slave-driver of Europe, Alexander III, has so reduced his usual monthly order for chains that the Russian foundries are running on only half time now? Also that other rumor that English nobility acquired an added stench the other day–and had to ship it to India and the continent because there wasn’t any more room for it at home? Things are working. By and by there is going to be an emigration, may be. Of course we shall make no preparation; we never do. In a few years from now we shall have nothing but played-out kings and dukes on the police, and driving the horse-cars, and whitewashing fences, and in fact overcrowding all the avenues of unskilled labor; and then we shall wish, when it is too late, that we had taken common and reasonable precautions and drowned them at Castle Garden.
There followed at this time a number of letters to Goodman, but as there is much of a sameness in them, we need not print them all. Clemens, in fact, kept the mails warm with letters bulging with schemes for capitalization, and promising vast wealth to all concerned. When the letters did not go fast enough he sent telegrams. In one of the letters Goodman is promised “five hundred thousand dollars out of the profits before we get anything ourselves.” One thing we gather from these letters is that Paige has taken the machine apart again, never satisfied with its perfection, or perhaps getting a hint that certain of its perfections were not permanent. A letter at the end of November seems worth preserving here.
To Joseph T. Goodman, in California:
HARTFORD, Nov. 29, ’89. DEAR JOE, Things are getting into better and more flexible shape every day. Papers are now being drawn which will greatly simplify the raising of capital; I shall be in supreme command; it will not be necessary for the capitalist to arrive at terms with anybody but me. I don’t want to dicker with anybody but Jones. I know him; that is to say, I want to dicker with you, and through you with Jones. Try to see if you can’t be here by the 15th of January.
The machine was as perfect as a watch when we took her apart the other day; but when she goes together again the 15th of January we expect her to be perfecter than a watch.
Joe, I want you to sell some royalties to the boys out there, if you can, for I want to be financially strong when we go to New York. You know the machine, and you appreciate its future enormous career better than any man I know. At the lowest conceivable estimate (2,000 machines a year,) we shall sell 34,000 in the life of the patent–17 years.
All the family send love to you–and they mean it, or they wouldn’t say it.
Yours ever
MARK.
The Yankee had come from the press, and Howells had praised it in the “Editor’s Study” in Harper’s Magazine. He had given it his highest commendation, and it seems that his opinion of it did not change with time. “Of all fanciful schemes of fiction it pleases me most,” he in one place declared, and again referred to it as “a greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale.”
In more than one letter to Goodman, Clemens had urged him to come East without delay. “Take the train, Joe, and come along,” he wrote early in December. And we judge from the following that Joe had decided to come.
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
HARTFORD, Dec. 23, ’89. DEAR HOWELLS,–The magazine came last night, and the Study notice is just great. The satisfaction it affords us could not be more prodigious if the book deserved every word of it; and maybe it does; I hope it does, though of course I can’t realize it and believe it. But I am your grateful servant, anyway and always.
I am going to read to the Cadets at West Point Jan. 11. I go from here to New York the 9th, and up to the Point the 11th. Can’t you go with me? It’s great fun. I’m going to read the passages in the “Yankee” in which the Yankee’s West Point cadets figure–and shall covertly work in a lecture on aristocracy to those boys. I am to be the guest of the Superintendent, but if you will go I will shake him and we will go to the hotel. He is a splendid fellow, and I know him well enough to take that liberty.
And won’t you give me a day or two’s visit toward the end of January? For two reasons: the machine will be at work again by that time, and we want to hear the rest of the dream-story; Mrs. Clemens keeps speaking about it and hankering for it. And we can have Joe Goodman on hand again by that time, and I want you to get to know him thoroughly. It’s well worth it. I am going to run up and stay over night with you as soon as I can get a chance.
We are in the full rush of the holidays now, and an awful rush it is, too. You ought to have been here the other day, to make that day perfect and complete. All alone I managed to inflict agonies on Mrs: Clemens, whereas I was expecting nothing but praises. I made a party call the day after the party–and called the lady down from breakfast to receive it. I then left there and called on a new bride, who received me in her dressing-gown; and as things went pretty well, I stayed to luncheon. The error here was, that the appointed reception-hour was 3 in the afternoon, and not at the bride’s house but at her aunt’s in another part of the town. However, as I meant well, none of these disasters distressed me.
Yrs ever
MARK.
The Yankee did not find a very hearty welcome in England. English readers did not fancy any burlesque of their Arthurian tales, or American strictures on their institutions. Mark Twain’s publishers had feared this, and asked that the story be especially edited for the English edition. Clemens, however, would not listen to any suggestions of the sort.
To Messrs. Chatto & Windus, in London, Eng.:
GENTLEMEN,–Concerning The Yankee, I have already revised the story twice; and it has been read critically by W. D. Howells and Edmund Clarence Stedman, and my wife has caused me to strike out several passages that have been brought to her attention, and to soften others. Furthermore, I have read chapters of the book in public where Englishmen were present and have profited by their suggestions.
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 might 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.
Very truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.
The English nation, at least a considerable portion of it, did not wish to be “pried up to a higher level of manhood” by a Connecticut Yankee. The papers pretty generally denounced the book as coarse; in fact, a vulgar travesty. Some of the critics concluded that England, after all, had made a mistake in admiring Mark Twain. Clemens stood this for a time and then seems to have decided that something should be done. One of the foremost of English critics was his friend and admirer; he would state the case to him fully and invite his assistance.
To Andrew Lang, in London:
[First page missing.]
1889
They vote but do not print. The head tells you pretty promptly whether the food is satisfactory or not; and everybody hears, and thinks the whole man has spoken. It is a delusion. Only his taste and his smell have been heard from–important, both, in a way, but these do not build up the man; and preserve his life and fortify it.
The little child is permitted to label its drawings “This is a cow this is a horse,” and so on. This protects the child. It saves it from the sorrow and wrong of hearing its cows and its horses criticized as kangaroos and work benches. A man who is white-washing a fence is doing a useful thing, so also is the man who is adorning a rich man’s house with costly frescoes; and all of us are sane enough to judge these performances by standards proper to each. Now, then, to be fair, an author ought to be allowed to put upon his book an explanatory line: “This is written for the Head;” “This is written for the Belly and the Members.” And the critic ought to hold himself in honor bound to put away from him his ancient habit of judging all books by one standard, and thenceforth follow a fairer course.
The critic assumes, every time, that if a book doesn’t meet the cultivated-class standard, it isn’t valuable. Let us apply his law all around: for if it is sound in the case of novels, narratives, pictures, and such things, it is certainly sound and applicable to all the steps which lead up to culture and make culture possible. It condemns the spelling book, for a spelling book is of no use to a person of culture; it condemns all school books and all schools which lie between the child’s primer and Greek, and between the infant school and the university; it condemns all the rounds of art which lie between the cheap terra cotta groups and the Venus de Medici, and between the chromo and the Transfiguration; it requires Whitcomb Riley to sing no more till he can sing like Shakespeare, and it forbids all amateur music and will grant its sanction to nothing below the “classic.”
Is this an extravagant statement? No, it is a mere statement of fact. It is the fact itself that is extravagant and grotesque. And what is the result? This–and it is sufficiently curious: 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 than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers’ singing society; and Homer than the little everybody’s-poet whose rhymes are in all mouths today and will be in nobody’s mouth next generation; and the Latin classics than Kipling’s far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation Army; and the Venus de Medici than the plaster-cast peddler; the superstition, in a word, that the vast and awful comet that trails its cold lustre through the remote abysses of space once a century and interests and instructs a cultivated handful of astronomers is worth more to the world than the sun which warms and cheers all the nations every day and makes the crops to grow.
If a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but to convert angels: and they wouldn’t need it. The thin top crust of humanity–the cultivated–are worth pacifying, worth pleasing, worth coddling, worth nourishing and preserving with dainties and delicacies, it is true; but to be caterer to that little faction is no very dignified or valuable occupation, it seems to me; it is merely feeding the over- fed, and there must be small satisfaction in that. It is not that little minority who are already saved that are best worth trying to uplift, 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 light; 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 up to pure air and a cleaner life; they know no sculpture, the Venus is not even a name to them, but they are a grade higher in the scale of civilization by the ministrations of the plaster-cast than they were before it took its place upon then mantel and made it beautiful to their unexacting eyes.
Indeed I have been misjudged, from the very first. I have never tried in even one single 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 have done my best to entertain them. To simply amuse them would have satisfied my dearest ambition at any time; for they could get instruction elsewhere, and I had two chances to help to the teacher’s one: for amusement is a good preparation for study and a good healer of fatigue after it. My audience is dumb, it has no voice in print, and so I cannot know whether I have won its approbation or only got its censure.
Yes, you see, I have always catered for the Belly and the Members, but have been served like the others–criticized from the culture-standard –to my sorrow and pain; because, honestly, I never cared what became of the cultured classes; they could go to the theatre and the opera–they had no use for me and the melodeon.
And now at last I arrive at my object and tender my petition, making supplication to this effect: that the critics adopt a rule recognizing the Belly and the Members, and formulate a standard whereby work done for them shall be judged. Help me, Mr. Lang; no voice can reach further than yours in a case of this kind, or carry greater weight of authority.
Lang’s reply was an article in the Illustrated London News on “The Art of Mark Twain.” Lang had no admiration to express for the Yankee, which he confessed he had not cared to read, but he glorified Huck Finn to the highest. “I can never forget, nor be ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which I read Huckleberry Finn for the first time, years ago,” he wrote; “I read it again last night, deserting Kenilworth for Huck. I never laid it down till I had finished it.”
Lang closed his article by referring to the story of Huck as the “great American novel which had escaped the eyes of those who watched to see this new planet swim into their ken.”
LETTERS, 1890, CHIEFLY TO JOS. T. GOODMAN. THE GREAT MACHINE ENTERPRISE
Dr. John Brown’s son, whom Mark Twain and his wife had known in 1873 as “Jock,” sent copies of Dr. John Brown and His Sister Isabella, by E. T. McLaren. It was a gift appreciated in the Clemens home.
To Mr. John Brown, in Edinburgh, Scotland:
HARTFORD, Feby 11, 1890. DEAR MR. BROWN,–Both copies came, and we are reading and re-reading the one, and lending the other, to old time adorers of “Rab and his Friends.” It is an exquisite book; the perfection of literary workmanship. It says in every line, “Don’t look at me, look at him”–and one tries to be good and obey; but the charm of the painter is so strong that one can’t keep his entire attention on the developing portrait, but must steal side- glimpses of the artist, and try to divine the trick of her felicitous brush. In this book the doctor lives and moves just as he was. He was the most extensive slave-holder of his time, and the kindest; and yet he died without setting one of his bondmen free. We all send our very, very kindest regards.
Sincerely yours
S. L. CLEMENS.
If Mark Twain had been less interested in the type-setting machine he might possibly have found a profit that winter in the old Sellers play, which he had written with Howells seven years before. The play had eventually been produced at the Lyceum Theatre in New York, with A. P. Burbank in the leading role, and Clemens and Howells as financial backers. But it was a losing investment, nor did it pay any better when Clemens finally sent Burbank with it on the road. Now, however, James A. Herne, a well-known actor and playwright, became interested in the idea, after a discussion of the matter with Howells, and there seemed a probability that with changes made under Herne’s advisement the play might be made sensible and successful.
But Mark Twain’s greater interest was now all in the type-machine, and certainly he had no money to put into any other venture. His next letter to Goodman is illuminating–the urgency of his need for funds opposed to that conscientiousness which was one of the most positive forces of Mark Twain’s body spiritual. The Mr. Arnot of this letter was an Elmira capitalist.
To Jos. T. Goodman, in California:
HARTFORD, March 31, ’90. DEAR JOE,–If you were here, I should say, “Get you to Washington and beg Senator Jones to take the chances and put up about ten or “–no, I wouldn’t. The money would burn a hole in my pocket and get away from me if the furnisher of it were proceeding upon merely your judgment and mine and without other evidence. It is too much of a responsibility.
But I am in as close a place to-day as ever I was; $3,000 due for the last month’s machine-expenses, and the purse empty. I notified Mr. Arnot a month ago that I should want $5,000 to-day, and his check arrived last night; but I sent it back to him, because when he bought of me on the 9th of December I said that I would not draw upon him for 3 months, and that before that date Senator Jones would have examined the machine and approved, or done the other thing. If Jones should arrive here a week or ten days from now (as he expects to do,) and should not approve, and shouldn’t buy any royalties, my deal with Arnot would not be symmetrically square, and then how could I refund? The surest way was to return his check.
I have talked with the madam, and here is the result. I will go down to the factory and notify Paige that I will scrape together $6,000 to meet the March and April expenses, and will retire on the 30th of April and return the assignment to him if in the meantime I have not found financial relief.
It is very rough; for the machine does at last seem perfect, and just a bird to go! I think she’s going to be good for 8,000 ems an hour in the hands of a good ordinary man after a solid year’s practice. I may be in error, but I most solidly believe it.
There’s an improved Mergenthaler in New York; Paige and Davis and I watched it two whole afternoons.
With the love of us all, MARK.
Arnot wrote Clemens urging him to accept the check for five thousand dollars in this moment of need. Clemens was probably as sorely tempted to compromise with his conscience as he had ever been in his life, but his resolution field firm.
To M. H. Arnot, in Elmira, N. Y.:
MR. M. H. ARNOT
DEAR SIR,–No–no, I could not think of taking it, with you unsatisfied; and you ought not to be satisfied until you have made personal examination of the machine and had a consensus of testimony of disinterested people, besides. My own perfect knowledge of what is required of such a machine, and my perfect knowledge of the fact that this is the only machine that can meet that requirement, make it difficult for me to realize that a doubt is possible to less well-posted men; and so I would have taken your money without thinking, and thus would have done a great wrong to you and a great one to myself. And now that I go back over the ground, I remember that where I said I could get along 3 months without drawing on you, that delay contemplated a visit from you to the machine in the interval, and your satisfaction with its character and prospects. I had forgotten all that. But I remember it now; and the fact that it was not “so nominated in the bond” does not alter the case or justify me in making my call so prematurely. I do not know that you regarded all that as a part of the bargain–for you were thoroughly and magnanimously unexacting–but I so regarded it, notwithstanding I have so easily managed to forget all about it.
You so gratified me, and did me so much honor in bonding yourself to me in a large sum, upon no evidence but my word and with no protection but my honor, that my pride in that is much stronger than my desire to reap a money advantage from it.
With the sincerest appreciation I am Truly yours S L. CLEMENS.
P. S. I have written a good many words and yet I seem to have failed to say the main thing in exact enough language–which is, that the transaction between us is not complete and binding until you shall have convinced yourself that the machine’s character and prospects are satisfactory.
I ought to explain that the grippe delayed us some weeks, and that we have since been waiting for Mr. Jones. When he was ready, we were not; and now we have been ready more than a month, while he has been kept in Washington by the Silver bill. He said the other day that to venture out of the Capitol for a day at this time could easily chance to hurt him if the bill came up for action, meantime, although it couldn’t hurt the bill, which would pass anyway. Mrs. Jones said she would send me two or three days’ notice, right after the passage of the bill, and that they would follow as soon as I should return word that their coming would not inconvenience us. I suppose I ought to go to New York without waiting for Mr. Jones, but it would not be wise to go there without money.
The bill is still pending.
The Mergenthaler machine, like the Paige, was also at this time in the middle stages of experimental development. It was a slower machine, but it was simpler, less expensive, occupied less room. There was not so much about it to get out of order; it was not so delicate, not so human. These were immense advantages.
But no one at this time could say with certainty which typesetter would reap the harvest of millions. It was only sure that at least one of them would, and the Mergenthaler people were willing to trade stock for stock with the Paige company in order to insure financial success for both, whichever won. Clemens, with a faith that never faltered, declined this offer, a decision that was to cost him millions.
Winter and spring had gone and summer had come, but still there had been no financial conclusion with Jones, Mackay, and the other rich Californians who were to put up the necessary million for the machine’s manufacture. Goodman was spending a large part of his time traveling back and forth between California and Washington, trying to keep business going at both ends. Paige spent most of his time working out improvements for the type-setter, delicate attachments which complicated its construction more and more.
To Joe T. Goodman, in Washington:
HARTFORD, June 22, ’90. DEAR JOE,–I have been sitting by the machine 2 hours, this afternoon, and my admiration of it towers higher than ever. There is no sort of mistake about it, it is the Big Bonanza. In the 2 hours, the time lost by type-breakage was 3 minutes.
This machine is totally without a rival. Rivalry with it is impossible. Last Friday, Fred Whitmore (it was the 28th day of his apprenticeship on the machine) stacked up 49,700 ems of solid nonpareil in 8 hours, and the type-breaking delay was only 6 minutes for the day.
I claim yet, as I have always claimed, that the machine’s market (abroad and here together,) is today worth $150,000,000 without saying anything about the doubling and trebling of this sum that will follow within the life of the patents. Now here is a queer fact: I am one of the wealthiest grandees in America–one of the Vanderbilt gang, in fact–and yet if you asked me to lend you a couple of dollars I should have to ask you to take my note instead.
It makes me cheerful to sit by the machine: come up with Mrs. Goodman and refresh yourself with a draught of the same. Ys ever
MARK.
The machine was still breaking the types now and then, and no doubt Paige was itching to take it to pieces, and only restrained by force from doing so. He was never thoroughly happy unless he was taking the machine apart or setting it up again. Finally, he was allowed to go at it–a disasterous permission, for it was just then that Jones decided to steal a day or two from the Silver Bill and watch the type-setter in operation. Paige already had it in parts when this word came from Goodman, and Jones’s visit had to be called off. His enthusiasm would seem to have weakened from that day. In July, Goodman wrote that both Mackay and Jones had become somewhat diffident in the matter of huge capitalization. He thought it partly due, at least, to “the fatal delays that have sicklied over the bloom of original enthusiasm.” Clemens himself went down to Washington and perhaps warmed Jones with his eloquence; at least, Jones seemed to have agreed to make some effort in the matter a qualified promise, the careful word of a wary politician and capitalist. How many Washington trips were made is not certain, but certainly more than one. Jones would seem to have suggested forms of contracts, but if he came to the point of signing any there is no evidence of it to-day.
Any one who has read Mark Twain’s, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” has a pretty good idea of his opinion of kings in general, and tyrants in particular. Rule by “divine right,” however liberal, was distasteful to him; where it meant oppression it stirred him to violence. In his article, “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” he gave himself loose rein concerning atrocities charged to the master of Russia, and in a letter which he wrote during the summer of 1890, he offered a hint as to remedies. The letter was written by editorial request, but was never mailed. Perhaps it seemed too openly revolutionary at the moment.
Yet scarcely more than a quarter of a century was needed to make it “timely.” Clemens and his family were spending some weeks in the Catskills when it was written.
An unpublished letter on the Czar.
ONTEORA, 1890. TO THE EDITOR OF FREE RUSSIA,–I thank you for the compliment of your invitation to say something, but when I ponder the bottom paragraph on your first page, and then study your statement on your third page, of the objects of the several Russian liberation-parties, I do not quite know how to proceed. Let me quote here the paragraph referred to:
“But men’s hearts are so made that the sight of one voluntary victim for a noble idea stirs them more deeply than the sight of a crowd submitting to a dire fate they cannot escape. Besides, foreigners could not see so clearly as the Russians how much the Government was responsible for the grinding poverty of the masses; nor could they very well realize the moral wretchedness imposed by that Government upon the whole of educated Russia. But the atrocities committed upon the defenceless prisoners are there in all their baseness, concrete and palpable, admitting of no excuse, no doubt or hesitation, crying out to the heart of humanity against Russian tyranny. And the Tzar’s Government, stupidly confident in its apparently unassailable position, instead of taking warning from the first rebukes, seems to mock this humanitarian age by the aggravation of brutalities. Not satisfied with slowly killing its prisoners, and with burying the flower of our young generation in the Siberian desserts, the Government of Alexander III. resolved to break their spirit by deliberately submitting them to a regime of unheard-of brutality and degradation.”
When one reads that paragraph in the glare of George Kennan’s revelations, and considers how much it means; considers that all earthly figures fail to typify the Czar’s government, and that one must descend into hell to find its counterpart, one turns hopefully to your statement of the objects of the several liberation-parties–and is disappointed. Apparently none of them can bear to think of losing the present hell entirely, they merely want the temperature cooled down a little.
I now perceive why all men are the deadly and uncompromising enemies of the rattlesnake: it is merely because the rattlesnake has not speech. Monarchy has speech, and by it has been able to persuade men that it differs somehow from the rattlesnake, has something valuable about it somewhere, something worth preserving, something even good and high and fine, when properly “modified,” something entitling it to protection from the club of the first comer who catches it out of its hole. It seems a most strange delusion and not reconcilable with our superstition that man is a reasoning being. If a house is afire, we reason confidently that it is the first comer’s plain duty to put the fire out in any way he can– drown it with water, blow it up with dynamite, use any and all means to stop the spread of the fire and save the rest of the city. What is the Czar of Russia but a house afire in the midst of a city of eighty millions of inhabitants? Yet instead of extinguishing him, together with his nest and system, the liberation-parties are all anxious to merely cool him down a little and keep him.
It seems to me that this is illogical–idiotic, in fact. Suppose you had this granite-hearted, bloody-jawed maniac of Russia loose in your house, chasing the helpless women and little children–your own. What would you do with him, supposing you had a shotgun? Well, he is loose in your house-Russia. And with your shotgun in your hand, you stand trying to think up ways to “modify” him.
Do these liberation-parties think that they can succeed in a project which has been attempted a million times in the history of the world and has never in one single instance been successful–the “modification” of a despotism by other means than bloodshed? They seem to think they can. My privilege to write these sanguinary sentences in soft security was bought for me by rivers of blood poured upon many fields, in many lands, but I possess not one single little paltry right or privilege that come to me as a result of petition, persuasion, agitation for reform, or any kindred method of procedure. When we consider that not even the most responsible English monarch ever yielded back a stolen public right until it was wrenched from them by bloody violence, is it rational to suppose that gentler methods can win privileges in Russia?
Of course I know that the properest way to demolish the Russian throne would be by revolution. But it is not possible to get up a revolution there; so the only thing left to do, apparently, is to keep the throne vacant by dynamite until a day when candidates shall decline with thanks. Then organize the Republic. And on the whole this method has some large advantages; for whereas a revolution destroys some lives which cannot well be spared, the dynamite way doesn’t. Consider this: the conspirators against the Czar’s life are caught in every rank of life, from the low to the high. And consider: if so many take an active part, where the peril is so dire, is this not evidence that the sympathizers who keep still and do not show their hands, are countless for multitudes? Can you break the hearts of thousands of families with the awful Siberian exodus every year for generations and not eventually cover all Russia from limit to limit with bereaved fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters who secretly hate the perpetrator of this prodigious crime and hunger and thirst for his life? Do you not believe that if your wife or your child or your father was exiled to the mines of Siberia for some trivial utterances wrung from a smarting spirit by the Czar’s intolerable tyranny, and you got a chance to kill him and did not do it, that you would always be ashamed to be in your own society the rest of your life? Suppose that that refined and lovely Russian lady who was lately stripped bare before a brutal soldiery and whipped to death by the Czar’s hand in the person of the Czar’s creature had been your wife, or your daughter or your sister, and to-day the Czar should pass within reach of your hand, how would you feel–and what would you do? Consider, that all over vast Russia, from boundary to boundary, a myriad of eyes filled with tears when that piteous news came, and through those tears that myriad of eyes saw, not that poor lady, but lost darlings of their own whose fate her fate brought back with new access of grief out of a black and bitter past never to be forgotten or forgiven.
If I am a Swinburnian–and clear to the marrow I am–I hold human nature in sufficient honor to believe there are eighty million mute Russians that are of the same stripe, and only one Russian family that isn’t.
MARK TWAIN.
Type-setter matters were going badly. Clemens still had faith in Jones, and he had lost no grain of faith in the machine. The money situation, however, was troublesome. With an expensive establishment, and work of one sort or another still to be done on the machine, his income would not reach. Perhaps Goodman had already given up hope, for he does not seem to have returned from California after the next letter was written–a colorless letter– in which we feel a note of resignation. The last few lines are sufficient.
To Joe T. Goodman, in California:
DEAR JOE,–…… I wish you could get a day off and make those two or three Californians buy those privileges, for I’m going to need money before long.
I don’t know where the Senator is; but out on the Coast I reckon.
I guess we’ve got a perfect machine at last. We never break a type, now, and the new device for enabling the operator to touch the last letters and justify the line simultaneously works, to a charm. With love to you both,
MARK
The year closed gloomily enough. The type-setter seemed to be perfected, but capital for its manufacture was not forthcoming. The publishing business of Charles L. Webster & Co. was returning little or no profit. Clemens’s mother had died in Keokuk at the end of October, and his wife’s mother, in Elmira a month later. Mark Twain, writing a short business letter to his publishing manager, Fred J. Ball, closed it: “Merry Xmas to you!–and I wish to God I could have one myself before I die.”
XXXI
LETTERS, 1891, TO HOWELLS, MRS. CLEMENS AND OTHERS. RETURN TO LITERATURE. AMERICAN CLAIMANT. LEAVING HARTFORD. EUROPE. DOWN THE RHINE
Clemens was still not without hope in the machine, at the beginning of the new year (1891) but it was a hope no longer active, and it presently became a moribund. Jones, on about the middle of February, backed out altogether, laying the blame chiefly on Mackay and the others, who, he said, had decided not to invest. Jones “let his victim down easy” with friendly words, but it was the end, for the present, at least, of machine financiering.
It was also the end of Mark Twain’s capital. His publishing business was not good. It was already in debt and needing more money. There was just one thing for him to do and he did it at once, not stopping to cry over spilt milk, but with good courage and the old enthusiasm that never failed him, he returned to the trade of authorship. He dug out half- finished articles and stories, finished them and sold them, and within a week after the Jones collapse he was at work on a novel based an the old Sellers idea, which eight years before he and Howells had worked into a play. The brief letter in which he reported this news to Howells bears no marks of depression, though the writer of it was in his fifty-sixth year; he was by no means well, and his financial prospects were anything but golden.
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
HARTFORD, Feb. 24, ’91 DEAR HOWELLS,–Mrs. Clemens has been sick abed for near two weeks, but is up and around the room now, and gaining. I don’t know whether she has written Mrs. Howells or not–I only know she was going to–and will yet, if she hasn’t. We are promising ourselves a whole world of pleasure in the visit, and you mustn’t dream of disappointing us.
Does this item stir an interest in you? Began a novel four days ago, and this moment finished chapter four. Title of the book
“Colonel Mulberry Sellers. American Claimant
Of the
Great Earldom of Rossmore’ in the
Peerage of Great Britain.”
Ys Ever
MARK.
Probably Mark Twain did not return to literary work reluctantly. He had always enjoyed writing and felt now that he was equipped better than ever for authorship, at least so far as material was concerned. There exists a fragmentary copy of a letter to some unknown correspondent, in which he recites his qualifications. It bears evidence of having been written just at this time and is of unusual interest at this point.
Fragment of Letter to ——-, 1891:
. . . . 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 steam-boatmen–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 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.
[No signature.]
Clemens for several years had been bothered by rheumatism in his shoulder. The return now to the steady use of the pen aggravated his trouble, and at times he was nearly disabled. The phonograph for commercial dictation had been tried experimentally, and Mark Twain was always ready for any innovation.
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
HARTFORD, Feb. 28, ’91. DEAR HOWELLS,–Won’t you drop-in at the Boylston Building (New England Phonograph Co) and talk into a phonograph in an ordinary conversation- voice and see if another person (who didn’t hear you do it) can take the words from the thing without difficulty and repeat them to you. If the experiment is satisfactory (also make somebody put in a message which you don’t hear, and see if afterward you can get it out without difficulty) won’t you then ask them on what terms they will rent me a phonograph for 3 months and furnish me cylinders enough to carry 75,000 words. 175 cylinders, ain’t it?
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 a million–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.
Ys ever
MARK.
Howells, always willing to help, visited the phonograph place, and a few days later reported results. He wrote: “I talked your letter into a fonograf in my usual tone at my usual gait of speech. Then the fonograf man talked his answer in at his wonted swing and swell. Then we took the cylinder to a type-writer in the next room, and she put the hooks into her ears and wrote the whole out. I send you the result. There is a mistake of one word. I think that if you have the cheek to dictate the story into the fonograf, all the rest is perfectly easy. It wouldn’t fatigue me to talk for an hour as I did.”
Clemens did not find the phonograph entirely satisfactory, at least not for a time, and he appears never to have used it steadily. His early experience with it, however, seems interesting.
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
HARTFORD, Apl. 4, ’91. DEAR HOWELLS,–I’m ashamed. It happened in this way. I was proposing to acknowledge the receipt of the play and the little book per phonograph, so that you could see that the instrument is good enough for mere letter- writing; then I meant to add the fact that you can’t write literature with it, because it hasn’t any ideas and it hasn’t any gift for elaboration, or smartness of talk, or vigor of action, or felicity of expression, but is just matter-of-fact, compressive, unornamental, and as grave and unsmiling as the devil.
I filled four dozen cylinders in two sittings, then found I could have said about as much with the pen and said it a deal better. Then I resigned.
I believe it could teach one to dictate literature to a phonographer–and some time I will experiment in that line.
The little book is charmingly written, and it interested me. But it flies too high for me. Its concretest things are filmy abstractions to me, and when I lay my grip on one of them and open my hand, I feel as embarrassed as I use to feel when I thought I had caught a fly. I’m going to try to mail it back to you to-day–I mean I am going to charge my memory. Charging my memory is one of my chief industries ….
With our loves and our kindest regards distributed among you according to the proprieties.
Yrs ever
MARK.
P. S.–I’m sending that ancient “Mental Telegraphy” article to Harper’s –with a modest postscript. Probably read it to you years ago. S. L. C.
The “little book” mentioned in this letter was by Swedenborg, an author in whom the Boston literary set was always deeply interested. “Mental Telegraphy” appeared in Harper’s Magazine, and is now included in the Uniform Edition of Mark Twain’s books. It was written in 1878.
Joe Goodman had long since returned to California, it being clear that nothing could be gained by remaining in Washington. On receipt of the news of the type-setter’s collapse he sent a consoling word. Perhaps he thought Clemens would rage over the unhappy circumstance, and possibly hold him in some measure to blame. But it was generally the smaller annoyances of life that made Mark Twain rage; the larger catastrophes were likely to stir only his philosophy.
The Library of American Literature, mentioned in the following letter, was a work in many volumes, edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson.
To Joe T. Goodman:
April [?] 1891. DEAR JOE, Well, it’s all right, anyway. Diplomacy couldn’t have saved it–diplomacy of mine–at that late day. I hadn’t any diplomacy in stock, anyway. In order to meet Jones’s requirements I had to surrender the old contract (a contract which made me boss of the situation and gave me the whip-hand of Paige) and allow the new one to be drafted and put in its place. I was running an immense risk, but it was justified by Jones’s promises–promises made to me not merely once but every time I tallied with him. When February arrived, I saw signs which were mighty plain reading. Signs which meant that Paige was hoping and praying that Jones would go back on me–which would leave Paige boss, and me robbed and out in the cold. His prayers were answered, and I am out in the cold. If I ever get back my nine-twentieths interest, it will be by law- suit–which will be instituted in the indefinite future, when the time comes.
I am at work again–on a book. Not with a great deal of spirit, but with enough–yes, plenty. And I am pushing my publishing house. It has turned the corner after cleaning $50,000 a year for three consecutive years, and piling every cent of it into one book–Library of American Literature–and from next January onward it will resume dividends. But I’ve got to earn $50,000 for it between now and then–which I will do if I keep my health. This additional capital is needed for that same book, because its prosperity is growing so great and exacting.
It is dreadful to think of you in ill health–I can’t realize it; you are always to me the same that you were in those days when matchless health. and glowing spirits and delight in life were commonplaces with us. Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope-tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.
With love to you both from us all. MARK.
Mark Twain’s residence in Hartford was drawing rapidly to a close. Mrs. Clemens was poorly, and his own health was uncertain. They believed that some of the European baths would help them. Furthermore, Mark Twain could no longer afford the luxury of his Hartford home. In Europe life could be simpler and vastly cheaper. He was offered a thousand dollars apiece for six European letters, by the McClure syndicate and W. M. Laffan, of the Sun. This would at least give him a start on the other side. The family began immediately their sad arrangements for departure.
To Fred J. Hall (manager Chas. L. Webster & Co.), N. Y.:
HARTFORD, Apl. 14, ’91. DEAR MR. HALL,–Privately–keep it to yourself–as you, are already aware, we are going to Europe in June, for an indefinite stay. We shall sell the horses and shut up the house. We wish to provide a place for our coachman, who has been with us a 21 years, and is sober, active, diligent, and unusually bright and capable. You spoke of hiring a colored man as engineer and helper in the packing room. Patrick would soon learn that trade and be very valuable. We will cease to need him by the middle or end of June. Have you made irrevocable arrangements with the colored man, or would you prefer to have Patrick, if he thinks he would like to try?
I have not said anything to him about it yet.
Yours
S. L. C.
It was to be a complete breaking up of their beautiful establishment. Patrick McAleer, George the butler, and others of their household help had been like members of the family. We may guess at the heartbreak of it all, even though the letters remain cheerful.
Howells, strangely enough, seems to have been about the last one to be told of their European plans; in fact, he first got wind of it from the papers, and wrote for information. Likely enough Clemens had not until then had the courage to confess.
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
HARTFORD, May 20, ’91. DEAR HOWELLS,–For her health’s sake Mrs. Clemens must try baths somewhere, and this it is that has determined us to go to Europe. The water required seems to be provided at a little obscure and little- visited nook up in the hills back of the Rhine somewhere and you get to it by Rhine traffic-boat and country stage-coach. Come, get “sick or sorry enough” and join us. We shall be a little while at that bath, and the rest of the summer at Annecy (this confidential to you) in Haute Savoie, 22 miles from Geneva. Spend the winters in Berlin. I don’t know how long we shall be in Europe–I have a vote, but I don’t cast it. I’m going to do whatever the others desire, with leave to change their mind, without prejudice, whenever they want to. Travel has no longer, any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to see except heaven and hell, and I have only a vague curiosity as concerns one of those.
I found I couldn’t use the play–I had departed too far from its lines when I came to look at it. I thought I might get a great deal of dialogue out of it, but I got only 15 loosely written pages–they saved me half a days work. It was the cursing phonograph. There was abundance of good dialogue, but it couldn’t befitted into the new conditions of the story.
Oh, look here–I did to-day what I have several times in past years thought of doing: answered an interviewing proposition from a rich newspaper with the reminder that they had not stated the terms; that my time was all occupied with writing, at good pay, and that as talking was harder work I should not care to venture it unless I knew the pay was going to be proportionately higher. I wish I had thought of this the other day when Charley Stoddard turned a pleasant Englishman loose on me and I couldn’t think of any rational excuse. Ys Ever
MARK.
Clemens had finished his Sellers book and had disposed of the serial rights to the McClure syndicate. The house in Hartford was closed early in June, and on the 6th the family, with one maid, Katie Leary, sailed on the Gascogne. Two weeks later they had begun a residence abroad which was to last for more than nine years.
It was not easy to get to work in Europe. Clemens’s arm remained lame, and any effort at writing brought suffering. The Century Magazine proposed another set of letters, but by the end of July he had barely begun on those promised to McClure and Laffan. In August, however, he was able to send three: one from Aix about the baths there, another from Bayreuth concerning the Wagner festival, and a third from Marienbad, in Bohemia, where they rested for a time. He decided that he would arrange for no more European letters when the six were finished, but would gather material for a book. He would take a courier and a kodak and go tramping again in some fashion that would be interesting to do and to write.
The idea finally matured when he reached Switzerland and settled the family at the Hotel Beau Rivage, Ouchy, Lausanne, facing Lake Leman. He decided to make a floating trip down the Rhone, and he engaged Joseph Very, a courier that had served him on a former European trip, to accompany him. The courier went over to Bourget and bought for five dollars a flat-bottomed boat and engaged its owner as their pilot. It was the morning of September 20, when they began their floating-trip down the beautiful historic river that flows through the loveliest and most romantic region of France. He wrote daily to Mrs. Clemens, and his letters tell the story of that drowsy, happy experience better than the notes made with a view to publication. Clemens had arrived at Lake Bourget on the evening before the morning of their start and slept on the Island of Chatillon, in an old castle of the same name. Lake Bourget connects with the Rhone by a small canal.
Letters and Memoranda to Mrs. Clemens, in Ouchy, Switzerland:
Sept. 20, 1891. Sunday, 11 a.m.
On the lake Bourget–just started. The castle of Chatillon high overhead showing above the trees. It was a wonderfully still place to sleep in. Beside us there was nobody in it but a woman, a boy and a dog. A Pope was born in the room I slept in. No, he became a Pope later.
The lake is smooth as glass–a brilliant sun is shining.
Our boat is 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.
3.15 p. m. Sunday. We have been in the Rhone 3 hours. It is unimaginably still and reposeful and cool and soft and 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. Good bye Sweetheart
S. L. C.
PORT DE GROLEE, Monday, 4.15 p.m. [Sept. 21, 1891]
Name of the village which we left five minutes ago.
We went ashore at 5 p. m. yesterday, dear heart, and walked a short mile to St. Geuix, a big village, and took quarters at the principal inn; had a good dinner and afterwards along walk out of town on the banks of the Guiers till 7.30.
Went to bed at 8.30 and continued to make notes and read books and newspapers till midnight. Slept until 8, breakfasted in bed, and lay till noon, because there had been a very heavy rain in the night and the day was still dark and lowering. But at noon the sun broke through and in 15 minutes we were tramping toward the river. Got afloat at 1 p. m. but at 2.40 we had to rush suddenly ashore and take refuge in the above village. Just as we got ourselves and traps safely housed in the inn, the rain let go and came down in great style. We lost an hour and a half there, but we are off again, now, with bright sunshine.
I wrote you yesterday my darling, and shall expect to write you every day.
Good-day, and love to all of you.
SAML.
ON THE RHONE BELOW VILLEBOIS, Tuesday noon.
Good morning, sweetheart. 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 and calves–also several rabbits.–[His word for fleas.]–The latter had a ball, and I was the ball-room; but they were very friendly and didn’t bite.
The peasants were mighty kind and hearty, and flew around and did their best to make us comfortable. This morning I breakfasted on the shore in the open air with two sociable dogs and a cat. Clean cloth, napkin and 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 and 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 water- proof sun-bonnet for the boat, and now we sail along dry although we had many heavy showers this morning.
With a word of love to you all and particularly you, SAML.
ON THE RHONE, BELOW VIENNA. I salute you, my darling. Your telegram reached me in Lyons last night and was very pleasant news indeed.
I was up and shaved before 8 this morning, but we got delayed and didn’t sail from Lyons till 10.3O–an hour and a half lost. And we’ve lost another hour–two of them, I guess–since, by an error. We came in sight of Vienne at 2 o’clock, several miles ahead, on a hill, and I proposed to walk down there and let the boat go ahead of us. So Joseph and I got out and struck through a willow swamp along a dim path, and by and by came out on the steep bank of a slough or inlet or something, and we followed that bank forever and ever trying to get around the head of that slough. Finally I noticed a twig standing up in the water, and by George it had a distinct and even vigorous quiver to it! I don’t know when I have felt so much like a donkey. On an island! I wanted to drown somebody, but I hadn’t anybody I could spare. However, after another long tramp we found a lonely native, and he had a scow and soon we were on the mainland–yes, and a blamed sight further from Vienne than we were when we started.
Notes–I make millions of them; and so I get no time to write to you. If you’ve got a pad there, please send it poste-restante to Avignon. I may not need it but I fear I shall.
I’m straining to reach St. Pierre de Boef, but it’s going to be a close fit, I reckon.
AFLOAT, Friday, 3 p.m., ’91. Livy darling, we sailed from St. Pierre de Boef six hours ago, and are now approaching Tournon, where we shall not stop, but go on and make Valence, a City Of 25,000 people. 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.
Joseph is perfect. He is at his very best–and never was better in his life. I guess he gets discouraged and feels disliked and in the way when he is lying around–but here he is perfection, and brim full of useful alacrities and helps and ingenuities.
When I woke up an hour ago and heard the clock strike 4, I said “I seem to have been asleep an immensely long time; I must have gone to bed mighty early; I wonder what time I did go to bed.” And I got up and lit a candle and looked at my watch to see.
AFLOAT
2 HOURS BELOW BOURG ST. ANDEOL. Monday, 11 a.m., Sept. 28. Livy darling, I didn’t write yesterday. We left La Voulte in a driving storm of cold rain–couldn’t write in it–and at 1 p. m. when we were not thinking of stopping, we saw a picturesque and mighty ruin on a high hill back of a village, and I was seized with a desire to explore it; so we landed at once and set out with rubbers and umbrella, sending the boat ahead to St. Andeol, and we spent 3 hours clambering about those cloudy heights among those worn and vast and idiotic ruins of a castle built by two crusaders 650 years ago. The work of these asses was full of interest, and we had a good time inspecting, examining and scrutinizing it. All the hills on both sides of the Rhone have peaks and precipices, and each has its gray and wasted pile of mouldy walls and broken towers. The Romans displaced the Gauls, the Visigoths displaced the Romans, the Saracens displaced the Visigoths, the Christians displaced the Saracens, and it was these pious animals who built these strange lairs and cut each other’s throats in the name and for the glory of God, and robbed and burned and slew in peace and war; and the pauper and the slave built churches, and the credit of it went to the Bishop who racked the money out of them. These are pathetic shores, and they make one despise the human race.
We came down in an hour by rail, but I couldn’t get your telegram till this morning, for it was Sunday and they had shut up the post office to go to the circus. I went, too. It was all one family–parents and 5 children–performing in the open air to 200 of these enchanted villagers, who contributed coppers when called on. It was a most gay and strange and pathetic show. I got up at 7 this morning to see the poor devils cook their poor breakfast and pack up their sordid fineries.
This is a 9 k-m. current and the wind is with us; we shall make Avignon before 4 o’clock. I saw watermelons and pomegranates for sale at St. Andeol.
With a power of love, Sweetheart, SAML.
HOTEL D’EUROPE, AVIGNON, Monday, 6 p.m., Sept. 28. Well, Livy darling, I have been having a perfect feast of letters for an hour, and I thank you and dear Clam with all my heart. It’s like hearing from home after a long absence.
It is early to be in bed, but I’m always abed before 9, on this voyage; and up at 7 or a trifle later, every morning. If I ever take such a trip again, I will have myself called at the first tinge of dawn and get to sea as soon after as possible. The early dawn on the water-nothing can be finer, as I know by old Mississippi experience. I did so long for you and Sue yesterday morning–the most superb sunrise!–the most marvelous sunrise! and 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 interest private to itself and not to be found elsewhere in the world; for between me and it, in the far distant-eastward, was a silhouette mountain-range in which I had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most noble face upturned to the sky, and mighty form out stretched, which I had named Napoleon Dreaming of Universal Empire–and 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 upstreaming and far-reaching lances of the sun. It made one want to cry for delight, it was so supreme in its unimaginable majesty and beauty.
We had a curious experience today. A little after I had sealed and directed my letter to you, in which I said we should make Avignon before 4, we got lost. We ceased to encounter any village or ruin mentioned in our “particularizes” and detailed Guide of the Rhone–went drifting along by the hour in a wholly unknown land and on an uncharted river! Confound it, we stopped talking and did nothing but stand up in the boat and search the horizons with the glass and wonder what in the devil had happened. And at last, away yonder at 5 o’clock when some east towers and fortresses hove in sight we couldn’t recognize them for Avignon–yet we knew by the broken bridge that it was Avignon.
Then we saw what the trouble was–at some time or other we had drifted down the wrong side of an island and followed a sluggish branch of the Rhone not frequented in modern times. We lost an hour and a half by it and missed one of the most picturesque and gigantic and history-sodden masses of castellated medieval ruin that Europe can show.
It was dark by the time we had wandered through the town and got the letters and found the hotel–so I went to bed.
We shall leave here at noon tomorrow and float down to Arles, arriving about dark, and there bid good bye to the boat, the river-trip finished. Between Arles and Nimes (and Avignon again,) we shall be till Saturday morning–then rail it through on that day to Ouchy, reaching the hotel at 11 at night if the train isn’t late.
Next day (Sunday) if you like, go to Basel, and Monday to Berlin. But I shall be at your disposal, to do exactly as you desire and prefer.
With no end of love to all of you and twice as much to you, sweetheart,
SAML.
I believe my arm is a trifle better than it was when I started.
The mention in the foregoing letter of the Napoleon effigy is the beginning of what proved to be a rather interesting episode. Mark Twain thought a great deal of his discovery, as he called it–the giant figure of Napoleon outlined by the distant mountain range. In his note-book he entered memoranda telling just where it was to be seen, and added a pencil sketch of the huge profile. But then he characteristically forgot all about it, and when he recalled the incident ten years later, he could not remember the name of the village, Beauchastel, from which the great figure could be seen; also, that he had made a record of the place.
But he was by this time more certain than ever that his discovery was a remarkable one, which, if known, would become one of the great natural wonders, such as Niagara Falls. Theodore Stanton was visiting him at the time, and Clemens urged him, on his return to France, to make an excursion to the Rhone and locate the Lost Napoleon, as he now called it. But Clemens remembered the wonder as being somewhere between Arles and Avignon, instead of about a hundred miles above the last-named town. Stanton naturally failed to find it, and it remained for the writer of these notes, motoring up the Rhone one September day, exactly twenty-two years after the first discovery, to re-locate the vast reclining figure of the first consul of France, “dreaming of Universal Empire.” The re-discovery was not difficult–with Mark Twain’s memoranda as a guide–and it was worth while. Perhaps the Lost Napoleon is not so important a natural wonder as Mark Twain believed, but it is a striking picture, and on a clear day the calm blue face outlined against the sky will long hold the traveler’s attention.
To Clara Clemens, in Ouchy, Switzerland:
AFLOAT, 11.20 a.m., Sept. 29, Tuesday. DEAR OLD BEN,–The vast stone masses and huge towers of the ancient papal palace of Avignon are projected above an intervening wooded island a mile up the river behind me–for we are already on our way to Arles. It is a perfectly still morning, with a brilliant sun, and very hot–outside; but I am under cover of the linen hood, and it is cool and shady in here.
Please tell mamma I got her very last letter this morning, and I perceive by it that I do not need to arrive at Ouchy before Saturday midnight. I am glad, because I couldn’t do the railroading I am proposing to do during the next two or three days and get there earlier. I could put in the time till Sunday midnight, but shall not venture it without telegraphic instructions from her to Nimes day after tomorrow, Oct. 1, care Hotel Manivet.
The only adventures we have is in drifting into rough seas now and then. They are not dangerous, but they go thro’ all the motions of it. Yesterday when we shot the Bridge of the Holy Spirit it was probably in charge of some inexperienced deputy spirit for the day, for we were allowed to go through the wrong arch, which brought us into a tourbillon below which tried to make this old scow stand on its head. Of course I lost my temper and blew it off in a way to be heard above the roar of the tossing waters. I lost it because the admiral had taken that arch in deference to my opinion that it was the best one, while his own judgment told him to take the one nearest the other side of the river. I could have poisoned him I was so mad to think I had hired such a turnip. A boatman in command should obey nobody’s orders but his own, and yield to nobody’s suggestions.
It was very sweet of you to write me, dear, and I thank you ever so much. With greatest love and kisses,
PAPA.
To Mrs. Clemens, in Ouchy, Switzerland:
ARLES, Sept. 30, noon. Livy darling, I hain’t got no time to write today, because I am sight seeing industriously and imagining my chapter.
Bade good-bye to the river trip and gave away the boat yesterday evening. We had ten great days in her.
We reached here after dark. We were due about 4.30, counting by distance, but we couldn’t calculate on such a lifeless current as we found.
I love you, sweetheart.
SAML.
It had been a long time since Clemens had written to his old friend Twichell, but the Rhone trip must have reminded him of those days thirteen years earlier, when, comparatively young men, he and Twichell were tramping through the Black Forest and scaling Gemmi Pass. He sent Twichell a reminder of that happy time.
To Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, in Hartford, Conn:
NIMES, Oct. 1, ’91. DEAR JOE,–I have been ten days floating down the Rhone on a raft, from Lake Bourget, and a most curious and darling kind of a trip it has been. You ought to have been along–I could have made room for you easily–and you would have found that a pedestrian tour in Europe doesn’t begin with a raft-voyage for hilarity and mild adventure, and intimate contact with the unvisited native of the back settlements, and extinction from the world and newspapers, and a conscience in a state of coma, and lazy comfort, and solid happiness. In fact there’s nothing that’s so lovely.
But it’s all over. I gave the raft away yesterday at Arles, and am loafing along back by short stages on the rail to Ouchy-Lausanne where the tribe are staying.
Love to you all
MARK.
The Clemenses settled in Berlin for the winter, at 7 Kornerstrasse, and later at the Hotel Royal. There had been no permanent improvement in Mark Twain’s arm and he found writing difficult. Some of the letters promised to Laffan and McClure were still unfinished.
Young Hall, his publishing manager in America, was working hard to keep the business afloat, and being full of the optimism of his years did not fail to make as good a showing as he could. We may believe his letters were very welcome to Clemens and his wife, who found little enough in the general prospect to comfort them.
To Mr. Hall, in New York:
BERLIN, Nov. 27, ’91. DEAR MR. HALL,–That kind of a statement is valuable. It came this morning. This is the first time since the business began that I have had a report that furnished the kind of information I wanted, and was really enlightening and satisfactory. Keep it up. Don’t let it fall into desuetude.
Everything looks so fine and handsome with the business, now, that I feel a great let-up from depression. The rewards of your long and patient industry are on their way, and their arrival safe in port, presently, seems assured.
By George, I shall be glad when the ship comes in!
My arm is so much better that I was able to make a speech last night to 250 Americans. But when they threw my portrait on the screen it was a sorrowful reminder, for it was from a negative of 15 years ago, and hadn’t a gray hair in it. And now that my arm is better, I have stolen a couple of days and finished up a couple of McClure letters that have been lying a long time.
I shall mail one of them to you next Tuesday–registered. Lookout for it.
I shall register and mail the other one (concerning the “Jungfrau”) next Friday look out for it also, and drop me a line to let me know they have arrived.
I shall write the 6th and last letter by and by when I have studied Berlin sufficiently.
Yours in a most cheerful frame of mind, and with my and all the family’s Thanksgiving greetings and best wishes,
S. L. CLEMENS.
Postscript by Mrs. Clemens written on Mr. Clemens’s letter:
DEAR MR. HALL,–This is my birthday and your letter this morning was a happy addition to the little gifts on the breakfast table. I thought of going out and spending money for something unnecessary after it came, but concluded perhaps I better wait a little longer. Sincerely yours
O. L. CLEMENS.
“The German Chicago” was the last of the six McClure letters and was finished that winter in Berlin. It is now included in the Uniform Edition of Mark Twain’s works, and is one of the best descriptive articles of the German capital ever written. He made no use of the Rhone notes further than to put them together in literary form. They did not seem to him to contain enough substance to warrant publication. A letter to Hall, written toward the end of December, we find rather gloomy in tone, though he is still able to extract comfort and even cheerfulness from one of Mr. Hall’s reports.
Memorandum to Fred J. Hall, in New York:
Among the MSS I left with you are a few that have a recent look and are written on rather stiff pale green paper. If you will have those type- writered and keep the originals and send me the copies (one per mail, not two.) I’ll see if I can use them.
But tell Howells and other inquirers that my hopes of writing anything are very slender–I seem to be disabled for life.
Drop McClure a line and tell him the same. I can’t dare to make an engagement now for even a single letter.
I am glad Howells is on a magazine, but sorry he gave up the Study. I shall have to go on a magazine myself if this L. A. L. continues to hold my nose down to the grind-stone much longer.
I’m going to hold my breath, now, for 30 days–then the annual statement will arrive and I shall know how we feel! Merry Xmas to you from us all.
Sincerely,
S. L. C.
P. S. Just finished the above and finished raging at the eternal German tax-gatherer, and so all the jubilant things which I was going to say about the past year’s business got knocked out of me. After writing this present letter I was feeling blue about Huck Finn, but I sat down and overhauled your reports from now back to last April and compared them with the splendid Oct.-Nov. business, and went to bed feeling refreshed and fine, for certainly it has been a handsome year. Now rush me along the Annual Report and let’s see how we feel! S. L. C.
XXXII
LETTERS, 1892, CHIEFLY TO MR. HALL AND MRS. CRANE. IN BERLIN, MENTONE, BAD-NAUHEIM, FLORENCE
Mark Twain was the notable literary figure in Berlin that winter, the center of every great gathering. He was entertained by the Kaiser, and shown many special attentions by Germans of every rank. His books were as well known in Berlin as in New York, and at court assemblies and embassies he was always a chief center of interest.
He was too popular for his own good; the gaiety of the capital told on him. Finally, one night, after delivering a lecture in a hot room, he contracted a severe cold, driving to a ball at General von Versen’s, and a few days later was confined to his bed with pneumonia. It was not a severe attack, but it was long continued. He could write some letters and even work a little, but he was not allowed to leave his bed for many weeks, a condition which he did not find a hardship, for no man ever enjoyed the loose luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows more than Mark Twain. In a memorandum of that time he wrote: “I am having a booming time all to myself.”
Meantime, Hall, in America, was sending favorable reports of the publishing business, and this naturally helped to keep up his spirits. He wrote frequently to Hall, of course, but the letters for the most part are purely of a business nature and of little interest to the general reader.
To Fred J. Hall, in New York:
HOTEL ROYAL, BERLIN, Feb. 12. DEAR MR. HALL,–Daly wants to get the stage rights of the “American Claimant.” The foundation from which I wrote the story is a play of the same name which has been in A. P. Burbank’s hands 5 or 6 years. That play cost me some money (helping Burbank stage it) but has never brought me any. I have written Burbank (Lotos Club) and asked him to give me back his rights in the old play so that I can treat with Daly and utilize this chance to even myself up. Burbank is a lovely fellow, and if he objects I can’t urge him. But you run in at the Lotos and see him; and if he relinquishes his claim, then I would like you to conduct the business with Daly; or have Whitford or some other lawyer do it under your supervision if you prefer.
This morning I seem to have rheumatism in my right foot.
I am ordered south by the doctor and shall expect to be well enough to start by the end of this month.
[No signature.]
It is curious, after Clemens and Howells had tried so hard and so long to place their “Sellers” Play, that now, when the story appeared in book form, Augustin Daly should have thought it worth dramatizing. Daly and Clemens were old friends, and it would seem that Daly could hardly have escaped seeing the play when it was going the rounds. But perhaps there is nothing more mysterious in the world than the ways and wants of theatrical managers. The matter came to nothing, of course, but the fact that Daly should have thought a story built from an old discarded play had a play in it seems interesting.
Clemens and his wife were advised to leave the cold of Berlin as soon as he was able to travel. This was not until the first of March, when, taking their old courier, Joseph Very, they left the children in good hands and journeyed to the south of France.
To Susy Clemens, in Berlin:
MENTONE, Mch 22, ’92. SUSY DEAR,–I have been delighted to note your easy facility with your pen and proud to note also your literary superiorities of one kind and another–clearness of statement, directness, felicity of expression, photographic ability in setting forth an incident–style–good style–no barnacles on it in the way of unnecessary, retarding words (the Shipman scrapes off the barnacles when he wants his racer to go her best gait and straight to the buoy.) You should write a letter every day, long or short –and so ought I, but I don’t.
Mamma says, tell Clara yes, she will have to write a note if the fan comes back mended.
We couldn’t go to Nice to-day–had to give it up, on various accounts– and this was the last chance. I am sorry for Mamma–I wish she could have gone. She got a heavy fall yesterday evening and was pretty stiff and lame this morning, but is working it off trunk packing.
Joseph is gone to Nice to educate himself in Kodaking–and to get the pictures mounted which Mamma 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. With lots of love.
PAPA.
In the course of their Italian wanderings they reached Florence, where they were so comfortable and well that they decided to engage a villa for the next winter. Through Prof. Willard Fiske, they discovered the Villa Viviani, near Settignano, an old palace beautifully located on the hilltops east of Florence, commanding a wonderful view of the ancient city. Clemens felt that he could work there, and time proved that he was right.
For the summer, however, they returned to Germany, and located at Bad-Nauheim. Clemens presently decided to make a trip to America to give some personal attention to business matters. For one thing, his publishing-house, in spite of prosperity, seemed constantly to be requiring more capital, and then a Chicago company had been persuaded by Paige to undertake the manufacture of the type-setter. It was the beginning of a series of feverish trips which he would make back and forth across the ocean during the next two years.
To Fred J. Hall, in New York:
BAD-NAUHEIM, June 11, ’92. Saturday.
DEAR MR. HALL,–If this arrives before I do, let it inform you that I am leaving Bremen for New York next Tuesday in the “Havel.”
If you can meet me when the ship arrives, you can help me to get away from the reporters; and maybe you can take me to your own or some other lodgings where they can’t find me.
But if the hour is too early or too late for you, I shall obscure myself somewhere till I can come to the office.
Yours sincerely
S. L. C.
Nothing of importance happened in America. The new Paige company had a factory started in Chicago and expected to manufacture fifty machines as a beginning. They claimed to have capital, or to be able to command it, and as the main control had passed from Clemens’s hands, he could do no more than look over the ground and hope for the best. As for the business, about all that he could do was to sign certain notes necessary to provide such additional capital as was needed, and agree with Hall that hereafter they would concentrate their efforts and resist further temptation in the way of new enterprise. Then he returned to Bad-Nauheim and settled down to literature. This was the middle of July, and he must have worked pretty steadily, for he presently had a variety of MSS. ready to offer.
To Fred J. Hall, in New York:
Aug. 10, ’92. DEAR MR. HALT,–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 and Tom Sawyer (still 15 years old) and their friend the freed slave Jim around the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator, and somewhere after the end of that great voyage he will work in the said episode and then nobody will suspect that a whole book has been written and the globe circumnavigated merely to get that episode in an effective (and at the same time apparently unintentional) way. I have written 12,000 words of this narrative, and find that the humor flows as easily as the adventures and 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, and I think will interest any boy between 8 years and 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 Childs 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 of the story, “New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
[No signature.]
The “novel” mentioned in the foregoing was The Extraordinary Twins, a story from which Pudd’nhead Wilson would be evolved later. It was a wildly extravagant farce–just the sort of thing that now and then Mark Twain plunged into with an enthusiasm that had to work itself out and die a natural death, or mellow into something worth while. Tom Sawyer Abroad, as the new Huck story was finally called, was completed and disposed of to St. Nicholas for serial publication.
The Twichells were in Europe that summer, and came to Bad-Nauheim. The next letter records a pleasant incident. The Prince of Wales of that day later became King Edward VII.
To Mr. and Mrs. Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa.:
Private. BAD-NAUHEIM, Aug. 23, ’92. DEAR ORION AND MOLLIE,–(“Private” because no newspaper-man or other gossip must get hold of it)
Livy is getting along pretty well, and the doctor thinks another summer here will cure her.
The Twichell’s have been here four days and we have had good times with them. Joe and I ran over to Homburg, the great pleasure resort, Saturday, to dine with some friends, and in the morning I went walking in the promenade and met the British Ambassador to the Court of Berlin, and he introduced me to the Prince of Wales, and I found him a most unusually comfortable and unembarrassing Englishman to talk with–quick to see the obscurest point, and equipped with a laugh which is spontaneous and catching. Am invited by a near friend of his to meet him at dinner day after tomorrow, and there could be a good time, but the brass band will smash the talk and spoil everything.
We are expecting to move to Florence ten or twelve days hence, but if this hot weather continues we shall wait for cooler. I take Clara to Berlin for the winter-music, mainly, with German and French added. Thus far, Jean is our only glib French scholar.
We all send love to you all and to Pamela and Sam’s family, and Annie.
SAM
Clemens and family left Bad-Nauheim for Italy by way of Switzerland. In September Mrs. Clemens’s sister, Mrs. Crane, who had been with them in Europe during the first year, had now returned to America. Mrs. Clemens had improved at the baths, though she had by no means recovered her health. We get a general report of conditions from the letter which Clemens wrote Mrs. Crane from Lucerne, Switzerland, where the party rested for several days. The “Phelps” mentioned in this letter was William Walter Phelps, United States Minister to Germany. The Phelps and Clemens families had been much associated in Berlin. “Mason” was Frank Mason, Consul General at Frankfort, and in later years at Paris. “Charlie and Ida” were Charles and Mrs. Langdon, of Elmira.
To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira, N. Y.:
LUCERNE, Sept. 18, ’92. DEAR AUNT SUE,–Imagine how I felt to find that you had actually gone off without filling my traveling ink stand which you gave me! I found it out yesterday. Livy advised me to write you about it.
I have been driving this pen hard. I wrote 280 pages on a yarn called “Tom Sawyer Abroad,” then took up the “Twins” again, destroyed the last half of the manuscript and re-wrote it in another form, and am going to continue it and finish it in Florence. “Tom Sawyer” seems rather pale to the family after the extravagances of the Twins, but they came to like it after they got used to it
We remained in Nauheim a little too long. If we had left there four or five days earlier we should have made Florence in 3 days; but by the time we got started Livy had got smitten with what we feared might be erysipelas–greatly swollen neck and face, and unceasing headaches. We lay idle in Frankfort 4 days, doctoring. We started Thursday and made Bale. Hard trip, because it was one of those trains that gets tired every seven minutes and stops to rest three quarters of an hour. It took us 3 1/2 hours to get here, instead of the regulation 2.20. We reached here Friday evening and will leave tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. The rest has made the headaches better. We shall pull through to Milan tomorrow if possible. Next day we shall start at 10 a. m., and try to make Bologna, 5 hours. Next day (Thursday) Florence, D. V. Next year we will walk, for these excursions have got to be made over again. I’ve got seven trunks, and I undertook to be courier because I meant to express them to Florence direct, but we were a couple of days too late. All continental roads had issued a peremptory order that no baggage should travel a mile except in the company of the owner. (All over Europe people are howling; they are separated from their baggage and can’t get it forwarded to them) I have to re-ship my trunks every day. It is very amusing–uncommonly so. There seemed grave doubts about our being able to get these trunks over the Italian frontier, but I’ve got a very handsome note from the Frankfort Italian Consul General addressed to all Italian Customs Officers, and we shall get through if anybody does.
The Phelpses 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 and fine.
The children are all right. They paddle around a little, and drive-so do we all. Lucerne seems to be pretty full of tourists. The Fleulen boat went out crowded yesterday morning.
The Paris Herald has created a public 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, and much hope is felt.
Livy says, I have said enough bad things, and better send all our loves to you and Charley and Ida and all the children and shut up. Which I do –and shut up.
S. L. C.
They reached Florence on the 26th, and four days later we find Clemens writing again to Mrs. Crane, detailing everything at length. Little comment on this letter is required; it fully explains itself. Perhaps a word of description from one of his memoranda will not be out of place. Of the villa he wrote: “It is a plain, square building, like a box, and is painted light green and 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 and olive groves of the estate slant away toward the valley…. Roses overflow the retaining walls and the battered and mossy stone urn on the gate- post, in pink and yellow cataracts, exactly as they do on the drop- curtains in the theaters. The house is a very fortress for strength.”
The Mrs. Ross in this letter was Janet Ross, daughter of Lady Duff Gordon, remembered to-day for her Egyptian letters. The Ross castle was but a little distance away.
To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira:
VILLA VIVIANI, SETTIGNANO, FLORENCE. Sept. 30, 1892
DEAR SUE,–We have been in the house several days, and certainly it is a beautiful place,–particularly at this moment, when the skies are a deep leaden color, the domes of Florence dim in the drizzling rain, and occasional perpendicular coils of lightning quivering intensely in the black sky about Galileo’s Tower. It is a charming panorama, and the most conspicuous towers and domes down in the city look to-day just as they looked when Boccaccio and Dante used to contemplate them from this hillock five and six hundred years ago.
The Mademoiselle is a great help to Livy in the housekeeping, and is a cheery and cheerful presence in the house. The butler is equipped with a little French, and it is this fact that enables the house to go–but it won’t go well until the family get some sort of facility with the Italian tongue, for the cook, the woman-of-all-work and the coachman understand only that. It is a stubborn and devilish language to learn, but Jean and the others will master it. Livy’s German Nauheim girl is the worst off of anybody, as there is no market for her tongue at all among the help.
With the furniture in and the curtains up the house is very pretty, and not unhomelike. At mid-night last night we heard screams up stairs–Susy had set the lofty window curtains afire with a candle. This sounds kind of frightful, whereas when you come to think of it, a burning curtain or pile of furniture hasn’t any element of danger about it in this fortress. There isn’t any conceivable way to burn this house down, or enable a conflagration on one floor to climb to the next.
Mrs. Ross laid in our wood, wine and servants for us, and they are excellent. She had the house scoured from Cellar to rook the curtains washed and put up, all beds pulled to pieces, beaten, washed and put together again, and beguiled the Marchese into putting a big porcelain stove in the vast central hall. She is a wonderful woman, and we don’t quite see how or when we should have gotten under way without her.
Observe our address above–the post delivers letters daily at the house.
Even with the work and fuss of settling the house Livy has improved–and the best is yet to come. There is going to be absolute seclusion here– a hermit life, in fact. We (the rest of us) shall run over to the Ross’s frequently, and they will come here now and then and see Livy–that is all. Mr. Fiske is away–nobody knows where–and the work on his house has been stopped and his servants discharged. Therefore we shall merely go Rossing–as far as society is concerned–shan’t circulate in Florence until Livy shall be well enough to take a share in it.
This present house is modern. It is not much more than two centuries old; but parts of it, and also its foundations are of high antiquity. The fine beautiful family portraits–the great carved ones in the large ovals over the doors of the big hall–carry one well back into the past. One of them is dated 1305–he could have known Dante, you see. Another is dated 1343–he could have known Boccaccio and spent his afternoons in Fiesole listening to the Decameron tales. Another is dated 1463– he could have met Columbus…..
Evening. The storm thundered away until night, and the rain came down in floods. For awhile there was a partial break, which furnished about such a sunset as will be exhibited when the Last Day comes and the universe tumbles together in wreck and ruin. I have never seen anything more spectacular and impressive.
One person is satisfied with the villa, anyway. Jean prefers it to all Europe, save Venice. Jean is eager to get at the Italian tongue again, now, and I see that she has forgotten little or nothing of what she learned of it in Rome and Venice last spring.
I am the head French duffer of the family. Most of the talk goes over my head at the table. I catch only words, not phrases. When Italian comes to be substituted I shall be even worse off than I am now, I suppose.
This reminds me that this evening the German girl said to Livy, “Man hat mir gesagt loss Sie una candella verlaught habe”–unconsciously dropping in a couple of Italian words, you see. So she is going to join the polyglots, too, it appears. They say it is good entertainment to hear her and the butler talk together in their respective tongues, piecing out and patching up with the universal sign-language as they go along. Five languages in use in the house (including the sign-language-hardest-worked of them all) and yet with all this opulence of resource we do seem to have an uncommonly tough time making ourselves understood.
What we lack is a cat. If we only had Germania! That was the most satisfactory all-round cat I have seen yet. Totally ungermanic in the raciness of his character and in the sparkle of his mind and the spontaneity of his movements. We shall not look upon his like again….
S. L. C.
Clemens got well settled down to work presently. He found the situation, the climate, the background, entirely suited to literary production, and in a little while he had accomplished more than at any other time since his arrival in Europe. From letters to Mrs. Crane and to Mr. Hall we learn something of his employments and his satisfaction.
To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira:
VILLA VIVIANI SETTIGNANO, FLORENCE. Oct. 22, ’92. DEAR SUE,–We are getting wonted. The open fires have driven away the cold and the doubt, and now a cheery spirit pervades the place. Livy and the Kings and Mademoiselle having been taking their tea a number of times, lately, on the open terrace with the city and the hills and the sunset for company. I stop work, a few minutes, as a rule, when the sun gets down to the hilltops west of Florence, and join the tea-group to wonder and exclaim. There is always some new miracle in the view, a new and exquisite variation in the show, a variation which occurs every 15 minutes between dawn and night. Once early in the morning, a multitude of white villas not before perceived, revealed themselves on the far hills; then we recognized that all those great hills are snowed thick with them, clear to the summit.
The variety of lovely effects, the infinitude of change, is something not to be believed by any who has not seen it. No view that I am acquainted with in the world is at all comparable to this for delicacy, charm, exquisiteness, dainty coloring, and bewildering rapidity of change. It keeps a person drunk with pleasure all the time. Sometimes Florence ceases to be substantial, and becomes just a faint soft dream, with domes and towers of air, and one is persuaded that he might blow it away with a puff of his breath.
Livy is progressing admirably. This is just the place for her.
[Remainder missing.]
To Fred J. Hall, in New York:
Dec. 12, ’92. DEAR MR. HALL,–November check received.
I have lent the Californian’s Story to Arthur Stedman for his Author Club Book, so your suggestion that my new spring-book bear that name arrives too late, as he probably would not want us to use that story in a book of ours until the Author book had had its run. That is for him to decide– and I don’t want him hampered at all in his decision. I, for my part, prefer the “$1,000,000 Banknote and Other Stories” by Mark Twain as a title, but above my judgment I prefer yours. I mean this–it is not taffy.
I told Arthur to leave out the former squib or paragraph and use only the Californian’s Story. Tell him this is because I am going to use that in the book I am now writing.
I finished “Those Extraordinary Twins” night before last makes 60 or 80,000 words–haven’t counted.
The last third of it suits me to a dot. I begin, to-day, to entirely recast and re-write the first two-thirds–new plan, with two minor characters, made very prominent, one major character cropped out, and the Twins subordinated to a minor but not insignificant place.
The minor character will now become the chiefest, and I will name the story after him–“Puddn’head Wilson.”
Merry Xmas to you, and great prosperity and felicity!
S. L. CLEMENS.
XXXIII
LETTERS, 1893, TO MR. HALL, MRS. CLEMENS, AND OTHERS. FLORENCE. BUSINESS TROUBLES. “PUDD’NHEAD WILSON.” “JOAN OF ARC.” AT THE PLAYERS, NEW YORK
The reader may have suspected that young Mr. Hall in New York was having his troubles. He was by this time one-third owner in the business of Charles L. Webster & Co., as well as its general manager. The business had been drained of its capital one way and another-partly by the publication of unprofitable books; partly by the earlier demands of the typesetter, but more than all by the manufacturing cost and agents’ commissions demanded by L. A. L.; that is to say, the eleven large volumes constituting the Library of American Literature, which Webster had undertaken to place in a million American homes. There was plenty of sale for it–indeed, that was just the trouble; for it was sold on payments–small monthly payments–while the cost of manufacture and the liberal agents’ commissions were cash items, and it would require a considerable period before the dribble of collections would swell into a