Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what
he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck
his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write
me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fulness and a lavish
dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages, so that
I have now perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters. They will no
doubt some day be published, but I am not even referring to them in these
records, which I think had best come to the reader with an old man’s
falterings and uncertainties. With his frequent absences and my own
abroad, and the intrusion of calamitous cares, the rich tide of his
letters was more and more interrupted. At times it almost ceased, and
then it would come again, a torrent. In the very last weeks of his life
he burst forth, and, though too weak himself to write, he dictated his
rage with me for recommending to him a certain author whose truthfulness
he could not deny, but whom he hated for his truthfulness to sordid and
ugly conditions. At heart Clemens was romantic, and he would have had
the world of fiction stately and handsome and whatever the real world was
not; but he was not romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an artist
not to wish his own work to show life as he had seen it. I was preparing
to rap him back for these letters when I read that he had got home to
die; he would have liked the rapping back.
He liked coming to Boston, especially for those luncheons and dinners in
which the fertile hospitality of our publisher, Osgood, abounded. He
dwelt equidistant from Boston and New York, and he had special friends in
New York, but he said he much preferred coming to Boston; of late years
he never went there, and he had lost the habit of it long before he came
home from Europe to live in New York. At these feasts, which were often
of after-dinner-speaking measure, he could always be trusted for
something of amazing delightfulness. Once, when Osgood could think of no
other occasion for a dinner, he gave himself a birthday dinner, and asked
his friends and authors. The beautiful and splendid trooper-like blaring
was there, and I recall how in the long, rambling speech in which Clemens
went round the table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting
Osgood with thanks for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he
congratulated blaring upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic
control of municipal governments. He said that if there was a plan for
draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water
in the down-hill course of the sewers, blaring would come with a plan to
drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the Common
Council without opposition. It is hard to say whether the time was
gladder at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which Osgood and
Aldrich and I foregathered with him and talked the afternoon away till
well toward the winter twilight.
He was a great figure, and the principal figure, at one of the first of
the now worn-out Authors’ Readings, which was held in the Boston Museum
to aid a Longfellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons Lathrop
(everybody seems to be late in these sad days) who imagined the reading,
but when it came to a price for seats I can always claim the glory of
fixing it at five dollars. The price if not the occasion proved
irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost
gallery. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens’s turn to read he
introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give,
but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which
are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded
of Darwin’s delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long
day’s exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a
volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him,
and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt
secure of a good night’s rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which
Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be
glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom
science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every
breast to burst forth, he began to read. It was curious to watch his
triumph with the house. His carefully studied effects would reach the
first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the
standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to
the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it
fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. He was
such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple
instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately
intended from his unerring knowledge. He was the most consummate public
performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him
lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he
probably would not have been on the stage. He was fond of private
theatricals, and liked to play in them with his children and their
friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his as ‘The Prince and the
Pauper;’ but I never saw him in any of these scenes. When he read his
manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary,
recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that an actor added fully
half to the character the author created. With my own hurried and
half-hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on him from
unprinted chapters (say, out of ‘The Undiscovered Country’ or ‘A Modern
Instance’) he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything. He was
realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so.
What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine,
and we ought to use every genuine art to that end.