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.