 Is it true that the son of a man's mentality touches noon at forty, and then begins to wane towards setting? Dr. Osler is charged with saying so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't. I don't know which it is. But if he said it, and if it is true, I can point him to a case which proves his rule. Proves it by being an exception to it. To this place I nominate Mr. Howells. I read his Venetian days about forty years ago. I compare it with his paper on Machiavelli in a late number of Harper, and I cannot find that his English has suffered any impairment. For forty years his English has been, to me, a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities, clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing, he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English writing world, sustained. And I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as does he, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between, whereas Howells' moon sails cloudless skies all night, and all the nights. In the matter of verbal exactness, Mr. Howells has no superior, I suppose. He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and shifty grain of gold. The right word. Others have to put up with approximations more or less frequently. He has better luck. To me, the others are miners working with the gold pan of necessity some of the gold washes over and escapes, whereas in my fancy he is quick silver, raiding down a riffle. No grain of the metal stands much chance of alluding him. A powerful agent is the right word. It lights the reader's way, and makes it plain. A close approximation to it will answer, and much travelling is done, in a well enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it, as we do when the right one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper, the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt. It tingles exquisitely around the walls of the mouth, and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn butter that creams the sumac berry. One has no time to examine the word and vote upon its rank in standing the automatic recognition of its supremacy is so immediate. There is a plenty of acceptable literature which deals largely in approximations, but it may be likened to a fine landscape seen through the rain. The right word would dismiss the rain, then you would see it better. It doesn't rain when howls as at work. And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech, and its cadence and undulating rhythm, and its architectural felicities of construction, its graces of expression, its pemicon quality of compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt, all in shining good order in the beginning, all extraordinary, and all just as shining, just as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear and use. He passed his fortieth year long and long ago, but I think his English of today, his perfect English, I wish to say, can throw down the glove before his English of that antique time, and not be afraid. I will go back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to examine this passage from it which I append. I do not mean examine it in a bird's eye way. I mean search it, study it, and, of course, read it loud. I may be wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get out of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it mutely. Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be politically a Republican and socially a just man, because he holds up an atrocious despot like Cesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers. What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder in which there was oppression without state's craft and revolt without patriotism. When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the scene and reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he might very well seem to such a dreamer the saviour of society whom a certain sort of dreamers are always looking for. Machiavelli was no less honest when he honoured the diabolical force of Cesar Borgia than Carlisle was when, at different times, he extolled the strong man who destroys liberty in creating order. But Carlisle has only just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer, while it is still Machiavelli's hard fate to be so trampled in his material that his name stands for whatever is most malevolent and perfidious in human nature. You see how easy and flowing it is, how unvext by ruggednesses, clumsinesses, broken meters, how simple and, so far as you or I can make out, unstudied, how clear, how limpid, how understandable, how unconfused by crosscurrents, eddies, undertows, how seemingly unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily of the valley, and how compressed, how compact, without a complacency signal hung out anywhere, to call attention to it. There are thirty-four lines in the quoted passage. After reading it several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter is crowded into that small space. I think it is a model of compactness. When I take its materials apart and work them over and put them together in my way, I find I cannot crowd the result back into the same hole. They're not being room enough. I find it a case of a woman packing a man's trunk. He can get the things out, but he can't ever get them back again. The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample. The rest of the article is as compact as it is. There are no waste words. The sample is just in other ways, limpid, fluent, graceful, and rhythmical as it is. It holds no superiority in these respects over the rest of the essay. Also the choice phrasing noticeable in the sample is not lonely. There is a plenty of its kin distributed through the other paragraphs. This is claiming much when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like the one in the middle sentence. An idealist immersed in realities who involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of reverie. With a hundred words to do it with, the literary artisan could catch that airy thought and tie it down and reduce it to a concrete condition, visible, substantial, understandable, and all right, like a cabbage, but the artist does it with twenty, and the result is a flower. The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come from the same source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse which take hold of us and stay in our memories. We do not understand why at first. All the words being the right words, none of them is conspicuous, and so they all seem inconspicuous, therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes their message take hold. The mossy marbles rest on the lips that he has pressed in their bloom, and the names he loved to hear have been carved for many a year on the tomb. It is like a dreamy strain of moving music with no sharp notes in it. The words are all right words, and all the same size. We do not notice it at first. We get the effect, it goes straight home to us, but we do not know why. It is when the right words are conspicuous that they thunder, the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. When I go back from Howell's old to Howell's young, I find him arranging and clustering English words well, but not any better than now. He is not more felicitous in concreting abstractions now than he was in translating and then the visions of the eye of flesh into words that reproduced their forms and colors. In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked fascini, and now in St. Mark's place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon my ear, and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the piazza. But the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only to renew the task. The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at across the piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark's church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snowfall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionate the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the strains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the builder, or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvellous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the façade, and all that gracious harmony into which the temple rises, of marble scrolls, and leafy exuberance eerily supporting the statues of the saints was a hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble like peacock crests above the vast domes, and pleamed them with softest white. It robed the saints in ermine, and it danced over all its work as if exalting in its beauty. Beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such evanescent lovelinesses for the little while longer of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem. Through the wavering snowfall the saint Theodore, upon one of the granite pillars of the Piazzetta, did not show so grim as his want is, and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb so gentle and mild he looked by the tender light of the storm. The towers of the island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness. The sailors in the rigging of the ships that lay in the basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds. The gondolas stole in and out of the opaque distance more noiselessly and dreamily than ever. And a silence, almost palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world. The spirit of Venice is there, of a city where age and decay, fagged with distributing damage and repulsiveness among the other cities of the planet in accordance with the policy and business of their profession, come for rest and play between seasons and treat themselves to the luxury and relaxation of sinking the shop and inventing and squandering charms all about, instead of abolishing such as they find, as is their habit when not on vacation. In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes, and a character in the undiscovered country takes accurate note of pathetic effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street of once dignified and elegant homes whose occupants have moved away and left them a prey to neglect and gradual ruin and progressive degradation—a descent which reaches bottom at last, when the street becomes a roost for humble professionals of the faith-cure and fortune-telling sort. What a queer melancholy house! What a queer melancholy street! I don't think I was ever in a street before where quite so many professional ladies with English surnames preferred Madame to Misses on their door-plates, and the poor old place has such a desperately conscious air of going to the deuce. Every house seems to wince as you go by, and button itself up to the chin, for fear you should find out it had no shirt on, so to speak. I don't know what's the reason, but these material tokens of a social decay afflict me terribly. A tipsy woman isn't dreadfuler than a haggard old house that's once been a home in a street like this. Mr. Howell's pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate photographs. They are photographs with feeling in them and sentiment, photographs taken in a dream, one might say. As concerns his humour I will not try to say anything, yet I would try if I had the words that might approximately reach up to its high place. I do not think anyone else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with, nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing themselves, and he was not aware that they were at it. For they are unobtrusive and quiet in their ways and well conducted. His is a humour which flows softly all around about and over and through the mash of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the blood. There is another thing which is contentingly noticeable in Mr. Howell's books, that is his stage directions, those artifices which authors employ to throw a kind of human naturalness around a scene and a conversation, and help the reader to see the one and get at meanings in the other which might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the bare words of the talk. Some authors overdo the stage directions, they elaborate them quite beyond necessity. They spend so much time and take up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing and how he looked and acted when he said it, that we get tired and vexed and wish he hadn't said it at all. Other authors' directions are brief enough, but it is seldom that the brevity contains either wit or information. Writers of this school go in rags in the matter of stage directions. The majority of them have nothing in stock but a cigar, a laugh, a blush, and a bursting into tears. In their poverty they work these sorry things to the bone. They say, replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar. This explains nothing it only wastes space. Responded Richard with a laugh. There was nothing to laugh about, there never is. The writer puts it in from habit, automatically. He is paying no attention to his work, or he would see that there is nothing to laugh at. Often, when a remark is unusually and poignantly flat and silly, he tries to deceive the reader by enlarging the stage direction and making Richard break into frenzies of uncontrollable laughter. This makes the reader sad. murmured Gladys blushing. This poor old shop-worn blush is a tiresome thing. We get so, we would rather Gladys would fall out of the book and break her neck than do it again. She is always doing it and, usually, irrelevantly. Whenever it is her turn to murmur, she hangs out her blush. It is the only thing she's got. In a little while we hate her, just as we do Richard. Repeated Evelyn bursting into tears. This kind keep a book damp all the time. They can't say a thing without crying. They cry so much about nothing, that by and by, when they have something to cry about, they have gone dry. They sob and fetch nothing. We are not moved. We are only glad. They gravel me, these stale and overworked stage directions, these carbon films that got burnt out long ago and cannot now carry any faintest thread of light. It would be well if they could be relieved from duty and flung out in the literary back-yard to rot and disappear along with the discarded and forgotten steeds and halodomes and similar stage properties once so dear to our grandfathers. But I am friendly to Mr. Howell's stage directions, more friendly to them than to anyone else's, I think. They are done with a competent and discriminating art, and are faithful to the requirements of a stage direction's proper and lawful office which is to inform. Sometimes they convey a scene and its conditions so well that I believe I could see the scene and get the spirit and meaning of the accompanying dialogue if someone would read merely the stage directions to me and leave out the talk, for instance, a scene like this, from the undiscovered country, and she laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on her father's shoulder. She answered following his gesture with a glance. She said, laughing nervously, she asked, turning swiftly upon him that strange searching glance. She answered vaguely. She reluctantly admitted. But her voice died wearily away, and she stood looking into his face with puzzled entreaty. Mr. Howell's does not repeat his forms and does not need to. He can invent fresh ones without limit. It is mainly the repetition over and over again by the third rates of worn and commonplace and juiceless forms that makes their novels such a weariness and vexation to us, I think. We do not mind one or two deliveries of their wares, but as we turn the pages over and keep on meeting them we presently get tired of them and wish they would do other things for a change. Replied Alfred flipping the ash from his cigar. Responded Richard with a laugh. murmured Gladys blushing. Repeated Evelyn bursting into tears. Replied the Earl flipping the ash from his cigar. Responded The Undertaker with a laugh. murmured The Chambermaid blushing. Repeated The Burglar bursting into tears. Replied The Conductor flipping the ash from his cigar. Responded Arkwright with a laugh. murmured The Chief of Police blushing. Repeated The Housecat bursting into tears. And so on and so on till at last it ceases to excite. I always notice stage directions because they fret me and keep me trying to get out of their way just as the automobiles do, at first. Then by and by they become monotonous and I get run over. Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as beautiful as the make of it. I have held him in admiration and affection so many years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now, but his heart isn't, nor his pen, and years do not count. Let him have plenty of them. There is profit in them for us. It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of Tickner and Fields at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts and an unmanacled command of the book notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a book just winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had intimated my reservations concerning the innocence abroad, but I had the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had not had before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does not matter. It is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author. He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here. Throughout my long acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a freedom, which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. He had the south-western, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling oneself prudish, and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion. I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearean, or if his ghost will not suffer me the word, when he was Baconian. At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the winter, Clemens, as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed always somehow to mask him from my personal sense, was wearing a seal-skin coat, with the fur out in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. I do not know what droll comment was in Field's mind with respect to this garment, but probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. With his crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache, Clemens was not discordantly closed in that seal-skin coat, which afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through me, when I once accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the immense publicity at one him. He had always a relish for personal effect, which expressed itself in the white suit of complete surge which he wore in his last years, and in the Oxford gown which he put on for every possible occasion, and said he would like to wear all the time. That was not vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume, which the severity of our modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to every excess in it. Yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pang which it gave the sensibilities of others. Then there were times he played these pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness. Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a pair of white cow-skin slippers, with a hair out, and do a crippled colored uncle to the joy of all beholders. Or I must not say all, for I remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens and her low despairing cry of, oh, youth! That was her name for him among their friends, and it fitted him as no other would, though I fancied with her it was a shrinking from his baptismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier companionships. He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a boy with the head of a sage, the heart of a good boy or a bad boy, but always a willful boy, and willfulest to show himself out at every time for just the boy he was. CHAPTER II There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which I think is of a year or two, for the next thing I remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in Boston, given us by that genius of hospitality the tragically-dustened Ralph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten books, Vagabond Adventures, a true bit of picker-esque autobiography. Keeler never had any money to the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he invited us to feast at his expense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields, much of the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the trammels of the publishing business and was feeling his freedom in every word. There was Bret Hart, who had lately come east in his princely progress from California, and there was Clemens. Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it gladly, and amid the discourse so little improving, but so full of good fellowship, Bret Hart's fleeting dramatization of Clemens' mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. Why, fellows! he spluttered. This is the dream of Mark's life! And I remember the glance from under Clemens' feathery eyebrows which betrayed his enjoyment of the fun. We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which, in recognition of their shape, Aldrich hailed as shoe pegs. And to crown the feast we had an omelette soose, which the waiter brought in as flat as a pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poor keeler, who took them with appreciative submission. It was, in every way, what a Boston literary lunch ought not to have been, in the popular ideal which Hart attributed to Clemens. Our next meeting was at Hartford, or rather, at Springfield, where Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford. Aldrich was going on to be his guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner's, but Clemens had come partway to welcome us both. In the good fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on, in his round. There was constant running in and out of friendly houses, where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he satisfied his love of magnificence, as if it had been another sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance. The house was the design of that most original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church, proposed that it should be called the English Violet Order of Architecture. And this house was so absolutely suited to the owner's humor that I suppose there never was another house like it, but its character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences. The vividest impression which Clemens gave us to ravenous young Boston authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription publication. An army of agents was overrunning the country with the prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands in completed sale. Of the innocence abroad he said, It sells right along just like the Bible! And roughing it was swiftly following, without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But he lectured Aldridge and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the trade which we had thought had the highest success to achieve a chance in. Anything but subscription publication is printing for private circulation, he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that on the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume adapted to subscription publication. We got a very good name for it, as we believed, in memorable murders, and we never got farther with it. But by the time we reached Boston we were rolling and well so deep that we could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it best to spare car fare. Carriage fare we did not dream of, even in that opulence. End of Chapter 2 of My Mark Twain Section 4 of Twain and Howells on Each Other This liver-box recording is in the public domain. My Mark Twain. Literary Friends and Acquaintances. By William Dean Howells Chapter 3 The visits to Hartford, which had begun with this affluence, continued without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in Warner's European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to Clemens. By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm, so that the family should not be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot scotch, while we both talked and talked and talked of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York together, and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing a syllable till we had occasion to say, well, we're there. Then, with our installation in a now vanished hotel, the old Brunswick to be specific, the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep, but we could not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian night story, which I could never tire of, even when it began to be told over again, or at times he would reason high. Of Providence, for knowledge, will and fate, fixed fate, free will, for knowledge, absolute. Walking up and down and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him. He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great friend, the Reverend Joseph H. Twitchell, and at least tacitly far from the entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife's belief, for it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me. It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. She was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness. She united wonderful tact with wonderful truth, and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced. He gloried in it. I am not sure that he noticed all her goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others. He so had the habit of her goodness. But if there was any forlorn and helpless creature in the room, Mrs. Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or hers. She was always seeking occasion of kindness to those in her household or out of it. She loved to let her heart go beyond the reach of her hand, and imagined the whole hard and suffering world with compassion for its structural as well as incidental wrongs. I suppose she had her ladyhood limitations, her female fears of etiquette and convention, but she did not let them hamper the wild and splendid generosity with which Clemens rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties. She had been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the beautiful story of their courtship to each new friend whom he found capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of hearing it. Naturally her father had hesitated to give her into the keeping of the young, strange Westerner who had risen up out of the unknown with his giant reputation of burlesque humorist and demanded guarantees, demanded proofs. He asked me, Clemens would say, if I couldn't give him the names of people who knew me in California, and when it was time to hear from them, I heard from him. Well, Mr. Clemens, he said, nobody seems to have a very good word for you. I hadn't referred him to people that I thought were going to whitewash me. I thought it was all up with me, but I was disappointed. So I guess I shall have to back you myself. Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him, I cannot say, but probably not. It was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and, in proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed, he was ruthlessly and implacably resentful. But I wish now to speak of the happiness of that household in Hartford, which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the mother when the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet little children. There had been a boy, and yes, I killed him, Clemens once said, with the unsparing self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing regret. He meant that he had taken the child out imprudently, and the child had taken the cold which he died of, but it was by no means certain this was through its father's imprudence. I never heard him speak of his son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart his loss was irreparably present. He was a very tender father and delighted in the minds of his children, but he was wise enough to leave their training all together to the wisdom of their mother. He left them to that in everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of teaching them little scenes of drama, learning languages with them, and leading them in singing. They came to the table with their parents and could have set him an example in behavior when, in moments of intense excitement, he used to leave his place and walk up and down the room, flying his napkin and talking and talking. It was after his first English sojourn that I used to visit him, and he was then full of praise of everything English, the English personal independence and public spirit and hospitality and truth. He liked to tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the defects of their virtues, their submissive acceptance of caste, their callousness with strangers, their bluntness with one another. Mrs. Clemens had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she praised the English less. She had sat after dinner with ladies who snubbed and ignored one another, and left her to find her own amusement in the absence of the attention with which Americans perhaps cloy their guests, but which she could not help preferring. In their successive sojourns among them I believe he came to like the English less and she more. The fine delight of his first acceptance among them did not renew itself till his Oxford degree was given him, then it made his cup run over, and he was glad the whole world should see it. His wife would not chill the ardour of his early anglomania, and in this, as in everything, she wished to humour him to the utmost. No one could have realised more than she his essential fineness, his innate nobleness. Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death, that delayed long and cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in lasting night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she was dead. With a simple hearted cry I wish I was with Livy. I do not know why I have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful woman, classically regular in features, with black hair smooth over her forehead, and with tenderly peering myopia eyes, always behind glasses, and a smile of angelic kindness. But this kindness went with a sense of humour which qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius of a man who will be remembered with the great humourists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company. None of them was equal in humanity. CHAPTER IV Clemens had appointed himself, with the architects' connivance, a luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children grew older, this study, with its carved and cushioned arm chairs, was given over to them for a school room, and he took the room above his stable, which had been intended for his coachman. There we used to talk together, when we were not walking and talking together, until he discovered that he could make a more commodious use of the billiard room at the top of his house for the purposes of literature and friendship. It was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather, with which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth, we could keep it well above freezing. Clemens could also push the balls about, and, without rivalry from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke, could win endless games of pool, while he carried points of argument against imaginable differers in opinion. Here he wrote many of his tales and sketches, and for anything I know some of his books. I particularly remember his reading me here, his first rough sketch of Captain Stormfield's visit to Heaven, with the real name of the Captain, whom I knew already from his many stories about him. We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the pretty Hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees, clothing the hillside by which his house stood. We agree that there was a novel charm in trees seen from such advantage, far surpassing that of the farther scenery. He had not been a country boy for nothing, rather he had been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for everything that nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect of her was lost on him. We were natives of the same vast Mississippi valley, and Missouri was not so far from Ohio, but that we were akin, in our first knowledges of woods and fields, as we were in our early parlance. I had outgrown the use of mine through my greater bookishness, but I gladly recognized the phrases which he employed for their lasting juiciness, and the long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate. I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words, of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style. If I mention my own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less quantitative reading, it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always reading some vital book. It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it had the root of the human matter in it—a volume of great trials, one of the supreme autobiographies, a signal passage of history, a narrative of travel, a story of captivity, which gave him life at first hand. As I remember, he did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had certain distinct loathings. There were certain authors whose names he seemed not so much to pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. Goldsmith was one of these, but his prime abhorrence was my dear and honoured prime favorite, Jane Austen. He once said to me—I suppose after he had been reading some of my unsparing praises of her—I am always praising her—'You seem to think that woman could write!' and he forebore withering me with his scorn, apparently because we had been friends so long, and he more pitied than hated me for my bad taste. He seemed not to have any preferences among novelists, or at least I never heard him express any. He used to read the modern novels I praised, in or out of print, but I do not think he much liked reading fiction. As for plays, he detested the theatre and said he would as leaf to a sum as follow a plot on the stage. He could not, or did not, give any reasons for his literary abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none, but he could have said very distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the books he did. I was away at the time of his great browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from hearsay. But at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me over, Clemens wrote, That man seems to have been to you what browning was to me. I do not know that he had other favourites among the poets, but he had favourite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of course, splendidly. I have forgotten what piece of John Hayes it was that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely reveled in the vengefulness of William Morris' sir-guy of the Dolores Blast, and how he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker's joy in slaying the murderer of his brother. I am three score years and ten, and my hair is nigh turned grey, but I am glad to think of the moment when I took his life away. Generally I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of literature. He liked to find out good things and great things for himself. Sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him alone, and then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it, and enjoyed it the more, the more you rubbed it in. Of all the literary men I have known, he was the most unliterary in his make and manner. I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with Latin, but I believe not the least. German he knew pretty well, and Italian, enough late in life to have fun with it, but he used English in all its alien derivations, as if it were native to his own heir, as if it had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style was what we know for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. I have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to, that is, he wrote as he thought, and as all men think without sequence, without an eye to what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him. Then, when he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he would go back to the company he was entertaining and keep on with what he had been talking about. He observed this manner in the construction of his sentences and the arrangement of his chapters and the ordering or disordering of his compilations. I helped him with a library of humor which he once edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he tore it all apart and chucked the pieces in wherever the fancy for them took him at the moment. He was right. We were not making a textbook, but a book for the pleasure, rather than the instruction of the reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it. And I do not now see either, though at the time it confounded me. On minor points he was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of totology. If a word served his turn better than a substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose. CHAPTER V At that time I had become editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and I had allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his willfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so abounds for the hapless editor from narrower minded contributors. If he wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it. If you suggested that a word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he struck it out. His proof sheets came back each a veritable mush of concession, as Emerson says. Now and then he would try a little stronger language than the Atlantic had stomach for, and once when I sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the profanity. He wrote back, Mrs. Clemens opened that proof and lit into the room with danger in her eye. What profanity! You see, when I read the manuscript to her I skipped that. It was part of his joke to pretend of violence in that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the situation to their friends. I was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but I must not claim the whole merit or the first merit of having him right for us. It was the publisher, the late H. O. Houghton, who felt the incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country, and was always urging me to get him to write. I will take the credit of being eager for him, but it is to the publisher's credit that he tried, so far as the modest traditions of the Atlantic would permit, to meet the expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens's books might naturally have bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this he never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page did not surfeit the author of books that sold right along just like the Bible. We had several short contributions from Clemens first, all of capital quality, and then we had the series of papers which went mainly to the makings of his great book Life on the Mississippi. Upon the whole I have the notion that Clemens thought this his greatest book, and he was supported in his opinion by that of the Portier in his hotel at Vienna, and that of the German Emperor, who, as he told me, with equal respect for the preference of each, united in thinking at his best, with such far-sundered social polls approaching in its favor, he apparently found himself without standing for opposition. At any rate the papers won instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in its circulation. But those were days of simpler acceptance of the popular rights of newspapers than these are when magazines strictly guard their vested interests against them. The New York Times and the St. Louis Democrat, profited by the advanced copies of the magazine, sent them to reprint the papers month by month. Together they covered nearly the whole reading territory of the Union, and the terms of their daily publication enabled them to anticipate the magazine in its own restricted field. Its subscription list was not enlarged in the slightest measure, and the Atlantic monthly languished on the newsstands as undesired as ever. It was among my later visits to Hartford that we began to talk up the notion of collaborating a play, but we did not arrive at any clear intention, and it was a telegram out of the clear sky that one day summoned me from Boston to help with a continuation of Colonel Sellers. I had been a witness of the high joy of Clemens in the prodigious triumph of the first Colonel Sellers, which had been dramatized from the novel of the Gilded Age. This was the joint work of Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner, and the story had been put upon the stage by someone in Utah whom Clemens first brought to book in the courts for violation of his copyright, and then indemnified for such rights as his adaptation of the book had given him. The structure of the play, as John T. Raymond gave it, was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist. Clemens never pretended, to me at any rate, that he had the least hand in it. He frankly owned that he was incapable of dramatization. Yet the vital part was his, for the characters in the play were his, as the book embodied them, and the success which it won with the public was justly his. This he shared equally with the actor, following the company with an agent who counted out the author's share of the gate money, and sent him a note of the amount every day by postal card. The postals used to come about dinnertime, and Clemens would read them aloud to us in wild triumph. One hundred and fifty dollars, two hundred dollars, three hundred dollars, were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air before he sat down at table, or rose from it to brandish, and then, flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down to exalt him. By and by the popularity of the play waned, and the time came when he sickened of the whole affair, and withdrew his agent, and took whatever gain from it the actor apportioned him. He was apt to have these sudden surceases following upon the intensities of his earlier interest, though he seemed always to have the notion of making something more of Colonel Sellers. But when I arrived in Hartford in answer to his summons, I found him with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with him. I represented that we must have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we should both jot down a scenario overnight, and compare our respective schemes the next morning. As the author of a large number of little plays which have been privately presented throughout the United States and in parts of the United Kingdom, without ever getting upon the public stage, except for the noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off it, I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilariously with me and was willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. At the same time, he liked my plot very much, which ultimated Sellers, according to Clemens' intention, as a man crazed by his own inventions and by his superstition that he was the rightful heir to an English earldom. The exuberant nature of Sellers and the vast range of his imagination served our purpose in other ways. Clemens made him a spiritualist, whose specialty in the occult was materialization. He became on impulse an ardent temperance reformer, and he headed a procession of temperance ladies after disinterestedly testing the deleterious effects of liquor upon himself until he could not walk straight. Always he wore a marvellous fire extinguisher strapped on his back to give proof in any emergency of the effectiveness of his invention in that way. We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things out. It was not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else, but I could very easily write like Clemens, and we took the play scene and scene about, quite secure of coming out in temperamental agreement. The characters remained for the most part his, and I varied them only to make them more like his than, if possible, he could. Several years after, when I looked over a copy of the play, I could not always tell my work from his. I only knew that I had done certain scenes. We would work all day long at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner, read them over to each other. No dramatists ever got greater joy out of their creations, and when I reflect that the public never had the chance of sharing our joy, I pity the public from a full heart. I still believe that the play was immensely funny. I still believe that, if it could once have got behind the footlights, it would have continued to pack the house before them for an indefinite succession of nights. But this may be my fondness. At any rate it was not to be. Raymond had identified himself with sellers in the playgoing imagination, and whether consciously or unconsciously, we constantly worked with Raymond in our minds. But before this time, bitter displeasures had risen between Clemens and Raymond, and Clemens was determined that Raymond should never have the play. He first offered it to several other actors who eagerly caught it, only to give it back with the despairing renunciation. That is a Raymond play! We tried managers with it, but their only question was whether they could get Raymond to do it. In the meantime, Raymond had provided himself with a play for the winter, a very good play, by Demerest Lloyd, and he was in no hurry for hours. Perhaps he did not really care for it. Perhaps he knew, when he heard of it, that it must come to him in the end. In the end it did, from my hand, for Clemens would not meet him. I found him in a mood of sweet reasonableness, perhaps the more softened by one of those lunches which our publisher, the hospitable James R. Osgood, was always bringing people together over in Boston. He said that he could not do the play that winter, but he was sure that he should like it, and he had no doubt that he would do it the next winter. So I gave him the manuscript in spite of Clemens' charges, for his suspicions and rankers were such that he would not have had me leave it for a moment in the actor's hands. But it seemed a conclusion that involved success and fortune for us. In due time, but I do not remember how long after, Raymond declared himself delighted with the piece. He entered into a satisfactory agreement for it, and at the beginning of the next season he started with it to Buffalo, where he was to give a first production. At Rochester he paused long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted to him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a lunatic, and insanity was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the stage without outraging the sensibilities of the audience. Or, words to that effect, we were too far off to allege Hamlet to the contrary or King Lear, or to instance the delight which generations of readers throughout the world had taken in the mad freaks of Don Quixote. Whatever were the real reasons of Raymond for rejecting the play we had to be content with those he gave and to set about getting it into other hands. In this effort we failed even more signally than before, if that were possible. At last a clever and charming elocutionist who had long wished to get himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it. We would have shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly showed it to him. He came to Hartford and did some scenes from it for us. I must say he did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could have done them, in whose manner he did them. But now, late toward spring, the question was where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a theatre in New York for a week of trial performances. Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft. He went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and in visions of the night in slumberings upon the bed. Gasly forms of failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him, Here is a play which every manager has put out of doors, and which every actor known to us has refused. And now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We are fools. Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us. But Clemens was never a man to give up. I relinquished gratis all right and title I had in the play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week of one-night stands in the country. It never came to New York, and yet I think now that if it had come, it would have succeeded. So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in his work die. CHAPTER VII There is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I will yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to Hartford in response to Clemens' telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in Boston, and one of my family called on his to explain why I was not at home to receive his introduction. I had gone to see Mark Twain. Oh! but he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he? He likes Mr. Clemens very much, my representative answered, and he thinks him one of the greatest men he ever knew. I was still Clemens' guest at Hartford when Arnold came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception. While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed intensely on the other side of the room. Who—who in the world is that? I looked and said, oh! that is Mark Twain. I do not remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold's wish, but I have the impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence, was at Clemens' house. I cannot say how they got on, or what they made of each other. If Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he said, but Arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous sniff of the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already perished. It might well have done so with his first dramatic vision of that prodigious head. Clemens was then hard upon fifty, and he had kept, as he did to the end, the slender figure of his youth. But the ashes of the burnt-out years were beginning to gray the fires of that splendid shock of red hair, which he held to the height of a stature apparently greater than it was, and tilted from side to side in his undulating walk. He glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes underbranching brows, which with age grew more and more like a sort of plumage, and he was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence. You were all there for him, but he was not all there for you. I shall not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him, but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in association with the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then hospitality lingered. Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from the thread of thought in my mind. I wonder why we hate the past so, and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness. It's so damned humiliating, which is what any man would say of his past if he were honest. But honest men are few when it comes to themselves. Clemens was one of the few, and the first of them among all the people I have known. I have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. He could lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm. He was not stupidly truthful, but his first impulse was to say out the thing, and everything that was in him. To those who can understand, it will not be contradictory of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not ashamed for anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it. He could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough of in his life, but he was not ashamed in that mean way. What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was rather amused than troubled as to the effect in your mind. He would not obtrude the fact upon you, but if it were in the way of personal history he would not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it. He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it. In one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of his agnosticism, he declared that Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian influences. I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring Brace's Gasta Christi, or History of Humane Progress, and I could offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong. He did not like that, evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying he had not known those things. Later he was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long. He greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and regarded as an evangel of a new gospel, the gospel of free thought. He took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the time as to the existence of a hell. When the nose carried the day, I suppose that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He still loved his old friend and pastor Mr. Twitchell, but he no longer went to hear him preach his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to church, and he groaned out, oh, yes, I go. It most kills me, but I go. And I did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his wife wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had finally come to her saying, well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you. He could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice and exalt in it because of the supreme truth as he sought. After they had both ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved by his denial of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic lies which, for love's sake, he held above even the truth, and he went to her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he was convinced that the soul did live after death. It was too late. Her keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he brought the doctor who had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the heart, and, after making him go over the facts of it again with her, made him declare it merely functional. To make an end of these records, as to Clemens' beliefs, so far as I knew them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the Christian theology or in the notion of life after death or in a conscious divinity. It is best to be honest in this matter. He would have hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can hurt anyone. At one period he argued that there must have been a cause, a conscious source of things, that the universe could not have come by chance. I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again. But the expression of which they could not be certain was one of the vaguest, and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness. All his expressions to me were of a courageous renunciation of any hope of living again or elsewhere seeing those he had lost. He suffered terribly in their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his grief. He knew that for this there were but two medicines, that it would wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for it but those respits in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber. I remember that in a black hour of my own, when I was called down to see him, as he thought from sleep, he said, with an infinite and exquisite compassion, Oh, did I wake you? Did I wake you? Nothing more. But the look, the voice, or everything, and while I live they cannot pass from my sense. He was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine instinct, which would have pleased Lowell, of never putting his hands on you—fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers and pink nails, like a girl's, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion. He did not paw you with them to show his affection, as so many of us Americans are apt to do. Among the half-dozen or half-hundred personalities that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens' central and final personality was something exquisite. His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps, from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that was what in the last analysis he was. They might come away loathing or hating him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men. He was south-western, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights as against ours, but I never saw a man more regardful of Negroes. He had a yellow butler when I first began to know him, because he said he could not bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering George were those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore. He loved to rely upon George, who was such a broken read in some things, though so staunch in others, and the fervent Republican in politics that Clemens then liked him to be. He could interpret Clemens' meaning to the public without conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth to the person denied his presence. His general instructions were that this presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft heart of George was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up into the billiard room saying that Mr. Smith wished to see Clemens. Upon inquiry Mr. Smith developed no ties of friendship, and Clemens said, You go and tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn't come down to see the Twelve Apostles. George turned from the threshold where he had kept himself, and framed a paraphrase of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith away content with himself, and all the rest of the world. The part of him that was western in his south-western origin, Clemens kept to the end, but he was the most desothernized southerner I ever knew. No man more perfectly sensed, and more entirely abhorred, slavery, and no one has ever poured such scorn upon the second hand Walter's scoticized pseudo-chivalry of the southern ideal. He held himself responsible for the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he explained, in paying the way of a negro student through Yale, that he was doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every black man. He said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to see him or know his name. It was quite enough that he was a negro. About that time a colored cadet was expelled from West Point for some point of conduct, unbecoming an officer and gentleman, and there was the usual shabby philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro could never feel the claim of honour. The man was fifteen parts white. But, oh yes, Clemens said, with bitter irony, it was that one part black that undid him. It made him a nigger and incapable of being a gentleman. It was to blame for the whole thing. The fifteen parts white were guiltless. Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the civil war, and he was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history. He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that it was not yet time to philosophize the events of the great struggle, that we must wait till the passions had cooled and the clouds of strife had cleared away. He maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to ascertain them in lasting verity. Picturesquely and dramatically he portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the distance of future years when, inevitably, the facts would begin to put on fable. He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancour in his contempt, which those who knew him best appreciated most. The late Noah Brooks, who had been in California at the beginning of Clemens's career, and had witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it, once said to me that he would rather have anyone else in the world down on him than Mark Twain. But as Clemens grew older he grew more merciful, not to the wrong, but to the men who were in it. The wrong was often the source of his wildless drolling. He considered it in such hopelessness of ever doing it justice that his despair broke in laughter. I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest, with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. Over the chimney in the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science, Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson. The ornament of a house is the friends who frequented, and he gave his guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality. But I must not go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of sufficient gorility, if I give them as fully as I wish. The windows of the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed the leaves of the trees that almost brushed them as in a clawed Lorraine glass. To the eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south there was a wide hall where the voices of friends made themselves heard as they entered without ceremony and answered his joyous hail. At the west was a little semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly neighborhood. The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a fountain, accompanied by callus and other water-loving lilies. There, while we breakfast, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of its varied blossoms. Breakfast was Clemens's best meal, and he sat longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner. Luncheon was nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made at his dinner, and reserved the later we past as the occasion of walking up and down the room and discoursing at large on anything that came into his head. Like most good talkers, he liked other people to have their say. He did not talk them down. He stopped instantly at another's remark and, gladly or politely, heard him through. He even made believe to find suggestion or inspiration in what was said. His children came to the table, as I have told, and after dinner he was up to join his fine tenor to their trebles in singing. Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cambridge, where he made himself as much at home as in Hartford. He would come ostensibly to stay at the Parker House in Boston and take a room where he would light the gas and leave it burning after dressing, while he drove out to Cambridge and stayed two or three days with us. Once, I suppose, it was after a lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in that guys, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk. Sometimes he wore the slippers, which he preferred to shoes at home, and, if it was muddy, as it was want to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair of rubbers over them for our rambles. He liked the lawlessness of our delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost killed her, but it was worth it. In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or rather with reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager beer under his arms. Lager beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later on a visit I paid him at Hartford, I learned that hot scotch was the only somperific worth considering, and scotch whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard. One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he was still taking hot scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a while he had found going to bed on the bathroom floor was a somperific. Then one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o'clock, and had gone promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like effect ever since. Of course it amused him. There were few experiences of life, grave, or gay, which did not amuse him even when they wronged him. He came on to Cambridge in April 1875 to go with me to the centennial ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minutemen with the British troops a hundred years before. We both had special invitations, including passage from Boston. But I said, why bother to go into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the Cambridge Station? He equally decided that it would be absurd, so we breakfast deliberately and then walked to the station, reasoning of many things as usual. When the train stopped, we found it packed inside and out. People stood dense on the platform of the cars. To our startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory betrays me, they lay strewn upon the roofs, like breakmen slaying at the post of duty. Whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented an impenetrable front, even to our imagination, and we left it to go its way without the slightest effort to board. We remounted the fame-worn steps of Porter's station and began exploring North Cambridge for some means of transportation overland to Concord, for we were that far on the road by which the British went and came on the way of the battle. The livery men whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some with derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have hired a cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse or vehicle of any description. It was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally hot April day when the routed redcoats pursued by the Colonials fled panting back to Boston with their tongues hanging out like dogs. But we could not take due comfort in the vision of their discomforture. We could almost envy them, for they had at least got to Concord. A swift procession of coaches, carriages, and buggies all going to Concord passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud of North Cambridge. We began to wonder if we might not stop one of them and bribe it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and Clemens seized the opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion which gave his humour a very dismal cast. I felt keenly the shame of defeat and the guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay party of students came toward us on the top of a tally-ho, luxuriously empty inside, we felt that our chance had come, and our last chance. He said that if I would stop them and tell them who I was, they would gladly, perhaps proudly, give us passage. I contended that, if with his far vaster renown he would approach them, our success would be assured. While we stood lost in this contest of civilities, the coach passed us, with gay notes blown from the horns of the students, and then Clemens started in pursuit, encouraged with shouts from the merry party who could not imagine who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed. The unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall what he said when he came back to me. Since then I have often wondered at the grief which would have rung those blithe young hearts if they could have known that they might have had the company of Mark Twain to conquer that day, and did not. We hung about unavailingly in the bitter wind a while longer, and then slowly, very slowly, made our way home. We wished to pass as much time as possible in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to practice, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted wisdom of taking the train at Porter Station, and had agreed to say that we had been to conquer it and got back. Even after coming home to my house we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude without further delay, and we crept quietly into my library and made up a roaring fire on the hearth and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it before we regained our courage for the undertaking. With all these precautions we failed. For when our statement was imparted to the proposed victim, she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left with it on our hands intact. I think the humour of this situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord would have been. Only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exalted in our prompt detection. CHAPTER X My Mark Twain Literary Friends and Acquaintances by William Dean Howells CHAPTER XI From our joint experience in failing, I argue that Clemens' affection for me must have been great, to enable him to condone in me the final defection which was apt to be the end of our enterprises. I have fancied that I presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he could not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it, and that, never realising it, he always broke through with fresh surprise, but unimpaired faith. He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end, and the end was never too bitter, unless it brought grief or harm to another. Once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated with such insolent neglect by the young lady-in-charge, who was preoccupied in a flirtation with a gentleman friend, that emulous of the public spirit which he admired in the English, he told her he should report her to her superiors, and, probably to her astonishment, he did so. He went back to Hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me in terror and in tears, for I had abetted Clemens in his action and had joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities. She was threatened with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought back assurance of its acceptance. I felt able to give this, and, of course, he eagerly approved. I think he telegraphed his approval. Another time, some years afterward, we sat down together in places near the end of a car, and a breakman came in looking for his official notebook. Clemens found that he had sat down upon it and handed it to him. The man scolded him very abusively and came back again and again, still scolding him for having no more sense than to sit down on a notebook. The patience of Clemens in bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit to comment. I suppose you will report this, fellow? Yes, he answered slowly and sadly. That's what I should have done once. But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month. Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not for humanity alone. He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsmen in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once, when I met him in the country, he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a blackbird. And he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have given a wounded child. I find this a fit place to say that his mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they can. He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that way at all, but he was fascinated with looking backward and had Bellamy to visit him. And from the first he had a luminous vision of organized labour as the only present help for working men. He would show that side with such clearness and such force that you could not say anything in hopeful contradiction. He saw with that relentless insight of his that with unions was the working man's only present hope of standing up like a man against money and the power of it. There was a time when I was afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth. But in the very last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong and that this great humorist was as great a humanist as ever. I wish that all the workfolk could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in literature, as he was in such glorious gospel of equality as the Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court. End of Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Whether I will or no, I must let things come into my story thought-wise, as he would have let them, for I cannot remember them in their order. One night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend of his and mine, Mr. Twitchell, and immediately began to eat and drink of our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a hungered and a thirst. I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those scalloped oysters, without which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exalting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. They had broken their journey with a night's rest, and they had helped themselves lavishly out by rail in the last half, but still it had been a mighty walk to do in two days. Glemmons was a great walker in those years, and was always telling of his tramps with Mr. Twitchell to Talcott's Tower ten miles out of Hartford, as he walked, of course, he talked, and of course, he smoked. Whenever he had been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime. He always went to bed with a cigar in his mouth, and sometimes, mindful of my fire insurance, I went up and took it away, still burning, after he had fallen asleep. I do not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly. He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied, and we were greedy of him for ourselves. He was precious to us, and I would not have exposed him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his popularity was as instant as it was vast, but it must be acknowledged that, for a much longer time here than in England, polite learning hesitated his praise. In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord Mayors, Lord Chief Justices, and magnets of many kinds were his hosts. He was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favour of periodicals, which spurned the rest of our nation. But in his own country it was different. In proportion, as people thought themselves refined, they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude. I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think Longfellow made much of him, and Low made less. He stopped, as if with the long, symmetric curve of Clemens' nose, which in the indulgence of his passion for finding every one more or less a Jew, he pronounced unmistakably racial. It was two of my most fastidious Cambridge friends who accepted him with the English, the European entirety, namely Charles Elliot Norton and Professor Francis J. Child. Norton was then newly back from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalised. He met Clemens as if they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his bold freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of his talk. Child was of a personal liberty, as great in its fastidious way as that of Clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand, he exalted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as I shall have to tell by and by, almost solely. I cannot say just why Clemens seemed not to hit the favour of our community of scribes and scholars, as Bret Hart had done, when he came on from California, and swept them before him, disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with impunity. But it is certain he did not, and I had better say so. I am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was so late as 1875, when he came with the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked me to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor. I have an impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens' instance, in his own uncertainty about printing it. She trusted me, I can say with a satisfaction, few things now give me, to be her husband's true and cordial advisor, and I was so. I believe I never failed him in this part, though in so many of our enterprises and projects I was false as water through my temperamental love of backing out of any undertaking. I believe this never ceased to astonish him, and it has always astonished me. It appears to me quite out of character, though it is certain that an undertaking, when I have entered upon it, holds me rather than I it. But however this immaterial matter may be, I am glad to remember that I thoroughly liked Tom Sawyer, and said so with every possible amplification. Very likely I also made my suggestions for its improvement. I could not have been a real critic without that, and I have no doubt they were gratefully accepted and, I hope, never acted upon. I went with him to the horse-car station in Harvard Square, as my frequent want was, and put him aboard a car with his manuscript in hand, stayed and reassured, so far as I counted, concerning it. I do not know what his misgivings were. Perhaps they were his wife's misgivings, for she wished him to be known not only for the wild and boundless humour that was in him, but for the beauty and tenderness, and natural piety, and she would not have had him judged by a too close fidelity to the rude conditions of Tom Sawyer's life. This is the meaning that I read into the fact of his coming to me with those doubts.