement that his story was complete.

That forenoon the Saturday Morning Club met at the Clemens home. It was
a young women's club, of which Mark Twain was a sort of honorary member
--a club for the purpose of intellectual advancement, somewhat on the
order of the Monday Evening Club of men, except that the papers read
before it were not prepared by members, but by men and women prominent in
some field of intellectual progress. Bret Harte had agreed to read to
them on this particular occasion, and he gaily appeared and gave them the
story just finished, "Thankful Blossom," a tale which Mark Twain always
regarded as one of Harte's very best.

The new play, "Ah Sin," by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, was put on at
Washington, at the National Theater, on the evening of May 7, 1877. It
had been widely exploited in the newspapers, and the fame of the authors
insured a crowded opening. Clemens was unable to go over on account of a
sudden attack of bronchitis. Parsloe was nervous accordingly, and the
presence of Harte does not seem to have added to his happiness.

"I am not very well myself," he wrote to Clemens. "The excitement of the
first night is bad enough, but to have the annoyance with Harte that I
have is too much for a new beginner."

Nevertheless, the play seems to have gone well, with Parsloe as Ah Sin
--a Chinese laundryman who was also a great number of other diverting
things--with a fair support and a happy-go-lucky presentation of frontier
life, which included a supposed murder, a false accusation, and a general
clearing-up of mystery by the pleasant and wily and useful and
entertaining Ah Sin. It was not a great play. It was neither very
coherent nor convincing, but it had a lot of good fun in it, with
character parts which, if not faithful to life, were faithful enough to
the public conception of it to be amusing and exciting. At the end of
each act not only Parsloe, but also the principal members of the company,
were called before the curtain for special acknowledgments. When it was
over there was a general call for Ah Sin, who came before the curtain and
read a telegram.

CHARLES T. PARSLOE,--I am on the sick-list, and therefore cannot come to
Washington; but I have prepared two speeches--one to deliver in event of
failure of the play, and the other if successful. Please tell me which I
shall send. May be better to put it to vote.

                            MARK TWAIN.

The house cheered the letter, and when it was put to vote decided
unanimously that the play had been a success--a verdict more kindly than
true.

J. I. Ford, of the theater management, wrote to Clemens, next morning
after the first performance, urging him to come to Washington in person
and "wet nurse" the play until "it could do for itself."

Ford expressed satisfaction with the play and its prospects, and
concludes:

I inclose notices. Come if you can. "Your presence will be worth ten
thousand men. The king's name is a tower of strength." I have urged the
President to come to-night.

The play made no money in Washington, but Augustin Daly decided to put it
on in New York at the Fifth Avenue Theater, with a company which
included, besides Parsloe, Edmund Collier, P. A. Anderson, Dora
Goldthwaite, Henry Crisp, and Mrs. Wells, a very worthy group of players
indeed. Clemens was present at the opening, dressed in white, which he
affected only for warm-weather use in those days, and made a speech at
the end of the third act.

"Ah Sin" did not excite much enthusiasm among New York dramatic critics.
The houses were promising for a time, but for some reason the performance
as a whole did not contain the elements of prosperity. It set out on its
provincial travels with no particular prestige beyond the reputation of
its authors; and it would seem that this was not enough, for it failed to
pay, and all parties concerned presently abandoned it to its fate and it
was heard of no more. Just why "Ah Sin" did not prosper it would not
become us to decide at this far remove of time and taste. Poorer plays
have succeeded and better plays have failed since then, and no one has
ever been able to demonstrate the mystery. A touch somewhere, a
pulling-about and a readjustment, might have saved "Ali Sin," but the
pullings and haulings which they gave it did not. Perhaps it still lies
in some managerial vault, and some day may be dragged to light and
reconstructed and recast, and come into its reward. Who knows? Or it
may have drifted to that harbor of forgotten plays, whence there is no
returning.

As between Harte and Clemens, the whole matter was unfortunate. In the
course of their association there arose a friction and the long-time
friendship disappeared.




CXI

A BERMUDA HOLIDAY

On the 16th of May, 1877, Mark Twain set out on what, in his note-book,
he declared to be "the first actual pleasure-trip" he had ever taken,
meaning that on every previous trip he had started with a purpose other
than that of mere enjoyment. He took with him his, friend and pastor,
the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and they sailed for Bermuda, an island
resort not so well known or so fashionable as to-day.

They did not go to a hotel. Under assumed names they took up quarters in
a boarding-house, with a Mrs. Kirkham, and were unmolested and altogether
happy in their wanderings through four golden days. Mark Twain could not
resist keeping a note-book, setting down bits of scenery and character
and incident, just as he had always done. He was impressed with the
cheapness of property and living in the Bermuda of that period. He makes
special mention of some cottages constructed of coral blocks: "All as
beautiful and as neat as a pin, at the cost of four hundred and eighty
dollars each." To Twichell he remarked:

"Joe, this place is like Heaven, and I'm going to make the most of it."

"Mark," said Twichell, "that's right; make the most of a place that is
like Heaven while you have a chance."

In one of the entries--the final one--Clemens says:

"Bermuda is free (at present) from the triple curse of railways,
telegraphs, and newspapers, but this will not last the year. I propose
to spend next year here and no more."

When they were ready to leave, and started for the steamer, Twichell made
an excuse to go back, his purpose being to tell their landlady and her
daughter that, without knowing it, they had been entertaining Mark Twain.

"Did you ever hear of Mark Twain?" asked Twichell.

The daughter answered.

"Yes," she said, "until I'm tired of the name. I know a young man who
never talks of anything else."

"Well," said Twichell, "that gentleman with me is Mark Twain."

The Kirkhams declined to believe it at first, and then were in deep
sorrow that they had not known it earlier. Twichell promised that he and
Clemens would come back the next year; and they meant to go back--we
always mean to go back to places--but it was thirty years before they
returned at last, and then their pleasant landlady was dead.

On the home trip they sighted a wandering vessel, manned by blacks,
trying to get to New York. She had no cargo and was pretty helpless.
Later, when she was reported again, Clemens wrote about it in a Hartford
paper, telling the story as he knew it. The vessel had shipped the crew,
on a basis of passage to New York, in exchange for labor. So it was a
"pleasure-excursion!" Clemens dwelt on this fancy:

    I have heard of a good many pleasure-excursions, but this heads the
    list. It is monumental, and if ever the tired old tramp is found I
    should like to be there and see him in his sorrowful rags and his
    venerable head of grass and seaweed, and hear the ancient mariners
    tell the story of their mysterious wanderings through the solemn
    solitudes of the ocean.

Long afterward this vagrant craft was reported again, still drifting with
the relentless Gulf Stream. Perhaps she reached New York in time; one
would like to know, but there seems no good way to find out.

That first Bermuda voyage was always a happy memory to Mark Twain. To
Twichell he wrote that it was the "joyousest trip" he had ever made:

    Not a heartache anywhere, not a twinge of conscience. I often come
    to myself out of a reverie and detect an undertone of thought that
    had been thinking itself without volition of mind--viz., that if we
    had only had ten days of those walks and talks instead of four.

There was but one regret: Howells had not been with them. Clemens
denounced him for his absence:

    If you had gone with us and let me pay the fifty dollars, which the
    trip and the board and the various knick-knacks and mementos would
    cost, I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation
    to pay me five hundred per cent. profit in the way of the several
    magazine articles which I could have written; whereas I can now
    write only one or two, and am therefore largely out of pocket by
    your proud ways.

Clemens would not fail to write about his trip. He could not help doing
that, and he began "Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion" as soon as
he landed in Hartford. They were quite what the name would signify
--leisurely, pleasant commentaries on a loafing, peaceful vacation. They
are not startling in their humor or description, but are gently amusing
and summery, reflecting, bubble-like, evanescent fancies of Bermuda.
Howells, shut up in a Boston editorial office, found them delightful
enough, and very likely his Atlantic readers agreed with him. The story
of "Isaac and the Prophets of Baal" was one that Capt. Ned Wakeman had
told to Twichell during a voyage which the latter had made to Aspinwall
with that vigorous old seafarer; so in the "Rambling Notes" Wakeman
appears as Captain Hurricane Jones, probably a step in the evolution of
the later name of Stormfield. The best feature of the series (there were
four papers in all) is a story of a rescue in mid-ocean; but surely the
brightest ripple of humor is the reference to Bermuda's mahogany-tree:

    There was exactly one mahogany-tree on the island. I know this to
    be reliable because I saw a man who said he had counted it many a
    time and could not be mistaken. He was a man with a haze lip and a
    pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel. Such men
    are all too few.

Clemens cared less for these papers than did Howells. He had serious
doubts about the first two and suggested their destruction, but with
Howells's appreciation his own confidence in them returned and he let
them all go in. They did not especially advance his reputation, but
perhaps they did it no harm.




CXII

A NEW PLAY AND A NEW TALE

He wrote a short story that year which is notable mainly for the fact
that in it the telephone becomes a literary property, probably for the
first time. "The Loves of Alonzo Fitz-Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton"
employed in the consummation what was then a prospect, rather than a
reality--long-distance communication.

His work that summer consisted mainly of two extensive undertakings, one
of which he completed without delay. He still had the dramatic ambition,
and he believed that he was capable now of constructing a play entirely
from his own resources.

To Howells, in June, he wrote:

To-day I am deep in a comedy which I began this morning--principal
character an old detective. I skeletoned the first act and wrote the
second to-day, and am dog-tired now. Fifty-four pages of MS. in seven
hours.

Seven days later, the Fourth of July, he said:

I have piled up one hundred and fifty-one pages on my comedy. The first,
second and fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction, too.
To-morrow and next day will finish the third act, and the play. Never
had so much fun over anything in my life never such consuming interest
and delight. And just think! I had Sol Smith Russell in my mind's eye
for the old detective's part, and bang it! he has gone off pottering with
Oliver Optic, or else the papers lie.

He was working with enthusiasm, you see, believing in it with a faith
which, alas, was no warrant for its quality. Even Howells caught his
enthusiasm and became eager to see the play, and to have the story it
contained told for the Atlantic.

But in the end it proved a mistake. Dion Boucicault, when he read the
manuscript, pronounced it better than "Ah Sin," but that was only
qualified praise. Actors who considered the play, anxious enough to have
Mark Twain's name on their posters and small bills, were obliged to admit
that, while it contained marvelous lines, it wouldn't "go." John
Brougham wrote:

    There is an absolute "embarrassment of riches" in your "Detective"
    most assuredly, but the difficulty is to put it into profitable
    form. The quartz is there in abundance, only requiring the
    necessary manipulation to extract the gold.

    In narrative structure the story would be full of life, character,
    and the most exuberant fun, but it is altogether too diffuse in its
    present condition for dramatic representation, and I confess I do
    not feel sufficient confidence in my own experience (even if I had
    the time, which on reflection I find I have not) to undertake what,
    under different circumstances, would be a "labor of love."

                     Yours sincerely,  JOHN BROUGHAM.

That was frank, manly, and to the point; it covered the ground exactly.
"Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective," had plenty of good material in
it--plenty of dialogue and situations; but the dialogue wouldn't play,
and the situations wouldn't act. Clemens realized that perhaps the drama
was not, after all, his forte; he dropped "Simon Wheeler," lost his
interest in "Ah Sin," even leased "Colonel Sellers" for the coming
season, and so, in a sort of fury, put theatrical matters out of his
mind.

He had entered upon what, for him, was a truer domain. One day he picked
up from among the books at the farm a little juvenile volume, an English
story of the thirteenth century by Charlotte M. Yonge, entitled, The
Prince and the Page. It was a story of Edward I. and his cousins,
Richard and Henry de Montfort; in part it told of the submerged
personality of the latter, picturing him as having dwelt in disguise as a
blind beggar for a period of years. It was a story of a sort and with a
setting that Mark Twain loved, and as he read there came a correlative
idea. Not only would he disguise a prince as a beggar, but a beggar as a
prince. He would have them change places in the world, and each learn
the burdens of the other's life.--[There is no point of resemblance
between the Prince and the Pauper and the tale that inspired it. No one
would ever guess that the one had grown out of the readings of the other,
and no comparison of any sort is possible between them.]

The plot presented physical difficulties. He still had some lurking
thought of stage performance, and saw in his mind a spectacular
presentation, with all the costumery of an early period as background for
a young and beautiful creature who would play the part of prince. The
old device of changelings in the cradle (later used in Pudd'nhead Wilson)
presented itself to him, but it could not provide the situations he had
in mind. Finally came the thought of a playful interchange of raiment
and state (with startling and unlooked-for consequence)--the guise and
personality of Tom Canty, of Offal Court, for those of the son of Henry
VIII., little Edward Tudor, more lately sixth English king of that name.
This little prince was not his first selection for the part. His
original idea had been to use the late King Edward VII. (then Prince of
Wales) at about fifteen, but he found that it would never answer to lose
a prince among the slums of modern London, and have his proud estate
denied and jeered at by a modern mob. He felt that he could not make it
seem real; so he followed back through history, looking along for the
proper time and prince, till he came to little Edward, who was too young
--but no matter, he would do.

He decided to begin his new venture in story form. He could dramatize it
later. The situation appealed to him immensely. The idea seemed a
brand-new one; it was delightful, it was fascinating, and he was
saturated with the atmosphere and literature and history--the data and
detail of that delightful old time. He put away all thought of cheap,
modern play-acting and writing, to begin one of the loveliest and most
entertaining and instructive tales of old English life. He decided to be
quite accurate in his picture of the period, and he posted himself on old
London very carefully. He bought a pocket-map which he studied in the
minutest detail.

He wrote about four hundred manuscript pages of the tale that summer;
then, as the inspiration seemed to lag a little, put it aside, as was his
habit, to wait until the ambition for it should be renewed. It was a
long wait, as usual. He did not touch it again for more than three
years.




CXIII

TWO DOMESTIC DRAMAS

Some unusual happenings took place that summer of 1877. John T. Lewis
(colored), already referred to as the religious antagonist of Auntie
Cord, by great presence of mind and bravery saved the lives of Mrs.
Clemens's sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles ("Charley") Langdon, her little
daughter Julia, and her nurse-maid. They were in a buggy, and their
runaway horse was flying down East Hill toward Elmira to certain
destruction, when Lewis, laboring slowly homeward with a loaded wagon,
saw them coming and turned his team across the road, after which he
leaped out and with extraordinary strength and quickness grabbed the
horse's bridle and brought him to a standstill. The Clemens and Crane
families, who had seen the runaway start at the farm gate, arrived half
wild with fear, only to find the supposed victims entirely safe.

Everybody contributed in rewarding Lewis. He received money ($1,500) and
various other presents, including inscribed books and trinkets, also,
what he perhaps valued more than anything, a marvelous stem-winding gold
watch. Clemens, writing a full account to Dr. Brown of the watch, says:

    And if any scoffer shall say, "behold this thing is out of
    character," there is an inscription within which will silence him;
    for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not
    the watch the wearer.

In another paragraph he says:

    When Lewis arrived the other evening, after having saved those lives
    by a feat which I think is the most marvelous I can call to mind,
    when he arrived hunched up on his manure-wagon and as grotesquely
    picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked.
    They came back and said he was beautiful. It was so, too, and yet
    he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day
    these past seven years that he has occupied this farm.

Lewis acknowledged his gifts in a letter which closed with a paragraph of
rare native loftiness:

    But I beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine Providence saw fit
    to use me as an instrument for the saving of those preshious lives,
    the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed.

Lewis lived to enjoy his prosperity, and the honor of the Clemens and
Langdon households, for twenty-nine years. When he was too old to work
there was a pension, to which Clemens contributed; also Henry H. Rogers.
So the simple-hearted, noble old negro closed his days in peace.

Mrs. Crane, in a letter, late in July, 1906, told of his death:

    He was always cheerful, and seemed not to suffer much pain, told
    stories, and was able to eat almost everything.

    Three days ago a new difficulty appeared, on account of which his
    doctor said he must go to the hospital for care such as it was quite
    impossible to give in his home.

    He died on his way there.

    Thus it happened that he died on the road where he had performed his
    great deed.

A second unusual incident of that summer occurred in Hartford. There had
been a report of a strange man seen about the Clemens place, thought to
be a prospecting burglar, and Clemens went over to investigate. A little
searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a mechanic
out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had given him
food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm. When the girl
found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was her
fiance, though she said he appeared lately to have changed his mind and
no longer wished to marry her.

The girl seemed heartbroken, and sympathy for her was naturally the first
and about the only feeling which Clemens developed, for the time being.
He reasoned with the young man, but without making much headway. Finally
his dramatic instinct prompted him to a plan of a sort which would have
satisfied even Tom Sawyer. He asked Twichell to procure a license for
the couple, and to conceal himself in a ground floor bath-room. He
arranged with the chief of police to be on hand in another room; with the
rest of the servants quietly to prepare a wedding-feast, and finally with
Lizzie herself to be dressed for the ceremony. He had already made an
appointment with the young man to come to, see him at a certain hour on a
"matter of business," and the young man arrived in the belief, no doubt,
that it was something which would lead to profitable employment. When he
came in Clemens gently and quietly reviewed the situation, told him of
the young girl's love for him; how he had been sheltered and fed by her;
how through her kindness to him she had compromised her reputation for
honesty and brought upon her all the suspicion of having sheltered a
burglar; how she was ready and willing to marry him, and how he (Clemens)
was ready to assist them to obtain work and a start in life.

But the young man was not enthusiastic. He was a Swede and slow of
action. He resolutely declared that he was not ready to marry yet, and
in the end refused to do so. Then came the dramatic moment. Clemens
quietly but firmly informed him that the wedding ceremony must take
place; that by infesting his premises he had broken the law, not only
against trespass, but most likely against house-breaking. There was a
brief discussion of this point. Finally Clemens gave him five minutes to
make up his mind, with the statement that he had an officer in waiting,
and unless he would consent to the wedding he would be taken in charge.
The young man began to temporize, saying that it would be necessary for
him to get a license and a preacher. But Clemens stepped to the door of
the bath-room, opened it, and let out Twichell, who had been sweltering
there in that fearful place for more than an hour, it being August. The
delinquent lover found himself confronted with all the requisites of
matrimony except the bride, and just then this detail appeared on the
scene, dressed for the occasion. Behind her ranged the rest of the
servants and a few invited guests. Before the young man knew it he had a
wife, and on the whole did not seem displeased. It ended with a gay
supper and festivities. Then Clemens started them handsomely by giving
each of them a check for one hundred dollars; and in truth (which in this
case, at least, is stranger than fiction) they lived happily and
prosperously ever after.

Some years later Mark Twain based a story on this episode, but it was
never entirely satisfactory and remains unpublished.




CXIV

THE WHITTIER BIRTHDAY SPEECH

It was the night of December 17, 1877, that Mark Twain made his
unfortunate speech at the dinner given by the Atlantic staff to John G.
Whittier on his seventieth birthday. Clemens had attended a number of
the dinners which the Atlantic gave on one occasion or another, and had
provided a part of the entertainment. It is only fair to say that his
after-dinner speeches at such times had been regarded as very special
events, genuine triumphs of humor and delivery. But on this particular
occasion he determined to outdo himself, to prepare something unusual,
startling, something altogether unheard of.

When Mark Twain had an impulse like that it was possible for it to result
in something dangerous, especially in those earlier days. This time it
produced a bombshell; not just an ordinary bombshell, or even a
twelve-inch projectile, but a shell of planetary size. It was a sort of
hoax-always a doubtful plaything--and in this case it brought even
quicker and more terrible retribution than usual. It was an imaginary
presentation of three disreputable frontier tramps who at some time had
imposed themselves on a lonely miner as Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes,
quoting apposite selections from their verses to the accompaniment of
cards and drink, and altogether conducting themselves in a most unsavory
fashion. At the end came the enlightenment that these were not what they
pretended to be, but only impostors--disgusting frauds. A feature like
that would be a doubtful thing to try in any cultured atmosphere. The
thought of associating, ever so remotely, those three old bummers which
he had conjured up with the venerable and venerated Emerson, Longfellow,
and Holmes, the Olympian trinity, seems ghastly enough to-day, and must
have seemed even more so then. But Clemens, dazzled by the rainbow
splendor of his conception, saw in it only a rare colossal humor, which
would fairly lift and bear his hearers along on a tide of mirth. He did
not show his effort to any one beforehand. He wanted its full beauty to
burst upon the entire company as a surprise.

It did that. Howells was toastmaster, and when he came to present
Clemens he took particular pains to introduce him as one of his foremost
contributors and dearest friends. Here, he said, was "a humorist who
never left you hanging you head for having enjoyed his joke."

Thirty years later Clemens himself wrote of his impressions as he rose to
deliver his speech.

    I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering: dimly I
    can see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures,
    sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless
    forevermore. I don't know who they were, but I can very distinctly
    see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, Mr.
    Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave,
    lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr.
    Longfellow, with his silken-white hair and his benignant face; Dr.
    Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-
    fellowship everywhere, like a rose-diamond whose facets are being
    turned toward the light, first one way and then another--a charming
    man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he
    was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more
    or less motion to other people). I can see those figures with
    entire distinctiness across this abyss of time.

William Winter, the poet, had just preceded him, and it seemed a moment
aptly chosen for his so-different theme. "And then," to quote Howells,
"the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was
upon us."

After the first two or three hundred words, when the general plan and
purpose of the burlesque had developed, when the names of Longfellow,
Emerson, and Holmes began to be flung about by those bleary outcasts, and
their verses given that sorry association, those Atlantic diners became
petrified with amazement and horror. Too late, then, the speaker
realized his mistake. He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly
end. And somehow he did it, while "there fell a silence weighing many
tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was
broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single
guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy."

Howells can remember little more than that, but Clemens recalls that one
speaker made an effort to follow him--Bishop, the novelist, and that
Bishop didn't last long.

    It was not many sentences after his first before he began to
    hesitate and break, and lose his grip, and totter and wobble, and at
    last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile.

The next man had not strength to rise, and somehow the company broke up.

Howells's next recollection is of being in a room of the hotel, and of
hearing Charles Dudley Warner saying in the gloom:

"Well, Mark, you're a funny fellow."

He remembers how, after a sleepless night, Clemens went out to buy some
bric-a-brac, with a soul far from bric-a-brac, and returned to Hartford
in a writhing agony of spirit. He believed that he was ruined forever,
so far as his Boston associations were concerned; and when he confessed
all the tragedy to Mrs. Clemens it seemed to her also that the mistake
could never be wholly repaired. The fact that certain papers quoted the
speech and spoke well of it, and certain readers who had not listened to
it thought it enormously funny, gave very little comfort. But perhaps
his chief concern was the ruin which he believed he had brought upon
Howells. He put his heart into a brief letter:

    MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows.
    I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a
    list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years
    old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentances.

    I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country;
    therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at
    present. It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages
    now. So it is my opinion, and my wife's, that the telephone story
    had better be suppressed. Will you return those proofs or revises
    to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion?

    It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and
    saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced
    so much. And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in
    introducing me! It burns me like fire to think of it.

    The whole matter is a dreadful subject. Let me drop it here--at
    least on paper.

                         Penitently yours,  MARK

So, all in a moment, his world had come to an end--as it seemed. But
Howells's letter, which came rushing back by first mail, brought hope.

"It was a fatality," Howells said. "One of those sorrows into which a
man walks with his eyes wide open, no one knows why."

Howells assured him that Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes would so
consider it, beyond doubt; that Charles Eliot Norton had already
expressed himself exactly in the right spirit concerning it. Howells
declared that there was no intention of dropping Mark Twain's work from
the Atlantic.

    You are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than
    that even in this world. Especially as regards me, just call the
    sore spot well. I can say more, and with better heart, in praise of
    your good feeling (which was what I always liked in you), since this
    thing happened than I could before.

It was agreed that he should at once write a letter to Longfellow,
Emerson, and Holmes, and he did write, laying his heart bare to them.
Longfellow and Holmes answered in a fine spirit of kindliness, and Miss
Emerson wrote for her father in the same tone. Emerson had not been
offended, for he had not heard the speech, having arrived even then at
that stage of semi-oblivion as to immediate things which eventually so
completely shut him away. Longfellow's letter made light of the whole
matter. The newspapers, he said, had caused all the mischief.

    A bit of humor at a dinner-table talk is one thing; a report of it
    in the morning papers is another. One needs the lamplight and the
    scenery. These failing, what was meant in jest assumes a serious
    aspect.

    I do not believe that anybody was much hurt. Certainly I was not,
    and Holmes tells me that he was not. So I think you may dismiss the
    matter from your mind, without further remorse.

    It was a very pleasant dinner, and I think Whittier enjoyed it very
    much.

Holmes likewise referred to it as a trifle.

    It never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or to feel
    wounded by your playful use of my name. I have heard some mild
    questioning as to whether, even in fun, it was good taste to
    associate the names of the authors with the absurdly unlike
    personalities attributed to them, but it seems to be an open
    question. Two of my friends, gentlemen of education and the highest
    social standing, were infinitely amused by your speech, and stoutly
    defended it against the charge of impropriety. More than this, one
    of the cleverest and best-known ladies we have among us was highly
    delighted with it.

Miss Emerson's letter was to Mrs. Clemens and its homelike New England
fashion did much to lift the gloom.

    DEAR MRS. CLEMENS,--At New Year's our family always meets, to spend
    two days together. To-day my father came last, and brought with him
    Mr. Clemens's letter, so that I read it to the assembled family, and
    I have come right up-stairs to write to you about it. My sister
    said, "Oh, let father write!" but my mother said, "No, don't wait
    for him. Go now; don't stop to pick that up. Go this minute and
    write. I think that is a noble letter. Tell them so." First let
    me say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of our
    minds. The night of the dinner, my father says, he did not hear Mr.
    Clemens's speech. He was too far off, and my mother says that when
    she read it to him the next day it amused him. But what you will
    want is to know, without any softening, how we did feel. We were
    disappointed. We have liked almost everything we have ever seen
    over Mark Twain's signature. It has made us like the man, and we
    have delighted in the fun. Father has often asked us to repeat
    certain passages of The Innocents Abroad, and of a speech at a
    London dinner in 1872, and we all expect both to approve and to
    enjoy when we see his name. Therefore, when we read this speech it
    was a real disappointment. I said to my brother that it didn't seem
    good or funny, and he said, "No, it was unfortunate. Still some of
    those quotations were very good"; and he gave them with relish and
    my father laughed, though never having seen a card in his life, he
    couldn't understand them like his children. My mother read it
    lightly and had hardly any second thoughts about it. To my father
    it is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quite
    understood it, and he forgets easily and entirely. I think it
    doubtful whether he writes to Mr. Clemens, for he is old and long
    ago gave up answering letters, I think you can see just how bad, and
    how little bad, it was as far as we are concerned, and this lovely
    heartbreaking letter makes up for our disappointment in our much-
    liked author, and restores our former feeling about him.

                         ELLEN T. EMERSON.

The sorrow dulled a little as the days passed. Just after Christmas
Clemens wrote to Howells:

    I haven't done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner. But I'm
    going to try to-morrow. How could I ever----

    Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool,
    and all his work must be contemplated with respect.

So long as that unfortunate speech is remembered there will be
differences of opinion as to its merits and propriety. Clemens himself,
reading it for the first time in nearly thirty years, said:

"I find it gross, coarse--well, I needn't go on with particulars. I
don't like any part of it, from the beginning to the end. I find it
always offensive and detestable. How do I account for this change of
view? I don't know."

But almost immediately afterward he gave it another consideration and
reversed his opinion completely. All the spirit and delight of his old
first conception returned, and preparing it for publication, he wrote:

--[North American Review, December, 1907, now with comment included in
the volume of "Speeches." (Also see Appendix O, at the end of last
volume.)--I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot it hasn't a
single defect in it, from the first word to the last. It is just as good
as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn't a
suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere.]

It was altogether like Mark Twain to have those two absolutely opposing
opinions in that brief time; for, after all, it was only a question of
the human point of view, and Mark Twain's points of view were likely to
be as extremely human as they were varied.

Of course the first of these impressions, the verdict of the fresh mind
uninfluenced by the old conception, was the more correct one. The speech
was decidedly out of place in that company. The skit was harmless
enough, but it was of the Comstock grain. It lacked refinement, and,
what was still worse, it lacked humor, at least the humor of a kind
suited to that long-ago company of listeners. It was another of those
grievous mistakes which genius (and not talent) can make, for genius is a
sort of possession. The individual is pervaded, dominated for a time by
an angel or an imp, and he seldom, of himself, is able to discriminate
between his controls. A literary imp was always lying in wait for Mark
Twain; the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the 'outre', the
outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia Clemens had to
labor hardest against: the cheapening of his own high purpose with an
extravagant false note, at which sincerity, conviction, and artistic
harmony took wings and fled away. Notably he did a good burlesque now
and then, but his fame would not have suffered if he had been delivered
altogether from his besetting temptation.




CXV

HARTFORD AND BILLIARDS

Clemens was never much inclined to work, away from his Elmira study.
"Magnanimous Incident Literature" (for the Atlantic) was about his only
completed work of the winter of 1877-78. He was always tinkering with
the "Visit to Heaven," and after one reconstruction Howells suggested
that he bring it out as a book, in England, with Dean Stanley's
indorsement, though this may have been only semi-serious counsel. The
story continued to lie in seclusion.

Clemens had one new book in the field--a small book, but profitable. Dan
Slote's firm issued for him the Mark Twain Scrap-book, and at the end of
the first royalty period rendered a statement of twenty-five thousand
copies sold, which was well enough for a book that did not contain a
single word that critics could praise or condemn. Slote issued another
little book for him soon after Punch, Brothers, Punch!--which, besides
that lively sketch, contained the "Random Notes" and seven other
selections.

Mark Twain was tempted to go into the lecture field that winter, not by
any of the offers, though these were numerous enough, but by the idea of
a combination which he thought night be not only profitable but pleasant.
Thomas Nast had made a great success of his caricature lectures, and
Clemens, recalling Nast's long-ago proposal, found it newly attractive.
He wrote characteristically:

    MY DEAR NAST,--I did not think I should ever stand on a platform
    again until the time was come for me to say, "I die innocent." But
    the same old offers keep arriving. I have declined them all, just
    as usual, though sorely tempted, as usual.

    Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, but
    because (1) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and (2)
    shouldering the whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility.

    Therefore, I now propose to you what you proposed to me in 1867, ten
    years ago (when I was unknown)--viz., that you stand on the platform
    and make pictures, and I stand by you and blackguard the audience.
    I should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't
    want to go to the little ones), with you for company.

    My idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on the
    spoils, but to put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles,
    and say to the artist and lecturer, "absorb these."

    For instance, [here follows a plan and a possible list of the cities
    to be visited]. The letter continues:

    Call the gross receipts $100,00 for four months and a half, and the
    profit from $60,000 to $75,000 (I try to make the figures large
    enough, and leave it to the public to reduce them).

    I did not put in Philadelphia because Pugh owns that town, and last
    winter, when I made a little reading-trip, he only paid me $300, and
    pretended his concert (I read fifteen minutes in the midst of a
    concert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn't afford any more.
    I could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats.

    I have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying
    remarks, to see how the thing would go. I was charmed.

    Well, you think it over, Nast, and drop me a line. We should have
    some fun.

Undoubtedly this would have been a profitable combination, but Nast had a
distaste for platforming--had given it up, as he thought, for life. So
Clemens settled down to the fireside days, that afforded him always the
larger comfort. The children were at an age "to be entertaining, and to
be entertained." In either case they furnished him plenty of diversion
when he did not care to write. They had learned his gift as a romancer,
and with this audience he might be as extravagant as he liked. They
sometimes assisted by furnishing subjects. They would bring him a
picture, requiring him to invent a story for it without a moment's delay.
Sometimes they suggested the names of certain animals or objects, and
demanded that these be made into a fairy tale. If they heard the name of
any new creature or occupation they were likely to offer them as
impromptu inspiration. Once he was suddenly required to make a story out
of a plumber and a "bawgunstrictor," but he was equal to it. On one side
of the library, along the book-shelves that joined the mantelpiece, were
numerous ornaments and pictures. At one end was the head of a girl, that
they called "Emeline," and at the other was an oil-painting of a cat.
When other subjects failed, the romancer was obliged to build a story
impromptu, and without preparation, beginning with the cat, working along
through the bric-a-brac, and ending with "Emeline." This was the
unvarying program. He was not allowed to begin with "Emeline" and end
with the cat, and he was not permitted to introduce an ornament from any
other portion of the room. He could vary the story as much as he liked.
In fact, he was required to do that. The trend of its chapters, from the
cat to "Emeline," was a well-trodden and ever-entertaining way.

He gave up his luxurious study to the children as a sort of nursery and
playroom, and took up his writing-quarters, first in a room over the
stables, then in the billiard-room, which, on the whole, he preferred to
any other place, for it was a third-story remoteness, and he could knock
the balls about for inspiration.

The billiard-room became his headquarters. He received his callers there
and impressed them into the game. If they could play, well and good; if
they could not play, so much the better--he could beat them
extravagantly, and he took a huge delight in such conquests. Every
Friday evening, or oftener, a small party of billiard-lovers gathered,
and played until a late hour, told stories, and smoked till the room was
blue, comforting themselves with hot Scotch and general good-fellowship.
Mark Twain always had a genuine passion for billiards. He was never
tired of the game. He could play all night. He would stay till the last
man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the balls
about alone. He liked to invent new games and new rules for old games,
often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some particular
shot or position on the table. It amused him highly to do this, to make
the rule advantage his own play, and to pretend a deep indignation when
his opponents disqualified his rulings and rode him down. S. C. Dunham
was among those who belonged to the "Friday Evening Club," as they called
it, and Henry C. Robinson, long dead, and rare Ned Bunce, and F. G.
Whitmore; and the old room there at the top of the house, with its little
outside balcony, rang with their voices and their laughter in that day
when life and the world for them was young. Clemens quoted to them
sometimes:

    Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring
    Your winter garment of repentance fling;
    The bird of time has but a little way
    To flutter, and the bird is on the wing.

Omar was new then on this side of the Atlantic, and to his serene "eat,
drink, and be merry" philosophy, in Fitzgerald's rhyme, these were early
converts. Mark Twain had an impressive, musical delivery of verse; the
players were willing at any moment to listen as he recited:

    For some we loved, the loveliest and best
    That from his vintage rolling time has prest,
    Have drunk their cup a round or two before,
    And one by one crept silently to rest.
    Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
    Before we too into the dust descend;
    Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie,
    Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and--sans End.'

--[The 'Rubaiyat' had made its first appearance, in Hartford, a little
before in a column of extracts published in the Courant.] Twichell
immediately wrote Clemens a card:

"Read (if you haven't) the extracts from Oman Khayyam, on the first page
of this morning's Courant. I think we'll have to get the book. I never
yet came across anything that uttered certain thoughts of mine so.
adequately. And it's only a translation. Read it, and we'll talk it
over. There is something in it very like the passage of Emerson you read
me last night, in fact identical with it in thought.

"Surely this Omar was a great poet. Anyhow, he has given me an immense
revelation this morning.

"Hoping that you are better,

                     J. H. T."

Twichell's "only a translation" has acquired a certain humor with time.




CXVI

OFF FOR GERMANY

The German language became one of the interests of the Clemens home
during the early months of 1878. The Clemenses had long looked forward
to a sojourn in Europe, and the demand for another Mark Twain book of
travel furnished an added reason for their going. They planned for the
spring sailing, and to spend a year or more on the Continent, making
their headquarters in Germany. So they entered into the study of the
language with an enthusiasm and perseverance that insured progress. There
was a German nurse for the children, and the whole atmosphere of the
household presently became lingually Teutonic. It amused Mark Twain, as
everything amused him, but he was a good student; he acquired a working
knowledge of the language in an extraordinarily brief time, just as in an
earlier day he had picked up piloting. He would never become a German
scholar, but his vocabulary and use of picturesque phrases, particularly
those that combined English and German words, were often really
startling, not only for their humor, but for their expressiveness.

Necessarily the new study would infect his literature. He conceived a
plan for making Captain Wakeman (Stormfield) come across a copy of
Ollendorf in Heaven, and proceed to learn the language of a near-lying
district.

They arranged to sail early in April, and, as on their former trip,
persuaded Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, to accompany them. They wrote
to the Howellses, breaking the news of the journey, urging them to come
to Hartford for a good-by visit. Howells and his wife came. The
Twichells, Warners, and other Hartford friends paid repeated farewell
calls. The furniture was packed, the rooms desolated, the beautiful home
made ready for closing.

They were to have pleasant company on the ship. Bayard Taylor, then
recently appointed Minister to Germany, wrote that he had planned to sail
on the same vessel; Murat Halstead's wife and daughter were listed among
the passengers. Clemens made a brief speech at Taylor's "farewell
dinner."

The "Mark Twain" party, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens, Miss
Spaulding, little Susy and Clara ("Bay"), and a nurse-maid, Rosa, sailed
on the Holsatia, April 11, 1878. Bayard Taylor and the Halstead ladies
also sailed, as per program; likewise Murat Halstead himself, for whom no
program had been made. There was a storm outside, and the Holsatia
anchored down the bay to wait until the worst was over. As the weather
began to moderate Halstead and others came down in a tug for a final word
of good-by. When the tug left, Halstead somehow managed to get
overlooked, and was presently on his way across the ocean with only such
wardrobe as he had on, and what Bayard Taylor, a large man like himself,
was willing to lend him. Halstead was accused of having intentionally
allowed himself to be left behind, and his case did have a suspicious
look; but in any event they were glad to have him along.

In a written word of good-by to Howells, Clemens remembered a debt of
gratitude, and paid it in the full measure that was his habit.

    And that reminds me, ungrateful dog that I am, that I owe as much to
    your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss
    who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his
    art. I was talking to Mrs. Clemens about this the other day, and
    grieving because I never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to
    ignore it or to be unaware of it. Nothing that has passed under
    your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my
    other stuff does need so much.

In that ancient day, before the wireless telegraph, the voyager, when the
land fell away behind him, felt a mighty sense of relief and rest, which
to some extent has gone now forever. He cannot entirely escape the world
in this new day; but then he had a complete sense of dismissal from all
encumbering cares of life. Among the first note-book entries Mark Twain
wrote:

To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings--"I am no
longer of ye; what ye say of me is now of no consequence--but of how much
consequence when I am with ye and of ye. I know you will refrain from
saying harsh things because they cannot hurt me, since I am out of reach
and cannot hear them. This is why we say no harsh things of the dead."

It was a rough voyage outside, but the company made it pleasant within.
Halstead and Taylor were good smoking-room companions. Taylor had a
large capacity for languages and a memory that was always a marvel. He
would repeat for them Arabian, Hungarian, and Russian poetry, and show
them the music and construction of it. He sang German folk-lore songs
for them, and the "Lorelei," then comparatively unknown in America. Such
was his knowledge of the language that even educated Germans on board
submitted questions of construction to him and accepted his decisions. He
was wisely chosen for the mission he had to fill, but unfortunately he
did not fill it long. Both Halstead and Taylor were said to have heart
trouble. Halstead, however, survived many years. Taylor died December
19, 1878.




CXVII

GERMANY AND GERMAN

From the note-book:

    It is a marvel that never loses its surprise by repetition, this
    aiming a ship at a mark three thousand miles away and hitting the
    bull's-eye in a fog--as we did. When the fog fell on us the captain
    said we ought to be at such and such a spot (it had been eighteen
    hours since an observation was had), with the Scilly islands bearing
    so and so, and about so many miles away. Hove the lead and got
    forty-eight fathoms; looked on the chart, and sure enough this depth
    of water showed that we were right where the captain said we were.

    Another idea. For ages man probably did not know why God carpeted
    the ocean bottom with sand in one place, shells in another, and so
    on. But we see now; the kind of bottom the lead brings up shows
    where a ship is when the soundings don't, and also it confirms the
    soundings.

They reached Hamburg after two weeks' stormy sailing. They rested a few
days there, then went to Hanover and Frankfort, arriving at Heidelberg
early in May.

They had no lodgings selected in Heidelberg, and leaving the others at an
inn, Clemens set out immediately to find apartments. Chance or
direction, or both, led him to the beautiful Schloss Hotel, on a hill
overlooking the city, and as fair a view as one may find in all Germany.
He did not go back after his party. He sent a message telling them to
take carriage and drive at once to the Schloss, then he sat down to enjoy
the view.

Coming up the hill they saw him standing on the veranda, waving his hat
in welcome. He led them to their rooms--spacious apartments--and pointed
to the view. They were looking down on beautiful Heidelberg Castle,
densely wooded hills, the far-flowing Neckar, and the haze-empurpled
valley of the Rhine. By and by, pointing to a small cottage on the
hilltop, he said:

"I have been picking out my little house to work in; there it is over
there; the one with the gable in the roof. Mine is the middle room on
the third floor."

Mrs. Clemens thought the occupants of the house might be surprised if he
should suddenly knock and tell them he had come to take possession of his
room. Nevertheless, they often looked over in that direction and
referred to it as his office. They amused themselves by watching his
"people" and trying to make out what they were like. One day he went
over there, and sure enough there was a sign out, "Moblirte Wohnung zu
Vermiethen." A day or two later he was established in the very room he
had selected, it being the only room but one vacant.

In A Tramp Abroad Mark Twain tells of the beauty of their Heidelberg
environment. To Howells he wrote:

    Our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), one
    looking toward the Rhine Valley and sunset, the other looking up the
    Neckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend pearly all our time in
    these. We have tables and chairs in them; we do our reading,
    writing, studying, smoking, and suppering in them . . . . It
    must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. Lord, how
    blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! Only two
    sounds: the happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffled
    music of the Neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes. It is no
    hardship to lie awake awhile nights, for this subdued roar has
    exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. It is so
    healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's
    imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song....

    I have waited for a "call" to go to work--I knew it would come.
    Well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and
    more frequently every day since; three days ago I concluded to move
    my manuscripts over to my den. Now the call is loud and decided at
    last. So to-morrow I shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to
    it till the middle of July or August 1st, when I look for Twichell;
    we will then walk about Germany two or three weeks, and then I'll go
    to work again (perhaps in Munich).

The walking tour with Twichell had been contemplated in the scheme for
gathering book material, but the plan for it had not been completed when
he left Hartford. Now he was anxious that they should start as soon as
possible. Twichell, receiving the news in Hartford, wrote that it was a
great day for him: that his third son had been happily born early that
morning, and now the arrival of this glorious gift of a tramp through
Germany and Switzerland completed his blessings.

    I am almost too joyful for pleasure [he wrote]. I labor with my
    felicities. How I shall get to sleep to-night I don't know, though
    I have had a good start, in not having slept much last night. Oh,
    my! do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be? I do. To
    begin with, I am thoroughly tired and the rest will be worth
    everything. To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together
    --why, it's my dream of luxury. Harmony, who at sunrise this morning
    deemed herself the happiest woman on the Continent when I read your
    letter to her, widened her smile perceptibly, and revived another
    degree of strength in a minute. She refused to consider her being
    left alone; but: only the great chance opened to me.

    SHOES--Mark, remember that ever so much of our pleasure depends upon
    your shoes. Don't fail to have adequate preparation made in that
    department.

Meantime, the struggle with the "awful German language" went on. It was
a general hand-to-hand contest. From the head of the household down to
little Clara not one was exempt. To Clemens it became a sort of
nightmare. Once in his note-book he says:

"Dreamed all bad foreigners went to German heaven; couldn't talk, and
wished they had gone to the other place"; and a little farther along, "I
wish I could hear myself talk German."

To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira, he reported their troubles:

    Clara Spaulding is working herself to death with her German; never
    loses an instant while she is awake--or asleep, either, for that
    matter; dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up under
    her arms and glare upon her with red-hot eyes, and inquire about the
    genitive case and the declensions of the definite article. Livy is
    bully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar and
    her reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these two
    students stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, "Oh,
    there's no use! We never can learn it in the world!" Then Livy
    takes a sentence to go to bed on: goes gaping and stretching to her
    pillow murmuring, "Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr
    verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--I wonder if I can get that
    packed away so it will stay till morning"--and about an hour after
    midnight she wakes me up and says, "I do so hate to disturb you, but
    is it 'Ich Ben Jonson sehr befinden'?"

And Mrs. Clemens wrote:

    Oh, Sue dear, strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many
    shall seek to enter it and shall not be able. I am not striving
    these days. I am just interested in German.

Rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in German,
though Bay at first would have none of it. The nurse and governess tried
to blandish her, in vain. She maintained a calm and persistent attitude
of scorn. Little Susy tried, and really made progress; but one, day she
said, pathetically:

"Mama, I wish Rosa was made in English."

Yet a little later Susy herself wrote her Aunt Sue:

    I know a lot of German; everybody says I know a lot. I give you a
    million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars
    to see the lovely woods that we see.

Even Howells, in far-off America, caught the infection and began a letter
in German, though he hastened to add, "Or do you prefer English by this
time? Really I could imagine the German going hard with you, for you
always seemed to me a man who liked to be understood with the least
possible personal inconvenience."

Clemens declared more than once that he scorned the "outrageous and
impossible German grammar," and abandoned it altogether. In his
note-book he records how two Germans, strangers in Heidelberg, asked him
a direction, and that when he gave it, in the most elaborate and correct
German he could muster, one of them only lifted his eyes and murmured:

"Gott im Himmel!"

He was daily impressed with the lingual attainments of foreigners and his
own lack of them. In the notes he comments:

    Am addressed in German, and when I can't speak it immediately the
    person tackles me in French, and plainly shows astonishment when I
    stop him. They naturally despise such an ignoramus. Our doctor
    here speaks as pure English, as I.

On the Fourth of July he addressed the American students in Heidelberg in
one of those mixtures of tongues for which he had a peculiar gift.

The room he had rented for a study was let by a typical German family,
and he was a great delight to them. He practised his German on them, and
interested himself in their daily affairs.

Howells wrote insistently for some assurance of contributions to the
Atlantic.

"I must begin printing your private letters to satisfy the popular
demand," he said. "People are constantly asking when you are going to
begin."

Clemens replied that he would be only too glad to write for the Atlantic
if his contributions could be copyrighted in Canada, where pirates were
persistently enterprising.

I do not know that I have any printable stuff just now--separatable
stuff, that is--but I shall have by and by. It is very gratifying to
hear that it is wanted by anybody. I stand always prepared to hear the
reverse, and am constantly surprised that it is delayed so long.
Consequently it is not going to astonish me when it comes.

The Clemens party enjoyed Heidelberg, though in different ways. The
children romped and picnicked in the castle grounds, which adjoined the
hotel; Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding were devoted to bric-a-brac
hunting, picture-galleries, and music. Clemens took long walks, or made
excursions by rail and diligence to farther points. Art and opera did
not appeal to him. The note-book says:

    I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen
    years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening
    to an unfamiliar opera. I am enchanted with the airs of "Trovatore"
    and other old operas which the hand-organ and the music-box have
    made entirely familiar to my ear. I am carried away with delighted
    enthusiasm when they are sung at the opera. But oh, how far between
    they are! And what long, arid, heartbreaking and headaching
    "between-times" of that sort of intense but incoherent noise which
    always so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down.

    Sunday night, 11th. Huge crowd out to-night to hear the band play
    the "Fremersberg." I suppose it is very low-grade music--I know it
    must be low-grade music--because it so delighted me, it so warmed
    me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that at times
    I could have cried, and at others split my throat with shouting.
    The great crowd was another evidence that it was low-grade music,
    for only the few are educated up to a point where high-class music
    gives pleasure. I have never heard enough classic music to be able
    to enjoy it, and the simple truth is I detest it. Not mildly, but
    with all my heart.

    What a poor lot we human beings are anyway! If base music gives me
    wings, why should I want any other? But I do. I want to like the
    higher music because the higher and better like it. But you see I
    want to like it without taking the necessary trouble, and giving the
    thing the necessary amount of time and attention. The natural
    suggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by a
    lie--we will pretend we like it. This lie, this pretense, gives to
    opera what support it has in America.

    And then there is painting. What a red rag is to a bull Turner's
    "Slave Ship" is to me. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point
    where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as
    it throws me into one of rage. His cultivation enables him to see
    water in that yellow mud; his cultivation reconciles the floating of
    unfloatable things to him--chains etc.; it reconciles him to fishes
    swimming on top of the water. The most of the picture is a manifest
    impossibility, that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can
    enable a man to find truth in a lie. A Boston critic said the
    "Slave Ship" reminded him of a cat having a fit in a platter of
    tomatoes. That went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought, here
    is a man with an unobstructed eye.

Mark Twain has dwelt somewhat upon these matters in 'A Tramp Abroad'. He
confesses in that book that later he became a great admirer of Turner,
though perhaps never of the "Slave Ship" picture. In fact, Mark Twain
was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his
art nor his tastes were of an "artistic" kind.




CXVIII

TRAMPING WITH TWICHELL

Twichell arrived on time, August 1st. Clemens met him at Baden-Baden,
and they immediately set out on a tramp through the Black Forest,
excursioning as pleased them, and having an idyllic good time. They did
not always walk, but they often did. At least they did sometimes, when
the weather was just right and Clemens's rheumatism did not trouble him.
But they were likely to take a carriage, or a donkey-cart, or a train, or
any convenient thing that happened along. They did not hurry, but idled
and talked and gathered flowers, or gossiped with wayside natives and
tourists, though always preferring to wander along together, beguiling
the way with discussion and speculation and entertaining tales. They
crossed on into Switzerland in due time and considered the conquest of
the Alps. The family followed by rail or diligence, and greeted them
here and there when they rested from their wanderings. Mark Twain found
an immunity from attention in Switzerland, which for years he had not
known elsewhere. His face was not so well known and his pen-name was
carefully concealed.

It was a large relief to be no longer an object of public curiosity; but
Twichell, as in the Bermuda trip, did not feel quite honest, perhaps, in
altogether preserving the mask of unrecognition. In one of his letters
home he tells how; when a young man at their table was especially
delighted with Mark Twain's conversation, he could not resist taking the
young man aside and divulging to him the speaker's identity.

"I could not forbear telling him who Mark was," he says, "and the mingled
surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad I had done so."

They climbed the Rigi, after which Clemens was not in good walking trim
for some time; so Twichell went on a trip on his own account, to give his
comrade a chance to rest. Then away again to Interlaken, where the
Jungfrau rises, cold and white; on over the loneliness of Gemini Pass,
with glaciers for neighbors and the unfading white peaks against the
blue; to Visp and to Zermatt, where the Matterhorn points like a finger
that directs mankind to God. This was true Alpine wandering--sweet
vagabondage.

The association of the wanderers was a very intimate one. Their minds
were closely attuned, and there were numerous instances of
thought--echo-mind answering to mind--without the employment of words.
Clemens records in his notes:

    Sunday A.M., August 11th. Been reading Romola yesterday afternoon,
    last night, and this morning; at last I came upon the only passage
    which has thus far hit me with force--Tito compromising with his
    conscience, and resolving to do; not a bad thing, but not the best
    thing. Joe entered the room five minutes--no, three minutes later
    --and without prelude said, "I read that book you've got there six
    years ago, and got a mighty good text for a sermon out of it the
    passage where the young fellow compromises with his conscience, and
    resolves to do, not a bad thing, but not the best thing." This is
    Joe's first reference to this book since he saw me buy it twenty-
    four hours ago. So my mind operated on his in this instance. He
    said he was sitting yonder in the reading-room, three minutes ago (I
    have not got up yet), thinking of nothing in particular, and didn't
    know what brought Romola into his head; but into his head it came
    and that particular passage. Now I, forty feet away, in another
    room, was reading that particular passage at that particular moment.

    Couldn't suggest Romola to him earlier, because nothing in the book
    had taken hold of me till I came to that one passage on page 112,
    Tauchnitz edition.

And again:

    The instances of mind-telegraphing are simply innumerable. This
    evening Joe and I sat long at the edge of the village looking at the
    Matterhorn. Then Joe said, "We ought to go to the Cervin Hotel and
    inquire for Livy's telegram." If he had been but one instant later
    I should have said those words instead of him.

Such entries are frequent, and one day there came along a kind of
object-lesson. They were toiling up a mountainside, when Twichell began
telling a very interesting story which had happened in connection with a
friend still living, though Twichell had no knowledge of his whereabouts
at this time. The story finished just as they rounded a turn in, the
cliff, and Twichell, looking up, ended his last sentence, "And there's
the man!" Which was true, for they were face to face with the very man of
whom he had been telling.

Another subject that entered into their discussion was the law of
accidents. Clemens held that there was no such thing an accident: that
it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning; that every event,
however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and
immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny. Once on their
travels, when they were on a high bank above a brawling stream, a little
girl, who started to run toward them, slipped and rolled under the bottom
rail of the protecting fence, her feet momentarily hanging out over the
precipice and the tearing torrent below. It seemed a miraculous escape
from death, and furnished an illustration for their discussion. The
condition of the ground, the force of her fall, the nearness of the fatal
edge, all these had grown inevitably out of the first great projection of
thought, and the child's fall and its escape had been invested in life's
primal atom.

The author of A Tramp Abroad tells us of the rushing stream that flows
out of the Arcadian sky valley, the Gasternthal, and goes plunging down
to Kandersteg, and how he took exercise by making "Harris" (Twichell) set
stranded logs adrift while he lounged comfortably on a boulder, and
watched them go tearing by; also how he made Harris run a race with one
of those logs. But that is literature. Twichell, in a letter home, has
preserved a likelier and lovelier story:

    Mark is a queer fellow. There is nothing that he so delights in as
    a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one when
    once he is within the influence of its fascinations. To throw in
    stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. Tonight, as we were
    on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood caught by
    the torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in.
    When I got back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as
    hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the
    wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to
    view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He said
    afterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months. He acted
    just like a boy; another feature of his extreme sensitiveness in
    certain directions.

Then generalizing, Twichell adds:

    He has coarse spots in him. But I never knew a person so finely
    regardful of the feelings of others in some ways. He hates to pass
    another person walking, and will practise some subterfuge to take
    off what he feels is the discourtesy of it. And he is exceedingly
    timid, tremblingly timid, about approaching strangers; hates to ask
    a question. His sensitive regard for others extends to animals.
    When we are driving his concern is all about the horse. He can't
    bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard. To-day,
    when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a
    little, Mark said, "The fellow's got the notion that we are in a
    hurry." He is exceedingly considerate toward me in regard of
    everything--or most things.

The days were not all sunshine. Sometimes it rained and they took
shelter by the wayside, or, if there was no shelter, they plodded along
under their umbrellas, still talking away, and if something occurred that
Clemens wanted to put down they would stand stock still in the rain, and
Twichell would hold the umbrella while Clemens wrote--a good while
sometimes--oblivious to storm and discomfort and the long way yet ahead.

After the day on Gemmi Pass Twichell wrote home:

    Mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in the flowers. He scrambled
    around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest
    pleasure in them. He crowded a pocket of his note-book with his
    specimens and wanted more room. So I stopped the guide and got out
    my needle and thread, and out of a stiff paper, a hotel
    advertisement, I had about me made a paper bag, a cornucopia like,
    and tied it to his vest in front, and it answered the purpose
    admirably. He filled it full with a beautiful collection, and as
    soon as we got here to-night he transferred it to a cardboard box
    and sent it by mail to Livy. A strange Mark he is, full of
    contradictions. I spoke last night of his sensitive to others'
    feelings. To-day the guide got behind, and came up as if he would
    like to go by, yet hesitated to do so. Mark paused, went aside and
    busied himself a minute picking a flower. In the halt the guide got
    by and resumed his place in front. Mark threw the flower away,
    saying, "I didn't want that. I only wanted to give the old man a
    chance to go on without seeming to pass us." Mark is splendid to
    walk with amid such grand scenery, for he talks so well about it,
    has such a power of strong, picturesque expression. I wish you
    might have heard him to-day. His vigorous speech nearly did justice
    to the things we saw.

In an address which Twichell gave many years later he recalls another
pretty incident of their travels. They had been toiling up the Gorner
Grat.

As we paused for a rest, a lamb from a flock of sheep near by ventured
inquisitively toward us, whereupon Mark seated himself on a rock, and
with beckoning hand and soft words tried to get it to come to him.

On the lamb's part it was a struggle between curiosity and timidity, but
in a succession of advances and retreats it gained confidence, though at
a very gradual rate. It was a scene for a painter: the great American
humorist on one side of the game and that silly little creature on the
other, with the Matterhorn for a background. Mark was reminded that the
time he was consuming was valuable--but to no purpose. The Gorner Grat
could wait. He held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried
his point: the lamb finally put its nose in his hand, and he was happy
over it all the rest of the day.

The matter of religion came up now and again in the drift of their
discussions. It was Twichell's habit to have prayers in their room every
night at the hotels, and Clemens was willing to join in the observances.
Once Twichell, finding him in a responsive mood--a remorseful mood--gave
his sympathy, and spoke of the larger sympathy of divinity. Clemens
listened and seemed soothed and impressed, but his philosophies were too
wide and too deep for creeds and doctrines. A day or two later, as they
were tramping along in the hot sun, his honesty had to speak out.

"Joe," he said, "I'm going to make a confession. I don't believe in your
religion at all. I've been living a lie right straight along whenever I
pretended to. For a moment, sometimes, I have been almost a believer,
but it immediately drifts away from me again. I don't believe one word
of your Bible was inspired by God any more than any other book. I
believe it is entirely the work of man from beginning to end--atonement
and all. The problem of life and death and eternity and the true
conception of God is a bigger thing than is contained in that book."

So the personal side of religious discussion closed between them, and was
never afterward reopened.

They joined Mrs. Clemens and the others at Lausanne at last, and their
Swiss holiday was over. Twichell set out for home by way of England, and
Clemens gave himself up to reflection and rest after his wanderings.
Then, as the days of their companionship passed in review, quickly and
characteristically he sent a letter after his comrade:

    DEAR OLD JOE, It is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the
    station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn't seem to
    accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, and the pleasant
    tramping and talking at an end. Ah, my boy! it has been such a
    rich holiday to me, and I feel under such deep and honest
    obligations to you for coming. I am putting out of my mind all
    memory of the times when I misbehaved toward you and hurt you; I am
    resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only
    the charming hours of the journeys and the times when I was not
    unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands
    first after Livy's. It is justifiable to do this; for why should I
    let my small infirmities of disposition live and grovel among my
    mental pictures of the eternal sublimities of the Alps?

    Livy can't accept or endure the fact that you are gone. But you
    are, and we cannot get around it. So take our love with you, and
    bear it also over the sea to Harmony, and God bless you both.

                                MARK.




CXIX

ITALIAN DAYS

The Clemens party wandered down into Italy--to the lakes, Venice,
Florence, Rome--loitering through the galleries, gathering here and there
beautiful furnishings--pictures, marbles, and the like--for the Hartford
home.

In Venice they bought an old careen bed, a massive regal affair with
serpentine columns surmounted by singularly graceful cupids, and with
other cupids sporting on the headboard: the work of some artist who had
been dust three centuries maybe, for this bed had come out of an old
Venetian palace, dismantled and abandoned. It was a furniture with a
long story, and the years would add mightily to its memories. It would
become a stately institution in the Clemens household. The cupids on the
posts were removable, and one of the highest privileges of childhood
would be to occupy that bed and have down one of the cupids to play with.
It was necessary to be ill to acquire that privilege--not violently and
dangerously ill, but interestingly so--ill enough to be propped up with
pillows and have one's meals served on a tray, with dolls and
picture-books handy, and among them a beautiful rosewood cupid who had
kept dimpled and dainty for so many, many years.

They spent three weeks in Venice: a dreamlike experience, especially for
the children, who were on the water most of the time, and became fast
friends with their gondolier, who taught them some Italian words; then a
week in Florence and a fortnight in Rome.

--[From the note-book:
"BAY--When the waiter brought my breakfast this morning I spoke to him in
Italian.
"MAMA--What did you say?
"B.--I said, 'Polly-vo fransay.'
"M.--What does it mean?
"B.--I don't know. What does it mean, Susy?
"S.--It means, 'Polly wants a cracker.'"]

Clemens discovered that in twelve years his attitude had changed somewhat
concerning the old masters. He no longer found the bright, new copies an
improvement on the originals, though the originals still failed to wake
his enthusiasm. Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding spent long hours
wandering down avenues of art, accompanied by him on occasion, though not
always willingly. He wrote his sorrow to Twichell:

I do wish you were in Rome to do my sight-seeing for me. Rome interests
me as much as East Hartford could, and no more; that is, the Rome which
the average tourist feels an interest in. There are other things here
which stir me enough to make life worth living. Livy and Clara are
having a royal time worshiping the old masters, and I as good a time
gritting my ineffectual teeth over them.

Once when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party he remarked that if the
old masters had labeled their fruit one wouldn't be so likely to mistake
pears for turnips.

"Youth," said Mrs. Clemens, gravely, "if you do not care for these
masterpieces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of
others"; and Miss Jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint
Yankee fashion:

"Now, you've been spoke to!"

He felt duly reprimanded, but his taste did not materially reform. He
realized that he was no longer in a proper frame of mind to write of
general sight-seeing. One must be eager, verdant, to write happily the
story of travel. Replying to a letter from Howells on the subject he
said:

    I wish I could give those sharp satires on European life which you
    mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he
    be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I hate travel, and I hate
    hotels, and I hate the opera, and I hate the old masters. In truth
    I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to
    satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it and foam
    at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I have
    got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to
    do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort
    would burst me.

Clemens became his own courier for a time in Italy, and would seem to
have made more of a success of it than he did a good many years
afterward, if we may believe the story he has left us of his later
attempt:

"Am a shining success as a courier," he records, "by the use of francs.
Have learned how to handle the railway guide intelligently and with
confidence."

He declares that he will have no more couriers; but possibly he could
have employed one to advantage on the trip out of Italy, for it was a
desperately hard one, with bad connections and delayed telegrams. When,
after thirty-six hours weary, continuous traveling, they arrived at last
in Munich in a drizzle and fog, and were domiciled in their winter
quarters, at No. 1a, Karlstrasse, they felt that they had reached the
home of desolation itself, the very throne of human misery.

    And the rooms were so small, the conveniences so meager, and the
    porcelain stove was grim, ghastly, dismal, intolerable! So Livy and
    Clara Spaulding sat down forlorn and cried, and I retired to a
    private place to pray. By and by we all retired to our narrow
    German beds, and when Livy and I had finished talking across the
    room it was all decided that we should rest twenty-four hours, then
    pay whatever damages were required and straightway fly to the south
    of France.

The rooms had been engaged by letter, months before, of their
proprietress, Fraulein Dahlweiner, who had met them at the door with a
lantern in her hand, full of joy in their arrival and faith in her
ability to make them happy. It was a faith that was justified. Next
morning, when they all woke, rested, the weather had cleared, there were
bright fires in the rooms, the world had taken on a new aspect. Fraulein
Dahlweiner, the pathetic, hard-working little figure, became almost
beautiful in their eyes in her efforts for their comfort. She arranged
larger rooms and better conveniences for them. Their location was
central and there was a near-by park. They had no wish to change.
Clemens, in his letter to Howells, boasts that he brought the party
through from Rome himself, and that they never had so little trouble
before; but in looking over this letter, thirty years later, he
commented, "Probably a lie."

He secured a room some distance away for his work, but then could not
find his Swiss note-book. He wrote Twichell that he had lost it, and
that after all he might not be obliged to write a volume of travels. But
the notebook turned up and the work on the new book proceeded. For a
time it went badly. He wrote many chapters, only to throw them aside. He
had the feeling that he had somehow lost the knack of descriptive
narrative. He had become, as it seemed, too didactic. He thought his
description was inclined to be too literal, his humor manufactured. These
impressions passed, by and by; interest developed, and with it enthusiasm
and confidence. In a letter to Twichell he reported his progress:

I was about to write to my publisher and propose some other book, when
the confounded thing [the note-book] turned up, and down went my heart
into my boots. But there was now no excuse, so I went solidly to work,
tore up a great part of the MS. written in Heidelberg--wrote and tore up,
continued to write and tear up--and at last, reward of patient and noble
persistence, my pen got the old swing again! Since then I'm glad that
Providence knew better what to do with the Swiss notebook than I did.

Further along in the same letter there breaks forth a true heart-answer
to that voice of the Alps which, once heard, is never wholly silent:

    O Switzerland! The further it recedes into the enriching haze of
    time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer
    of it and the glory and majesty, and solemnity and pathos of it
    grow. Those mountains had a soul: they thought, they spoke. And
    what a voice it was! And how real! Deep down in my memory it is
    sounding yet. Alp calleth unto Alp! That stately old Scriptural
    wording is the right one for God's Alps and God's ocean. How puny
    we were in that awful Presence, and how painless it was to be so!
    How fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of
    our unspeakable insignificance! And Lord, how pervading were the
    repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the
    invisible Great Spirit of the mountains!

    Now what is it? There are mountains and mountains and mountains in
    this world, but only these take you by the heartstrings. I wonder
    what the secret of it is. Well, time and time and again it has
    seemed to me that I must drop everything and flee to Switzerland
    once more. It is a longings deep, strong, tugging longing. That is
    the word. We must go again, Joe.




CXX

IN MUNICH

That winter in Munich was not recalled as an unpleasant one in
after-years. His work went well enough--always a chief source of
gratification. Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding found interest in the
galleries, in quaint shops, in the music and picturesque life of that
beautiful old Bavarian town. The children also liked Munich. It was
easy for them to adopt any new environment or custom. The German
Christmas, with its lavish tree and toys and cakes, was an especial
delight. The German language they seemed fairly to absorb. Writing to
his mother Clemens said:

I cannot see but that the children speak German as well as they do
English. Susy often translates Livy's orders to the servants. I cannot
work and study German at the same time; so I have dropped the latter and
do not even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the
news.

In Munich--as was the case wherever they were known--there were many
callers. Most Americans and many foreigners felt it proper to call on
Mark Twain. It was complimentary, but it was wearying sometimes. Mrs.
Clemens, in a letter written from Venice, where they had received even
more than usual attention, declared there were moments when she almost
wished she might never see a visitor again.

Originally there was a good deal about Munich in the new book, and some
of the discarded chapters might have been retained with advantage. They
were ruled out in the final weeding as being too serious, along with the
French chapters. Only a few Italian memories were left to follow the
Switzerland wanderings.

The book does record one Munich event, though transferring it to
Heilsbronn. It is the incident of the finding of the lost sock in the
vast bedroom. It may interest the reader to compare what really
happened, as set down in a letter to Twichell, with the story as written
for publication:

    Last night I awoke at three this morning, and after raging to myself
    for two interminable hours I gave it up. I rose, assumed a catlike
    stealthiness, to keep from waking Livy, and proceeded to dress in
    the pitch-dark. Slowly but surely I got on garment after garment
    --all down to one sock; I had one slipper on and the other in my hand.
    Well, on my hands and knees I crept softly around, pawing and
    feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs, for
    that missing sock, I kept that up, and still kept it up, and kept it
    up. At first I only said to myself, "Blame that sock," but that
    soon ceased to answer. My expletives grew steadily stronger and
    stronger, and at last, when I found I was lost, I had to sit flat
    down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting
    the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out
    of me. I could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was
    in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where I
    was. But I had one comfort--I had not waked Livy; I believed I
    could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough.
    So I started again and softly pawed all over the place, and sure
    enough, at the end of half an hour I laid my hand on the missing
    article. I rose joyfully up and butted the washbowl and pitcher off
    the stand, and simply raised----so to speak. Livy screamed, then
    said, "Who is it? What is the matter?" I said, "There ain't
    anything the matter. I'm hunting for my sock." She said, "Are you
    hunting for it with a club?"

    I went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury
    subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest
    themselves. So I lay on the sofa with note-book and pencil, and
    transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at
    Heilsbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction.

He wrote with frequency to Howells, and sent him something for the
magazine now and then: the "Gambetta Duel" burlesque, which would make a
chapter in the book later, and the story of "The Great Revolution in
Pitcairn."--[Included in The Stolen White Elephant volume. The
"Pitcairn" and "Elephant" tales were originally chapters in 'A Tramp
Abroad'; also the unpleasant "Coffin-box" yarn, which Howells rejected
for the Atlantic and generally condemned, though for a time it remained a
favorite with its author.]

Howells's novel, 'The Lady of the Aroostook', was then running through
the 'Atlantic', and in one of his letters Clemens expresses the general
deep satisfaction of his household in that tale:

If your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see
what is lacking. It is all such truth--truth to the life; everywhere
your pen falls it leaves a photograph . . . . Possibly you will not
be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead one hundred years
--it is the fate of the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then
your books will be as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day I shall
be in the encyclopedias too, thus: "Mark Twain, history and occupation
unknown; but he was personally acquainted with Howells."

Though in humorous form, this was a sincere tribute. Clemens always
regarded with awe William Dean Howells's ability to dissect and
photograph with such delicacy the minutiae of human nature; just as
Howells always stood in awe of Mark Twain's ability to light, with a
single flashing sentence, the whole human horizon.




CXXI

PARIS, ENGLAND, AND HOMEWARD BOUND

They decided to spend the spring months in Paris, so they gave up their
pleasant quarters with Fraulein Dahlweiner, and journeyed across Europe,
arriving at the French capital February 28, 1879. Here they met another
discouraging prospect, for the weather was cold and damp, the cabmen
seemed brutally ill-mannered, their first hotel was chilly, dingy,
uninviting. Clemens, in his note-book, set down his impressions of their
rooms. A paragraph will serve:

    Ten squatty, ugly arm-chairs, upholstered in the ugliest and
    coarsest conceivable scarlet plush; two hideous sofas of the same
    --uncounted armless chairs ditto. Five ornamental chairs, seats
    covered with a coarse rag, embroidered in flat expanse with a
    confusion of leaves such as no tree ever bore, six or seven a dirty
    white and the rest a faded red. How those hideous chairs do swear
    at the hideous sofa near them! This is the very hatefulest room I
    have seen in Europe.

    Oh, how cold and raw and unwarmable it is!

It was better than that when the sun came out, and they found happier
quarters presently at the Hotel Normandy, rue de l'Echelle.

But, alas, the sun did not come out often enough. It was one of those
French springs and summers when it rains nearly every day, and is
distressingly foggy and chill between times. Clemens received a bad
impression of France and the French during that Parisian-sojourn, from
which he never entirely recovered. In his note-book he wrote: "France
has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks
it is a fine country."

The weather may not have been entirely accountable for his prejudice, but
from whatever cause Mark Twain, to the day of his death, had no great
love for the French as a nation. Conversely, the French as a nation did
not care greatly for Mark Twain. There were many individual Frenchmen
that Mark Twain admired, as there were many Frenchmen who admired the
work and personality of Mark Twain; but on neither side was there the
warm, fond, general affection which elsewhere throughout Europe he
invited and returned.

His book was not yet finished. In Paris he worked on it daily, but
without enthusiasm. The city was too noisy, the weather too dismal. His
note-book says:

May 7th. I wish this terrible winter would come to an end. Have had
rain almost without intermission for two months and one week.

May 28th. This is one of the coldest days of this most damnable and
interminable winter.

It was not all gloom and discomfort. There was congenial company in
Paris, and dinner-parties, and a world of callers. Aldrich the
scintillating--[ Of Aldrich Clemens used to say: "When Aldrich speaks it
seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and I feel like the other
side." Aldrich, unlike Clemens, was not given to swearing. The Parisian
note-book has this memorandum: "Aldrich gives his seat in the horse-car
to a crutched cripple, and discovers that what he took for a crutch is
only a length of walnut beading and the man not lame; whereupon Aldrich
uses the only profanity that ever escaped his lips: 'Damn a dam'd man who
would carry a dam'd piece of beading under his dam'd arm!'"]--was there,
also Gedney Bunce, of Hartford, Frank Millet and his wife, Hjalinar
Hjorth Boyesen and his wife, and a Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain, artist
people whom the Clemenses had met pleasantly in Italy. Turgenieff, as in
London, came to call; also Baron Tauchnitz, that nobly born
philanthropist of German publishers, who devoted his life, often at his
personal cost, to making the literature of other nations familiar to his
own. Tauchnitz had early published the 'Innocents', following it with
other Mark Twain volumes as they appeared, paying always, of his own will
and accord, all that he could afford to pay for this privilege; which was
not really a privilege, for the law did not require him to pay at all. He
traveled down to Paris now to see the author, and to pay his respects to
him. "A mighty nice old gentleman," Clemens found him. Richard Whiteing
was in Paris that winter, and there were always plenty of young American
painters whom it was good to know.

They had what they called the Stomach Club, a jolly organization, whose
purpose was indicated by its name. Mark Twain occasionally attended its
sessions, and on one memorable evening, when Edwin A. Abbey was there,
speeches were made which never appeared in any printed proceedings. Mark
Twain's address that night has obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs
of the world, though no line of it, or even its title has ever found its
way into published literature.

Clemens had a better time in Paris than the rest of his party. He could
go and come, and mingle with the sociabilities when the abnormal weather
kept the others housed in. He did a good deal of sight-seeing of his own
kind, and once went up in a captive balloon. They were all studying
French, more or less, and they read histories and other books relating to
France. Clemens renewed his old interest in Joan of Arc, and for the
first time appears to have conceived the notion of writing the story of
that lovely character.

The Reign of Terror interested him. He reread Carlyle's Revolution, a
book which he was never long without reading, and they all read 'A Tale
of Two Cities'. When the weather permitted they visited the scenes of
that grim period.

In his note-book he comments:

    "The Reign of Terror shows that, without distinction or rank, the
    people were savages. Marquises, dukes, lawyers, blacksmiths, they
    each figure in due proportion to their crafts."

And again:

    "For 1,000 years this savage nation indulged itself in massacre;
    every now and then a big massacre or a little one. The spirit is
    peculiar to France--I mean in Christendom--no other state has had
    it. In this France has always walked abreast, kept her end up with
    her brethren, the Turks and the Burmese. Their chief traits--love
    of glory and massacre."

Yet it was his sense of fairness that made him write, as a sort of
quittance:

    "You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances.
    It is the tourists' custom. When I see a man jump from the Vendome
    Column I say, 'They like to do that in Paris.'"

Following this implied atonement, he records a few conclusions, drawn
doubtless from Parisian reading and observation:

    "Childish race and great."

    "I'm for cremation."

    "I disfavor capital punishment."

    "Samson was a Jew, therefore not a fool. The Jews have the best
    average brain of any people in the world. The Jews are the only
    race in the world who work wholly with their brains, and never with
    their hands. There are no Jew beggars, no Jew tramps, no Jew
    ditchers, hod-carriers, day-laborers, or followers of toilsome
    mechanical trade.

    "They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world's intellectual
    aristocracy."

    "Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose
    they did it. It requires brains to keep money as well as to make
    it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the
    former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again. The
    division would have to be remade every three years or it would do
    the communist no good."

A curious thing happened one day in Paris. Boyesen; in great excitement,
came to the Normandy and was shown to the Clemens apartments. He was
pale and could hardly speak, for his emotion. He asked immediately if
his wife had come to their rooms. On learning that she had not, he
declared that she was lost or had met with an accident. She had been
gone several hours, he said, and had sent no word, a thing which she had
never done before. He besought Clemens to aid him in his search for her,
to do something to help him find her. Clemens, without showing the least
emotion or special concentration of interest, said quietly:

"I will."

"Where will you go first," Boyesen demanded.

Still in the same even voice Clemens said:

"To the elevator."

He passed out of the room, with Boyesen behind him, into the hall. The
elevator was just coming up, and as they reached it, it stopped at their
landing, and Mrs. Boyesen stepped out. She had been delayed by a
breakdown and a blockade. Clemens said afterward that he had a positive
conviction that she would be on the elevator when they reached it. It
was one of those curious psychic evidences which we find all along during
his life; or, if the skeptics prefer to call them coincidences, they are
privileged to do so.

    Paris, June 1, 1879. Still this vindictive winter continues. Had a
    raw, cold rain to-day. To-night we sit around a rousing wood fire.

They stood it for another month, and then on the 10th of July, when it
was still chilly and disagreeable, they gave it up and left for Brussels,
which he calls "a dirty, beautiful (architecturally), interesting town."

Two days in Brussels, then to Antwerp, where they dined on the Trenton
with Admiral Roan, then to Rotterdam, Dresden, Amsterdam, and London,
arriving there the 29th of July, which was rainy and cold, in keeping
with all Europe that year.

    Had to keep a rousing big cannel-coal fire blazing in the grate all
    day. A remarkable summer, truly!

London meant a throng of dinners, as always: brilliant, notable affairs,
too far away to recall. A letter written by Mrs. Clemens at the time
preserves one charming, fresh bit of that departed bloom.

    Clara [Spaulding] went in to dinner with Mr. Henry James; she
    enjoyed him very much. I had a little chat with him before dinner,
    and he was exceedingly pleasant and easy to talk with. I had
    expected just the reverse, thinking one would feel looked over by
    him and criticized.

    Mr. Whistler, the artist, was at the dinner, but he did not attract
    me. Then there was a lady, over eighty years old, a Mrs. Stuart,
    who was Washington Irving's love, and she is said to have been his
    only love, and because of her he went unmarried to his grave.
    --[Mrs. Clemens was misinformed. Irving's only "love" was a Miss
    Hoffman.]--She was also an intimate friend of Madame Bonaparte.
    You would judge Mrs. Stuart to be about fifty, and she was the life
    of the drawing-room after dinner, while the ladies were alone,
    before the gentlemen came up. It was lovely to see such a sweet old
    age; every one was so fond of her, every one deferred to her, yet
    every one was joking her, making fun of her, but she was always
    equal to the occasion, giving back as bright replies as possible;
    you had not the least sense that she was aged. She quoted French in
    her stories with perfect ease and fluency, and had all the time such
    a kindly, lovely way. When she entered the room, before dinner, Mr.
    James, who was then talking with me, shook hands with her and said,
    "Good evening, you wonderful lady." After she had passed . . .
    he said, "She is the youngest person in London. She has the
    youngest feelings and the youngest interests . . . . She is
    always interested."

    It was a perfect delight to hear her and see her.

For more than two years they had had an invitation from Reginald
Cholmondeley to pay him another visit.

So they went for a week to Condover, where many friends were gathered,
including Millais, the painter, and his wife (who had been the wife of
Ruskin), numerous relatives, and other delightful company. It was one of
the happiest chapters of their foreign sojourn.--[Moncure D. Conway, who
was in London at the time, recalls, in his Autobiography, a visit which
he made with Mr. and Mrs. Clemens to Stratford-on-Avon. "Mrs. Clemens
was an ardent Shakespearian, and Mark Twain determined to give her a
surprise. He told her that we were going on a journey to Epworth, and
persuaded me to connive with the joke by writing to Charles Flower not to
meet us himself, but send his carriage. On arrival at the station we
directed the driver to take us straight to the church. When we entered,
and Mrs. Clemens read on Shakespeare's grave, 'Good friend, for Jesus'
sake, forbear,' she started back, exclaiming, 'where am I?' Mark
received her reproaches with an affluence of guilt, but never did lady
enjoy a visit more than that to Avonbank. Mrs. Charles Flower (nee
Martineau) took Mrs. Clemens to her heart, and contrived that every
social or other attraction of that region should surround her."]

From the note-book:

    Sunday, August 17,'79. Raw and cold, and a drenching rain. Went to
    hear Mr. Spurgeon. House three-quarters full-say three thousand
    people. First hour, lacking one minute, taken up with two prayers,
    two ugly hymns, and Scripture-reading. Sermon three-quarters of an
    hour long. A fluent talker, good, sonorous voice. Topic treated in
    the unpleasant, old fashion: Man a mighty bad child, God working at
    him in forty ways and having a world of trouble with him.

    A wooden-faced congregation; just the sort to see no incongruity in
    the majesty of Heaven stooping to plead and sentimentalize over
    such, and see in their salvation an important matter.

    Tuesday, August 19th. Went up Windermere Lake in the steamer.
    Talked with the great Darwin.

They had planned to visit Dr. Brown in Scotland. Mrs. Clemens, in
particular, longed to go, for his health had not been of the best, and
she felt that they would never have a chance to see him again. Clemens
in after years blamed himself harshly for not making the trip, declaring
that their whole reason for not going was an irritable reluctance on his
part to take the troublesome journey and a perversity of spirit for which
there was no real excuse. There is documentary evidence against this
harsh conclusion. They were, in fact, delayed here and there by
misconnections and the continued terrific weather, barely reaching
Liverpool in time for their sailing date, August 23d. Unquestionably he
was weary of railway travel, far he always detested it. Time would
magnify his remembered reluctance, until, in the end, he would load his
conscience with the entire burden of blame.

Their ship was the Gallia, and one night, when they were nearing the
opposite side of the Atlantic, Mark Twain, standing on deck, saw for the
third time in his experience a magnificent lunar rainbow: a complete
arch, the colors part of the time very brilliant, but little different
from a day rainbow. It is not given to many persons in this world to see
even one of these phenomena. After each previous vision there had come
to him a period of good-fortune. Perhaps this also boded well for him.




CXXII

AN INTERLUDE

The Gallia reached New York September 3, 1879. A report of his arrival,
in the New York Sun, stated that Mark Twain had changed in his absence;
that only his drawl seemed natural.

    His hat, as he stood on the deck of the incoming Cunarder, Gallia,
    was of the pattern that English officers wear in India, and his suit
    of clothes was such as a merchant might wear in his store. He
    looked older than when he went to Germany, and his hair has turned
    quite gray.

It was a late hour when they were finally up to the dock, and Clemens,
anxious to get through the Custom House, urged the inspector to accept
his carefully prepared list of dutiable articles, without opening the
baggage. But the official was dubious. Clemens argued eloquently, and a
higher authority was consulted. Again Clemens stated his case and
presented his arguments. A still higher chief of inspection was
summoned, evidently from his bed. He listened sleepily to the preamble,
then suddenly said: "Oh, chalk his baggage, of course! Don't you know
it's Mark Twain and that he'll talk all night?"

They went directly to the farm, for whose high sunlit loveliness they had
been longing through all their days of absence. Mrs. Clemens, in her
letters, had never failed to dwell on her hunger for that fair hilltop.
From his accustomed study-table Clemens wrote to Twichell:

"You have run about a good deal, Joe, but you have never seen any place
that was so divine as the farm. Why don't you come here and take a
foretaste of Heaven?" Clemens declared he would roam no more forever,
and settled down to the happy farm routine. He took up his work, which
had not gone well in Paris, and found his interest in it renewed. In the
letter to Twichell he said:

    I am revising my MS. I did not expect to like it, but I do. I have
    been knocking out early chapters for more than a year now, not
    because they had not merit, but merely because they hindered the
    flow of the narrative; it was a dredging process. Day before
    yesterday my shovel fetched up three more chapters and laid them,
    reeking, on the festering shore-pile of their predecessors, and now
    I think the yarn swims right along, without hitch or halt. I
    believe it will be a readable book of travels. I cannot see that it
    lacks anything but information.

Mrs. Clemens was no less weary of travel than her husband. Yet she had
enjoyed their roaming, and her gain from it had been greater than his.
Her knowledge of art and literature, and of the personal geography of
nations, had vastly increased; her philosophy of life had grown beyond
all counting.

She had lost something, too; she had outstripped her traditions. One
day, when she and her sister had walked across the fields, and had
stopped to rest in a little grove by a pretty pond, she confessed,
timidly enough and not without sorrow, how she had drifted away from her
orthodox views. She had ceased to believe, she said, in the orthodox
Bible God, who exercised a personal supervision over every human soul.
The hordes of people she had seen in many lands, the philosophies she had
listened to from her husband and those wise ones about him, the life away
from the restricted round of home, all had contributed to this change.
Her God had become a larger God; the greater mind which exerts its care
of the individual through immutable laws of time and change and
environment--the Supreme Good which comprehends the individual flower,
dumb creature, or human being only as a unit in the larger scheme of life
and love. Her sister was not shocked or grieved; she too had grown with
the years, and though perhaps less positively directed, had by a path of
her own reached a wider prospect of conclusions. It was a sweet day
there in the little grove by the water, and would linger in the memory of
both so long as life lasted. Certainly it was the larger faith; though
the moment must always come when the narrower, nearer, more humanly
protecting arm of orthodoxy lends closer comfort. Long afterward, in the
years that followed the sorrow of heavy bereavement, Clemens once said to
his wife, "Livy, if it comforts you to lean on the Christian faith do
so," and she answered, "I can't, Youth. I haven't any."

And the thought that he had destroyed her illusion, without affording a
compensating solace, was one that would come back to him, now and then,
all his days.




CXXIII

THE GRANT SPEECH OF 1879

If the lunar rainbow had any fortuitous significance, perhaps we may find
it in the two speeches which Mark Twain made in November and December of
that year. The first of these was delivered at Chicago, on the occasion
of the reception of General Grant by the Army of the Tennessee, on the
evening of November 73, 1879. Grant had just returned from his splendid
tour of the world. His progress from San Francisco eastward had been
such an ovation as is only accorded to sovereignty. Clemens received an
invitation to the reunion, but, dreading the long railway journey, was at
first moved to decline. He prepared a letter in which he made "business"
his excuse, and expressed his regret that he would not be present to see
and hear the veterans of the Army of the Tennessee at the moment when
their old commander entered the room and rose in his place to speak.

"Besides," he said, "I wanted to see the General again anyway and renew
the acquaintance. He would remember me, because I was the person who did
not ask him for an office."

He did not send the letter. Reconsidering, it seemed to him that there
was something strikingly picturesque in the idea of a Confederate soldier
who had been chased for a fortnight in the rain through Ralls and Monroe
counties, Missouri, now being invited to come and give welcome home to
his old imaginary pursuer. It was in the nature of an imperative
command, which he could not refuse to obey.

He accepted and agreed to speak. They had asked him to respond to the
toast of "The Ladies," but for him the subject was worn out. He had
already responded to that toast at least twice. He telegraphed that
there was one class of the community that had always been overlooked upon
such occasions, and that if they would allow him to do so he would take
that class for a toast: the babies. Necessarily they agreed, and he
prepared himself accordingly.

He arrived in Chicago in time for the prodigious procession of welcome.
Grant was to witness the march from a grand reviewing stand, which had
been built out from the second story of the Palmer House. Clemens had
not seen the General since the "embarrassing" introduction in Washington,
twelve years before. Their meeting was characteristic enough. Carter
Harrison, Mayor of Chicago, arriving with Grant, stepped over to Clemens,
and asked him if he wouldn't like to be presented. Grant also came
forward, and a moment later Harrison was saying:

"General, let me present Mr. Clemens, a man almost as great as yourself."
They shook hands; there was a pause of a moment, then Grant said, looking
at him gravely:

"Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed, are you?"

So he remembered that first, long-ago meeting. It was a conspicuous
performance. The crowd could not hear the words, but they saw the
greeting and the laugh, and cheered both men.

Following the procession, there were certain imposing ceremonies of
welcome at Haverly's Theater where long, laudatory eloquence was poured
out upon the returning hero, who sat unmoved while the storm of music and
cheers and oratory swept about him. Clemens, writing of it that evening
to Mrs. Clemens, said:

    I never sat elbow to elbow with so many historic names before.
    Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Schofield, Pope, Logan, and so on.

    What an iron man Grant is! He sat facing the house, with his right
    leg crossed over his left, his right boot sole tilted up at an
    angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair.
    You note that position? Well, when glowing references were made to
    other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle
    of nervous consciousness, and as these references came frequently
    the nervous changes of position and attitude were also frequent.
    But Grant! He was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of
    praise and congratulation; but as true as I'm sitting here he never
    moved a muscle of his body for a single instant during thirty
    minutes! You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy.
    Perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a
    particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the
    audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an
    entire minute--Grant sitting as serene as ever-when General Sherman
    stepped up to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder,
    bent respectfully down, and whispered in his ear. Then Grant got up
    and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane.

But it was the next evening that the celebration rose to a climax. This
was at the grand banquet at the Palmer House, where six hundred guests
sat down to dinner and Grant himself spoke, and Logan and Hurlbut, and
Vilas and Woodford and Pope, fifteen in all, including Robert G.
Ingersoll and Mark Twain. Chicago has never known a greater event than
that dinner, for there has never been a time since when those great
soldiers and citizens could have been gathered there.

To Howells Clemens wrote:

    Imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag
    reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers,
    most of whom hadn't seen it since they saw it advancing over
    victorious fields when they were in their prime. And imagine what
    it was like when Grant, their first commander, stepped into view
    while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the
    midst of it all somebody struck up "When we were marching through
    Georgia." Well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that
    chorus and seen the tears stream down. If I live a hundred years I
    sha'n't ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them. I
    sha'n't ever forget that I saw Phil Sheridan, with martial cloak and
    plumed chapeau, riding his big black horse in the midst of his own
    cannon; by all odds the superbest figure of a soldier. I ever
    looked upon!
    Grand times, my boy, grand times!

Mark Twain declared afterward that he listened to four speeches that
night which he would remember as long as he lived. One of them was by
Emory Storrs, another by General Vilas, another by Logan, and the last
and greatest by Robert Ingersoll, whose eloquence swept the house like a
flame. The Howells letter continues:

    I doubt if America has ever seen anything quite equal to it; I am
    well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again. How pale
    those speeches are in print, but how radiant, how full of color, how
    blinding they were in the delivery! Bob Ingersoll's music will sing
    through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my
    ears. And I shall always see him, as he stood that night on a
    dinner-table, under the flash of lights and banners, in the midst of
    seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature
    that ever lived. "They fought, that a mother might own her child."
    The words look like any other print, but, Lord bless me! he
    borrowed the very accent of the angel of mercy to say them in, and
    you should have seen that vast house rise to its feet; and you
    should have heard the hurricane that followed. That's the only
    test! People may shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their
    napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet.

Clemens's own speech came last. He had been placed at the end to hold
the house. He was preceded by a dull speaker, and his heart sank, for it
was two o'clock and the diners were weary and sleepy, and the dreary
speech had made them unresponsive.

They gave him a round of applause when he stepped up upon the table in
front of him--a tribute to his name. Then he began the opening words of
that memorable, delightful fancy.

"We haven't all had the good-fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been
generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the
babies--we stand on common ground--"

The tired audience had listened in respectful silence through the first
half of the sentence. He made one of his effective pauses on the word
"babies," and when he added, in that slow, rich measure of his, "we stand
on common ground," they let go a storm of applause. There was no
weariness and inattention after that. At the end of each sentence, he
had to stop to let the tornado roar itself out and sweep by. When he
reached the beginning of the final paragraph, "Among the three or four
million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would
preserve for ages as sacred things if we could know which ones they are,"
the vast audience waited breathless for his conclusion. Step by step he
led toward some unseen climax--some surprise, of course, for that would
be his way. Then steadily, and almost without emphasis, he delivered the
opening of his final sentence:

"And now in his cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious
commander-in-chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his
approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole
strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his
own big toe into his mouth, an achievement which (meaning no disrespect)
the illustrious guest of this evening also turned his attention to some
fifty-six years ago."

He paused, and the vast crowd had a chill of fear. After all, he seemed
likely to overdo it to spoil everything with a cheap joke at the end. No
one ever knew better than Mark Twain the value of a pause. He waited now
long enough to let the silence become absolute, until the tension was
painful, then wheeling to Grant himself he said, with all the dramatic
power of which he was master:

"And if the child is but the father of the man, there are mighty few who
will doubt that he succeeded!"

The house came down with a crash. The linking of their hero's great
military triumphs with that earliest of all conquests seemed to them so
grand a figure that they went mad with the joy of it. Even Grant's iron
serenity broke; he rocked and laughed while the tears streamed down his
cheeks.

They swept around the speaker with their congratulations, in their
efforts to seize his hand. He was borne up and down the great
dining-hall. Grant himself pressed up to make acknowledgments.

"It tore me all to pieces," he said; and Sherman exclaimed, "Lord bless
you, my boy! I don't know how you do it!"

The little speech has been in "cold type" so many years since then that
the reader of it to-day may find it hard to understand the flame of
response it kindled so long ago. But that was another day--and another
nation--and Mark Twain, like Robert Ingersoll, knew always his period and
his people.




CXXIV

ANOTHER "ATLANTIC" SPEECH

The December good-fortune was an opportunity Clemens had to redeem
himself with the Atlantic contingent, at a breakfast given to Dr. Holmes.

Howells had written concerning it as early as October, and the first
impulse had been to decline. It would be something of an ordeal; for
though two years had passed since the fatal Whittier dinner, Clemens had
not been in that company since, and the lapse of time did not signify.
Both Howells and Warner urged him to accept, and he agreed to do so on
condition that he be allowed to speak.

If anybody talks there I shall claim the right to say a word myself, and
be heard among the very earliest, else it would be confoundedly awkward
for me--and for the rest, too. But you may read what I say beforehand,
and strike out whatever you choose.

Howells advised against any sort of explanation. Clemens accepted this
as wise counsel, and prepared an address relevant only to the guest of
honor.

It was a noble gathering. Most of the guests of the Whittier dinner were
present, and this time there were ladies. Emerson, Longfellow, and
Whittier were there, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe; also the
knightly Colonel Waring, and Stedman, and Parkman, and grand old John
Bigelow, old even then.--[He died in 1911 in his 94th year.]

Howells was conservative in his introduction this time. It was better
taste to be so. He said simply:

"We will now listen to a few words of truth and soberness from Mark
Twain."

Clemens is said to have risen diffidently, but that was his natural
manner. It probably did not indicate anything of the inner tumult he
really felt.

Outwardly he was calm enough, and what he said was delicate and
beautiful, the kind of thing that he could say so well. It seems fitting
that it should be included here, the more so that it tells a story not
elsewhere recorded. This is the speech in full:

    MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN,--I would have traveled a much
    greater distance than I have come to witness the paying of honors to
    Dr. Holmes, for my feeling toward him has always been one of
    peculiar warmth. When one receives a letter from a great man for
    the first time in his life it is a large event to him, as all of you
    know by your own experience. You never can receive letters enough
    from famous men afterward to obliterate that one or dim the memory
    of the pleasant surprise it was and the gratification it gave you.
    Lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap. Well, the first
    great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest, Oliver Wendell
    Holmes. He was also the first great literary man I ever stole
    anything from, and that is how I came to write to him and he to me.
    When my first book was new a friend of mine said, "The dedication is
    very neat." Yes, I said, I thought it was. My friend said,
    "I always admired it, even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad."
    I naturally said, "What do you mean? Where did you ever see it
    before?" "Well, I saw it first, some years ago, as Dr. Holmes's
    dedication to his Songs in Many Keys." Of course my first impulse
    was to prepare this man's remains for burial, but upon reflection I
    said I would reprieve him for a moment or two, and give him a chance
    to prove his assertion if he could. We stepped into a book-store.
    and he did prove it. I had stolen that dedication almost word for
    word. I could not imagine how this curious thing happened; for I
    knew one thing, for a dead certainty--that a certain amount of pride
    always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride
    protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas.
    That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and admirers
    had often told me I had nearly a basketful, though they were rather
    reserved as to the size of the basket. However, I thought the thing
    out and solved the mystery. Some years before I had been laid up a
    couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and had read and reread Dr.
    Holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the
    brim. The dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by I
    unconsciously took it. Well, of course, I wrote to Dr. Holmes and
    told him I hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote back and said, in the
    kindest way, that it was all right, and no harm done, and added that
    he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in
    reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves.
    He stated a truth and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over
    my sore spot so gently and so healingly, that I was rather glad I
    had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. I afterward
    called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of
    mine that struck him as good protoplasm for poetry. He could see by
    that time that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along,
    right from the start.--[Holmes in his letter had said: "I rather
    think The Innocents Abroad will have many more readers than Songs in
    Many Keys. . . You will be stolen from a great deal oftener than
    you will borrow from other people."]

    I have met Dr. Holmes many times since; and lately he said--However,
    I am wandering wildly away from the one thing which I got on my feet
    to do; that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of
    the great public, and likewise to say I am right glad to see that
    Dr. Holmes is still in his prime and full of generous life, and as
    age is not determined by years but by trouble, and by infirmities of
    mind and body, I hope it may be a very long time yet before any can
    truthfully say, "He is growing old."

Whatever Mark Twain may have lost on that former occasion, came back to
him multiplied when he had finished this happy tribute. So the year for
him closed prosperously. The rainbow of promise was justified.




CXXV

THE QUIETER THINGS OF HOME

Upset and disturbed as Mark Twain often was, he seldom permitted his
distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside. His days and
his nights might be fevered, but the evenings belonged to another world.
The long European wandering left him more than ever enamoured of his
home; to him it had never been so sweet before, so beautiful, so full of
peace. Company came: distinguished guests and the old neighborhood
circles. Dinner-parties were more frequent than ever, and they were
likely to be brilliant affairs. The best minds, the brightest wits,
gathered around Mark Twain's table. Booth, Barrett, Irving, Sheridan,
Sherman, Howells, Aldrich: they all assembled, and many more. There was
always some one on the way to Boston or New York who addressed himself
for the day or the night, or for a brief call, to the Mark Twain
fireside.

Certain visitors from foreign lands were surprised at his environment,
possibly expecting to find him among less substantial, more bohemian
surroundings. Henry Drummond, the author of Natural Law in the Spiritual
World, in a letter of this time, said:

    I had a delightful day at Hartford last Wednesday . . . . Called
    on Mark Twain, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the widow of Horace
    Bushnell. I was wishing A----had been at the Mark Twain interview.
    He is funnier than any of his books, and to my surprise a most
    respected citizen, devoted to things esthetic, and the friend of the
    poor and struggling.--[Life of Henry Drummond, by George Adam
    Smith.]

The quieter evenings were no less delightful. Clemens did not often go
out. He loved his own home best. The children were old enough now to
take part in a form of entertainment that gave him and them especial
pleasure-acting charades. These he invented for them, and costumed the
little performers, and joined in the acting as enthusiastically and as
unrestrainedly as if he were back in that frolicsome boyhood on John
Quarles's farm. The Warner and Twichell children were often there and
took part in the gay amusements. The children of that neighborhood
played their impromptu parts well and naturally. They were in a dramatic
atmosphere, and had been from infancy. There was never any preparation
for the charades. A word was selected and the parts of it were whispered
to the little actors. Then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts of
costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and each
detachment marched into the library, performed its syllable and retired,
leaving the audience, mainly composed of parents, to guess the answer.
Often they invented their own words, did their own costuming, and
conducted the entire performance independent of grown-up assistance or
interference. Now and then, even at this early period, they conceived
and produced little plays, and of course their father could not resist
joining in these. At other times, evenings, after dinner, he would sit
at the piano and recall the old darky songs-spirituals and jubilee
choruses-singing them with fine spirit, if not with perfect technic, the
children joining in these moving melodies.

He loved to read aloud to them. It was his habit to read his manuscript
to Mrs. Clemens, and, now that the children were older, he was likely to
include them in his critical audience.

It would seem to have been the winter after their return from Europe that
this custom was inaugurated, for 'The Prince and the Pauper' manuscript
was the first one so read, and it was just then he was resuming work on
this tale. Each afternoon or evening, when he had finished his chapter,
he assembled his little audience and read them the result. The children
were old enough to delight in that half real, half fairy tale of the
wandering prince and the royal pauper: and the charm and simplicity of
the story are measurably due to those two small listeners, to whom it was
adapted in that early day of its creation.

Clemens found the Prince a blessed relief from 'A Tramp Abroad', which
had become a veritable nightmare. He had thought it finished when he
left the farm, but discovered that he must add several hundred pages to
complete its bulk. It seemed to him that he had been given a
life-sentence. He wrote six hundred pages and tore up all but two
hundred and eighty-eight. He was about to destroy these and begin again,
when Mrs. Clemens's health became poor and he was advised to take her to
Elmira, though it was then midwinter. To Howells he wrote:

    I said, "if there is one death that is painfuler than another, may I
    get it if I don't do that thing."

    So I took the 288 pages to Bliss and told him that was the very last
    line I should ever write on this book (a book which required 600
    pages of MS., and I have written nearly four thousand, first and
    last).

    I am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket to-day, with the unutterable
    joy of getting that Old Man of the Sea off my back, where he has
    been roosting more than a year and a half.

They remained a month at Elmira, and on their return Clemens renewed work
on 'The Prince and the Pauper'. He reported to Howells that if he never
sold a copy his jubilant delight in writing it would suffer no
diminution. A week later his enthusiasm had still further increased:

    I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loath to hurry, not
    wanting to get it done. Did I ever tell you the plot of it? It
    begins at 9 A.M., January 27, 1547.

He follows with a detailed synopsis of his plot, which in this instance
he had worked out with unusual completeness--a fact which largely
accounts for the unity of the tale. Then he adds:

    My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of
    the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the
    king himself, and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them
    applied to others; all of which is to account for certain mildnesses
    which distinguished Edward VI.'s reign from those that precede it
    and follow it.

    Imagine this fact: I have even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this
    yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable damning with
    faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way. She
    is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind fast
    enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir.

He forgot, perhaps, to mention his smaller auditors, but we may believe
they were no less eager in their demands for the tale's continuance.




CXXVI

"A TRAMP ABROAD"

'A Tramp Abroad' came from the presses on the 13th of March, 1880. It
had been widely heralded, and there was an advance sale of twenty-five
thousand copies. It was of the same general size and outward character
as the Innocents, numerously illustrated, and was regarded by its
publishers as a satisfactory book.

It bore no very striking resemblance to the Innocents on close
examination. Its pictures-drawn, for the most part, by a young art
student named Brown, whom Clemens had met in Paris--were extraordinarily
bad, while the crude engraving process by which they had been reproduced;
tended to bring them still further into disrepute. A few drawings by
True Williams were better, and those drawn by Clemens himself had a value
of their own. The book would have profited had there been more of what
the author calls his "works of art."

Mark Twain himself had dubious anticipations as to the book's reception.

But Howells wrote:

    Well, you are a blessing. You ought to believe in God's goodness,
    since he has bestowed upon the world such a delightful genius as
    yours to lighten its troubles.

Clemens replied:

    Your praises have been the greatest uplift I ever had. When a body
    is not even remotely expecting such things, how the surprise takes
    the breath away! We had been interpreting your stillness to
    melancholy and depression, caused by that book. This is honest.
    Why, everything looks brighter now. A check for untold cash could
    not have made our hearts sing as your letter has done.

A letter from Tauchnitz, proposing to issue an illustrated edition in
Germany, besides putting it into his regular series, was an added
satisfaction. To be in a Tauchnitz series was of itself a recognition of
the book's merit.

To Twichell, Clemens presented a special copy of the Tramp with a
personal inscription, which must not be omitted here:

    MY DEAR "HARRIS"--NO, I MEAN MY DEAR JOE,--Just imagine it for a
    moment: I was collecting material in Europe during fourteen months
    for a book, and now that the thing is printed I find that you, who
    were with me only a month and a half of the fourteen, are in actual
    presence (not imaginary) in 440 of the 531 pages the book contains!
    Hang it, if you had stayed at home it would have taken me fourteen
    years to get the material. You have saved me an intolerable whole
    world of hated labor, and I'll not forget it, my boy.

    You'll find reminders of things, all along, that happened to us, and
    of others that didn't happen; but you'll remember the spot where
    they were invented. You will see how the imaginary perilous trip up
    the Riffelberg is preposterously expanded. That horse-student is on
    page 192. The "Fremersberg" is neighboring. The Black Forest novel
    is on page 211. I remember when and where we projected that: in the
    leafy glades with the mountain sublimities dozing in the blue haze
    beyond the gorge of Allerheiligen. There's the "new member," page
    213; the dentist yarn, 223; the true Chamois, 242; at page 248 is a
    pretty long yarn, spun from a mighty brief text meeting, for a
    moment, that pretty girl who knew me and whom I had forgotten; at
    281 is "Harris," and should have been so entitled, but Bliss has
    made a mistake and turned you into some other character; 305 brings
    back the whole Rigi tramp to me at a glance; at 185 and 186 are
    specimens of my art; and the frontispiece is the combination which I
    made by pasting one familiar picture over the lower half of an
    equally familiar one. This fine work being worthy of Titian, I have
    shed the credit of it upon him. Well, you'll find more reminders of
    things scattered through here than are printed, or could have been
    printed, in many books.

    All the "legends of the Neckar," which I invented for that unstoried
    region, are here; one is in the Appendix. The steel portrait of me
    is just about perfect.

    We had a mighty good time, Joe, and the six weeks I would dearly
    like to repeat any time; but the rest of the fourteen months-never.
    With love,
                            Yours, MARK.

    Hartford, March 16, 1880.

Possibly Twichell had vague doubts concerning a book of which he was so
large a part, and its favorable reception by the critics and the public
generally was a great comfort. When the Howells letter was read to him
he is reported as having sat with his hands on his knees, his head bent
forward--a favorite attitude--repeating at intervals:

"Howells said that, did he? Old Howells said that!"

There have been many and varying opinions since then as to the literary
merits of 'A Tramp Abroad'. Human tastes differ, and a "mixed" book of
this kind invites as many opinions as it has chapters. The word "uneven"
pretty safely describes any book of size, but it has a special
application to this one. Written under great stress and uncertainty of
mind, it could hardly be uniform. It presents Mark Twain at his best,
and at his worst. Almost any American writer was better than Mark Twain
at his worst: Mark Twain at his best was unapproachable.

It is inevitable that 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'The Innocents Abroad' should
be compared, though with hardly the warrant of similarity. The books are
as different as was their author at the periods when they were written.
'A Tramp Abroad' is the work of a man who was traveling and observing for
the purpose of writing a book, and for no other reason. The Innocents
Abroad was written by a man who was reveling in every scene and
experience, every new phase and prospect; whose soul was alive to every
historic association, and to every humor that a gay party of young
sight-seers could find along the way. The note-books of that trip fairly
glow with the inspiration of it; those of the later wanderings are mainly
filled with brief, terse records, interspersed with satire and
denunciation. In the 'Innocents' the writer is the enthusiast with a
sense of humor. In the 'Tramp' he has still the sense of humor, but he
has become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less. In the
'Innocents' he laughs at delusions and fallacies--and enjoys them. In
the 'Tramp' he laughs at human foibles and affectations--and wants to
smash them. Very often he does not laugh heartily and sincerely at all,
but finds his humor in extravagant burlesque. In later life his gentler
laughter, his old, untroubled enjoyment of human weakness, would return,
but just now he was in that middle period, when the "damned human race"
amused him indeed, though less tenderly. (It seems proper to explain
that in applying this term to mankind he did not mean that the race was
foredoomed, but rather that it ought to be.)

Reading the 'Innocents', the conviction grows that, with all its faults,
it is literature from beginning to end. Reading the 'Tramp', the
suspicion arises that, regardless of technical improvement, its
percentage of literature is not large. Yet, as noted in an earlier
volume, so eminent a critic as Brander Matthews has pronounced in its
favor, and he undoubtedly had a numerous following; Howells expressed.
his delight in the book at the time of its issue, though one wonders how
far the personal element entered into his enjoyment, and what would be
his final decision if he read the two books side by side to-day. He
reviewed 'A Tramp Abroad' adequately and finely in the Atlantic, and
justly; for on the whole it is a vastly entertaining book, and he did not
overpraise it.

'A Tramp Abroad' had an "Introduction" in the manuscript, a pleasant word
to the reader but not a necessary one, and eventually it was omitted.
Fortunately the appendix remained. Beyond question it contains some of
the very best things in the book. The descriptions of the German Portier
and the German newspaper are happy enough, and the essay on the awful
German language is one of Mark Twain's supreme bits of humor. It is Mark
Twain at his best; Mark Twain in a field where he had no rival, the field
of good-natured, sincere fun-making-ridicule of the manifest absurdities
of some national custom or institution which the nation itself could
enjoy, while the individual suffered no wound. The present Emperor of
Germany is said to find comfort in this essay on his national speech when
all other amusements fail. It is delicious beyond words to express; it
is unique.

In the body of the book there are also many delights. The description of
the ant might rank next to the German language almost in its humor, and
the meeting with the unrecognized girl at Lucerne has a lively charm.

Of the serious matter, some of the word-pictures are flawless in their
beauty; this, for instance, suggested by the view of the Jungfrau from
Interlaken:

    There was something subduing in the influence of that silent and
    solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the
    indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial
    and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the
    contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding
    contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a
    spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a
    million vanished races of men and judged them; and would judge a
    million more--and still be there, watching unchanged and
    unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have
    become a vacant desolation

    While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it,
    toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in
    the Alps, and in no other mountains; that strange, deep, nameless
    influence which, once felt, cannot be forgotten; once felt, leaves
    always behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing
    which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which
    will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. I met
    dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and
    uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the
    Swiss Alps year after year--they could not explain why. They had
    come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, because everybody
    talked about it; they had come since because they could not help it,
    and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same
    reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but it
    was futile; now they had no desire to break them. Others came
    nearer formulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect
    rest and peace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and
    worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant
    serenity of the Alps; the Great Spirit of the mountain breathed his
    own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them;
    they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid things
    here, before the visible throne of God.

Indeed, all the serious matter in the book is good. The reader's chief
regret is likely to be that there is not more of it. The main difficulty
with the humor is that it seems overdone. It is likely to be carried too
far, and continued too long. The ascent of Riffelberg is an example.
Though spotted with delights it seems, to one reader at least, less
admirable than other of the book's important features, striking, as it
does, more emphatically the chief note of the book's humor--that is to
say, exaggeration.

Without doubt there must be many--very many--who agree in finding a
fuller enjoyment in 'A Tramp Abroad' than in the 'Innocents'; only, the
burden of the world's opinion lies the other way. The world has a
weakness for its illusions: the splendor that falls on castle walls, the
glory of the hills at evening, the pathos of the days that are no more.
It answers to tenderness, even on the page of humor, and to genuine
enthusiasm, sharply sensing the lack of these things; instinctively
resenting, even when most amused by it, extravagance and burlesque. The
Innocents Abroad is more soul-satisfying than its successor, more poetic;
more sentimental, if you will. The Tramp contains better English usage,
without doubt, but it is less full of happiness and bloom and the halo of
romance. The heart of the world has felt this, and has demanded the book
in fewer numbers.--[The sales of the Innocents during the earlier years
more than doubled those of the Tramp during a similar period. The later
ratio of popularity is more nearly three to one. It has been repeatedly
stated that in England the Tramp has the greater popularity, an assertion
not sustained by the publisher's accountings.]




CXXVII

LETTERS, TALES, AND PLANS

The reader has not failed to remark the great number of letters which
Samuel Clemens wrote to his friend William Dean Howells; yet
comparatively few can even be mentioned. He was always writing to
Howells, on every subject under the sun; whatever came into his mind
--business, literature, personal affairs--he must write about it to
Howells. Once, when nothing better occurred, he sent him a series of
telegrams, each a stanza from an old hymn, possibly thinking they might
carry comfort.--["Clemens had then and for many years the habit of
writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was
experiencing. Nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily
routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest
fullness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or
forty pages:" (My Mark Twain, by W. D. Howells.)] Whatever of
picturesque happened in the household he immediately set it down for
Howells's entertainment. Some of these domestic incidents carry the
flavor of his best humor. Once he wrote:

    Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, "George didn't
    take the cat down to the cellar; Rosa says he has left it shut up in
    the conservatory." So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat).
    About three in the morning Mrs. C. woke me and said, "I do believe
    I hear that cat in the drawing-room. What did you do with him?" I
    answered with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the
    right thing for once, and said, "I opened the conservatory doors,
    took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that
    there wasn't any obstruction between him and the cellar." Language
    wasn't capable of conveying this woman's disgust. But the sense of
    what she said was, "He couldn't have done any harm in the
    conservatory; so you must go and make the entire house free to him
    and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the
    drawing-room. If you had had Mr. Howells to help you I should have
    admired, but not have been astonished, because I should know that
    together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive
    such a stately blunder all by yourself is what I cannot understand."

    So, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts....

    I knocked off during these stirring hours, and don't intend to go to
    work again till we go away for the summer, four or six weeks hence.
    So I am writing to you, not because I have anything to say, but
    because you don't have to answer and I need something to do this
    afternoon.

    The rightful earl has----
              Friday, 7th.

    Well, never mind about the rightful earl; he merely wanted to-borrow
    money. I never knew an American earl that didn't.

After a trip to Boston, during which Mrs. Clemens did some bric-a-brac
shopping, he wrote:

    Mrs. Clemens has two imperishable topics now: the museum of andirons
    which she collected and your dinner. It is hard to tell which she
    admires the most. Sometimes she leans one way and sometimes the
    other; but I lean pretty steadily toward the dinner because I can
    appreciate that, whereas I am no prophet in andirons. There has
    been a procession of Adams Express wagons filing before the door all
    day delivering andirons.

In a more serious vein he refers to the aged violinist Ole Bull and his
wife, whom they had met during their visit, and their enjoyment of that
gentle-hearted pair.

Clemens did some shorter work that spring, most of which found its way
into the Atlantic. "Edward Mills and George Benton," one of the
contributions of this time, is a moral sermon in its presentation of a
pitiful human spectacle and misdirected human zeal.

It brought a pack of letters of approval, not only from laity, but the
church, and in some measure may have helped to destroy the silly
sentimentalism which manifested itself in making heroes of spectacular
criminals. That fashion has gone out, largely. Mark Twain wrote
frequently on the subject, though never more effectively than in this
particular instance. "Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning" was another
Atlantic story, a companion piece to "Mrs. McWilliams's Experience with
the Membranous Croup," and in the same delightful vein--a vein in which
Mark Twain was likely to be at his best--the transcription of a scene not
so far removed in character from that in the "cat" letter just quoted:
something which may or may not have happened, but might have happened,
approximately as set down. Rose Terry Cooke wrote:

    Horrid man, how did you know the way I behave in a thunderstorm?
    Have you been secreted in the closet or lurking on the shed roof?
    I hope you got thoroughly rained on; and worst of all is that you
    made me laugh at myself; my real terrors turned round and grimaced
    at me: they were sublime, and you have made them ridiculous just
    come out here another year and have four houses within a few rods of
    you struck and then see if you write an article of such exasperating
    levity. I really hate you, but you are funny.

In addition to his own work, he conceived a plan for Orion. Clemens
himself had been attempting, from time to time, an absolutely faithful
autobiography; a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even his moods
and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down. He had found it an
impossible task. He confessed freely that he lacked the courage, even
the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his soul bare, but he
believed Orion equal to the task. He knew how rigidly honest he was, how
ready to confess his shortcomings, how eager to be employed at some
literary occupation. It was Mark Twain's belief that if Orion would
record in detail his long, weary struggle, his succession of attempts and
failures, his past dreams and disappointments, along with his sins of
omission and commission, it would make one of those priceless human
documents such as have been left by Benvenuto Cellini, Cazenova, and
Rousseau.

"Simply tell your story to yourself," he wrote, "laying all hideousness
utterly bare, reserving nothing. Banish the idea of the audience and all
hampering things."

Orion, out in Keokuk, had long since abandoned the chicken farm and a
variety of other enterprises. He had prospected insurance, mining,
journalism, his old trade of printing, and had taken down and hung up his
law shingle between each of these seizures. Aside from business, too, he
had been having a rather spectacular experience. He had changed his
politics three times (twice in one day), and his religion as many more.
Once when he was delivering a political harangue in the street, at night,
a parade of the opposition (he had but just abandoned them) marched by
carrying certain flaming transparencies, which he himself had made for
them the day before. Finally, after delivering a series of infidel
lectures; he had been excommunicated and condemned to eternal flames by
the Presbyterian Church. He was therefore ripe for any new diversion,
and the Autobiography appealed to him. He set about it with splendid
enthusiasm, wrote a hundred pages or so of his childhood with a startling
minutia of detail and frankness, and mailed them to his brother for
inspection.

They were all that Mark Twain had expected; more than he had expected. He
forwarded them to Howells with great satisfaction, suggesting, with
certain excisions, they be offered anonymously to the Atlantic readers.

But Howells's taste for realism had its limitations. He found the story
interesting--indeed, torturingly, heart-wringingly so--and, advising
strongly against its publication, returned it.

Onion was steaming along at the rate of ten to twenty pages a day now,
forwarding them as fast as written, while his courage was good and the
fires warm. Clemens, receiving a package by every morning mail, soon
lost interest, then developed a hunted feeling, becoming finally
desperate. He wrote wildly to shut Orion off, urging him to let his
manuscript accumulate, and to send it in one large consignment at the
end. This Orion did, and it is fair to say that in this instance at
least he stuck to his work faithfully to the bitter, disheartening end.
And it would have been all that Mark Twain had dreamed it would be, had
Orion maintained the simple narrative spirit of its early pages. But he
drifted off into theological byways; into discussions of his
excommunication and infidelities, which were frank enough, but lacked
human interest.

In old age Mark Twain once referred to Orion's autobiography in print and
his own disappointment in it, which he attributed to Orion's having
departed from the idea of frank and unrestricted confession to exalt
himself as a hero-a statement altogether unwarranted, and due to one of
those curious confusions of memory and imagination that more than once
resulted in a complete reversal of the facts. A quantity of Orion's
manuscript has been lost and destroyed, but enough fragments of it remain
to show its fidelity to the original plan. It is just one long record of
fleeting hope, futile effort, and humiliation. It is the story of a life
of disappointment; of a man who has been defeated and beaten down and
crushed by the world until he has nothing but confession left to
surrender.--[Howells, in his letter concerning the opening chapters, said
that they would some day make good material. Fortunately the earliest of
these chapters were preserved, and, as the reader may remember, furnished
much of the childhood details for this biography.]

Whatever may have been Mark Twain's later impression of his brother's
manuscript, its story of failure and disappointment moved him to definite
action at the time.

Several years before, in Hartford, Orion had urged him to make his
publishing contracts on a basis of half profits, instead of on the
royalty plan. Clemens, remembering this, had insisted on such an
arrangement for the publication of 'A Tramp Abroad', and when his first
statement came in he realized that the new contract was very largely to
his advantage. He remembered Orion's anxiety in the matter, and made it
now a valid excuse for placing his brother on a firm financial footing.

Out of the suspicions which you bred in me years ago has grown this
result, to wit: that I shall within the twelve months get $40,000 out of
this Tramp, instead of $20,000. $20,000, after taxes and other expenses
are stripped awa

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