It never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or to feelwounded by your playful use of my name. I have heard some mildquestioning as to whether, even in fun, it was good taste toassociate the names of the authors with the absurdly unlikepersonalities attributed to them, but it seems to be an openquestion. Two of my friends, gentlemen of education and the highestsocial standing, were infinitely amused by your speech, and stoutlydefended it against the charge of impropriety. More than this, oneof the cleverest and best-known ladies we have among us was highlydelighted with it.
Miss Emerson's letter was to Mrs. Clemens and its homelike New England fashion did much to lift the gloom.
DEAR MRS. CLEMENS,—At New Year's our family always meets, to spendtwo days together. To-day my father came last, and brought with himMr. Clemens's letter, so that I read it to the assembled family, andI have come right up-stairs to write to you about it. My sistersaid, “Oh, let father write!” but my mother said, “No, don't waitfor him. Go now; don't stop to pick that up. Go this minute andwrite. I think that is a noble letter. Tell them so.” First letme say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of ourminds. The night of the dinner, my father says, he did not hear Mr.Clemens's speech. He was too far off, and my mother says that whenshe read it to him the next day it amused him. But what you willwant is to know, without any softening, how we did feel. We weredisappointed. We have liked almost everything we have ever seenover Mark Twain's signature. It has made us like the man, and wehave delighted in the fun. Father has often asked us to repeatcertain passages of The Innocents Abroad, and of a speech at aLondon dinner in 1872, and we all expect both to approve and toenjoy when we see his name. Therefore, when we read this speech itwas a real disappointment. I said to my brother that it didn't seemgood or funny, and he said, “No, it was unfortunate. Still some ofthose quotations were very good”; and he gave them with relish andmy father laughed, though never having seen a card in his life, hecouldn't understand them like his children. My mother read itlightly and had hardly any second thoughts about it. To my fatherit is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quiteunderstood it, and he forgets easily and entirely. I think itdoubtful whether he writes to Mr. Clemens, for he is old and longago gave up answering letters, I think you can see just how bad, andhow little bad, it was as far as we are concerned, and this lovelyheartbreaking letter makes up for our disappointment in our much-liked author, and restores our former feeling about him.ELLEN T. EMERSON.
The sorrow dulled a little as the days passed. Just after Christmas Clemens wrote to Howells:
I haven't done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner. But I'mgoing to try to-morrow. How could I ever——Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool,and all his work must be contemplated with respect.
So long as that unfortunate speech is remembered there will be differences of opinion as to its merits and propriety. Clemens himself, reading it for the first time in nearly thirty years, said:
“I find it gross, coarse—well, I needn't go on with particulars. I don't like any part of it, from the beginning to the end. I find it always offensive and detestable. How do I account for this change of view? I don't know.”
But almost immediately afterward he gave it another consideration and reversed his opinion completely. All the spirit and delight of his old first conception returned, and preparing it for publication, he wrote: —[North American Review, December, 1907, now with comment included in the volume of “Speeches.” (Also see Appendix O, at the end of last volume.)—I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot it hasn't a single defect in it, from the first word to the last. It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere.]
It was altogether like Mark Twain to have those two absolutely opposing opinions in that brief time; for, after all, it was only a question of the human point of view, and Mark Twain's points of view were likely to be as extremely human as they were varied.
Of course the first of these impressions, the verdict of the fresh mind uninfluenced by the old conception, was the more correct one. The speech was decidedly out of place in that company. The skit was harmless enough, but it was of the Comstock grain. It lacked refinement, and, what was still worse, it lacked humor, at least the humor of a kind suited to that long-ago company of listeners. It was another of those grievous mistakes which genius (and not talent) can make, for genius is a sort of possession. The individual is pervaded, dominated for a time by an angel or an imp, and he seldom, of himself, is able to discriminate between his controls. A literary imp was always lying in wait for Mark Twain; the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the 'outre', the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia Clemens had to labor hardest against: the cheapening of his own high purpose with an extravagant false note, at which sincerity, conviction, and artistic harmony took wings and fled away. Notably he did a good burlesque now and then, but his fame would not have suffered if he had been delivered altogether from his besetting temptation.
Clemens was never much inclined to work, away from his Elmira study. “Magnanimous Incident Literature” (for the Atlantic) was about his only completed work of the winter of 1877-78. He was always tinkering with the “Visit to Heaven,” and after one reconstruction Howells suggested that he bring it out as a book, in England, with Dean Stanley's indorsement, though this may have been only semi-serious counsel. The story continued to lie in seclusion.
Clemens had one new book in the field—a small book, but profitable. Dan Slote's firm issued for him the Mark Twain Scrap-book, and at the end of the first royalty period rendered a statement of twenty-five thousand copies sold, which was well enough for a book that did not contain a single word that critics could praise or condemn. Slote issued another little book for him soon after “Punch, Brothers, Punch!”which, besides that lively sketch, contained the “Random Notes” and seven other selections.
Mark Twain was tempted to go into the lecture field that winter, not by any of the offers, though these were numerous enough, but by the idea of a combination which he thought might be not only profitable but pleasant. Thomas Nast had made a great success of his caricature lectures, and Clemens, recalling Nast's long-ago proposal, found it newly attractive. He wrote characteristically:
MY DEAR NAST,—I did not think I should ever stand on a platformagain until the time was come for me to say, “I die innocent.” Butthe same old offers keep arriving. I have declined them all, justas usual, though sorely tempted, as usual.Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, butbecause (1) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and (2)shouldering the whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility.Therefore, I now propose to you what you proposed to me in 1867, tenyears ago (when I was unknown)—viz., that you stand on the platformand make pictures, and I stand by you and blackguard the audience.I should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns—don'twant to go to the little ones), with you for company.My idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on thespoils, but to put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles,and say to the artist and lecturer, “absorb these.”For instance, [here follows a plan and a possible list of the citiesto be visited]. The letter continues:Call the gross receipts $100,000 for four months and a half, and theprofit from $60,000 to $75,000 (I try to make the figures largeenough, and leave it to the public to reduce them).I did not put in Philadelphia because Pugh owns that town, and lastwinter, when I made a little reading-trip, he only paid me $300, andpretended his concert (I read fifteen minutes in the midst of aconcert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn't afford any more.I could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats.I have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanyingremarks, to see how the thing would go. I was charmed.Well, you think it over, Nast, and drop me a line. We should havesome fun.
Undoubtedly this would have been a profitable combination, but Nast had a distaste for platforming—had given it up, as he thought, for life. So Clemens settled down to the fireside days, that afforded him always the larger comfort. The children were at an age “to be entertaining, and to be entertained.” In either case they furnished him plenty of diversion when he did not care to write. They had learned his gift as a romancer, and with this audience he might be as extravagant as he liked. They sometimes assisted by furnishing subjects. They would bring him a picture, requiring him to invent a story for it without a moment's delay. Sometimes they suggested the names of certain animals or objects, and demanded that these be made into a fairy tale. If they heard the name of any new creature or occupation they were likely to offer them as impromptu inspiration. Once he was suddenly required to make a story out of a plumber and a “bawgunstrictor,” but he was equal to it. On one side of the library, along the book-shelves that joined the mantelpiece, were numerous ornaments and pictures. At one end was the head of a girl, that they called “Emeline,” and at the other was an oil-painting of a cat. When other subjects failed, the romancer was obliged to build a story impromptu, and without preparation, beginning with the cat, working along through the bric-a-brac, and ending with “Emeline.” This was the unvarying program. He was not allowed to begin with “Emeline” and end with the cat, and he was not permitted to introduce an ornament from any other portion of the room. He could vary the story as much as he liked. In fact, he was required to do that. The trend of its chapters, from the cat to “Emeline,” was a well-trodden and ever-entertaining way.
He gave up his luxurious study to the children as a sort of nursery and playroom, and took up his writing-quarters, first in a room over the stables, then in the billiard-room, which, on the whole, he preferred to any other place, for it was a third-story remoteness, and he could knock the balls about for inspiration.
The billiard-room became his headquarters. He received his callers there and impressed them into the game. If they could play, well and good; if they could not play, so much the better—he could beat them extravagantly, and he took a huge delight in such conquests. Every Friday evening, or oftener, a small party of billiard-lovers gathered, and played until a late hour, told stories, and smoked till the room was blue, comforting themselves with hot Scotch and general good-fellowship. Mark Twain always had a genuine passion for billiards. He was never tired of the game. He could play all night. He would stay till the last man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the balls about alone. He liked to invent new games and new rules for old games, often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some particular shot or position on the table. It amused him highly to do this, to make the rule advantage his own play, and to pretend a deep indignation when his opponents disqualified his rulings and rode him down. S. C. Dunham was among those who belonged to the “Friday Evening Club,” as they called it, and Henry C. Robinson, long dead, and rare Ned Bunce, and F. G. Whitmore; and the old room there at the top of the house, with its little outside balcony, rang with their voices and their laughter in that day when life and the world for them was young. Clemens quoted to them sometimes:
Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of springYour winter garment of repentance fling;The bird of time has but a little wayTo flutter, and the bird is on the wing.
Omar was new then on this side of the Atlantic, and to his serene “eat, drink, and be merry” philosophy, in Fitzgerald's rhyme, these were early converts. Mark Twain had an impressive, musical delivery of verse; the players were willing at any moment to listen as he recited:
For some we loved, the loveliest and bestThat from his vintage rolling time has prest,Have drunk their cup a round or two before,And one by one crept silently to rest.Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,Before we too into the dust descend;Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie,Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and—sans End.'—[The 'Rubaiyat' had made its first appearance, in Hartford, a littlebefore in a column of extracts published in the Courant.] Twichellimmediately wrote Clemens a card:
“Read (if you haven't) the extracts from Oman Khayyam, on the first page of this morning's Courant. I think we'll have to get the book. I never yet came across anything that uttered certain thoughts of mine so adequately. And it's only a translation. Read it, and we'll talk it over. There is something in it very like the passage of Emerson you read me last night, in fact identical with it in thought.
“Surely this Omar was a great poet. Anyhow, he has given me an immense revelation this morning.
“Hoping that you are better,
J. H. T.”
Twichell's “only a translation” has acquired a certain humor with time.
The German language became one of the interests of the Clemens home during the early months of 1878. The Clemenses had long looked forward to a sojourn in Europe, and the demand for another Mark Twain book of travel furnished an added reason for their going. They planned for the spring sailing, and to spend a year or more on the Continent, making their headquarters in Germany. So they entered into the study of the language with an enthusiasm and perseverance that insured progress. There was a German nurse for the children, and the whole atmosphere of the household presently became lingually Teutonic. It amused Mark Twain, as everything amused him, but he was a good student; he acquired a working knowledge of the language in an extraordinarily brief time, just as in an earlier day he had picked up piloting. He would never become a German scholar, but his vocabulary and use of picturesque phrases, particularly those that combined English and German words, were often really startling, not only for their humor, but for their expressiveness.
Necessarily the new study would infect his literature. He conceived a plan for making Captain Wakeman (Stormfield) come across a copy of Ollendorf in Heaven, and proceed to learn the language of a near-lying district.
They arranged to sail early in April, and, as on their former trip, persuaded Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, to accompany them. They wrote to the Howellses, breaking the news of the journey, urging them to come to Hartford for a good-by visit. Howells and his wife came. The Twichells, Warners, and other Hartford friends paid repeated farewell calls. The furniture was packed, the rooms desolated, the beautiful home made ready for closing.
They were to have pleasant company on the ship. Bayard Taylor, then recently appointed Minister to Germany, wrote that he had planned to sail on the same vessel; Murat Halstead's wife and daughter were listed among the passengers. Clemens made a brief speech at Taylor's “farewell dinner.”
The “Mark Twain” party, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens, Miss Spaulding, little Susy and Clara (“Bay”), and a nurse-maid, Rosa, sailed on the Holsatia, April 11, 1878. Bayard Taylor and the Halstead ladies also sailed, as per program; likewise Murat Halstead himself, for whom no program had been made. There was a storm outside, and the Holsatia anchored down the bay to wait until the worst was over. As the weather began to moderate Halstead and others came down in a tug for a final word of good-by. When the tug left, Halstead somehow managed to get overlooked, and was presently on his way across the ocean with only such wardrobe as he had on, and what Bayard Taylor, a large man like himself, was willing to lend him. Halstead was accused of having intentionally allowed himself to be left behind, and his case did have a suspicious look; but in any event they were glad to have him along.
In a written word of good-by to Howells, Clemens remembered a debt of gratitude, and paid it in the full measure that was his habit.
And that reminds me, ungrateful dog that I am, that I owe as much toyour training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city bosswho takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle hisart. I was talking to Mrs. Clemens about this the other day, andgrieving because I never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming toignore it or to be unaware of it. Nothing that has passed underyour eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all myother stuff does need so much.
In that ancient day, before the wireless telegraph, the voyager, when the land fell away behind him, felt a mighty sense of relief and rest, which to some extent has gone now forever. He cannot entirely escape the world in this new day; but then he had a complete sense of dismissal from all encumbering cares of life. Among the first note-book entries Mark Twain wrote:
To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings—“I am no longer of ye; what ye say of me is now of no consequence—but of how much consequence when I am with ye and of ye. I know you will refrain from saying harsh things because they cannot hurt me, since I am out of reach and cannot hear them. This is why we say no harsh things of the dead.”
It was a rough voyage outside, but the company made it pleasant within. Halstead and Taylor were good smoking-room companions. Taylor had a large capacity for languages and a memory that was always a marvel. He would repeat for them Arabian, Hungarian, and Russian poetry, and show them the music and construction of it. He sang German folk-lore songs for them, and the “Lorelei,” then comparatively unknown in America. Such was his knowledge of the language that even educated Germans on board submitted questions of construction to him and accepted his decisions. He was wisely chosen for the mission he had to fill, but unfortunately he did not fill it long. Both Halstead and Taylor were said to have heart trouble. Halstead, however, survived many years. Taylor died December 19, 1878.
It is a marvel that never loses its surprise by repetition, thisaiming a ship at a mark three thousand miles away and hitting thebull's-eye in a fog—as we did. When the fog fell on us the captainsaid we ought to be at such and such a spot (it had been eighteenhours since an observation was had), with the Scilly islands bearingso and so, and about so many miles away. Hove the lead and gotforty-eight fathoms; looked on the chart, and sure enough this depthof water showed that we were right where the captain said we were.Another idea. For ages man probably did not know why God carpetedthe ocean bottom with sand in one place, shells in another, and soon. But we see now; the kind of bottom the lead brings up showswhere a ship is when the soundings don't, and also it confirms thesoundings.
They reached Hamburg after two weeks' stormy sailing. They rested a few days there, then went to Hanover and Frankfort, arriving at Heidelberg early in May.
They had no lodgings selected in Heidelberg, and leaving the others at an inn, Clemens set out immediately to find apartments. Chance or direction, or both, led him to the beautiful Schloss Hotel, on a hill overlooking the city, and as fair a view as one may find in all Germany. He did not go back after his party. He sent a message telling them to take carriage and drive at once to the Schloss, then he sat down to enjoy the view.
Coming up the hill they saw him standing on the veranda, waving his hat in welcome. He led them to their rooms—spacious apartments—and pointed to the view. They were looking down on beautiful Heidelberg Castle, densely wooded hills, the far-flowing Neckar, and the haze-empurpled valley of the Rhine. By and by, pointing to a small cottage on the hilltop, he said:
“I have been picking out my little house to work in; there it is over there; the one with the gable in the roof. Mine is the middle room on the third floor.”
Mrs. Clemens thought the occupants of the house might be surprised if he should suddenly knock and tell them he had come to take possession of his room. Nevertheless, they often looked over in that direction and referred to it as his office. They amused themselves by watching his “people” and trying to make out what they were like. One day he went over there, and sure enough there was a sign out, “Moblirte Wohnung zu Vermiethen.” A day or two later he was established in the very room he had selected, it being the only room but one vacant.
In A Tramp Abroad Mark Twain tells of the beauty of their Heidelberg environment. To Howells he wrote:
Our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), onelooking toward the Rhine Valley and sunset, the other looking up theNeckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend nearly all our time inthese. We have tables and chairs in them; we do our reading,writing, studying, smoking, and suppering in them.... Itmust have been a noble genius who devised this hotel. Lord, howblessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place! Only twosounds: the happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffledmusic of the Neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes. It is nohardship to lie awake awhile nights, for this subdued roar hasexactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof. It is sohealing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one'simaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song....I have waited for a “call” to go to work—I knew it would come.Well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more andmore frequently every day since; three days ago I concluded to movemy manuscripts over to my den. Now the call is loud and decided atlast. So to-morrow I shall begin regular, steady work, and stick toit till the middle of July or August 1st, when I look for Twichell;we will then walk about Germany two or three weeks, and then I'll goto work again (perhaps in Munich).
The walking tour with Twichell had been contemplated in the scheme for gathering book material, but the plan for it had not been completed when he left Hartford. Now he was anxious that they should start as soon as possible. Twichell, receiving the news in Hartford, wrote that it was a great day for him: that his third son had been happily born early that morning, and now the arrival of this glorious gift of a tramp through Germany and Switzerland completed his blessings.
I am almost too joyful for pleasure [he wrote]. I labor with myfelicities. How I shall get to sleep to-night I don't know, thoughI have had a good start, in not having slept much last night. Oh,my! do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be? I do. Tobegin with, I am thoroughly tired and the rest will be wortheverything. To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together—why, it's my dream of luxury. Harmony, who at sunrise this morningdeemed herself the happiest woman on the Continent when I read yourletter to her, widened her smile perceptibly, and revived anotherdegree of strength in a minute. She refused to consider her beingleft alone; but: only the great chance opened to me.SHOES—Mark, remember that ever so much of our pleasure depends uponyour shoes. Don't fail to have adequate preparation made in thatdepartment.
Meantime, the struggle with the “awful German language” went on. It was a general hand-to-hand contest. From the head of the household down to little Clara not one was exempt. To Clemens it became a sort of nightmare. Once in his note-book he says:
“Dreamed all bad foreigners went to German heaven; couldn't talk, and wished they had gone to the other place”; and a little farther along, “I wish I could hear myself talk German.”
To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira, he reported their troubles:
Clara Spaulding is working herself to death with her German; neverloses an instant while she is awake—or asleep, either, for thatmatter; dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up underher arms and glare upon her with red-hot eyes, and inquire about thegenitive case and the declensions of the definite article. Livy isbully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar andher reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these twostudents stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, “Oh,there's no use! We never can learn it in the world!” Then Livytakes a sentence to go to bed on: goes gaping and stretching to herpillow murmuring, “Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden—Ich bin Ihnen sehrverbunden—Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden—I wonder if I can get thatpacked away so it will stay till morning”—and about an hour aftermidnight she wakes me up and says, “I do so hate to disturb you, butis it 'Ich Ben Jonson sehr befinden'?”
And Mrs. Clemens wrote:
Oh, Sue dear, strive to enter in at the straight gate, for manyshall seek to enter it and shall not be able. I am not strivingthese days. I am just interested in German.
Rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in German, though Bay at first would have none of it. The nurse and governess tried to blandish her, in vain. She maintained a calm and persistent attitude of scorn. Little Susy tried, and really made progress; but one day she said, pathetically:
“Mama, I wish Rosa was made in English.”
Yet a little later Susy herself wrote her Aunt Sue:
I know a lot of German; everybody says I know a lot. I give you amillion dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollarsto see the lovely woods that we see.
Even Howells, in far-off America, caught the infection and began a letter in German, though he hastened to add, “Or do you prefer English by this time? Really I could imagine the German going hard with you, for you always seemed to me a man who liked to be understood with the least possible personal inconvenience.”
Clemens declared more than once that he scorned the “outrageous and impossible German grammar,” and abandoned it altogether. In his note-book he records how two Germans, strangers in Heidelberg, asked him a direction, and that when he gave it, in the most elaborate and correct German he could muster, one of them only lifted his eyes and murmured:
“Gott im Himmel!”
He was daily impressed with the lingual attainments of foreigners and his own lack of them. In the notes he comments:
Am addressed in German, and when I can't speak it immediately theperson tackles me in French, and plainly shows astonishment when Istop him. They naturally despise such an ignoramus. Our doctorhere speaks as pure English, as I.
On the Fourth of July he addressed the American students in Heidelberg in one of those mixtures of tongues for which he had a peculiar gift.
The room he had rented for a study was let by a typical German family, and he was a great delight to them. He practised his German on them, and interested himself in their daily affairs.
Howells wrote insistently for some assurance of contributions to the Atlantic.
“I must begin printing your private letters to satisfy the popular demand,” he said. “People are constantly asking when you are going to begin.”
Clemens replied that he would be only too glad to write for the Atlantic if his contributions could be copyrighted in Canada, where pirates were persistently enterprising.
I do not know that I have any printable stuff just now—separatablestuff, that is—but I shall have by and by. It is very gratifying tohear that it is wanted by anybody. I stand always prepared to hear thereverse, and am constantly surprised that it is delayed so long.Consequently it is not going to astonish me when it comes."
The Clemens party enjoyed Heidelberg, though in different ways. The children romped and picnicked in the castle grounds, which adjoined the hotel; Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding were devoted to bric-a-brac hunting, picture-galleries, and music. Clemens took long walks, or made excursions by rail and diligence to farther points. Art and opera did not appeal to him. The note-book says:
I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteenyears now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listeningto an unfamiliar opera. I am enchanted with the airs of “Trovatore”and other old operas which the hand-organ and the music-box havemade entirely familiar to my ear. I am carried away with delightedenthusiasm when they are sung at the opera. But oh, how far betweenthey are! And what long, arid, heartbreaking and headaching“between-times” of that sort of intense but incoherent noise whichalways so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down.Sunday night, 11th. Huge crowd out to-night to hear the band playthe “Fremersberg.” I suppose it is very low-grade music—I know itmust be low-grade music—because it so delighted me, it so warmedme, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that at timesI could have cried, and at others split my throat with shouting.The great crowd was another evidence that it was low-grade music,for only the few are educated up to a point where high-class musicgives pleasure. I have never heard enough classic music to be ableto enjoy it, and the simple truth is I detest it. Not mildly, butwith all my heart.What a poor lot we human beings are anyway! If base music gives mewings, why should I want any other? But I do. I want to like thehigher music because the higher and better like it. But you see Iwant to like it without taking the necessary trouble, and giving thething the necessary amount of time and attention. The naturalsuggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by alie—we will pretend we like it. This lie, this pretense, gives toopera what support it has in America.And then there is painting. What a red rag is to a bull Turner's“Slave Ship” is to me. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a pointwhere that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure asit throws me into one of rage. His cultivation enables him to seewater in that yellow mud; his cultivation reconciles the floating ofunfloatable things to him—chains etc.; it reconciles him to fishesswimming on top of the water. The most of the picture is a manifestimpossibility, that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation canenable a man to find truth in a lie. A Boston critic said the“Slave Ship” reminded him of a cat having a fit in a platter oftomatoes. That went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought, hereis a man with an unobstructed eye.
Mark Twain has dwelt somewhat upon these matters in 'A Tramp Abroad'. He confesses in that book that later he became a great admirer of Turner, though perhaps never of the “Slave Ship” picture. In fact, Mark Twain was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of an “artistic” kind.
Clemens met him at Baden-Baden, and they immediately set out on a tramp through the Black Forest, excursioning as pleased them, and having an idyllic good time. They did not always walk, but they often did. At least they did sometimes, when the weather was just right and Clemens's rheumatism did not trouble him. But they were likely to take a carriage, or a donkey-cart, or a train, or any convenient thing that happened along. They did not hurry, but idled and talked and gathered flowers, or gossiped with wayside natives and tourists, though always preferring to wander along together, beguiling the way with discussion and speculation and entertaining tales. They crossed on into Switzerland in due time and considered the conquest of the Alps. The family followed by rail or diligence, and greeted them here and there when they rested from their wanderings. Mark Twain found an immunity from attention in Switzerland, which for years he had not known elsewhere. His face was not so well known and his pen-name was carefully concealed.
It was a large relief to be no longer an object of public curiosity; but Twichell, as in the Bermuda trip, did not feel quite honest, perhaps, in altogether preserving the mask of unrecognition. In one of his letters home he tells how, when a young man at their table, he was especially delighted with Mark Twain's conversation, he could not resist taking the young man aside and divulging to him the speaker's identity.
“I could not forbear telling him who Mark was,” he says, “and the mingled surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad I had done so.”
They climbed the Rigi, after which Clemens was not in good walking trim for some time; so Twichell went on a trip on his own account, to give his comrade a chance to rest. Then away again to Interlaken, where the Jungfrau rises, cold and white; on over the loneliness of Gemimi Pass, with glaciers for neighbors and the unfading white peaks against the blue; to Visp and to Zermatt, where the Matterhorn points like a finger that directs mankind to God. This was true Alpine wandering—sweet vagabondage.
The association of the wanderers was a very intimate one. Their minds were closely attuned, and there were numerous instances of thought—echo-mind answering to mind—without the employment of words. Clemens records in his notes:
Sunday A.M., August 11th. Been reading Romola yesterday afternoon,last night, and this morning; at last I came upon the only passagewhich has thus far hit me with force—Tito compromising with hisconscience, and resolving to do, not a bad thing, but not the bestthing. Joe entered the room five minutes—no, three minutes later—and without prelude said, “I read that book you've got there sixyears ago, and got a mighty good text for a sermon out of it thepassage where the young fellow compromises with his conscience, andresolves to do, not a bad thing, but not the best thing.” This isJoe's first reference to this book since he saw me buy it twenty-four hours ago. So my mind operated on his in this instance. Hesaid he was sitting yonder in the reading-room, three minutes ago (Ihave not got up yet), thinking of nothing in particular, and didn'tknow what brought Romola into his head; but into his head it cameand that particular passage. Now I, forty feet away, in anotherroom, was reading that particular passage at that particular moment.Couldn't suggest Romola to him earlier, because nothing in the bookhad taken hold of me till I came to that one passage on page 112,Tauchnitz edition.
And again:
The instances of mind-telegraphing are simply innumerable. Thisevening Joe and I sat long at the edge of the village looking at theMatterhorn. Then Joe said, “We ought to go to the Cervin Hotel andinquire for Livy's telegram.” If he had been but one instant laterI should have said those words instead of him.
Such entries are frequent, and one day there came along a kind of object-lesson. They were toiling up a mountainside, when Twichell began telling a very interesting story which had happened in connection with a friend still living, though Twichell had no knowledge of his whereabouts at this time. The story finished just as they rounded a turn in, the cliff, and Twichell, looking up, ended his last sentence, “And there's the man!” Which was true, for they were face to face with the very man of whom he had been telling.
Another subject that entered into their discussion was the law of accidents. Clemens held that there was no such thing as an accident: that it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning; that every event, however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny. Once on their travels, when they were on a high bank above a brawling stream, a little girl, who started to run toward them, slipped and rolled under the bottom rail of the protecting fence, her feet momentarily hanging out over the precipice and the tearing torrent below. It seemed a miraculous escape from death, and furnished an illustration for their discussion. The condition of the ground, the force of her fall, the nearness of the fatal edge, all these had grown inevitably out of the first great projection of thought, and the child's fall and its escape had been invested in life's primal atom.
The author of A Tramp Abroad tells us of the rushing stream that flows out of the Arcadian sky valley, the Gasternthal, and goes plunging down to Kandersteg, and how he took exercise by making “Harris” (Twichell) set stranded logs adrift while he lounged comfortably on a boulder, and watched them go tearing by; also how he made Harris run a race with one of those logs. But that is literature. Twichell, in a letter home, has preserved a likelier and lovelier story:
Mark is a queer fellow. There is nothing that he so delights in asa swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one whenonce he is within the influence of its fascinations. To throw instones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. Tonight, as we wereon our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood caught bythe torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in.When I got back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it ashard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in thewildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged toview in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He saidafterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months. He actedjust like a boy; another feature of his extreme sensitiveness incertain directions.
Then generalizing, Twichell adds:
He has coarse spots in him. But I never knew a person so finelyregardful of the feelings of others in some ways. He hates to passanother person walking, and will practise some subterfuge to takeoff what he feels is the discourtesy of it. And he is exceedinglytimid, tremblingly timid, about approaching strangers; hates to aska question. His sensitive regard for others extends to animals.When we are driving his concern is all about the horse. He can'tbear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard. To-day,when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace alittle, Mark said, “The fellow's got the notion that we are in ahurry.” He is exceedingly considerate toward me in regard ofeverything—or most things.
The days were not all sunshine. Sometimes it rained and they took shelter by the wayside, or, if there was no shelter, they plodded along under their umbrellas, still talking away, and if something occurred that Clemens wanted to put down they would stand stock still in the rain, and Twichell would hold the umbrella while Clemens wrote—a good while sometimes—oblivious to storm and discomfort and the long way yet ahead.
After the day on Gemmi Pass Twichell wrote home:
Mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in the flowers. He scrambledaround and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensestpleasure in them. He crowded a pocket of his note-book with hisspecimens and wanted more room. So I stopped the guide and got outmy needle and thread, and out of a stiff paper, a hoteladvertisement, I had about me made a paper bag, a cornucopia like,and tied it to his vest in front, and it answered the purposeadmirably. He filled it full with a beautiful collection, and assoon as we got here to-night he transferred it to a cardboard boxand sent it by mail to Livy. A strange Mark he is, full ofcontradictions. I spoke last night of his sensitive to others'feelings. To-day the guide got behind, and came up as if he wouldlike to go by, yet hesitated to do so. Mark paused, went aside andbusied himself a minute picking a flower. In the halt the guide gotby and resumed his place in front. Mark threw the flower away,saying, “I didn't want that. I only wanted to give the old man achance to go on without seeming to pass us.” Mark is splendid towalk with amid such grand scenery, for he talks so well about it,has such a power of strong, picturesque expression. I wish youmight have heard him to-day. His vigorous speech nearly did justiceto the things we saw.
In an address which Twichell gave many years later he recalls another pretty incident of their travels. They had been toiling up the Gorner Grat.