He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to
New York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points),
but first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a
far journey and along absence in view. Jane Clemens made him renew
his promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing. He had
expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea--a literary
idea--came to him, and he returned to Keokuk. The Saturday Post, a
Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary
airs. He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was
the head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of
his travels to the Post--for, a consideration. He may have had a still
larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have
been in his consciousness. Rees agreed to take letters from him at five
dollars each--good payment for that time and place. The young traveler,
jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made
another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis
according to his first letter in the Post.--[Supplied by Thomas Rees, of
the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son of George Rees named.]
This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a
promising literary production. It was written in the exaggerated dialect
then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the
undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between. The genius that
a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered
feebly enough at twenty-one. The letter is a burlesque account of the
trip to Cincinnati. A brief extract from it, as characteristic as any,
will serve.
I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto
the Laclede House, and bought about a quire o' yaller paper, cut up
into tickets--one for each railroad in the United States, I thought,
but I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Line
was left out--and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to
the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin' it open and
shakin' out the contents, consisting of “guides” to Chicago, and
“guides” to Cincinnati, and travelers' guides, and all kinds of sich
books, not excepting a “guide to heaven,” which last aint much use
to a Teller in Chicago, I kin tell you. Finally, that fast packet
quit ringing her bell, and started down the river--but she hadn't
gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar
she stuck till plum one o'clock, spite of the Captain's swearin'
--and they had to set the whole crew to cussin' at last afore they
got her off.
This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a
little later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward. Only
careful examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain. The
letters were signed “Snodgrass,” and there are but two of them. The
second, dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same
assassinating dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of
coal in Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a baby
left on his hands.
From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them
hard work, and it is said he raised on the price. At all events, the
second concluded the series. They are mainly important in that they are
the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first
for which he received a cash return.
He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of
Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857. That winter
in Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable
association--one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens's general
interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain
views and philosophies which he never forgot.
He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace
people, with one exception. This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling
Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly
unlike him--without humor or any comprehension of it. Yet meeting on
the common plane of intellect, the two became friends. Clemens spent
his evenings in Macfarlane's room until the clock struck ten; then
Macfarlane grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in
Philadelphia had done two years before, and the evening ended.
Macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and
scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary. He had studied these
and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker. He never
talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired
his knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a
mystery. He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the
same hour in the evening. His hands were hardened from some sort of
toil-mechanical labor, his companion thought, but he never knew. He
would have liked to know, and he watched for some reference to slip out
that would betray Macfarlane's trade; but this never happened.
What he did learn was that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of
abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher
besides. He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word
in the English dictionary, and he made it good. The younger man tried
repeatedly to discover a word that Macfarlane could not define.
Perhaps Macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for
he never tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his
companion never tired of listening. This Scotch philosopher did not
always reflect the conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and
strikingly on his own account. That was a good while before Darwin
and Wallace gave out--their conclusions on the Descent of Man; yet
Macfarlane was already advancing a similar philosophy. He went even
further: Life, he said, had been developed in the course of ages from a
few microscopic seed-germs--from one, perhaps, planted by the Creator
in the dawn of time, and that from this beginning development on an
ascending scale had finally produced man. Macfarlane said that the
scheme had stopped there, and failed; that man had retrograded; that
man's heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom: that man was the
only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness--almost the
only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness. He said that man's
intellect was a depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him
in a rank far below the other beasts, though it enabled him to keep them
in servitude and captivity, along with many members of his own race.
They were long, fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens listened
to that winter in Macfarlane's room, and those who knew the real Mark
Twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings left their
impress upon him for life.