 Section 56 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910-1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. October 13, 1912. Mark Twain. The official three-volume biography of Mr. Clemens, by Professor Brander Matthews, Columbia University. Mark Twain, a biography. The personal and literary life of Samuel Langhorn Clemens, by Albert Bigelow Payne, with letters, comments, and incidental writings hitherto unpublished. Also new episodes, anecdotes, etc. Three volumes, fully illustrated, Harper and Brothers, $6. Whenever an important biography of an important author appears, there are two courses open to the reviewer. He may write his article wholly about the new book and give his opinion of that, letting his opinion of its subject be taken for granted, or he may say as little as he pleases about the new book itself, accepting it merely as a peg upon which to hang his opinions of its subject. But when the new book happens to have Mark Twain for its subject, and to possess the amplitude and the authority of these three volumes with their 1,700 solid pages, then the present reviewer declines the privilege of choice between these two methods of consideration, and he feels impelled to avail himself of both methods, one after the other, to consider first of all the book itself, and then to consider its subject as revealed in his new account of his career and this new revelation of his characteristics. To begin with the book itself, the bard of the British Empire has insisted that there are nine and sixty ways of writing tribal laws and every single one of them is right. So may it be said that there are nine, or at least six, different ways of writing a biography, and every single one of them is right. Mr. Payne has chosen the right way for him, which might not be the right way for another biographer. He has written not a critical study of the author, but a detailed account of the man. He has preferred to be an analyst rather than a historian. What he has here given us is the chronicle of Mark Twain's long life, the record of that career, year after year, month by month, and almost week by week. He has availed himself of all the sources of information available. He was selected for the task by Mark himself, and accepted by the family, so he has been able to use all the correspondence and all the multiplied memorandums and all the many unpublished writings that Mark put aside, or never finished. He has had the advantage of the abundant reminiscences dictated by Mark, especially for his benefit. He has verified and rectified all this by diligent and incessant labour. He has interviewed all sorts and conditions of men who knew Mark in his boyhood, in his youth, and in his maturity. He has sought to buttress his narrative from direct and positive sources, and he has never been content with hearsay or vagrant printed items. One result of this method and of the biographer's conscientiousness is that he has given us one of the longest biographies in the English language, quite the longest which has ever been written about an American author. He supplies us with abundant information about Mark's father and mother, about his brother and his sister, about his wife and his children, about his many friends and his innumerable acquaintances, and even about the strangers within his gates. With infinite care and with infinite detail he traces Mark's career from the cradle to the grave, omitting nothing which could in any way cast light upon his character. With Mark's death he stops, and as a result he does not record the memorial meeting at Steinway Hall, arranged by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Here, once for all, are the final materials for all who may, hereafter, want to write about the most interesting figure American literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, a figure as intensely and inexpugnably American as the figures of Franklin and Lincoln. The Gleaners, who come after, may have access to correspondence not now accessible, and they may be able to add inconsiderable items of information here and there. But now, in these three volumes, the record is substantially complete. In these pages we have Mark Twain as he lived his long life. Much Autobiography A large part, a very large part, of Mark's work was autobiographical. He told us about his own boyhood in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He described in Life on the Mississippi how he began as a pilot, and how he learned the river. He narrated his travels in the Innocence Abroad and a Tramp Abroad and following the Equator. He began a formal autobiography of which fragments have been published. To all these, Mr. Payne supplies a running commentary correcting the slips of Mark's memory and noting the variations from fact, which Mark often made, sometimes for reasons of his own, literary reasons only, and sometimes from sheer inadvertence. In some ways Mark's memory was marvellous, but it was uncertain. When I was younger, so Mr. Payne records him as saying, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not, but I'm getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter. In the memory of every man possessed of imagination there is ever an irrepressible conflict between poetry and truth, die Stuhmann Wachtheit, and Mark was subject to this rule as well as Goethe, whose good faith is equally indisputable. Mr. Payne straightens out the facts for us even though Mark had somehow twisted them, and he gives us a host of other facts not derived from Mark himself or from Mark's writings, published or unpublished. He tells a plain tale, not extenuating Mark's mistakes, his peculiarities, or his misunderstandings. Here Mr. Payne fulfills the first duty of a biographer. He is sincere, honest, frank, as Mark himself. He has a superb belief in the nobility of his subject, and he paints him, as Cromwell wished to be portrayed, with his warts. This is how Mark also would wish to be delineated, and taken as a whole the book completely justifies Mr. Payne's belief that Mark was so big that there is nothing lost by revealing the infrequent littlenesses he chants to have, the few defects, and the many inconsistencies. To know him was to understand him and to love him, and Mr. Payne will help thousands who already love him without knowing him to understand him, as they never did before. His Clubs. What I, for one, if a book reviewer who warrants his opinion by his signature may for a moment speak for himself, what I have found in these volumes only confirms and strengthens the impression formed by many years of friendship. I was only a boy of fifteen when I bought the Jumping Frog, issued by Charles H. Webb in 1867. A few years later I heard the speech which Mark made at the hundredth performance of Colonel Sellers by John F. Raymond. And I recall that this was not one of his most appropriate addresses, since it consisted mainly in his telling the tale of his unfortunate experiences with a certain Mexican plug. Not long after I met him, and even before the little dining club called the Kinsman was founded, I came to know him better. I had the satisfaction of pleasing him by an article on Huckleberry Finn, written for the London Saturday Review in 1884. We helped to found the author's club about that time, as later we helped to found the players. We served together on the executive committee of the American Copyright League, which led to our having a little passage at arms in the pages of the new Princeton Review. Then more than a score of years ago we spent the better part of a summer together at Antiocha, where I was made witness of the beautiful happiness of his home life. When the complete edition of his works was planned I was asked to prepare a biographical criticism for the first volume. Only seven years ago at my request he gladly became a member of the simplified spelling board, for the absurdities of our English orthography appealed irresistibly to his sense of humor. And the Mark Twain I came to know in the course of all these years is the Mark Twain I find portrayed in this biography. Although these volumes are intended rather as a record of Mark's career than as a study of his character, they lay that character bare before us that we may analyze it for ourselves. Here is the full story of his life, and we can see for ourselves what manner of man he was in the beginning and what manner of man he was at the end. As we turn Mr. Payne's pages what is borne in upon us is that although the boy is father to the man, and although Mark was in many respects at the end what he had been at the beginning, yet there had been a wonderful development in him, an amazing expansion of unexpected power, a transformation which we might be tempted to call unprecedented if we did not remember that it has been paralleled by Franklin and by Lincoln, a transformation possible only in these United States, and perhaps characteristic of these United States. Here is a boy born in a primitive Missouri village with no advantages, as these are called. He starts as a journeyman printer, roaming as far east as New York. He turns pilot on the mighty river he'd always load. He sets off pioneering in Nevada. He becomes a newspaper man in San Francisco, and it is as a newspaper correspondent that he first crosses the Atlantic. The book in which he describes this trip makes him famous, and launches him on the voyage to fame. He travels, he writes other books, he makes a fortune, and he loses it, and when he is seventy he is universally recognized as one of the half dozen living authors whose reputation is truly international. Universities are glad to honor him, and kings are glad to talk to him, and to let him talk to them. He is welcome in all circles, and in every circle he holds his own with the best. Yet he remains himself the simple creature he had been at the beginning. Perhaps better than any other of our authors had he seen the full spectroscope of American life, that spectroscope which is so curiously akin to a kaleidoscope. How did this expansion come about? How did the idle boy who was more or less Tom Sawyer, and rather more than less, how did he grow up to be the austere satirist who wrote The Man the Corrupted Hadleybird? How came it about that the profane pilot of a Mississippi steamer rose to be the reverent recorder of the life and death of the maid of France? How was it that the newspaper reporter whose earliest efforts at authorship are little better than the comic copy, common enough in the journals of fifty years ago, should have so mastered our stubborn language that he became as remarkable as a stylist as he was a moralist? He achieved a control over the multifarious vocabulary of English, a command of the exact noun and of the inevitable adjective not inferior to that of swift or bunion. No one of the monarchs of English prose has surpassed in power, in dignity, and in beauty the description of the Jungfrau, which Mr. Payne quotes from A Tramp Abroad, or one descriptive of a gentleman, also here quoted from his tribute to the dead coachman who had served his family for years. THE TRANSFORMATION Mr. Payne's narrative sets before us the successive stages of this most interesting and most mysterious transformation, even if they cannot explain the secret or genius, for one other puzzle, however, they do supply an explanation, or at least they present the facts from which an explanation may be deduced. The puzzle is this. How are we to account for the strange inequality in Marx's dating, late as well as early? How was it that, after the veracity of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, he descended to the labored unreality of Tom Sawyer Detective, and its fellow artificialities? It will not do to answer that Marx's taste was uncertain, and that he could not distinguish his bad work from his good. The question lies deeper. How did he come to write so much that was distinctly inferior to his own average? How did he come to make so many mistakes in name and treatment? Mr. Payne frankly tells us that there are still, in manuscript, a host of these, discarded by Marx himself, under advice from Mrs. Clemens, or from Mr. Howells. The explanation seems to be that Marx was rarely at his best when he was relying solely, or mainly, on his own invention. He seems to have needed the sustaining power of the actual fact. What he invented himself was likely to have the artificiality and the fantasticality of mere invention. What he had seen himself, or what he had heard from an eye witness, he could absorb, and make his own, and set his imagination at work to interpret. It is a common place of criticism that great poets do not invent their myths. They are content to take an old tale and tell it anew, bringing out its latent beauty and its human significance. In this way Mark was a poet, and he was happiest when he did not tax his invention, but let his imagination play with the actual fact. True Stories I can recall that forty years ago when Tom Kennett, the man from whom Mark had bought his share of the Buffalo Express, said that Mark liked to get hold of true stories to tell them in his own fashion. I rather resented this as an unfair aspersion on Mark's literary honesty. But I am a little older now, and I can see that this slur was only the offensive expression of the truth. Mr. Payne gives us the names of the men from whose lips Mark heard the original of the Jumping Frog, and of the Blue Jay Tale, in A Tramp Abroad, and of other similar humorous narratives. Mark told me once that there was not a chapter in Tom Sawyer that was not taken straight from life, and that what happened to Tom in the book had happened to Mark himself, or to some other boy he knew. As there is little of sheer invention in Tom Sawyer, however much there may be of coordinating and interpreting imagination, so there is little sheer invention in the autobiographic books, The Innocence Abroad and A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, and Following the Equator. Mark made his profit out of what he said himself, out of what happened to him, or to the friend who was with him, and out of what the friend told out of a personal experience. This was the raw material that he needed, and that he could use to best advantage. He wanted the concrete fact to embroider with humorous fancy, and when he started by himself inventing the fancy the result was likely to be fantastic. This accounts for the disconcerting unreality of some of his inventions, as it accounts also for the solidity of the stories originally rooted in reality. Mr. Payne described how Mark took down a true story, and declares that this gave him a chance to exercise two of his chief gifts, transcription and portrayal. He was always greater at these things than at invention. But the temptation to quote and to comment must be resisted once for all. Mr. Payne has done a work well worth doing, and on the whole he has done it well. If the reader, after having followed Mark's career in Mr. Payne's pages, wants a more intimate and a more imaginative interpretation of Mark's character, he will find it in Mr. Howell's sequence of criticisms and confidences which he aptly entitled My Mark Twain. The long friendship of Mr. Howells and Mark, its absolute loyalty on both sides, may be set by the side of the friendships, not nobler or more helpful, of Molière and Boileau and of Goethe and Schiller. Mr. Payne gives many alluring excerpts from the innumerable letters they interchanged in the course of two score years. Perhaps some day this correspondence may be printed in full, for the delight of all lovers of good writing and good humor, good thinking, and good fellowship. End of Section 56, October 13, 1912, Mark Twain, the official three volume biography of Mr. Clemens, read by John Greenman. Section 57 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. February 2, 1913. A Tragic Death. The recent tragic death of Lysander Johnson, formerly of Hannibal, Missouri, removes another of the joyous band which helped the youthful Samuel Clemens to enliven the world with the record later of their boyish doings. Johnson and Samuel Clemens explored together the caves along the Mississippi River, which figures so importantly in Tom Sawyer. A. B. Payne, author of Mark Twain, a biography, states that the fascination of this cave to Samuel Clemens never faded. Other localities and diversions might fail, but any mention of the cave found him always eager and ready for the three-mile walk or pull that brought them to this mystic door. End of Section 57, February 2, 1913. A Tragic Death. Read by John Greenman. Section 58 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. March 22, 1913. How Twain Reached Old Age? Lecture on him by Dr. W. L. Phelps. Violated all rules of health, according to old friend. Richmond, Virginia, March 21st. Mark Twain attributed his long and healthy life to his constant violation of all the rules of right living, according to Dr. William Lyon Phelps, who delivered a lecture at the Richmond College recently about the humorist. Dr. Phelps was a personal friend of Twain, and spoke of Twain's life as a wonderful romance, in which every circumstance tended to push him forward in the great career for which he was destined. In his youth, he said, he had no literary ambition, and he would never have left his position as a Mississippi River pilot, but for the outbreak of the Civil War. He then became a minor in the West, and missed striking an immense fortune by five minutes, so that he remained poor and had to become a newspaper man. He was sent abroad as a correspondent, and the book Innocence Abroad, which first made his reputation, was the result. The great flaw in Twain's character, said Dr. Phelps, was his pessimism, for with all his humor he considered life wholly bad. He declared in all seriousness that he always felt happier at a funeral than at a wedding, because at a wedding the trouble was just beginning, whereas at a funeral it was all over. Mark at one time, continued Dr. Phelps, said that for twenty-four years he had known that life was not worth living. This trait, Dr. Phelps said, showed that although a great literary artist, he was not a great philosopher. Dr. Phelps read several letters from Twain to him, including one which was probably the last that he wrote. Mark Twain's humor, he said, was the typical American humor, having nothing of the cynicism and mockery of the French, nor of the careless good humor of the Irish. American humor, he defined as an explosive reaction against American nervousness. It was a sort of broad and incongruous buffoonery. End of Section 58, March 22, 1913, How Twain Reached Old Age Red by John Greenman Section 59 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. December 7, 1914, A War Prayer by Twain Unpublished article by author Red in St. Louis Special to the New York Times St. Louis, December 6 An unpublished article by Mark Twain called The War Prayer was recalled by Dr. Henry Newman, leader of the Ethical Culture Society in Brooklyn, this morning in his address on Mark Twain before the Ethical Society of St. Louis. The story tells how a regiment on its way to the front assembles at a church and prays for victory. When the prayer is concluded, a white-robed stranger enters to say he has been sent from on high with a message that the petition will be answered if the men care to repeat it after understanding its full import. Their prayer, he tells them, asks for more than they seem to realize. Hence he bids them listen while he repeats aloud these unspoken implications of their desire. O Lord! We go forth to smite the foe. Help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells. Help us to cover their smiting fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead. Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire. Help us to ring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief. For our sakes who adore thee, Lord, blast their steps, water their way with their tears. Because he was told that this article would be regarded as sacrilegious, Mark Twain, who, according to Dr. Newman, was a free thinker, did not print it. End of Section 59, December 7, 1914, A War Prayer by Twain, read by John Greenman. Section 60 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910-1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. February 20, 1915, Frank Fuller dead, Utah war-governor. Well-known character of this city and country was an intimate of Mark Twain. Dr. Dentist lawyer. Told story of humorist, cutting buttonhole stitches in his first evening dress suit. Frank Fuller, war-governor of Utah, lawyer, dentist, physician, friend of Lincoln, intimate of Mark Twain, and one of the most widely known characters of this city and the United States, died of old age yesterday afternoon in his apartments at the Hotel Irving, 26 Gramercy Park, in his 88th year. He was one of the few men who had lived and been part of the history of this country and had been in touch with events of national import. Dr. Fuller was born in Boston, his father John Smith Fuller, being a deacon in Dr. Lyman Beecher's church, and a noted biblical scholar. As soon as he was able to decide for himself, he made up his mind to become a doctor. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes selected Dr. Benjamin Hubbard of Plymouth, Massachusetts as his preceptor because he had a drug store, and Dr. Fuller studied under him. Later he studied dentistry under John Gunn, one of the best dentists of his time, and of whose will his father was the executor. Dr. Fuller next became a newspaper man, more by accident than by his own decision. His brother, Edward Fuller, was a printer on the Dover Gazette, and sent for him to come and help him out, and he remained with the paper until he had thoroughly mastered the business. In 1860, when Dr. Fuller was practicing dentistry in Portsmouth, he began making speeches for the Republican Party and became prominent in politics. Robert T. Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, was then at school at Phillips Exeter Academy, and when Dr. Fuller was asked to deliver a Fourth of July oration, he asked that young Lincoln be called upon to read the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln agreed to do so if his father would permit. Dr. Fuller wired to Mr. Lincoln, and his reply, received next day, gave the permission, saying, tell Robert to take every occasion to read the immortal document, and the bigger the crowd, the louder he must holler. Shortly after this, Dr. Fuller attended a convention in Cleveland, and there met Abraham Lincoln for the first time. When the war broke out, Dr. Fuller organized the second New Hampshire regiment, of which he was the beginning paymaster, quartermaster, and, to use his own words, inspector of cooks, and protector against coffee strong enough to kill. He went with his regiment to Washington, and then came another change in his life. Governor Cummings of Utah had been reported missing at that time, and President Lincoln was much worried over the situation in that state. Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire took Dr. Fuller to the White House, and suggested to the President that he appoint him Governor of Utah in place of the missing Governor. Because he feared that Cummings might return, Mr. Lincoln appointed Dr. Fuller, Secretary of Utah, with a salary of Governor, and sent him out to take charge of that state. The understanding was that if Cummings never returned, and he never did, Dr. Fuller was to be appointed Governor, and thus he became the wartime Chief Executive of Utah, which then was having much trouble with Brigham Young and his Mormons. The Governor was able to avoid friction by taking a firm stand for the enforcement of the laws, and the result was that conditions in Utah were better during the evil times of the Civil War than ever before. When the Pacific Telegraph Company completed the first telegraph line into Salt Lake City in October 1861, Dr. Fuller sent the first message, a dispatch to President Lincoln, to which the President replied, saying, The completion of the telegraph to Salt Lake City is auspicious of the stability and union of the Republic. The Government reciprocates your congratulations. Dr. Fuller first met Mark Twain in Nevada when he lived in the little camp which was the home of Governor Nye of Nevada, whom he was visiting. On this trip Dr. Fuller was admitted to the bar of Nevada, the motion to admit being made by the late Senator William M. Stewart. Mark Twain at that time was working on the territorial enterprise of Virginia City. Dr. Fuller and the author became intimate friends, and years after, when Mark Twain first came to this city after his first successful lecture tour in California, he called on the former Governor at his offices at twenty-five Broadway. With the assistance of Dr. Fuller, arrangements were made for the first Twain lecture, which was given at Cooper Union. Before the lecture an incident occurred typical of both Mark Twain and Dr. Fuller. In speaking of it in later years, Dr. Fuller said, Mark was a very fine dresser, and thought that his ordinary sack suit would be good enough to lecture in. I told him he must wear evening dress, and he said he had never worn a claw hammer in his life. I put a first-class tailor on the job and made Mark get a suitable collar and necktie. When the clothes came, Mark put them on and rehearsed in my office. And as he rehearsed, he railed at the tailor who had sewed up the buttonholes so he couldn't button his coat. I told him that it was not customary to button a dress coat. He pointed to my engraving of Daniel Webster and sarcastically asked who knew best Daniel Webster or a scrub of a tailor. He then asked if I knew of any other man who habitually wore evening dress, and I told him I did. He then grabbed the scissors and cut the stitches closing the buttonholes and buttoning the coat, remarked, Now there are three of us. And so, garb'd, he spoke his piece when the time came. Dr. Fuller established the Health Food Company of 25 Lexington Avenue in 1874, of which he was president until his death. With his wife, who died in 1906, he was in the Windsor Hotel Fire, in which eighty-four of their friends lost their lives, and from which they escaped unhurt. A son, Louis R. Fuller, survives him. This edited article contains only segments related to Mark Twain. May 16, 1915. Authors Give Manuscripts for War Sale. By Joyce Kilmer. Half a century ago there were held in New York the great sanitary fairs, which were managed and patronized by the charitably disposed in an effort to relieve some of the suffering caused by the Civil War. On the afternoon and evening of Thursday, May 20, will occur at the Anderson Gallery's, a benefit sale for the Belgian sufferers, which brings to mind these philanthropic enterprises of a bygone generation. But this sale is under the auspices of one organization, the Author's Club, and the articles to be sold, which are to be on exhibition at the galleries during the week preceding the sale, are literary and artistic in character, consisting of original manuscripts, presentation books, autograph letters, and original drawings. Of all the great sales of books which have occurred in America, few, it may safely be assumed, have surpassed this in general interest. The Author's Club counts among its members nearly all the important writers in the country, and these men have given their inscribed and autographed books and, in some cases, pages of manuscript. Through the generosity of their publishers, many of the deceased members of the Club are also represented, notably James Russell Lowell, John Griefly Whittier, Robert Louis Stevenson, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Edmund Clarence Steadman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the only woman ever admitted to membership in the authors. The books and manuscripts on sale have been gathered and arranged by a committee consisting of Dr. Rosseter Johnson, James Howard Bridge, George Sidney Hellman, and Joseph Spencer Kennard. The fund, obtained, will be forwarded to the American Minister at The Hague, Dr. Henry Van Dyke, who is himself a member of the Author's Club. He will give his personal attention to the distribution of the money. One of the prizes of the collection, the item likely to be most eagerly sought for, is the original autographed manuscript of Mark Twain's story, The New War Scare. This curious piece of fantastic writing, which deals with the government and people of the state of Monaco, never was published. It consists of twenty-nine octavo pages in Mark Twain's clear and interesting hand, and is signed at the end Mark Twain. In a preparatory note the author states that this was written in the threatening days of 1891, but was not published because the scare passed away. There are other Mark Twain items. One is a copy of the personal recollections of Joan of Arc, with a page and a half letter by the author inserted. The letter deals with the serial publication of the work and reads in part, Your printers need watching. They take some very large liberties with my spelling and punctuation. There is an uncut copy of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, inscribed on the fly-leaf, S. L. Clemens, Mark Twain. There is also a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with a signed letter from Mark Twain to Duffield Osborne, in which Mark Twain gives Mr. Osborne his private telephone number and invites him to his home. End of Section 61, May 16, 1915. Authors give manuscripts for war sale. Read by John Greenman. Section 62 of Mark Twain in The New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. June 6, 1915. Mark Twain. In these days of international animosities, it is pleasant to recognize the universality of appreciation that attaches to what is truly great, or, in other words, human in literature, a universality that is emphasized in the obliteration of national prejudices with which the humor of Mark Twain finds general acceptance. From the reports that have reached us from time to time as to the books that find favor in the literature in demand at the front, we recall that the name of this typical American humorist enjoys a generous popularity with the German soldiery. That this is so constitutes one of those spontaneous tributes to genius that is worth more, perhaps, than the reasoned appreciation of scholarship. It is the humanity in the work of Mark Twain that gives to his humor the cosmopolitan quality that transcends geographical and even racial limitations, and makes of him something that belongs not to a nation merely, but to mankind. The fact, and something of its explanation, is noted by Professor Lenon Kellner in his recently published work on American literature, appearing in the new series of American books, Doubleday, Page, and Company. American humor, in general, according to Professor Kellner, has appealed to the German reader. But of all our humorists in this connection, Mark Twain seems to stand supreme. All strata, all callings, all climbs, all temperaments and destinies are represented in him. The pompous senator is not spared, the poor nigger Jim not forgotten. This is the chief reason why, to foreigners, Mark Twain comes so much closer than do the more recent American humorists who surpass him, perhaps, in keenness and wit. The reason why Germans in particular regard him almost as one of their own. I believe no English or American writer of today has found as many translators and publishers in Germany. Our American, in his fine humanity, in his idealism, in his gentleness, is almost an old-fashioned gentleman. It is a pity that the puritan spirit, which still prevailed in the home of Mark Twain's parents, is dying out. True enough, it often produced blind zealots, intolerable patents. But where the puritan chute encountered the suitable psychical disposition, we had a Lincoln, an Emerson, an Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Mark Twain. Professor Kellner assails the criticism that attempts to define and condemn Mark Twain's humor as merely grotesque exaggeration. He places Mr. Clemens among those who, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, are gifted with telescopic natures, and, in the breadth of his interests and humanity, classes him with Dickens. Vindication is a slow pedestrian, usually waiting, in fact, till near the end of the Third Act. Not often does it proceed so swiftly and unerringly, as it has in the case of some observations made in the New York Times, concerning, is this Mr. Riley, with an incidental reference to, punch in the presence of the pass and jar? There has arisen a host of witnesses to confute us, and they have stepped on each other's feet and, out of their own mouths, have they vindicated us. The chorus of Mr. Riley appears to be the simplest in the world, but not only can no two persons agree upon it, but each displays a heated certainty about his version, and men who will conceive that their religion is wrong will regard it as the last insult, if anyone questions their version of Mr. Riley. This tantalizing chorus, what witchery did Pat Rooney weave into its construction that men should lose their reason? It seems to fit smoothly into the memory, but only to confuse the minds of men and make them short-breath and red-faced with old friends. Magic not exactly black, but none too white, magic as subtle as that woven into punch-brothers, which condemned anyone who heard it once to go on hearing it, to keep quoting it, until the frenzy wore off. Since, for some deep psychological reason, any question about either of these productions arouses anger deeper than the rage of war, there immediately rushed upon us hordes of indignant letter writers, each denying that there was any question about the Riley chorus and each giving the correct one. Only each gave a different chorus. And on their heels came rushing yet others, denying that there was anything peculiar about punch-brothers. Most of these misunderstood the contention, and supposed that there was a controversy over the authorship of that great poem, and with a contempt that bit deep, they informed us that there was no such controversy, that it was written by Mark Twain. But it wasn't. And out of their own mouths they have erected a controversy where there was done before. Mark Twain did not write it, and never pretended to write it. In the famous skit in which he dealt with the irritating problem raised by this exasperating jingle, he said that it was a newspaper jingle, and it was. Mark Twain did not know who the author was. There really was a sign in the horse-cars of the seventies directing conductors to punch in the presence of the passenger, and specifying a buff trip-slip for a three-cent fare, a pink trip-slip for a five-cent fare, and so on. Why, it's poetry! exclaimed one of a party of newspaper men one night, studying the sign as they went home. They assembled its lines in metrical form, added some improvements, such as punch, brothers, punch, punch with care, all in the presence of the passenger. And one of them, Isaac H. Bromley, published it in the New York Tribune, where Mark Twain saw it, and let it loose upon the world. A maddening thing, it filled nearly as many insane asylums as Mr. Riley. And now thirty years after the question of whether Mr. Riley was Terence or John, and whether he was looking quite well, or cut quite as well, has died out. Forty years after Mark Twain got punch conductor out of his head by reciting it to an orphan asylum, and when the world is at last able to forget its disquiet over these problems, there arise vaunting and top lofty persons to assert that there is not, and never was, a problem connected with either. It is well if they can quaff a kind nepenthe and forget the hot and rebellious dissensions of the 70s and 80s, but let them not instruct those less fortunate, and of better memory. End of Section 63, August 3, 1915, Two Painful Poems, Read by John Greenman. Section 64 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. The haunting doggerel, further involuntary discussion of the Punch Brothers rhyme from the New Bedford Morning Mercury. It is extraordinary how many people know things that aren't so. In the silly summer season, it is a habit to give over newspaper space to discussions over trivial subjects. This year the New York Times has been printing variant versions of the Riley Lyric of the 80s until the other day when an inquiry appeared concerning the authorship of that haunting doggerel, Punch, in the presence of the Passenger. Someone started trouble by inquiring into the authorship and a score of contributors hastened to say Mark Twain. Mark Twain wrote a number of metrical compositions, but in spite of general assumption he was not the author of the Punch Lines. Those verses were the joint composition of Isaac Bromley, Noah Brooks, W. C. Wyckoff, and Moses W. Handy. Mark Twain read the verses in a newspaper and gave them currency in a skit, in which he pictured their tantalizing sway. To correct misinformation upon the important subject of the authorship of the classic lines we quote the true story as told by Albert Bigelow Payne in his biography of Mark Twain. A certain carline rights Mr. Payne had recently adopted the Punch system and posted in its cars for the information of passengers and conductor this placard. A blue trip slip for an eight cents fare, a buff trip slip for a six cents fare, a pink trip slip for a three cents fare. For coupon and transfer punch the tickets. Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley were riding downtown one evening on the Fourth Avenue line when Bromley said, Brooks it's poetry! By George it's poetry! Brooks followed the direction of Bromley's finger and read the card of instructions. They began perfecting the poetic character of the notice, giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and jingle and, arriving at the Tribune Office, W. C. Wyckoff, scientific editor, and Moses P. Handy lent intellectual and poetic assistance with this result. Conductor, when you receive a fare, punch in the presence of the passenger, a blue trip slip for an eight cents fare, a buff trip slip for a six cents fare, a pink trip slip for a three cents fare, punch in the presence of the passenger. Chorus, punch brothers, punch with care, punch in the presence of the passenger. It was printed and streetcar poetry had once became popular. Clemens discovered the line, writes Mr. Payne, and on one of their walks recited them to Twittal. A literary nightmare was written a few days later. In it Mark tells how the jingle took instant and entire possession of him and went waltzing through his brain. How, when he had finished his breakfast, he couldn't tell whether he had eaten anything or not, and how, when he went to finish the novel he was writing and took up his pen, he could only get it to say, punch in the presence of the passenger. He found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend, Twittal, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results. The skit was published in the Atlantic. Howls, it is related, going to dine at Ernest Longfellow's the day following its appearance, heard his host and Tom Appleton urging each other to punch with care. The Longfellow ladies had it by heart. Boston was devastated by it. At home Howls' children recited it to him in chorus. The streets were full of it. In Harvard it became an epidemic. It was transformed into other tongues. Swinburne did a French version for the Revue des Deux Monde, entitled Le Chant du Conducteur. Commencing, Ayaan et Paye, le Conducteur, percera en plein vue du voyageur, quand il recoit trois sous un coup en verre, etc. The St. Louis magazine found relief in a Latin anthem with this chorus. Punghite fratres, Punghite, Punghite cum m'amore, Punghite pro vectore, diligentime Punghite. In view of the history of this haunting diri and the fact that it has been deemed worthwhile to revive the lines after thirty years or more, it is worthwhile to set the generations straight as to the authorship. End of Section 64, August 8, 1915, The Haunting Doggeral, read by John Greenman. Section 65 of Mark Twain and the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This Liber Vox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. This edited article includes only segments related to Mark Twain. September 26, 1915, Financial Mistakes of Leaders and Thinkers. The case of Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis has interesting parallels in the experiences of Grant, Mark Twain, Sir Walter Scott, and many others. Financial misfortune is often the portion of leaders and thinkers, wherefore in the light of historic instances the Reverend Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis may well take heart of grace. His dramatic story of his luckless speculations in Western Timberlands told last Sunday from the storied pulpit of Plymouth Church still rings in the public ear. And yet, how like a repeat of history it seems, the very mention of it brings before the mind's eye visions of scores of the world's great who fell into the same error and retrieved it by remitting toil just as Dr. Hillis proposes to do. The clergyman is peculiarly subject to the advice of well-meaning friends and the artifice of the charlatan, for although he has breadth of vision his mind has so little to do with the things of the earth that he has little real understanding of the trend of affairs. I was careless of my temporalities! You remember the impicunious goldsmith makes Dr. Primrose say in the vicar of Wakefield. Trusting all his money to the merchant in the neighbouring town the vicar distributed alms to the poor and dispensed hospitality with open hands. When disaster came upon him he did the best that he could, withdrew from his associations, and faced the world with high courage and firm resolve, until again fortune smiled anew. Although the minister is more liable to financial error than other classes of professional men, the history of modern times is filled with instances of leaders of thought who have fallen into the same pitfalls. The homely wisdom which Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain, puts into the utterances of his hero, Puttenhead, sick Wilson, our hard-earned axioms coming from his own financial reverses. He warns us in one of the inimitable paragraphs to beware of putting one's eggs in different baskets, for better it is to put them all in the same place and watch the basket. There are few men who can attend to one thing well. The minister, the writer, and the teacher are less likely than those in any other vocations to win material success. In the days when get-rich-quick concerns flourished a special attention was given to the ministry, and alluring circulars were sent to them, giving them special rates on the consideration that they would recommend stocks to the members of their flocks. Occasionally one fell into the trap to his great sorrow and to that of those who had accepted his counsel. In these days it is the nudge and the whisper which so often leaves the clergyman with little save his library. Some friend who knows or thinks he does bestows the kindly hint upon the man of the cloth who takes all that is said as gospel and gives over his savings. The anxiety of the minister to provide for the future of his family is as intense as is that of men in other professions, and he has little opportunity for making those sudden coups which so often lead others to fortune. Those who are familiar with the inventories of estates are impressed with a wide variety of worthless stocks and bonds which find their way into the strong boxes of ministers, of physicians, and even lawyers. These professions are noted for their accumulations of cats and dogs. Even in the appraisal of the property of the greatest financiers are found many securities purchased often on account of personal friendship, which are not worth the paper on which they are printed. The businessman makes losses and retrieves them. The professional man intent on his own affairs is likely to drop the game, to sell house and goods and become a slave to debt. The reverend Dr. Dwight Hillis is following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott, of Mark Twain, of General Grant, and of a host of others who found themselves at middle age in much the same predicament. The great historic instance is that of Sir Walter Scott. He saw himself the head of a great publishing house, producing costly books and rare editions, and issuing scholarly reviews from the ever-busy press. The fall of the house of Ballantine and Company, of which he was the secret partner for years, was one of the great failures in the publishing trade. His commercial advisors, so confident were they in his genius, followed his directions without question. Finally came the crash under one hundred and thirty thousand pounds of debt for which the novelist assumed the responsibility. Despite his advancing age and his growing infirmities, he evolved poems and novels from his fertile brain and repaid a large portion of the staggering debt. In the course of two years the earnings of his pen contributed forty thousand pounds to his creditors. Mark Twain had for many years received large royalties. Through the advice of friends he was induced to invest in the firm of Charles L. Webster and Company of this city. When disaster came he pledged himself to pay off the full amount. By writing unceasingly and lecturing around the world he did it. The erroneous impression prevails to this day that the late H. H. Rogers, standard oil millionaire and long his friend, contributed money to tide the author over his period of misfortune. As a matter of fact Mr. Rogers never gave a cent. He constituted himself general manager for Mark Twain and gave the business of authorship the benefit of that acumen and common sense, which it so often lacks. The indebtedness was discharged and the name of Samuel L. Clemens will always be connected with an honourable and courageous life. End of Section 65 September 26, 1915. Financial Mistakes of Leaders and Thinkers. Red by John Greenman. Section 66 of Mark Twain in the New York Times Part 6. 1910-1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. April 30, 1916. Mark Twain. Mr. Howells. Book review of The Mysterious Stranger. Among the many new names, new tendencies, new achievements characterising our current literature we are apt to regard Mr. Clemens and Mr. Howells and their work as belonging to a school of fiction slightly different, appreciably older than the one that is supposed to ordain the form and texture of our present day novels. Of course fiction has become much too large a branch of the world's literature and comprises the contributions from too many and diverse minds to be really dominated by any one school in spite of the literary historian's passion for so analysing and labelling it. Nevertheless we do, unconsciously perhaps, think of these two revered masters of the story art as working by a method and with an aim that does not particularly belong to this present decade of the twentieth century. In this we may be right, although it is more likely that in the case of any genuine mastery in creative literature we should not admit the circumscribing influence of any one age or set of literary theories. The truth of the latter view is abundantly upheld by the two novels that have just commenced their serial publication, the one entitled The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, appearing in Harper's Magazine, the other The Leatherwood God by William Dean Howells in The Century. Both stories, judging by their first few chapters, are marked in treatment by their essential contemporaneousness. This is not to say that they are the familiar product known as stories of present day life. Mr. Clemens indeed places the scene of his romance in The Austria of over three centuries ago, while Mr. Howells chooses a backward settlement of an earlier period by several decades than the one in which we are living. But in both novels the theme that is apparently chosen for development has to do with humanity's religious strivings, and in so far they enter a field that has of late exerted an increasing attraction upon other novelists. The coincidence in choice is a striking one. Novel readers, assuredly, have an exceptional treat promise them for this and the ensuing season in following the strange adventures and unraveling the problems that both these stories promise. The posthumous novel by Mark Twain is the fruit, apparently, of that author's matured thought and art, full of daring imagination, abundantly evident even in this first installment, and not without those touches of humorous description characteristic of his pen. The picture drawn thus far by Mr. Howells, it is needless to say, is delightfully real, while the religious or psychological problem hinted at inevitably fills the reader's mind with the particular kind of curiosity indispensable to the creation of the highest interest in a work of fiction. One never knows, of course, what will happen in a serial novel. The lead, apparently given, may end in a blind trail. Few recent novels, however, have opened with such ample promise as the two by these masters of fiction appearing in Harper's and the Century. Their further development, through many installments, will be worth watching. End of Section 66 April 30, 1916 Mark Twain, Mr. Howells Red by John Greenman Section 67 of Mark Twain in The New York Times, Part 6, 1910-1919 This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. August 27, 1916 Literary Style Untitled Review of the Mysterious Stranger Readers who have noted in his later writings Mark Twain's increasing penchant for speculative thought will not be surprised at the strong tendency in this direction shown in his posthumous story The Mysterious Stranger appearing serially in Harper's Magazine. Mr. Clemens was much interested in the problems of theology, although he wrote little, if anything, on the subject over his own name. His religious theories, however, were published anonymously a few years before his death, in a monograph privately circulated by the author. The thin octavo volume has probably become, by this time, one of the rare treasures for which book collectors are looking. In The Mysterious Stranger, these religious theories appear incidentally to the story. In the September installment, for instance, there is this bit on predestination. Among you, boys, you have a game. You stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart. You push a brick, it knocks the neighbor over. The neighbor knocks over the next brick and so on till all the row is prostrate. That is human life. A child's first act knocks over the initial brick and the rest will follow inexorably. If you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that was going to happen to that creature, for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event has determined it. That is, nothing will change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act. That act begets another, and so on to the end. And the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave. Does God order the career? For ordain it? No. The man's circumstance and environment order it. His first act determines the second and all that follow after. But suppose, for argument's sake, that the man should skip one of these acts, an apparently trifling one, for instance. Suppose that it had been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second and fraction of a second, he should go to the well and he didn't go. That man's career would change utterly from that moment. Thence to the grave it would be wholly different from the career which his first act as a child had arranged for him. Indeed it might be that if he had gone to the well he would have ended his career on a throne, and that omitting to do it would get him upon a career that would lead to beggary and a pauper's grave. For instance, if at any time, say in boyhood, Columbus had skipped the triflingest little link in the chain of acts projected and made inevitable by his first childish act, it would have changed his whole subsequent life, and he would have become a priest and died obscure in an Italian village, and America would not have been discovered for two centuries afterward. CHAPTER XXVII PORK HAS IT'S LORIOT Mr. Nicholas Longworth, who usually takes the lid only in private from his comic gift, let that gift soar and bubble in the house the other day. Dig, brothers, dig with glee, dig to the bottom of the treasury, shovel out the shekels for the kiss and me, millions for nitrates on the tennis sea, the south is in the saddle you bet by gee, dig to the bottom of the treasury, dig, brothers, dig with glee, why leave a nickel in the treasury, leave the accounting to William G., he can fake up a balance to a T., the voters are plunged in the lessler G., dig to the bottom of the treasury. Mr. Longworth, with praiseworthy but mistaken conscientiousness, acknowledged the inspiration of this really admirable poem to lie in Mark Twain's punch conductor, punch with care. If Mr. Longworth will take down his copy of Mark Twain and read him again, with more care, he will discover that in quoting that immortal thing, Mark Twain explicitly disclaims its authorship and says that he got it from a newspaper clipping. He gave it currency, but he did not know who the author was. It was, in fact, a composite, but was chiefly the work of the late Isaac H. Bromley. Mark Twain never wrote any verse, but he is persistently credited with the authorship of two metrical compositions, punch conductor, and the epitaph beginning warm summer wind, which was the work of Robert Richardson. By the end of Section 68, February 7, 1917, he gave credit, but in the wrong place. Read by John Greenman. Section 69 of Mark Twain in The New York Times, Part 6, 1910-1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read by John Greenman. March 7, 1917. Inventor in Poor House. Page once had one million five hundred thousand dollars, typesetting machine failed. Chicago, March 6. James W. Page, inventor of one of the most remarkable pieces of mechanism ever put together, is in the Poor House today at Oak Forest. Twenty-five years ago he was the owner of the Page plant here for the making of typesetting machines. Nearly two million dollars was invested in the plant. Mr. Page was reputed to be worth one million five hundred thousand dollars at that time. Mark Twain was one of the investors. In the panic of 1893 Mr. Page lost his money. His invention, although a mechanical marvel, proved impractical and needed further development, which never came. Mr. Page then disappeared. Mr. Page's name was written into the Encyclopedia Britannica, and his invention was then described as most remarkable. End of Section 69. March 7, 1917. Inventor in Poor House. Read by John Greenman. Section 70 of Mark Twain in the New York Times. Parts 6. 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. May 6, 1917. Books this season. Mark Twain's Letters. The first installment of Mark Twain's Letters, appearing in this month's Harper's Magazine, gives promise of an absorbingly interesting volume of reminiscence when the series is completed and published in book form. Mr. Clemens did not have many correspondence, until now few of his letters have found their way into print. Judging by this collection, however, he took a genuine, whole-soul sort of delight in writing letters to the few privileged ones with whom he engaged in this manifestation of friendly intimacy. The present series comprises his correspondence with William Dean Howells, dating from June, 1872, and covering a period of nearly forty years. The personality revealed is an altogether lovable one, brimming over, as one would expect, with characteristic Mark Twain humor, more spontaneous here perhaps than in his works written for publication, and full of interesting allusions to his literary and other activities. He writes, for instance, of his struggle with a novel which was never completed, and which he found he could not go on with. Books for boys were more to his liking, so the novel was thrown over, and Huck Finn's autobiography taken up in its stead. These were the days of Tom Sawyer, and the letters are full of the experience attending the writing and disposing of that immortal book. The note of friendship pervading the letters constituted much of their charm. His praise of Mr. Howells, full of humorous digs, of course, and intentional exaggerations, is delightfully generous and sincere. If your literature has not struck perfection now, we are not able to see what is lacking. It is all such truth, truth to life. Everywhere your pen falls, it leaves a photograph. I did imagine that everything had been said about life at sea that could be said, but, no matter, it was all a failure and lies, nothing but lies, with a thin varnish of fact. Only you have stated it as it absolutely is, and only you see people and their ways, and their insides and outsides, as they are, and make them talk as they do talk. I think you are the very greatest artist in these tremendous mysteries that ever lived. There doesn't seem to be anything that can be concealed from your awful, all-seeing eye. It must be a cheerful thing for one to live with you, and be aware that you are going up and down in him like another conscience all the time. Possibly you will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead a hundred years. It is the fate of the Shakespeare's and of all genuine prophets. But then your books will be as common as Bibles, I believe. You're not a weed, but an oak, not a summer house, but a cathedral. In that day I shall still be in the Encyclopedias, too, thus Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown, but he was personally acquainted with Howells. There I could sing your praises all day and feel and believe every bit of it. When a famous writer dies there is frequently an increased output of new books from his pen extending in some cases over a period of years. These new books, as a rule, add nothing of real substance to the dead author's fame. More often, indeed, they detract from it. The late Watts-Dunton, for instance, published in his lifetime a novel that was at once recognized as a masterly work of creative literature. Aylwin was the result of a score and more years of patient study, during which the entire novel was recast and rewritten several times before its author consented to its publication. Had the book been published in one of the earlier stages of its development, Watts-Dunton would doubtless have suffered in reputation as a writer of fiction, and nothing of value would have been added to our literature through the premature appearance of Aylwin. Now that Watts-Dunton is dead, the manuscripts of two novels have been found among his papers. They are at once published and turn out to be very poor, crude stuff indeed. Anyone knowing their author's conscientious scruples in matters of literary art must feel certain that he never would have consented to their appearance in their present unfinished condition, that he would have been horrified at the association of his name with such uncouth offspring. But there they are, and Posterity's estimate of their author will be largely influenced by these posthumous misdeeds of his. The case of Watts-Dunton is only one of many illustrating the mistaken zeal that is apt to inspire a deceased writer's admirers. Usually the desire seems to be to gather up every scrap of juvenilia, or whatnot, that an author has written, and discarded, and bring it out in a posthumous volume or volumes. There are few poets in past generations who have not suffered in this respect, even in so recent and interesting a case as Rupert Brooke, one cannot help thinking that his fame would have burned with a steadier, clearer light if many of his earlier ventures with the muse had been left out of the posthumous volume of his work. So too one cannot help thinking that the fame of Mark Twain will not be enhanced by the posthumous volume of his essays that has just appeared under the title What Is Man? Harper's. Of course in the case of so high a name it will be argued, and with much seeming justice, that anything by Mark Twain should be published. A glance at the present volume bears this out in a measure. For instance, the poignant chapter The Death of Jean, written within four months of his own death, will be read with appreciation and reverence by all to whom the name of Mark Twain means much in life as well as in literature. It was intended to be the final chapter to Mr. Clemens' autobiography, according to a preparatory note by Mr. Albert Bigelow Payne. So too there is pleasure enough to be derived from the reading some of the lighter essays in the volume. These are, for the most part, sufficiently stamped with the Mark Twain humor to ensure them a welcome reception from his admirers. But there seems to be little by way of excuse to be said for the publication of the initial essay What Is Man? This essay occupying nearly a third of the present volume was published anonymously and for private circulation only eleven years ago. It would be difficult to find anything more dreary, cynical, pessimistic than the view of life here revealed. One refuses to believe that it voices the settled, mature convictions held by Mr. Clemens, at least one does not wish to believe it. Remembering that he himself had the essay privately printed, it is reasonable to suppose that Mr. Clemens did not care to have What Is Man? included with his acknowledged works. It seems a pity that it has not been allowed to remain in the obscurity to which he had apparently assigned it. What gain is there in being told that man is merely a machine, and that there is practically nothing real in his idealism, no basis for his brave dreams, his aspirations toward a life of spiritual beauty and achievement. There is nothing new in pessimism of this kind. It seems singularly out of place in the work of a writer who has done so much, through his joyous humor, to lighten the burdens of his generation. But there it is, the penalty of the posthumous. It is a curious essay altogether. Doubtless there are readers who will find much to admire in it, but they will be the readers who rejoice in a gloomy view of things. The rest will refuse to accept this as a lasting authentic message from Mark Twain. End of Section 71, June 3, 1917, as to the posthumous, read by John Greenman. Section 72 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6. 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. July 2, 1917, to sell Mark Twain home. Humorous's daughter finds Connecticut place too isolated. Stormfield, Mark Twain's old home near Reading, Connecticut, in which the humorous died, has been advertised for sale. He built it with the idea of getting a country home which should be near enough to New York and yet not too near in summer and winter. But his daughter, Mrs. Clara Clemens Gabrilovitch, to whom it passed after his death, found it too far away for the needs of an artist whose affair is required frequent presence in the metropolis. She and her husband, Osip Gabrilovitch, lived in it intermittently until 1914. But since then they have spent their summers at Seal Harbor, Maine, and most of the winter seasons in New York. The house, built on 248 acres acquired by Mr. Clemens, stands on a hilltop in the section where General Israel Putnam raised his troops in the Revolution. It embodies a good many of the humorous own ideas of architecture. The house was built in 1907, but the humorous did not find the happiness he expected there. His daughter Jean, who had lived with him for many years, was drowned in her bath at Stormfield on Christmas Eve, 1909, as a result of an epileptic stroke, and Mark Twain was still suffering from grief over her death when he died on April 21st following. End of Section 72, July 2, 1917, To Sell Mark Twain Home. Read by John Greenman. Section 73 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6. 1910 through 1919. This Libervox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. September 9, 1917. Latest Works of Fiction. Jap Heron. Jap Heron, a novel written from the Ouija Board, with an introduction on the coming of Jap Heron, frontist piece portrait, New York, Mitchell Kennerly. One dollar fifty cents. The Ouija Board seems to have come to stay as a competitor of the typewriter in the production of fiction. For this is the third novel in the last few months that has claimed the authorship of some dead and gone being who, unwilling to give up human activities, has appeared to find in the Ouija Board a material means of expression. This last story is unequivocal in its claim of origin, for those who are responsible for it appear to be convinced beyond doubt that no less a spirit than that of Mark Twain guided their hands as the story was spelled out on the board. Emily Grant Hutchings and Lola V. Hayes are the sponsors of the tale. Mrs. Hayes, being the passive recipient whose hands upon the pointer were especially necessary. St. Louis is the scene of the exploit, as it is also of the literary labors of that Ouija Board that writes the patient's worth stories. Emily Grant Hutchings, who writes the introductory account of how it all happened, is from Hannibal, Missouri, the home of Mark Twain's boyhood, and in her the alleged spirit of the author seems to have put much confidence. Her long description of how the story was written and of the many conversations they had with Mark Twain through the Ouija Board contains many quotations of his remarks that sometimes have a reminiscent flavor of the humorous characteristic conversation. The story itself, a long novelette, is seen in a Missouri town and tells how a lad born to poverty and shiftlessness, by the help of a fine-sold and high-minded man and woman, grew into a noble and useful manhood and helped to regenerate his town. There is evident a rather striking knowledge of the conditions of life and the peculiarities of character in a Missouri town, the dialect is true, and the picture has, in general, many features that will seem familiar to those who know their Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. A country paper fills an important place in the tale, and there is constant proof of familiarity with the life and work of the editor of such a sheet. The humor impresses as a feeble attempt at imitation, and, while there is now and then a strong sure touch of pathos or a swift and true revelation of human nature, the sob stuff that oozes through many of the scenes and the overdrawn emotions are too much for credulity. If this is the best that Mark Twain can do by reaching across the barrier, the army of admirers that his works of one for him will all hope that he will hear after respect that boundary. End of Section 73, September 9, 1917, Latest Works of Fiction, J.P. Herron, read by John Greenman. Section 74 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. November 18, 1917, Mark Twain as a letter writer. Two volumes of hitherto unpublished correspondence full of delightful self-revelations and noble friendships. By Brander Matthews. Mark Twain's letters arranged with comment by Albert Bigelow Payne, two volumes illustrated, New York, Harper and Brothers. Five years ago Mr. Albert Bigelow Payne published his monumental life of Mark Twain, one of the very best of modern biographies, solidly authenticated by laborious research, imitably honest, setting down not in malice, instinct with the desire to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. In that book he made constant use of Mark Twain's correspondence, selecting judiciously and quoting from the letters not so much for their own sake as to illuminate characteristics of his subject. Now he has collected two solid volumes of Mark Twain's correspondence, which he has arranged chronologically, and which he has elucidated by a running commentary, always modest, always unobtrusive, and always confined to the strictly necessary explanations. In other words, he has let Mark Twain, the letter writer, speak for himself. It is difficult to see how this work could have been done more discreetly or more tactfully. Mark Twain, in spite of his abiding boyishness, which was continually tempting him into exuberant outbreaks, had an unusual gift for friendships, and these two volumes are a record of noble and enduring friendships. It is true that he had permanent disagreements with Bret Hart and Edward H. House and John T. Raymond, but he bound Howells and H. H. Rogers to him with hooks of steel, and his association with Aldridge and Twitchell, Warner and Gilder, Charles Warren Stoddard and George W. Cable, was almost as intimate and as unclouded. The sympathy between Goethe and Shiller, or that between Carlisle and Emerson, was not finer or more beautiful than that between Mark Twain and Howells. In these volumes Mr. Payne has given us two or three score of Mark's letters to Howells, and only a scat half dozen of Howells' letters to Mark. We want them all, and it is to be hoped that their correspondence will be printed in full, and by itself, sooner or later. Mark Twain was a marvelous talker, and he was also a marvelous letter writer, because he wrote letters as if he were merely talking to the friend from whom he chanced to be separated. These letters are never composed with any thought of publication. They are never labored. They are always easy. They are sometimes even free and easy. They are the spontaneous expression of the man himself as he happened to be at the moment of taking pen in hand. In the shortest of them, as in the longest, he is unmistakably himself, setting down in black and white his thoughts and his feelings as they surged up naturally, and assured that the recipient would supply the understanding needed for their complete appreciation. They are highly individual. They abound in whim, in humorous exaggeration, in imagination, and in energy. They are delightful reading in themselves in the first place, and in the second as revelations of the character and the characteristics of Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, who was in some ways a different person from Mr. Mark Twain known to all the world. Of course the earlier letters written in his boyhood and youth to his mother, his sister, and his brother are what might be expected in the correspondence of a fledgling author who ripened slowly and who did not discover himself and come into his own until he was thirty. Indeed most of these missives of his immaturity are not only flavorless but quite without any promise of the later mastery of the accomplished man of letters which their writer was to become. Only in the course of years did he acquire the command of style, the nervous directness, the pungent vitality, the instinct for the unerring adjective and for the inevitable noun, which became his in the course of time, and which revealed itself first in the unforgettable description of the Sphinx in the Innocence Abroad, to be matched later by the superb account of the youngfrau in A Tramp Abroad. Those belated readers who may even now think of Mark Twain as a mere fund-maker, to be classed carelessly with John Phoenix and Artemis Ward and Josh Billings, will find in these letters cause to revise hasty judgment and to recognize the depth and nobility of Mark Twain's nature. A humorist he was from the beginning to the end, but at the end humor was no longer the dominant element in his work. He made men laugh as no one else was able to do so abundantly in the final two score years of the nineteenth century, but his laughter was never forced or trivial or accidental. His humor was rooted in and flowered out of a deep and abiding melancholy, and at the end of his life he was as serious and as sad at heart as Swift or Cervantes or Mulier. His tenderness is beautifully displayed in the letters to his wife, of which Mr. Payne allows us to read only a few simple and sincere in their direct expression of a love which began at first sight and which grew steadily with the years. As these years passed he was stricken again and again, his only son was taken from him in infancy, then his eldest daughter died, and what her loss meant to him can be seen from a letter, page 641, to Mr. Twitchell, in which he laid his heart bare before his friend. Then Mrs. Clemens was snatched away at last after protracted periods of hopeless invalidism. Finally his youngest daughter died in her turn, and there is unspeakable pathos in the letter he then wrote to his sole surviving child, page 835. It is only on occasion and to the members of his own family that the deeper aspects of the man are disclosed. For the most part the letters deal with surface of life and with the experiences of the moment. Many of them have a reckless and joyous exaggeration, as in that which he wrote to Mr. Twitchell, page 666, and which was called forth by an article of mine. One paragraph in this, expressing violently his distaste for the ivory miniatures of Jane Austen, was so vehement that Mr. Payne has decorously edited out the most picturesque of its phrases. But its purport can be guessed at from another paragraph in another letter, in which he expresses his wonder why the contemporaries of Jane Austen allowed her to die a natural death. Mr. Payne prints without any editing two similar but less vehement letters to me, written after Mark had been reading several of Scott's novels with increasing dissatisfaction, relieved only after he had come to Quentin Derwood, and after he had found that bravura romance more to his liking. These two letters, pages 737 and 8, are very like the article he wrote on Fenimore Cooper's literary offences, and in these letters and in that article he reveals his critical insight, his fundamental honesty, which was continually compelling him to read the accredited authors of the past with his own spectacles and to apply his own standards of judgment. He has no reverence for a classic which cannot prove its right to be received as a classic, but while he has the insight of a true critic, he lacks the balance that true criticism demands. Most of the blemishes he dwells on in the stories of Scott and Cooper are there for all to see, yet there are counter balancing beauties which Mark fail to perceive, or at least to acknowledge. Here again he discloses his eternal boyishness, so to call it, which is one of his most marked characteristics. A great part of the merit of Tom Sawyer and of Huckleberry Finn is due to his ability to recapture the temper of his own boyhood with its eagerness of self-assertion and with its youthful intolerance. As he wrote in a letter given on page 566, 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. He was himself a man who could never forget that he had been a boy himself, a man who could and did retain an ever fresh boyishness of outlook and of attitude. It was perhaps this eternal boyishness which led him sometimes to answer a foolish or indiscreet letter with a volcanic frankness which relieved his own feelings at the time but which was entirely disproportionate to the offense he had received, and it was his natural kindness which induced him not to send this letter, page 475, and to substitute for it a colorless and commonplace acknowledgment less likely to arouse sentiment. Now that I have endeavored to describe the house of fame that Mr. Payne has erected to the memory of Mark Twain as a letter writer it may be well for me to submit a few specimen bricks that the reader of this review may see for himself a little of the material out of which the stately edifice has been built. Here, for example, is a characteristic passage from a letter sent to Helen Keller when she had been annoyed by one of those futile and foolish accusations of plagiarism brought by somebody with a mania for uncovering mare's nests. Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and oulishly idiotic and grotesque was that plagiarism farce, as if there was much of anything in any human utterance, or all or written, except plagiarism. The colonel, the soul, let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances, is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them, whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere, except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech, you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men, but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his, but not enough to signify. Missing text. No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time, and now imagine to be our own, but that is about the most we can do. In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes' poems in the Sandwich Islands. A year and a half later I stole his dictation without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my innocence abroad with. Then, years afterward, I was talking with Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant ass. No, not he. He was not a collection of human turnips, like your plagiarism court, and so when I said, I know now where I stole it, but whom did you steal it from? He said, I don't remember. I only know I stole it from somebody because I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anybody who had. Rudyard Kipling wrote to a friend that, I love to think of the great and godlike Clemens. He is the biggest man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don't you forget it. Cervantes was a relative of his. And when this was transmitted to Mark he wrote, It makes me proud and glad what Kipling says. I hope fate will fetch him to Florence while we are there. I would rather see him than any other man. And earlier in the same acknowledgment Mark had expressed his thanks for a volume of Kipling's verse. I have been reading the bell buoy and Kipling's work, and saving up the rest for other leisurely and luxurious meals. A bell buoy is a deeply impressive fellow being. In these many recent trips up and down the sound in the canola, Mr. Rogers yacht, he talked to me nightly, sometimes in his pathetic and melancholy way, sometimes with his strenuous and urgent note, and I got his meaning. Now I have his words. No one but Kipling could do this strong and vivid thing. Someday I hope to hear the poem chanted or sung with the bell buoy breaking out of the distance. And here finally is part of the letter to me about Sir Walter Scott. I haven't been out of my bed for four weeks, but well I have been reading a good deal, and it occurs to me to ask you to sit down some time or other, when you have eight or nine months to spare, and jot me down a certain few literary particulars for my help and elevation. Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make Colombian lectures out of the results and do your students a good turn. One, are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English, English which is neither slovenly or involved? Two, are there passages whose English is not poor and thin and commonplace, but is of equality above that? Three, are there passages which burn with real, fine, not punk Foxfire make-believe? Four, has he heroes and heroines who are not cads and cadduses? Five, has he personages whose acts and talk correspond with their characters as described by him? Six, has he heroes and heroines whom the reader admires, admires and knows why? Seven, has he funny characters that are funny and humorous passages that are humorous? Eight, does he ever claim the reader's interest and make him reluctant to lay the book down? Nine, are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood and flow of his own delusions, ceases from being artificial, and is for a time long or short recognizably sincere and in earnest? Ten, did he know how to write English and didn't do it because he didn't want to? Eleven, did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of any other one, or did he run so much to wrong because he didn't know the right one when he saw it? Twelve, can you read him and keep your respect for him? Of course, a person could in his day an era of sentimentality and sloppy romantics, but land, can a body do it today? End of Section 74, November 18, 1917, Mark Twain as a letter writer, read by John Greenman. Section 75 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 6, 1910 through 1919. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. February 11, 1918, Twain's daughter Spurn's Spirit Book. Mrs. Gabrilevich, incensed by work attributed to her father by psychics. We'll seek an injunction, says she pronounced false data about which Dr. Hislip consulted her. Special to the New York Times Philadelphia, February 10. A revolutionary volume on modern science and philosophy, which the troubled spirit of Mark Twain is endeavouring to give the world through the medium of the American Society for Psychical Research, will never see the light of day if Mrs. Asip Gabrilevich of Bryn Mar, wife of the celebrated pianist and daughter of the great humorist, can prevent it. Announcement of the book which Twain is said to be trying to address to this unhappy civilization from that mystic realm beyond the grave, is made by James H. Hislip in the January issue of the Journal of the Psychical Research Society. It seems that Professor Hislip and two women mediums, Mrs. Hayes of St. Louis and Mrs. Hutchings, have held frequent conversations with the spirit of Mark Twain, and have found the humorist in a state of intellectual torture because of the difficulty he is having in getting his momentous work into print. He is now greatly relieved, because at last he has found a means of communication with the world, which he was forced to leave before he had time to put the volume into writing. The great author is elated, Professor Hislip says, because what he has to say to the world will shed enlightenment where now there is only darkness and dismay. But Mrs. Gabrilevich, who before her marriage was Clara Clemens, is not impressed. In an interview today she unsympathetically characterized Professor Hislip's assertions as silly, foolish, stupid, and crazy, and announced that she has asked her attorney Charles P. Lark of New York to prevent the publication of the work through an injunction. While Professor Hislip was engaged in his so-called research work, said Mrs. Gabrilevich, he sent me many letters in which he asked me to confirm certain things which my father is supposed to have said to him. I answered a few of these letters telling him that everything he had asked about was false, and finally the whole proceeding became so annoying I asked him not to write me any more. It was so silly and stupid that I decided I could not waste my time talking or writing about it. Then I placed the matter in the hands of my attorney, because I do not want any such book published. I suppose it would be harmless, but what would be the use of it? It is indescribably wild and foolish. I am sorry that even this preliminary announcement had to be made. In one letter the Professor asked me if my father had seen a vision of his mother just before he died. I told him he had not, so far as I knew. In other communications he asked me about little personal things he is supposed to have found out—things concerning pictures, trinkets, and so forth that my father is supposed to have owned. I found that I could not verify or confirm anything he had discovered, and at length I became weary of the matter. February 12, 1918, editorial. Annoying but not dangerous. Anybody who is at all well-read in the literature of communications, ascribed to the Spirits of Departed Notables, can easily understand why the daughter of Mark Twain grieves over the fact that a whole bookful of such messages from her distinguished father is soon to appear. It is not easy to see, however, just what she or others in like case can do to prevent the publication of such a volume. Unless it differs amazingly from all previous books of the same class, it will, indeed, demonstrate to all who accept the claims made as to its origin that habitation of the other world results in a pathetic deterioration of intelligence, and a complete loss of the sense of humor. But there is no possibility of proving in court that such changes show the communications to be spurious. Whoever will can say they are what would be expected from the difficulties of transmission through an imperfect channel, and that assertion puts an end to argument. At any rate, it leaves small chance for an appeal to the law for protection or redress. It is much to be regretted that Mark Twain himself is precluded by circumstances from commenting on the forthcoming and very posthumous production. The task is one that would have delighted him, and its performance by him would delight everybody else, except perhaps the psychical researchers who so industriously set down the products of subconscious activities. His daughter should not be unduly disturbed. Her father's memory is safe, no matter what nonsense the mediums say he makes them talk, or write. End of Section 76 February 12, 1918 Editorial Annoying but Not Dangerous Read by John Greenman Section 77 of Mark Twain in the New York Times Part 6 1910 through 1919 This LibriVox recording is in the public domain read by John Greenman. June 9, 1918 Sue for Spirit Story Harper's asked for the destruction of Mrs. Hutchings' book. The alleged spirit story told by the late Samuel M. Sick, Clemens, to Mrs. Emily Grant Hutchings was the subject of a suit filed in the Supreme Court yesterday by Harper and Brothers, who for seventeen years have had the sole rights to the Mark Twain stories, against Mrs. Hutchings and Mitchell Kennerley, her publisher, to restrain the sale of the book written by Mrs. Hutchings and asking for the destruction of the books now on sale and an accounting of the sales to date. The complaint states that Mrs. Hutchings' book, Jop Heron, purports to be a spirit communication in the form of a short story. The announcement in the book concerning the alleged spirit story states that, after several messages had been spelled out, the pointer of the planchette traced the words Samuel M. Sick, Clemens, lazy Sam, and the story as printed was then told. The complaint alleges that, during the last seventeen years, the Harper House has published the Mark Twain works, and during that time has distributed five hundred thousand circulars bearing his picture, as a result of which he became more widely known than any other American, not in public life. It is alleged that Mrs. Hutchings visited the Harper's with the alleged spirit story in 1916, but they refused to publish it on the ground that it didn't emanate from Mark Twain and had no literary merit. Mrs. Hutchings has since induced Mitchell Kennerley to publish it. End of Section 77, June 9, 1918, Sue for Spirit Story, read by John Greenman.