It was in the early seventies that Mark Twain dropped into New York,
where there was already gathered a congenial group to meet and greet
him. John Hay, quoting old Jack Dade’s description of himself, was wont
to speak of this group as “of high aspirations and peregrinations.” It
radiated between Franklin Square, where Joseph W. Harper—“Joe
Brooklyn,” we called him—reigned in place of his uncle, Fletcher
Harper, the man of genius among the original Harper Brothers, and the
Lotos Club, then in Irving Place, and Delmonico’s, at the corner of
Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, with Sutherland’s in Liberty Street
for a downtown place of luncheon resort, not to forget Dorlon’s in
Fulton Market.
[Illustration: General Leonidas Polk—Lieutenant General C.S.A.—Killed
in Georgia June 14, 1864—P.E. Bishop of Louisiana]
The Harper contingent, beside its chief, embraced Tom Nast and William
A. Seaver, whom John Russell Young named “Papa Pendennis,” and pictured
as “a man of letters among men of the world and a man of the world
among men of letters,” a very apt phrase appropriated from Doctor
Johnson, and Major Constable, a giant, who looked like a dragoon and
not a bookman, yet had known Sir Walter Scott and was sprung from the
family of Edinburgh publishers. Bret Harte had but newly arrived from
California. Whitelaw Reid, though still subordinate to Greeley, was
beginning to make himself felt in journalism. John Hay played high
priest to the revels. Occasionally I made a pious pilgrimage to the
delightful shrine.
Truth to tell, it emulated rather the gods than the graces, though all
of us had literary leanings of one sort and another, especially late at
night; and Sam Bowles would come over from Springfield and Murat
Halstead from Cincinnati to join us. Howells, always something of a
prig, living in Boston, held himself at too high account; but often we
had Joseph Jefferson, then in the heyday of his career, with once in a
while Edwin Booth, who could not quite trust himself to go our gait.
The fine fellows we caught from oversea were innumerable, from the
elder Sothern and Sala and Yates to Lord Dufferin and Lord Houghton.
Times went very well those days, and whilst some looked on askance,
notably Curtis and, rather oddly, Stedman, and thought we were wasting
time and convivializing more than was good for us, we were mostly young
and hearty, ranging from thirty to five and forty years of age, with
amazing capabilities both for work and play, and I cannot recall that
any hurt to any of us came of it.
Although robustious, our fribbles were harmless enough—ebullitions of
animal spirit, sometimes perhaps of gaiety unguarded—though each shade,
treading the Celestian way, as most of them do, and recurring to those
Noctes Ambrosianæ, might e’en repeat to the other the words on a
memorable occasion addressed by Curran to Lord Avonmore:
_“We spent them not in toys or lust or wine; But search of deep
philosophy, Wit, eloquence and poesy— Arts which I loved, for they, my
friend, were thine.”_
V
Mark Twain was the life of every company and all occasions. I remember
a practical joke of his suggestion played upon Murat Halstead. A party
of us were supping after the theater at the old Brevoort House. A card
was brought to me from a reporter of the World. I was about to deny
myself, when Mark Twain said:
“Give it to me, I’ll fix it,” and left the table.
Presently he came to the door and beckoned me out.
“I represented myself as your secretary and told this man,” said he,
“that you were not here, but that if Mr. Halstead would answer just as
well I would fetch him. The fellow is as innocent as a lamb and doesn’t
know either of you. I am going to introduce you as Halstead and we’ll
have some fun.”
No sooner said than done. The reporter proved to be a little
bald-headed cherub newly arrived from the isle of dreams, and I lined
out to him a column or more of very hot stuff, reversing Halstead in
every opinion. I declared him in favor of paying the national debt in
greenbacks. Touching the sectional question, which was then the burning
issue of the time, I made the mock Halstead say: “The ‘bloody shirt’ is
only a kind of Pickwickian battle cry. It is convenient during
political campaigns and on election day. Perhaps you do not know that I
am myself of dyed-in-the-wool Southern and secession stock. My father
and grandfather came to Ohio from South Carolina just before I was
born. Naturally I have no sectional prejudices, but I live in
Cincinnati and I am a Republican.”
There was not a little more of the same sort. Just how it passed
through the World office I know not; but it actually appeared. On
returning to the table I told the company what Mark Twain and I had
done. They thought I was joking. Without a word to any of us, next day
Halstead wrote a note to the World repudiating the interview, and the
World printed his disclaimer with a line which said: “When Mr. Halstead
conversed with our reporter he had dined.” It was too good to keep. A
day or two later, John Hay wrote an amusing story for the Tribune,
which set Halstead right.
Mark Twain’s place in literature is not for me to fix. Some one has
called him “The Lincoln of letters.” That is striking, suggestive and
apposite. The genius of Clemens and the genius of Lincoln possessed a
kinship outside the circumstances of their early lives; the common lack
of tools to work with; the privations and hardships to be endured and
to overcome; the way ahead through an unblazed and trackless forest;
every footstep over a stumbling block and each effort saddled with a
handicap. But they got there, both of them, they got there, and mayhap
somewhere beyond the stars the light of their eyes is shining down upon
us even as, amid the thunders of a world tempest, we are not wholly
forgetful of them.