There came a time when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime
became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with
indescribable violence. Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots
whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his
withdrawal from the platform. The Authors’ Readings when they had won
their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him. Reading from
one’s book was not so bad as giving a lecture written for a lecture’s
purpose, and he was willing at last to compromise. He had a magnificent
scheme for touring the country with Aldrich and Mr. G. W. Cable and
myself, in a private car, with a cook of our own, and every facility for
living on the fat of the land. We should read only four times a week, in
an entertainment that should not last more than an hour and a half. He
would be the impresario, and would guarantee us others at least
seventy-five dollars a day, and pay every expense of the enterprise,
which he provisionally called the Circus, himself. But Aldrich and I
were now no longer in those earlier thirties when we so cheerfully
imagined ‘Memorable Murders’ for subscription publication; we both
abhorred public appearances, and, at any rate, I was going to Europe for
a year. So the plan fell through except as regarded Mr. Cable, who, in
his way, was as fine a performer as Clemens, and could both read and sing
the matter of his books. On a far less stupendous scale they two made
the rounds of the great lecturing circuit together. But I believe a
famous lecture-manager had charge of them and travelled with them.
He was a most sanguine man, a most amiable person, and such a believer in
fortune that Clemens used to say of him, as he said of one of his early
publishers, that you could rely upon fifty per cent. of everything he
promised. I myself many years later became a follower of this hopeful
prophet, and I can testify that in my case at least he was able to keep
ninety-nine, and even a hundred, per cent. of his word. It was I who was
much nearer failing of mine, for I promptly began to lose sleep from the
nervous stress of my lecturing and from the gratifying but killing
receptions afterward, and I was truly in that state from insomnia which
Clemens recognized in the brief letter I got from him in the Western
city, after half a dozen wakeful nights. He sardonically congratulated
me on having gone into “the lecture field,” and then he said: “I know
where you are now. You are in hell.”
It was this perdition which he re-entered when he undertook that
round-the-world lecturing tour for the payment of the debts left to him
by the bankruptcy of his firm in the publishing business. It was not
purely perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only one-half
of him, the author-half; for the actor-half it was paradise. The author
who takes up lecturing without the ability to give histrionic support to
the literary reputation which he brings to the crude test of his reader’s
eyes and ears, invokes a peril and a misery unknown to the lecturer who
has made his first public from the platform. Clemens was victorious on
the platform from the beginning, and it would be folly to pretend that he
did not exult in his triumphs there. But I suppose, with the wearing
nerves of middle life, he hated more and more the personal swarming of
interest upon him, and all the inevitable clatter of the thing. Yet he
faced it, and he labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the
uttermost farthing of debts which he had not knowingly contracted, the
debts of his partners who had meant well and done ill, not because they
were evil, but because they were unwise, and as unfit for their work as
he was. “Pay what thou owest.” That is right, even when thou owest it
by the error of others, and even when thou owest it to a bank, which had
not lent it from love of thee, but in the hard line of business and thy
need.
Clemens’s behavior in this matter redounded to his glory among the
nations of the whole earth, and especially in this nation, so wrapped in
commerce and so little used to honor among its many thieves. He had
behaved like Walter Scott, as millions rejoiced to know, who had not
known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens. No
doubt it will be put to his credit in the books of the Recording Angel,
but what the Judge of all the Earth will say of it at the Last Day there
is no telling. I should not be surprised if He accounted it of less
merit than some other things that Clemens did and was: less than his
abhorrence of the Spanish War, and the destruction of the South-African
republics, and our deceit of the Filipinos, and his hate of slavery, and
his payment of his portion of our race’s debt to the race of the colored
student whom he saw through college, and his support of a poor artist for
three years in Paris, and his loan of opportunity to the youth who became
the most brilliant of our actor-dramatists, and his eager pardon of the
thoughtless girl who was near paying the penalty of her impertinence with
the loss of her place, and his remembering that the insolent brakeman got
so few dollars a month, and his sympathy for working-men standing up to
money in their Unions, and even his pity for the wounded bird throbbing
out its little life on the grass for the pleasure of the cruel fool who
shot it. These and the thousand other charities and beneficences in
which he abounded, openly or secretly, may avail him more than the
discharge of his firm’s liabilities with the Judge of all the Earth, who
surely will do right, but whose measures and criterions no man knows, and
I least of all men.
He made no great show of sympathy with people in their anxieties, but it
never failed, and at a time when I lay sick for many weeks his letters
were of comfort to those who feared I might not rise again. His hand was
out in help for those who needed help, and in kindness for those who
needed kindness. There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long,
long drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he
went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a
lengthening chain from his early days in Missouri--a most inadequate
person, in whose vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was
almost too deep for tears. He bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and
silently smoked away the sense of it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in
his slippered feet, sombrely musing, sombrely swearing. But he knew he
had done the right, the kind thing, and he was content. He came the
whole way from Hartford to go with me to a friendless play of mine, which
Alessandro Salvini was giving in a series of matinees to houses never
enlarging themselves beyond the count of the brave two hundred who sat it
through, and he stayed my fainting spirit with a cheer beyond flagons,
joining me in my joke at the misery of it, and carrying the fun farther.
Before that he had come to witness the aesthetic suicide of Anna
Dickinson, who had been a flaming light of the political platform in the
war days, and had been left by them consuming in a hapless ambition for
the theatre. The poor girl had had a play written especially for her,
and as Anne Boleyn she ranted and exhorted through the five acts, drawing
ever nearer the utter defeat of the anticlimax. We could hardly look at
each other for pity, Clemens sitting there in the box he had taken, with
his shaggy head out over the corner and his slippered feet curled under
him: he either went to a place in his slippers or he carried them with
him, and put them on as soon as he could put off his boots. When it was
so that we could not longer follow her failure and live, he began to talk
of the absolute close of her career which the thing was, and how probably
she had no conception that it was the end. He philosophized the
mercifulness of the fact, and of the ignorance of most of us, when
mortally sick or fatally wounded. We think it is not the end, because we
have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end. Some can push
by the awful hour and live again, but for Anna Dickinson there could be,
and was, no such palingenesis. Of course we got that solemn joy out of
reading her fate aright which is the compensation of the wise spectator
in witnessing the inexorable doom of others.