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Complete Letters of Mark Twain
Yours ever,
Mark.
From a gentleman in Buffalo Clemens one day received a letter inclosing an incompleted list of the world’s “One Hundred Greatest Men,” men who had exerted “the largest visible influence on the life and activities of the race.” The writer asked that Mark Twain examine the list and suggest names, adding “would you include Jesus, as the founder of Christianity, in the list?”
To the list of statesmen Clemens added the name of Thomas Paine; to the list of inventors, Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. The question he answered in detail.
*****
To —, Buffalo, N. Y.
Private. Redding, Conn, Aug. 28, ’08.
Dear sir, – By “private,” I mean don’t print any remark of mine.
……………… I like your list.
The “largest visible influence.”
These terms require you to add Jesus. And they doubly and trebly require you to add Satan. From A.D. 350 to A.D. 1850 these gentlemen exercised a vaster influence over a fifth part of the human race than was exercised over that fraction of the race by all other influences combined. Ninety-nine hundredths of this influence proceeded from Satan, the remaining fraction of it from Jesus. During those 1500 years the fear of Satan and Hell made 99 Christians where love of God and Heaven landed one. During those 1500 years, Satan’s influence was worth very nearly a hundred times as much to the business as was the influence of all the rest of the Holy Family put together.
You have asked me a question, and I have answered it seriously and sincerely. You have put in Buddha – a god, with a following, at one time, greater than Jesus ever had: a god with perhaps a little better evidence of his godship than that which is offered for Jesus’s. How then, in fairness, can you leave Jesus out? And if you put him in, how can you logically leave Satan out? Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work.
Very truly yours,
S. L. Clemens.
The “Children’s Theatre” of the next letter was an institution of the New York East Side in which Mark Twain was deeply interested. The children were most, if not all, of Hebrew parentage, and the performances they gave, under the direction of Alice M. Herts, were really remarkable. It seemed a pity that lack of funds should have brought this excellent educational venture to an untimely end.
The following letter was in reply to one inclosing a newspaper clipping reporting a performance of The Prince and the Pauper, given by Chicago school children.
*****
To Mrs. Hookway, in Chicago:
Sept., 1908.
Dear Mrs. Hookway, – Although I am full of the spirit of work this morning, a rarity with me lately – I must steal a moment or two for a word in person: for I have been reading the eloquent account in the Record-Herald and am pleasurably stirred, to my deepest deeps. The reading brings vividly back to me my pet and pride. The Children’s Theatre of the East side, New York. And it supports and re-affirms what I have so often and strenuously said in public that a children’s theatre is easily the most valuable adjunct that any educational institution for the young can have, and that no otherwise good school is complete without it.
It is much the most effective teacher of morals and promoter of good conduct that the ingenuity of man has yet devised, for the reason that its lessons are not taught wearily by book and by dreary homily, but by visible and enthusing action; and they go straight to the heart, which is the rightest of right places for them. Book morals often get no further than the intellect, if they even get that far on their spectral and shadowy pilgrimage: but when they travel from a Children’s Theatre they do not stop permanently at that halfway house, but go on home.
The children’s theatre is the only teacher of morals and conduct and high ideals that never bores the pupil, but always leaves him sorry when the lesson is over. And as for history, no other teacher is for a moment comparable to it: no other can make the dead heroes of the world rise up and shake the dust of the ages from their bones and live and move and breathe and speak and be real to the looker and listener: no other can make the study of the lives and times of the illustrious dead a delight, a splendid interest, a passion; and no other can paint a history-lesson in colors that will stay, and stay, and never fade.
It is my conviction that the children’s theatre is one of the very, very great inventions of the twentieth century; and that its vast educational value – now but dimly perceived and but vaguely understood – will presently come to be recognized. By the article which I have been reading I find the same things happening in the Howland School that we have become familiar with in our Children’s Theatre (of which I am President, and sufficiently vain of the distinction.) These things among others;
1. The educating history-study does not stop with the little players, but the whole school catches the infection and revels in it.
2. And it doesn’t even stop there; the children carry it home and infect the family with it – even the parents and grandparents; and the whole household fall to studying history, and bygone manners and customs and costumes with eager interest. And this interest is carried along to the studying of costumes in old book-plates; and beyond that to the selecting of fabrics and the making of clothes. Hundreds of our children learn, the plays by listening without book, and by making notes; then the listener goes home and plays the piece – all the parts! to the family. And the family are glad and proud; glad to listen to the explanations and analyses, glad to learn, glad to be lifted to planes above their dreary workaday lives. Our children’s theatre is educating 7,000 children – and their families. When we put on a play of Shakespeare they fall to studying it diligently; so that they may be qualified to enjoy it to the limit when the piece is staged.
3. Your Howland School children do the construction-work, stage-decorations, etc. That is our way too. Our young folks do everything that is needed by the theatre, with their own hands; scene-designing, scene-painting, gas-fitting, electric work, costume-designing – costume making, everything and all things indeed – and their orchestra and its leader are from their own ranks.
The article which I have been reading, says – speaking of the historical play produced by the pupils of the Howland School—
“The question naturally arises, What has this drama done for those who so enthusiastically took part? – The touching story has made a year out of the Past live for the children as could no chronology or bald statement of historical events; it has cultivated the fancy and given to the imagination strength and purity; work in composition has ceased to be drudgery, for when all other themes fall flat a subject dealing with some aspect of the drama presented never fails to arouse interest and a rapid pushing of pens over paper.”
That is entirely true. The interest is not confined to the drama’s story, it spreads out all around the period of the story, and gives to all the outlying and unrelated happenings of that period a fascinating interest – an interest which does not fade out with the years, but remains always fresh, always inspiring, always welcome. History-facts dug by the job, with sweat and tears out of a dry and spiritless text-book – but never mind, all who have suffered know what that is…
I remain, dear madam,
Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens.
Mark Twain had a special fondness for cats. As a boy he always owned one and it generally had a seat beside him at the table. There were cats at Quarry Farm and at Hartford, and in the house at Redding there was a gray mother-cat named Tammany, of which he was especially fond. Kittens capering about were his chief delight. In a letter to a Chicago woman he tells how those of Tammany assisted at his favorite game.
*****
To Mrs. Mabel Larkin Patterson, in Chicago:
Redding, Connecticut,
Oct. 2, ’08.
Dear Mrs. Patterson, – The contents of your letter are very pleasant and very welcome, and I thank you for them, sincerely. If I can find a photograph of my “Tammany” and her kittens, I will enclose it in this.
One of them likes to be crammed into a corner-pocket of the billiard table – which he fits as snugly as does a finger in a glove and then he watches the game (and obstructs it) by the hour, and spoils many a shot by putting out his paw and changing the direction of a passing ball. Whenever a ball is in his arms, or so close to him that it cannot be played upon without risk of hurting him, the player is privileged to remove it to anyone of the 3 spots that chances to be vacant.
Ah, no, my lecturing days are over for good and all.
Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens.
The letter to Howells which follows was written a short time before the passage of the copyright extension bill, which rendered Mark Twain’s new plan, here mentioned, unneeded – at least for the time.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in New York:
Monday, Oct. 26, ’08. Oh, I say! Where are you hiding, and why are you hiding? You promised to come here and you didn’t keep your word. (This sounds like astonishment – but don’t be misled by that.)
Come, fire up again on your fiction-mill and give us another good promise. And this time keep it – for it is your turn to be astonished. Come and stay as long as you possibly can. I invented a new copyright extension scheme last Friday, and sat up all night arranging its details. It will interest you. Yesterday I got it down on paper in as compact a form as I could. Harvey and I have examined the scheme, and to-morrow or next day he will send me a couple of copyright-experts to arrange about getting certain statistics for me.
Authors, publishers and the public have always been damaged by the copyright laws. The proposed amendment will advantage all three – the public most of all. I think Congress will pass it and settle the vexed question permanently.
I shall need your assent and the assent of about a dozen other authors. Also the assent of all the large firms of the 300 publishers. These authors and publishers will furnish said assent I am sure. Not even the pirates will be able to furnish a serious objection, I think.
Come along. This place seemed at its best when all around was summer-green; later it seemed at its best when all around was burning with the autumn splendors; and now once more it seems at its best, with the trees naked and the ground a painter’s palette.
Yours ever,
Mark.
Clemens was a great admirer of the sea stories of W. W. Jacobs and generally kept one or more of this author’s volumes in reach of his bed, where most of his reading was done. The acknowledgment that follows was sent when he had finished Salthaven.
*****
To W. W. Jacobs, in England:
Redding, Conn,
Oct. 28, ’08.
Dear Mr. Jacobs, – It has a delightful look. I will not venture to say how delightful, because the words would sound extravagant, and would thereby lose some of their strength and to that degree misrepresent me. It is my conviction that Dialstone Lane holds the supremacy over all purely humorous books in our language, but I feel about Salthaven as the Cape Cod poet feels about Simon Hanks:
“The Lord knows all things, great and small,
With doubt he’s not perplexed:
’Tis Him alone that knows it all
But Simon Hanks comes next.”
The poet was moved by envy and malice and jealousy, but I am not: I place Salthaven close up next to Dialstone because I think it has a fair and honest right to that high position. I have kept the other book moving; I shall begin to hand this one around now.
And many thanks to you for remembering me.
This house is out in the solitudes of the woods and the hills, an hour and a half from New York, and I mean to stay in it winter and summer the rest of my days. I beg you to come and help occupy it a few days the next time you visit the U.S.
Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens.
One of the attractions of Stormfield was a beautiful mantel in the billiard room, presented by the Hawaiian Promotion Committee. It had not arrived when the rest of the house was completed, but came in time to be set in place early in the morning of the owner’s seventy-third birthday. It was made of a variety of Hawaiian woods, and was the work of a native carver, F. M. Otremba. Clemens was deeply touched by the offering from those “western isles”—the memory of which was always so sweet to him.
*****
To Mr. Wood, in Hawaii:
Nov. 30, ’08.
Dear Mr. Wood, – The beautiful mantel was put in its place an hour ago, and its friendly “Aloha” was the first uttered greeting my 73rd birthday received. It is rich in color, rich in quality, and rich in decoration, therefore it exactly harmonizes with the taste for such things which was born in me and which I have seldom been able to indulge to my content. It will be a great pleasure to me, daily renewed, to have under my eye this lovely reminder of the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, and I beg to thank the Committee for providing me that pleasure.
Sincerely Yours,
S. L. Clemens.
XLVII. Letters, 1909. To Howells And Others. Life At Stormfield. Copyright Extension. Death Of Jean Clemens
Clemens remained at Stormfield all that winter. New York was sixty miles away and he did not often care to make the journey. He was constantly invited to this or that public gathering, or private party, but such affairs had lost interest for him. He preferred the quiet of his luxurious home with its beautiful outlook, while for entertainment he found the billiard afternoons sufficient. Guests came from the city, now and again, for week-end visits, and if he ever was restless or lonely he did not show it.
Among the invitations that came was one from General O. O. Howard asking him to preside at a meeting to raise an endowment fund for a Lincoln Memorial University at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. Closing his letter, General Howard said, “Never mind if you did fight on the other side.”
*****
To General O. O. Howard:
Stormfield, Redding, Connecticut,
Jan, 12, ’09.
Dear general Howard, – You pay me a most gratifying compliment in asking me to preside, and it causes me very real regret that I am obliged to decline, for the object of the meeting appeals strongly to me, since that object is to aid in raising the $500,000 Endowment Fund for Lincoln Memorial University. The Endowment Fund will be the most fitting of all the memorials the country will dedicate to the memory of Lincoln, serving, as it will, to uplift his very own people.
I hope you will meet with complete success, and I am sorry I cannot be there to witness it and help you rejoice. But I am older than people think, and besides I live away out in the country and never stir from home, except at geological intervals, to fill left-over engagements in mesozoic times when I was younger and indiscreeter.
You ought not to say sarcastic things about my “fighting on the other side.” General Grant did not act like that. General Grant paid me compliments. He bracketed me with Zenophon – it is there in his Memoirs for anybody to read. He said if all the confederate soldiers had followed my example and adopted my military arts he could never have caught enough of them in a bunch to inconvenience the Rebellion. General Grant was a fair man, and recognized my worth; but you are prejudiced, and you have hurt my feelings.
But I have an affection for you, anyway.
Mark Twain.
One of Mark Twain’s friends was Henniker-Heaton, the so-called “Father of Penny Postage” between England and America. When, after long years of effort, he succeeded in getting the rate established, he at once bent his energies in the direction of cheap cable service and a letter from him came one day to Stormfield concerning his new plans. This letter happened to be over-weight, which gave Mark Twain a chance for some amusing exaggerations at his expense.
*****
To Henniker-Heaton, in London:
Stormfield, Redding, Connecticut,
Jan. 18, 1909.
Dear Henniker-Heaton, – I do hope you will succeed to your heart’s desire in your cheap-cablegram campaign, and I feel sure you will. Indeed your cheap-postage victory, achieved in spite of a quarter-century of determined opposition, is good and rational prophecy that you will. Wireless, not being as yet imprisoned in a Chinese wall of private cash and high-placed and formidable influence, will come to your aid and make your new campaign briefer and easier than the other one was.
Now then, after uttering my serious word, am I privileged to be frivolous for a moment? When you shall have achieved cheap telegraphy, are you going to employ it for just your own selfish profit and other people’s pecuniary damage, the way you are doing with your cheap postage? You get letter-postage reduced to 2 cents an ounce, then you mail me a 4-ounce letter with a 2-cent stamp on it, and I have to pay the extra freight at this end of the line. I return your envelope for inspection. Look at it. Stamped in one place is a vast “T,” and under it the figures “40,” and under those figures appears an “L,” a sinister and suspicious and mysterious L. In another place, stamped within a circle, in offensively large capitals, you find the words “Due 8 cents.” Finally, in the midst of a desert space up nor-noreastard from that circle you find a figure “3” of quite unnecessarily aggressive and insolent magnitude – and done with a blue pencil, so as to be as conspicuous as possible. I inquired about these strange signs and symbols of the postman. He said they were P. O. Department signals for his instruction.
“Instruction for what?”
“To get extra postage.”
“Is it so? Explain. Tell me about the large T and the 40.
“It’s short for Take 40—or as we postmen say, grab 40”
“Go on, please, while I think up some words to swear with.”
“Due 8 means, grab 8 more.”
“Continue.”
“The blue-pencil 3 was an afterthought. There aren’t any stamps for afterthoughts; the sums vary, according to inspiration, and they whirl in the one that suggests itself at the last moment. Sometimes they go several times higher than this one. This one only means hog 3 cents more. And so if you’ve got 51 cents about you, or can borrow it—”
“Tell me: who gets this corruption?”
“Half of it goes to the man in England who ships the letter on short postage, and the other half goes to the P.O.D. to protect cheap postage from inaugurating a deficit.”
“–”
“I can’t blame you; I would say it myself in your place, if these ladies were not present. But you see I’m only obeying orders, I can’t help myself.”
“Oh, I know it; I’m not blaming you. Finally, what does that L stand for?”
“Get the money, or give him L. It’s English, you know.”
“Take it and go. It’s the last cent I’ve got in the world—.”
After seeing the Oxford pageant file by the grand stand, picture after picture, splendor after splendor, three thousand five hundred strong, the most moving and beautiful and impressive and historically-instructive show conceivable, you are not to think I would miss the London pageant of next year, with its shining host of 15,000 historical English men and women dug from the misty books of all the vanished ages and marching in the light of the sun – all alive, and looking just as they were used to look! Mr. Lascelles spent yesterday here on the farm, and told me all about it. I shall be in the middle of my 75th year then, and interested in pageants for personal and prospective reasons.
I beg you to give my best thanks to the Bath Club for the offer of its hospitalities, but I shall not be able to take advantage of it, because I am to be a guest in a private house during my stay in London.
Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens.
It was in 1907 that Clemens had seen the Oxford Pageant – during the week when he had been awarded his doctor’s degree. It gave him the greatest delight, and he fully expected to see the next one, planned for 1910.
In the letter to Howells which follows we get another glimpse of Mark Twain’s philosophy of man, the irresponsible machine.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in New York:
Stormfield, Redding, Conn.,
Jan. 18, ’09.
Dear Howells, – I have to write a line, lazy as I am, to say how your Poe article delighted me; and to say that I am in agreement with substantially all you say about his literature. To me his prose is unreadable – like Jane Austin’s. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane’s. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
Another thing: you grant that God and circumstances sinned against Poe, but you also grant that he sinned against himself – a thing which he couldn’t do and didn’t do.
It is lively up here now. I wish you could come.
Yrs ever,
Mark.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in New York:
Stormfield, Redding, Connecticut,
3 in the morning, Apl. 17, ’09.
(Written with pencil).
My pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach. Howells, Did you write me day-before-day before yesterday, or did I dream it? In my mind’s eye I most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue envelop in the mailpile. I have hunted the house over, but there is no such letter. Was it an illusion?
I am reading Lowell’s letter, and smoking. I woke an hour ago and am reading to keep from wasting the time. On page 305, vol. I. I have just margined a note:
“Young friend! I like that! You ought to see him now.”
It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young. It was a brick out of a blue sky, and knocked me groggy for a moment. Ah me, the pathos of it is, that we were young then. And he – why, so was he, but he didn’t know it. He didn’t even know it 9 years later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying, “Don’t say anything about age – he has just turned fifty, and thinks he is old and broods over it.”
(Well, Clara did sing! And you wrote her a dear letter.)
Time to go to sleep.
Yours ever,
Mark.
*****
To Daniel Kiefer:
(No date)
DANL Kiefer Esq. Dear sir, – I should be far from willing to have a political party named after me.
I would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed its members to have political aspirations or to push friends forward for political preferment.
Yours very truly,
S. L. Clemens.
The copyright extension, for which the author had been working so long, was granted by Congress in 1909, largely as the result of that afternoon in Washington when Mark Twain had “received” in “Uncle Joe” Cannon’s private room, and preached the gospel of copyright until the daylight faded and the rest of the Capitol grew still. Champ Clark was the last to linger that day and they had talked far into the dusk. Clark was powerful, and had fathered the bill. Now he wrote to know if it was satisfactory.
*****
To Champ Clark, in Washington:
Stormfield, Redding, Conn., June 5, ’09.
Dear Champ Clark—Is the new copyright law acceptable to me? Emphatically, yes! Clark, it is the only sane, and clearly defined, and just and righteous copyright law that has ever existed in the United States. Whosoever will compare it with its predecessors will have no trouble in arriving at that decision.
The bill which was before the committee two years ago when I was down there was the most stupefying jumble of conflicting and apparently irreconcilable interests that was ever seen; and we all said “the case is hopeless, absolutely hopeless – out of this chaos nothing can be built.” But we were in error; out of that chaotic mass this excellent bill has been instructed; the warring interests have been reconciled, and the result is as comely and substantial a legislative edifice as lifts its domes and towers and protective lightning rods out of the statute book, I think. When I think of that other bill, which even the Deity couldn’t understand, and of this one which even I can understand, I take off my hat to the man or men who devised this one. Was it R. U. Johnson? Was it the Author’s League? Was it both together? I don’t know, but I take off my hat, anyway. Johnson has written a valuable article about the new law – I enclose it.
At last – at last and for the first time in copyright history we are ahead of England! Ahead of her in two ways: by length of time and by fairness to all interests concerned. Does this sound like shouting? Then I must modify it: all we possessed of copyright-justice before the fourth of last March we owed to England’s initiative.
Truly Yours,
S. L. Clemens.
Because Mark Twain amused himself with certain aspects of Christian Science, and was critical of Mrs. Eddy, there grew up a wide impression that he jeered at the theory of mental healing; when, as a matter of fact, he was one of its earliest converts, and never lost faith in its power. The letter which follows is an excellent exposition of his attitude toward the institution of Christian Science and the founder of the church in America.
*****
To J. Wylie Smith, Glasgow, Scotland:
“Stormfield,” August 7, 1909
Dear sir, – My view of the matter has not changed. To wit, that Christian Science is valuable; that it has just the same value now that it had when Mrs. Eddy stole it from Quimby; that its healing principle (its most valuable asset) possesses the same force now that it possessed a million years ago before Quimby was born; that Mrs. Eddy… organized that force, and is entitled to high credit for that. Then, with a splendid sagacity she hitched it to… a religion, the surest of all ways to secure friends for it, and support. In a fine and lofty way – figuratively speaking – it was a tramp stealing a ride on the lightning express. Ah, how did that ignorant village-born peasant woman know the human being so well? She has no more intellect than a tadpole – until it comes to business then she is a marvel! Am I sorry I wrote the book? Most certainly not. You say you have 500 (converts) in Glasgow. Fifty years from now, your posterity will not count them by the hundred, but by the thousand. I feel absolutely sure of this.
Very truly yours,
S. L. Clemens.
Clemens wrote very little for publication that year, but he enjoyed writing for his own amusement, setting down the things that boiled, or bubbled, within him: mainly chapters on the inconsistencies of human deportment, human superstition and human creeds. The “Letters from the Earth” referred to in the following, were supposed to have been written by an immortal visitant from some far realm to a friend, describing the absurdities of mankind. It is true, as he said, that they would not do for publication, though certainly the manuscript contains some of his most delicious writing. Miss Wallace, to whom the next letter is written, had known Mark Twain in Bermuda, and, after his death, published a dainty volume entitled Mark Twain in the Happy Island.
“Stormfield,” Redding, Connecticut,
Nov. 13, ’09.
Dear Betsy, – I’ve been writing “Letters from the Earth,” and if you will come here and see us I will – what? Put the Ms in your hands, with the places to skip Mark.d? No. I won’t trust you quite that far. I’ll read messages to you. This book will never be published – in fact it couldn’t be, because it would be felony to soil the mails with it, for it has much Holy Scripture in it of the kind that… can’t properly be read aloud, except from the pulpit and in family worship. Paine enjoys it, but Paine is going to be damned one of these days, I suppose.
The autumn splendors passed you by? What a pity. I wish you had been here. It was beyond words! It was heaven and hell and sunset and rainbows and the aurora all fused into one divine harmony, and you couldn’t look at it and keep the tears back. All the hosannahing strong gorgeousnesses have gone back to heaven and hell and the pole, now, but no matter; if you could look out of my bedroom window at this moment, you would choke up; and when you got your voice you would say: This is not real, this is a dream. Such a singing together, and such a whispering together, and such a snuggling together of cosy soft colors, and such kissing and caressing, and such pretty blushing when the sun breaks out and catches those dainty weeds at it – you remember that weed-garden of mine? – and then – then the far hills sleeping in a dim blue trance – oh, hearing about it is nothing, you should be here to see it.
Good! I wish I could go on the platform and read. And I could, if it could be kept out of the papers. There’s a charity-school of 400 young girls in Boston that I would give my ears to talk to, if I had some more; but – oh, well, I can’t go, and it’s no use to grieve about it.
This morning Jean went to town; also Paine; also the butler; also Katy; also the laundress. The cook and the maid, and the boy and the roustabout and Jean’s coachman are left – just enough to make it lonesome, because they are around yet never visible. However, the Harpers are sending Leigh up to play billiards; therefore I shall survive.
Affectionately,
S. L. Clemens.
Early in June that year, Clemens had developed unmistakable symptoms of heart trouble of a very serious nature. It was angina pectoris, and while to all appearances he was as well as ever and usually felt so, he was periodically visited by severe attacks of acute “breast pains” which, as the months passed, increased in frequency and severity. He was alarmed and distressed – not on his own account, but because of his daughter Jean – a handsome girl, who had long been subject to epileptic seizures. In case of his death he feared that Jean would be without permanent anchorage, his other daughter, Clara – following her marriage to Ossip Gabrilowitsch in October – having taken up residence abroad.
This anxiety was soon ended. On the morning of December 24th, Jean Clemens was found dead in her apartment. She was not drowned in her bath, as was reported, but died from heart exhaustion, the result of her malady and the shock of cold water.[51]
The blow to her father was terrible, but heavy as it was, one may perhaps understand that her passing in that swift, painless way must have afforded him a measure of relief.
