Professor Winchester also said something about there being no modernepics like “Paradise Lost.” I guess he's right. He talked as if hewas pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobodywould suppose that he never had read it. I don't believe any of youhave ever read “Paradise Lost,” and you don't want to. That'ssomething that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, justas Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of aclassic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobodywants to read.Professor Trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearanceof literature. He said that Scott would outlive all his critics.I guess that's true. That fact of the business is you've got to beone of two ages to appreciate Scott. When you're eighteen you canread Ivanhoe, and you want to wait until you're ninety to read someof the rest. It takes a pretty well-regulated abstemious critic tolive ninety years.
But a few days later he was back again in the forefront of reform, preaching at the Berkeley Lyceum against foreign occupation in China. It was there that he declared himself a Boxer.
Why should not China be free from the foreigners, who are onlymaking trouble on her soil? If they would only all go home what apleasant place China would be for the Chinese! We do not allowChinamen to come here, and I say, in all seriousness, that it wouldbe a graceful thing to let China decide who shall go there.China never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wantedChinamen, and on this question I am with the Boxers every time. TheBoxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does thecountries of other people. I wish him success. We drive theChinaman out of our country; the Boxer believes in driving us out ofhis country. I am a Boxer, too, on those terms.
Introducing Winston Churchill, of England, at a dinner some weeks later, he explained how generous England and America had been in not requiring fancy rates for “extinguished missionaries” in China as Germany had done. Germany had required territory and cash, he said, in payment for her missionaries, while the United States and England had been willing to settle for produce—firecrackers and tea.
The Churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for the year 1900, and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last for a long time. He realized that he was tired and that the strain upon him made any other sort of work out of the question. Writing to MacAlister at the end of the year, he said, “I seem to have made many speeches, but it is not so. It is not more than ten, I think.” Still, a respectable number in the space of two months, considering that each was carefully written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social pressure. Again to MacAlister:
I declined 7 banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average)& answered 29 letters. I have slaved at my mail every day since wearrived in mid-October, but Jean is learning to typewrite &presently I'll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time.
He added that after January 4th he did not intend to speak again for a year—that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the reform of city government.
The occasion of January 4, 1901, was a rather important one. It was a meeting of the City Club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal reform. Wheeler H. Peckham presided, and Bishop Potter made the opening address. It all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is not very vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then, and Mark Twain's declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of fifty were honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to disqualify the fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as a sort of slogan for reform.
Clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn't speak again that year. He had become a sort of general spokesman on public matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be denied. He declined a Yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to preside at the Lincoln Birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, February 11th, where he must introduce Watterson as the speaker of the evening.
“Think of it!” he wrote Twichell. “Two old rebels functioning there: I as president and Watterson as orator of the day! Things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank God!”
The Watterson introduction is one of the choicest of Mark Twain's speeches—a pure and perfect example of simple eloquence, worthy of the occasion which gave it utterance, worthy in spite of its playful paragraphs (or even because of them, for Lincoln would have loved them), to become the matrix of that imperishable Gettysburg phrase with which he makes his climax. He opened by dwelling for a moment on Colonel Watterson as a soldier, journalist, orator, statesman, and patriot; then he said:
It is a curious circumstance that without collusion of any kind, butmerely in obedience to a strange and pleasant and dramatic freak ofdestiny, he and I, kinsmen by blood—[Colonel Watterson's forebearshad intermarried with the Lamptons.]—for we are that—and one-timerebels—for we were that—should be chosen out of a millionsurviving quondam rebels to come here and bare our heads inreverence and love of that noble soul whom 40 years ago we triedwith all our hearts and all our strength to defeat and dispossess—Abraham Lincoln! Is the Rebellion ended and forgotten? Are theBlue and the Gray one to-day? By authority of this sign we mayanswer yes; there was a Rebellion—that incident is closed.I was born and reared in a slave State, my father was a slaveowner;and in the Civil War I was a second lieutenant in the Confederateservice. For a while. This second cousin of mine, ColonelWatterson, the orator of this present occasion, was born and rearedin a slave State, was a colonel in the Confederate service, andrendered me such assistance as he could in my self-appointed greattask of annihilating the Federal armies and breaking up the Union.I laid my plans with wisdom and foresight, and if Colonel Wattersonhad obeyed my orders I should have succeeded in my giantundertaking. It was my intention to drive General Grant into thePacific—if I could get transportation—and I told Colonel Wattersonto surround the Eastern armies and wait till I came. But he wasinsubordinate, and stood upon a punctilio of military etiquette; herefused to take orders from a second lieutenant—and the Union wassaved. This is the first time that this secret has been revealed.Until now no one outside the family has known the facts. But therethey stand: Watterson saved the Union. Yet to this day that mangets no pension. Those were great days, splendid days. What anuprising it was! For the hearts of the whole nation, North andSouth, were in the war. We of the South were not ashamed; for, likethe men of the North, we were fighting for 'flags we loved; and whenmen fight for these things, and under these convictions, withnothing sordid to tarnish their cause, that cause is holy, the bloodspilt for it is sacred, the life that is laid down for it isconsecrated. To-day we no longer regret the result, to-day we areglad it came out as it did, but we are not ashamed that we did ourendeavor; we did our bravest best, against despairing odds, for thecause which was precious to us and which our consciences approved;and we are proud—and you are proud—the kindred blood in your veinsanswers when I say it—you are proud of the record we made in thosemighty collisions in the fields.What an uprising it was! We did not have to supplicate for soldierson either side. “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundredthousand strong!” That was the music North and South. The verychoicest young blood and brawn and brain rose up from Maine to theGulf and flocked to the standards—just as men always do when intheir eyes their cause is great and fine and their hearts are in it;just as men flocked to the Crusades, sacrificing all they possessedto the cause, and entering cheerfully upon hardships which we cannoteven imagine in this age, and upon toilsome and wasting journeyswhich in our time would be the equivalent of circumnavigating theglobe five times over.North and South we put our hearts into that colossal struggle, andout of it came the blessed fulfilment of the prophecy of theimmortal Gettysburg speech which said: “We here highly resolve thatthese dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God,shall have a new birth of freedom; and that a government of thepeople, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from theearth.”We are here to honor the birthday of the greatest citizen, and thenoblest and the best, after Washington, that this land or any otherhas yet produced. The old wounds are healed, you and we arebrothers again; you testify it by honoring two of us, once soldiersof the Lost Cause, and foes of your great and good leader—with theprivilege of assisting here; and we testify it by laying our honesthomage at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, and in forgetting that you ofthe North and we of the South were ever enemies, and rememberingonly that we are now indistinguishably fused together and nameableby one common great name—Americans!
Mark Twain had really begun his crusade for reform soon after his arrival in America in a practical hand-to-hand manner. His housekeeper, Katie Leary, one night employed a cabman to drive her from the Grand Central Station to the house at 14 West Tenth Street. No contract had been made as to price, and when she arrived there the cabman's extortionate charge was refused. He persisted in it, and she sent into the house for her employer. Of all men, Mark Twain was the last one to countenance an extortion. He reasoned with the man kindly enough at first; when the driver at last became abusive Clemens demanded his number, which was at first refused. In the end he paid the legal fare, and in the morning entered a formal complaint, something altogether unexpected, for the American public is accustomed to suffering almost any sort of imposition to avoid trouble and publicity.
In some notes which Clemens had made in London four years earlier he wrote:
If you call a policeman to settle the dispute you can depend on onething—he will decide it against you every time. And so will theNew York policeman. In London if you carry your case into court theman that is entitled to win it will win it. In New York—but no onecarries a cab case into court there. It is my impression that it isnow more than thirty years since any one has carried a cab case intocourt there.
Nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case was called to sustain the charge and to read the cabdrivers' union and the public in general a lesson in good-citizenship. At the end of the hearing, to a representative of the union he said:
“This is not a matter of sentiment, my dear sir. It is simply practical business. You cannot imagine that I am making money wasting an hour or two of my time prosecuting a case in which I can have no personal interest whatever. I am doing this just as any citizen should do. He has no choice. He has a distinct duty. He is a non-classified policeman. Every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if necessary, to do so. Here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of an infamous system in this city—a charge upon the lax patriotism in this city of New York that this thing can exist. You have encouraged him, in every way you know how to overcharge. He is not the criminal here at all. The criminal is the citizen of New York and the absence of patriotism. I am not here to avenge myself on him. I have no quarrel with him. My quarrel is with the citizens of New York, who have encouraged him, and who created him by encouraging him to overcharge in this way.”
The driver's license was suspended. The case made a stir in the newspapers, and it is not likely that any one incident ever contributed more to cab-driving morals in New York City.
But Clemens had larger matters than this in prospect. His many speeches on municipal and national abuses he felt were more or less ephemeral. He proposed now to write himself down more substantially and for a wider hearing. The human race was behaving very badly: unspeakable corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the Congo, and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering the Chinese. In his letters he had more than once boiled over touching these matters, and for New-Year's Eve, 1900, had written:
A GREETING FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURYI bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning,bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soulfull of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full ofpious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking-glass.—[Prepared for Red Cross Society watch-meeting, which waspostponed until March. Clemens recalled his “Greeting” for thatreason and for one other, which he expressed thus: “The list ofgreeters thus far issued by you contains only vague generalities andone definite name—mine: 'Some kings and queens and Mark Twain.' NowI am not enjoying this sparkling solitude and distinction. It makesme feel like a circus-poster in a graveyard.”]
This was a sort of preliminary. Then, restraining himself no longer, he embodied his sentiments in an article for the North American Review entitled, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” There was crying need for some one to speak the right word. He was about the only one who could do it and be certain of a universal audience. He took as his text some Christmas Eve clippings from the New York Tribune and Sun which he had been saving for this purpose. The Tribune clipping said:
Christmas will dawn in the United States over a people full of hopeand aspiration and good cheer. Such a condition means contentmentand happiness. The carping grumbler who may here and there go forthwill find few to listen to him. The majority will wonder what isthe matter with him, and pass on.
A Sun clipping depicted the “terrible offenses against humanity committed in the name of politics in some of the most notorious East Side districts “—the unmissionaried, unpoliced darker New York. The Sun declared that they could not be pictured even verbally. But it suggested enough to make the reader shudder at the hideous depths of vice in the sections named. Another clipping from the same paper reported the “Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions,” as having collected indemnities for Boxer damages in China at the rate of three hundred taels for each murder, “full payment for all destroyed property belonging to Christians, and national fines amounting to thirteen times the indemnity.” It quoted Mr. Ament as saying that the money so obtained was used for the propagation of the Gospel, and that the amount so collected was moderate when compared with the amount secured by the Catholics, who had demanded, in addition to money, life for life, that is to say, “head for head”—in one district six hundred and eighty heads having been so collected.
The despatch made Mr. Ament say a great deal more than this, but the gist here is enough. Mark Twain, of course, was fiercely stirred. The missionary idea had seldom appealed to him, and coupled with this business of bloodshed, it was less attractive than usual. He printed the clippings in full, one following the other; then he said:
By happy luck we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve—justthe time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety andenthusiasm. Our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes;taels I win, heads you lose.
He went on to score Ament, to compare the missionary policy in China to that of the Pawnee Indians, and to propose for him a monument—subscriptions to be sent to the American Board. He denounced the national policies in Africa, China, and the Philippines, and showed by the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel and barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose avowed purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and Gospel “to the benighted native”—how in very truth these priceless blessings had been handed on the point of a bayonet to the “Person Sitting in Darkness.”
Mark Twain never wrote anything more scorching, more penetrating in its sarcasm, more fearful in its revelation of injustice and hypocrisy, than his article “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” He put aquafortis on all the raw places, and when it was finished he himself doubted the wisdom of printing it. Howells, however, agreed that it should be published, and “it ought to be illustrated by Dan Beard,” he added, “with such pictures as he made for the Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but you'd better hang yourself afterward.”
Meeting Beard a few days later, Clemens mentioned the matter and said:
“So if you make the pictures, you hang with me.”
But pictures were not required. It was published in the North American Review for February, 1901, as the opening article; after which the cyclone. Two storms moving in opposite directions produce a cyclone, and the storms immediately developed; one all for Mark Twain and his principles, the other all against him. Every paper in England and America commented on it editorially, with bitter denunciations or with eager praise, according to their lights and convictions.
At 14 West Tenth Street letters, newspaper clippings, documents poured in by the bushel—laudations, vituperations, denunciations, vindications; no such tumult ever occurred in a peaceful literary home. It was really as if he had thrown a great missile into the human hive, one-half of which regarded it as a ball of honey and the remainder as a cobblestone. Whatever other effect it may have had, it left no thinking person unawakened.
Clemens reveled in it. W. A. Rogers, in Harper's Weekly, caricatured him as Tom Sawyer in a snow fort, assailed by the shower of snowballs, “having the time of his life.” Another artist, Fred Lewis, pictured him as Huck Finn with a gun.
The American Board was naturally disturbed. The Ament clipping which Clemens had used had been public property for more than a month—its authenticity never denied; but it was immediately denied now, and the cable kept hot with inquiries.
The Rev. Judson Smith, one of the board, took up the defense of Dr. Ament, declaring him to be one who had suffered for the cause, and asked Mark Twain, whose “brilliant article,” he said, “would produce an effect quite beyond the reach of plain argument,” not to do an innocent man an injustice. Clemens in the same paper replied that such was not his intent, that Mr. Ament in his report had simply arraigned himself.
Then it suddenly developed that the cable report had “grossly exaggerated” the amount of Mr. Ament's collections. Instead of thirteen times the indemnity it should have read “one and a third times” the indemnity; whereupon, in another open letter, the board demanded retraction and apology. Clemens would not fail to make the apology—at least he would explain. It was precisely the kind of thing that would appeal to him—the delicate moral difference between a demand thirteen times as great as it should be and a demand that was only one and a third times the correct amount. “To My Missionary Critics,” in the North American Review for April (1901), was his formal and somewhat lengthy reply.
“I have no prejudice against apologies,” he wrote. “I trust I shall never withhold one when it is due.”
He then proceeded to make out his case categorically. Touching the exaggerated indemnity, he said:
To Dr. Smith the “thirteen-fold-extra” clearly stood for “theft and extortion,” and he was right, distinctly right, indisputably right. He manifestly thinks that when it got scaled away down to a mere “one-third” a little thing like that was some other than “theft and extortion.” Why, only the board knows!
I will try to explain this difficult problem so that the board can get an idea of it. If a pauper owes me a dollar and I catch him unprotected and make him pay me fourteen dollars thirteen of it is “theft and extortion.” If I make him pay only one dollar thirty-three and a third cents the thirty-three and a third cents are “theft and extortion,” just the same.
I will put it in another way still simpler. If a man owes me one dog—any kind of a dog, the breed is of no consequence—and I—but let it go; the board would never understand it. It can't understand these involved and difficult things.
He offered some further illustrations, including the “Tale of a King and His Treasure” and another tale entitled “The Watermelons.”
I have it now. Many years ago, when I was studying for the gallows,I had a dear comrade, a youth who was not in my line, but still ascrupulously good fellow though devious. He was preparing toqualify for a place on the board, for there was going to be avacancy by superannuation in about five years. This was down South,in the slavery days. It was the nature of the negro then, as now,to steal watermelons. They stole three of the melons of an adoptivebrother of mine, the only good ones he had. I suspected three of aneighbor's negroes, but there was no proof, and, besides, thewatermelons in those negroes' private patches were all green andsmall and not up to indemnity standard. But in the private patchesof three other negroes there was a number of competent melons. Iconsulted with my comrade, the understudy of the board. He saidthat if I would approve his arrangements he would arrange. I said,“Consider me the board; I approve; arrange.” So he took a gun andwent and collected three large melons for my brother-on-the-halfshell, and one over. I was greatly pleased and asked:“Who gets the extra one?”“Widows and orphans.”“A good idea, too. Why didn't you take thirteen?”“It would have been wrong; a crime, in fact-theft and extortion.”“What is the one-third extra—the odd melon—the same?”It caused him to reflect. But there was no result.The justice of the peace was a stern man. On the trial he foundfault with the scheme and required us to explain upon what we basedour strange conduct—as he called it. The understudy said:“On the custom of the niggers. They all do it.”—[The point hadbeen made by the board that it was the Chinese custom to make theinhabitants of a village responsible for individual crimes; andcustom, likewise, to collect a third in excess of the damage, suchsurplus having been applied to the support of widows and orphans ofthe slain converts.]The justice forgot his dignity and descended to sarcasm.“Custom of the niggers! Are our morals so inadequate that we haveto borrow of niggers?”Then he said to the jury: “Three melons were owing; they werecollected from persons not proven to owe them: this is theft; theywere collected by compulsion: this is extortion. A melon was addedfor the widows and orphans. It was owed by no one. It is anothertheft, another extortion. Return it whence it came, with theothers. It is not permissible here to apply to any purpose goodsdishonestly obtained; not even to the feeding of widows and orphans,for this would be to put a shame upon charity and dishonor it.”He said it in open court, before everybody, and to me it did notseem very kind.
It was in the midst of the tumult that Clemens, perhaps feeling the need of sacred melody, wrote to Andrew Carnegie:
DEAR SIR & FRIEND,—You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an admirer $1.50 to buy a hymn-book with? God will bless you. I feel it; I know it.
N. B.—If there should be other applications, this one not to count.
Yours, MARK.
P. S.-Don't send the hymn-book; send the money; I want to make the selection myself.
Carnegie answered:
Nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do foryou. Your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shallhave it.There's a new Gospel of Saint Mark in the North American which Ilike better than anything I've read for many a day.I am willing to borrow a thousand dollars to distribute that sacredmessage in proper form, & if the author don't object may I send thatsum, when I can raise it, to the Anti-Imperialist League, Boston, towhich I am a contributor, the only missionary work I am responsiblefor.Just tell me you are willing & many thousands of the holy littlemissals will go forth. This inimitable satire is to become aclassic. I count among my privileges in life that I know you, theauthor.
Perhaps a few more of the letters invited by Mark Twain's criticism of missionary work in China may still be of interest to the reader: Frederick T. Cook, of the Hospital Saturday and Sunday Association, wrote: “I hail you as the Voltaire of America. It is a noble distinction. God bless you and see that you weary not in well-doing in this noblest, sublimest of crusades.”
Ministers were by no means all against him. The associate pastor of the Every-day Church, in Boston, sent this line: “I want to thank you for your matchless article in the current North American. It must make converts of well-nigh all who read it.”
But a Boston school-teacher was angry. “I have been reading the North American,” she wrote, “and I am filled with shame and remorse that I have dreamed of asking you to come to Boston to talk to the teachers.”
On the outside of the envelope Clemens made this pencil note:
“Now, I suppose I offended that young lady by having an opinion of my own, instead of waiting and copying hers. I never thought. I suppose she must be as much as twenty-five, and probably the only patriot in the country.”
A critic with a sense of humor asked: “Please excuse seeming impertinence, but were you ever adjudged insane? Be honest. How much money does the devil give you for arraigning Christianity and missionary causes?”
But there were more of the better sort. Edward S. Martin, in a grateful letter, said: “How gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us who understands the rarity of the plain truth, and who delights to utter it, and has the gift of doing so without cant and with not too much seriousness.”
Sir Hiram Maxim wrote: “I give you my candid opinion that what you have done is of very great value to the civilization of the world. There is no man living whose words carry greater weight than your own, as no one's writings are so eagerly sought after by all classes.”
Clemens himself in his note-book set down this aphorism:
“Do right and you will be conspicuous.”
In June Clemens took the family to Saranac Lake, to Ampersand. They occupied a log cabin which he called “The Lair,” on the south shore, near the water's edge, a remote and beautiful place where, as had happened before, they were so comfortable and satisfied that they hoped to return another summer. There were swimming and boating and long walks in the woods; the worry and noise of the world were far away. They gave little enough attention to the mails. They took only a weekly paper, and were likely to allow it to lie in the postoffice uncalled for. Clemens, especially, loved the place, and wrote to Twichell:
I am on the front porch (lower one-main deck) of our little bijou ofa dwelling-house. The lake edge (Lower Saranac) is so nearly underme that I can't see the shore, but only the water, small-poxed withrain splashes—for there is a heavy down pour. It is charminglylike sitting snuggled up on a ship's deck with the stretching seaall around but very much more satisfactory, for at sea a rainstormis depressing, while here of course the effect engendered is just adeep sense of comfort & contentment. The heavy forest shuts ussolidly in on three sides—there are no neighbors. There arebeautiful little tan-colored impudent squirrels about. They taketea 5 P.M. (not invited) at the table in the woods where Jean doesmy typewriting, & one of them has been brave enough to sit uponJean's knee with his tail curved over his back & munch his food.They come to dinner 7 P.M. on the front porch (not invited), butClara drives them away. It is an occupation which requires someindustry & attention to business. They all have the one name—Blennerhasset, from Burr's friend—& none of them answers to itexcept when hungry.
Clemens could work at “The Lair,” often writing in shady seclusions along the shore, and he finished there the two-part serial,—[ Published in Harper's Magazine for January and February, 1902.]—“The Double-Barrelled Detective Story,” intended originally as a burlesque on Sherlock Holmes. It did not altogether fulfil its purpose, and is hardly to be ranked as one of Mark Twain's successes. It contains, however, one paragraph at least by which it is likely to be remembered, a hoax—his last one—on the reader. It runs as follows:
It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs andlaburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning andflashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind naturefor the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-topsand would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung theirpurple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along theslanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerabledeciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in theempty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing;everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.
The warm light and luxury of this paragraph are factitious. The careful reader will, note that its various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird. But it disturbed a great many admirers, and numerous letters of inquiry came wanting to know what it was all about. Some suspected the joke and taunted him with it; one such correspondent wrote:
MY DEAR MARK TWAIN,—Reading your “Double-Barrelled Detective Story”in the January Harper's late one night I came to the paragraph whereyou so beautifully describe “a crisp and spicy morning in earlyOctober.” I read along down the paragraph, conscious only of itswoozy sound, until I brought up with a start against your oesophagusin the empty sky. Then I read the paragraph again. Oh, Mark Twain!Mark Twain! How could you do it? Put a trap like that into themidst of a tragical story? Do serenity and peace brood over youafter you have done such a thing?Who lit the lilacs, and which end up do they hang? When did larchesbegin to flame, and who set out the pomegranates in that canyon?What are deciduous flowers, and do they always “bloom in the fall,tra la”?I have been making myself obnoxious to various people by demandingtheir opinion of that paragraph without telling them the name of theauthor. They say, “Very well done.” “The alliteration is sopretty.” “What's an oesophagus, a bird?” “What's it all mean,anyway?” I tell them it means Mark Twain, and that an oesophagus isa kind of swallow. Am I right? Or is it a gull? Or a gullet?Hereafter if you must write such things won't you please be so kindas to label them?Very sincerely yours,ALLETTA F. DEAN.
Mark Twain to Miss Dean:
Don't you give that oesophagus away again or I'll never trust youwith another privacy!
So many wrote, that Clemens finally felt called upon to make public confession, and as one searching letter had been mailed from Springfield, Massachusetts, he made his reply through the Republican of that city. After some opening comment he said:
I published a short story lately & it was in that that I put theoesophagus. I will say privately that I expected it to bother somepeople—in fact, that was the intention—but the harvest has beenlarger than I was calculating upon. The oesophagus has gathered inthe guilty and the innocent alike, whereas I was only fishing forthe innocent—the innocent and confiding.
He quoted a letter from a schoolmaster in the Philippines who thought the passage beautiful with the exception of the curious creature which “slept upon motionless wings.” Said Clemens:
Do you notice? Nothing in the paragraph disturbed him but that oneword. It shows that that paragraph was most ably constructed forthe deception it was intended to put upon the reader. It was myintention that it should read plausibly, and it is now plain that itdoes; it was my intention that it should be emotional and touching,and you see yourself that it fetched this public instructor. Alas!if I had but left that one treacherous word out I should havescored, scored everywhere, and the paragraph would have sliddenthrough every reader's sensibilities like oil and left not asuspicion behind.The other sample inquiry is from a professor in a New Englanduniversity. It contains one naughty word (which I cannot bear tosuppress), but he is not in the theological department, so it is noharm:“DEAR MR. CLEMENS,—'Far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagusslept upon motionless wing.'“It is not often I get a chance to read much periodical literature,but I have just gone through at this belated period, with muchgratification and edification, your 'Double-Barrelled DetectiveStory.'“But what in hell is an oesophagus? I keep one myself, but it neversleeps in the air or anywhere else. My profession is to deal withwords, and oesophagus interested me the moment I lighted upon it.But, as a companion of my youth used to say, 'I'll be eternally,co-eternally cussed' if I can make it out. Is it a joke or am I anignoramus?”Between you and me, I was almost ashamed of having fooled that man,but for pride's sake I was not going to say so. I wrote and toldhim it was a joke—and that is what I am now saying to mySpringfield inquirer. And I told him to carefully read the wholeparagraph and he would find not a vestige of sense in any detail ofit. This also I recommend to my Springfield inquirer.I have confessed. I am sorry—partially. I will not do so anymore—for the present. Don't ask me any more questions; let theoesophagus have a rest—on his same old motionless wing.
He wrote Twichell that the story had been a six-day 'tour de force', twenty-five thousand words, and he adds:
How long it takes a literary seed to sprout sometimes! This seed wasplanted in your house many years ago when you sent me to bed with abook not heard of by me until then—Sherlock Holmes....I've done a grist of writing here this summer, but not forpublication soon, if ever. I did write two satisfactory articlesfor early print, but I've burned one of them & have buried the otherin my large box of posthumous stuff. I've got stacks of literaryremains piled up there.
Early in August Clemens went with H. H. Rogers in his yacht Kanawha on a cruise to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Rogers had made up a party, including ex-Speaker Reed, Dr. Rice, and Col. A. G. Paine. Young Harry Rogers also made one of the party. Clemens kept a log of the cruise, certain entries of which convey something of its spirit. On the 11th, at Yarmouth, he wrote:
Fog-bound. The garrison went ashore. Officers visited the yacht inthe evening & said an anvil had been missed. Mr. Rogers paid forthe anvil.August 13th. There is a fine picture-gallery here; the sheriffphotographed the garrison, with the exception of Harry (Rogers) andMr. Clemens.August 14th. Upon complaint of Mr. Reed another dog was procured.He said he had been a sailor all his life, and considered itdangerous to trust a ship to a dog-watch with only one dog in it.Poker, for a change.August 15th. To Rockland, Maine, in the afternoon, arriving about 6P.M. In the night Dr. Rice baited the anchor with his winnings &caught a whale 90 feet long. He said so himself. It is thoughtthat if there had been another witness like Dr. Rice the whale wouldhave been longer.August 16th. We could have had a happy time in Bath but for theinterruptions caused by people who wanted Mr. Reed to explain votesof the olden time or give back the money. Mr. Rogers recouped them.Another anvil missed. The descendant of Captain Kidd is the onlyperson who does not blush for these incidents. Harry and Mr.Clemens blush continually. It is believed that if the rest of thegarrison were like these two the yacht would be welcome everywhereinstead of being quarantined by the police in all the ports. Mr.Clemens & Harry have attracted a great deal of attention, & men haveexpressed a resolve to turn over a new leaf & copy after them fromthis out.Evening. Judge Cohen came over from another yacht to pay hisrespects to Harry and Mr. Clemens, he having heard of theirreputation from the clergy of these coasts. He was invited by thegang to play poker apparently as a courtesy & in a spirit of seeminghospitality, he not knowing them & taking it all at par. Mr. Rogerslent him clothes to go home in.August 17th. The Reformed Statesman growling and complaining again—not in a frank, straightforward way, but talking at the Commodore,while letting on to be talking to himself. This time he wasdissatisfied about the anchor watch; said it was out of date,untrustworthy, & for real efficiency didn't begin with theWaterbury, & was going on to reiterate, as usual, that he had been apilot all his life & blamed if he ever saw, etc., etc., etc.But he was not allowed to finish. We put him ashore at Portland.
That is to say, Reed landed at Portland, the rest of the party returning with the yacht.
“We had a noble good time in the yacht,” Clemens wrote Twichell on their return. “We caught a Chinee missionary and drowned him.”
Twichell had been invited to make one of the party, and this letter was to make him feel sorry he had not accepted.
The Clemens household did not return to 14 West Tenth Street. They spent a week in Elmira at the end of September, and after a brief stop in New York took up their residence on the northern metropolitan boundary, at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, in the old Appleton home. They had permanently concluded not to return to Hartford. They had put the property there into an agent's hands for sale. Mrs. Clemens never felt that she had the strength to enter the house again.
They had selected the Riverdale place with due consideration. They decided that they must have easy access to the New York center, but they wished also to have the advantage of space and spreading lawn and trees, large rooms, and light. The Appleton homestead provided these things. It was a house built in the first third of the last century by one of the Morris family, so long prominent in New York history. On passing into the Appleton ownership it had been enlarged and beautified and named “Holbrook Hall.” It overlooked the Hudson and the Palisades. It had associations: the Roosevelt family had once lived there, Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, and others of their intellectual rank had been entertained there during its occupation by the first Appleton, the founder of the publishing firm. The great hall of the added wing was its chief feature. Clemens once remembered:
“We drifted from room to room on our tour of inspection, always with a growing doubt as to whether we wanted that house or not; but at last, when we arrived in a dining-room that was 60 feet long, 30 feet wide, and had two great fireplaces in it, that settled it.”
There were pleasant neighbors at Riverdale, and had it not been for the illnesses that seemed always ready to seize upon that household the home there might have been ideal. They loved the place presently, so much so that they contemplated buying it, but decided that it was too costly. They began to prospect for other places along the Hudson shore. They were anxious to have a home again—one that they could call their own.
Among the many pleasant neighbors at Riverdale were the Dodges, the Quincy Adamses, and the Rev. Mr. Carstensen, a liberal-minded minister with whom Clemens easily affiliated. Clemens and Carstensen visited back and forth and exchanged views. Once Mr. Carstensen told him that he was going to town to dine with a party which included the Reverend Gottheil, a Catholic bishop, an Indian Buddhist, and a Chinese scholar of the Confucian faith, after which they were all going to a Yiddish theater. Clemens said:
“Well, there's only one more thing you need to make the party complete—that is, either Satan or me.”
Howells often came to Riverdale. He was living in a New York apartment, and it was handy and made an easy and pleasant outing for him. He says:
“I began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. I recall that at the end of a certain year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at New-Year's; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud, as from the going down of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle provisionally. But the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth.”
Both Howells and Clemens were made doctors of letters by Yale that year and went over in October to receive their degrees. It was Mark Twain's second Yale degree, and it was the highest rank that an American institution of learning could confer.
Twichell wrote:
I want you to understand, old fellow, that it will be in its intention the highest public compliment, and emphatically so in your case, for it will be tendered you by a corporation of gentlemen, the majority of whom do not at all agree with the views on important questions which you have lately promulgated in speech and in writing, and with which you are identified to the public mind. They grant, of course, your right to hold and express those views, though for themselves they don't like 'em; but in awarding you the proposed laurel they will make no count of that whatever. Their action will appropriately signify simply and solely their estimate of your merit and rank as a man of letters, and so, as I say, the compliment of it will be of the pure, unadulterated quality.
Howells was not especially eager to go, and tried to conspire with Clemens to arrange some excuse which would keep them at home.
I remember with satisfaction [he wrote] our joint success in keeping away from the Concord Centennial in 1875, and I have been thinking we might help each other in this matter of the Yale Anniversary. What are your plans for getting left, or shall you trust to inspiration?
Their plans did not avail. Both Howells and Clemens went to New Haven to receive their honors.
When they had returned, Howells wrote formally, as became the new rank: