BLOODGOOD H. CUTTERHe is fifty years old, and small of his age. He dresses inhomespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, witha strange proclivity for writing rhymes. He writes them on allpossible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with hisportrait at the head. These he will give to any man who comesalong, whether he has anything against him or not....Dan said:“It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of dayand put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron andShakespeare and those fellows.”“Oh yes, it is—it is—Why, many's the time I've had to get up inthe night when it comes on me:Whether we're on the sea or the landWe've all got to go at the word of command—“Hey! how's that?”
A curious character was Cutter—a Long Island farmer with the obsession of rhyme. In his old age, in an interview, he said:
“Mark was generally writing and he was glum. He would write what we were doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say:
“'For Heaven's sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.'
“Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing.”
Poor old Poet Lariat—dead now with so many others of that happy crew. We may believe that Mark learned to be “glum” when he saw the Lariat approaching with his sheaf of rhymes. We may believe, too, that he was “generally writing.” He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta during that five months and six to the Tribune. They would average about two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all. To turn out an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider these statistics. That he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last year he was the most industrious of men.
It was Dan, Jack, and the Doctor who with Mark Twain wandered down through Italy and left moral footprints that remain to this day. The Italian guides are wary about showing pieces of the True Cross, fragments of the Crown of Thorns, and the bones of saints since then. They show them, it is true, but with a smile; the name of Mark Twain is a touch-stone to test their statements. Not a guide in Italy but has heard the tale of that iconoclastic crew, and of the book which turned their marvels into myths, their relics into bywords.
It was Doctor Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. It is all set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the quartermaster, Pratt, connived at the escapade, or how the latter watched the shore in anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which was their signal to be taken aboard. It would have meant six months' imprisonment if they had been captured, for there was no discretion in the Greek law.
It was T. D. Crocker, A. N. Sanford, Col. Peter Kinney, and William Gibson who were delegated to draft the address to the Emperor of Russia at Yalta, with Samuel L. Clemens as chairman of that committee. The chairman wrote the address, the opening sentence of which he grew so weary of hearing:
We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simplyfor recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficialstate.
The address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists the first rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand. He deplores the time it required:
That job is over. Writing addresses to emperors is not my strongsuit. However, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn'tsignify—the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it;they had nothing to do, and I had my hands full. But for botheringwith this I would have caught up entirely with my New York Tribunecorrespondence and nearly up with the San Francisco.
They wanted him also to read the address to the Emperor, but he pointed out that the American consul was the proper person for that office. He tells how the address was presented:
August 26th. The Imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven, and at twelve we were at the palace....
The Consul for Odessa read the address and the Czar said frequently, “Good—very good; indeed”—and at the close, “I am very, very grateful.”
It was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more, in his own note-book—not then for publication. It was in fact a very proper record—for today.
One incident of the imperial audience Mark Twain omitted from his book, perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become sufficiently evident. “The humorous perception of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes,” he once remarked. It was about seventeen years before he could laugh enjoyably at a slight mistake he made at the Emperor's reception. He set down a memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be lost:
There were a number of great dignitaries of the Empire there, andalthough, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen'sclothing, I observed that the most of them wore a very small pieceof ribbon in the lapels of their coats. That little touch of colorstruck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my ownattractions; not imagining that it had any special significance. SoI stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon, and ornamented mylapel with it. Presently, Count Festetics, the Grand Master ofceremonies, and the only man there who was gorgeously arrayed, infull official costume, began to show me a great many attentions. Hewas particularly polite, and pleasant, and anxious to be of serviceto me. Presently, he asked me what order of nobility I belonged to?I said, “I didn't belong to any.” Then he asked me what order ofknighthood I belonged to? I said, “None.” Then he asked me whatthe red ribbon in my buttonhole stood for? I saw, at once, what anass I had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused andembarrassed. I said the first thing that came into my mind, andthat was that the ribbon was merely the symbol of a club ofjournalists to which I belonged, and I was not pursued with any moreof Count Festetic's attentions.Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom Itook to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens,slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur onhis part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he wasnot a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia! Ialmost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again.
Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish things. Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings. At Constantinople his room-mate writes:
I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last,but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastlytombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carvedand gilted on it in Turkish characters. That fellow will buy aCircassian slave next.
It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who made the “long trip” through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags “Jericho,” “Baalbec,” and the rest. It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in that torrid summer heat. Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now. Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go back before November. One brief quotation from Mark Twain's book gives us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo:
We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple ofhours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-trees to give me a chance to rest. It was the hottest day we hadseen yet—the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire thatstream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a delugeon the head and pass downward like rain from a roof. I imagined Icould distinguish between the floods of rays. I thought I couldtell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders,and when the next one came. It was terrible.
He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack of that dread disease is serious enough. He tells of this in the book, but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack which Dan Slote had some days later. It remained for William F. Church, of the party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that Mark Twain was not likely to record, or even to remember. Doctor Church was a deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he thought him sinful, irreverent, profane.
“He was the worst man I ever knew,” Church said; then he added, “And the best.”
What happened was this: At the end of a terrible day of heat, when the party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian village, Dan was taken suddenly ill. It was cholera, beyond doubt. Dan could not go on—he might never go on. The chances were that way. It was a serious matter all around. To wait with Dan meant to upset their travel schedule—it might mean to miss the ship. Consultation was held and a resolution passed (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for Dan as well as possible, and leave him behind. Clemens, who had remained with Dan, suddenly appeared and said:
“Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote here alone. I'll be d—-d if I do!”
And he didn't. He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a few days late, but convalescent.
Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy Land trip. It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills the reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories. Jack was particularly sinful. When they learned the price for a boat on Galilee, and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on that sacred water were confounded by the charge, Jack said:
“Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?”
It was the irreverent Jack who one morning (they had camped the night before by the ruins of Jericho) refused to get up to see the sun rise across the Jordan. Deacon Church went to his tent.
“Jack, my boy, get up. Here is the place where the Israelites crossed over into the Promised Land, and beyond are the mountains of Moab, where Moses lies buried.”
“Moses who!” said Jack.
“Oh, Jack, my boy, Moses, the great lawgiver—who led the Israelites out of Egypt-forty years through the wilderness—to the Promised Land.”
“Forty years!” said Jack. “How far was it?”
“It was three hundred miles, Jack; a great wilderness, and he brought them through in safety.”
Jack regarded him with scorn. “Huh, Moses—three hundred miles forty years—why, Ben Holiday would have brought them through in thirty-six hours!”—[Ben Holiday, owner of the Overland stages, and a man of great executive ability. This incident, a true one, is more elaborately told in Roughing It, but it seems pertinent here.]
Jack probably learned more about the Bible during that trip-its history and its heroes-than during all his former years. Nor was Jack the only one of that group thus benefited. The sacred landmarks of Palestine inspire a burning interest in the Scriptures, and Mark Twain probably did not now regret those early Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not fail to review them exhaustively on that journey. His note-books fairly overflow with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The Innocents Abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the Bible story. The little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in Constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship again at Jaffa. He must have read it with a large and persistent interest; also with a double benefit. For, besides the knowledge acquired, he was harvesting a profit—probably unsuspected at the time—-viz., the influence of the most direct and beautiful English—the English of the King James version—which could not fail to affect his own literary method at that impressionable age. We have already noted his earlier admiration for that noble and simple poem, “The Burial of Moses,” which in the Palestine note-book is copied in full. All the tendency of his expression lay that way, and the intense consideration of stately Bible phrase and imagery could hardly fail to influence his mental processes. The very distinct difference of style, as shown in The Innocents Abroad and in his earlier writings, we may believe was in no small measure due to his study of the King James version during those weeks in Palestine.
He bought another Bible at Jerusalem; but it was not for himself. It was a little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood, and on the fly-leaf is inscribed:
Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son. Jerusalem, Sept. 24, 1867.
There is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded neither in the book nor the notes—an incident brief, but of more importance in the life of Samuel Clemens than any heretofore set down. It occurred in the beautiful Bay of Smyrna, on the fifth or sixth of September, while the vessel lay there for the Ephesus trip.
Reference has been made to young Charles Langdon, of Elmira (the “Charley” once mentioned in the Innocents), as an admirer of Mark Twain. There was a good deal of difference in their ages, and they were seldom of the same party; but sometimes the boy invited the journalist to his cabin and, boy-like, exhibited his treasures. He had two sisters at home; and of Olivia, the youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature done on ivory in delicate tints—a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and spiritual. On that fateful day in the day of Smyrna, Samuel Clemens, visiting in young Langdon's cabin, was shown this portrait. He looked at it with long admiration, and spoke of it reverently, for the delicate face seemed to him to be something more than a mere human likeness. Each time he came, after that, he asked to see the picture, and once even begged to be allowed to take it away with him. The boy would not agree to this, and the elder man looked long and steadily at the miniature, resolving in his mind that some day he would meet the owner of that lovely face—a purpose for once in accord with that which the fates had arranged for him, in the day when all things were arranged, the day of the first beginning.
At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta. Very stormy.Terrible death to be talked to death. The storm has blown two smallland birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board. Sea full offlying-fish.
That is all. There is no record of the week's travel in Spain, which a little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar guide, Benunes, still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts. This side-trip is covered in a single brief paragraph in the Innocents, and the only account we have of it is in a home letter, from Cadiz, of October 24th:
We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thusdodging the quarantine—took dinner, and then rode horseback allnight in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeledvehicle), and rode 5 hours—then took cars and traveled till twelveat night. That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard partof our trip and somewhat tired. Since then we have taken thingscomparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another andattracting a good deal of attention—for I guess strangers do notwander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spainoften. The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote andSancho Panza were possible characters.But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it wasunder Moorish domination. No, I will not say that—but then whenone is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of theAlhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt tooverflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that createdthem.
We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but it will never be written now. A night or two before the vessel reached New York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion, at Mrs. Severance's request, Mark Twain wrote some verses. They were not especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one prophetic stanza is worth remembering. In the opening lines the passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:
Lo! other ships of that parted fleetShall suffer this fate or that:One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,Or ground on treacherous flat.Some shall be famed in many landsAs good ships, fast and fair,And some shall strangely disappear,Men know not when or where.
The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark Twain found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute. The fifty-three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York Tribune had carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and Territories. Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they came as a revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome travel-letters of that period. They preached a new gospel in travel-literature: the gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity in according praises to whatever seemed genuine, and ridicule to the things considered sham. It was the gospel that Mark Twain would continue to preach during his whole career. It became his chief literary message to the world-a world waiting for that message.
Moreover, the letters were literature. He had received, from whatever source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception and expression. It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander chord, the throbbing cadence of human story.
Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America; old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.
This is pure poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before, but he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain, the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph or two of that word-picture:
After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face wasso sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity notof earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such asnever anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient.If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was lookingtoward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothingbut distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everythingof the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of thewars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created anddestroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whoseprogress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joyand sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of fivethousand slow-revolving years....The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in itsmagnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over itsstory. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of thiseternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds ofall ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel whenwe shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.
Then that closing word of Egypt. He elaborated it for the book, and did not improve it. Let us preserve here its original form.
We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen that oldland which taught Greece her letters—and through Greece, Rome—andthrough Rome, the world—that venerable cradle of culture andrefinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children ofIsrael, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages—thoseChildren whom we still revere, still love, and whose sadshortcomings we still excuse—not because they were savages, butbecause they were the chosen savages of God.
The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame. They presented the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written—one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human nature remains unchanged. From beginning to end the tale is rarely, reverently told. Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the voluminous literature of that solemn land:
Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell ofa curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemnsea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thingexists—over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangsmotionless and dead—about whose borders nothing grows but weeds andscattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promisesrefreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts ofIsrael entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one findsonly a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho theaccursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle leftit more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, intheir poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now toremind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour'spresence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocksby night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men,is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any featurethat is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, thestateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, andis become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longerthere to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; thewonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel isgone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, onthat most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared theHoly Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rodeat anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and itsborders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin havevanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round about themwhere thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and atethe miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that isinhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise?Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
It would be easy to quote pages here—a pictorial sequence from Gibraltar to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march. In time he would write technically better. He would avoid solecism, he would become a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the years ahead he would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of those fresh, first impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas. No need to mention the humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of old masters and of sacred relics, so called. These we have kept familiar with much repetition. Only, the humor had grown more subtle, more restrained; the burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the ridicule so frank and good-natured, that even the old masters themselves might have enjoyed it, while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded by bigotry, would find in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.
The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival, and was altogether unlike those that preceded it. Gaily satirical and personal—inclusively so—it might better have been left unwritten, for it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is all past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous have all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still farther voyage. Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly, tenderly recall their old-time journeying.
Clemens remained but one day in New York. Senator Stewart had written, about the time of the departure of the Quaker City, offering him the position of private secretary—a position which was to give him leisure for literary work, with a supporting salary as well. Stewart no doubt thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the brilliant writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and Clemens likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement. From Naples, in August, he had written accepting Stewart's offer; he lost no time now in discussing the matter in person.—[In a letter home, August 9th, he referred to the arrangement: “I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day accepting his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter.”]
There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the arrangement. When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find him writing:
DEAR FOLKS, Tired and sleepy—been in Congress all day and makingnewspaper acquaintances. Stewart is to look up a clerkship in thePatent Office for Orion. Things necessarily move slowly where thereis so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attendedto. I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right.I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various partsof the Union—have declined them all. I am for business now.Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally. Amoffered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter. Shall writeMr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it willnot interfere. Am pretty well known now—intend to be better known.Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugsfor no good purpose. Don't have any more trouble making friendsthan I did in California. All serene. Good-by. Shall continue onthe Alta.Yours affectionately,SAM.P.S.—I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard's Hotel.
But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter. It is impossible to conceive of Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, especially as the secretary of Senator Stewart. —[In Senator Stewart's memoirs he refers unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and after relating several incidents that bear only strained relations to the truth, states that when the writer returned from the Holy Land he (Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of charity. He adds that Mark Twain's behavior on his premises was such that a threat of a thrashing was necessary. The reason for such statements becomes apparent, however, when he adds that in 'Roughing It' the author accuses him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch over his eye, and claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none of which statements, save only the one concerning the picture (an apparently unforgivable offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily ascertain for himself.]
Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of “My Late Senatorial Secretaryship,” “Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,” etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we may believe, by the change: These articles appeared in the New York Tribune, the New York Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine.
There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between Clemens and Stewart. If so, it is not discoverable in any of the former's personal or newspaper correspondence. In fact, in his article relating to his “late senatorial secretaryship” he puts the joke, so far as it is a joke, on Senator James W. Nye, probably as an additional punishment for Nye's failure to appear on the night of his lecture. He established headquarters with a brilliant newspaper correspondent named Riley. “One of the best men in Washington—or elsewhere,” he tells us in a brief sketch of that person.—[See Riley, newspaper correspondent. Sketches New and Old.]—He had known Riley in San Francisco; the two were congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings.
Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make money and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion. He had used up the most of his lecture accumulations, and was moderately in debt. His work was in demand at good rates, for those days, and with working opportunity he could presently dispose of his financial problem. The Tribune was anxious for letters; the Enterprise and Alta were waiting for them; the Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the magazines—all had solicited contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him. Personally his outlook was bright.
The appointment for Orion was a different matter. The powers were not especially interested in a brother; there were too many brothers and assorted relatives on the official waiting-list already. Clemens was offered appointments for himself—a consulship, a post-mastership; even that of San Francisco. From the Cabinet down, the Washington political contingent had read his travel-letters, and was ready to recognize officially the author of them in his own person and personality.
Also, socially: Mark Twain found himself all at once in the midst of receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for a time at least, but not profitable, not conducive to work. At a dinner of the Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, “Women,” was pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be “the best after dinner speech ever made.” Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or clumsy-witted efforts common to that period. He was coming altogether into his own.—[This is the first of Mark Twain's after-dinner speeches to be preserved. The reader will find it complete, as reported next day, in Appendix G, at the end of last volume.]
He was not immediately interested in the matter of book publication. The Jumping Frog book was popular, and in England had been issued by Routledge; but the royalty returns were modest enough and slow in arrival. His desire was for prompter results. His interest in book publication had never been an eager one, and related mainly to the advertising it would furnish, which he did not now need; or to the money return, in which he had no great faith. Yet at this very moment a letter for him was lying in the Tribune office in New York which would bring the book idea into first prominence and spell the beginning of his fortune.
Among those who had read and found delight in the Tribune letters was Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, of Hartford. Bliss was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen appreciation for humor and the American fondness for that literary quality. He had recently undertaken the management of a Hartford concern, and had somewhat alarmed its conservative directorate by publishing books that furnished entertainment to the reader as well as moral instruction. Only his success in paying dividends justified this heresy and averted his downfall. Two days after the arrival of the Quaker City Bliss wrote the letter above mentioned. It ran as follows:
OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO.HARTFORD, CONN., November 21, 1867.
SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ., Tribune Office, New York.
DEAR SIR,—We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a letter which we had recently written and were about to forward to you, not knowing your arrival home was expected so soon. We are desirous of obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your letters from the past, etc., with such interesting additions as may be proper. We are the publishers of A. D. Richardson's works, and flatter ourselves that we can give an author a favorable term and do as full justice to his productions as any other house in the country. We are perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never failed to give a book an immense circulation. We sold about 100,000 copies of Richardson's F. D. and E. ('Field, Dungeon and Escape'), and are now printing 41,000 of 'Beyond the Mississippi', and large orders ahead. If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to do so, we should be pleased to see you, and will do so. Will you do us the favor of reply at once, at your earliest convenience.
Very truly etc.,E. BLISS, JR.,Secretary.
After ten days' delay this letter was forwarded to the Tribune bureau in Washington, where Clemens received it. He replied promptly.
WASHINGTON, December 2, 1867.
E. BLISS, JR., ESQ., Secretary American Publishing Co.
DEAR SIR,—I only received your favor of November 21st last night, at the rooms of the Tribune Bureau here. It was forwarded from the Tribune office, New York where it had lain eight or ten days. This will be a sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence.
I wrote fifty-two letters for the San Francisco Alta California during the Quaker City excursion, about half of which number have been printed thus far. The Alta has few exchanges in the East, and I suppose scarcely any of these letters have been copied on this side of the Rocky Mountains. I could weed them of their chief faults of construction and inelegancies of expression, and make a volume that would be more acceptable in many respects than any I could now write. When those letters were written my impressions were fresh, but now they have lost that freshness; they were warm then, they are cold now. I could strike out certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their places. If you think such a book would suit your purpose, please drop me a line, specifying the size and general style of the volume—when the matter ought to be ready; whether it should have pictures in it or not; and particularly what your terms with me would be, and what amount of money I might possibly make out of it. The latter clause has a degree of importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension. But you understand that, of course.
I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me. But I know Richardson, and learned from him some months ago something of an idea of the subscription plan of publishing. If that is your plan invariably it looks safe.
I am on the New York Tribune staff here as an “occasional,” among otherthings, and a note from you addressed to Very truly, etc.,SAM. L. CLEMENS,New York Tribune Bureau, Washingtonwill find me, without fail.
The exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of the most notable publishing connections in American literary history.
Consummation, however, was somewhat delayed. Bliss was ill when the reply came, and could not write again in detail until nearly a month later. In this letter he recited the profits made by Richardson and others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid. Richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price, a small enough rate for these later days; but the cost of manufacture was larger then, and the sale and delivery of books through agents has ever been an expensive process. Even Horace Greeley had received but a fraction more on his Great American Conflict. Bliss especially suggested and emphasized a “humorous work—that is to say, a work humorously inclined.” He added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright purchase, and royalty. He invited a meeting in New York to arrange terms.
Clemens did in fact go to New York that same evening, to spend Christmas with Dan Slote, and missed Bliss's second letter. It was no matter. Fate had his affairs properly in hand, and had prepared an event of still larger moment than the publication even of Innocents Abroad. There was a pleasant reunion at Dan Slote's. He wrote home about it:
Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I (all Quaker Citynight-hawks) had a blow-out at Dan's house and a lively talk overold times. I just laughed till my sides ached at some of ourreminiscences. It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted throughPalestine, but those are the best boys in the world.
This, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it. We are coming to that now. At the old St. Nicholas Hotel, which stood on the west of Broadway between Spring and Broome streets, there were stopping at this time Jervis Langdon, a wealty coal-dealer and mine-owner of Elmira, his son Charles and his daughter Olivia, whose pictured face Samuel Clemens had first seen in the Bay of Smyrna one September day. Young Langdon had been especially anxious to bring his distinguished Quaker City friend and his own people together, and two days before Christmas Samuel Clemens was invited to dine at the hotel. He went very willingly. The lovely face of that miniature had been often a part of his waking dreams. For the first time now he looked upon its reality. Long afterward he said:
“It is forty years ago. From that day to this she has never been out of my mind.”
Charles Dickens was in New York then, and gave a reading that night in Steinway Hall. The Langdons went, and Samuel Clemens accompanied them. He remembered afterward that Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a fiery red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from Copperfield—the death of James Steerforth. But he remembered still more clearly the face and dress of that slender girlish figure at his side.
Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer with the shattered health of her girlhood. At sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two years, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her back. Great physicians and surgeons, one after another, had done their best for her but she had failed steadily until every hope had died. Then, when nothing else was left to try, a certain Doctor Newton, of spectacular celebrity, who cured by “laying on of hands,” was brought to Elmira to see her. Doctor Newton came into the darkened room and said:
“Open the windows—we must have light!”
They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows were opened. Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl, delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and bade her sit up. She had not moved for two years, and the family were alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair. Sensation came back to her limbs. With his assistance she even made a feeble attempt to walk. He left then, saying that she would gradually improve, and in time be well, though probably never very strong. On the same day he healed a boy, crippled and drawn with fever.
It turned out as he had said. Olivia Langdon improved steadily, and now at twenty-two, though not robust—she was never that—she was comparatively well. Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol, and Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first meeting.
Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had ever known. Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple sort. She had never seen anything resembling him before. Indeed, nobody had. Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than cultured, of speech—a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset, tossed by the drift of fortune at her feet. He disturbed rather than gratified her. She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward life—to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of religion. When he had gone she somehow had the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had swept across her sky.
To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, Miss Langdon conceded admiration. As for her father, he did not qualify his opinion. With hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity and capability in men, Jervis Langdon accepted Samuel Clemens from the start, and remained his stanch admirer and friend. Clemens left that night with an invitation to visit Elmira by and by, and with the full intention of going—soon. Fate, however, had another plan. He did not see Elmira for the better part of a year.
He saw Miss Langdon again within the week. On New-Year's Day he set forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time—more lavish then than now. Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first. With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o'clock in the morning, and they did not leave until midnight. If his first impression upon Olivia Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon. One thing is certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future years. He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with him by invitation. Harriet Beecher Stowe was present, and others of that eminent family. Likewise his old Quaker City comrades, Moses S. and Emma Beach. It was a brilliant gathering, a conclave of intellectual gods—a triumph to be there for one who had been a printer-boy on the banks of the Mississippi, and only a little while before a miner with pick and shovel. It was gratifying to be so honored; it would be pleasant to write home; but the occasion lacked something too—everything, in fact—for when he ran his eye around the board the face of the minature was not there.
Still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but pleasant enough to remember. It was Sunday evening and the party adjourned to Plymouth Church. After services Mr. Beecher invited him to return home with him for a quiet talk. Evidently they had a good time, for in the letter telling of these things Samuel Clemens said: “Henry Ward Beecher is a brick.”