Metropolitan Club, New York City, that Col. George Harvey, president of
the Harper Company, gave Mark Twain a dinner in celebration of his
sixty-seventh birthday. The actual date fell three days later; but that
would bring it on Sunday, and to give it on Saturday night would be more
than likely to carry it into Sabbath morning, and so the 27th was chosen.
Colonel Harvey himself presided, and Howells led the speakers with a
poem, "A Double-Barreled Sonnet to Mark Twain," which closed:
Still, to have everything beyond cavil right,
We will dine with you here till Sunday night.
Thomas Brackett Reed followed with what proved to be the last speech he
would ever make, as it was also one of his best. All the speakers did
well that night, and they included some of the country's foremost in
oratory: Chauncey Depew, St. Clair McKelway, Hamilton Mabie, and Wayne
MacVeagh. Dr. Henry van Dyke and John Kendrick Bangs read poems. The
chairman constantly kept the occasion from becoming too serious by
maintaining an attitude of "thinking ambassador" for the guest of the
evening, gently pushing Clemens back in his seat when he attempted to
rise and expressing for him an opinion of each of the various tributes.
"The limit has been reached," he announced at the close of Dr. van Dyke's
poem. "More that is better could not be said. Gentlemen, Mr. Clemens."
It is seldom that Mark Twain has made a better after-dinner speech than
he delivered then. He was surrounded by some of the best minds of the
nation, men assembled to do him honor. They expected much of him--to
Mark Twain always an inspiring circumstance. He was greeted with cheers
and hand-clapping that came volley after volley, and seemed never ready
to end. When it had died away at last he stood waiting a little in the
stillness for his voice; then he said, "I think I ought to be allowed to
talk as long as I want to," and again the storm broke.
It is a speech not easy to abridge--a finished and perfect piece of
after-dinner eloquence,--[The "Sixty-seventh Birthday Speech" entire is
included in the volume Mark Twain's Speeches.]--full of humorous stories
and moving references to old friends--to Hay; and Reed, and Twichell, and
Howells, and Rogers, the friends he had known so long and loved so well.
He told of his recent trip to his boyhood home, and how he had stood with
John Briggs on Holliday's Hill and they had pointed out the haunts of
their youth. Then at the end he paid a tribute to the companion of his
home, who could not be there to share his evening's triumph. This
peroration--a beautiful heart-offering to her and to those that had
shared in long friendship--demands admission:
Now, there is one invisible guest here. A part of me is not
present; the larger part, the better part, is yonder at her home;
that is my wife, and she has a good many personal friends here, and
I think it won't distress any one of them to know that, although she
is going to be confined to her bed for many months to come from that
nervous prostration, there is not any danger and she is coming along
very well--and I think it quite appropriate that I should speak of
her. I knew her for the first time just in the same year that I
first knew John Hay and Tom Reed and Mr. Twichell--thirty-six years
ago--and she has been the best friend I have ever had, and that is
saying a good deal--she has reared me--she and Twichell together
--and what I am I owe to them. Twichell--why, it is such a pleasure
to look upon Twichell's face! For five and twenty years I was under
the Rev. Mr. Twichell's tuition, I was in his pastorate occupying a
pew in his church and held him in due reverence. That man is full
of all the graces that go to make a person companionable and
beloved; and wherever Twichell goes to start a church the people
flock there to buy the land; they find real estate goes up all
around the spot, and the envious and the thoughtful always try to
get Twichell to move to their neighborhood and start a church; and
wherever you see him go you can go and buy land there with
confidence, feeling sure that there will be a double price for you
before very long.
I have tried to do good in this world, and it is marvelous in how
many different ways I have done good, and it is comfortable to
reflect--now, there's Mr. Rogers--just out of the affection I bear
that man many a time I have given him points in finance that he had
never thought of--and if he could lay aside envy, prejudice, and
superstition, and utilize those ideas in his business, it would make
a difference in his bank-account.
Well, I liked the poetry. I liked all the speeches and the poetry,
too. I liked Dr. van Dyke's poem. I wish I could return thanks in
proper measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your
feelings to pay me compliments; some were merited and some you
overlooked, it is true; and Colonel Harvey did slander every one of
you, and put things into my mouth that I never said, never thought
of at all.
And now my wife and I, out of our single heart, return you our
deepest and most grateful thanks, and--yesterday was her birthday.
The sixty-seventh birthday dinner was widely celebrated by the press, and
newspaper men generally took occasion to pay brilliant compliments to
Mark Twain. Arthur Brisbane wrote editorially:
For more than a generation he has been the Messiah of a genuine
gladness and joy to the millions of three continents.
It was little more than a week later that one of the old friends he had
mentioned, Thomas Brackett Reed, apparently well and strong that birthday
evening, passed from the things of this world. Clemens felt his death
keenly, and in a "good-by" which he wrote for Harper's Weekly he said:
His was a nature which invited affection--compelled it, in fact--and
met it half-way. Hence, he was "Tom" to the most of his friends and
to half of the nation . . . .
I cannot remember back to a time when he was not "Tom" Reed to me,
nor to a time when he could have been offended at being so addressed
by me. I cannot remember back to a time when I could let him alone
in an after-dinner speech if he was present, nor to a time when he
did not take my extravagance concerning him and misstatements about
him in good part, nor yet to a time when he did not pay them back
with usury when his turn came. The last speech he made was at my
birthday dinner at the end of November, when naturally I was his
text; my last word to him was in a letter the next day; a day later
I was illustrating a fantastic article on art with his portrait
among others--a portrait now to be laid reverently away among the
jests that begin in humor and end in pathos. These things happened
only eight days ago, and now he is gone from us, and the nation is
speaking of him as one who was. It seems incredible, impossible.
Such a man, such a friend, seems to us a permanent possession; his
vanishing from our midst is unthinkable, as was the vanishing of the
Campanile, that had stood for a thousand years and was turned to
dust in a moment.
The appreciation closes:
I have only wished to say how fine and beautiful was his life and
character, and to take him by the hand and say good-by, as to a
fortunate friend who has done well his work and gees a pleasant
journey.
CCXXV
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CONTROVERSIES
The North American Review for December (1902) contained an instalment of
the Christian Science series which Mark Twain had written in Vienna
several years before. He had renewed his interest in the doctrine, and
his admiration for Mrs. Eddy's peculiar abilities and his antagonism
toward her had augmented in the mean time. Howells refers to the "mighty
moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction
of Christian Science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all,
expected to destroy":
He believed that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church
was as perfect as the Roman Church, and destined to be more
formidable in its control of the minds of men . . . .
An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not.
only his admiration for the masterly policy of the Christian Science
hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers
to be tried on his friends and family if they wished it. He had a
tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the
newer sorts of scienticians, but he seemed to base his faith in them
largely upon the failure of the regulars, rather than upon their own
successes, which also he believed in. He was recurrently, but not
insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when
you were going to try the familiar medicines.
Clemens never had any quarrel with the theory of Christian Science or
mental healing, or with any of the empiric practices. He acknowledged
good in all of them, and he welcomed most of them in preference to
materia medica. It is true that his animosity for the founder of the
Christian Science cult sometimes seems to lap over and fringe the
religion itself; but this is apparent rather than real. Furthermore, he
frequently expressed a deep obligation which humanity owed to the founder
of the faith, in that she had organized a healing element ignorantly and
indifferently employed hitherto. His quarrel with Mrs. Eddy lay in the
belief that she herself, as he expressed it, was "a very unsound
Christian Scientist."
I believe she has a serious malady--self-edification--and that it
will be well to have one of the experts demonstrate over her. [But
he added]: Closely examined, painstakingly studied, she is easily
the most interesting person on the planet, and in several ways as
easily the most extraordinary woman that was ever born upon it.
Necessarily, the forces of Christian Science were aroused by these
articles, and there were various replies, among them, one by the founder
herself, a moderate rejoinder in her usual literary form.
"Mrs. Eddy in Error," in the North American Review for April, 1903,
completed what Clemens had to say on the matter for this time.
He was putting together a book on the subject, comprised of his various
published papers and some added chapters. It would not be a large
volume, and he offered to let his Christian Science opponents share it
with him, stating their side of the case. Mr. William D. McCrackan, one
of the church's chief advocates, was among those invited to participate.
McCrackan and Clemens, from having begun as enemies, had become quite
friendly, and had discussed their differences face to face at
considerable length. Early in the controversy Clemens one night wrote
McCrackan a pretty savage letter. He threw it on the hall table for
mailing, but later got out of bed and slipped down-stairs to get it. It
was too late--the letters had been gathered up and mailed. Next evening
a truly Christian note came from McCrackan, returning the hasty letter,
which he said he was sure the writer would wish to recall. Their
friendship began there. For some reason, however, the collaborated
volume did not materialize. In the end, publication was delayed a number
of years, by which time Clemens's active interest was a good deal
modified, though the practice itself never failed to invite his
attention.
Howells refers to his anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the
postponement of the book, and these Clemens vented at the time in another
manuscript entitled, "Eddypus," an imaginary history of a thousand years
hence, when Eddyism should rule the world. By that day its founder would
have become a deity, and the calendar would be changed to accord with her
birth. It was not publishable matter, and really never intended as such.
It was just one of the things which Mark Twain wrote to relieve mental
pressure.
CCXXVI
"WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL?"
The Christmas number of Harper's Magazine for 1902 contained the story,
"Was it Heaven? or Hell?" and it immediately brought a flood of letters
to its author from grateful readers on both sides of the ocean. An
Englishman wrote: "I want to thank you for writing so pathetic and so
profoundly true a story"; and an American declared it to be the best
short story ever written. Another letter said:
I have learned to love those maiden liars--love and weep over them
--then put them beside Dante's Beatrice in Paradise.
There were plenty of such letters; but there was one of a different sort.
It was a letter from a man who had but recently gone through almost
precisely the experience narrated in the tale. His dead daughter had
even borne the same name--Helen. She had died of typhus while her mother
was prostrated with the same malady, and the deception had been
maintained in precisely the same way, even to the fictitiously written
letters. Clemens replied to this letter, acknowledging the striking
nature of the coincidence it related, and added that, had he invented the
story, he would have believed it a case of mental telegraphy.
I was merely telling a true story just as it had been told to me by
one who well knew the mother and the daughter & all the beautiful &
pathetic details. I was living in the house where it had happened,
three years before, & I put it on paper at once while it was fresh
in my mind, & its pathos still straining at my heartstrings.
Clemens did not guess that the coincidences were not yet complete, that
within a month the drama of the tale would be enacted in his own home. In
his note-book, under the date of December 24(1902), he wrote:
Jean was hit with a chill: Clara was completing her watch in her
mother's room and there was no one able to force Jean to go to bed.
As a result she is pretty ill to-day-fever & high temperature.
Three days later he added:
It was pneumonia. For 5 days jean's temperature ranged between 103
& 104 2/5, till this morning, when it got down to 101. She looks
like an escaped survivor of a forest fire. For 6 days now my story
in the Christmas Harper's "Was it Heaven? or Hell?"--has been
enacted in this household. Every day Clara & the nurses have lied
about Jean to her mother, describing the fine times she is having
outdoors in the winter sports.
That proved a hard, trying winter in the Clemens home, and the burden of
it fell chiefly, indeed almost entirely, upon Clara Clemens. Mrs.
Clemens became still more frail, and no other member of the family, not
even her husband, was allowed to see her for longer than the briefest
interval. Yet the patient was all the more anxious to know the news, and
daily it had to be prepared--chiefly invented--for her comfort. In an
account which Clemens once set down of the "Siege and Season of
Unveracity," as he called it, he said:
Clara stood a daily watch of three or four hours, and hers was a
hard office indeed. Daily she sealed up in her heart a dozen
dangerous truths, and thus saved her mother's life and hope and
happiness with holy lies. She had never told her mother a lie in
her life before, and I may almost say that she never told her a
truth afterward. It was fortunate for us all that Clara's
reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother's
mind. It was our daily protection from disaster. The mother never
doubted Clara's word. Clara could tell her large improbabilities
without exciting any suspicion, whereas if I tried to market even a
small and simple one the case would have been different. I was
never able to get a reputation like Clara's. Mrs. Clemens
questioned Clara every day concerning Jean's health, spirits,
clothes, employments, and amusements, and how she was enjoying
herself; and Clara furnished the information right along in minute
detail--every word of it false, of course. Every day she had to
tell how Jean dressed, and in time she got so tired of using Jean's
existing clothes over and over again, and trying to get new effects
out of them, that finally, as a relief to her hard-worked invention,
she got to adding imaginary clothes to Jean's wardrobe, and probably
would have doubled it and trebled it if a warning note in her
mother's comments had not admonished her that she was spending more
money on these spectral gowns and things than the family income
justified.
Some portions of detailed accounts of Clara's busy days of this period,
as written at the time by Clemens to Twichell and to Mrs. Crane, are
eminently worth preserving. To Mrs. Crane:
Clara does not go to her Monday lesson in New York today [her mother
having seemed not so well through the night], but forgets that fact
and enters her mother's room (where she has no business to be)
toward train-time dressed in a wrapper.
LIVY. Why, Clara, aren't you going to your lesson?
CLARA (almost caught). Yes.
L. In that costume?
CL. Oh no.
L. Well, you can't make your train; it's impossible.
CL. I know, but I'm going to take the other one.
L. Indeed that won't do--you'll be ever so much too late for
your lesson.
CL. No, the lesson-time has been put an hour later.
L. (satisfied, then suddenly). But, Clara, that train and the late
lesson together will make you late to Mrs. Hapgood's luncheon.
CL. No, the train leaves fifteen minutes earlier than it used to.
L. (satisfied). Tell Mrs. Hapgood, etc., etc., etc. (which Clara
promises to do). Clara, dear, after the luncheon--I hate to put
this on you--but could you do two or three little shopping-errands
for me?
CL. Oh, it won't trouble me a bit-I can do it. (Takes a list of
the things she is to buy-a list which she will presently hand to
another.)
At 3 or 4 P.M. Clara takes the things brought from New York,
studies over her part a little, then goes to her mother's room.
LIVY. It's very good of you, dear. Of course, if I had known it
was going to be so snowy and drizzly and sloppy I wouldn't have
asked you to buy them. Did you get wet?
CL. Oh, nothing to hurt.
L. You took a cab both ways?
CL. Not from the station to the lesson-the weather was good enough
till that was over.
L. Well, now, tell me everything Mrs. Hapgood said.
Clara tells her a long yarn-avoiding novelties and surprises and
anything likely to inspire questions difficult to answer; and of
course detailing the menu, for if it had been the feeding of the
5,000 Livy would have insisted on knowing what kind of bread it was
and how the fishes were served. By and by, while talking of
something else:
LIVY. Clams!--in the end of December. Are you sure it was clams?
CL. I didn't say cl---I meant Blue Points.
L. (tranquilized). It seemed odd. What is Jean doing?
CL. She said she was going to do a little typewriting.
L. Has she been out to-day?
CL. Only a moment, right after luncheon. She was determined to go
out again, but----
L. How did you know she was out?
CL. (saving herself in time). Katie told me. She was determined
to go out again in the rain and snow, but I persuaded her to stay
in.
L. (with moving and grateful admiration). Clara, you are
wonderful! the wise watch you keep over Jean, and the influence you
have over her; it's so lovely of you, and I tied here and can't take
care of her myself. (And she goes on with these undeserved praises
till Clara is expiring with shame.)
To Twichell:
I am to see Livy a moment every afternoon until she has another bad
night; and I stand in dread, for with all my practice I realize that
in a sudden emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar, whereas a fine
alert and capable emergency liar is the only sort that is worth
anything in a sick-chamber.
Now, Joe, just see what reputation can do. All Clara's life she has
told Livy the truth and now the reward comes; Clara lies to her
three and a half hours every day, and Livy takes it all at par,
whereas even when I tell her a truth it isn't worth much without
corroboration . . . .
Soon my brief visit is due. I've just been up listening at Livy's
door.
5 P.M. A great disappointment. I was sitting outside Livy's door
waiting. Clara came out a minute ago and said L ivy is not so well,
and the nurse can't let me see her to-day.
That pathetic drama was to continue in some degree for many a long month.
All that winter and spring Mrs. Clemens kept but a frail hold on life.
Clemens wrote little, and refused invitations everywhere he could. He
spent his time largely in waiting for the two-minute period each day when
he could stand at the bed-foot and say a few words to the invalid, and he
confined his writing mainly to the comforting, affectionate messages
which he was allowed to push under her door. He was always waiting there
long before the moment he was permitted to enter. Her illness and her
helplessness made manifest what Howells has fittingly characterized as
his "beautiful and tender loyalty to her, which was the most moving
quality of his most faithful soul."
CCXXVII
THE SECOND RIVERDALE WINTER
Most of Mark Twain's stories have been dramatized at one time or another,
and with more or less success. He had two plays going that winter, one
of them the little "Death Disk," which--in story form had appeared a year
before in Harper's Magazine. It was put on at the Carnegie Lyceum with
considerable effect, but it was not of sufficient importance to warrant a
long continuance.
Another play of that year was a dramatization of Huckleberry Finn, by Lee
Arthur. This was played with a good deal of success in Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and elsewhere, the receipts ranging from three hundred to
twenty-one hundred dollars per night, according to the weather and
locality. Why the play was discontinued is not altogether apparent;
certainly many a dramatic enterprise has gone further, faring worse.
Huck in book form also had been having adventures a little earlier, in
being tabooed on account of his morals by certain librarians of Denver
and Omaha. It was years since Huck had been in trouble of that sort, and
he acquired a good deal of newspaper notoriety in consequence.
Certain entries in Mark Twain's note-book reveal somewhat of his life and
thought at this period. We find such entries as this:
Saturday, January 3, 1903. The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity,
ostentation, arrogance, tyranny.
Sunday, January 4, 1903. The offspring of poverty: Greed,
sordidness, envy, hate, malice, cruelty, meanness, lying, shirking,
cheating, stealing, murder.
Monday, February 2, 1903. 33d wedding anniversary. I was allowed
to see Livy 5 minutes this morning in honor of the day. She makes
but little progress toward recovery, still there is certainly some,
we are sure.
Sunday, March 1, 1903. We may not doubt that society in heaven
consists mainly of undesirable persons.
Thursday, March 19, 1903. Susy's birthday. She would be 31 now.
The family illnesses, which presently included an allotment for himself,
his old bronchitis, made him rage more than ever at the imperfections of
the species which could be subject to such a variety of ills. Once he
wrote:
Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
And again:
Adam, man's benefactor--he gave him all that he has ever received
that was worth having--death.
The Riverdale home was in reality little more than a hospital that
spring. Jean had scarcely recovered her physical strength when she was
attacked by measles, and Clara also fell a victim to the infection.
Fortunately Mrs. Clemens's health had somewhat improved.
It was during this period that Clemens formulated his eclectic
therapeutic doctrine. Writing to Twichell April 4, 1903, he said:
Livy does make a little progress these past 3 or 4 days, progress
which is visible to even the untrained eye. The physicians are
doing good work for her, but my notion is, that no art of healing is
the best for all ills. I should distribute the ailments around:
surgery cases to the surgeon; lupus to the actinic-ray specialist;
nervous prostration to the Christian Scientist; most ills to the
allopath & the homeopath; & (in my own particular case) rheumatism,
gout, & bronchial attack to the osteopathist.
He had plenty of time to think and to read during those weeks of
confinement, and to rage, and to write when he felt the need of that
expression, though he appears to have completed not much for print beyond
his reply to Mrs. Eddy, already mentioned, and his burlesque,
"Instructions in Art," with pictures by himself, published in the
Metropolitan for April and May.