_P.S. March 25_. About two months ago I was illuminating this
Autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, and I then took occasion to air the
opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no public
consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly obscure
and unimportant. And not only in great London, but also in the little
village where he was born, where he lived a quarter of a century, and
where he died and was buried. I argued that if he had been a person of
any note at all, aged villagers would have had much to tell about him
many and many a year after his death, instead of being unable to
furnish inquirers a single fact connected with him. I believed, and I
still believe, that if he had been famous, his notoriety would have
lasted as long as mine has lasted in my native village out in Missouri.
It is a good argument, a prodigiously strong one, and most formidable
one for even the most gifted and ingenious and plausible
Stratfordolator to get around or explain away. Today a Hannibal
_Courier-Post_ of recent date has reached me, with an article in it
which reinforces my contention that a really celebrated person cannot
be forgotten in his village in the short space of sixty years. I will
make an extract from it:
Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but ingratitude
is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she has produced,
and as the years go by her greatest son, Mark Twain, or S. L. Clemens
as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard
of the residents of the town he made famous and the town that made him
famous. His name is associated with every old building that is torn
down to make way for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly
growing city, and with every hill or cave over or through which he
might by any possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest
which he wove into his stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson’s Island,
or Mark Twain Cave, are now monuments to his genius. Hannibal is glad
of any opportunity to do him honor as he had honored her.
So it has happened that the “old timers” who went to school with Mark
or were with him on some of his usual escapades have been honored with
large audiences whenever they were in a reminiscent mood and
condescended to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary boy who came
to be a very extraordinary humorist and whose every boyish act is now
seen to have been indicative of what was to come. Like Aunt Becky and
Mrs. Clemens, they can now see that Mark was hardly appreciated when he
lived here and that the things he did as a boy and was whipped for
doing were not all bad, after all. So they have been in no hesitancy
about drawing out the bad things he did as well as the good in their
efforts to get a “Mark Twain” story, all incidents being viewed in the
light of his present fame, until the volume of “Twainiana” is already
considerable and growing in proportion as the “old timers” drop away
and the stories are retold second and third hand by their descendants.
With some seventy-three years young and living in a villa instead of a
house, he is a fair target, and let him incorporate, copyright, or
patent himself as he will, there are some of his “works” that will go
swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as graybeards gather about the
fires and begin with, “I’ve heard father tell,” or possibly, “Once when
I.” The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother—_was_ my mother.
And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper, of date twenty days
ago:
Miss Becca Blankenship died at the home of William Dickason, 408 Rock
Street, at 2.30 o’clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72 years. The
deceased was a sister of “Huckleberry Finn,” one of the famous
characters in Mark Twain’s _Tom Sawyer_. She had been a member of the
Dickason family—the housekeeper— for nearly forty-five years, and was a
highly respected lady. For the past eight years she had been an
invalid, but was as well cared for by Mr. Dickason and his family as if
she had been a near relative. She was a member of the Park Methodist
Church and a Christian woman.
I remember her well. I have a picture of her in my mind which was
graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three years ago. She was
at that time nine years old, and I was about eleven. I remember where
she stood, and how she looked; and I can still see her bare feet, her
bare head, her brown face, and her short tow-linen frock. She was
crying. What it was about I have long ago forgotten. But it was the
tears that preserved the picture for me, no doubt. She was a good
child, I can say that for her. She knew me nearly seventy years ago.
Did she forget me, in the course of time? I think not. If she had lived
in Stratford in Shakespeare’s time, would she have forgotten him? Yes.
For he was never famous during his lifetime, he was utterly obscure in
Stratford, and there wouldn’t be any occasion to remember him after he
had been dead a week.
“Injun Joe,” “Jimmy Finn,” and “General Gaines” were prominent and very
intemperate ne’er-do-weels in Hannibal two generations ago. Plenty of
grayheads there remember them to this day, and can tell you about them.
Isn’t it curious that two “town drunkards” and one half-breed loafer
should leave behind them, in a remote Missourian village, a fame a
hundred times greater and several hundred times more particularized in
the matter of definite facts than Shakespeare left behind him in the
village where he had lived the half of his lifetime?