I declined. I said I didn't want anything more to do with wildcatspeculation. Then he [Bell] offered the stock to me at twenty-five. I saidI didn't want it at any price. He became eager; insisted that I take fivehundred dollars' worth. He said he would sell me as much as I wanted forfive hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my hands andmeasure it in a plug hat; said I could have a whole hatful for fivehundred dollars. But I was the burnt child, and I resisted all thesetemptations-resisted them easily; went off with my check intact, and nextday lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to a friend who wasgoing to go bankrupt three days later.
About the end of the year I put up a telephone wire from my house down tothe Courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first onethat was ever used in a private house in the world.
That had been only a little while before he sailed for Europe. When he returned he would have been willing to accept a very trifling interest in the telephone industry for the amount of his insurance salvage.
He had a fresh interest in patents now, and when his old friend Dan Slote got hold of a new process for engraving—the kaolatype or “chalk-plate” process—which was going to revolutionize the world of illustration, he promptly acquired a third interest, and eventually was satisfied with nothing short of control. It was an ingenious process: a sheet of perfectly smooth steel was coated with a preparation of kaolin (or china clay), and a picture was engraved through the coating down to the steel surface. This formed the matrix into which the molten metal was poured to make the stereotype plate, or die, for printing. It was Clemens's notion that he could utilize this process for the casting of brass dies for stamping book covers—that, so applied, the fortunes to be made out of it would be larger and more numerous. Howells tells how, at one time, Clemens thought the “damned human race” was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without air-bubbles in it. This was the time referred to and the race had to go unredeemed; for, after long, worried, costly experimenting, the brass refused to accommodate its nature to the new idea, while the chalk plate itself, with all its subsidiary and auxiliary possibilities, was infringed upon right and left, and the protecting patent failed to hold. The process was doomed, in any case. It was barely established before the photographic etching processes, superior in all ways, were developed and came quickly into use. The kaolatype enterprise struggled nobly for a considerable period. Clemens brought his niece's husband, young Charles L. Webster, from Fredonia to manage it for him, and backed it liberally. Webster was vigorous, hard-working, and capable; but the end of each month showed a deficit, until Clemens was from forty to fifty thousand dollars out of pocket in his effort to save the race with chalk and brass. The history of these several ventures (and there were others), dismissed here in a few paragraphs, would alone make a volume not without interest, certainly not without humor. Following came the type-setting machine, but we are not ready for that. Of necessity it is a longer, costlier story.
Mrs. Clemens did not share his enthusiasm in these various enterprises. She did not oppose them, at least not strenuously, but she did not encourage them. She did not see their need. Their home was beautiful; they were happy; he could do his work in deliberation and comfort. She knew the value of money better than he, cared more for it in her own way; but she had not his desire to heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers. She was willing to let well enough alone. Clemens could not do this, and suffered accordingly. In the midst of fair home surroundings and honors we find him writing to his mother:
Life has come to be a very serious matter with me. I have abadgered, harassed feeling a good part of my time. It comes mainlyfrom business responsibilities and annoyances.
He had no moral right to be connected with business at all. He had a large perception of business opportunity, but no vision of its requirements—its difficulties and details. He was the soul of honor, but in anything resembling practical direction he was but a child. During any period of business venture he was likely to be in hot water: eagerly excited, worried, impatient; alternately suspicious and over-trusting, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset.
Yet never, even to the end of his days, would he permanently lose faith in speculative ventures. Human traits are sometimes modified, but never eliminated. The man who is born to be a victim of misplaced confidence will continue to be one so long as he lives and there are men willing to victimize him. The man who believes in himself as an investor will uphold that faith against all disaster so long as he draws breath and has money to back his judgments.
By a statement made on the 1st of January, 1882, of Mark Twain's disbursements for the preceding year, it is shown that considerably more than one hundred thousand dollars had been expended during that twelve months. It is a large sum for an author to pay out in one year. It would cramp most authors to do it, and it was not the best financing, even for Mark Twain. It required all that the books could earn, all the income from the various securities, and a fair sum from their principal. There is a good deal of biography in the statement. Of the amount expended forty-six thousand dollars represented investments; but of this comfortable sum less than five thousand dollars would cover the legitimate purchases; the rest had gone in the “ventures” from whose bourne no dollar would ever return. Also, a large sum had been spent for the additional land and for improvements on the home—somewhat more than thirty thousand dollars altogether—while the home life had become more lavish, the establishment had grown each year to a larger scale, the guests and entertainments had become more and more numerous, until the actual household expenditure required about as much as the books and securities could earn.
It was with the increased scale of living that Clemens had become especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with “millions in it.” Almost any proposition that seemed to offer these possible millions appealed to him, and in his imagination he saw the golden freshet pouring in.
His natural taste was for a simple, inexpensive life; yet in his large hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur, he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests. There were always guests; they were coming and going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of his company. He had the Southern hospitality. Much company appealed to a very large element in his strangely compounded nature. For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance, and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed for the simpler life—above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit cried out for the rest and comfort there. In one of her letters she says:
The house has been full of company, and I have been “whirledaround.” How can a body help it? Oh, I cannot help sighing for thepeace and quiet of the farm. This is my work, and I know that I dovery wrong when I feel chafed by it, but how can I be right aboutit? Sometimes it seems as if the simple sight of people would driveme mad. I am all wrong; if I would simply accept the fact that thisis my work and let other things go, I know I should not be sofretted; but I want so much to do other things, to study and dothings with the children, and I cannot.I have the best French teacher that I ever had, and if I could giveany time to it I could not help learning French.
When we reflect on the conditions, we are inclined to say how much better it would have been to have remained there among the hills in that quiet, inexpensive environment, to have let the world go. But that was not possible. The game was of far larger proportions than any that could be restricted to the limits of retirement and the simpler round of life. Mark Twain's realm had become too large for his court to be established in a cottage.
It is hard to understand that in spite of a towering fame Mark Twain was still not regarded by certain American arbiters of reputations as a literary fixture; his work was not yet recognized by them as being of important meaning and serious purport.
In Boston, at that time still the Athens of America, he was enjoyed, delighted in; but he was not honored as being quite one of the elect. Howells tells us that:
In proportion as people thought themselves refined they questionedthat quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then theinspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude.
Even at the Atlantic dinners his place was “below the salt”—a place of honor, but not of the greatest honor. He did not sit on the dais with Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Howells, and Aldrich. We of a later period, who remember him always as the center of every board—the one supreme figure, his splendid head and crown of silver hair the target of every eye-find it hard to realize the Cambridge conservatism that clad him figuratively always in motley, and seated him lower than the throne itself.
Howells clearly resented this condition, and from random review corners had ventured heresy. Now in 1882 he seems to have determined to declare himself, in a large, free way, concerning his own personal estimate of Mark Twain. He prepared for the Century Magazine a biographical appreciation, in which he served notice to the world that Mark Twain's work, considered even as literature, was of very considerable importance indeed. Whether or not Howells then realized the “inspired knowledge of the multitude,” and that most of the nation outside of the counties of Suffolk and Essex already recognized his claim, is not material. Very likely he did; but he also realized the mental dusk of the cultured uninspired and his prerogative to enlighten them. His Century article was a kind of manifesto, a declaration of independence, no longer confined to the obscurities of certain book notices, where of course one might be expected to stretch friendly favor a little for a popular Atlantic contributor. In the open field of the Century Magazine Howells ventured to declare:
Mark Twain's humor is as simple in form and as direct as thestatesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant.When I think how purely and wholly American it is I am a littlepuzzled at its universal acceptance.... Why, in fine, shouldan English chief-justice keep Mark Twain's books always at hand?Why should Darwin have gone to them for rest and refreshment atmidnight, when spent with scientific research?I suppose that Mark Twain transcends all other American humorists inthe universal qualities. He deals very little with the pathetic,which he nevertheless knows very well how to manage, as he hasshown, notably in the true story of the old slave-mother; but thereis a poetic lift in his work, even when he permits you to recognizeit only as something satirized. There is always the touch ofnature, the presence of a sincere and frank manliness in what hesays, the companionship of a spirit which is at once delightfullyopen and deliciously shrewd. Elsewhere I have tried to persuade thereader that his humor is, at its best, the foamy break of the strongtide of earnestness in him. But it would be limiting him unjustlyto describe him as a satirist, and it is hardly practicable toestablish him in people's minds as a moralist; he has made themlaugh too long; they will not believe him serious; they think somejoke is always intended. This is the penalty, as Dr. Holmes haspointed out, of making one's first success as a humorist. There wasa paper of Mark Twain's printed in the Atlantic Monthly some yearsago and called, “The Facts Concerning the Late Carnival of Crime inConnecticut,” which ought to have won popular recognition of theethical intelligence underlying his humor. It was, of course,funny; but under the fun it was an impassioned study of the humanconscience. Hawthorne or Bunyan might have been proud to imaginethat powerful allegory, which had a grotesque force far beyondeither of them.... Yet it quite failed of the response I had hopedfor it, and I shall not insist here upon Mark Twain as a moralist;though I warn the reader that if he leaves out of the account anindignant sense of right and wrong, a scorn of all affectations andpretense, an ardent hate of meanness and injustice, he will comeinfinitely short of knowing Mark Twain.
Howells realized the unwisdom and weakness of dogmatic insistence, and the strength of understatement. To him Mark Twain was already the moralist, the philosopher, and the statesman; he was willing that the reader should take his time to realize these things. The article, with his subject's portrait as a frontispiece, appeared in the Century for September, 1882. If it carried no new message to many of its readers, it at least set the stamp of official approval upon what they had already established in their hearts.
Osgood was doing no great things with The Prince and the Pauper, but Clemens gave him another book presently, a collection of sketches—The Stolen White Elephant. It was not an especially important volume, though some of the features, such as “Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning” and the “Carnival of Crime,” are among the best of their sort, while the “Elephant” story is an amazingly good take-off on what might be called the spectacular detective. The interview between Inspector Blunt and the owner of the elephant is typical. The inspector asks:
“Now what does this elephant eat, and how much?”“Well, as to what he eats—he will eat anything. He will eat a man,he will eat a Bible; he will eat anything between a man and aBible.”“Good-very good, indeed, but too general. Details are necessary;details are the only valuable thing in our trade. Very well, as tomen. At one meal—or, if you prefer, during one day—how many menwill he eat if fresh?”“He would not care whether they were fresh or not; at a single mealhe would eat five ordinary men.”“Very good; five men. We will put that down. What nationalitieswould he prefer?”“He is indifferent about nationalities. He prefers acquaintances,but is not prejudiced against strangers.”“Very good. Now, as to Bibles. How many Bibles would he eat at ameal?”“He would eat an entire edition.”
Clemens and Osgood had a more important publishing enterprise on hand. The long-deferred completion of the Mississippi book was to be accomplished; the long-deferred trip down the river was to be taken. Howells was going abroad, but the charming Osgood was willing to make the excursion, and a young man named Roswell Phelps, of Hartford, was engaged as a stenographer to take the notes.
Clemens made a farewell trip to Boston to see Howells before his departure, and together they went to Concord to call on Emerson; a fortunate thing, for he lived but a few weeks longer. They went again in the evening, not to see him, but to stand reverently outside and look at his house. This was in April. Longfellow had died in March. The fact that Howells was going away indefinitely, made them reminiscent and sad.
Just what breach Clemens committed during this visit is not remembered now, and it does not matter; but his letter to Howells, after his return to Hartford, makes it pretty clear that it was memorable enough at the time. Half-way in it he breaks out:
But oh, hell, there is no hope for a person that is built like me,because there is no cure, no cure.If I could only know when I have committed a crime: then I couldconceal it, and not go stupidly dribbling it out, circumstance bycircumstance, into the ears of a person who will give no sign tillthe confession is complete; and then the sudden damnation drops on abody like the released pile-driver, and he finds himself in theearth down to his chin. When he merely supposed he was beingentertaining.
Next day he was off with Osgood and the stenographer for St. Louis, where they took the steamer Gold Dust down the river. He intended to travel under an assumed name, but was promptly recognized, both at the Southern Hotel and on the boat. In 'Life on the Mississippi' he has given us the atmosphere of his trip, with his new impressions of old scenes; also his first interview with the pilot, whom he did not remember, but who easily remembered him.
“I did not write that story in the book quite as it happened,” he reflected once, many years later. “We went on board at night. Next morning I was up bright and early and out on deck to see if I could recognize any of the old landmarks. I could not remember any. I did not know where we were at all. It was a new river to me entirely. I climbed up in the pilot-house and there was a fellow of about forty at the wheel. I said 'Good morning.' He answered pleasantly enough. His face was entirely strange to me. Then I sat down on the high seat back of the wheel and looked out at the river and began to ask a few questions, such as a landsman would ask. He began, in the old way, to fill me up with the old lies, and I enjoyed letting him do it. Then suddenly he turned round to me and said:
“'I want to get a cup of coffee. You hold her, will you, till I come back?' And before I could say a word he was out of the pilot-house door and down the steps. It all came so suddenly that I sprang to the wheel, of course, as I would have done twenty years before. Then in a moment I realized my position. Here I was with a great big steamboat in the middle of the Mississippi River, without any further knowledge than that fact, and the pilot out of sight. I settled my mind on three conclusions: first, that the pilot might be a lunatic; second, that he had recognized me and thought I knew the river; third, that we were in a perfectly safe place, where I could not possibly kill the steamboat. But that last conclusion, though the most comforting, was an extremely doubtful one. I knew perfectly well that no sane pilot would trust his steamboat for a single moment in the hands of a greenhorn unless he were standing by the greenhorn's side. Of course, by force of habit, when I grabbed the wheel, I had taken the steering marks ahead and astern, and I made up my mind to hold her on those marks to the hair; but I could feel myself getting old and gray. Then all at once I recognized where we were; we were in what is called the Grand Chain—a succession of hidden rocks, one of the most dangerous places on the river. There were two rocks there only about seventy feet apart, and you've got to go exactly between them or wreck the boat. There was a time when I could have done it without a tremor, but that time wasn't now. I would have given any reasonable sum to have been on the shore just at that moment. I think I was about ready to drop dead when I heard a step on the pilothouse stair; then the door opened and the pilot came in, quietly picking his teeth, and took the wheel, and I crawled weakly back to the seat. He said:
“'You thought you were playing a nice joke on me, didn't you? You thought I didn't know who you were. Why, I recognized that drawl of yours as soon as you opened your mouth.'
“I said, 'Who the h—l are you? I don't remember you.'
“'Well,' he said, 'perhaps you don't, but I was a cub pilot on the river before the war, when you were a licensed pilot, and I couldn't get a license when I was qualified for one, because the Pilots' Association was so strong at that time that they could keep new pilots out if they wanted to, and the law was that I had to be examined by two licensed pilots, and for a good while I could not get any one to make that examination. But one day you and another pilot offered to do it, and you put me through a good, healthy examination and indorsed my application for a license. I had never seen you before, and I have never seen you since until now, but I recognized you.'
“'All right,' I said. 'But if I had gone half a mile farther with that steamboat we might have all been at the bottom of the river.'
“We got to be good friends, of course, and I spent most of my time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a big, full river—for it was highwater season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river—I had her most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before.”
From the book we gather that he could not keep out of the pilot-house. He was likely to get up at any hour of the night to stand his watch, and truly enough the years had slipped away. He was the young fellow in his twenties again, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his fortune in the stars. To heighten the illusion, he had himself called regularly with the four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings.—[It will repay the reader to turn to chap. xxx of Life on the Mississippi, and consider Mark Twain's word-picture of the river sunrise.]
The majesty and solitude of the river impressed him more than ever before, especially its solitude. It had been so full of life in his time; now it had returned once more to its primal loneliness—the loneliness of God.
At one place two steamboats were in sight at once an unusual spectacle. Once, in the mouth of a river, he noticed a small boat, which he made out to be the Mark Twain. There had been varied changes in twenty-one years; only the old fascination of piloting remained unchanged. To Bixby afterward he wrote:
“I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done in my life. How do you run Plum Point?”
He met Bixby at New Orleans. Bixby was captain now on a splendid new Anchor Line steamboat, the City of Baton Rouge. The Anchor Line steamers were the acme of Mississippi River steamboat-building, and they were about the end of it. They were imposingly magnificent, but they were only as gorgeous clouds that marked the sunset of Mississippi steamboat travel. Mark Twain made his trip down the river just in time.
In New Orleans he met George W. Cable and Joel Chandler Harris, and they had a fraternizing good time together, mousing about the old French Quarter or mingling with the social life of the modern city. He made a trip with Bixby in a tug to the Warmouth plantation, and they reviewed old days together, as friends parted for twenty-one years will. Altogether the New Orleans sojourn was a pleasant one, saddened only by a newspaper notice of the death, in Edinburgh, of the kindly and gentle and beloved Dr. Brown.
Clemens arranged to make the trip up the river on the Baton Rouge. Bixby had one pretty inefficient pilot, and stood most of the watches himself, so that with “Sam Clemens” in the pilot-house with him, it was wonderfully like those old first days of learning the river, back in the fifties.
“Sam was ever making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always did,” said Bixby to the writer, recalling the time. “I was sorry I had to stay at the wheel so much. I wanted to have more time with Sam without thinking of the river at all. Sam was sorry, too, from what he wrote after he got home.”
Bixby produced a letter in the familiar handwriting. It was a tender, heart-spoken letter:
I didn't see half enough of you. It was a sore disappointment.Osgood could have told you, if he would—discreet old dog—Iexpected to have you with me all the time. Altogether, the mostpleasant part of my visit with you was after we arrived in St.Louis, and you were your old natural self again. Twenty years havenot added a month to your age or taken a fraction from yourloveliness.
Said Bixby: “When we arrived in St. Louis we came to the Planters' Hotel; to this very table where you and I are sitting now, and we had a couple of hot Scotches between us, just as we have now, and we had a good last talk over old times and old acquaintances. After he returned to New York he sent for my picture. He wanted to use it in his book.”
At St. Louis the travelers changed boats, and proceeded up the Mississippi toward St. Paul. Clemens laid off three days at Hannibal.
Delightful days [he wrote home]. Loitering around all day long, examiningthe old localities, and talking with the gray heads who were boys andgirls with me thirty or forty years ago. I spent my nights with John andHelen Garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and beautiful house.They were children with me, and afterward schoolmates. That world which Iknew in its blooming youth is old and bowed and melancholy now; its softcheeks are leathery and withered, the fire has gone out of its eyes, thespring from its step. It will be dust and ashes when I come again.
He had never seen the far upper river, and he found it very satisfying. His note-book says:
The bluffs all along up above St. Paul are exquisitely beautifulwhere the rough and broken turreted rocks stand up against the skyabove the steep, verdant slopes. They are inexpressibly rich andmellow in color; soft dark browns mingled with dull greens—the verytints to make an artist worship.
In a final entry he wrote:
The romance of boating is gone now. In Hannibal the steamboat man is nolonger the god.
Clemens took a further step toward becoming a publisher on his own account. Not only did he contract to supply funds for the Mississippi book, but, as kaolatype, the chalk-engraving process, which had been lingeringly and expensively dying, was now become merely something to swear at, he had his niece's husband, Webster, installed as Osgood's New York subscription manager, with charge of the general agencies. There was no delay in this move. Webster must get well familiarized with the work before the Mississippi book's publication.
He had expected to have the manuscript finished pretty promptly, but the fact that he had promised it for a certain time paralyzed his effort. Even at the farm he worked without making much headway. At the end of October he wrote Howells:
The weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while I stilllacked thirty thousand words. I had been sick and got delayed. Iam going to write all day and two-thirds of the night until thething is done or break down at it. The spur and burden of thecontract are intolerable to me. I can endure the irritation of itno longer. I went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning andwent to bed an hour after midnight. Result of the day (mainlystolen from books though credit given), 9,500 words, so I reduced myburden by one-third in one day. It was five days' work in one. Ihave nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be written.It is ten days' work and unless something breaks it will be finishedin five.
He had sworn once, when he had finally finished 'A Tramp Abroad', that he would never limit himself as to time again. But he had forgotten that vow, and was suffering accordingly.
Howells wrote from London urging him to drop everything and come over to Europe for refreshment.
We have seen lots of nice people, and have been most pleasantly madeof; but I would rather have you smoke in my face and talk for half aday, just for pleasure, than to go to the best house or club inLondon.
Clemens answered:
Yes, it would be more profitable to me to do that because, with yoursociety to help me, I should swiftly finish this now apparentlyinterminable book. But I cannot come, because I am not boss here,and nothing but dynamite can move Mrs. Clemens away from home in thewinter season.
This was in November, and he had broken all restrictions as to time. He declared that he had never had such a fight over any book before, and that he had told Osgood and everybody concerned that they must wait.
I have said with sufficient positiveness that I will finish the bookat no particular date; that I will not hurry it; that I will nothurry myself; that I will take things easy and comfortably—writewhen I choose to write, leave it alone when I do so prefer...I have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where itought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any otherpolicy would be to make the book worse than it already is. I oughtto have finished it before showing it to anybody, and then sent itacross the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be agreat many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if I hadthought of this thing earlier I would have acted upon it and takenthe tuck somewhat out of your joyousness.
It was a long, heartfelt letter. Near the end of it he said:
Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. He is amarvelous talker on a deep subject. I do not see how even Spencercould unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it incleaner, clearer, crisper English. He astounded Twichell with hisfaculty. You know that when it comes down to moral honesty, limpidinnocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the apostles were merepolicemen to Cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at amidnight dinner in Boston the other night, where we gathered aroundthe board of the Summerset Club: Osgood full, Boyle O'Reilly full,Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and myself possessing thefloor and properly fortified. Cable told Mrs. Clemens, when hereturned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself withhorses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to Boston in acattle-car. It was a very large time. He called it an orgy. Andno doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint.
Osgood wanted Mark Twain to lecture that fall, as preliminary advertising for the book, with “Life on the Mississippi” as his subject. Osgood was careful to make this proposition by mail, and probably it was just as well; for if there was any single straw that could have broken the back of Clemens's endurance and made him violent at this particular time, it was a proposition to go back on the platform. His answer to Osgood has not been preserved.
Clemens spoke little that winter. In February he addressed the Monday Evening Club on “What is Happiness?” presenting a theory which in later years he developed as a part of his “gospel,” and promulgated in a privately printed volume, 'What is Man'? It is the postulate already mentioned in connection with his reading of Lecky, that every human action, bad or good, is the result of a selfish impulse; that is to say, the result of a desire for the greater content of spirit. It is not a new idea; philosophers in all ages have considered it, and accepted or rejected it, according to their temperament and teachings, but it was startling and apparently new to the Monday Evening Club. They scoffed and jeered at it; denounced it as a manifest falsity. They did not quite see then that there may be two sorts of selfishness—brutal and divine; that he who sacrifices others to himself exemplifies the first, whereas he who sacrifices himself for others personifies the second—the divine contenting of his soul by serving the happiness of his fellow-men. Mark Twain left this admonition in furtherance of that better sort:
“Diligently train your ideals upward, and still upward, toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure, in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community.”
It is a divine admonition, even if, in its suggested moral freedom, it does seem to conflict with that other theory—the inevitable sequence of cause and effect, descending from the primal atom. There is seeming irrelevance in introducing this matter here; but it has a chronological relation, and it presents a mental aspect of the time. Clemens was forty-eight, and becoming more and more the philosopher; also, in logic at least, a good deal of a pessimist. He made a birthday aphorism on the subject:
“The man who is a pessimist before he is forty-eight knows too much; the man who is an optimist after he is forty-eight knows too little.”
He was never more than a pessimist in theory at any time. In practice he would be a visionary; a builder of dreams and fortunes, a veritable Colonel Sellers to the end of his days.
The Mississippi book was completed at last and placed in Osgood's hands for publication. Clemens was immensely fond of Osgood. Osgood would come down to Hartford and spend days discussing plans and playing billiards, which to Mark Twain's mind was the proper way to conduct business. Besides, there was Webster, who by this time, or a very little later, had the word “publisher” printed in his letter-heads, and was truly that, so far as the new book was concerned. Osgood had become little more than its manufacturer, shipping-agent, and accountant. It should be added that he made the book well, though somewhat expensively. He was unaccustomed to getting out big subscription volumes. His taste ran to the artistic, expensive product.
“That book cost me fifty thousand dollars to make,” Clemens once declared. “Bliss could have built a whole library, for that sum. But Osgood was a lovely fellow.”
Life on the Mississippi was issued about the middle of May. It was a handsome book of its kind and a successful book, but not immediately a profitable one, because of the manner of its issue. It was experimental, and experiments are likely to be costly, even when successful in the final result.
Among other things, it pronounced the final doom of kaolatype. The artists who drew the pictures for it declined to draw them if they were to be reproduced by that process, or indeed unless some one of the lately discovered photographic processes was used. Furthermore, the latter were much cheaper, and it was to the advantage of Clemens himself to repudiate kaolatype, even for his own work.
Webster was ordered to wind up the last ends of the engraving business with as little sacrifice as possible, and attend entirely to more profitable affairs—viz., the distribution of books.
As literature, the Mississippi book will rank with Mark Twain's best—so far, at least, as the first twenty chapters of it are concerned. Earlier in this history these have been sufficiently commented upon. They constitute a literary memorial seemingly as enduring as the river itself.
Concerning the remaining chapters of the book, they are also literature, but of a different class. The difference is about the same as that between 'A Tramp Abroad' and the 'Innocents'. It is the difference between the labors of love and duty; between art and industry, literature and journalism.
But the last is hardly fair. It is journalism, but it is literary journalism, and there are unquestionably areas that are purely literary, and not journalistic at all. There would always be those in any book of travel he might write. The story of the river revisited is an interesting theme; and if the revisiting had been done, let us say eight or ten years earlier, before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river itself had become a background for pessimism, the tale might have had more of the literary glamour and illusion, even if less that is otherwise valuable.
'Life on the Mississippi' has been always popular in Germany. The Emperor William of Germany once assured Mark Twain that it was his favorite American book, and on the same evening the portier of the author's lodging in Berlin echoed the Emperor's opinion.
Paul Lindau, a distinguished German author and critic, in an interview at the time the Mississippi book appeared, spoke of the general delight of his countrymen in its author. When he was asked, “But have not the Germans been offended by Mark Twain's strictures on their customs and language in his 'Tramp Abroad'?” he replied, “We know what we are and how we look, and the fanciful picture presented to our eyes gives us only food for laughter, not cause for resentment. The jokes he made on our long words, our inverted sentences, and the position of the verb have really led to a reform in style which will end in making our language as compact and crisp as the French or English. I regard Mark Twain as the foremost humorist of the age.”
Howells, traveling through Europe, found Lindau's final sentiment echoed elsewhere, and he found something more: in Europe Mark Twain was already highly regarded as a serious writer. Thomas Hardy said to Howells one night at dinner:
“Why don't people understand that Mark Twain is not merely a great humorist? He is a very remarkable fellow in a very different way.”
The Rev. Dr. Parker, returning from England just then, declared that, wherever he went among literary people, the talk was about Mark Twain; also that on two occasions, when he had ventured diffidently to say that he knew that author personally, he was at once so evidently regarded as lying for effect that he felt guilty, and looked it, and did not venture to say it any more; thus, in a manner, practising untruth to save his reputation for veracity.
That the Mississippi book throughout did much to solidify this foreign opinion of Mark Twain's literary importance cannot be doubted, and it is one of his books that will live longest in the memory of men.
For purposes of copyright another trip to Canada was necessary, and when the newspapers announced (May, 1883) that Mark Twain was about to cross the border there came one morning the following telegram:
Meeting of Literary and Scientific Society at Ottawa from 22d to26th. It would give me much pleasure if you could come and be myguest during that time.LORNE.
The Marquis of Lorne, then Governor-General of Canada, was the husband of Queen Victoria's daughter, the Princess Louise. The invitation was therefore in the nature of a command. Clemens obeyed it graciously enough, and with a feeling of exaltation no doubt. He had been honored by the noble and the great in many lands, but this was royalty—English royalty—paying a tribute to an American writer whom neither the Marquis nor the Princess, his wife, had ever seen. They had invited him because they had cared enough for his books to make them wish to see him, to have him as a guest in Rideau Hall, their home. Mark Twain was democratic. A king to him was no more than any other man; rather less if he were not a good king. But there was something national in this tribute; and, besides, Lord Lorne and the Princess Louise were the kind of sovereigns that honored their rank, instead of being honored by it.
It is a good deal like a fairy tale when you think of it; the barefooted boy of Hannibal, who had become a printer, a pilot, a rough-handed miner, being summoned, not so many years later, by royalty as one of America's foremost men of letters. The honor was no greater than many others he had received, certainly not greater than the calls of Canon Kingsley and Robert Browning and Turgenieff at his London hotel lodgings, but it was of a less usual kind.
Clemens enjoyed his visit. Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne kept him with them almost continually, and were loath to let him go. Once they took him tobogganing—an exciting experience.
It happened that during his stay with them the opening of the Canadian Parliament took place. Lord Lorne and the principal dignitaries of state entered one carriage, and in a carriage behind them followed Princess Louise with Mark Twain. As they approached the Parliament House the customary salute was fired. Clemens pretended to the Princess considerable gratification. The temptation was too strong to resist: