While this letter with its amazing contents is on its way to
astonish Joe Goodman, we will consider one of quite a different,
but equally characteristic sort. We may assume that Mark Twain's
sister Pamela had been visiting him in Hartford and was now making
a visit in Keokuk.
*****
To Mrs. Moffett, in Keokuk:
HARTFORD, Oct 9, '89.
DEAR PAMELA,--An hour after you left I was suddenly struck with a
realizing sense of the utter chuckle-headedness of that notion of mine:
to send your trunk after you. Land! it was idiotic. None but a lunatic
would, separate himself from his baggage.
Well, I am soulfully glad the baggage fetcher saved me from consummating
my insane inspiration. I met him on the street in the afternoon and paid
him again. I shall pay him several times more, as opportunity offers.
I declined the invitation to banquet with the visiting South American
Congress, in a polite note explaining that I had to go to New York
today. I conveyed the note privately to Patrick; he got the envelope
soiled, and asked Livy to put on a clean one. That is why I am going to
the banquet; also why I have disinvited the boys I thought I was going
to punch billiards with, upstairs to-night.
Patrick is one of the injudiciousest people I ever struck. And I am the
other.
Your Brother
SAM.
The Yankee was now ready for publication, and advance sheets were
already in the reviewers' hands. Just at this moment the Brazilian
monarchy crumbled, and Clemens was moved to write Sylvester Baxter,
of the Boston Herald, a letter which is of special interest in its
prophecy of the new day, the dawn of which was even nearer than he
suspected.
DEAR MR. BAXTER, Another throne has gone down, and I swim in oceans of
satisfaction. I wish I might live fifty years longer; I believe I should
see the thrones of Europe selling at auction for old iron. I believe I
should really see the end of what is surely the grotesquest of all the
swindles ever invented by man-monarchy. It is enough to make a graven
image laugh, to see apparently rational people, away down here in this
wholesome and merciless slaughter-day for shams, still mouthing empty
reverence for those moss-backed frauds and scoundrelisms, hereditary
kingship and so-called “nobility.” It is enough to make the monarchs
and nobles themselves laugh--and in private they do; there can be no
question about that. I think there is only one funnier thing, and
that is the spectacle of these bastard Americans--these Hamersleys
and Huntingtons and such--offering cash, encumbered by themselves,
for rotten carcases and stolen titles. When our great brethren the
disenslaved Brazilians frame their Declaration of Independence, I
hope they will insert this missing link: “We hold these truths to
be self-evident: that all monarchs are usurpers, and descendants of
usurpers; for the reason that no throne was ever set up in this world by
the will, freely exercised, of the only body possessing the legitimate
right to set it up--the numerical mass of the nation.”
You already have the advance sheets of my forthcoming book in your
hands. If you will turn to about the five hundredth page, you will
find a state paper of my Connecticut Yankee in which he announces
the dissolution of King Arthur's monarchy and proclaims the English
Republic. Compare it with the state paper which announces the downfall
of the Brazilian monarchy and proclaims the Republic of the United
States of Brazil, and stand by to defend the Yankee from plagiarism.
There is merely a resemblance of ideas, nothing more. The Yankee's
proclamation was already in print a week ago. This is merely one of
those odd coincidences which are always turning up. Come, protect
the Yank from that cheapest and easiest of all charges--plagiarism.
Otherwise, you see, he will have to protect himself by charging
approximate and indefinite plagiarism upon the official servants of our
majestic twin down yonder, and then there might be war, or some similar
annoyance.
Have you noticed the rumor that the Portuguese throne is unsteady, and
that the Portuguese slaves are getting restive? Also, that the head
slave-driver of Europe, Alexander III, has so reduced his usual monthly
order for chains that the Russian foundries are running on only half
time now? Also that other rumor that English nobility acquired an added
stench the other day--and had to ship it to India and the continent
because there wasn't any more room for it at home? Things are working.
By and by there is going to be an emigration, may be. Of course we shall
make no preparation; we never do. In a few years from now we shall have
nothing but played-out kings and dukes on the police, and driving the
horse-cars, and whitewashing fences, and in fact overcrowding all the
avenues of unskilled labor; and then we shall wish, when it is too late,
that we had taken common and reasonable precautions and drowned them at
Castle Garden.
There followed at this time a number of letters to Goodman, but as
there is much of a sameness in them, we need not print them all.
Clemens, in fact, kept the mails warm with letters bulging with
schemes for capitalization, and promising vast wealth to all
concerned. When the letters did not go fast enough he sent
telegrams. In one of the letters Goodman is promised “five hundred
thousand dollars out of the profits before we get anything
ourselves.” One thing we gather from these letters is that Paige
has taken the machine apart again, never satisfied with its
perfection, or perhaps getting a hint that certain of its
perfections were not permanent. A letter at the end of November
seems worth preserving here.
*****
To Joseph T. Goodman, in California:
HARTFORD, Nov. 29, '89.
DEAR JOE, Things are getting into better and more flexible shape every
day. Papers are now being drawn which will greatly simplify the raising
of capital; I shall be in supreme command; it will not be necessary for
the capitalist to arrive at terms with anybody but me. I don't want to
dicker with anybody but Jones. I know him; that is to say, I want to
dicker with you, and through you with Jones. Try to see if you can't be
here by the 15th of January.
The machine was as perfect as a watch when we took her apart the other
day; but when she goes together again the 15th of January we expect her
to be perfecter than a watch.
Joe, I want you to sell some royalties to the boys out there, if you
can, for I want to be financially strong when we go to New York. You
know the machine, and you appreciate its future enormous career better
than any man I know. At the lowest conceivable estimate (2,000 machines
a year,) we shall sell 34,000 in the life of the patent--17 years.
All the family send love to you--and they mean it, or they wouldn't say
it.
Yours ever
MARK.
The Yankee had come from the press, and Howells had praised it in
the “Editor's Study” in Harper's Magazine. He had given it his
highest commendation, and it seems that his opinion of it did not
change with time. “Of all fanciful schemes of fiction it pleases me
most,” he in one place declared, and again referred to it as
“a greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale.”
In more than one letter to Goodman, Clemens had urged him to come
East without delay. “Take the train, Joe, and come along,” he wrote
early in December. And we judge from the following that Joe had
decided to come.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
HARTFORD, Dec. 23, '89.
DEAR HOWELLS,--The magazine came last night, and the Study notice is
just great. The satisfaction it affords us could not be more prodigious
if the book deserved every word of it; and maybe it does; I hope it
does, though of course I can't realize it and believe it. But I am your
grateful servant, anyway and always.
I am going to read to the Cadets at West Point Jan. 11. I go from here
to New York the 9th, and up to the Point the 11th. Can't you go with me?
It's great fun. I'm going to read the passages in the “Yankee” in which
the Yankee's West Point cadets figure--and shall covertly work in
a lecture on aristocracy to those boys. I am to be the guest of the
Superintendent, but if you will go I will shake him and we will go to
the hotel. He is a splendid fellow, and I know him well enough to take
that liberty.
And won't you give me a day or two's visit toward the end of January?
For two reasons: the machine will be at work again by that time, and we
want to hear the rest of the dream-story; Mrs. Clemens keeps speaking
about it and hankering for it. And we can have Joe Goodman on hand again
by that time, and I want you to get to know him thoroughly. It's well
worth it. I am going to run up and stay over night with you as soon as I
can get a chance.
We are in the full rush of the holidays now, and an awful rush it is,
too. You ought to have been here the other day, to make that day perfect
and complete. All alone I managed to inflict agonies on Mrs. Clemens,
whereas I was expecting nothing but praises. I made a party call the day
after the party--and called the lady down from breakfast to receive
it. I then left there and called on a new bride, who received me in her
dressing-gown; and as things went pretty well, I stayed to luncheon.
The error here was, that the appointed reception-hour was 3 in the
afternoon, and not at the bride's house but at her aunt's in another
part of the town. However, as I meant well, none of these disasters
distressed me.
Yrs ever
MARK.
The Yankee did not find a very hearty welcome in England. English
readers did not fancy any burlesque of their Arthurian tales, or
American strictures on their institutions. Mark Twain's publishers
had feared this, and asked that the story be especially edited for
the English edition. Clemens, however, would not listen to any
suggestions of the sort.
*****
To Messrs. Chatto & Windus, in London, Eng.:
GENTLEMEN,--Concerning The Yankee, I have already revised the story
twice; and it has been read critically by W. D. Howells and Edmund
Clarence Stedman, and my wife has caused me to strike out several
passages that have been brought to her attention, and to soften others.
Furthermore, I have read chapters of the book in public where Englishmen
were present and have profited by their suggestions.
Now, mind you, I have taken all this pains because I wanted to say a
Yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural props,
and yet make a book which you would be willing to print exactly as it
comes to you, without altering a word.
We are spoken of (by Englishmen) as a thin-skinned people. It is you who
are thin-skinned. An Englishman may write with the most brutal frankness
about any man or institution among us and we republish him without
dreaming of altering a line or a word. But England cannot stand
that kind of a book written about herself. It is England that is
thin-skinned. It causeth me to smile when I read the modifications of my
language which have been made in my English editions to fit them for the
sensitive English palate.
Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of
offense that you might not lack the nerve to print it just as it stands.
I am going to get the proofs to you just as early as I can. I want you
to read it carefully. If you can publish it without altering a single
word, go ahead. Otherwise, please hand it to J. R. Osgood in time for
him to have it published at my expense.
This is important, for the reason that the book was not written for
America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their
sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems
to me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good
intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level
of manhood in turn.
Very truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.
The English nation, at least a considerable portion of it, did not wish
to be “pried up to a higher level of manhood” by a Connecticut Yankee.
The papers pretty generally denounced the book as coarse; in fact, a
vulgar travesty. Some of the critics concluded that England, after all,
had made a mistake in admiring Mark Twain. Clemens stood this for a time
and then seems to have decided that something should be done. One of the
foremost of English critics was his friend and admirer; he would state
the case to him fully and invite his assistance.
*****
To Andrew Lang, in London:
[First page missing.]
1889
They vote but do not print. The head tells you pretty promptly whether
the food is satisfactory or not; and everybody hears, and thinks the
whole man has spoken. It is a delusion. Only his taste and his smell
have been heard from--important, both, in a way, but these do not build
up the man; and preserve his life and fortify it.
The little child is permitted to label its drawings “This is a cow this
is a horse,” and so on. This protects the child. It saves it from
the sorrow and wrong of hearing its cows and its horses criticized as
kangaroos and work benches. A man who is white-washing a fence is doing
a useful thing, so also is the man who is adorning a rich man's house
with costly frescoes; and all of us are sane enough to judge these
performances by standards proper to each. Now, then, to be fair, an
author ought to be allowed to put upon his book an explanatory line:
“This is written for the Head;” “This is written for the Belly and the
Members.” And the critic ought to hold himself in honor bound to put
away from him his ancient habit of judging all books by one standard,
and thenceforth follow a fairer course.
The critic assumes, every time, that if a book doesn't meet the
cultivated-class standard, it isn't valuable. Let us apply his law all
around: for if it is sound in the case of novels, narratives, pictures,
and such things, it is certainly sound and applicable to all the steps
which lead up to culture and make culture possible. It condemns the
spelling book, for a spelling book is of no use to a person of culture;
it condemns all school books and all schools which lie between the
child's primer and Greek, and between the infant school and the
university; it condemns all the rounds of art which lie between the
cheap terra cotta groups and the Venus de Medici, and between the chromo
and the Transfiguration; it requires Whitcomb Riley to sing no more till
he can sing like Shakespeare, and it forbids all amateur music and will
grant its sanction to nothing below the “classic.”
Is this an extravagant statement? No, it is a mere statement of fact.
It is the fact itself that is extravagant and grotesque. And what is the
result? This--and it is sufficiently curious: the critic has actually
imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is
more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo;
and the august opera than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers' singing
society; and Homer than the little everybody's-poet whose rhymes are in
all mouths today and will be in nobody's mouth next generation; and
the Latin classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan
Edwards than the Salvation Army; and the Venus de Medici than the
plaster-cast peddler; the superstition, in a word, that the vast and
awful comet that trails its cold lustre through the remote abysses of
space once a century and interests and instructs a cultivated handful
of astronomers is worth more to the world than the sun which warms and
cheers all the nations every day and makes the crops to grow.
If a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but
to convert angels: and they wouldn't need it. The thin top crust of
humanity--the cultivated--are worth pacifying, worth pleasing, worth
coddling, worth nourishing and preserving with dainties and delicacies,
it is true; but to be caterer to that little faction is no very
dignified or valuable occupation, it seems to me; it is merely feeding
the over-fed, and there must be small satisfaction in that. It is not
that little minority who are already saved that are best worth trying to
uplift, I should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are
underneath. That mass will never see the Old Masters--that sight is for
the few; but the chromo maker can lift them all one step upward toward
appreciation of art; they cannot have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy
and the singing class lift them a little way toward that far light; they
will never know Homer, but the passing rhymester of their day leaves
them higher than he found them; they may never even hear of the Latin
classics, but they will strike step with Kipling's drum-beat, and they
will march; for all Jonathan Edwards's help they would die in their
slums, but the Salvation Army will beguile some of them up to pure air
and a cleaner life; they know no sculpture, the Venus is not even a name
to them, but they are a grade higher in the scale of civilization by
the ministrations of the plaster-cast than they were before it took its
place upon then mantel and made it beautiful to their unexacting eyes.
Indeed I have been misjudged, from the very first. I have never tried
in even one single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I
was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training. And I
never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger
game--the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them,
but have done my best to entertain them. To simply amuse them would
have satisfied my dearest ambition at any time; for they could get
instruction elsewhere, and I had two chances to help to the teacher's
one: for amusement is a good preparation for study and a good healer of
fatigue after it. My audience is dumb, it has no voice in print, and
so I cannot know whether I have won its approbation or only got its
censure.
Yes, you see, I have always catered for the Belly and the Members,
but have been served like the others--criticized from the
culture-standard--to my sorrow and pain; because, honestly, I never
cared what became of the cultured classes; they could go to the theatre
and the opera--they had no use for me and the melodeon.
And now at last I arrive at my object and tender my petition, making
supplication to this effect: that the critics adopt a rule recognizing
the Belly and the Members, and formulate a standard whereby work done
for them shall be judged. Help me, Mr. Lang; no voice can reach further
than yours in a case of this kind, or carry greater weight of authority.
Lang's reply was an article in the Illustrated London News on “The
Art of Mark Twain.” Lang had no admiration to express for the
Yankee, which he confessed he had not cared to read, but he
glorified Huck Finn to the highest. “I can never forget, nor be
ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which I read Huckleberry
Finn for the first time, years ago,” he wrote; “I read it again last
night, deserting Kenilworth for Huck. I never laid it down till I
had finished it.”
Lang closed his article by referring to the story of Huck as the
“great American novel which had escaped the eyes of those who
watched to see this new planet swim into their ken.”
XXX. LETTERS, 1890, CHIEFLY TO JOS. T. GOODMAN. THE GREAT MACHINE
ENTERPRISE
Dr. John Brown's son, whom Mark Twain and his wife had known in 1873
as “Jock,” sent copies of Dr. John Brown and His Sister Isabella, by
E. T. McLaren. It was a gift appreciated in the Clemens home.
*****
To Mr. John Brown, in Edinburgh, Scotland:
HARTFORD, Feby 11, 1890.
DEAR MR. BROWN,--Both copies came, and we are reading and re-reading
the one, and lending the other, to old time adorers of “Rab and
his Friends.” It is an exquisite book; the perfection of literary
workmanship. It says in every line, “Don't look at me, look at him”--and
one tries to be good and obey; but the charm of the painter is so strong
that one can't keep his entire attention on the developing portrait, but
must steal side-glimpses of the artist, and try to divine the trick of
her felicitous brush. In this book the doctor lives and moves just as
he was. He was the most extensive slave-holder of his time, and the
kindest; and yet he died without setting one of his bondmen free. We all
send our very, very kindest regards.
Sincerely yours
S. L. CLEMENS.
If Mark Twain had been less interested in the type-setting machine
he might possibly have found a profit that winter in the old Sellers
play, which he had written with Howells seven years before. The
play had eventually been produced at the Lyceum Theatre in New York,
with A. P. Burbank in the leading role, and Clemens and Howells as
financial backers. But it was a losing investment, nor did it pay
any better when Clemens finally sent Burbank with it on the road.
Now, however, James A. Herne, a well-known actor and playwright,
became interested in the idea, after a discussion of the matter with
Howells, and there seemed a probability that with changes made under
Herne's advisement the play might be made sensible and successful.
But Mark Twain's greater interest was now all in the type-machine,
and certainly he had no money to put into any other venture. His
next letter to Goodman is illuminating--the urgency of his need for
funds opposed to that conscientiousness which was one of the most
positive forces of Mark Twain's body spiritual. The Mr. Arnot of
this letter was an Elmira capitalist.
*****
To Jos. T. Goodman, in California:
HARTFORD, March 31, '90.
DEAR JOE,--If you were here, I should say, “Get you to Washington and
beg Senator Jones to take the chances and put up about ten or “--no, I
wouldn't. The money would burn a hole in my pocket and get away from
me if the furnisher of it were proceeding upon merely your judgment and
mine and without other evidence. It is too much of a responsibility.
But I am in as close a place to-day as ever I was; $3,000 due for the
last month's machine-expenses, and the purse empty. I notified Mr. Arnot
a month ago that I should want $5,000 to-day, and his check arrived last
night; but I sent it back to him, because when he bought of me on the
9th of December I said that I would not draw upon him for 3 months, and
that before that date Senator Jones would have examined the machine and
approved, or done the other thing. If Jones should arrive here a week
or ten days from now (as he expects to do,) and should not approve,
and shouldn't buy any royalties, my deal with Arnot would not be
symmetrically square, and then how could I refund? The surest way was to
return his check.
I have talked with the madam, and here is the result. I will go down to
the factory and notify Paige that I will scrape together $6,000 to meet
the March and April expenses, and will retire on the 30th of April
and return the assignment to him if in the meantime I have not found
financial relief.
It is very rough; for the machine does at last seem perfect, and just a
bird to go! I think she's going to be good for 8,000 ems an hour in the
hands of a good ordinary man after a solid year's practice. I may be in
error, but I most solidly believe it.
There's an improved Mergenthaler in New York; Paige and Davis and I
watched it two whole afternoons.
With the love of us all,
MARK.
Arnot wrote Clemens urging him to accept the check for five thousand
dollars in this moment of need. Clemens was probably as sorely
tempted to compromise with his conscience as he had ever been in his
life, but his resolution field firm.
*****
To M. H. Arnot, in Elmira, N. Y.: