Mark Twain—The Original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers—The “Earl of
Durham”—Some Noctes Ambrosianæ—A Joke on Murat Halstead
I
Mark Twain came down to the footlights long after Artemus Ward had
passed from the scene; but as an American humorist with whom during
half a century I was closely intimate and round whom many of my London
experiences revolve, it may be apropos to speak of him next after his
elder. There was not lacking a certain likeness between them.
Samuel L. Clemens and I were connected by a domestic tie, though before
either of us were born the two families on the maternal side had been
neighbors and friends. An uncle of his married an aunt of mine—the
children of this marriage cousins in common to us—albeit, this apart,
we were life-time cronies. He always contended that we were “bloodkin.”
Notwithstanding that when Mark Twain appeared east of the Alleghanies
and north of the Blue Ridge he showed the weather-beating of the west,
the bizarre alike of the pilot house and the mining camp very much in
evidence, he came of decent people on both sides of the house. The
Clemens and the Lamptons were of good old English stock. Toward the
middle of the eighteenth century three younger scions of the Manor of
Durham migrated from the County of Durham to Virginia and thence
branched out into Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.
His mother was the loveliest old aristocrat with a taking drawl, a
drawl that was high-bred and patrician, not rustic and plebeian, which
her famous son inherited. All the women of that ilk were gentlewomen.
The literary and artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him
had percolated through the veins of a long line of silent singers, of
poets and painters, unborn to the world of expression till he arrived
upon the scene.
These joint cousins of ours embraced an exceedingly large, varied and
picturesque assortment. Their idiosyncrasies were a constant source of
amusement to us. Just after the successful production of his play, The
Gilded Age, and the uproarious hit of the comedian, Raymond, in the
leading role, I received a letter from him in which he told me he had
made in Colonel Mulberry Sellers a close study of one of these kinsmen
and thought he had drawn him to the life. “But for the love o’ God,” he
said, “don’t whisper it, for he would never understand or forgive me,
if he did not thrash me on sight.”
The pathos of the part, and not its comic aspects, had most impressed
him. He designed and wrote it for Edwin Booth. From the first and
always he was disgusted by the Raymond portrayal. Except for its
popularity and money-making, he would have withdrawn it from the stage
as, in a fit of pique, Raymond himself did while it was still packing
the theaters.
The original Sellers had partly brought him up and had been very good
to him. A second Don Quixote in appearance and not unlike the knight of
La Mancha in character, it would have been safe for nobody to laugh at
James Lampton, or by the slightest intimation, look or gesture to treat
him with inconsideration, or any proposal of his, however preposterous,
with levity.
He once came to visit me upon a public occasion and during a function.
I knew that I must introduce him, and with all possible ceremony, to my
colleagues. He was very queer; tall and peaked, wearing a black,
swallow-tailed suit, shiny with age, and a silk hat, bound with black
crepe to conceal its rustiness, not to indicate a recent death; but his
linen as spotless as new-fallen snow. I had my fears. Happily the
company, quite dazed by the apparition, proved decorous to solemnity,
and the kind old gentleman, pleased with himself and proud of his
“distinguished young kinsman,” went away highly gratified.
Not long after this one of his daughters—pretty girls they were, too,
and in charm altogether worthy of their Cousin Sam Clemens—was to be
married, and Sellers wrote me a stately summons, all-embracing, though
stiff and formal, such as a baron of the Middle Ages might have indited
to his noble relative, the field marshal, bidding him bring his good
lady and his retinue and abide within the castle until the festivities
were ended, though in this instance the castle was a suburban cottage
scarcely big enough to accommodate the bridal couple. I showed the
bombastic but hospitable and genuine invitation to the actor Raymond,
who chanced to be playing in Louisville when it reached me. He read it
through with care and reread it.
“Do you know,” said he, “it makes me want to cry. That is not the man I
am trying to impersonate at all.”
Be sure it was not; for there was nothing funny about the spiritual
being of Mark Twain’s Colonel Mulberry Sellers; he was as brave as a
lion and as upright as Sam Clemens himself.
When a very young man, living in a woodland cabin down in the Pennyrile
region of Kentucky, with a wife he adored and two or three small
children, he was so carried away by an unexpected windfall that he
lingered overlong in the nearby village, dispensing a royal
hospitality; in point of fact, he “got on a spree.” Two or three days
passed before he regained possession of himself. When at last he
reached home, he found his wife ill in bed and the children nearly
starved for lack of food. He said never a word, but walked out of the
cabin, tied himself to a tree, and was wildly horsewhipping himself
when the cries of the frightened family summoned the neighbors and he
was brought to reason. He never touched an intoxicating drop from that
day to his death.