The occasions which brought us to New York together were not nearly so
frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given
him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men
present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet
old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist
across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving
the reasons why he thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the
character of Cromwell. The other was a modestly millioned rich man who
was then only beginning to amass the moneys afterward heaped so high, and
was still in the condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet
greater millionaire. His contribution to our gaiety was the verbatim
report of a call he had made upon William H. Vanderbilt, whom he had
found just about starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the
front hall, but who had stayed to receive the narrator. He had, in fact,
sat down on one of the trunks, and talked with the easiest friendliness,
and quite, we were given to infer, like an ordinary human being. Clemens
often kept on with some thread of the talk when we came away from a
dinner, but now he was silent, as if “high sorrowful and cloyed”; and it
was not till well afterward that I found he had noted the facts from the
bitterness with which he mocked the rich man, and the pity he expressed
for the actor.
He had begun before that to amass those evidences against mankind which
eventuated with him in his theory of what he called “the damned human
race.” This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind contempt to
which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them
in himself as well as in others. It was as mild a misanthropy, probably,
as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. But I believe it was
about the year 1900 that his sense of our perdition became insupportable
and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no
occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs. Clemens should have
found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the
reflection that now she should not hear so much about “the damned human
race.” He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of
overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and
her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how
it sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly
whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he
in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. When I
first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and I fancy he was
under a promise to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his
nerves with advancing years disabled him. Then it would be like him to
struggle with himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his
promise back, and it would be like her to give it back. His profanity
was the heritage of his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions
and under the duress of exigencies in which everybody swore about as
impersonally as he smoked. It is best to recognize the fact of it, and I
do so the more readily because I cannot suppose the Recording Angel
really minded it much more than that Guardian. Angel of his. It
probably grieved them about equally, but they could equally forgive it.
Nothing came of his pose regarding “the damned human race” except his
invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club. This was confined to four
persons who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their
indifference.
In the earlier days that I have more specially in mind one of the
questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human
motive was not selfish. We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest,
the holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish
origin. Pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from New
York to Hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of
a mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving
his mistress from fire or flood, of the hero’s courage in the field and
the martyr’s at the stake. Each he found springing from the unconscious
love of self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-sacrificer
would suffer in-forbearing the sacrifice. If we had any time left from
this inquiry that day, he must have devoted it to a high regret that
Napoleon did not carry out his purpose of invading England, for then he
would have destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or “reformed the lords,” as
it might be called now. He thought that would have been an incalculable
blessing to the English people and the world. Clemens was always
beautifully and unfalteringly a republican. None of his occasional
misgivings for America implicated a return to monarchy. Yet he felt
passionately the splendor of the English monarchy, and there was a time
when he gloried in that figurative poetry by which the king was phrased
as “the Majesty of England.” He rolled the words deep-throatedly out,
and exulted in their beauty as if it were beyond any other glory of the
world. He read, or read at, English history a great deal, and one of the
by-products of his restless invention was a game of English Kings (like
the game of Authors) for children. I do not know whether he ever
perfected this, but I am quite sure it was not put upon the market. Very
likely he brought it to a practicable stage, and then tired of it, as he
was apt to do in the ultimation of his vehement undertakings.