LXXXVI. ENGLAND

From that night Mark Twain's stay in England could not properly be called a gloomy one.

Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set themselves the task of giving him a good time. Whatever place of interest they could think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it. Dinners, receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him. The White Friars' Club and others gave banquets in his honor. He was the sensation of the day. When he rose to speak on these occasions he was greeted with wild cheers. Whatever he said they eagerly applauded—too eagerly sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible to American humor. Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to provoke his retorts. When a speaker humorously referred to his American habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella that an Englishman wouldn't steal, was all over England next day, and regarded as one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift.

The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid. Joaquin Miller writes:

    He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white
    flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the
    learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand.

Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade and Canon Kingsley. Kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote, asking for an appointment. Reade invited his assistance on a novel. Indeed, it was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful heritage. Whatever may have been the doubts concerning him in America, there was no question in England. Howells says:

    In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors,
    lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he
    was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the
    favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.

After that first visit of Mark Twain's, when Americans in England, referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the like, naturally mentioned the names of Seward, Webster, Lowell, or Holmes, the English comment was likely to be: “Never mind those. We can turn out academic Sewards by the dozen, and cultured humorists like Lowell and Holmes by the score. Tell us of Lincoln, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain. We cannot match these; they interest us.” And it was true. History could not match them, for they were unique.

Clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not realized the fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a little to the folks at home. There never lived a more modest, less pretentious, less aggressive man than Mark Twain, but there never lived a man who took a more childlike delight in genuine appreciation; and, being childlike, it was only human that he should wish those nearest to him to share his happiness. After one memorable affair he wrote:

    I have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the
    brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of
    London; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received
    with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long
    list of guests was called.

I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and assistance of my excellent friend, Sir John Bennett.

This letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason why he might have perished on the spot. During the long roll-call of guests he had lost interest a little, and was conversing in whispers with his “excellent friend,” Sir John Bennett, stopping to applaud now and then when the applause of the others indicated that some distinguished name had been pronounced. All at once the applause broke out with great vehemence. This must be some very distinguished person indeed. He joined in it with great enthusiasm. When it was over he whispered to Sir John:

“Whose name was that we were just applauding?”

“Mark Twain's.”

Whereupon the support was needed.

Poor little pirate Hotten did not have a happy time during this visit. He had reveled in the prospect at first, for he anticipated a large increase to be derived from his purloined property; but suddenly, one morning, he was aghast to find in the Spectator a signed letter from Mark Twain, in which he was repudiated, referred to as “John Camden Hottentot,” an unsavory person generally. Hotten also sent a letter to the Spectator, in which he attempted to justify himself, but it was a feeble performance. Clemens prepared two other communications, each worse than the other and both more destructive than the first one. But these were only to relieve his mind. He did not print them. In one of them he pursued the fancy of John Camden Hottentot, whom he offers as a specimen to the Zoological Gardens.

It is not a bird. It is not a man. It is not a fish. It does not seem to be in all respects a reptile. It has the body and features of a man, but scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure.... I am sure that this singular little creature is the missing link between the man and the hyena.

Hotten had preyed upon explorer Stanley and libeled him in a so-called. biography to a degree that had really aroused some feeling against Stanley in England. Only for the moment—the Queen invited Stanley to luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased. Hotten was in general disrepute, therefore, so it was not worth while throwing a second brick at him.

In fact, now that Clemens had expended his venom, on paper, Hotten seemed to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise. An incident grew out of it all, however, that was not amusing. E. P. Hingston, whom the reader may remember as having been with Artemus Ward in Virginia City, and one of that happy group that wined and dined the year away, had been engaged by Hotten to write the introductory to his edition of The Innocents Abroad. It was a well-written, highly complimentary appreciation. Hingston did not dream that he was committing an offense, nor did Clemens himself regard it as such in the beginning.

But Mark Twain's views had undergone a radical change, and with characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten that he had ever had any other views than those he now held. Hingston was in London, and one evening, at a gathering, approached Clemens with outstretched hand. But Clemens failed to see Hingston's hand or to recognize him. In after-years his conscience hurt him terribly for this. He remembered it only with remorse and shame. Once, in his old age, he spoke of it with deep sorrow.





LXXXVII. THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN

The book on England, which he had prepared for so carefully, was never written. Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia Clemens, but the notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun. There was too much sociability in London for one thing, and then he found that he could not write entertainingly of England without introducing too many personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had taken him into their hearts and homes. In a word, he would have to write too seriously or not at all.

He began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might have been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind. The reader will hardly fail to find a few of the entries interesting. They are offered here as examples of his daily observation during those early weeks of his stay, and to show somewhat of his purpose:

                    AN EXPATRIATE

    There was once an American thief who fled his country and took
    refuge in England. He dressed himself after the fashion of the
    Londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the London
    pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a
    native. But he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham
    Hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon and
    the grave of Shakespeare. These things betrayed his nationality.

                  STANLEY AND THE QUEEN

    See the power a monarch wields! When I arrived here, two weeks ago,
    the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor Stanley up
    without salt or sauce. The Queen says, “Come four hundred miles up
    into Scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes”; which,
    being translated, means, “Gentlemen, I believe in this man and take
    him under my protection”; and not another yelp is heard.

                  AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM

    What a place it is!

    Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature—a something
    which you have read about somewhere but never seen—they show you a
    dozen! They show you all the possible varieties of that thing!
    They show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold,
    worn by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks,
    Britons—every people of the forgotten ages, indeed. They show you
    the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did
    live. Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell's face in
    death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of
    Xerxes.

    I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum. Nobody comes
    bothering around me—nobody elbows me—all the room and all the
    light I want, under this huge dome—no disturbing noises—and people
    standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever
    was printed under the sun—and if I choose to go wandering about the
    long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of
    all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me. I am not
    capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum—it seems
    as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones.

                WESTMINSTER ABBEY BY NIGHT

    It was past eleven o'clock and I was just going to bed. But this
    friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was
    not a doubt in my mind that his “expedition” had merit in it. I put
    on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.

    “Where is it? Where are we going?”

    “Don't worry. You'll see.”

    He was not inclined to talk. So I thought this must be a weighty
    matter. My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully
    under the surface. I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as
    we thundered down the long street. I am always lost in London, day
    or night. It was very chilly, almost bleak. People leaned against
    the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. The crowds grew
    thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away.
    The sky was overcast and threatening. We drove on, and still on,
    till I wondered if we were ever going to stop. At last we passed by
    a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a
    gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court
    surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. Then we
    alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. In a little while
    footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we
    dropped into his wake without saying anything. He led us under an
    archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a
    tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. We followed him down
    this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than
    by anything we could very distinctly see. At the end of it we came
    to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a
    bull's-eye lantern. Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had
    oiled it first, it grated so dismally. The gate swung open and we
    stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared
    cavern, carved out of the solid darkness. The conductor and my
    friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise. For the
    moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness
    seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. I looked my inquiry!

    “It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey.”...

    We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting,
    standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness
    —reached out their hands toward us—some appealing, some beckoning,
    some warning us away. Effigies they were—statues over the graves;
    but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. Now a
    little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the
    bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by
    the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that
    sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of
    yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn
    of history, more than twelve hundred years ago....

    Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon
    that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing
    about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of
    interest. He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his
    daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the
    great pile. Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would
    say:

    “Observe the height of the Abbey—one hundred and three feet to the
    base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day. Notice the
    base of this column—old, very old—hundreds and hundreds of years
    —and how well they knew how to build in those old days! Notice it
    —every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature
    laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day
    some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and
    flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this
    matting—it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit
    of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these
    scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before
    time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in the border,
    was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by
    the ornaments that have been pulled out—here is an A and there is
    an O, and yonder another A—all beautiful Old English capitals;
    there is no telling what the inscription was—no record left now.
    Now move along in this direction, if you please. Yonder is where
    old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the
    Abbey; Sebert died in 616,—[Clemens probably misunderstood the
    name. It was Ethelbert who died in 616. The name Sebert does not
    appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]—and that's
    as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it! Twelve
    hundred and fifty years! Now yonder is the last one—Charles
    Dickens—there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab—and
    to this day the people come and put flowers on it.... There is
    Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust—and
    Macaulay lies there. And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan
    and Dr. Johnson—and here is old Parr....

    “That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know
    pretty well—Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who
    wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson—there are three
    tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben
    Jonson' cut on them. You were standing on one of them just now he
    is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that
    explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried
    in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present
    of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and
    asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.
    Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,
    sure enough-stood up on end.”

The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that the book itself was never written. Just when he gave up the project is not recorded. He was urged to lecture in London, but declined. To Mrs. Clemens, in September, he wrote:

Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea of doing it; certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him word once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no time to spare. There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast enough with work.

In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs. Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer to have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London in the spring. So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned. He felt that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only just begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him. To his mother and sister, in November, he wrote:

I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make after-dinner speeches here. I have made hundreds of friends; and last night, in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and Museum, I was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.

All his impressions of England had been happy ones. He could deliver a gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions—certain London localities and features—as in his speech at the Savage Club,—[September 28, 1872. This is probably the most characteristic speech made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will find it in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]—but taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects, he had found in it only delight. To Mrs. Crane he wrote:

    If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,
    and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful
    that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land. There is nothing
    like it elsewhere on the globe. You should have a season ticket and
    travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship
    nature.

    And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now
    as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the
    British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the
    customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every
    official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the
    speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their
    lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder. I
    would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
    over.

He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for his namesake, Sam Moffett. Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out of her course. It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors clinging to her rigging. In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was launched and the perishing men were rescued. Clemens prepared a graphic report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking that medals be conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide celebrity. Closing, the writer said:

    As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service toward
    rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the
    deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on
    things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a
    cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I am
    satisfied. I ask no reward. I would do it again under the same
    circumstances. But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is
    that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our
    life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor
    and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized
    world.

The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872. Mark Twain had been absent three months, during which he had been brought to at least a partial realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind.

An election had taken place during his absence—an election which gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency of General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom he admired perhaps, but not as presidential material. To Thomas Nast, who had aided very effectually in Mr. Greeley's overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote:

Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for Grant—I mean, rather, for civilization and progress. Those pictures were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast events that man is unquestionably yourself. We all do sincerely honor you, and are proud of you.

Horace Greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for him, rather than voters. Mark Twain once said of him:

“He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and was an honor to it. Also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy. He was profane, but that is nothing; the best of us is that. I did not know him well, but only just casually, and by accident. I never met him but once. I called on him in the Tribune office, but I was not intending to. I was looking for Whitelaw Reid, and got into the wrong den. He was alone at his desk, writing, and we conversed—not long, but just a little. I asked him if he was well, and he said, 'What the hell do you want?' Well, I couldn't remember what I wanted, so I said I would call again. But I didn't.”

Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way. Sometimes it was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and the conversation with Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not have been out of character with either of the men.





LXXXVIII. “THE GILDED AGE”

Mark Twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter. Redpath had besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written:

“Will you? Won't you? We have seven thousand to eight thousand dollars in engagements recorded for you,” and he named a list of towns ranging geographically from Boston to St. Paul.

But Clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and again in November, from London, he announced (to Redpath):

“When I yell again for less than $500 I'll be pretty hungry, but I haven't any intention of yelling at any price.”

Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single night in Philadelphia, but without result. He did lecture two nights in Steinway Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, on the basis of half profits, netting $1,300 for the two nights as his share; and he lectured one night in Hartford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity. Father Hawley, of Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was suffering for lack of funds. Some of his people were actually without food, he said, their children crying with hunger. No one ever responded to an appeal like that quicker than Samuel Clemens. He offered to deliver a lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in forwarding the project. He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the close of it a large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts printed upon it. It was held up to view, and the house broke into a storm of cheers.

He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return. Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he urged annexation.

“We must annex those people,” he declared, and proceeded to specify the blessings we could give them, such as “leather-headed juries, the insanity law, and the Tweed Ring.”

    We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train.
    We can give them lecturers! I will go myself.

    We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner
    on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy
    civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need!

    “Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?”

His success in England became an incentive to certain American institutions to recognize his gifts at home. Early in the year he was dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two later elected to its membership. This was but a beginning. Some new membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets that he finally invented a set form for declining them. He was not yet recognized as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he had become the most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or but little later, said:

“Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past fifty years.” So he was beginning to be “discovered” in high places.

It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since those earliest days of marriage. The Hooker mansion was a comfortable place. The little family had comparatively good health. Their old friends were stanch and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones. Their fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those they cared for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the Trumbulls—all certain of a welcome there. George Warner, only a little while ago, remembering, said:

“The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there was never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were always welcome. Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner were an unending flow of stories.”

Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking. They were more like one great family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a unity of ideals. The Warner families and the Clemenses were particularly intimate, and out of their association grew Mark Twain's next important literary undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in 'The Gilded Age'.

A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the origin of this book. It was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural development.

At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of dinner-table talk. The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment. The wives naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to furnish the American people with better ones. This was regarded in the nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted—mutually accepted: that is to say, in partnership. On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it immediately. This is the whole story of the book's origin; so far, at least, as the collaboration is concerned. Clemens, in fact, had the beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint authorship. His purpose was to write a tale around that lovable character of his youth, his mother's cousin, James Lampton—to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure against a proper background. The idea appealed to Warner, and there was no delay in the beginning. Clemens immediately set to work and completed 399 pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book, before the early flush of enthusiasm waned.

Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him. Warner had some plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued it through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, “in the superstition,” as Mark Twain long afterward declared, “that we were writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were writing two incoherent ones.”—[The reader may be interested in the division of labor. Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also chapters XXIV, XXV, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XLII, XLIII, XLV, LI, LII, LIII, LVII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, and portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX, LVI. Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII; also chapters XXVI, XXIX, XXXI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV, XLVI, XLVII, XLVIII, L, LIV, LV, LVIII, LXIII, and portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX, and LVI. The work was therefore very evenly divided.

There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally completed. This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated, marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: Trumbull was the most learned man that ever lived in Hartford. He was familiar with all literary and scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven languages. It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book, the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader—a purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.]

The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work did not lag. The result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good reading. Warner had the touch of romance, Clemens, the gift of creating, or at least of portraying, human realities. Most of his characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life. Besides the apotheosis of James Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his creations. As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a bugbear, it became tangible property at last. Only a year or two before Clemens had written to Orion:

    Oh, here! I don't want to be consulted at all about Tennessee. I
    don't want it even mentioned to me. When I make a suggestion it is
    for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to
    ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property.

But it came in good play now. It is the important theme of the story.

Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale. He knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly. Senator Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, then notorious for attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough. That winter in Washington had acquainted Clemens with the life there, its political intrigues, and the disrepute of Congress. Warner was equally well qualified for his share of the undertaking, and the chief criticism that one may offer is the one stated by Clemens himself—that the divisions of the tale remain divisions rather than unity.

As for the story itself—the romance and tragedy of it—the character of Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to forget. Whether this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly done, the reader himself must judge. Morally, the character is not justified. Laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning. There could be no poetic justice in her doom. To drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind. Laura is a sort of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky's fate, whereas Laura's doom is warranted only by the author's whim. As for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage, destroyed her future, taken away her life.

The authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but that is nothing. Any author regards his work highly at the moment of its completion. In later years neither of them thought very well of their production; but that also is nothing. The author seldom cares very deeply for his offspring once it is turned over to the public charge. The fact that the story is still popular, still delights thousands of readers, when a myriad of novels that have been written since it was completed have lived their little day and died so utterly that even their names have passed out of memory, is the best verdict as to its worth.





LXXXIX. PLANNING A NEW HOME

Clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a fine, sightly piece of land on Farmington Avenue—table-land, sloping down to a pretty stream that wound through the willows and among the trees. They were as delighted as children with their new purchase and the prospect of building. To her sister Mrs. Clemens wrote:

    Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes daily
    into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the land by
    sliding around on his feet....

    For three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been
    glorious. We could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you
    looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward
    the sun, they were covered with jewels. If you looked toward the
    sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land. Then the
    nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving
    us the same prismatic effect.

This was the storm of which Mark Twain wrote his matchless description, given first in his speech on New England weather, and later preserved in 'Following the Equator', in more extended form. In that book he likens an ice-storm to his impressions derived from reading descriptions of the Taj Mahal, that wonderful tomb of a fair East Indian queen. It is a marvelous bit of word-painting—his description of that majestic vision: “When every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume.” It will pay any one to look up that description and read it all, though it has been said, by the fortunate one or two who heard him first give it utterance as an impromptu outburst, that in the subsequent process of writing the bloom of its original magnificence was lost.

The plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle architect Edward Potter, whose art to-day may be considered open to criticism, but not because of any lack of originality. Hartford houses of that period were mainly of the goods-box form of architecture, perfectly square, typifying the commercial pursuits of many of their owners. Potter agreed to get away from this idea, and a radical and even frenzied departure was the result. Certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all who saw them were filled with wonder and delight. Architecture has lavished itself in many florescent forms since then, but we may imagine that Potter's “English violet” order of design, as he himself designated it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day, when most houses were mere habitations, built with a view to economy and the largest possible amount of room.

Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the builders, and work was rapidly pushed along. Then in May the whole matter was left in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with Lawyer Charles E. Perkins to stand between Potter and the violent builder, who roared at Potter and frightened him when he wanted changes), while the Clemens household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood friend of Mrs. Clemens, sailed away to England for a half-year holiday.





XC. A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY

They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an amanuensis. There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man, and it may as well be set down here. Clemens found, a few weeks after his arrival in England, that so great was the tax upon his time that he could make no use of Thompson's services. He gave Thompson fifty dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man's desiring to return to America, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could return it some day, and never thought of it again. But the young man remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt to be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt. That letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to Mark Twain. He felt that it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years' struggle with ill-fortune. He returned the money, of course, and in a biographical note commented:

    How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it! Thompson's
    heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and
    which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound
    obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days. I had
    forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly
    as lightning. I can see him now. It was on the deck of the
    Batavia, in the dock. The ship was casting off, with that hubbub
    and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and
    shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure
    preparations in those days—an impressive contrast with the solemn
    silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of
    the present day. Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and
    the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion. We all
    had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and
    designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance
    with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly
    and odiously out of the question.

    Very well. On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable
    and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave,
    long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper
    end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without
    break or wrinkle, to his ankles. He came straight to us, and shook
    hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him. A
    nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment.

    However, Thompson didn't know that anything was happening. He had
    no prejudices about clothes. I can still see him as he looked when
    we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.
    Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug
    on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level
    with his neck. There were scoffers observing, but he didn't know
    it; he wasn't disturbed.

    In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me
    down in shorthand. The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr.
    Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty's
    progress across the Channel and write an account of it. I can't
    recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor
    as mine.

They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to took place—the arrival of the Shah of Persia—and were comfortably quartered at the Langham Hotel. To Twichell Clemens wrote:

    We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor,
    our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a
    noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland
    Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).

    Nine p.m. full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.

    I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back.
    I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got
    anyway. And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.

Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: “It is perfectly discouraging to try to write you. There is so much to write about that it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin.”

It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment. If Mark Twain had been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now. His rooms at the Langham were like a court. Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John B. Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his fame) were among those that called to pay their respects. In a recent letter she says: