But I have to stop with that. Even if wrong—& she is wrong—Englandmust be upheld. He is an enemy of the human race who shall speakagainst her now. Why was the human race created? Or at least whywasn't something creditable created in place of it?... I talkthe war with both sides—always waiting until the other manintroduces the topic. Then I say, “My head is with the Briton, butmy heart & such rags of morals as I have are with the Boer—now wewill talk, unembarrassed and without prejudice.” And so we discuss& have no trouble.I notice that God is on both sides in this war; thus history repeatsitself. But I am the only person who has noticed this; everybodyhere thinks He is playing the game for this side, & for this sideonly.
Clemens wrote one article for anonymous publication in the Times. But when the manuscript was ready to mail in an envelope stamped and addressed to Moberly Bell—he reconsidered and withheld it. It still lies in the envelope with the accompanying letter, which says:
Don't give me away, whether you print it or not. But I think you ought to print it and get up a squabble, for the weather is just suitable.
Clemens was not wholly wedded to osteopathy. The financial interest which he had taken in the new milk albumen, “a food for invalids,” tended to divide his faith and make him uncertain as to which was to be the chief panacea for all ills—osteopathy or plasmon.
MacAlister, who was deeply interested in the plasmon fortunes, was anxious to get the product adopted by the army. He believed, if he could get an interview with the Medical Director-General, he could convince him of its merits. Discussing the matter with Clemens, the latter said:
“MacAlister, you are going at it from the wrong end. You can't go direct to that man, a perfect stranger, and convince him of anything. Who is his nearest friend?”
MacAlister knew a man on terms of social intimacy with the official.
Clemens said, “That is the man to speak to the Director-General.”
“But I don't know him, either,” said MacAlister.
“Very good. Do you know any one who does know him?”
“Yes, I know his most intimate friend.”
“Then he is the man for you to approach. Convince him that plasmon is what the army needs, that the military hospitals are suffering for it. Let him understand that what you want is to get this to the Director-General, and in due time it will get to him in the proper way. You'll see.”
This proved to be a true prophecy. It was only a little while until the British army had experimented with plasmon and adopted it. MacAlister reported the success of the scheme to Clemens, and out of it grew the story entitled, “Two Little Tales,” published in November of the following year (1901) in the Century Magazine. Perhaps the reader will remember that in the “Two Little Tales” the Emperor is very ill and the lowest of all his subjects knows a certain remedy, but he cannot seek the Emperor direct, so he wisely approaches him through a series of progressive stages—finally reaching and curing his stricken Majesty.
Clemens had the courage of his investments. He adopted plasmon as his own daily food, and induced various members of the family to take it in its more palatable forms, one of these being a preparation of chocolate. He kept the reading-table by his bed well stocked with a variety of the products and invited various callers to try a complimentary sample lot. It was really an excellent and harmless diet, and both the company and its patients would seem to have prospered—perhaps are prospering still.
There was another business opportunity came along just at this time. S. S. McClure was in England with a proposition for starting a new magazine whose complexion was to be peculiarly American, with Mark Twain as its editor. The magazine was to be called 'The Universal', and by the proposition Clemens was to receive a tenth interest in it for his first year's work, and an added twentieth interest for each of the two succeeding years, with a guarantee that his shares should not earn him less than five thousand dollars the first year, with a proportionate increase as his holdings grew.
The scheme appealed to Clemens, it being understood in the beginning that he was to give very little time to the work, with the privilege of doing it at his home, wherever that might happen to be. He wrote of the matter to Mr. Rogers, explaining in detail, and Rogers replied, approving the plan. Mr. Rogers said he knew that he [Rogers] would have to do most of the work in editing the magazine, and further added:
One thing I shall insist upon, however, if I have anything to dowith the matter, and it is this: that when you have made up yourmind on the subject you will stick to it. I have not found in yourcomposition that element of stubbornness which is a constant sourceof embarrassment to me in all friendly and social ways, but which,when applied to certain lines of business, brings in the dollar andfifty-cent pieces. If you accept the position, of course that meansthat you have to come to this country. If you do, the yachting willbe a success.
There was considerable correspondence with McClure over the new periodical. In one letter Clemens set forth his general views of the matter quite clearly:
Let us not deceive any one, nor allow any one to deceive himself, ifit can be prevented. This is not to be a comic magazine. It is to besimply a good, clean, wholesome collection of well-written &enticing literary products, like the other magazines of its class;not setting itself to please but one of man's moods, but all ofthem. It will not play but one kind of music, but all kinds. Ishould not be able to edit a comic periodical satisfactorily, forlack of interest in the work. I value humor highly, & amconstitutionally fond of it, but I should not like it as a steadydiet. For its own best interests, humor should take its outings ingrave company; its cheerful dress gets heightened color from theproximity of sober hues. For me to edit a comic magazine would bean incongruity & out of character, for of the twenty-three bookswhich I have written eighteen do not deal in humor as their chiefestfeature, but are half & half admixtures of fun & seriousness. Ithink I have seldom deliberately set out to be humorous, but havenearly always allowed the humor to drop in or stay out, according toits fancy. Although I have many times been asked to write somethinghumorous for an editor or a publisher I have had wisdom enough todecline; a person could hardly be humorous with the other manwatching him like that. I have never tried to write a humorouslecture; I have only tried to write serious ones—it is the only waynot to succeed.I shall write for this magazine every time the spirit moves me; butI look for my largest entertainment in editing. I have been editedby all kinds of people for more than thirty-eight years; there hasalways been somebody in authority over my manuscript & privileged toimprove it; this has fatigued me a good deal, & I have often longedto move up from the dock to the bench & rest myself and fatigueothers. My opportunity is come, but I hope I shall not abuse itovermuch. I mean to do my best to make a good magazine; I mean todo my whole duty, & not shirk any part of it. There are plenty ofdistinguished artists, novelists, poets, story-tellers,philosophers, scientists, explorers, fighters, hunters, followers ofthe sea, & seekers of adventure; & with these to do the hard & thevaluable part of the work with the pen & the pencil it will becomfort & joy to me to walk the quarter-deck & superintend.
Meanwhile McClure's enthusiasm had had time to adjust itself to certain existing facts. Something more than a month later he wrote from America at considerable length, setting forth the various editorial duties and laying stress upon the feature of intimate physical contact with the magazine. He went into the matter of the printing schedule, the various kinds of paper used, the advertising pages, illustrations—into all the detail, indeed, which a practical managing editor must compass in his daily rounds. It was pretty evident that Clemens would not be able to go sailing about on Mr. Rogers's yacht or live at will in London or New York or Vienna or Elmira, but that he would be more or less harnessed to a revolving chair at an editorial desk, the thing which of all fates he would be most likely to dread. The scheme appears to have died there—the correspondence to have closed.
Somewhat of the inducement in the McClure scheme had been the thought in Clemens's mind that it would bring him back to America. In a letter to Mr. Rogers (January 8, 1900) he said, “I am tired to death of this everlasting exile.” Mrs. Clemens often wrote that he was restlessly impatient to return. They were, in fact, constantly discussing the practicability of returning to their own country now and opening the Hartford home. Clemens was ready to do that or to fall in with any plan that would bring him across the water and settle him somewhere permanently. He was tired of the wandering life they had been leading. Besides the long trip of '95 and '96 they had moved two or three times a year regularly since leaving Hartford, nine years before. It seemed to him that they were always packing and unpacking.
“The poor man is willing to live anywhere if we will only let him 'stay put,” wrote Mrs. Clemens, but he did want to settle in his own land. Mrs. Clemens, too, was weary with wandering, but the Hartford home no longer held any attraction for her. There had been a time when her every letter dwelt on their hope of returning to it. Now the thought filled her with dread. To her sister she wrote:
Do you think we can live through the first going into the house in Hartford? I feel if we had gotten through the first three months all might be well, but consider the first night.
The thought of the responsibility of that great house—the taking up again of the old life-disheartened her, too. She had added years and she had not gained in health or strength.
When I was comparatively young I found the burden of that house verygreat. I don't think I was ever fitted for housekeeping. I dislikethe practical part of it so much. I hate it when the servants don'tdo well, and I hate the correcting them.
Yet no one ever had better discipline in her domestic affairs or ever commanded more devoted service. Her strength of character and the proportions of her achievement show large when we consider this confession.
They planned to return in the spring, but postponed the date for sailing. Jean was still under Kellgren's treatment, and, though a cure had been promised her, progress was discouragingly slow. They began to look about for summer quarters in or near London.
All this time Clemens had been tossing on the London social tide. There was a call for him everywhere. No distinguished visitor of whatever profession or rank but must meet Mark Twain. The King of Sweden was among his royal conquests of that season.
He was more happy with men of his own kind. He was often with Moberly Bell, editor of the Times; E. A. Abbey, the painter; Sir Henry Lucy, of Punch (Toby, M.P.); James Bryce, and Herbert Gladstone; and there were a number of brilliant Irishmen who were his special delight. Once with Mrs. Clemens he dined with the author of his old favorite, 'European Morals', William E. H. Lecky. Lady Gregory was there and Sir Dennis Fitz-Patrick, who had been Governor-General at Lahore when they were in India, and a number of other Irish ladies and gentlemen. It was a memorable evening. To Twichell Clemens wrote:
Joe, do you know the Irish gentleman & the Irish lady, the Scotchgentleman & the Scotch lady? These are darlings, every one. Nightbefore last it was all Irish—24. One would have to travel far tomatch their ease & sociability & animation & sparkle & absence ofshyness & self-consciousness. It was American in these finequalities. This was at Mr. Lecky's. He is Irish, you know. Lastnight it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory's. Lord Roberts is Irish,& Sir William Butler, & Kitchener, I think, & a disproportion of theother prominent generals are of Irish & Scotch breed keeping up thetraditions of Wellington & Sir Colin Campbell, of the Mutiny. Youwill have noticed that in S. A., as in the Mutiny, it is usually theIrish & Scotch that are placed in the forefront of the battle....Sir William Butler said, “the Celt is the spearhead of the Britishlance.”
He mentions the news from the African war, which had been favorable to England, and what a change had come over everything in consequence. The dinner-parties had been lodges of sorrow and depressing. Now everybody was smiling again. In a note-book entry of this time he wrote:
Relief of Mafeking (May 18, 1900). The news came at 9.17 P.M.Before 10 all London was in the streets, gone mad with joy. By thenthe news was all over the American continent.
Clemens had been talking copyright a good deal in London, and introducing it into his speeches. Finally, one day he was summoned before a committee of the House of Lords to explain his views. His old idea that the product of a man's brain is his property in perpetuity and not for any term of years had not changed, and they permitted him to dilate on this (to them) curious doctrine. The committee consisted of Lords Monkswell, Knutsford, Avebury, Farrar, and Thwing. When they asked for his views he said:
“In my opinion the copyright laws of England and America need only the removal of the forty-two-year limit and the return to perpetual copyright to be perfect. I consider that at least one of the reasons advanced in justification of limited copyright is fallacious—namely, the one which makes a distinction between an author's property and real estate, and pretends that the two are not created, produced, or acquired in the same way, thus warranting a different treatment of the two by law.”
Continuing, he dwelt on the ancient doctrine that there was no property in an idea, showing how the far greater proportion of all property consisted of nothing more than elaborated ideas—the steamship, locomotive, telephone, the vast buildings in the world, how all of these had been constructed upon a basic idea precisely as a book is constructed, and were property only as a book is property, and therefore rightly subject to the same laws. He was carefully and searchingly examined by that shrewd committee. He kept them entertained and interested and left them in good-nature, even if not entirely converted. The papers printed his remarks, and London found them amusing.
A few days after the copyright session, Clemens, responding to the toast, “Literature,” at the Royal Literary Fund Banquet, made London laugh again, and early in June he was at the Savoy Hotel welcoming Sir Henry Irving back to England after one of his successful American tours.
On the Fourth of July (1900) Clemens dined with the Lord Chief-Justice, and later attended an American banquet at the Hotel Cecil. He arrived late, when a number of the guests were already going. They insisted, however, that he make a speech, which he did, and considered the evening ended. It was not quite over. A sequel to his “Luck” story, published nine years before, suddenly developed.
To go back a little, the reader may recall that “Luck” was a story which Twichell had told him as being supposedly true. The hero of it was a military officer who had risen to the highest rank through what at least seemed to be sheer luck, including a number of fortunate blunders. Clemens thought the story improbable, but wrote it and laid it away for several years, offering it at last in the general house-cleaning which took place after the first collapse of the machine. It was published in Harper's Magazine for August, 1891, and something less than a year later, in Rome, an English gentleman—a new acquaintance—said to him:
“Mr. Clemens, shall you go to England?”
“Very likely.”
“Shall you take your tomahawk with you?”
“Why—yes, if it shall seem best.”
“Well, it will. Be advised. Take it with you.”
“Why?”
“Because of that sketch of yours entitled 'Luck.' That sketch is current in England, and you will surely need your tomahawk.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I think so because the hero of the sketch will naturally want your scalp, and will probably apply for it. Be advised. Take your tomahawk along.”
“Why, even with it I sha'n't stand any chance, because I sha'n't know him when he applies, and he will have my scalp before I know what his errand is.”
“Come, do you mean to say that you don't know who the hero of that sketch is?”
“Indeed I haven't any idea who the hero of the sketch is. Who is it?”
His informant hesitated a moment, then named a name of world-wide military significance.
As Mask Twain finished his Fourth of July speech at the Cecil and started to sit down a splendidly uniformed and decorated personage at his side said:
“Mr. Clemens, I have been wanting to know you a long time,” and he was looking down into the face of the hero of “Luck.”
“I was caught unprepared,” he said in his notes of it. “I didn't sit down—I fell down. I didn't have my tomahawk, and I didn't know what would happen. But he was composed, and pretty soon I got composed and we had a good, friendly time. If he had ever heard of that sketch of mine he did not manifest it in any way, and at twelve, midnight, I took my scalp home intact.”
It was early in July, 1900, that they removed to Dollis Hill House, a beautiful old residence surrounded by trees on a peaceful hilltop, just outside of London. It was literally within a stone's-throw of the city limits, yet it was quite rural, for the city had not overgrown it then, and it retained all its pastoral features—a pond with lily-pads, the spreading oaks, the wide spaces of grassy lawn. Gladstone, an intimate friend of the owner, had made it a favorite retreat at one period of his life, and the place to-day is converted into a public garden called Gladstone Park. The old English diplomat used to drive out and sit in the shade of the trees and read and talk and translate Homer, and pace the lawn as he planned diplomacy, and, in effect, govern the English empire from that retired spot.
Clemens, in some memoranda made at the moment, doubts if Gladstone was always at peace in his mind in this retirement.
“Was he always really tranquil within,” he says, “or was he only externally so—for effect? We cannot know; we only know that his rustic bench under his favorite oak has no bark on its arms. Facts like this speak louder than words.”
The red-brick residential wave of London was still some distance away in 1900. Clemens says:
The rolling sea of green grass still stretches away on every hand,splotches with shadows of spreading oaks in whose black coolnessflocks of sheep lie peacefully dreaming. Dreaming of what? Thatthey are in London, the metropolis of the world, Post-officeDistrict, N. W.? Indeed no. They are not aware of it. I am awareof it, but that is all. It is not possible to realize it. Forthere is no suggestion of city here; it is country, pure & simple,& as still & reposeful as is the bottom of the sea.
They all loved Dollis Hill. Mrs. Clemens wrote as if she would like to remain forever in that secluded spot.
It is simply divinely beautiful & peaceful;... the great oldtrees are beyond everything. I believe nowhere in the world do youfind such trees as in England.... Jean has a hammock swungbetween two such great trees, & on the other side of a little pond,which is full of white & yellow pond-lilies, there is tall grass &trees & Clara & Jean go there in the afternoons, spread down a rugon the grass in the shade & read & sleep.
They all spent most of their time outdoors at Dollis Hill under those spreading trees.
Clemens to Twichell in midsummer wrote:
I am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but Iam working & deep in the luxury of it. But there is one tremendousdefect. Livy is all so enchanted with the place & so in love withit that she doesn't know how she is going to tear herself away fromit.
Much company came to them at Dollis Hill. Friends drove out from London, and friends from America came often, among them—the Sages, Prof. Willard Fiske, and Brander Matthews with his family. Such callers were served with tea and refreshment on the lawn, and lingered, talking and talking, while the sun got lower and the shadows lengthened, reluctant to leave that idyllic spot.
“Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever occupied,” he wrote when the summer was about over.
But there was still a greater attraction than Dollis Hill. Toward the end of summer they willingly left that paradise, for they had decided at last to make that home-returning voyage which had invited them so long. They were all eager enough to go—Clemens more eager than the rest, though he felt a certain sadness, too, in leaving the tranquil spot which in a brief summer they had so learned to love.
Writing to W. H. Helm, a London newspaper man who had spent pleasant hours with him chatting in the shade, he said:
... The packing & fussing & arranging have begun, for theremoval to America &, by consequence, the peace of life is marred &its contents & satisfactions are departing. There is not muchchoice between a removal & a funeral; in fact, a removal is afuneral, substantially, & I am tired of attending them.
They closed Dollis Hill, spent a few days at Brown's Hotel, and sailed for America, on the Minnehaha, October 6, 1900, bidding, as Clemens believed, and hoped, a permanent good-by to foreign travel. They reached New York on the 15th, triumphantly welcomed after their long nine years of wandering. How glad Mark Twain was to get home may be judged from his remark to one of the many reporters who greeted him.
“If I ever get ashore I am going to break both of my legs so Ican't, get away again.”
It would be hard to exaggerate the stir which the newspapers and the public generally made over the homecoming of Mark Twain. He had left America, staggering under heavy obligation and set out on a pilgrimage of redemption. At the moment when this Mecca, was in view a great sorrow had befallen him and, stirred a world-wide and soul-deep tide of human sympathy. Then there had followed such ovation as has seldom been conferred upon a private citizen, and now approaching old age, still in the fullness of his mental vigor, he had returned to his native soil with the prestige of these honors upon him and the vast added glory of having made his financial fight single-handed-and won.
He was heralded literally as a conquering hero. Every paper in the land had an editorial telling the story of his debts, his sorrow, and his triumphs.
“He had behaved like Walter Scott,” says Howells, “as millions rejoiced to know who had not known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens.”
Howells acknowledges that he had some doubts as to the permanency of the vast acclaim of the American public, remembering, or perhaps assuming, a national fickleness. Says Howells:
He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largelyimagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this thatinspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider“the state of polite learning” among us, “You mustn't expect peopleto keep it up here as they do in England.” But it appeared that hiscountrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up inhonor of him past all precedent.
Clemens went to the Earlington Hotel and began search for a furnished house in New York. They would not return to Hartford—at least not yet. The associations there were still too sad, and they immediately became more so. Five days after Mark Twain's return to America, his old friend and co-worker, Charles Dudley Warner, died. Clemens went to Hartford to act as a pall-bearer and while there looked into the old home. To Sylvester Baxter, of Boston, who had been present, he wrote a few days later:
It was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days with you, &there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing Hartford & the house again;but I realized that if we ever enter the house again to live ourhearts will break. I am not sure that we shall ever be strongenough to endure that strain.
Even if the surroundings had been less sorrowful it is not likely that Clemens would have returned to Hartford at this time. He had become a world-character, a dweller in capitals. Everywhere he moved a world revolved about him. Such a figure in Germany would live naturally in Berlin; in England London; in France, Paris; in Austria, Vienna; in America his headquarters could only be New York.
Clemens empowered certain of his friends to find a home for him, and Mr. Frank N. Doubleday discovered an attractive and handsomely furnished residence at 14 West Tenth Street, which was promptly approved. Doubleday, who was going to Boston, left orders with the agent to draw the lease and take it up to the new tenant for signature. To Clemens he said:
“The house is as good as yours. All you've got to do is to sign the lease. You can consider it all settled.”
When Doubleday returned from Boston a few days later the agent called on him and complained that he couldn't find Mark Twain anywhere. It was reported at his hotel that he had gone and left no address. Doubleday was mystified; then, reflecting, he had an inspiration. He walked over to 14 West Tenth Street and found what he had suspected—Mark Twain had moved in. He had convinced the caretaker that everything was all right and he was quite at home. Doubleday said:
“Why, you haven't executed the lease yet.”
“No,” said Clemens, “but you said the house was as good as mine,” to which Doubleday agreed, but suggested that they go up to the real-estate office and give the agent notice that he was in possession of the premises.
Doubleday's troubles were not quite over, however. Clemens began to find defects in his new home and assumed to hold Doubleday responsible for them. He sent a daily postal card complaining of the windows, furnace, the range, the water-whatever he thought might lend interest to Doubleday's life. As a matter of fact, he was pleased with the place. To MacAlister he wrote:
We were very lucky to get this big house furnished. There was notanother one in town procurable that would answer us, but this one isall right-space enough in it for several families, the rooms allold-fashioned, great size.
The house at 14 West Tenth Street became suddenly one of the most conspicuous residences in New York. The papers immediately made its appearance familiar. Many people passed down that usually quiet street, stopping to observe or point out where Mark Twain lived. There was a constant procession of callers of every kind. Many were friends, old and new, but there was a multitude of strangers. Hundreds came merely to express their appreciation of his work, hoping for a personal word or a hand-shake or an autograph; but there were other hundreds who came with this thing and that thing—axes to grind—and there were newspaper reporters to ask his opinion on politics, or polygamy, or woman's suffrage; on heaven and hell and happiness; on the latest novel; on the war in Africa, the troubles in China; on anything under the sun, important or unimportant, interesting or inane, concerning which one might possibly hold an opinion. He was unfailing “copy” if they could but get a word with him. Anything that he might choose to say upon any subject whatever was seized upon and magnified and printed with head-lines. Sometimes opinions were invented for him. If he let fall a few words they were multiplied into a column interview.
“That reporter worked a miracle equal to the loaves and fishes,” he said of one such performance.
Many men would have become annoyed and irritable as these things continued; but Mark Twain was greater than that. Eventually he employed a secretary to stand between him and the wash of the tide, as a sort of breakwater; but he seldom lost his temper no matter what was the request which was laid before him, for he recognized underneath it the great tribute of a great nation.
Of course his literary valuation would be affected by the noise of the general applause. Magazines and syndicates besought him for manuscripts. He was offered fifty cents and even a dollar a word for whatever he might give them. He felt a child-like gratification in these evidences of his market advancement, but he was not demoralized by them. He confined his work to a few magazines, and in November concluded an arrangement with the new management of Harper & Brothers, by which that firm was to have the exclusive serial privilege of whatever he might write at a fixed rate of twenty cents per word—a rate increased to thirty cents by a later contract, which also provided an increased royalty for the publication of his books.
The United States, as a nation, does not confer any special honors upon private citizens. We do not have decorations and titles, even though there are times when it seems that such things might be not inappropriately conferred. Certain of the newspapers, more lavish in their enthusiasm than others, were inclined to propose, as one paper phrased it, “Some peculiar recognition—something that should appeal to Samuel L. Clemens, the man, rather than to Mark Twain, the literate. Just what form this recognition should take is doubtful, for the case has no exact precedent.”
Perhaps the paper thought that Mark Twain was entitled—as he himself once humorously suggested-to the “thanks of Congress” for having come home alive and out of debt, but it is just as well that nothing of the sort was ever seriously considered. The thanks of the public at large contained more substance, and was a tribute much more to his mind. The paper above quoted ended by suggesting a very large dinner and memorial of welcome as being more in keeping with the republican idea and the American expression of good-will.
But this was an unneeded suggestion. If he had eaten all the dinners proposed he would not have lived to enjoy his public honors a month. As it was, he accepted many more dinners than he could eat, and presently fell into the habit of arriving when the banqueting was about over and the after-dinner speaking about to begin. Even so the strain told on him.
“His friends saw that he was wearing himself out,” says Howells, and perhaps this was true, for he grew thin and pale and contracted a hacking cough. He did not spare himself as often as he should have done. Once to Richard Watson Gilder he sent this line of regrets:
In bed with a chest cold and other company—Wednesday.DEAR GILDER,—I can't. If I were a well man I could explain withthis pencil, but in the cir—-ces I will leave it all to yourimagination.Was it Grady who killed himself trying to do all the dining andspeeching?No, old man, no, no! Ever yours, MARK.
He became again the guest of honor at the Lotos Club, which had dined him so lavishly seven years before, just previous to his financial collapse. That former dinner had been a distinguished occasion, but never before had the Lotos Club been so brimming with eager hospitality as on the second great occasion. In closing his introductory speech President Frank Lawrence said, “We hail him as one who has borne great burdens with manliness and courage, who has emerged from great struggles victorious,” and the assembled diners roared out their applause. Clemens in his reply said:
Your president has referred to certain burdens which I was weightedwith. I am glad he did, as it gives me an opportunity which Iwanted—to speak of those debts. You all knew what he meant when hereferred to it, & of the poor bankrupt firm of C. L. Webster & Co.No one has said a word about those creditors. There were ninety-sixcreditors in all, & not by a finger's weight did ninety-five out ofthe ninety-six add to the burden of that time. They treated mewell; they treated me handsomely. I never knew I owed themanything; not a sign came from them.
It was like him to make that public acknowledgment. He could not let an unfair impression remain that any man or any set of men had laid an unnecessary burden upon him-his sense of justice would not consent to it. He also spoke on that occasion of certain national changes.
How many things have happened in the seven years I have been awayfrom home! We have fought a righteous war, and a righteous war is arare thing in history. We have turned aside from our own comfortand seen to it that freedom should exist, not only within our owngates, but in our own neighborhood. We have set Cuba free andplaced her among the galaxy of free nations of the world. Westarted out to set those poor Filipinos free, but why that righteousplan miscarried perhaps I shall never know. We have also beenmaking a creditable showing in China, and that is more than all theother powers can say. The “Yellow Terror” is threatening the world,but no matter what happens the United States says that it has had nopart in it.Since I have been away we have been nursing free silver. We havewatched by its cradle, we have done our best to raise that child,but every time it seemed to be getting along nicely along came somepestiferous Republican and gave it the measles or something. I fearwe will never raise that child.We've done more than that. We elected a President four years ago.We've found fault and criticized him, and here a day or two ago wego and elect him for another four years, with votes enough to spareto do it over again.
One club followed another in honoring Mark Twain—the Aldine, the St. Nicholas, the Press clubs, and other associations and societies. His old friends were at these dinners—Howells, Aldrich, Depew, Rogers, ex-Speaker Reed—and they praised him and gibed him to his and their hearts' content.
It was a political year, and he generally had something to say on matters municipal, national, or international; and he spoke out more and more freely, as with each opportunity he warmed more righteously to his subject.
At the dinner given to him by the St. Nicholas Club he said, with deep irony:
Gentlemen, you have here the best municipal government in the world,and the most fragrant and the purest. The very angels of heavenenvy you and wish they had a government like it up there. You gotit by your noble fidelity to civic duty; by the stern and everwatchful exercise of the great powers lodged in you as lovers andguardians of your city; by your manly refusal to sit inert when basemen would have invaded her high places and possessed them; by yourinstant retaliation when any insult was offered you in her person,or any assault was made upon her fair fame. It is you who have madethis government what it is, it is you who have made it the envy anddespair of the other capitals of the world—and God bless you forit, gentlemen, God bless you! And when you get to heaven at lastthey'll say with joy, “Oh, there they come, the representatives ofthe perfectest citizenship in the universe show them the archangel'sbox and turn on the limelight!”
Those hearers who in former years had been indifferent to Mark Twain's more serious purpose began to realize that, whatever he may have been formerly, he was by no means now a mere fun-maker, but a man of deep and grave convictions, able to give them the fullest and most forcible expression. He still might make them laugh, but he also made them think, and he stirred them to a truer gospel of patriotism. He did not preach a patriotism that meant a boisterous cheering of the Stars and Stripes right or wrong, but a patriotism that proposed to keep the Stars and Stripes clean and worth shouting for. In an article, perhaps it was a speech, begun at this time he wrote:
We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them totake their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largestcrowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter—exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always beentaught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversionand contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, & so here in ourdemocracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is mostforeign to it & out of place—the delivery of our politicalconscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on theRussian plan.
Howells tells of discussing these vital matters with him in “an upper room, looking south over a quiet, open space of back yards where,” he says, “we fought our battles in behalf of the Filipinos and Boers, and he carried on his campaign against the missionaries in China.”
Howells at the time expressed an amused fear that Mark Twain's countrymen, who in former years had expected him to be merely a humorist, should now, in the light of his wider acceptance abroad, demand that he be mainly serious.
But the American people were quite ready to accept him in any of his phases, fully realizing that whatever his philosophy or doctrine it would have somewhat of the humorous form, and whatever his humor, there would somewhere be wisdom in it. He had in reality changed little; for a generation he had thought the sort of things which he now, with advanced years and a different audience, felt warranted in uttering openly. The man who in '64 had written against corruption in San Francisco, who a few years later had defended the emigrant Chinese against persecution, who at the meetings of the Monday Evening Club had denounced hypocrisy in politics, morals, and national issues, did not need to change to be able to speak out against similar abuses now. And a newer generation as willing to herald Mark Twain as a sage as well as a humorist, and on occasion to quite overlook the absence of the cap and bells.
Clemens did not confine his speeches altogether to matters of reform. At a dinner given by the Nineteenth Century Club in November, 1900, he spoke on the “Disappearance of Literature,” and at the close of the discussion of that subject, referring to Milton and Scott, he said: