MY DEAR SISTER,--I had no idea that Charley's case was so serious. I
knew it was bad, and persistent, but I was not aware of the full size of
the matter.
I have just been writing to a friend in Hartford' who treated what
I imagine was a similar case surgically last fall, and produced a
permanent cure. If this is a like case, Charley must go to him.
If relief fails there, he must take the required rest, whether the
business can stand it or not.
It is most pleasant to hear such prosperous accounts of Sam and Mary, I
do not see how Sam could well be more advantageously fixed. He can grow
up with that paper, and achieve a successful life.
It is not all holiday here with Susie and Clara this time. They have to
put in some little time every day on their studies. Jean thinks she is
studying too, but I don't know what it is unless it is the horses;
she spends the day under their heels in the stables--and that is but a
continuation of her Hartford system of culture.
With love from us all to you all.
Affectionately
SAM.
Mark Twain had a few books that he read regularly every year or two.
Among these were 'Pepys's Diary', Suetonius's 'Lives of the Twelve
Caesars', and Thomas Carlyle's 'French Revolution'. He had a passion for
history, biography, and personal memoirs of any sort. In his early life
he had cared very little for poetry, but along in the middle eighties
he somehow acquired a taste for Browning and became absorbed in it. A
Browning club assembled as often as once a week at the Clemens home in
Hartford to listen to his readings of the master. He was an impressive
reader, and he carefully prepared himself for these occasions,
indicating by graduated underscorings, the exact values he wished to
give to words and phrases. Those were memorable gatherings, and they
must have continued through at least two winters. It is one of the
puzzling phases of Mark Twain's character that, notwithstanding his
passion for direct and lucid expression, he should have found pleasure
in the poems of Robert Browning.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
ELMIRA, Aug. 22, '87.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man
while he sleeps. When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871,
I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it
differently being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and
environment (and Taine and St. Simon): and now I lay the book down
once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale,
characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such gospel
so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences.
People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did
at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so.
It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens's or
Scott's books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look at
the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance
of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination
call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn't
altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.
Well, that's loss. To have house and Bible shrink so, under the
disillusioning corrected angle, is loss-for a moment. But there are
compensations. You tilt the tube skyward and bring planets and comets
and corona flames a hundred and fifty thousand miles high into the
field. Which I see you have done, and found Tolstoi. I haven't got him
in focus yet, but I've got Browning....
Ys Ever
MARK.
Mention has been made already of Mark Twain's tendency to
absentmindedness. He was always forgetting engagements, or getting
them wrong. Once he hurried to an afternoon party, and finding the
mistress of the house alone, sat down and talked to her comfortably
for an hour or two, not remembering his errand at all. It was only
when he reached home that he learned that the party had taken place
the week before. It was always dangerous for him to make
engagements, and he never seemed to profit by sorrowful experience.
We, however, may profit now by one of his amusing apologies.
*****
To Mrs. Grover Cleveland, in Washington:
HARTFORD, Nov. 6, 1887.
MY DEAR MADAM,--I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this
house of ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run
itself without the help of the major half it gets aground. Last night
when I was offered the opportunity to assist you in the throwing open
the Warner brothers superb benefaction in Bridgeport to those fortunate
women, I naturally appreciated the honor done me, and promptly seized my
chance. I had an engagement, but the circumstances washed it out of
my mind. If I had only laid the matter before the major half of the
administration on the spot, there would have been no blunder; but
I never thought of that. So when I did lay it before her, later, I
realized once more that it will not do for the literary fraction of a
combination to try to manage affairs which properly belong in the office
of the business bulk of it. I suppose the President often acts just like
that: goes and makes an impossible promise, and you never find it out
until it is next to impossible to break it up and set things
straight again. Well, that is just our way, exactly-one half of the
administration always busy getting the family into trouble, and the
other half busy getting it out again. And so we do seem to be all pretty
much alike, after all. The fact is, I had forgotten that we were to have
a dinner party on that Bridgeport date--I thought it was the next day:
which is a good deal of an improvement for me, because I am more used
to being behind a day or two than ahead. But that is just the difference
between one end of this kind of an administration and the other end of
it, as you have noticed, yourself--the other end does not forget these
things. Just so with a funeral; if it is the man's funeral, he is most
always there, of course--but that is no credit to him, he wouldn't be
there if you depended on him to remember about it; whereas, if on the
other hand--but I seem to have got off from my line of argument somehow;
never mind about the funeral. Of course I am not meaning to say
anything against funerals--that is, as occasions--mere occasions--for as
diversions I don't think they amount to much But as I was saying--if you
are not busy I will look back and see what it was I was saying.
I don't seem to find the place; but anyway she was as sorry as ever
anybody could be that I could not go to Bridgeport, but there was
no help for it. And I, I have been not only sorry but very sincerely
ashamed of having made an engagement to go without first making sure
that I could keep it, and I do not know how to apologize enough for my
heedless breach of good manners.
With the sincerest respect,
S. L. CLEMENS.
Samuel Clemens was one of the very few authors to copyright a book
in England before the enactment of the international copyright law.
As early as 1872 he copyrighted 'Roughing It' in England, and
piratical publishers there respected his rights. Finally, in 1887,
the inland revenue office assessed him with income tax, which he
very willingly paid, instructing his London publishers, Chatto &
Windus, to pay on the full amount he had received from them. But
when the receipt for his taxes came it was nearly a yard square with
due postage of considerable amount. Then he wrote:
*****
To Mr. Chatto, of Chatto & Windus, in London:
HARTFORD, Dec. 5, '87.
MY DEAR CHATTO,--Look here, I don't mind paying the tax, but don't you
let the Inland Revenue Office send me any more receipts for it, for the
postage is something perfectly demoralizing. If they feel obliged to
print a receipt on a horse-blanket, why don't they hire a ship and send
it over at their own expense?
Wasn't it good that they caught me out with an old book instead of a new
one? The tax on a new book would bankrupt a body. It was my purpose to
go to England next May and stay the rest of the year, but I've found
that tax office out just in time. My new book would issue in March,
and they would tax the sale in both countries. Come, we must get up a
compromise somehow. You go and work in on the good side of those revenue
people and get them to take the profits and give me the tax. Then I will
come over and we will divide the swag and have a good time.
I wish you to thank Mr. Christmas for me; but we won't resist. The
country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me.
Sincerely Yours
S. L. CLEMENS.
Another English tax assessment came that year, based on the report
that it was understood that he was going to become an English
resident, and had leased Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year.
Clemens wrote his publishers: “I will explain that all that about
Buckenham Hall was an English newspaper's mistake. I was not in
England, and if I had been I wouldn't have been at Buckenham Hall,
anyway, but at Buckingham Palace, or I would have endeavored to find
out the reason why.” Clemens made literature out of this tax
experience. He wrote an open letter to Her Majesty Queen Victoria.
Such a letter has no place in this collection. It was published in
the “Drawer” of Harper's Magazine, December, 1887, and is now
included in the uniform edition of his works under the title of,
“A Petition to the Queen of England.”
From the following letter, written at the end of the year, we gather
that the type-setter costs were beginning to make a difference in
the Clemens economies.
*****
To Mrs. Moffett, in Fredonia:
HARTFORD, Dec. 18, '87.
DEAR PAMELA,--will you take this $15 and buy some candy or some other
trifle for yourself and Sam and his wife to remember that we remember
you, by?
If we weren't a little crowded this year by the typesetter, I'd send a
check large enough to buy a family Bible or some other useful thing like
that. However we go on and on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at
$3,000 a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the
first seventeen months, when the bill only averaged $2,000, and promised
to take a thousand years. We'll be through, now, in 3 or 4 months, I
reckon, and then the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once
more, whether success ensues or failure.
Even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least
scrimped--but it would take a long letter to explain why and who is to
blame.
All the family send love to all of you and best Christmas wishes for
your prosperity.
Affectionately,
SAM.
XXVIII. LETTERS,1888. A YALE DEGREE. WORK ON “THE YANKEE.” ON
INTERVIEWING, ETC.
Mark Twain received his first college degree when he was made Master
of Arts by Yale, in June, 1888. Editor of the Courant, Charles H.
Clarke, was selected to notify him of his new title. Clarke was an
old friend to whom Clemens could write familiarly.
*****
To Charles H. Clarke, in Hartford:
ELMIRA, July 2, '88.
MY DEAR CHARLES,--Thanks for your thanks, and for your initiation
intentions. I shall be ready for you. I feel mighty proud of that
degree; in fact, I could squeeze the truth a little closer and say vain
of it. And why shouldn't I be?--I am the only literary animal of my
particular subspecies who has ever been given a degree by any College in
any age of the world, as far as I know.
Sincerely Yours
S. L. Clemens M. A.
Reply: Charles H. Clarke to S. L Clemens:
MY DEAR FRIEND, You are “the only literary animal of your particular
subspecies” in existence and you've no cause for humility in the fact.
Yale has done herself at least as much credit as she has done you, and
“Don't you forget it.”