A little after this Clemens went abroad with his family, and lived
several years in Germany. His letters still came, but at longer
intervals, and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably
broken. He would write me when something I had written pleased him, or
when something signal occurred to him, or some political or social
outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished to free his mind in pious
profanity. During this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia in
Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after coming home. In Berlin
also he had the honor of dining with the German Emperor at the table of a
cousin married to a high officer of the court. Clemens was a man to
enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take it as a delegated
recognition from the German people; but as coming from a rather cockahoop
sovereign who had as yet only his sovereignty to value himself upon, he
was not very proud of it. He expressed a quiet disdain of the event as
between the imperiality and himself, on whom it was supposed to confer
such glory, crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel. He was in
the same mood in his account of an English dinner many years before,
where there was a “little Scotch lord” present, to whom the English
tacitly referred Clemens’s talk, and laughed when the lord laughed, and
were grave when he failed to smile. Of all the men I have known he was
the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and liked the
flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way. He would not
go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men he loved
the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive
perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say,
and their pretty, temerarious defiances. He had, of course, the keenest
sense of what was truly dignified and truly undignified in people; but he
was not really interested in what we call society affairs; they scarcely
existed for him, though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful
fools who through some chance of birth or wealth hold themselves
different from other men.
Commonly he did not keep things to himself, especially dislikes and
condemnations. Upon most current events he had strong opinions, and he
uttered them strongly. After a while he was silent in them, but if you
tried him you found him in them still. He was tremendously worked up by
a certain famous trial, as most of us were who lived in the time of it.
He believed the accused guilty, but when we met some months after it was
over, and I tempted him to speak his mind upon it, he would only say. The
man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was
not going to do anything to renew his penalty. I found that very
curious, very delicate. His continued blame could not come to the
sufferer’s knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it.
He was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his resentments; or,
he had so spent himself in uttering them that he had literally nothing
more to say. You could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men
and he did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if
he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and
maranatha forever. Yet not forever, perhaps, for by and-by, after years,
he would be silent. There were two men, half a generation apart in their
succession, whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him,
and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even after they were out of the
world. He went farther than Heine, who said that he forgave his enemies,
but not till they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies;
their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a
cowardly attempt to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like
to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay. So he said, but no
doubt he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him.
He was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his
generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance,
a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from
others could quench; it had to burn itself out. He was eagerly and
lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in
any way to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably. In his
frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could
not, listen to reason. But if between the paroxysms he were confronted
with the facts he would own them, no matter how much they told against
him. At one period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him
with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling himself
up with wrath to be duly discharged on the editor’s head. Later, he
wrote me with a humorous joy in his mistake that Warner had advised him
to have the paper watched for these injuries. He had done so, and how
many mentions of him did I reckon he had found in three months? Just
two, and they were rather indifferent than unfriendly. So the paper was
acquitted, and the editor’s life was spared. The wretch never knew how
near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a
subsequent devotion to lasting infamy.
His memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and he liked to return
your friendliness with as loud a band of music as could be bought or
bribed for the occasion. All that you had to do was to signify that you
wanted his help. When my father was consul at Toronto during Arthur’s
administration, he fancied that his place was in danger, and he appealed
to me. In turn I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of his
friendship with Grant and Grant’s friendship with Arthur. I asked him to
write to Grant in my father’s behalf, but No, he answered me, I must come
to Hartford, and we would go on to New York together and see Grant
personally. This was before, and long before, Clemens became Grant’s
publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such
men could not help doing. Clemens made the appointment, and we went to
find Grant in his business office, that place where his business
innocence was afterward so betrayed. He was very simple and very
cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice
was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest
used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my
business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr.
Arthur; and he did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his
office, when he tired of it, with no urgence from above.
It is not irrelevant to Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding
himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could
make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked
constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature. At least he
talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest of the early Pacific Slope
humorists, whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby, when
they were fellow-cadets at West Point. It was mighty pretty, as Pepys
would say, to see the delicate deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and
the manly respect with which he listened. While Grant talked, his
luncheon was brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he
asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee which were served us
in a little room out of the office with about the same circumstance as at
a railroad refreshment-counter. The baked beans and coffee were of about
the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like
sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander,
or some other great Plutarchan captain. One of the highest satisfactions
of Clemens’s often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant.
It was his proud joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign a contract
for his book on certainly very good terms, and said to him that he would
himself publish the book and give him a percentage three times as large.
He said Grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably withdraw from
the negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore his scruples, and it
was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the author
a far larger check for his work than had ever been paid to an author
before. He valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred
moments in which their business brought him into the presence of the
slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was so befriending; and he
told me in words which surely lost none of their simple pathos through
his report how Grant described his suffering.
The prosperity, of this venture was the beginning of Clemens’s adversity,
for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation. The
young sculptor who had come back to him from Paris modelled a small bust
of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great loss,
and the success of Grant’s book tempted him to launch on publishing seas
where his bark presently foundered. The first and greatest of his
disasters was the Life of Pope Leo XIII, which he came to tell me of,
when he had imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation. He had no
words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast
its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded only by the
number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be translated into every
language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated
literally in every country of the globe, and Clemens’s book agents would
carry the prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends
of the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every
Catholic must, as he was a good Catholic, as he hoped to be saved. It
was a magnificent scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated
Clemens; it dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal defect in
it. We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often
when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved that
whether they could read or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to
read the life of the Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the
Church and issued to the world with every sanction from the Vatican. The
failure was incredible to Clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly
confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so
exuberantly jubilant.