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Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume II, Part 2: 1886-1900

by Albert Bigelow Paine · English · Gutenberg #2985 · 498,626 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mark Twain: A Biography. Volume II, Part 2: 1886-1900

Author: Albert Bigelow Paine


        
Release date: October 4, 2004 [eBook #2985]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN: A BIOGRAPHY. VOLUME II, PART 2: 1886-1900 ***




Produced by David Widger





MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY

By Albert Bigelow Paine



VOLUME II, Part 2: 1886-1900




CLXII


BROWNING, MEREDITH, AND MEISTERSCHAFT

The Browning readings must have begun about this time. Just what kindled
Mark Twain's interest in the poetry of Robert Browning is not remembered,
but very likely his earlier associations with the poet had something to
do with it. Whatever the beginning, we find him, during the winter of
1886 and 1887, studiously, even violently, interested in Browning's
verses, entertaining a sort of club or class who gathered to hear his
rich, sympathetic, and luminous reading of the Payleyings--"With Bernard
de Mandeville," "Daniel Bartoli," or "Christopher Smart." Members of the
Saturday Morning Club were among his listeners and others-friends of the
family. They were rather remarkable gatherings, and no one of that group
but always vividly remembered the marvelously clear insight which Mark
Twain's vocal personality gave to those somewhat obscure measures. They
did not all of them realize that before reading a poem he studied it line
by line, even word by word; dug out its last syllable of meaning, so far
as lay within human possibility, and indicated with pencil every shade of
emphasis which would help to reveal the poet's purpose. No student of
Browning ever more devoutly persisted in trying to compass a master's
intent--in such poems as "Sordello," for instance--than Mark Twain. Just
what permanent benefit he received from this particular passion it is
difficult to know. Once, at a class-meeting, after finishing "Easter
Day," he made a remark which the class requested him to "write down." It
is recorded on the fly-leaf of Dramatis Personae as follows:

    One's glimpses & confusions, as one reads Browning, remind me of
    looking through a telescope (the small sort which you must move with
    your hand, not clock-work). You toil across dark spaces which are
    (to your lens) empty; but every now & then a splendor of stars &
    suns bursts upon you and fills the whole field with flame. Feb.
    23, 1887.

In another note he speaks of the "vague dim flash of splendid
hamming-birds through a fog." Whatever mental treasures he may or may
not have laid up from Browning there was assuredly a deep gratification
in the discovery of those splendors of "stars and suns" and the flashing
"humming-birds," as there must also have been in pointing out those
wonders to the little circle of devout listeners. It all seemed so worth
while.

It was at a time when George Meredith was a reigning literary favorite.
There was a Meredith cult as distinct as that of Browning. Possibly it
exists to-day, but, if so, it is less militant. Mrs. Clemens and her
associates were caught in the Meredith movement and read Diana of the
Crossways and the Egoist with reverential appreciation.

The Meredith epidemic did not touch Mark Twain. He read but few novels
at most, and, skilful as was the artistry of the English favorite, he
found his characters artificialities--ingeniously contrived puppets
rather than human beings, and, on the whole, overrated by their creator.
Diana of the Crossways was read aloud, and, listening now and then, he
was likely to say:

"It doesn't seem to me that Diana lives up to her reputation. The author
keeps telling us how smart she is, how brilliant, but I never seem to
hear her say anything smart or brilliant. Read me some of Diana's smart
utterances."

He was relentless enough in his criticism of a literature he did not care
for, and he never learned to care for Meredith.

He read his favorite books over and over with an ever-changing point of
view. He re-read Carlyle's French Revolution during the summer at the
farm, and to Howells he wrote:

    How stunning are the changes which age makes in man while he sleeps!
    When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871 I was a
    Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it
    differently--being influenced & changed, little by little, by life &
    environment (& Taine & St. Simon); & now I lay the book down once
    more, & recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale,
    characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such
    gospel, so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences.

    People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it
    did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they
    can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say
    that of Dickens's or Scott's books. Nothing remains the same. When
    a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood it has always
    shrunk; there is no instance of such house being as big as the
    picture in memory & imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its
    correct dimensions; the house hasn't altered; this is the first time
    it has been in focus.

    Well, that's loss. To have house & Bible shrink so, under the
    disillusioning corrected angle, is loss--for a moment. But there
    are compensations. You tilt the tube skyward & bring planets &
    comets & corona flames a hundred & fifty thousand miles high into
    the field. Which I see you have done, & found Tolstoi. I haven't
    got him in focus yet, but I've got Browning.

In time the Browning passion would wane and pass, and the club was
succeeded by, or perhaps it blended with, a German class which met at
regular intervals at the Clemens home to study "der, die, and das" and
the "gehabt habens" out of Meisterschaft and such other text-books as
Professor Schleutter could provide. They had monthly conversation days,
when they discussed in German all sorts of things, real and imaginary.
Once Dr. Root, a prominent member, and Clemens had a long wrangle over
painting a house, in which they impersonated two German neighbors.

Clemens finally wrote for the class a three-act play "Meisterschaft"--a
literary achievement for which he was especially qualified, with its
picturesque mixture of German and English and its unfailing humor. It
seems unlike anything ever attempted before or since. No one but Mark
Twain could have written it. It was given twice by the class with
enormous success, and in modified form it was published in the Century
Magazine (January, 1888). It is included to-day in his "Complete Works,"
but one must have a fair knowledge of German to capture the full delight
of it.--[On the original manuscript Mark Twain wrote: "There is some
tolerably rancid German here and there in this piece. It is attributable
to the proof-reader." Perhaps the proof-reader resented this and cut it
out, for it does not appear as published.]

Mark Twain probably exaggerated his sentiments a good deal when in the
Carlyle letter he claimed to be the most rabid of Sansculottes. It is
unlikely that he was ever very bare-kneed and crimson in his anarchy. He
believed always that cruelty should be swiftly punished, whether in king
or commoner, and that tyrants should be destroyed. He was for the people
as against kings, and for the union of labor as opposed to the union of
capital, though he wrote of such matters judicially--not radically. The
Knights of Labor organization, then very powerful, seemed to Clemens the
salvation of oppressed humanity. He wrote a vehement and convincing
paper on the subject, which he sent to Howells, to whom it appealed very
strongly, for Howells was socialistic, in a sense, and Clemens made his
appeal in the best and largest sense, dramatizing his conception in a
picture that was to include, in one grand league, labor of whatever form,
and, in the end, all mankind in a final millennium. Howells wrote that
he had read the essay "with thrills amounting to yells of satisfaction,"
and declared it to be the best thing yet said on the subject. The essay
closed:

    He [the unionized workman] is here and he will remain. He is the
    greatest birth of the greatest age the nations of the world have
    known. You cannot sneer at him--that time has gone by. He has
    before him the most righteous work that was ever given into the hand
    of man to do; and he will do it. Yes, he is here; and the question
    is not--as it has been heretofore during a thousand ages--What shall
    we do with him? For the first time in history we are relieved of
    the necessity of managing his affairs for him. He is not a broken
    dam this time--he is the Flood!

It must have been about this time that Clemens developed an intense, even
if a less permanent, interest in another matter which was to benefit the
species. He was one day walking up Fifth Avenue when he noticed the sign,

                  PROFESSOR LOISETTE
                   SCHOOL OF MEMORY
           The Instantaneous Art of Never Forgetting

Clemens went inside. When he came out he had all of Professor Loisette's
literature on "predicating correlation," and for the next several days
was steeping himself in an infusion of meaningless words and figures and
sentences and forms, which he must learn backward and forward and
diagonally, so that he could repeat them awake and asleep in order to
predicate his correlation to a point where remembering the ordinary facts
of life, such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers, would be a mere
diversion.

It was another case of learning the multitudinous details of the
Mississippi River in order to do the apparently simple thing of steering
a boat from New Orleans to St. Louis, and it is fair to say that, for the
time he gave it, he achieved a like success. He was so enthusiastic over
this new remedy for human distress that within a very brief time he was
sending out a printed letter recommending Loisette to the public at
large. Here is an extract:

    . . . I had no SYSTEM--and some sort of rational order of
    procedure is, of course, necessary to success in any study. Well,
    Loisette furnished me a system. I cannot undertake to say it is the
    best, or the worst, because I don't know what the other systems are.
    Loisette, among other cruelties, requires you to memorize a great
    long string of words that, haven't any apparent connection or
    meaning--there are perhaps 500 of these words, arranged in maniacal
    lines of 6 to 8 or 9 words in each line--71 lines in all. Of course
    your first impulse is to resign, but at the end of three or four
    hours you find to your surprise that you've GOT them and can deliver
    them backward or forward without mistake or hesitation. Now, don't
    you see what a world of confidence that must necessarily breed?
    --confidence in a memory which before you wouldn't even venture to
    trust with the Latin motto of the U. S. lest it mislay it and the
    country suffer.

    Loisette doesn't make memories, he furnishes confidence in memories
    that already exist. Isn't that valuable? Indeed it is to me.
    Whenever hereafter I shall choose to pack away a thing properly in
    that refrigerator I sha'n't be bothered with the aforetime doubts; I
    shall know I'm going to find it sound and sweet when I go for it
    again.

Loisette naturally made the most of this advertising and flooded the
public with Mark Twain testimonials. But presently Clemens decided that
after all the system was not sufficiently simple to benefit the race at
large. He recalled his printed letters and prevailed upon Loisette to
suppress his circulars. Later he decided that the whole system was a
humbug.




CLXIII

LETTER TO THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND

It was one day in 1887 that Clemens received evidence that his reputation
as a successful author and publisher--a man of wealth and revenues--had
penetrated even the dimness of the British Tax Offices. A formidable
envelope came, inclosing a letter from his London publishers and a very
large printed document all about the income tax which the Queen's
officers had levied upon his English royalties as the result of a report
that he had taken Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year, and was to become
an English resident. The matter amused and interested him. To Chatto &
Windus he wrote:

    I will explain that all that about Buckenham Hall was an English
    newspaper's mistake. I was not in England, and if I had been I
    wouldn't have been at Buckenham Hall anyway, but Buckingham Palace,
    or I would have endeavored to have found out the reason why . . .

    But we won't resist. We'll pay as if I were really a resident. The
    country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me.

Reflecting on the matter, Clemens decided to make literature of it. He
conceived the notion of writing an open letter to the Queen in the
character of a rambling, garrulous, but well-disposed countryman whose
idea was that her Majesty conducted all the business of the empire
herself. He began:

                     HARTFORD, November 6, 2887.

    MADAM, You will remember that last May Mr. Edward Bright, the clerk
    of the Inland Revenue Office, wrote me about a tax which he said was
    due from me to the Government on books of mine published in London
    --that is to say, an income tax on the royalties. I do not know Mr.
    Bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers,
    for I was raised in the country and have always lived there, the
    early part in Marion County, Missouri, before the war, and this part
    in Hartford County, Connecticut, near Bloomfield and about 8 miles
    this side of Farmington, though some call it 9, which it is
    impossible to be, for I have walked it many and many a time in
    considerably under three hours, and General Hawley says he has done
    it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best
    that I write your Majesty.

The letter proceeded to explain that he had never met her Majesty
personally, but that he once met her son, the Prince of Wales, in Oxford
Street, at the head of a procession, while he himself was on the top of
an omnibus. He thought the Prince would probably remember him on account
of a gray coat with flap pockets which he wore, he being the only person
on the omnibus who had on that kind of a coat.

"I remember him," he said, "as easily as I would a comet."

He explained the difficulty he had in understanding under what heading he
was taxed. There was a foot-note on the list which stated that he was
taxed under "Schedule D, section 14." He had turned to that place and
found these three things: "Trades, Offices, Gas Works." He did not
regard authorship as a trade, and he had no office, so he did not
consider that he was taxable under "Schedule D, section 14." The letter
concludes:

    Having thus shown your Majesty that I am not taxable, but am the
    victim of the error of a clerk who mistakes the nature of my
    commerce, it only remains for me to beg that you will, of your
    justice, annul my letter that I spoke of, so that my publisher can
    keep back that tax money which, in the confusion and aberration
    caused by the Document, I ordered him to pay. You will not miss the
    sum, but this is a hard year for authors, and as for lectures I do
    not suppose your Majesty ever saw such a dull season.

    With always great and ever-increasing respect, I beg to sign myself
    your Majesty's servant to command,
                                MARK TWAIN.
    Her Majesty the Queen, London.

The letter, or "petition," as it was called, was published in the
Harper's Magazine "Drawer" (December, 1889), and is now included in the
"Complete Works." Taken as a whole it is one of the most exquisite of
Mark Twain's minor humors. What other humorist could have refrained from
hinting, at least, the inference suggested by the obvious "Gas Works"?
Yet it was a subtler art to let his old, simple-minded countryman ignore
that detail. The little skit was widely copied and reached the Queen
herself in due time, and her son, Prince Edward, who never forgot its
humor.

Clemens read a notable paper that year before the Monday Evening Club.
Its subject was "Consistency"--political consistency--and in it he took
occasion to express himself pretty vigorously regarding the virtue of
loyalty to party before principle, as exemplified in the Blaine-Cleveland
campaign. It was in effect a scathing reply to those who, three years,
before, had denounced Twichell and himself for standing by their
convictions.--[ Characteristic paragraphs from this paper will be found
under Appendix R, at the end of last volume.]




CLXIV

SOME FURTHER ACCOUNT OF CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO.

Flood-tide is a temporary condition, and the ebb in the business of
Charles L. Webster & Co., though very deliberate, was not delayed in its
beginning. Most of the books published--the early ones at least-were
profitable. McClellan's memoirs paid, as did others of the war series.

Even The Life of Pope Leo XIII. paid. What a statement to make, after
all their magnificent dreams and preparations! It was published
simultaneously in six languages. It was exploited in every conceivable
fashion, and its aggregate sales fell far short of the number which the
general agents had promised for their first orders. It was amazing, it
was incredible, but, alas! it was true. The prospective Catholic
purchaser had decided that the Pope's Life was not necessary to his
salvation or even to his entertainment. Howells explains it, to his own
satisfaction at least, when he says:

    We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often,
    when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved
    that, whether they could read or not, the immeasurable majority did
    not wish to read The Life of the Pope, though it was written by a
    dignitary of the Church and issued to the world with sanction from
    the Vatican.

Howells, of course, is referring to the laboring Catholic of that day.
There are no Catholics of this day--no American Catholics, at least--who
do not read, and money among them has become plentiful. Perhaps had the
Pope's Life been issued in this new hour of enlightenment the tale of its
success might have been less sadly told.

A variety of books followed. Henry Ward Beecher agreed to write an
autobiography, but he died just when he was beginning the work, and the
biography, which his family put together, brought only a moderate return.
A book of Sandwich Islands tales and legends, by his Hawaiian Majesty
King Kalakaua, edited by Clemens's old friend, Rollin M. Daggett, who had
become United States minister to the islands, barely paid for the cost of
manufacture, while a volume of reminiscences by General Hancock was still
less fortunate. The running expenses of the business were heavy. On the
strength of the Grant success Webster had moved into still larger
quarters at No. 3 East Fifteenth Street, and had a ground floor for a
salesroom. The force had become numerous and costly. It was necessary
that a book should pay largely to maintain this pretentious
establishment. A number of books were published at a heavy loss. Never
mind their titles; we may forget them, with the name of the bookkeeper
who presently embezzled thirty thousand dollars of the firm's money and
returned but a trifling sum.

By the end of 1887 there were three works in prospect on which great
hopes were founded--'The Library of Humor', which Howells and Clark had
edited; a personal memoir of General Sheridan's, and a Library of
American Literature in ten volumes, compiled by Edmund Clarence Stedman
and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson. It was believed these would restore the
fortunes and the prestige of the firm. They were all excellent,
attractive features. The Library of Humor was ably selected and
contained two hundred choice drawings by Kemble. The Sheridan Memoir was
finely written, and the public interest in it was bound to be general.
The Library of American Literature was a collection of the best American
writing, and seemed bound to appeal to every American reading-home. It
was necessary to borrow most of the money required to build these books,
for the profit made from the Grant Life and less fortunate ventures was
pretty well exhausted. Clemens presently found a little drift of his
notes accumulating at this bank and that--a disturbing condition, when he
remembered it, for he was financing the typesetting machine by this time,
and it was costing a pretty sum.

Meantime, Webster was no longer active in the management. In two years
he had broken down from overwork, and was now desperately ill with an
acute neuralgia that kept him away from the business most of the time.
Its burdens had fallen upon his assistant, Fred J. Hall, a willing,
capable young man, persevering and hopeful, lacking only years and
experience. Hall worked like a beaver, and continually looked forward to
success. He explained, with each month's report of affairs, just why the
business had not prospered more during that particular month, and just
why its profits would be greater during the next. Webster finally
retired from the business altogether, and Hall was given a small
partnership in the firm. He reduced expenses, worked desperately,
pumping out the debts, and managed to keep the craft afloat.

The Library of Humor, the Life of Sheridan, and The Library of American
Literature all sold very well; not so well as had been hoped, but the
sales yielded a fair profit. It was thought that if Clemens himself
would furnish a new book now and then the business might regain something
of its original standing.

We may believe that Clemens had not been always patient, not always
gentle, during this process of decline. He had differed with Webster,
and occasionally had gone down and reconstructed things after his own
notions. Once he wrote to Orion that he had suddenly awakened to find
that there was no more system in the office than in a nursery without a
nurse.

"But," he added, "I have spent a good deal of time there since, and
reduced everything to exact order and system."

Just what were the new features of order instituted it would be
interesting to know. That the financial pressure was beginning to be
felt even in the Clemens home is shown by a Christmas letter to Mrs.
Moffett.

                     HARTFORD, December 18, 1887.

DEAR PAMELA,--Will you take this $15 & buy some candy or other trifle for
yourself & Sam & his wife to remind you that we remember you?

If we weren't a little crowded this year by the type-setter I'd send a
check large enough to buy a family Bible or some other useful thing like
that. However, we go on & on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at
$3,000 a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the
first 17 months, when the bill only averaged $2,000, & promised to take a
thousand years. We'll be through now in 3 or 4 months, I reckon, & then
the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once more, whether
success ensues or failure.

Even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least
scrimped-but it would take a long letter to explain why & who is to
blame.

All the family send love to all of you, & best Christmas wishes for your
prosperity.

Affectionately,
SAM.




CLXV

LETTERS, VISITS, AND VISITORS

There were many pleasanter things, to be sure. The farm life never
failed with each returning summer; the winters brought gay company and
fair occasions. Sir Henry and Lady Stanley, visiting. America, were
entertained in the Clemens home, and Clemens went on to Boston to
introduce Stanley to his lecture audience. Charles Dickens's son, with
his wife and daughter, followed a little later. An incident of their
visit seems rather amusing now. There is a custom in England which
requires the host to give the guest notice of bedtime by handing him a
lighted candle. Mrs. Clemens knew of this custom, but did not have the
courage to follow it in her own home, and the guests knew of no other way
to relieve the situation; as a result, all sat up much later than usual.
Eventually Clemens himself suggested that possibly the guests would like
to retire.

Robert Louis Stevenson came down from Saranac, and Clemens went in to
visit him at his New York hotel, the St. Stevens, on East Eleventh
Street. Stevenson had orders to sit in the sunshine as much as possible,
and during the few days of their association he and Clemens would walk
down to Washington Square and sit on one of the benches and talk. They
discussed many things--philosophies, people, books; it seems a pity their
talk could not have been preserved.

Stevenson was a great admirer of Mark Twain's work. He said that during
a recent painting of his portrait he had insisted on reading Huck Finn
aloud to the artist, a Frenchman, who had at first protested, and finally
had fallen a complete victim to Huck's yarn. In one of Stevenson's
letters to Clemens he wrote:

    My father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read Roughing It
    (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening
    spent with the book he declared: "I am frightened. It cannot be
    safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much."

What heaps of letters, by the way, remain from this time, and how curious
some of them are! Many of them are requests of one sort or another,
chiefly for money--one woman asking for a single day's income,
conservatively estimated at five thousand dollars. Clemens seldom
answered an unwarranted letter; but at one time he began a series of
unmailed answers--that is to say, answers in which he had let himself go
merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance. He
prepared an introduction for this series. In it he said:

    . . . You receive a letter. You read it. It will be tolerably
    sure to produce one of three results: 1, pleasure; 2, displeasure;
    3, indifference. I do not need to say anything about Nos. 1 & 3;
    everybody knows what to do with those breeds of letters; it is breed
    No. 2 that I am after. It is the one that is loaded up with
    trouble.

    When you get an exasperating letter what happens? If you are young
    you answer it promptly, instantly--and mail the thing you have
    written. At forty what do you do? By that time you have found out
    that a letter written in a passion is a mistake in ninety-nine cases
    out of a hundred; that it usually wrongs two persons, and always
    wrongs one--yourself. You have grown weary of wronging yourself and
    repenting; so you manacle, you fetter, you log-chain the frantic
    impulse to write a pulverizing answer. You will wait a day or die.
    But in the mean time what do you do? Why, if it is about dinner-
    time, you sit at table in a deep abstraction all through the meal;
    you try to throw it off and help do the talking; you get a start
    three or four times, but conversation dies on your lips every time
    --your mind isn't on it; your heart isn't in it. You give up, and
    subside into a bottomless deep of silence, permanently; people must
    speak to you two or three times to get your attention, and then say
    it over again to make you understand. This kind of thing goes on
    all the rest of the evening; nobody can interest you in anything;
    you are useless, a depressing influence, a burden. You go to bed at
    last; but at three in the morning you are as wide awake as you were
    in the beginning. Thus we see what you have been doing for nine
    hours--on the outside. But what were you doing on the inside? You
    were writing letters--in your mind. And enjoying it, that is quite
    true; that is not to be denied. You have been flaying your
    correspondent alive with your incorporeal pen; you have been
    braining him, disemboweling him, carving him into little bits, and
    then--doing it all over again. For nine hours.

    It was wasted time, for you had no intention of putting any of this
    insanity on paper and mailing it. Yes, you know that, and confess
    it--but what were you to do? Where was your remedy? Will anybody
    contend that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and
    be obeyed?

    No, he cannot; that is certainly true. Well, then, what is he to
    do? I will explain by the suggestion contained in my opening
    paragraph. During the nine hours he has written as many as forty-
    seven furious letters--in his mind. If he had put just one of them
    on paper it would have brought him relief, saved him eight hours of
    trouble, and given him an hour's red-hot pleasure besides.

    He is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can
    turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm. He is only
    writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a volcano:
    imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater
    and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would
    get relief.

    Before he has filled his first sheet sometimes the relief is there.
    He degenerates into good-nature from that point.

    Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as
    three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry
    one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in
    it here and there. He pigeonholes these and then does one of two
    things--dismisses the whole matter from his mind or writes the
    proper sort of letter and mails it.

    To this day I lose my balance and send an overwarm letter--or more
    frequently telegram--two or three times a year. But that is better
    than doing it a hundred times a year, as I used to do years ago.
    Perhaps I write about as many as ever, but I pigeonhole them. They
    ought not to be thrown away. Such a letter a year or so old is as
    good as a sermon to the maw who wrote it. It makes him feel small
    and shabby, but--well, that wears off. Any sermon does; but the
    sermon does some little good, anyway. An old cold letter like that
    makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about
    nothing.

The unmailed answers that were to accompany this introduction were
plentiful enough and generally of a fervent sort. One specimen will
suffice. It was written to the chairman of a hospital committee.

    DEAR SIR,--If I were Smithfield I would certainly go out and get
    behind something and blush. According to your report, "the
    politicians are afraid to tax the people for the support" of so
    humane and necessary a thing as a hospital. And do your "people"
    propose to stand that?--at the hands of vermin officials whom the
    breath of their votes could blow out of official existence in a
    moment if they had the pluck to band themselves together and blow.
    Oh, come, these are not "people"--they are cowed school-boys with
    backbones made of boiled macaroni. If you are not misreporting
    those "people" you are just in the right business passing the
    mendicant hat for them. Dear sir, communities where anything like
    citizenship exists are accustomed to hide their shames, but here we
    have one proposing to get up a great "exposition" of its dishonor
    and advertise it all it can.

    It has been eleven years since I wrote anything for one of those
    graveyards called a "Fair paper," and so I have doubtless lost the
    knack of it somewhat; still I have done the best I could for you.

    This was from a burning heart and well deserved. One may almost
    regret that he did not send it.

Once he received a letter intended for one Samuel Clements, of Elma, New
York, announcing that the said Clements's pension had been allowed. But
this was amusing. When Clemens had forwarded the notice to its proper
destination he could not resist sending this comment to the commissioner
at Washington:

    DEAR SIR,--I have not applied for a pension. I have often wanted a
    pension--often--ever so often--I may say, but in as much as the only
    military service I performed during the war was in the Confederate
    army, I have always felt a delicacy about asking you for it.
    However, since you have suggested the thing yourself, I feel
    strengthened. I haven't any very pensionable diseases myself, but I
    can furnish a substitute--a man who is just simply a chaos, a museum
    of all the different kinds of aches and pains, fractures,
    dislocations and malformations there are; a man who would regard
    "rheumatism and sore eyes" as mere recreation and refreshment after
    the serious occupations of his day. If you grant me the pension,
    dear sir, please hand it to General Jos. Hawley, United States
    Senator--I mean hand him the certificate, not the money, and he will
    forward it to me. You will observe by this postal-card which I
    inclose that he takes a friendly interest in the matter. He thinks
    I've already got the pension, whereas I've only got the rheumatism;
    but didn't want that--I had that before. I wish it were catching. I
    know a man that I would load up with it pretty early. Lord, but we
    all feel that way sometimes. I've seen the day when but never mind
    that; you may be busy; just hand it to Hawley--the certificate, you
    understand, is not transferable.

Clemens was in good standing at Washington during the Cleveland
administration, and many letters came, asking him to use his influence
with the President to obtain this or that favor. He always declined,
though once--a few years later, in Europe--when he learned that Frank
Mason, consul-general at Frankfort, was about to be displaced, Clemens,
of his own accord, wrote to Baby Ruth Cleveland about it.

    MY DEAR RUTH, I belong to the Mugwumps, and one of the most sacred
    rules of our order prevents us from asking favors of officials or
    recommending men to office, but there is no harm in writing a
    friendly letter to you and telling you that an infernal outrage is
    about to be committed by your father in turning out of office the
    best Consul I know (and I know a great many) just because he is a
    Republican and a Democrat wants his place.

    He went on to recall Mason's high and honorable record, suggesting
    that Miss Ruth take the matter into her own hands. Then he said:

    I can't send any message to the President, but the next time you
    have a talk with him concerning such matters I wish you would tell
    him about Captain Mason and what I think of a Government that so
    treats its efficient officials.

Just what form of appeal the small agent made is not recorded, but by and
by Mark Twain received a tiny envelope, postmarked Washington, inclosing
this note in President Cleveland's handwriting:

    Miss Ruth Cleveland begs to acknowledge the receipt of Mr. Twain's
    letter and say that she took the liberty of reading it to the
    President, who desires her to thank Mr. Twain for her information,
    and to say to him that Captain Mason will not be disturbed in the
    Frankfort Consulate. The President also desires Miss Cleveland to
    say that if Mr. Twain knows of any other cases of this kind he will
    be greatly obliged if he will write him concerning them at his
    earliest convenience.

Clemens immensely admired Grover Cleveland, also his young wife, and his
visits to Washington were not infrequent. Mrs. Clemens was not always
able to accompany him, and he has told us how once (it was his first
visit after the President's marriage) she put a little note in the pocket
of his evening waistcoat, which he would be sure to find when dressing,
warning him about his deportment. Being presented to Mrs. Cleveland, he
handed her a card on which he had written "He didn't," and asked her to
sign her name below those words. Mrs. Cleveland protested that she
couldn't sign it unless she knew what it was he hadn't done; but he
insisted, and she promised to sign if he would tell her immediately
afterward all about it. She signed, and he handed her Mrs. Clemens's
note, which was very brief. It said:

"Don't wear your arctics in the White House."

Mrs. Cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card she had signed
mailed at once to Mrs. Clemens at Hartford.

He was not always so well provided against disaster. Once, without
consulting his engagements, he agreed to assist Mrs. Cleveland at a
dedication, only to find that he must write an apology later. In his
letter he said:

    I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this house of
    ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run
    itself without the help of the major half it gets aground.

He explained his position, and added:

    I suppose the President often acts just like that; goes and makes an
    impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next to
    impossible to break it up and set things straight again. Well, that
    is just our way exactly--one-half the administration always busy
    getting the family into trouble and the other half busy getting it
    out.




CLVXI

A "PLAYER" AND A MASTER OF ARTS

One morning early in January Clemens received the following note:

              DALY'S THEATER, NEW YORK, January 2, 1888.

    Mr. Augustin Daly will be very much pleased to have Mr. S. L.
    Clemens meet Mr. Booth, Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Palmer and a few
    friends at lunch on Friday next, January 6th (at one o'clock in
    Delmonico's), to discuss the formation of a new club which it is
    thought will claim your (sic) interest.

    R. S. V. P.

There were already in New York a variety of literary and artistic
societies, such as The Kinsmen and Tile clubs, with which Clemens was
more or less associated. It was proposed now to form a more
comprehensive and pretentious organization--one that would include the
various associated arts. The conception of this new club, which was to
be called The Players, had grown out of a desire on the part of Edwin
Booth to confer some enduring benefit upon the members of his profession.
It had been discussed during a summer cruise on Mr. E. C. Benedict's
steam-yacht by a little party which, besides the owner, consisted of
Booth himself, Aldrich, Lawrence Barrett, William Bispham, and Laurence
Hutton. Booth's original idea had been to endow some sort of an actors'
home, but after due consideration this did not appear to be the best
plan. Some one proposed a club, and Aldrich, with never-failing
inspiration, suggested its name, The Players, which immediately impressed
Booth and the others. It was then decided that members of all the
kindred arts should be admitted, and this was the plan discussed and
perfected at the Daly luncheon. The guests became charter members, and
The Players became an incorporated fact early in January, 1888.
--[Besides Mr. Booth himself, the charter members were: Lawrence Barrett,
William Bispham, Samuel L. Clemens, Augustin Daly, Joseph F. Daly, John
Drew, Henry Edwards, Laurence Hutton, Joseph Jefferson, John A. Lane,
James Lewis, Brander Matthews, Stephen H. Olin, A. M. Palmer, and William
T. Sherman.]--Booth purchased the fine old brownstone residence at 16
Gramercy Park, and had expensive alterations made under the directions of
Stanford White to adapt it for club purposes. He bore the entire cost,
furnished it from garret to cellar, gave it his books and pictures, his
rare collections of every sort. Laurence Hutton, writing of it
afterward, said:

And on the first Founder's Night, the 31st of December, 1888, he
transferred it all to the association, a munificent gift; absolutely
without parallel in its way. The pleasure it gave to Booth during the
few remaining years of his life was very great. He made it his home.
Next to his own immediate family it was his chief interest, care, and
consolation. He nursed and petted it, as it nursed and petted and
honored him. He died in it. And it is certainly his greatest monument.

There is no other club quite like The Players. The personality of Edwin
Booth pervades it, and there is a spirit in its atmosphere not found in
other large clubs--a spirit of unity, and ancient friendship, and
mellowness which usually come only of small membership and long
establishment. Mark Twain was always fond of The Players, and more than
once made it his home. It is a true home, and its members are a genuine
brotherhood.

It was in June, 1888, that Yale College conferred upon Samuel Clemens the
degree of Master of Arts. It was his first honor of this kind, and he
was proud of it. To Charles Hopkins ("Charley") Clark, who had been
appointed to apprise him of the honor, he wrote:

    I felt mighty proud of that degree; in fact I could squeeze the
    truth a little closer and say vain of it. And why shouldn't I be?
    I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has
    ever been given a degree by any college in any age of the world as
    far as I know.

To which Clark answered:

    MY DEAR FRIEND, You are "the only literary animal of your particular
    subspecies" in existence, and you've no cause for humility in the
    fact. Yale has done herself at least as much credit as she has done
    you, and "don't you forget it."
                                C. H. C.

Clemens could not attend the alumni dinner, being at Elmira and unable to
get away, but in an address he made at Yale College later in the year he
thus freely expressed himself:

    I was sincerely proud and grateful to be made a Master of Arts by
    this great and venerable University, and I would have come last June
    to testify this feeling, as I do now testify it, but that the sudden
    and unexpected notice of the honor done me found me at a distance
    from home and unable to discharge that duty and enjoy that
    privilege.

    Along at first, say for the first month or so, I, did not quite know
    hove to proceed because of my not knowing just what authorities and
    privileges belonged to the title which had been granted me, but
    after that I consulted some students of Trinity--in Hartford--and
    they made everything clear to me. It was through them that I found
    out that my title made me head of the Governing Body of the
    University, and lodged in me very broad and severely responsible
    powers.

    I was told that it would be necessary to report to you at this time,
    and of course I comply, though I would have preferred to put it off
    till I could make a better showing; for indeed I have been so
    pertinaciously hindered and obstructed at every turn by the faculty
    that it would be difficult to prove that the University is really in
    any better shape now than it was when I first took charge. By
    advice, I turned my earliest attention to the Greek department. I
    told the Greek professor I had concluded to drop the use of Greek-
    written character because it is so hard to spell with, and so
    impossible to read after you get it spelt. Let us draw the curtain
    there. I saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved
    him from being a very profane man. I ordered the professor of
    mathematics to simplify the whole system, because the way it was I
    couldn't understand it, and I didn't want things going on in the
    college in what was practically a clandestine fashion. I told him
    to drop the conundrum system; it was not suited to the dignity of a
    college, which should deal in facts, not guesses and suppositions;
    we didn't want any more cases of if A and B stand at opposite poles
    of the earth's surface and C at the equator of Jupiter, at what
    variations of angle will the left limb of the moon appear to these
    different parties?--I said you just let that thing alone; it's
    plenty time to get in a sweat about it when it happens; as like as
    not it ain't going to do any harm, anyway. His reception of these
    instructions bordered on insubordination, insomuch that I felt
    obliged to take his number and report him. I found the astronomer
    of the University gadding around after comets and other such odds
    and ends--tramps and derelicts of the skies. I told him pretty
    plainly that we couldn't have that. I told him it was no economy to
    go on piling up and piling up raw material in the way of new stars
    and comets and asteroids that we couldn't ever have any use for till
    we had worked off the old stock. At bottom I don't really mind
    comets so much, but somehow I have always been down on asteroids.
    There is nothing mature about them; I wouldn't sit up nights the way
    that man does if I could get a basketful of them. He said it was
    the bast line of goods he had; he said he could trade them to
    Rochester for comets, and trade the comets to Harvard for nebulae,
    and trade the nebula to the Smithsonian for flint hatchets. I felt
    obliged to stop this thing on the spot; I said we couldn't have the
    University turned into an astronomical junk shop. And while I was
    at it I thought I might as well make the reform complete; the
    astronomer is extraordinarily mutinous, and so, with your approval,
    I will transfer him to the law department and put one of the law
    students in his place. A boy will be more biddable, more tractable,
    also cheaper. It is true he cannot be intrusted with important work
    at first, but he can comb the skies for nebulae till he gets his
    hand in. I have other changes in mind, but as they are in the
    nature of surprises I judge it politic to leave them unspecified at
    this time.

Very likely it was in this new capacity, as the head of the governing
body, that he wrote one morning to Clark advising him as to the misuse of
a word in the Courant, though he thought it best to sign the
communication with the names of certain learned friends, to give it
weight with the public, as he afterward explained.

    SIR,--The word "patricide" in your issue of this morning (telegrams)
    was an error. You meant it to describe the slayer of a father; you
    should have used "parricide" instead. Patricide merely means the
    killing of an Irishman--any Irishman, male or female.

           Respectfully,
                  J. HAMMOND TRUMBULL.
                  N. J. BURTON.
                  J. H. TWICHELL.




CLXVII

NOTES AND LITERARY MATTERS

Clemens' note-books of this time are full of the vexations of his
business ventures, figures, suggestions, and a hundred imagined
combinations for betterment--these things intermingled with the usual
bits of philosophy and reflections, and amusing reminders.

    Aldrich's man who painted the fat toads red, and naturalist chasing
    and trying to catch them.

    Man who lost his false teeth over Brooklyn Bridge when he was on his
    way to propose to a widow.

    One believes St. Simon and Benvenuto and partly believes the
    Margravine of Bayreuth. There are things in the confession of
    Rousseau which one must believe.

    What is biography? Unadorned romance. What is romance? Adorned
    biography. Adorn it less and it will be better than it is.

    If God is what people say there can be none in the universe so
    unhappy as he; for he sees unceasingly myriads of his creatures
    suffering unspeakable miseries, and, besides this, foresees all they
    are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might
    well say "as unhappy as God."

In spite of the financial complexities and the drain of the enterprises
already in hand he did not fail to conceive others. He was deeply
interested in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress at the moment, and from
photography and scenic effect he presaged a possibility to-day realized
in the moving picture.

Dress up some good actors as Apollyon, Greatheart, etc., & the other
Bunyan characters, take them to a wild gorge and photograph them--Valley
of the Shadow of Death; to other effective places & photo them along with
the scenery; to Paris, in their curious costumes, place them near the Arc
de l'Etoile & photo them with the crowd-Vanity Fair; to Cairo, Venice,
Jerusalem, & other places (twenty interesting cities) & always make them
conspicuous in the curious foreign crowds by their costume. Take them to
Zululand. It would take two or three years to do the photographing &
cost $10,000; but this stereopticon panorama of Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress could be exhibited in all countries at the same time & would
clear a fortune in a year. By & by I will do this.

    If in 1891 I find myself not rich enough to carry out my scheme of
    buying Christopher Columbus's bones & burying them under the Statue
    of Liberty Enlightening the World I will give the idea to somebody
    who is rich enough.

Incidentally he did an occasional piece of literary work. Early in the
year, with Brander Matthews, he instructed and entertained the public
with a copyright controversy in the Princeton Review. Matthews would
appear to have criticized the English copyright protection, or rather the
lack of it, comparing it unfavorably with American conditions. Clemens,
who had been amply protected in Great Britain, replied that America was
in no position to criticize England; that if American authors suffered in
England they had themselves to blame for not taking the proper trouble
and precautions required by the English law, that is to say, "previous
publication" on English soil. He declared that his own books had been as
safe in England as at home since he had undertaken to comply with English
requirements, and that Professor Matthews was altogether mistaken, both
as to premise and conclusion.

"You are the very wrong-headedest person in America," he said; "and you
are injudicious." And of the article: "I read it to the cat--well, I
never saw a cat carry on so before . . . . The American author can go
to Canada, spend three days there and come home with an English and
American copyright as strong as if it had been built out of railroad
iron."

Matthews replied that not every one could go to Canada, any more than to
Corinth. He said:

"It is not easy for a poor author who may chance to live in Florida or
Texas, those noted homes of literature, to go to Canada."

Clemens did not reply again; that is to say, he did not publish his
reply. It was a capable bomb which he prepared, well furnished with
amusing instance, sarcasm, and ridicule, but he did not use it. Perhaps
he was afraid it would destroy his opponent, which would not do. In his
heart he loved Matthews. He laid the deadly thing away and maintained a
dignified reserve.

Clemens often felt called upon to criticize American institutions, but he
was first to come to their defense, especially when the critic was an
alien. When Matthew Arnold offered some strictures on America. Clemens
covered a good many quires of paper with caustic replies. He even
defended American newspapers, which he had himself more than once
violently assailed for misreporting him and for other journalistic
shortcomings, and he bitterly denounced every shaky British institution,
touched upon every weak spot in hereditary rule. He did not print--not
then--[An article on the American press, probably the best of those
prepared at this time, was used, in part, in The American Claimant, as
the paper read before the Mechanics' Club, by "Parker," assistant editor
of the 'Democrat'.]--he was writing mainly for relief--without success,
however, for he only kindled the fires of his indignation. He was at
Quarry Farm and he plunged into his neglected story--A Yankee in King
Arthur's Court--and made his astonishing hero the mouthpiece of his
doctrines. He worked with an inspiration and energy born of his
ferocity. To Whitmore, near the end of the summer, he wrote:

I've got 16 working-days left yet, and in that time I will add another
120,000 words to my book if I have luck.

In his memoranda of this time he says:

    There was never a throne which did not represent a crime. There is
    no throne to-day which does not represent a crime ....

Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a
journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth
being, is the shoemaker's inferior; and in the shoemaker I will show you
a dull animal, a poor-spirited insect; for there are enough of him to
rise and chuck the lords and royalties into the sea where they belong,
and he doesn't do it.

But his violence waned, maybe, for he did not finish the Yankee in the
sixteen days as planned. He brought the manuscript back to Hartford, but
found it hard work there, owing to many interruptions. He went over to
Twichell's and asked for a room where he might work in seclusion. They
gave him a big upper chamber, but some repairs were going on below. From
a letter written to Theodore Crane we gather that it was not altogether
quiet.

                     Friday, October 5, 1888.

    DEAR THEO, I am here in Twichell's house at work, with the noise of
    the children and an army of carpenters to help: Of course they don't
    help, but neither do they hinder. It's like a boiler factory for
    racket, and in nailing a wooden ceiling on to the room under me the
    hammering tickles my feet amazingly sometimes and jars my table a
    good deal, but I never am conscious of the racket at all, and I move
    my feet into positions of relief without knowing when I do it. I
    began here Monday morning, and have done eighty pages since. I was
    so tired last night that I thought I would lie abed and rest to-day;
    but I couldn't resist. I mean to try to knock off tomorrow, but
    it's doubtful if I do. I want to finish the day the machine
    finishes, and a week ago the closest calculations for that indicated
    Oct. 22--but experience teaches me that the calculations will miss
    fire as usual.

    The other day the children were projecting a purchase, Livy and I to
    furnish the money--a dollar and a half. Jean discouraged the idea.
    She said, "We haven't got any money. Children, if you would think,
    you would remember the machine isn't done."

    It's billiards to-night. I wish you were here.

    With love to you both,                S. L. C.

    P. S. I got it all wrong. It wasn't the children, it was Marie.
    She wanted a box of blacking for the children's shoes. Jean
    reproved her and said, "Why, Marie, you mustn't ask for things now.
    The machine isn't done."

Neither the Yankee nor the machine was completed that fall, though
returns from both were beginning to be badly needed. The financial pinch
was not yet severe, but it was noticeable, and it did not relax.

A memorandum of this time tells of an anniversary given to Charles and
Susan Warner in their own home. The guests assembled at the Clemens
home, the Twichells among them, and slipped across to Warner's, entering
through a window. Dinner was then announced to the Warners, who were
sitting by their library fire. They came across the hall and opened the
dining-room door, to be confronted by a table fully spread and lighted
and an array of guests already seated.




CLXVIII

INTRODUCING NYE AND RILEY AND OTHERS

It was the winter (1888-89) that the Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley
entertainment combination set out on its travels. Mark Twain introduced
them to their first Boston audience. Major J. B. Pond was exploiting Nye
and Riley, and Clemens went on to Boston especially to hear them. Pond
happened upon him in the lobby of the Parker House and insisted that
nothing would do but he must introduce them. In his book of memories
which he published later Pond wrote:

He replied that he believed I was his mortal enemy, and determined that
he should never have an evening's enjoyment in my presence. He
consented, however, and conducted his brother-humorist and the Hoosier
poet to the platform. Mark's presence was a surprise to the audience,
and when they recognized him the demonstration was tremendous. The
audience rose in a body, and men and women shouted at the very top of
their voices. Handkerchiefs waved, the organist even opened every forte
key and pedal in the great organ, and the noise went on unabated for
minutes. It took some time for the crowd to get down to listening, but
when they did subside, as Mark stepped to the front, the silence was as
impressive as the noise had been.

He presented the Nye-Riley pair as the Siamese Twins. "I saw them
first," he sand, "a great many years ago, when Mr. Barnum had them, and
they were just fresh from Siam. The ligature was their best hold then,
but literature became their best hold later, when one of them committed
an indiscretion, and they had to cut the old bond to accommodate the
sheriff."

He continued this comic fancy, and the audience was in a proper frame of
mind, when he had finished, to welcome the "Twins of Genius" who were to
entertain them:

Pond says:

It was a carnival of fun in every sense of the word. Bostonians will not
have another such treat in this generation.

Pond proposed to Clemens a regular tour with Nye and Riley. He wrote:

    I will go partners with you, and I will buy Nye and Riley's time and
    give an entertainment something like the one we gave in Boston. Let
    it be announced that you will introduce the "Twins of Genius."
    Ostensibly a pleasure trip for you. I will take one-third of the
    profits and you two-thirds. I can tell you it will be the biggest
    thing that can be brought before the American public.

But Clemens, badly as he was beginning to need the money, put this
temptation behind him. His chief diversion these days was in gratuitous
appearances. He had made up his mind not to read or lecture again for
pay, but he seemed to take a peculiar enjoyment in doing these things as
a benefaction. That he was beginning to need the money may have added a
zest to the joy of his giving. He did not respond to all invitations; he
could have been traveling constantly had he done so. He consulted with
Mrs. Clemens and gave himself to the cause that seemed most worthy. In
January Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston was billed to give a reading with
Thomas Nelson Page in Baltimore. Page's wife fell ill and died, and
Colonel Johnston, in extremity, wired Charles Dudley Warner to come in
Page's place. Warner, unable to go, handed the invitation to Clemens,
who promptly wired that he would come. They read to a packed house, and
when the audience was gone and the returns had been counted an equal
division of the profits was handed to each of the authors. Clemens
pushed his share over to Johnston, saying:

"That's yours, Colonel. I'm not reading for money these days."

Colonel Johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but
he only said:

"Never mind, Colonel, it only gave me pleasure to do you that little
favor. You can pass it on some day."

As a matter of fact, hard put to it as he was for funds, Clemens at this
time regarded himself as a potential multi-millionaire. The type-setting
machine which for years had been sapping his financial strength was
believed to be perfected, and ship-loads of money were waiting in the
offing. However, we shall come to this later.

Clemens read for the cadets at West Point and for a variety of
institutions and on many special occasions. He usually gave chapters
from his Yankee, now soon to be finished, chapters generally beginning
with the Yankee's impression of the curious country and its people,
ending with the battle of the Sun-belt, when the Yankee and his
fifty-four adherents were masters of England, with twenty-five thousand
dead men lying about them. He gave this at West Point, including the
chapter where the Yankee has organized a West Point of his own in King
Arthur's reign.

In April, '89, he made an address at a dinner given to a victorious
baseball team returning from a tour of the world by way of the Sandwich
Islands. He was on familiar ground there. His heart was in his words.
He began:

    I have been in the Sandwich Islands-twenty-three years ago--that
    peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of solitude,
    and soft idleness, and repose, and dreams, where life is one long
    slumberous Sabbath, the climate one long summer day, and the good
    that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one
    heaven and wake up in another. And these boys have played baseball
    there!--baseball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible
    expression, of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the
    living, tearing, booming nineteenth, the mightiest of all the
    centuries!

He told of the curious island habits for his hearers' amusement, but at
the close the poetry of his memories once more possessed him:

    Ah, well, it is refreshment to the jaded, it is water to the
    thirsty, to look upon men who have so lately breathed the soft air
    of those Isles of the Blest and had before their eyes the
    inextinguishable vision of their beauty. No alien land in all the
    earth has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land
    could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and
    waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things
    leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the
    same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas
    flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see
    its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing
    by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the
    cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the
    plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of
    flowers that perished twenty years ago.




CLXIX

THE COMING OF KIPLING

It was the summer of 1889 that Mark Twain first met Rudyard Kipling.
Kipling was making his tour around the world, a young man wholly unheard
of outside of India. He was writing letters home to an Indian journal,
The Pioneer, and he came to Elmira especially to see Mark Twain. It was
night when he arrived, and next morning some one at the hotel directed
him to Quarry Farm. In a hired hack he made his way out through the
suburbs, among the buzzing planing-mills and sash factories, and toiled
up the long, dusty, roasting east hill, only to find that Mark Twain was
at General Langdon's, in the city he had just left behind. Mrs. Crane
and Susy Clemens were the only ones left at the farm, and they gave him a
seat on the veranda and brought him glasses of water or cool milk while
he refreshed them with his talk-talk which Mark Twain once said might be
likened to footprints, so strong and definite was the impression which it
left behind. He gave them his card, on which the address was Allahabad,
and Susy preserved it on that account, because to her India was a
fairyland, made up of magic, airy architecture, and dark mysteries.
Clemens once dictated a memory of Kipling's visit.

    Kipling had written upon the card a compliment to me. This gave it
    an additional value in Susy's eyes, since, as a distinction, it was
    the next thing to being recognized by a denizen of the moon.

    Kipling came down that afternoon and spent a couple of hours with
    me, and at the end of that time I had surprised him as much as he
    had surprised me--and the honors were easy. I believed that he knew
    more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that
    I knew less than any person he had met before--though he did not say
    it, and I was not expecting that he would. When he was gone Mrs.
    Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said:

    "He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and I am
    the other one. Between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that
    can be known, and I know the rest."

    He was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for
    twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known.
    From that day to this he has held this unique distinction--that of
    being the only living person, not head of a nation, whose voice is
    heard around the world the moment it drops a remark; the only such
    voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail, but
    always travels first-class--by cable.

    About a year after Kipling's visit in Elmira George Warner came into
    our library one morning in Hartford with a small book in his hand
    and asked me if I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling. I said, "No."

    He said I would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he was
    going to make would be loud and continuous. The little book was the
    Plain Tales, and he left it for me to read, saying it was charged
    with a new and inspiriting fragrance, and would blow a refreshing
    breath around the world that would revive the nations. A day or two
    later he brought a copy of the London World which had a sketch of
    Kipling in it, and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the
    United States. According to this sketch he had passed through
    Elmira. This remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from
    India, attracted my attention--also Susy's. She went to her room
    and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and
    the Quarry Farm visitor stood identified.

Kipling also has left an account of that visit. In his letter recording
it he says:

    You are a contemptible lot over yonder. Some of you are
    Commissioners and some are Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the
    V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm
    with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning,
    have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him,
    and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand clearly
    that I do not despise you; indeed, I don't. I am only very sorry
    for you, from the Viceroy downward.

    A big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane
    of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a
    woman's, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest,
    calmest, levelest voice in all the world saying:

    "Well, you think you owe me something, and you've come to tell me
    so. That's what I call squaring a debt handsomely."

    "Piff!" from a cob-pipe (I always said that a Missouri meerschaum
    was the best smoking in the world), and behold! Mark Twain had
    curled himself up in the big arm-chair, and I was smoking
    reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior.

    The thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet,
    after a minute's thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, and in
    five minutes, the eyes looking at me, I saw that the gray hair was
    an accident of the most trivial. He was quite young. I was shaking
    his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk--this
    man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away.

    Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality,
    and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality.
    Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face
    to face with a revered writer.

The meeting of those two men made the summer of '89 memorable in later
years. But it was recalled sadly, too. Theodore Crane, who had been
taken suddenly and dangerously ill the previous autumn, had a recurring
attack and died July 3d. It was the first death in the immediate
families for more than seventeen years, Mrs. Clemens, remembering that
earlier period of sorrow, was depressed with forebodings.




CLXX

"THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER" ON THE STAGE

There was an unusual dramatic interest in the Clemens home that autumn.
Abby Sage Richardson had dramatized 'The Prince and the Pauper', and
Daniel Frohman had secured Elsie Leslie (Lyde) to take the double role of
the Prince and Tom Canty. The rehearsals were going on, and the Clemens
children were naturally a good deal excited over the outcome. Susy
Clemens was inspired to write a play of her own--a pretty Greek fancy,
called "The Triumph of Music," and when it was given on Thanksgiving
night, by herself, with Clara and Jean and Margaret Warner, it was really
a lovely performance, and carried one back to the days when emotions were
personified, and nymphs haunted the seclusions of Arcady. Clemens was
proud of Susy's achievement, and deeply moved by it. He insisted on
having the play repeated, and it was given again later in the year.

Pretty Elsie Leslie became a favorite of the Clemens household. She was
very young, and when she visited Hartford Jean and she were companions
and romped together in the hay-loft. She was also a favorite of William
Gillette. One day when Clemens and Gillette were together they decided
to give the little girl a surprise--a unique one. They agreed to
embroider a pair of slippers for her--to do the work themselves. Writing
to her of it, Mark Twain said:

    Either one of us could have thought of a single slipper, but it took
    both of us to think of two slippers. In fact, one of us did think
    of one slipper, and then, quick as a flash, the other of the other
    one. It shows how wonderful the human mind is....

    Gillette embroidered his slipper with astonishing facility and
    splendor, but I have been a long time pulling through with mine.
    You see, it was my very first attempt at art, and I couldn't rightly
    get the hang of it along at first. And then I was so busy that I
    couldn't get a chance to work at it at home, and they wouldn't let
    me embroider on the cars; they said it made the other passengers
    afraid. They didn't like the light that flared into my eye when I
    had an inspiration. And even the most fair-minded people doubted me
    when I explained what it was I was making--especially brakemen.
    Brakemen always swore at it and carried on, the way ignorant people
    do about art. They wouldn't take my word that it was a slipper;
    they said they believed it was a snow-shoe that had some kind of
    disease.

He went on to explain and elucidate the pattern of the slipper, and how
Dr. Root had come in and insisted on taking a hand in it, and how
beautiful it was to see him sit there and tell Mrs. Clemens what had been
happening while they were away during the summer, holding the slipper up
toward the end of his nose, imagining the canvas was a "subject" with a
scalp-wound, working with a "lovely surgical stitch," never hesitating a
moment in his talk except to say "Ouch!" when he stuck himself with the
needle.

    Take the slippers and wear them next your heart, Elsie dear; for
    every stitch in them is a testimony of the affection which two of
    your loyalest friends bear you. Every single stitch cost us blood.
    I've got twice as many pores in me now as I used to have; and you
    would never believe how many places you can stick a needle in
    yourself until you go into the embroidery line and devote yourself
    to art.

    Do not wear these slippers in public, dear; it would only excite
    envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try to shoot you.

    Merely use them to assist you in remembering that among the many,
    many people who think all the world of you is your friend,

                            MARK TWAIN.

The play of "The Prince and the Pauper," dramatized by Mrs. Richardson
and arranged for the stage by David Belasco, was produced at the Park
Theater, Philadelphia, on Christmas Eve. It was a success, but not a
lavish one. The play was well written and staged, and Elsie Leslie was
charming enough in her parts, but in the duality lay the difficulty. The
strongest scenes in the story had to be omitted when one performer played
both Tom Canty and the little Prince. The play came to New York--to the
Broadway Theater--and was well received. On the opening night there Mark
Twain made a speech, in which he said that the presentation of "The
Prince and the Pauper" realized a dream which fifteen years before had
possessed him all through a long down-town tramp, amid the crowds and
confusion of Broadway. In Elsie Leslie, he said, he had found the
embodiment of his dream, and to her he offered homage as the only prince
clothed in a divine right which was not rags and sham--the divine right
of an inborn supremacy in art.

It seems incredible to-day that, realizing the play's possibilities as
Mark Twain did, and as Belasco and Daniel Frohman must have done, they
did not complete their partial triumph by finding another child actress
to take the part of Tom Canty. Clemens urged and pleaded with them, but
perhaps the undertaking seemed too difficult--at all events they did not
find the little beggar king. Then legal complications developed. Edward
House, to whom Clemens had once given a permission to attempt a
dramatization of the play, suddenly appeared with a demand for
recognition, backed by a lawsuit against all those who had a proprietary
interest in the production. House, with his adopted Japanese daughter
Koto, during a period of rheumatism and financial depression, had made a
prolonged visit in the Clemens home and originally undertook the
dramatization as a sort of return for hospitality. He appears not to
have completed it and to have made no arrangement for its production or
to have taken any definite step until Mrs. Richardson's play was
profitably put on; whereupon his suit and injunction.

By the time a settlement of this claim had been reached the play had run
its course, and it was not revived in that form. It was brought out in
England, where it was fairly prosperous, though it seems not to have been
long continued. Variously reconstructed, it has occasionally been played
since, and always, when the parts of Tom Canty and the Prince were
separate, with great success. Why this beautiful drama should ever be
absent from the boards is one of the unexplainable things. It is a play
for all times and seasons, the difficulty of obtaining suitable "twin"
interpreters for the characters of the Prince and the Pauper being its
only drawback.




CLXXI

"A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT"

From every point of view it seemed necessary to make the 'Yankee in King
Arthur's Court' an important and pretentious publication. It was Mark
Twain's first book after a silence of five years; it was a book badly
needed by his publishing business with which to maintain its prestige and
profit; it was a book which was to come out of his maturity and present
his deductions, as to humanity at large and kings in particular, to a
waiting public. It was determined to spare no expense on the
manufacture, also that its illustrations must be of a sort to illuminate
and, indeed, to elaborate the text. Clemens had admired some pictures
made by Daniel Carter ("Dan") Beard for a Chinese story in the
Cosmopolitan, and made up his mind that Beard was the man for the Yankee.
The manuscript was sent to Beard, who met Clemens a little later in the
office of Webster & Co. to discuss the matter. Clemens said:

"Mr. Beard, I do not want to subject you to any undue suffering, but I
wish you would read the book before you make the pictures."

Beard replied that he had already read it twice.

"Very good," Clemens said; "but I wasn't led to suppose that that was the
usual custom among illustrators, judging from some results I have seen.
You know," he went on, "this Yankee of mine has neither the refinement
nor the weakness of a college education; he is a perfect ignoramus; he is
boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomotive or a Colt's revolver,
he can put up and run a telegraph line, but he's an ignoramus,
nevertheless. I am not going to tell you what to draw. If a man comes
to me and says, 'Mr. Clemens, I want you to write me a story,' I'll write
it for him; but if he undertakes to tell me what to write I'll say, 'Go
hire a typewriter.'"

To Hall a few days later he wrote:

    Tell Beard to obey his own inspirations, and when he sees a picture
    in his mind put that picture on paper, be it humorous or be it
    serious. I want his genius to be wholly unhampered. I sha'n't have
    any fear as to results.

Without going further it is proper to say here that the pictures in the
first edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court justified
the author's faith in the artist of his selection. They are far and away
Dan Beard's best work. The socialism of the text strongly appealed to
him. Beard himself had socialistic tendencies, and the work inspired him
to his highest flights of fancy and to the acme of his technic. Clemens
examined the pictures from time to time, and once was moved to write:

    My pleasure in them is as strong and as fresh as ever. I do not
    know of any quality they lack. Grace, dignity, poetry, spirit,
    imagination, these enrich them and make them charming and beautiful;
    and wherever humor appears it is high and fine--easy, unforced, kept
    under, masterly, and delicious.

He went on to describe his appreciation in detail, and when the drawings
were complete he wrote again:

    Hold me under permanent obligations. What luck it was to find you!
    There are hundreds of artists who could illustrate any other book of
    mine, but there was only one who could illustrate this one. Yes, it
    was a fortunate hour that I went netting for lightning-bugs and
    caught a meteor. Live forever!

This was not too much praise. Beard realized the last shade of the
author's allegorical intent and portrayed it with a hundred accents which
the average reader would otherwise be likely to miss.

Clemens submitted his manuscript to Howells and to Stedman, and he read
portions of it, at least, to Mrs. Clemens, whose eyes were troubling her
so that she could not read for herself. Stedman suggested certain
eliminations, but, on the whole, would seem to have approved of the book.
Howells was enthusiastic. It appealed to him as it had appealed to
Beard. Its sociology and its socialism seemed to him the final word that
could be said on those subjects. When he had partly finished it he
wrote:

    It's a mighty great book and it makes my heart, burn with wrath. It
    seems that God didn't forget to put a soul in you. He shuts most
    literary men off with a brain, merely.

A few days later he wrote again:

    The book is glorious-simply noble. What masses of virgin truth
    never touched in print before!

And when he had finished it:

    Last night I read your last chapter. As Stedman says of the whole
    book, it's titanic.

Clemens declared, in one of his replies to Howells:

    I'm not writing for those parties who miscall themselves critics,
    and I don't care to have them paw the book at all. It's my swan
    song, my retirement from literature permanently, and I wish to pass
    to the cemetery unclodded . . . . Well, my book is written--let
    it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so
    many things left out. They burn in me; they keep multiplying and
    multiplying, but now they can't ever be said; and besides they would
    require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell.

In another letter of this time to Sylvester Baxter, apropos of the
tumbling Brazilian throne, he wrote:

    When our great brethren, the disenslaved Brazilians, frame their
    declaration of independence I hope they will insert this missing
    link: "We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all monarchs
    are usurpers and descendants of usurpers, for the reason that no
    throne was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised,
    of the only body possessing the legitimate right to set it up--the
    numerical mass of the nation."

He was full of it, as he had been all along, and 'A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur's Court' is nothing less than a brief for human rights and
human privileges. That is what it is, and it is a pity that it should be
more than that. It is a pity that he should have been beset by his old
demon of the burlesque, and that no one should have had the wisdom or the
strength to bring it under control.

There is nothing more charming in any of Mark Twain's work than his
introductory chapter, nothing more delightful than the armoring of the
Yankee and the outset and the wandering with Alisande. There is nothing
more powerful or inspiring than his splendid panoramic picture--of the
King learning mercy through his own degradation, his daily intercourse
with a band of manacled slaves; nothing more fiercely moving than that
fearful incident of the woman burned to warm those freezing chattels, or
than the great gallows scene, where the priest speaks for the young
mother about to pay the death penalty for having stolen a halfpenny's
worth, that her baby might have bread. Such things as these must save
the book from oblivion; but alas! its greater appeal is marred almost to
ruin by coarse and extravagant burlesque, which destroys illusion and
antagonizes the reader often at the very moment when the tale should fill
him with a holy fire of a righteous wrath against wrong. As an example
of Mark Twain at his literary worst and best the Yankee ranks supreme. It
is unnecessary to quote examples; one cannot pick up the volume and read
ten pages of it, or five pages, without finding them. In the midst of
some exalted passage, some towering sublimity, you are brought suddenly
to earth with a phrase which wholly destroys the illusion and the diviner
purpose. Howells must have observed these things, or was he so dazzled
by the splendor of its intent, its righteous charge upon the ranks of
oppression, that he regarded its offenses against art as unimportant.
This is hard to explain, for the very thing that would sustain such a
great message and make it permanent would be the care, the restraint, the
artistic worthiness of its construction. One must believe in a story
like that to be convinced of its logic. To lose faith in it--in its
narrative--is absolutely fatal to its purpose. The Yankee in King
Arthur's Court not only offended the English nation, but much of it
offended the better taste of Mark Twain's own countrymen, and in time it
must have offended even Mark Twain himself. Reading it, one can
visualize the author as a careering charger, with a bit in his teeth,
trampling the poetry and the tradition of the romantic days, the very
things which he himself in his happier moods cared for most. Howells
likened him to Cervantes, laughing Spain's chivalry away. The comparison
was hardly justified. It was proper enough to laugh chivalry out of
court when it was a reality; but Mark Twain, who loved Sir Thomas Malory
to the end of his days, the beauty and poetry of his chronicles; who had
written 'The Prince and the Pauper', and would one day write that divine
tale of the 'Maid of Orleans'; who was himself no more nor less than a
knight always ready to redress wrong, would seem to have been the last
person to wish to laugh it out of romance.

And yet, when all is said, one may still agree with Howells in ranking
the Yankee among Mark Twain's highest achievements in the way of "a
greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale." It is of that class,
beyond doubt. Howells goes further:

    Of all the fanciful schemes in fiction it pleases me most, and I
    give myself with absolute delight to its notion of a keen East
    Hartford Yankee finding himself, by a retroactionary spell, at the
    court of King Arthur of Britain, and becoming part of the sixth
    century with all the customs and ideas of the nineteenth in him and
    about him. The field for humanizing satire which this scheme opens
    is illimitable.

Colossal it certainly is, as Howells and Stedman agreed: colossal in its
grotesqueness as in its sublimity. Howells, summarizing Mark Twain's
gifts (1901), has written:

    He is apt to burlesque the lighter colloquiality, and it is only in
    the more serious and most tragical junctures that his people utter
    themselves with veracious simplicity and dignity. That great, burly
    fancy of his is always tempting him to the exaggeration which is the
    condition of so much of his personal humor, but which when it
    invades the drama spoils the illusion. The illusion renews itself
    in the great moments, but I wish it could be kept intact in the
    small, and I blame him that he does not rule his fancy better.

All of which applies precisely to the writing of the Yankee in King
Arthur's Court. Intended as a fierce heart-cry against human injustice
--man's inhumanity to man--as such it will live and find readers; but,
more than any other of Mark Twain's pretentious works, it needs editing
--trimming by a fond but relentless hard.




CLXXII

THE "YANKEE" IN ENGLAND

The London publishers of the Yankee were keenly anxious to revise the
text for their English readers. Clemens wrote that he had already
revised the Yankee twice, that Stedman had critically read it, and that
Mrs. Clemens had made him strike out many passages and soften others. He
added that he had read chapters of it in public several times where
Englishmen were present and had profited by their suggestions. Then he
said:

    Now, mind you, I have taken all this pains because I wanted to say a
    Yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural
    props, and yet make a book which you would be willing to print
    exactly as it comes to you, without altering a word.

    We are spoken of (by Englishmen) as a thin-skinned people. It is
    you who are thin-skinned. An Englishman may write with the most
    brutal frankness about any man or institution among us and we
    republish him without dreaming of altering a line or a word. But
    England cannot stand that kind of a book written about herself. It
    is England that is thin-skinned. It causeth me to smile when I read
    the modifications of my language which have been made in my English
    editions to fit them for the sensitive English palate.

    Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of
    offense that you'll not lack the nerve to print it just as it
    stands. I am going to get the proofs to you just as early as I can.
    I want you to read it carefully. If you can publish it without
    altering a single word, go ahead. Otherwise, please hand it to
    J. R. Osgood in time for him to have it published at my expense.

    This is important, for the reason that the book was not written for
    America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done
    their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that
    it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially
    recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the English nation to
    a little higher level of manhood in turn.

So the Yankee was published in England just as he had written it,--[The
preface was shortened and modified for both the American and English
editions. The reader will find it as originally written under Appendix
S, at the end of last volume.]--and the criticisms were as plentiful as
they were frank. It was referred to as a "lamentable failure" and as an
"audacious sacrilege" and in terms still less polite. Not all of the
English critics were violent. The Daily Telegraph gave it something more
than a column of careful review, which did not fail to point out the
book's sins with a good deal of justice and dignity; but the majority of
English papers joined in a sort of objurgatory chorus which, for a time
at least, spared neither the author nor his work. Strictures on the
Yankee extended to his earlier books. After all, Mark Twain's work was
not for the cultivated class.

These things must have begun to gravel Clemens a good deal at last, for
he wrote to Andrew Lang at considerable length, setting forth his case in
general terms--that is to say, his position as an author--inviting Lang
to stand as his advocate before the English public. In part he said:

    The critic assumes every time that if a book doesn't meet the
    cultivated-class standard it isn't valuable . . . The critic has
    actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by
    Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a
    chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy-gurdy and the
    villagers' singing society; and the Latin classics than Kipling's
    far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation
    Army . . . . If a critic should start a religion it would not
    have any object but to convert angels, and they wouldn't need it.
    It is not that little minority who are already saved that are best
    worth lifting up, I should think, but the mighty mass of the
    uncultivated who are underneath! That mass will never see the old
    masters--that sight is for the few; but the chromo-maker can lift
    them all one step upward toward appreciation of art; they cannot
    have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and the singing-class lift them
    a little way toward that far height; they will never know Homer, but
    the passing rhymester of their day leaves them higher than he found
    them; they may never even hear of the Latin classics, but they will
    strike step with Kipling's drum-beat and they will march; for all
    Jonathan Edwards's help they would die in their slums, but the
    Salvation Army will beguile some of them to a purer air and a
    cleaner life.

    . . . I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to
    help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it
    either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in
    that direction, but always hunted for bigger game--the masses. I
    have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my
    best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere . .
    . . My audience is dumb; it has no voice in print, and so I cannot
    know whether I have won its approval or only got its censure.

He closed by asking that Lang urge the critics to adopt a rule
recognizing the masses, and to formulate a standard whereby work done for
them might be judged. "No voice can reach further than yours in a case
of this kind," he said, "or carry greater weight of authority." There
was no humor in this letter, and the writer of it was clearly in earnest.

Lang's response was an article published in the Illustrated London News
on the art of Mark Twain. He began by gently ridiculing hyperculture
--the new culture--and ended with a eulogy on Huck Finn. It seems worth
while, however, to let Andrew Lang speak for himself.

    I have been educated till I nearly dropped; I have lived with the
    earliest apostles of culture, in the days when Chippendale was first
    a name to conjure with, and Japanese art came in like a raging lion,
    and Ronsard was the favorite poet, and Mr. William Morris was a
    poet, too, and blue and green were the only wear, and the name of
    Paradise was Camelot. To be sure, I cannot say that I took all this
    quite seriously, but "we, too, have played" at it, and know all
    about it. Generally speaking, I have kept up with culture. I can
    talk (if desired) about Sainte-Beuve, and Merimee, and Felicien
    Rops; I could rhyme "Ballades" when they were "in," and knew what a
    "pantoom" was . . . . And yet I have not culture. My works are
    but tinkling brass because I have not culture. For culture has got
    into new regions where I cannot enter, and, what is perhaps worse,
    I find myself delighting in a great many things which are under the
    ban of culture.

He confesses that this is a dreadful position; one that makes a man feel
like one of those Liberal politicians who are always "sitting on the
fence," and who follow their party, if follow it they do, with the
reluctant acquiescence of the prophet's donkey. He further confesses
that he has tried Hartmann and prefers Plato, that he is shaky about
Blake, though stalwart concerning Rudyard Kipling.

    This is not the worst of it. Culture has hardly a new idol but I
    long to hurl things at it. Culture can scarcely burn anything, but
    I am impelled to sacrifice to that same. I am coming to suspect
    that the majority of culture's modern disciples are a mere crowd of
    very slimly educated people who have no natural taste or impulses;
    who do not really know the best things in literature; who have a
    feverish desire to admire the newest thing, to follow the latest
    artistic fashion; who prate about "style," without the faintest
    acquaintance with the ancient examples of style in Greek, French, or
    English; who talk about the classics and--criticize the classical
    critics and poets, without being able to read a line of them in the
    original. Nothing of the natural man is left in these people; their
    intellectual equipment is made up of ignorant vanity and eager
    desire for novelty, and a yearning to be in the fashion. Take, for
    example--and we have been a long time in coming to him--Mark Twain.
    [Here follow some observations concerning the Yankee, which Lang
    confesses that he has not read, and has abstained from reading
    because----]. Here Mark Twain is not, and cannot be, at the proper
    point of view. He has not the knowledge which would enable him to
    be a sound critic of the ideals of the Middle Ages. An Arthurian
    Knight in New York or in Washington would find as much to blame, and
    justly, as a Yankee at Camelot.

Of Mark Twain's work in general he speaks with another conclusion:

    Mark Twain is a benefactor beyond most modern writers, and the
    cultured who do not laugh are merely to be pitied. But his art is
    not only that of the maker of the scarce article--mirth. I have no
    hesitation in saying that Mark Twain is one among the greatest
    contemporary makers of fiction . . . . I can never forget or be
    ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which I read Huckleberry
    Finn for the first time years ago. I read it again last night,
    deserting Kenilworth for Huck. I never laid it down till I had
    finished it. I perused several passages more than once, and rose
    from it with a higher opinion of its merits than ever.

    What is it that we want in a novel? We want a vivid and original
    picture of life; we want character naturally displayed in action;
    and if we get the excitement of adventure into the bargain, and that
    adventure possible and plausible, I so far differ from the newest
    school of criticism as to think that we have additional cause for
    gratitude. If, moreover, there is an unstrained sense of humor in
    the narrator we have a masterpiece, and Huckleberry Finn is, nothing
    less.

He reviews Huck sympathetically in detail, and closes:

    There are defects of taste, or passages that to us seem deficient in
    taste, but the book remains a nearly flawless gem of romance and of
    humor. The world appreciates it, no doubt, but "cultured critics"
    are probably unaware of its singular value. The great American
    novel has escaped the eyes of those who watch to see this new planet
    swim into their ken. And will Mark Twain never write such another?
    One is enough for him to live by, and for our gratitude, but not
    enough for our desire.

In the brief column and a half which it occupies, this comment of Andrew
Lang's constitutes as thoughtful and fair an estimate of Mark Twain's
work as was ever written.

W. T. Stead, of the Review of Reviews, was about the only prominent
English editor to approve of the Yankee and to exploit its merits. Stead
brought down obloquy upon himself by so doing, and his separation from
his business partner would seem to have been at least remotely connected
with this heresy.

The Yankee in King Arthur's Court was dramatized in America by Howard
Taylor, one of the Enterprise compositors, whom Clemens had known in the
old Comstock days. Taylor had become a playwright of considerable
success, with a number of well-known actors and actresses starring in his
plays. The Yankee, however, did not find a manager, or at least it seems
not to have reached the point of production.




CLXXIII

A SUMMER AT ONTEORA

With the exception of one article--"A Majestic Literary Fossil"
--[Harper's Magazine, February, 1890. Included in the "Complete Works."]
--Clemens was writing nothing of importance at this time. This article
grew out of a curious old medical work containing absurd prescriptions
which, with Theodore Crane, he had often laughed over at the farm. A
sequel to Huckleberry Finn--Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians
--was begun, and a number of its chapters were set in type on the new
Paige compositor, which had cost such a gallant sum, and was then thought
to be complete. There seems to have been a plan to syndicate the story,
but at the end of Chapter IX Huck and Tom had got themselves into a
predicament from which it seemed impossible to extricate them, and the
plot was suspended for further inspiration, which apparently never came.

Clemens, in fact, was troubled with rheumatism in his arm and shoulder,
which made writing difficult. Mrs. Clemens, too, had twinges of the
malady. They planned to go abroad for the summer of 1890, to take the
waters of some of the German baths, but they were obliged to give up the
idea. There were too many business complications; also the health of
Clemens's mother had become very feeble. They went to Tannersville in
the Catskills, instead--to the Onteora Club, where Mrs. Candace Wheeler
had gathered a congenial colony in a number of picturesque cottages, with
a comfortable hotel for the more transient visitor. The Clemenses
secured a cottage for the season. Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence
Hutton, Carroll Beckwith, the painter; Brander Matthews, Dr. Heber
Newton, Mrs. Custer, and Dora Wheeler were among those who welcomed Mark
Twain and his family at a generous home-made banquet.

It was the beginning of a happy summer. There was a constant visiting
from one cottage to another, with frequent assemblings at the Bear and
Fox Inn, their general headquarters. There were pantomimes and charades,
in which Mark Twain and his daughters always had star parts. Susy
Clemens, who was now eighteen, brilliant and charming, was beginning to
rival her father as a leader of entertainment. Her sister Clara gave
impersonations of Modjeska and Ada Rehan. When Fourth of July came there
were burlesque races, of which Mark Twain was starter, and many of that
lighthearted company took part. Sometimes, in the evening, they gathered
in one of the cottages and told stories by the firelight, and once he
told the story of the Golden Arm, so long remembered, and brought them up
with the same old jump at the sudden climax. Brander Matthews remembers
that Clemens was obliged frequently to go to New York on business
connected with the machine and the publishing, and that during one of
these absences a professional entertainer came along, and in the course
of his program told a Mark Twain story, at which Mrs. Clemens and the
girls laughed without recognizing its authorship. Matthews also
remembers Jean, as a little girl of ten, allowed to ride a pony and to go
barefoot, to her great delight, full of health and happiness, a favorite
of the colony.

Clemens would seem to have forgiven Brander Matthews for his copyright
articles, for he walked over to the Matthews cottage one morning and
asked to be taught piquet, the card game most in vogue there that season.
At odd times he sat to Carroll Beckwith for his portrait, and smoked a
cob pipe meantime, so Beckwith painted him in that way.

It was a season that closed sadly. Clemens was called to Keokuk in
August, to his mother's bedside, for it was believed that her end was
near. She rallied, and he returned to Onteora. But on the 27th of
October came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two
generations before had followed John Clemens into the wilderness, and
along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to Hannibal and
laid to rest at his side. She was in her eighty-eighth year.

The Clemens family were back in Hartford by this time, and it was only a
little later that Mrs. Clemens was summoned to the death-bed of her own
mother, in Elmira. Clemens accompanied her, but Jean being taken
suddenly ill he returned to Hartford. Watching by the little girl's
bedside on the night of the 27th of November, he wrote Mrs. Clemens a
birthday letter, telling of Jean's improved condition and sending other
good news and as many loving messages as he could devise. But it proved
a sad birthday for Mrs. Clemens, for on that day her mother's gentle and
beautiful soul went out from among them. The foreboding she had felt at
the passing of Theodore Crane had been justified. She had a dread that
the harvest of death was not yet ended. Matters in general were going
badly with them, and an anxiety began to grow to get away from America,
and so perhaps leave sorrow and ill-luck behind. Clemens, near the end
of December, writing to his publishing manager, Hall, said:

    Merry Christmas to you, and I wish to God I could have one myself
    before I die.

The house was emptier that winter than before, for Susy was at Bryn Mawr.
Clemens planned some literary work, but the beginning, after his long
idleness, was hard. A diversion was another portrait of himself, this
time undertaken by Charles Noel Flagg. Clemens rather enjoyed
portrait-sittings. He could talk and smoke, and he could incidentally
acquire information. He liked to discuss any man's profession with him,
and in his talks with Flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight
which would enable him to appreciate the old masters. Flagg found him a
tractable sitter, and a most interesting one. Once he paid him a
compliment, then apologized for having said the obvious thing.

"Never mind the apology," said Clemens. "The compliment that helps us on
our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is
spoken out."

When Flagg's portrait was about completed, Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Crane
came to the studio to look at it. Mrs. Clemens complained only that the
necktie was crooked.

"But it's always crooked," said Flagg, "and I have a great fancy for the
line it makes."

She straightened it on Clemens himself, but it immediately became crooked
again. Clemens said:

"If you were to make that necktie straight people would say; 'Good
portrait, but there is something the matter with it. I don't know where
it is.'"

The tie was left unchanged.




CLXXIV

THE MACHINE

The reader may have realized that by the beginning of 1891 Mark Twain's
finances were in a critical condition. The publishing business had
managed to weather along. It was still profitable, and could have been
made much more so if the capital necessary to its growth had not been
continuously and relentlessly absorbed by that gigantic vampire of
inventions--that remorseless Frankenstein monster--the machine.

The beginning of this vast tragedy (for it was no less than that) dated
as far back as 1880, when Clemens one day had taken a minor and purely
speculative interest in patent rights, which was to do away with setting
type by hand. In some memoranda which he made more than ten years later,
when the catastrophe was still a little longer postponed, he gave some
account of the matter.

    This episode has now spread itself over more than one-fifth of my
    life, a considerable stretch of time, as I am now 55 years old.

    Ten or eleven years ago Dwight Buell, a jeweler, called at our house
    and was shown up to the billiard-room-which was my study; and the
    game got more study than the other sciences. He wanted me to take
    some stock in a type-setting machine. He said it was at the Colt's
    Arms factory, and was about finished. I took $2,000 of the stock.
    I was always taking little chances like that, and almost always
    losing by it, too. Some time afterward I was invited to go down to
    the factory and see the machine. I went, promising myself nothing,
    for I knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held
    the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting
    machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot
    be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think or
    retire defeated. So, the performance I witnessed did most
    thoroughly amaze me. Here was a machine that was really setting
    type, and doing it with swiftness and accuracy, too. Moreover, it
    was distributing its case at the same time. The distribution was
    automatic; the machine fed itself from a galley of dead matter and
    without human help or suggestion, for it began its work of its own
    accord when the type channels needed filling, and stopped of its own
    accord when they were full enough. The machine was almost a
    complete compositor; it lacked but one feature--it did not "justify"
    the lines. This was done by the operator's assistant.

    I saw the operator set at the rate of 3,000 ems an hour, which,
    counting distribution, was but little short of four casemen's work.
    William Hamersley was there. He said he was already a considerable
    owner, and was going to take as much more of the stock as he could
    afford. Wherefore, I set down my name for an additional $3,000. It
    is here that the music begins.

It was the so-called Farnham machine that he saw, invented by James W.
Paige, and if they had placed it on the market then, without waiting for
the inventor to devise improvements, the story might have been a
different one. But Paige was never content short of absolute perfection
--a machine that was not only partly human, but entirely so. Clemens'
used to say later that the Paige type-setter would do everything that a
human being could do except drink and swear and go on a strike. He might
properly have omitted the last item, but of that later. Paige was a
small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man, with a crystal-clear
mind, but a dreamer and a visionary. Clemens says of him: "He is a poet;
a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in
steel."

It is easy to see now that Mark Twain and Paige did not make a good
business combination. When Paige declared that, wonderful as the machine
was, he could do vastly greater things with it, make it worth many more
and much larger fortunes by adding this attachment and that, Clemens was
just the man to enter into his dreams and to furnish the money to realize
them. Paige did not require much money at first, and on the capital
already invested he tinkered along with his improvements for something
like four or five years; Hamersley and Clemens meantime capitalizing the
company and getting ready to place the perfected invention on the market.
By the time the Grant episode had ended Clemens had no reason to believe
but that incalculable wealth lay just ahead, when the newspapers should
be apprised of the fact that their types were no longer to be set by
hand. Several contracts had been made with Paige, and several new
attachments had been added to the machine. It seemed to require only one
thing more, the justifier, which would save the labor of the extra man.
Paige could be satisfied with nothing short of that, even though the
extra man's wage was unimportant. He must have his machine do it all,
and meantime five precious years had slipped away. Clemens, in his
memoranda, says:

    End of 1885. Paige arrives at my house unheralded. I had seen
    little or nothing of him for a year or two. He said:

    "What will you complete the machine for?"

    "What will it cost?"

    "Twenty thousand dollars; certainly not over $30,000."

    "What will you give?"

    "I'll give you half."

Clemens was "flush" at this time. His reading tour with Cable, the great
sale of Huck Finn, the prospect of the Grant book, were rosy realities.
He said:

    "I'll do it, but the limit must be $30,000."

They agreed to allow Hamersley a tenth interest for the money he had
already invested and for legal advice.

Hamersley consented readily enough, and when in February, 1886, the new
contract was drawn they believed themselves heir to the millions of the
Fourth Estate.

By this time F. G. Whitmore had come into Clemens's business affairs, and
he did not altogether approve of the new contract. Among other things,
it required that Clemens should not only complete the machine, but
promote it, capitalize it commercially. Whitmore said:

"Mr. Clemens, that clause can bankrupt you."

Clemens answered: "Never mind that, Whitmore; I've considered that. I
can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if I can
get a perfect machine."

He immediately began to calculate the number of millions he would be
worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the
waiting world. He covered pages with figures that never ran short of
millions, and frequently approached the billion mark. Colonel Sellers in
his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly. He obtained a list of
all the newspapers in the United States and in Europe, and he counted up
the machines that would be required by each. To his nephew, Sam Moffett,
visiting him one day, he declared that it would take ten men to count the
profits from the typesetter. He realized clearly enough that a machine
which would set and distribute type and do the work of half a dozen men
or more would revolutionize type composition. The fact that other
inventors besides Paige were working quite as diligently and perhaps
toward more simple conclusions did not disturb him. Rumors came of the
Rogers machine and the Thorne machine and the Mergenthaler linotype, but
Mark Twain only smiled. When the promoters of the Mergenthaler offered
to exchange half their interests for a half interest in the Paige patent,
to obtain thereby a wider insurance of success, it only confirmed his
trust, and he let the golden opportunity go by.

Clemens thinks the thirty thousand dollars lasted about a year. Then
Paige confessed that the machine was still incomplete, but he said that
four thousand dollars more would finish it, and that with ten thousand
dollars he could finish it and give a big exhibition in New York. He had
discarded the old machine altogether, it seems, and at Pratt & Whitney's
shops was building a new one from the ground up--a machine of twenty
thousand minutely exact parts, each of which must be made by expert hand
workmanship after elaborate drawings and patterns even more expensive. It
was an undertaking for a millionaire.

Paige offered to borrow from Clemens the amount needed, offering the
machine as security. Clemens supplied the four thousand dollars, and
continued to advance money from time to time at the rate of three to four
thousand dollars a month, until he had something like eighty thousand
dollars invested, with the machine still unfinished. This would be early
in 1888, by which time other machines had reached a state of completion
and were being placed on the market. The Mergenthaler, in particular,
was attracting wide attention. Paige laughed at it, and Clemens, too,
regarded it as a joke. The moment their machine was complete all other
machines would disappear. Even the fact that the Tribune had ordered
twenty-three of the linotypes, and other journals were only waiting to
see the paper in its new dress before ordering, did not disturb them.
Those linotypes would all go into the scrap-heap presently. It was too
bad people would waste their money so. In January, 1888, Paige promised
that the machine would be done by the 1st of April. On the 1st of April
he promised it for September, but in October he acknowledged there were
still eighty-five days' work to be done on it. In November Clemens wrote
to Orion:

The machine is apparently almost done--but I take no privileges on that
account; it must be done before I spend a cent that can be avoided. I
have kept this family on very short commons for two years and they must
go on scrimping until the machine is finished, no matter how long that
may be.

By the end of '88 the income from the books and the business and Mrs.
Clemens's Elmira investments no longer satisfied the demands of the
type-setter, in addition to the household expense, reduced though the
latter was; and Clemens began by selling and hypothecating his marketable
securities. The whole household interest by this time centered in the
machine. What the Tennessee land had been to John and Jane Clemens and
their children, the machine had now become to Samuel Clemens and his
family. "When the machine is finished everything will be all right
again" afforded the comfort of that long-ago sentence, "When the
Tennessee land is sold."

They would have everything they wanted then. Mrs. Clemens planned
benefactions, as was her wont. Once she said to her sister:

"How strange it will seem to have unlimited means, to be able to do
whatever you want to do, to give whatever you want to give without
counting the cost."

Straight along through another year the three thousand dollars and more a
month continued, and then on the 5th of January, 1889, there came what
seemed the end--the machine and justifier were complete! In his notebook
on that day Mark Twain set down this memorandum:

                       EUREKA!

    Saturday, January 5, 1889-12.20 P.M. At this moment I have seen a
    line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery! This is the
    first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has
    ever been done. Present:
    J. W. Paige, the inventor;
    Charles Davis, | Mathematical assistants
    Earll          | & mechanical
    Graham         | experts
    Bates, foreman, and S. L. Clemens.
    This record is made immediately after the prodigious event.

Two days later he made another note:

    Monday, January 7--4.45 P.m. The first proper name ever set by this
    new keyboard was William Shakspeare. I set it at the above hour; &
    I perceive, now that I see the name written, that I either
    misspelled it then or I've misspelled it now.

    The space-bar did its duty by the electric connections & steam &
    separated the two words preparatory to the reception of the space.

It seemed to him that his troubles were at an end. He wrote overflowing
letters, such as long ago he had written about his first mining claims,
to Orion and to other members of the family and to friends in America and
Europe. One of these letters, written to George Standring, a London
printer and publisher, also an author, will serve as an example.

    The machine is finished! An hour and forty minutes ago a line of
    movable type was spaced and justified by machinery for the first
    time in the history of the world. And I was there to see.

    That was the final function. I had before seen the machine set
    type, automatically, and distribute type, and automatically
    distribute its eleven different thicknesses of spaces. So now I
    have seen the machine, operated by one individual, do the whole
    thing, and do it a deal better than any man at the case can do it.

    This is by far and away the most marvelous invention ever contrived
    by man. And it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made of
    massive steel, and will last a century.

    She will do the work of six men, and do it better than any six men
    that ever stood at a case.

    The death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world
    was signed at 12.20 this afternoon, when that first line was shot
    through this machine and came out perfectly spaced and justified.
    And automatically, mind you.

    There was a speck of invisible dirt on one of those nonpareil types.
    Well, the machine allowed for that by inserting of its own accord a
    space which was the 5-1,000 of an inch thinner than it would have
    used if the dirt had been absent. But when I send you the details
    you will see that that's nothing for this machine to do; you'll see
    that it knows more and has got more brains than all the printers in
    the world put together.

His letter to Orion was more technical, also more jubilant. At the end
he said:

    All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical
    birth--the first justification of a line of movable type by
    machinery--& also set down the hour and the minute. Nobody had
    drank anything, & yet everybody seemed drunk. Well-dizzy,
    stupefied, stunned.

    All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty
    nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical
    miracle. Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton-gins, sewing-
    machines, Babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses,
    all mere toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone and
    far in the land of human inventions.

In one paragraph of Orion's letter he refers to the machine as a "cunning
devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived." That was a profound
truth, though not as he intended it. That creation of James Paige's
brain reflected all the ingenuity and elusiveness of its creator, and
added something on its own account. It was discovered presently that it
had a habit of breaking the types. Paige said it was a trifling thing:
he could fix it, but it meant taking down the machine, and that deadly
expense of three thousand or four thousand dollars a month for the band
of workmen and experts in Pratt & Whitney's machine shops did not cease.
In February the machine was again setting and justifying type "to a
hair," and Whitmore's son, Fred, was running it at a rate of six thousand
ems an hour, a rate of composition hitherto unknown in the history of the
world. His speed was increased to eight thousand ems an hour by the end
of the year, and the machine was believed to have a capacity of eleven
thousand. No type-setter invented to this day could match it for
accuracy and precision when it was in perfect order, but its point of
perfection was apparently a vanishing point. It would be just reached,
when it would suddenly disappear, and Paige would discover other needed
corrections. Once, when it was apparently complete as to every detail;
and running like a human thing, with such important customers as the New
York Herald and other great papers ready to place their orders, Paige
suddenly discovered that it required some kind of an air-blast, and it
was all taken down again and the air-blast, which required months to
invent and perfect, was added.

But what is the use of remembering all these bitter details? The steady
expense went on through another year, apparently increasing instead of
diminishing, until, by the beginning of 1890, Clemens was finding it
almost impossible to raise funds to continue the work. Still he
struggled on. It was the old mining fascination--"a foot farther into
the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold."

He sent for Joe Goodman to come and help him organize a capital-stock
company, in which Senator Jones and John Mackay, old Comstock friends,
were to be represented. He never for a moment lost faith in the final
outcome, and he believed that if they could build their own factory the
delays and imperfections of construction would be avoided. Pratt &
Whitney had been obliged to make all the parts by hand. With their own
factory the new company would have vast and perfect machinery dedicated
entirely to the production of type-setters.

Nothing short of two million dollars capitalization was considered, and
Goodman made at least three trips from California to the East and labored
with Jones and Mackay all that winter and at intervals during the
following year, through which that "cunning devil," the machine, consumed
its monthly four thousand dollars--money that was the final gleanings and
sweepings of every nook and corner of the strong-box and bank-account and
savings of the Clemens family resources. With all of Mark Twain's fame
and honors his life at this period was far from an enviable one. It was,
in fact, a fevered delirium, often a veritable nightmare.

Reporters who approached him for interviews, little guessing what he was
passing through, reported that Mark Twain's success in life had made him
crusty and sour.

Goodman remembers that when they were in Washington, conferring with
Jones, and had rooms at the Arlington, opening together, often in the
night he would awaken to see a light burning in the next room and to hear
Mark Twain's voice calling:

"Joe, are you awake?"

"Yes, Mark, what is it?"

"Oh, nothing, only I can't sleep. Won't you talk awhile? I know it's
wrong to disturb you, but I am so d--d miserable that I can't help it."

Whereupon he would get up and talk and talk, and pace the floor and curse
the delays until he had refreshed himself, and then perhaps wallow in
millions until breakfast-time.

Jones and Mackay, deeply interested, were willing to put up a reasonable
amount of money, but they were unable to see a profit in investing so
large a capital in a plant for constructing the machines.

Clemens prepared estimates showing that the American business alone would
earn thirty-five million dollars a year, and the European business twenty
million dollars more. These dazzled, but they did not convince the
capitalists. Jones was sincerely anxious to see the machine succeed, and
made an engagement to come out to see it work, but a day or two before he
was to come Paige was seized with an inspiration. The type-setter was
all in parts when the day came, and Jones's visit had to be postponed.
Goodman wrote that the fatal delay had "sicklied over the bloom" of
Jones's original enthusiasm.

Yet Clemens seems never to have been openly violent with Paige. In the
memorandum which he completed about this time he wrote:

    Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he
    knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut
    out all human succor and watch that trap until he died.

He was grabbing at straws now. He offered a twentieth or a hundredth or
a thousandth part of the enterprise for varying sums, ranging from one
thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. He tried to capitalize his
advance (machine) royalties, and did dispose of a few of these; but when
the money came in for them he was beset by doubts as to the final
outcome, and though at his wit's ends for further funds, he returned the
checks to the friends who had sent them. One five-thousand-dollar check
from a friend named Arnot, in Elmira, went back by the next mail. He was
willing to sacrifice his own last penny, but he could not take money from
those who were blindly backing his judgment only and not their own. He
still had faith in Jones, faith which lasted up to the 13th of February,
1891. Then came a final letter, in which Jones said that he had
canvassed the situation thoroughly with such men as Mackay, Don Cameron,
Whitney, and others, with the result that they would have nothing to do
with the machine. Whitney and Cameron, he said, were large stockholders
in the Mergenthaler. Jones put it more kindly and more politely than
that, and closed by saying that there could be no doubt as to the
machine's future an ambiguous statement. A letter from young Hall came
about the same time, urging a heavy increase of capital in the business.
The Library of American Literature, its leading feature, was handled on
the instalment plan. The collections from this source were deferred
driblets, while the bills for manufacture and promotion must be paid down
in cash. Clemens realized that for the present at least the dream was
ended. The family securities were exhausted. The book trade was dull;
his book royalties were insufficient even to the demands of the
household. He signed further notes to keep business going, left the
matter of the machine in abeyance, and turned once more to the trade of
authorship. He had spent in the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety
thousand dollars on the typesetter--money that would better have been
thrown into the Connecticut River, for then the agony had been more
quickly over. As it was, it had shadowed many precious years.




CLXXV

"THE CLAIMANT"--LEAVING HARTFORD

For the first time in twenty years Mark Twain was altogether dependent on
literature. He did not feel mentally unequal to the new problem; in
fact, with his added store of experience, he may have felt himself more
fully equipped for authorship than ever before. It had been his habit to
write within his knowledge and observation. To a correspondent of this
time he reviewed his stock in trade--

    . . . I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when
    pretending to portray life. But I confined myself to the boy-life
    out on the Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and
    not because I was not familiar with other phases of life. I was a
    soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted
    like a rat the whole time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself
    hasn't a more burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity
    with that death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which
    is a raw soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without
    any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is
    ever going to see.

    Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple
    of weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that
    direction. And I've done "pocket-mining" during three months in the
    one little patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals
    gold in pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and
    exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature
    ever indulged in. There are not thirty men left alive who, being
    told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain,
    would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest idea of
    how to set about it; but I am one of the possible 20 or 30 who
    possess the secret, and I could go and put my hand on that hidden
    treasure with a most deadly precision.

    And I've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find
    it--just with a touch of the tongue. And I've been a silver miner
    and know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast. And so
    I know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte
    knows them exteriorly.

    And I was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the
    inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two
    sessions and the same in Congress one session, and thus learned to
    know personally three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the
    selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.

    And I was some years a Mississippi pilot, and familiarly knew all
    the different kinds of steamboatmen--a race apart, and not like
    other folk.

    And I was for some years a traveling "jour" printer, and wandered
    from city to city--and so I know that sect familiarly.

    And I was a lecturer on the public platform a number of seasons and
    was a responder to toasts at all the different kinds of banquets
    --and so I know a great many secrets about audiences--secrets not to
    be got out of books, but only acquirable by experience.

    And I watched over one dear project of mine for years, spent a
    fortune on it, and failed to make it go--and the history of that
    would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves
    as in a mirror; and they would testify and say, Verily, this is not
    imagination; this fellow has been there--and after would they cast
    dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming.

    And I am a publisher, and did pay to one author's widow (General
    Grant's) the largest copyright checks this world has seen
    --aggregating more than L80,000 in the first year.

    And I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.

    Now then: as the most valuable capital or culture or education
    usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to
    be well equipped for that trade.

    I surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real,
    none of it artificial, for I don't know anything about books.

This generous bill of literary particulars was fully warranted. Mark
Twain's equipment was equal to his occasions. It is true that he was no
longer young, and that his health was not perfect, but his resolution and
his energy had not waned.

His need was imminent and he lost no time. He dug out from his
pigeonholes such materials as he had in stock, selecting a few completed
manuscripts for immediate disposal--among them his old article entitled,
"Mental Telegraphy," written in 1878, when he had hesitated to offer it,
in the fear that it would not be accepted by the public otherwise than as
a joke. He added to it now a supplement and sent it to Mr. Alden, of
Harper's Magazine.

Psychic interest had progressed in twelve years; also Mark Twain had come
to be rather more seriously regarded. The article was accepted promptly!
--[The publication of this article created a good deal of a stir and
resulted in the first general recognition of what later became known as
Telepathy. A good many readers insisted on regarding the whole matter as
one of Mark Twain's jokes, but its serious acceptance was much wider.]
--The old sketch, "Luck," also found its way to Harper's Magazine, and
other manuscripts were looked over and furbished up with a view to their
disposal. Even the history game was dragged from the dust of its
retirement, and Hall was instructed to investigate its chance of profit.

Then Mark Twain went to work in earnest. Within a week after the
collapse of the Jones bubble he was hard at work on a new book--the
transmigration of the old "Claimant" play into a novel.

Ever since the appearance of the Yankee there had been what was evidently
a concerted movement to induce him to write a novel with the theories of
Henry George as the central idea. Letters from every direction had urged
him to undertake such a story, and these had suggested a more serious
purpose for the Claimant book. A motif in which there is a young lord
who renounces his heritage and class to come to America and labor with
his hands; who attends socialistic meetings at which men inspired by
readings of 'Progress and Poverty' and 'Looking Backward' address their
brothers of toil, could have in it something worth while. Clemens
inserted portions of some of his discarded essays in these addresses, and
had he developed this element further, and abandoned Colonel Sellers's
materialization lunacies to the oblivion they had earned, the result
might have been more fortunate.

But his faith in the new Sellers had never died, and the temptation to
use scenes from the abandoned play proved to be too strong to be
resisted. The result was incongruous enough. The author, however,
admired it amazingly at the time. He sent Howells stirring reports of
his progress. He wrote Hall that the book would be ready soon and that
there must be seventy-five thousand orders by the date of issue, "not a
single one short of that." Then suddenly, at the end of February, the
rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly
hold the pen. He conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and
wrote Howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three
months, with cylinders enough to carry one hundred and seventy-five
thousand words.

    I don't want to erase any of them. My right arm is nearly disabled
    by rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (and sell 100,000
    copies of it-no, I mean 1,000,000--next fall). I feel sure I can
    dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't have to yell. I write
    2,000 words a day. I think I can dictate twice as many.

    But mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you--go ahead
    and do it all the same.

Howells replied encouragingly. He had talked a letter into a phonograph
and the phonograph man had talked his answer into it, after which the
cylinder had been taken to a typewriter in the-next room and correctly
written out. If a man had the "cheek" to dictate his story into a
phonograph, Howells said, all the rest seemed perfectly easy.

Clemens ordered a phonograph and gave it a pretty fair trial. It was
only a partial success. He said he couldn't write literature with it
because it hadn't any ideas or gift for elaboration, but was just as
matter-of-fact, compressive and unresponsive, grave and unsmiling as the
devil--a poor audience.

I filled four dozen cylinders in two sittings, then I found I could have
said it about as easy with the pen, and said it a deal better. Then I
resigned.

He did not immediately give it up. To relieve his aching arm he
alternated the phonograph with the pen, and the work progressed rapidly.
Early in May he was arranging for its serial disposition, and it was
eventually sold for twelve thousand dollars to the McClure Syndicate, who
placed it with a number of papers in America and with the Idler Magazine
in England. W. M. Laffan, of the Sun, an old and tried friend, combined
with McClure in the arrangement. Laffan also proposed to join with
McClure in paying Mark Twain a thousand dollars each for a series of six
European letters. This was toward the end of May, 1891, when Clemens had
already decided upon a long European sojourn.

There were several reasons why this was desirable. Neither Clemens nor
his wife was in good health. Both of them were troubled with rheumatism,
and a council of physicians had agreed that Mrs. Clemens had some
disturbance of the heart. The death of Charles L. Webster in April--the
fourth death among relatives in two years--had renewed her forebodings.
Susy, who had been at Bryn Mawr, had returned far from well. The
European baths and the change of travel it was believed would be
beneficial to the family health. Furthermore, the maintenance of the
Hartford home was far too costly for their present and prospective
income. The house with its associations of seventeen incomparable years
must be closed. A great period had ended.

They arranged to sail on the 6th of June by the French line.--[On the
Gascogne.]--Mrs. Crane was to accompany them, and came over in April to
help in breaking the news to the servants. John and Ellen O'Neill (the
gardener and his wife) were to remain in charge; places were found for
George and Patrick. Katie Leary was retained to accompany the family. It
was a sad dissolution.

The day came for departure and the carriage was at the door. Mrs.
Clemens did not come immediately. She was looking into the rooms,
bidding a kind of silent good-by to the home she had made and to all its
memories. Following the others she entered the carriage, and Patrick
McAleer drove them together for the last time. They were going on a long
journey. They did not guess how long, or that the place would never be
home to them again.




CLXXVI

A EUROPEAN SUMMER

They landed at Havre and went directly to Paris, where they remained
about a week. From Paris Clemens wrote to Hall that a deal by which he
had hoped to sell out his interest in the type-setter to the Mallorys, of
the Churchman, had fallen through.

"Therefore," he said, "you will have to modify your instalment system to
meet the emergency of a constipated purse; for if you should need to
borrow any more money I would not know how or where to raise it."

The Clemens party went to Geneva, then rested for a time at the baths of
Aix; from Aix to Bayreuth to attend the Wagner festival, and from
Bayreuth to Marienbad for further additions of health. Clemens began
writing his newspaper letters at Aix, the first of which consists of
observations at that "paradise of rheumatics." This letter is really a
careful and faithful description of Aix-les-Bains, with no particular
drift of humor in it. He tells how in his own case the baths at first
developed plenty of pain, but that the subsequent ones removed almost all
of it.

"I've got back the use of my arm the last few days, and I am going away
now," he says, and concludes by describing the beautiful drives and
scenery about Aix--the pleasures to be found paddling on little Lake
Bourget and the happy excursions to Annecy.

    At the end of an hour you come to Annecy and rattle through its old
    crooked lanes, built solidly up with curious old houses that are a
    dream of the Middle Ages, and presently you come to the main object
    of your trip--Lake Annecy. It is a revelation. It is a miracle.
    It brings the tears to a body's eyes. It is so enchanting. That is
    to say, it affects you just as all other things that you instantly
    recognize as perfect affect you--perfect music, perfect eloquence,
    perfect art, perfect joy, perfect grief.

He was getting back into his old descriptive swing, but his dislike for
travel was against him, and he found writing the letters hard. From
Bayreuth he wrote "At the Shrine of St. Wagner," one of the best
descriptions of that great musical festival that has been put into words.
He paid full tribute to the performance, also to the Wagner devotion,
confessing its genuineness.

    This opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of
    all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some, and have
    heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night
    away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the
    one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes I feel like
    the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in
    the college of the learned, and always during service I feel like a
    heretic in heaven.

He tells how he really enjoyed two of the operas, and rejoiced in
supposing that his musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected;
but alas! he was informed by experts that those particular events were
not real music at all. Then he says:

    Well, I ought to have recognized the sign the old, sure sign that
    has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in
    art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this
    fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of
    many and many a chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me
    profit sometimes; I was the only man out of 3,200 who got his money
    back on those two operas.

His third letter was from Marienbad, in Bohemia, another
"health-factory," as he calls it, and is of the same general character as
those preceding. In his fourth letter he told how he himself took charge
of the family fortunes and became courier from Aix to Bayreuth. It is a
very delightful letter, most of it, and probably not greatly burlesqued
or exaggerated in its details. It is included now in the "Complete
Works," as fresh and delightful as ever. They returned to Germany at the
end of August, to Nuremberg, which he notes as the "city of exquisite
glimpses," and to Heidelberg, where they had their old apartment of
thirteen years before, Room 40 at the Schloss Hotel, with its wonderful
prospect of wood and hill, and the haze-haunted valley of the Rhine. They
remained less than a week in that beautiful place, and then were off for
Switzerland, Lucerne, Brienz, Interlaken, finally resting at the Hotel
Beau Rivage, Ouchy, Lausanne, on beautiful Lake Leman.

Clemens had agreed to write six of the newspaper letters, and he had by
this time finished five of them, the fifth being dated from Interlaken,
its subject, "Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty." He wrote to Hall that
it was his intention to write another book of travel and to take a year
or two to collect the material. The Century editors were after him for a
series after the style of Innocents Abroad. He considered this
suggestion, but declined by cable, explaining to Hall that he intended to
write for serial publication no more than the six newspaper letters. He
said:

    To write a book of travel would be less trouble than to write six
    detached chapters. Each of these letters requires the same variety
    of treatment and subject that one puts into a book; but in the book
    each chapter doesn't have to be rounded and complete in itself.

He suggested that the six letters be gathered into a small volume which
would contain about thirty-five or forty thousand words, to be sold as
low as twenty-five cents, but this idea appears to have been dropped.

At Ouchy Clemens conceived the idea of taking a little trip on his own
account, an excursion that would be a rest after the strenuous three
months' travel and sightseeing--one that he could turn into literature.
He engaged Joseph Very, a courier used during their earlier European
travels, and highly recommended in the Tramp Abroad. He sent Joseph over
to Lake Bourget to engage a boat and a boatman for a ten days' trip down
the river Rhone. For five dollars Joseph bought a safe, flat-bottom
craft; also he engaged the owner as pilot. A few days later--September
19--Clemens followed. They stopped overnight on an island in Lake
Bourget, and in his notes Clemens tells how he slept in the old castle of
Chatillon, in the room where a pope was born. They started on their
drift next morning. To Mrs. Clemens, in some good-by memoranda, he said:

    The lake is as smooth as glass; a brilliant sun is shining.

    Our boat is so comfortable and shady with its awning.

    11.20. We have crossed the lake and are entering the canal. Shall
    presently be in the Rhone.

    Noon. Nearly down to the Rhone, passing the village of Chanaz.

    Sunday, 3.15 P.M. We have been in the Rhone three hours. It
    is unimaginably still & reposeful & cool & soft & breezy. No rowing
    or work of any kind to do--we merely float with the current we glide
    noiseless and swift--as fast as a London cab-horse rips along--8
    miles an hour--the swiftest current I've ever boated in. We have the
    entire river to ourselves nowhere a boat of any kind.

Pleasant it must have been in the warm September days to go swinging down
that swift, gray stream which comes racing out of Switzerland into
France, fed from a thousand glaciers. He sent almost daily memoranda of
his progress. Half-way to Arles he wrote:

    It's too delicious, floating with the swift current under the
    awning these superb, sunshiny days in deep peace and quietness.

    Some of these curious old historical towns strangely persuade me,
    but it is so lovely afloat that I don't stop, but view them from the
    outside and sail on. We get abundance of grapes and peaches for
    next to nothing. My, but that inn was suffocating with garlic where
    we stayed last night! I had to hold my nose as we went up-stairs or
    I believe I should have fainted.

    Little bit of a room, rude board floor unswept, 2 chairs, unpainted
    white pine table--void the furniture! Had a good firm bed, solid as
    a rock, & you could have brained an ox with the bolster.

    These six hours have been entirely delightful. I want to do all the
    rivers of Europe in an open boat in summer weather.

    Still further along he described one of their shore accommodations.

    Night caught us yesterday where we had to take quarters in a
    peasant's house which was occupied by the family and a lot of cows &
    calves, also several rabbits.--[His word for fleas. Neither fleas
    nor mosquitoes ever bit him--probably because of his steady use of
    tobacco.]--The latter had a ball & I was the ballroom; but they
    were very friendly and didn't bite.

    The peasants were mighty kind and hearty & flew around & did their
    best to make us comfortable. This morning I breakfasted on the
    shore in the open air with two sociable dogs & a cat. Clean cloth,
    napkins & table furniture, white sugar, a vast hunk of excellent
    butter, good bread, first-class coffee with pure milk, fried fish
    just caught. Wonderful that so much cleanliness should come out of
    such a phenomenally dirty house.

    An hour ago we saw the Falls of the Rhone, a prodigiously rough and
    dangerous-looking place; shipped a little water, but came to no
    harm. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of piloting & boat
    management I ever saw. Our admiral knew his business.

    We have had to run ashore for shelter every time it has rained
    heretofore, but Joseph has been putting in his odd time making a
    waterproof sun-bonnet for the boat, & now we sail along dry,
    although we have had many heavy showers this morning.

Here follows a pencil-drawing of the boat and its new awning, and he
adds: "I'm on the stern, under the shelter, and out of sight."

The trip down the Rhone proved more valuable as an outing than as
literary material. Clemens covered one hundred and seventy-four pages
with his notes of it, then gave it up. Traveling alone with no one but
Joseph and the Admiral (former owner of the craft) was reposeful and
satisfactory, but it did not inspire literary flights. He tried to
rectify the lack of companionship by introducing fictitious characters,
such as Uncle Abner, Fargo, and Stavely, a young artist; also Harris,
from the Tramp Abroad; but Harris was not really there this time, and
Mark Twain's genius, given rather to elaboration than to construction,
found it too severe a task to imagine a string of adventures without at
least the customary ten per cent. of fact to build upon.

It was a day above Avignon that he had an experience worth while. They
were abreast of an old castle, nearing a village, one of the huddled
jumble of houses of that locality, when, glancing over his left shoulder
toward the distant mountain range, he received what he referred to later
as a soul-stirring shock. Pointing to the outline of the distant range
he said to the courier:

"Name it. Who is it?"

The courier said, "Napoleon."

Clemens assented. The Admiral, when questioned, also promptly agreed
that the mountain outlined was none other than the reclining figure of
the great commander himself. They watched and discussed the phenomenon
until they reached the village. Next morning Clemens was up for a first
daybreak glimpse of his discovery. Later he reported it to Mrs. Clemens:

    I did so long for you and Sue yesterday morning--the most superb
    sunrise--the most marvelous sunrise--& I saw it all, from the very
    faintest suspicion of the coming dawn, all the way through to the
    final explosion of glory. But it had an interest private to itself
    & not to be found elsewhere in the world; for between me & it, in
    the far-distant eastward, was a silhouetted mountain range, in which
    I had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most noble face upturned
    to the sky, & mighty form outstretched, which I had named Napoleon
    Dreaming of Universal Empire--& now this prodigious face, soft,
    rich, blue, spirituelle, asleep, tranquil, reposeful, lay against
    that giant conflagration of ruddy and golden splendors, all rayed
    like a wheel with the up-streaming & far-reaching lances of the sun.
    It made one want to cry for delight, it was so supreme in its
    unimaginable majesty & beauty.

He made a pencil-sketch of the Napoleon head in his note-book, and stated
that the apparition could be seen opposite the castle of Beauchastel; but
in later years his treacherous memory betrayed him, and, forgetting these
identifying marks, he told of it as lying a few hours above Arles, and
named it the "Lost Napoleon," because those who set out to find it did
not succeed. He even wrote an article upon the subject, in which he
urged tourists to take steamer from Arles and make a short trip upstream,
keeping watch on the right-hand bank, with the purpose of rediscovering
the natural wonder. Fortunately this sketch was not published. It would
have been set down as a practical joke by disappointed travelers. One of
Mark Twain's friends, Mr. Theodore Stanton, made a persistent effort to
find the Napoleon, but with the wrong directions naturally failed.

It required ten days to float to Arles. Then the current gave out and
Clemens ended the excursion and returned to Lausanne by rail. He said:

"It was twenty-eight miles to Marseilles, and somebody would have to row.
That would not have been pleasure; it would have meant work for the
sailor, and I do not like work even when another person does it."

To Twichell in America he wrote:

    You ought to have been along--I could have made room for you easily,
    & you would have found that a pedestrian tour in Europe doesn't
    begin with a raft voyage for hilarity & mild adventure & intimate
    contact with the unvisited native of the back settlements &
    extinction from the world and newspapers & a conscience in a state
    of coma & lazy comfort & solid happiness. In fact, there's nothing
    that's so lovely.

But it's all over. I gave the raft away yesterday at Arles & am loafing
along back by short stages on the rail to Ouchy, Lausanne, where the
tribe are staying at the Beau Rivage and are well and prosperous.




CLXXVII

KORNERSTRASSE,7

They had decided to spend the winter in Berlin, and in October Mrs.
Clemens and Mrs. Crane, after some previous correspondence with an agent,
went up to that city to engage an apartment. The elevator had not
reached the European apartment in those days, and it was necessary, on
Mrs. Clemens's account, to have a ground floor. The sisters searched a
good while without success, and at last reached Kornerstrasse, a short,
secluded street, highly recommended by the agent. The apartment they
examined in Kornerstrasse was Number 7, and they were so much pleased
with the conveniences and comfort of it and so tired that they did not
notice closely its, general social environment. The agent supplied an
assortment of furniture for a consideration, and they were soon settled
in the attractive, roomy place. Clemens and the children, arriving
somewhat later, expressed themselves as satisfied.

Their contentment was somewhat premature. When they began to go out
socially, which was very soon, and friends inquired as to their location,
they noticed that the address produced a curious effect.
Semi-acquaintances said, "Ah, yes, Kornerstrasse"; acquaintances said,
"Dear me, do you like it?" An old friend exclaimed, "Good gracious! How
in the world did you ever come to locate there?" Then they began to
notice what they had not at first seen. Kornerstrasse was not
disreputable, but it certainly was not elegant. There were rag
warehouses across the street and women who leaned out the windows to
gossip. The street itself was thronged with children. They played on a
sand pile and were often noisy and seldom clean. It was eminently not
the place for a distinguished man of letters. The family began to be
sensitive on the subject of their address.

Clemens, of course, made humor out of it. He wrote a newspaper letter on
the subject, a burlesque, naturally, which the family prevailed upon him
not to print. But the humiliation is out of it now, and a bit of its
humor may be preserved. He takes upon himself the renting of the place,
and pictures the tour of inspection with the agent's assistant.

He was greatly moved when they came to the street and said, softly and
lovingly:

    "Ah, Korner Street, Korner Street, why did I not think of you
    before! A place fit for the gods, dear sir. Quiet?--notice how
    still it is; and remember this is noonday--noonday. It is but one
    block long, you see, just a sweet, dear little nest hid away here in
    the heart of the great metropolis, its presence and its sacred quiet
    unsuspected by the restless crowds that swarm along the stately
    thoroughfares yonder at its two extremities. And----"

    "This building is handsome, but I don't think much of the others.
    They look pretty commonplace, compared with the rest of Berlin."

    "Dear! dear! have you noticed that? It is just an affectation of
    the nobility. What they want----"

    "The nobility? Do they live in----"

    "In this street? That is good! very good, indeed! I wish the Duke
    of Sassafras-Hagenstein could hear you say that. When the Duke
    first moved in here he----"

    "Does he live in this street?"

    "Him! Well, I should say so! Do you see the big, plain house over
    there with the placard in the third floor window? That's his
    house."

    "The placard that says 'Furnished rooms to let'? Does he keep
    boarders?"

    "What an idea! Him! With a rent-roll of twelve hundred thousand
    marks a year? Oh, positively this is too good."

    "Well, what does he have that sign up for?"

    The assistant took me by the buttonhole & said, with a merry light
    beaming in his eye:

    "Why, my dear sir, a person would know you are new to Berlin just by
    your innocent questions. Our aristocracy, our old, real, genuine
    aristocracy, are full of the quaintest eccentricities,
    eccentricities inherited for centuries, eccentricities which they
    are prouder of than they are of their titles, and that sign-board
    there is one of them. They all hang them out. And it's regulated
    by an unwritten law. A baron is entitled to hang out two, a count
    five, a duke fifteen----"

    "Then they are all dukes over on that side, I sup----"

    "Every one of them. Now the old Duke of Backofenhofenschwartz not
    the present Duke, but the last but one, he----"

    "Does he live over the sausage-shop in the cellar?"

    "No, the one farther along, where the eighteenth yellow cat is
    chewing the door-mat----"

    "But all the yellow cats are chewing the door-mats."

    "Yes, but I mean the eighteenth one. Count. No, never mind;
    there's a lot more come. I'll get you another mark. Let me see---"

They could not remain permanently in Komerstrasse, but they stuck it out
till the end of December--about two months. Then they made such
settlement with the agent as they could--that is to say, they paid the
rest of their year's rent--and established themselves in a handsome
apartment at the Hotel Royal, Unter den Linden. There was no need to be
ashamed of this address, for it was one of the best in Berlin.

As for Komerstrasse, it is cleaner now. It is still not aristocratic,
but it is eminently respectable. There is a new post-office that takes
in Number 7, where one may post mail and send telegrams and use the
Fernsprecher--which is to say the telephone--and be politely treated by
uniformed officials, who have all heard of Mark Twain, but have no
knowledge of his former occupation of their premises.

CLXXVIII

A WINTER IN BERLIN

Clemens, meantime, had been trying to establish himself in his work, but
his rheumatism racked him occasionally and was always a menace. Closing
a letter to Hall, he said:

    "I must stop-my arm is howling."

He put in a good deal of time devising publishing schemes, principal
among them being a plan for various cheap editions of his books,
pamphlets, and such like, to sell for a few cents. These projects appear
never to have been really undertaken, Hall very likely fearing that a
flood of cheap issues would interfere with the more important trade. It
seemed dangerous to trifle with an apparently increasing prosperity, and
Clemens was willing enough to agree with this view.

Clemens had still another letter to write for Laffan and McClure, and he
made a pretty careful study of Berlin with that end in view. But his arm
kept him from any regular work. He made notes, however. Once he wrote:

    The first gospel of all monarchies should be Rebellion; the second
    should be Rebellion; and the third and all gospels, and the only
    gospel of any monarchy, should be Rebellion--against Church and
    State.

And again:

    I wrote a chapter on this language 13 years ago and tried my level
    best to improve it and simplify it for these people, and this is the
    result--a word of thirty-nine letters. It merely concentrates the
    alphabet with a shovel. It hurts me to know that that chapter is
    not in any of their text-books and they don't use it in the
    university.

Socially, that winter in Berlin was eventful enough. William Walter
Phelps, of New Jersey (Clemens had known him in America), was United
States minister at the German capital, while at the Emperor's court there
was a cousin, Frau von Versen, nee Clemens, one of the St. Louis family.
She had married a young German officer who had risen to the rank of a
full general. Mark Twain and his family were welcome guests at all the
diplomatic events--often brilliant levees, gatherings of distinguished
men and women from every circle of achievement. Labouchere of 'Truth'
was there, De Blowitz of the 'Times', and authors, ambassadors, and
scientists of rank. Clemens became immediately a distinguished figure at
these assemblies. His popularity in Germany was openly manifested. At
any gathering he was surrounded by a brilliant company, eager to do him
honor. He was recognized whenever he appeared on the street, and
saluted, though in his notes he says he was sometimes mistaken for the
historian Mommsen, whom he resembled in hair and features. His books
were displayed for sale everywhere, and a special cheap edition of them
was issued at a few cents per copy.

Captain Bingham (later General Bingham, Commissioner of Police in New
York City) and John Jackson were attaches of the legation, both of them
popular with the public in general, and especially so with the Clemens
family. Susy Clemens, writing to her father during a temporary absence,
tells of a party at Mrs. Jackson's, and especially refers to Captain
Bingham in the most complimentary terms.

"He never left me sitting alone, nor in an awkward situation of any kind,
but always came cordially to the rescue. My gratitude toward him was
absolutely limitless."

She adds that Mrs. Bingham was very handsome and decidedly the most
attractive lady present. Berlin was Susy's first real taste of society,
and she was reveling in it. In her letter she refers to Minister Phelps
by the rather disrespectful nickname of "Yaas," a term conferred because
of his pronounciation of that affirmative. The Clemens children were not
entirely happy in the company of the minister. They were fond of him,
but he was a great tease. They were quite young enough, but it seemed
always to give him delight to make them appear much younger. In the
letter above quoted Susy says:

    When I saw Mr. Phelps I put out my hand enthusiastically and said,
    "Oh, Mr. Phelps, good evening," whereat he drew back and said, so
    all could hear, "What, you here! why, you're too young. Do you
    think you know how to behave?" As there were two or three young
    gentlemen near by to whom I hadn't been introduced I wasn't exactly
    overjoyed at this greeting.

We may imagine that the nickname "Yaas" had been invented by Susy in
secret retaliation, though she was ready enough to forgive him, for he
was kindness itself at heart.

In one of his later dictations Clemens related an anecdote concerning a
dinner with Phelps, when he (Clemens) had been invited to meet Count
S----, a cabinet minister of long and illustrious descent. Clemens, and
Phelps too, it seems, felt overshadowed by this ancestry.

    Of course I wanted to let out the fact that I had some ancestors,
    too; but I did not want to pull them out of their graves by the
    ears, and I never could seem to get the chance to work them in, in a
    way that would look sufficiently casual. I suppose Phelps was in
    the same difficulty. In fact he looked distraught now and then just
    as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by
    accident and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough.
    But at last, after dinner, he made a try. He took us about his
    drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a
    rude and ancient engraving. It was a picture of the court that
    tried Charles I. There was a pyramid of judges in Puritan slouch
    hats, and below them three bareheaded secretaries seated at a table.
    Mr. Phelps put his finger upon one of the three and said, with
    exulting indifference:

    "An ancestor of mine."

    I put a finger on a judge and retorted with scathing languidness:
    "Ancestor of mine. But it is a small matter. I have others."

Clemens was sincerely fond of Phelps and spent a good deal of time at the
legation headquarters. Sometimes he wrote there. An American
journalist, Henry W. Fischer, remembers seeing him there several times
scribbling on such scraps of paper as came handy, and recalls that on one
occasion he delivered an address to a German and English audience on the
"Awful German Tongue." This was probably the lecture that brought
Clemens to bed with pneumonia. With Mrs. Clemens he had been down to
Ilsenburg, in the Hartz Mountains, for a week of change. It was pleasant
there, and they would have remained longer but for the Berlin lecture
engagement. As it was, they found Berlin very cold and the lecture-room
crowded and hot. When the lecture was over they stopped at General von
Versen's for a ball, arriving at home about two in the morning. Clemens
awoke with a heavy cold and lung congestion. He remained in bed, a very
sick man indeed, for the better part of a month. It was unpleasant
enough at first, though he rather enjoyed the convalescent period. He
could sit up in bed and read and receive occasional callers. Fischer
brought him Memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth, always a favorite.
--[Clemens was deeply interested in the Margravine, and at one time began
a novel with her absorbing history as its theme. He gave it up, probably
feeling that the romantic form could add nothing to the Margravine's own
story.]--The Emperor sent Frau von Versen with an invitation for him to
attend the consecration of some flags in the palace. When she returned,
conveying thanks and excuses, his Majesty commanded her to prepare a
dinner at her home for Mark Twain and himself and a few special guests,
the date to be arranged when Clemens's physician should pronounce him
well enough to attend.

Members of the Clemens household were impressed by this royal attention.
Little Jean was especially awed. She said:

"I wish I could be in papa's clothes"; then, after reflection, "but that
wouldn't be any use. I reckon the Emperor wouldn't recognize me." And a
little later, when she had been considering all the notables and
nobilities of her father's recent association, she added:

"Why, papa, if it keeps on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody
for you to get acquainted with but God," which Mark Twain decided was not
quite as much of a compliment as it had at first seemed.

It was during the period of his convalescence that Clemens prepared his
sixth letter for the New York Sun and McClure's syndicate, "The German
Chicago," a finely descriptive article on Berlin, and German customs and
institutions generally. Perhaps the best part of it is where he
describes the grand and prolonged celebration which had been given in
honor of Professor Virchow's seventieth birthday.--[Rudolph Virchow, an
eminent German pathologist and anthropologist and scholar; then one of
the most prominent figures of the German Reichstag. He died in 1902.]
--He tells how the demonstrations had continued in one form or another
day after day, and merged at last into the seventieth birthday of
Professor Helmholtz--[Herman von Helmholtz, an eminent German physicist,
one of the most distinguished scientists of the nineteenth century. He
died in 1894.]--also how these great affairs finally culminated in a
mighty 'commers', or beer-fest, given in their honor by a thousand German
students. This letter has been published in Mark Twain's "Complete
Works," and is well worth reading to-day. His place had been at the
table of the two heroes of the occasion, Virchow and Helmholtz, a place
where he could see and hear all that went on; and he was immensely
impressed at the honor which Germany paid to her men of science. The
climax came when Mommsen unexpectedly entered the room.--[Theodor Mommsen
(1817-1903), an eminent German historian and archeologist, a powerful
factor in all liberal movements. From 1874-1895 permanent secretary of
the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences.]

    There seemed to be some signal whereby the students on the platform
    were made aware that a professor had arrived at the remote door of
    entrance, for you would see them suddenly rise to their feet, strike
    an erect military attitude, then draw their swords; the swords of
    all their brethren standing guard at the innumerable tables would
    flash from the scabbard and be held aloft--a handsome spectacle.
    Three clear bugle-notes would ring out, then all these swords would
    come down with a crash, twice repeated, on the tables and be
    uplifted and held aloft again; then in the distance you would see
    the gay uniforms and uplifted swords of a guard of honor clearing
    the way and conducting the guest down to his place. The songs were
    stirring, and the immense outpour from young life and young lungs,
    the crash of swords, and the thunder of the beer-mugs gradually
    worked a body up to what seemed the last possible summit of
    excitement. It surely seemed to me that I had reached that summit,
    that I had reached my limit, and that there was no higher lift
    devisable for me. When apparently the last eminent guest had long
    ago taken his place, again those three bugle-blasts rang out, and
    once more the swords leaped from their scabbards. Who might this
    late comer be? Nobody was interested to inquire. Still, indolent
    eyes were turned toward the distant entrance, and we saw the silken
    gleam and the lifted sword of a guard of honor plowing through the
    remote crowds. Then we saw that end of the house rising to its
    feet; saw it rise abreast the advancing guard all along like a wave.
    This supreme honor had been offered to no one before. There was an
    excited whisper at our table--"Mommsen!"--and the whole house rose
    --rose and shouted and stamped and clapped and banged the beer-mugs.
    Just simply a storm! Then the little man with his long hair and
    Emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat. I could
    have touched him with my hand--Mommsen!--think of it!

    This was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few
    times in one's life. I was not dreaming of him; he was to me only a
    giant myth, a world-shadowing specter, not a reality. The surprise
    of it all can be only comparable to a man's suddenly coming upon
    Mont Blanc, with its awful form towering into the sky, when he
    didn't suspect he was in its neighborhood. I would have walked a
    great many miles to get a sight of him, and here he was, without
    trouble, or tramp, or cost of any kind. Here he was, clothed in a
    titanic deceptive modesty which made him look like other men. Here
    he was, carrying the Roman world and all the Caesars in his
    hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous
    vault, the skull of the universe, carries the Milky Way and the
    constellations.

During his convalescent days, Clemens had plenty of time to reflect and
to look out of the window. His notebook preserves some of his
reflections. In one place he says:

    The Emperor passes in a modest open carriage. Next that happy
    12-year-old butcher-boy, all in white apron and turban, standing up
    & so proud!

    How fast they drive-nothing like it but in London. And the horses
    seem to be of very fine breed, though I am not an expert in horses
    & do not speak with assurance. I can always tell which is the front
    end of a horse, but beyond that my art is not above the ordinary.

    The "Court Gazette" of a German paper can be covered with a playing-
    card. In an English paper the movements of titled people take up
    about three times that room. In the papers of Republican France
    from six to sixteen times as much. There, if a Duke's dog should
    catch cold in the head they would stop the press to announce it and
    cry about it. In Germany they respect titles, in England they
    revere them, in France they adore them. That is, the French
    newspapers do.

    Been taken for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on
    examination it was found the brains were different.

On February 14th he records that Professor Helmholtz called, but
unfortunately leaves no further memorandum of that visit. He was quite
recovered by this time, but was still cautioned about going out in the
severe weather. In the final entry he says:

    Thirty days sick abed--full of interest--read the debates and get
    excited over them, though don't 'versteh'. By reading keep in a
    state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire;
    flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't
    know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a
    booming time all to myself.

Don't know what a 'Schelgesetzentwurf' is, but I keep as excited over it
and as worried about it as if it was my own child. I simply live on the
Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn't have the question settled for
anything in the world. Especially now that I've lost the 'offentliche
Militargericht circus'. I read all the debates on that question with a
never-failing interest, but all at once they sprung a vote on me a couple
of days ago & did something by a vote of 100 to 143, but I couldn't find
out what it was.




CLXXIX

A DINNER WITH WILLIAM II.

The dinner with Emperor William II. at General von Versen's was set for
the 20th of February. A few days before, Mark Twain entered in his
note-book:

    In that day the Imperial lion and the Democratic lamb shall sit down
    together, and a little General shall feed them.

Mark Twain was the guest of honor on this occasion, and was seated at the
Emperor's right hand. The Emperor's brother, Prince Heinrich, sat
opposite; Prince Radolin farther along. Rudolf Lindau, of the Foreign
Office, was also present. There were fourteen at the table, all told. In
his memorandum made at the time, Clemens gave no account of the dinner
beyond the above details, only adding:

    After dinner 6 or 8 officers came in, & all hands adjourned to the
    big room out of the smoking-room and held a "smoking parliament"
    after the style of the ancient Potsdam one, till midnight, when the
    Emperor shook hands and left.

It was not until fourteen years later that Mark Twain related some
special matters pertaining to that evening. He may have expanded then
somewhat to fill out spaces of his memory, and embroidered them, as was
his wont; but that something happened, either in reality or in his
imagination, which justified his version of it we may believe. He told
it as here given, premising: "This may appear in print after I am dead,
but not before.

    "From 1891 until day before yesterday I had never mentioned the
    matter, nor set it down with a pen, nor ever referred to it in any
    way--not even to my wife, to whom I was accustomed to tell
    everything that happened to me.

    "At the dinner his Majesty chatted briskly and entertainingly along
    in easy and flowing English, and now and then he interrupted himself
    to address a remark to me or to some other individual of the guests.
    When the reply had been delivered he resumed his talk. I noticed
    that the table etiquette tallied with that which was the law of my
    house at home when we had guests; that is to say, the guests
    answered when the host favored them with a remark, and then quieted
    down and behaved themselves until they got another chance. If I had
    been in the Emperor's chair and he in mine I should have felt
    infinitely comfortable and at home, but I was guest now, and
    consequently felt less at home. From old experience I was familiar
    with the rules of the game and familiar with their exercise from the
    high place of host; but I was not familiar with the trammeled and
    less satisfactory position of guest, therefore I felt a little
    strange and out of place. But there was no animosity--no, the
    Emperor was host, therefore, according to my own rule, he had a
    right to do the talking, and it was my honorable duty to intrude no
    interruptions or other improvements except upon invitation; and of
    course it could be my turn some day--some day, on some friendly
    visit of inspection to America, it might be my pleasure and
    distinction to have him as guest at my table; then I would give him
    a rest and a quiet time.

    "In one way there was a difference between his table and mine-for
    instance, atmosphere; the guests stood in awe of him, and naturally
    they conferred that feeling upon me, for, after all, I am only
    human, although I regret it. When a guest answered a question he
    did it with a deferential voice and manner; he did not put any
    emotion into it, and he did not spin it out, but got it out of his
    system as quickly as he could, and then looked relieved. The
    Emperor was used to this atmosphere, and it did not chill his blood;
    maybe it was an inspiration to him, for he was alert, brilliant, and
    full of animation; also he was most gracefully and felicitously
    complimentary to my books--and I will remark here that the happy
    phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts and the
    happy delivery of it another. I once mentioned the high compliment
    which he paid to the book 'Old Times on the Mississippi'; but there
    were others, among them some high praise of my description in 'A
    Tramp Abroad' of certain striking phases of German student life.

    "Fifteen or twenty minutes before the dinner ended the Emperor made
    a remark to me in praise of our generous soldier pensions; then,
    without pausing, he continued the remark, not speaking to me, but
    across the table to his brother, Prince Heinrich. The Prince
    replied, endorsing the Emperor's view of the matter. Then I
    followed with my own view of it. I said that in the beginning our
    government's generosity to the soldier was clear in its intent and
    praiseworthy, since the pensions were conferred upon soldiers who
    had earned them, soldiers who had been disabled in the war and could
    no longer earn a livelihood for themselves and their families, but
    that the pensions decreed and added later lacked the virtue of a
    clean motive, and had, little by little, degenerated into a wider
    and wider and more and more offensive system of vote-purchasing, and
    was now become a source of corruption, which was an unpleasant thing
    to contemplate and was a danger besides. I think that that was
    about the substance of my remark; but in any case the remark had a
    quite definite result, and that is the memorable thing about it
    --manifestly it made everybody uncomfortable. I seemed to perceive
    this quite plainly. I had committed an indiscretion. Possibly it
    was in violating etiquette by intruding a remark when I had not been
    invited to make one; possibly it was in taking issue with an opinion
    promulgated by his Majesty. I do not know which it was, but I quite
    clearly remember the effect which my act produced--to wit, the
    Emperor refrained from addressing any remarks to me afterward, and
    not merely during the brief remainder of the dinner, but afterward
    in the kneip-room, where beer and cigars and hilarious anecdoting
    prevailed until about midnight. I am sure that the Emperor's good
    night was the only thing he said to me in all that time.

    "Was this rebuke studied and intentional? I don't know, but I
    regarded it in that way. I can't be absolutely sure of it because
    of modifying doubts created afterward by one or two circumstances.
    For example: the Empress Dowager invited me to her palace, and the
    reigning Empress invited me to breakfast, and also sent for General
    von Versen to come to her palace and read to her and her ladies from
    my books."

It was a personal message from the Emperor that fourteen years later
recalled to him this curious circumstance. A gentleman whom Clemens knew
went on a diplomatic mission to Germany. Upon being presented to Emperor
William, the latter had immediately begun to talk of Mark Twain and his
work. He spoke of the description of German student life as the greatest
thing of its kind ever written, and of the sketch on the German language
as wonderful; then he said:

"Convey to Mr. Clemens my kindest regards, ask him if he remembers that
dinner at Von Versen's, and ask him why he didn't do any more talking at
that dinner."

It seemed a mysterious message. Clemens thought it might have been meant
to convey some sort of an imperial apology; but again it might have meant
that Mark Twain's breach and the Emperor's coolness on that occasion were
purely imaginary, and that the Emperor had really expected him to talk
far more than he did.

Returning to the Royal Hotel after the Von Versen dinner, Mark Twain
received his second high compliment that day on the Mississippi book. The
portier, a tow-headed young German, must have been comparatively new at
the hotel; for apparently he had just that day learned that his favorite
author, whose books he had long been collecting, was actually present in
the flesh. Clemens, all ready to apologize for asking so late an
admission, was greeted by the portier's round face all sunshine and
smiles. The young German then poured out a stream of welcome and
compliments and dragged the author to a small bedroom near the front
door, where he excitedly pointed out a row of books, German translations
of Mark Twain.

"There," he said; "you wrote them. I've found it out. Lieber Gott! I
did not know it before, and I ask a million pardons. That one there, Old
Times on the Mississippi, is the best you ever wrote."

The note-book records only one social event following the Emperor's
dinner--a dinner with the secretary of the legation. The note says:

At the Emperor's dinner black cravats were ordered. Tonight I went in a
black cravat and everybody else wore white ones. Just my luck.

The Berlin activities came to an end then. He was still physically far
from robust, and his doctors peremptorily ordered him to stay indoors or
to go to a warmer climate. This was March 1st. Clemens and his wife
took Joseph Very, and, leaving the others for the time in Berlin, set out
for Mentone, in the south of France.




CLXXX

MANY WANDERINGS

Mentone was warm and quiet, and Clemens worked when his arm permitted. He
was alone there with Mrs. Clemens, and they wandered about a good deal,
idling and picture-making, enjoying a sort of belated honeymoon. Clemens
wrote to Susy:

Joseph is gone to Nice to educate himself in kodaking--and to get the
pictures mounted which mama thinks she took here; but I noticed she
didn't take the plug out, as a rule. When she did she took nine pictures
on top of each other--composites.

They remained a month in Mentone, then went over to Pisa, and sent Joseph
to bring the rest of the party to Rome. In Rome they spent another
month--a period of sight-seeing, enjoyable, but to Clemens pretty
profitless.

"I do not expect to be able to write any literature this year," he said
in a letter to Hall near the end of April. "The moment I take up my pen
my rheumatism returns."

Still he struggled along and managed to pile up a good deal of copy in
the course of weeks. From Rome to Florence, at the end of April, and so
pleasing was the prospect, and so salubrious the air of that ancient
city, that they resolved to engage residence there for the next winter.
They inspected accommodations of various kinds, and finally, through
Prof. Willard Fiske, were directed to the Villa Viviani, near Settignano,
on a hill to the eastward of Florence, with vineyard and olive-grove
sloping away to the city lying in a haze-a vision of beauty and peace.
They closed the arrangement for Viviani, and about the middle of May went
up to Venice for a fortnight of sight-seeing--a break in the travel back
to Germany. William Gedney Bunce, the Hartford artist, was in Venice,
and Sarah Orne Jewett and other home friends.

From Venice, by way of Lake Como and "a tangled route" (his note-book
says) to Lucerne, and so northward to Berlin and on to Bad Nauheim, where
they had planned to spend the summer. Clemens for some weeks had
contemplated a trip to America, for matters there seemed to demand his
personal attention. Summer arrangements for the family being now
concluded, he left within the week and set sail on the Havel for New
York. To Jean he wrote a cheerful good-by letter, more cheerful, we may
believe, than he felt.

                         BREMEN, 7.45 A.M., June 14, 1892.

DEAR JEAN CLEMENS,--I am up & shaved & got my clean shirt on & feel
mighty fine, & am going down to show off before I put on the rest of my
clothes.

Perhaps mama & Mrs. Hague can persuade the Hauswirth to do right; but if
he don't you go down & kill his dog.

I wish you would invite the Consul-General and his ladies down to take
one of those slim dinners with mama, then he would complain to the
Government.

Clemens felt that his presence in America, was demanded by two things.
Hall's reports continued, as ever, optimistic; but the semi-annual
statements were less encouraging. The Library of Literature and some of
the other books were selling well enough; but the continuous increase of
capital required by a business conducted on the instalment plan had
steadily added to the firm's liabilities, while the prospect of a general
tightening in the money-market made the outlook not a particularly happy
one. Clemens thought he might be able to dispose of the Library or an
interest in it, or even of his share of the business itself, to some one
with means sufficient to put it on an easier financial footing. The
uncertainties of trade and the burden of increased debt had become a
nightmare which interfered with his sleep. It seemed hard enough to earn
a living with a crippled arm, without this heavy business care.

The second interest requiring attention was that other old one--the
machine. Clemens had left the matter in Paige's hands, and Paige, with
persuasive eloquence, had interested Chicago capital to a point where a
company had been formed to manufacture the type-setter in that city.
Paige reported that he had got several million dollars subscribed for the
construction of a factory, and that he had been placed on a salary as a
sort of general "consulting omniscient" at five thousand dollars a month.
Clemens, who had been negotiating again with the Mallorys for the
disposal of his machine royalties, thought it proper to find out just
what was going on. He remained in America less than two weeks, during
which he made a flying trip to Chicago and found that Paige's company
really had a factory started, and proposed to manufacture fifty machines.
It was not easy to find out the exact status of this new company, but
Clemens at least was hopeful enough of its prospects to call off the
negotiations with the Mallorys which had promised considerable cash in
hand. He had been able to accomplish nothing material in the publishing
situation, but his heart-to-heart talk with Hall for some reason had
seemed comforting. The business had been expanding; they would now
"concentrate." He returned on the Lahn, and he must have been in better
health and spirits, for it is said he kept the ship very merry during the
passage. He told many extravagantly amusing yarns; so many that a court
was convened to try him on the charge of "inordinate and unscientific
lying." Many witnesses testified, and his own testimony was so
unconvincing that the jury convicted him without leaving the bench. He
was sentenced to read aloud from his own works for a considerable period
every day until the steamer should reach port. It is said that he
faithfully carried out this part of the program, and that the proceeds
from the trial and the various readings amounted to something more than
six hundred dollars, which was turned over to the Seamen's Fund.

Clemens's arm was really much better, and he put in a good deal of spare
time during the trip writing an article on "All Sorts and Conditions of
Ships," from Noah's Ark down to the fine new Havel, then the latest word
in ship-construction. It was an article written in a happy vein and is
profitable reading to-day. The description of Columbus as he appeared on
the deck of his flag-ship is particularly rich and flowing:

    If the weather was chilly he came up clad from plumed helmet to
    spurred heel in magnificent plate-armor inlaid with arabesques of
    gold, having previously warmed it at the galley fire. If the
    weather was warm he came up in the ordinary sailor toggery of the
    time-great slouch hat of blue velvet, with a flowing brush of snowy
    ostrich-plumes, fastened on with a flashing cluster of diamonds and
    emeralds; gold-embroidered doublet of green velvet, with slashed
    sleeves exposing undersleeves of crimson satin; deep collar and cuff
    ruffles of rich, limp lace; trunk hose of pink velvet, with big
    knee-knots of brocaded yellow ribbon; pearl-tinted silk stockings,
    clocked and daintily embroidered; lemon-colored buskins of unborn
    kid, funnel-topped, and drooping low to expose the pretty stockings;
    deep gauntlets of finest white heretic skin, from the factory of the
    Holy Inquisition, formerly part of the person of a lady of rank;
    rapier with sheath crusted with jewels and hanging from a broad
    baldric upholstered with rubies and sapphires.




CLXXXI

NAUHEIM AND THE PRINCE OF WALES

Clemens was able to write pretty steadily that summer in Nauheim and
turned off a quantity of copy. He completed several short articles and
stories, and began, or at least continued work on, two books--'Tom Sawyer
Abroad' and 'Those Extraordinary Twins'--the latter being the original
form of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'. As early as August 4th he wrote to Hall
that he had finished forty thousand words of the "Tom Sawyer" story, and
that it was to be offered to some young people's magazine, Harper's Young
People or St. Nicholas; but then he suddenly decided that his narrative
method was altogether wrong. To Hall on the 10th he wrote:

    I have dropped that novel I wrote you about because I saw a more
    effective way of using the main episode--to wit, by telling it
    through the lips of Huck Finn. So I have started Huck Finn & Tom
    Sawyer (still 15 years old) & their friend the freed slave Jim
    around the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator, &
    somewhere after the end of that great voyage he will work in that
    original episode & then nobody will suspect that a whole book has
    been written & the globe circumnavigated merely to get that episode
    in in an effective (& at the same time apparently unintentional)
    way. I have written 12,000 words of this new narrative, & find that
    the humor flows as easily as the adventures & surprises--so I shall
    go along and make a book of from 50,000 to 100,000 words.

    It is a story for boys, of course, & I think it will interest any
    boy between 8 years & 80.

    When I was in New York the other day Mrs. Dodge, editor of St.
    Nicholas, wrote and offered me $5,000 for (serial right) a story for
    boys 50,000 words long. I wrote back and declined, for I had other
    matter in my mind then.

    I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write
    so that it will not only interest boys, but will also strongly
    interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges
    the audience.

    Now, this story doesn't need to be restricted to a child's magazine
    --it is proper enough for any magazine, I should think, or for a
    syndicate. I don't swear it, but I think so.

    Proposed title--New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

He was full of his usual enthusiasm in any new undertaking, and writes of
the Extraordinary Twins:

    By and by I shall have to offer (for grown folks' magazine) a novel
    entitled, 'Those Extraordinary Twins'. It's the howling farce I
    told you I had begun awhile back. I laid it aside to ferment while
    I wrote Tom Sawyer Abroad, but I took it up again on a little
    different plan lately, and it is swimming along satisfactorily now.
    I think all sorts of folks will read it. It is clear out of the
    common order--it is a fresh idea--I don't think it resembles
    anything in literature.

He was quite right; it did not resemble anything in literature, nor did
it greatly resemble literature, though something at least related to
literature would eventually grow out of it.

In a letter written many years afterward by Frank Mason, then
consul-general at Frankfort, he refers to "that happy summer at Nauheim."
Mason was often a visitor there, and we may believe that his memory of
the summer was justified. For one thing, Clemens himself was in better
health and spirits and able to continue his work. But an even greater
happiness lay in the fact that two eminent physicians had pronounced Mrs.
Clemens free from any organic ills. To Orion, Clemens wrote:

    We are in the clouds because the bath physicians say positively that
    Livy has no heart disease but has only weakness of the heart muscles
    and will soon be well again. That was worth going to Europe to find
    out.

It was enough to change the whole atmosphere of the household, and
financial worries were less considered. Another letter to Orion relates
history:

    The Twichells have been here four days & we have had good times with
    them. Joe & I ran over to Homburg, the great pleasure-resort,
    Saturday, to dine with friends, & in the morning I went walking in
    the promenade & met the British ambassador to the Court of Berlin
    and he introduced me to the Prince of Wales. I found him a most
    unusually comfortable and unembarrassing Englishman.

Twichell has reported Mark Twain's meeting with the Prince (later Edward
VII) as having come about by special request of the latter, made through
the British ambassador. "The meeting," he says, "was a most cordial one
on both sides, and presently the Prince took Mark Twain's arm and the two
marched up and down, talking earnestly together, the Prince, solid,
erect, and soldierlike, Clemens weaving along in his curious, swinging
gait in a full tide of talk, and brandishing a sun-umbrella of the most
scandalous description."

When they parted Clemens said:

"It has been, indeed, a great pleasure to meet your Royal Highness."

The Prince answered:

"And it is a pleasure, Mr. Clemens, to have met you--again."

Clemens was puzzled to reply.

"Why," he said, "have we met before?"

The Prince smiled happily.

"Oh yes," he said; "don't you remember that day on the Strand when you
were on the top of a bus and I was heading a procession and you had on
your new overcoat with flap-pockets?"--[See chap. clxiii, "A Letter to
the Queen of England."]

It was the highest compliment he could have paid, for it showed that he
had read, and had remembered all those years. Clemens expressed to
Twichell regret that he had forgotten to mention his visit to the
Prince's sister, Louise, in Ottawa, but he had his opportunity at a
dinner next day. Later the Prince had him to supper and they passed an
entire evening together.

There was a certain uneasiness in the Nauheim atmosphere that year, for
the cholera had broken out at Hamburg, and its victims were dying at a
terrific rate. It was almost impossible to get authentic news as to the
spread of the epidemic, for the German papers were curiously conservative
in their reports. Clemens wrote an article on the subject but concluded
not to print it. A paragraph will convey its tenor.

    What I am trying to make the reader understand is the strangeness of
    the situation here--a mighty tragedy being played upon a stage that
    is close to us, & yet we are as ignorant of its details as we should
    be if the stage were in China. We sit "in front," & the audience is
    in fact the world; but the curtain is down, & from behind it we hear
    only an inarticulate murmur. The Hamburg disaster must go into
    history as the disaster without a history.

He closes with an item from a physician's letter--an item which he says
"gives you a sudden and terrific sense of the situation there."
    For in a line it flashes before you--this ghastly picture--a thing
    seen by the physician: a wagon going along the street with five sick
    people in it, and with them four dead ones.




CLXXXII

THE VILLA VIVIANI

'The American Claimant', published in May l (1892), did not bring a very
satisfactory return. For one thing, the book-trade was light, and then
the Claimant was not up to his usual standard. It had been written under
hard circumstances and by a pen long out of practice; it had not paid,
and its author must work all the harder on the new undertakings. The
conditions at Nauheim seemed favorable, and they lingered there until
well into September. To Mrs. Crane, who had returned to America, Clemens
wrote on the 18th, from Lucerne, in the midst of their travel to Italy:

    We remained in Nauheim a little too long. If we had left four or
    five days earlier we should have made Florence in three days. Hard
    trip because it was one of those trains that gets tired every 7
    minutes and stops to rest three-quarters of an hour. It took us
    3 1/2 hours to get there instead of the regulation 2 hours. We
    shall pull through to Milan to-morrow if possible. Next day we
    shall start at 10 AM and try to make Bologna, 5 hours. Next day,
    Florence, D. V. Next year we will walk. Phelps came to Frankfort
    and we had some great times--dinner at his hotel; & the Masons,
    supper at our inn--Livy not in it. She was merely allowed a
    glimpse, no more. Of course Phelps said she was merely pretending
    to be ill; was never looking so well & fine.

    A Paris journal has created a happy interest by inoculating one of
    its correspondents with cholera. A man said yesterday he wished to
    God they would inoculate all of them. Yes, the interest is quite
    general and strong & much hope is felt.

    Livy says I have said enough bad things, and better send all our
    loves & shut up. Which I do--and shut up.

They lingered at Lucerne until Mrs. Clemens was rested and better able to
continue the journey, arriving at last in Florence, September 26th. They
drove out to the Villa Viviani in the afternoon and found everything in
readiness for their reception, even to the dinner, which was prepared and
on the table. Clemens, in his notes, speaks of this and adds:

It takes but a sentence to state that, but it makes an indolent person
tired to think of the planning & work and trouble that lie concealed in
it.

Some further memoranda made at this time have that intimate interest
which gives reality and charm. The 'contadino' brought up their trunks
from the station, and Clemens wrote:

    The 'contadino' is middle-aged & like the rest of the peasants--that
    is to say, brown, handsome, good-natured, courteous, & entirely
    independent without making any offensive show of it. He charged too
    much for the trunks, I was told. My informer explained that this
    was customary.

    September 27. The rest of the trunks brought up this morning. He
    charged too much again, but I was told that this was also customary.
    It's all right, then. I do not wish to violate the customs. Hired
    landau, horses, & coachman. Terms, 480 francs a month & a pourboire
    to the coachman, I to furnish lodging for the man & the horses, but
    nothing else. The landau has seen better days & weighs 30 tons.
    The horses are feeble & object to the landau; they stop & turn
    around every now & then & examine it with surprise & suspicion.
    This causes delay. But it entertains the people along the road.
    They came out & stood around with their hands in their pockets &
    discussed the matter with each other. I was told that they said
    that a 30-ton landau was not the thing for horses like those--what
    they needed was a wheelbarrow.

His description of the house pictures it as exactly today as it did then,
for it has not changed in these twenty years, nor greatly, perhaps, in
the centuries since it was built.
    It is a plain, square building, like a box, & is painted light
    yellow & has green window-shutters. It stands in a commanding
    position on the artificial terrace of liberal dimensions, which is
    walled around with masonry. From the walls the vineyards & olive
    orchards of the estate slant away toward the valley. There are
    several tall trees, stately stone-pines, also fig-trees & trees of
    breeds not familiar to me. Roses overflow the retaining-walls, &
    the battered & mossy stone urn on the gate-posts, in pink & yellow
    cataracts exactly as they do on the drop-curtains in the theaters.
    The house is a very fortress for strength. The main walls--all
    brick covered with plaster--are about 3 feet thick. I have several
    times tried to count the rooms of the house, but the irregularities
    baffle me. There seem to be 28. There are plenty of windows &
    worlds of sunlight. The floors are sleek & shiny & full of
    reflections, for each is a mirror in its way, softly imaging all
    objects after the subdued fashion of forest lakes. The curious
    feature of the house is the salon. This is a spacious & lofty
    vacuum which occupies the center of the house. All the rest of the
    house is built around it; it extends up through both stories & its
    roof projects some feet above the rest of the building. The sense
    of its vastness strikes you the moment you step into it & cast your
    eyes around it & aloft. There are divans distributed along its
    walls. They make little or no show, though their aggregate length
    is 57 feet. A piano in it is a lost object. We have tried to
    reduce the sense of desert space & emptiness with tables & things,
    but they have a defeated look, & do not do any good. Whatever
    stands or moves under that soaring painted vault 

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