In time Mark Twain became very lonely in Dublin. After the brilliant
winter the contrast was too great. He was not yet ready for exile. In
one of his dictations he said:
The skies are enchantingly blue. The world is a dazzle of sunshine.
Monadnock is closer to us than usual by several hundred yards. The
vast extent of spreading valley is intensely green--the lakes as
intensely blue. And there is a new horizon, a remoter one than we
have known before, for beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy
mountains that form the usual frame of the picture rise certain
shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes....
But there is a defect--only one, but it is a defect which almost
entitles it to be spelled with a capital D. This is the defect of
loneliness. We have not a single neighbor who is a neighbor.
Nobody lives within two miles of us except Franklin MacVeagh, and he
is the farthest off of any, because he is in Europe....
I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them. I am
existing, broken-hearted, in a Garden of Eden.... The Garden of
Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent
of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society....
I never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this
place until a symbol of it--a compact and visible allegory of it
--furnished me the lacking lift three days ago. I was standing alone
on this veranda, in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness,
the far-spreading, beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible
life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering
across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently
looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as bric-a-brac.
Then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less
money elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away and disappeared
among the trees. It sized up this solitude. It is so complete, so
perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it. Those
dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me.
This was no more than a mood--though real enough while it
lasted--somber, and in its way regal. It was the loneliness of a
king--King Lear. Yet he returned gladly enough to solitude after each
absence.
It was just before one of his departures that I made another set of
pictures of him, this time on the colonnaded veranda, where his figure
had become so familiar. He had determined to have his hair cut when
he reached New York, and I was anxious to get the pictures before this
happened. When the proofs came seven of them--he arranged them as a
series to illustrate what he called “The Progress of a Moral Purpose.”
He ordered a number of sets of this series, and he wrote a legend on
each photograph, numbering them from 1 to 7, laying each set in a sheet
of letter-paper which formed a sort of wrapper, on which was written:
This series of q photographs registers with scientific precision,
stage by stage, the progress of a moral purpose through the
mind of the human race's Oldest Friend. S. L. C.
He added a personal inscription, and sent one to each of his more
intimate friends. One of the pictures amused him more than the others,
because during the exposure a little kitten, unnoticed, had walked into
it, and paused near his foot. He had never outgrown his love for cats,
and he had rented this kitten and two others for the summer from a
neighbor. He didn't wish to own them, he said, for then he would have
to leave them behind uncared for, so he preferred to rent them and pay
sufficiently to insure their subsequent care. These kittens he called
Sackcloth and Ashes--Ashes being the joint name of the two that looked
exactly alike, and so did not need distinctive titles. Their gambols
always amused him. He would stop any time in the midst of dictation to
enjoy them. Once, as he was about to enter the screen-door that led into
the hall, two of the kittens ran up in front of him and stood waiting.
With grave politeness he opened the door, made a low bow, and stepped
back and said: “Walk in, gentlemen. I always give precedence to
royalty.” And the kittens marched in, tails in air. All summer long
they played up and down the wide veranda, or chased grasshoppers and
butterflies down the clover slope. It was a never-ending amusement to
him to see them jump into the air after some insect, miss it and tumble
back, and afterward jump up, with a surprised expression and a look of
disappointment and disgust. I remember once, when he was walking up and
down discussing some very serious subject--and one of the kittens was
lying on the veranda asleep--a butterfly came drifting along three feet
or so above the floor. The kitten must have got a glimpse of the insect
out of the corner of its eye, and perhaps did not altogether realize
its action. At all events, it suddenly shot straight up into the air,
exactly like a bounding rubber ball, missed the butterfly, fell back on
the porch floor with considerable force and with much surprise. Then it
sprang to its feet, and, after spitting furiously once or twice, bounded
away. Clemens had seen the performance, and it completely took his
subject out of his mind. He laughed extravagantly, and evidently cared
more for that moment's entertainment than for many philosophies.
In that remote solitude there was one important advantage--there was no
procession of human beings with axes to grind, and few curious callers.
Occasionally an automobile would find its way out there and make a
circuit of the drive, but this happened too seldom to annoy him. Even
newspaper men rarely made the long trip from Boston or New York to
secure his opinions, and when they came it was by permission and
appointment. Newspaper telegrams arrived now and then, asking for a
sentiment on some public condition or event, and these he generally
answered willingly enough. When the British Premier, Campbell-Bannerman,
celebrated his seventieth birthday, the London Tribune and the New York
Herald requested a tribute. He furnished it, for Bannerman was a very
old friend. He had known him first at Marienbad in '91, and in Vienna
in '98, in daily intercourse, when they had lived at the same hotel. His
tribute ran:
To HIS EXCELLENCY THE BRITISH PREMIER,--Congratulations, not
condolences. Before seventy we are merely respected, at best, and we
have to behave all the time, or we lose that asset; but after seventy
we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered, and don't have to behave
unless we want to. When I first knew you, Honored Sir, one of us was
hardly even respected. MARK TWAIN.
He had some misgivings concerning the telegram after it had gone, but he
did not recall it.
Clemens became the victim of a very clever hoax that summer. One day a
friend gave him two examples of the most deliciously illiterate letters,
supposed to have been written by a woman who had contributed certain
articles of clothing to the San Francisco sufferers, and later wished
to recall them because of the protests of her household. He was so sure
that the letters were genuine that he included them in his dictations,
after reading them aloud with great effect. To tell the truth, they did
seem the least bit too well done, too literary in their illiteracy; but
his natural optimism refused to admit of any suspicion, and a little
later he incorporated one of the Jennie Allen letters in a speech which
he made at a Press Club dinner in New York on the subject of simplified
spelling--offering it as an example of language with phonetic brevity
exercising its supreme function, the direct conveyance of ideas.
The letters, in the end, proved to be the clever work of Miss Grace
Donworth, who has since published them serially and in book form.
Clemens was not at all offended or disturbed by the exposure. He even
agreed to aid the young author in securing a publisher, and wrote to
Miss Stockbridge, through whom he had originally received the documents:
DEAR MISS STOCKBRIDGE (if she really exists),