Mark affected to “be mad clean through” at impositions practiced upon
him by foreigners, and clenched both fists as he remarked: “We paid the
heavy bill, about _six cents_.”
If Mark had used the slang loved by the vaudevillians he would be as
widely unread in the Scandinavian countries, in modern Greece and in
Russia as are the latter. “I never liked riddles and jaw-breakers,” he
said to a member of the firm of Chatto and Windus in London one day,
after the gentleman “had caught another foreign country for him,” “but
I guess cannibals and Pollacks alike love to be surprised, and the
grotesque, always unexpected, is surprising.”
“During my stay in Stockholm some one read the following from one of
my books (translated): ‘The solemn steadfastness of the deep made the
ship roll sideways.’ Great laughter. ‘And she kicked up behind!’ At
that the house shook and rocked and quivered with merriment and my fame
was firmly established in Sweden. If I had told the audience that ‘Her
Majesty’s dress crept along the floor for three minutes (count ’em)
after the queen had gone,’ they would have risen to a man and kissed
me.”
MARK “NO GENTLEMAN”
Mark didn’t resort to profanity when he wanted to lambaste man or
measure. I once heard him say to Mrs. Clemens: “I will write him that
‘his mind is all caked up, that as an idiot he is simply immeasurable.’
“And I will call him a snug person full of pedantic proclivities; and
further, ‘a long-eared animal’ (and striking an attitude)--‘a mule
hostler with his pate full of axle grease.’”
“All right,” said gentle Mrs. Livy, “do so by all means, but take care
not to send the letter.”
“Livy, dear, let me get it off my chest,” pleaded Mark, “for ‘Hotel
Normandie, Paris,’ would be just the place to date such an epistle
from. Don’t you remember the ‘Madame’s screech’ to the effect that ‘one
must expect neither tact nor delicacy from Mark Twain?’”
The “Madame” referred to was Madam Blanc, the critic of one of the
chief French reviews, already mentioned.
“The vagabond and adventurer, who from crown to sole remained a
gentleman” (I forget from which magazine this is quoted) fairly reveled
“in the French Madame’s abomination of his lowly self.”
MARK, POETRY, AND ART
Like other authors, Mark was not indifferent to praise. I think he
liked best an essay in a Vienna review which hailed him as “the
journalist of _belles-lettres_ who has made the commonplaces literary,
even as Emerson rendered the commonplaces philosophic.” “A French
writer has accused him of denying that there was any poetic feeling in
the middle ages,” continues the essay, “yet his Joan of Arc is the most
wonderfully lyric-dramatic prose I can recall.”
“There are lots of people who know me better than I do myself,” was
Mark’s comment on the above, and followed it up with a yarn on life
in “old Nevada,” when he rode several miles behind a prairie schooner
“because of a red petticoat fluttering in the breeze at the tail end.”
“That is, I thought it was a petticoat, but when I caught up with the
wagon on that spent mud turtle of mine (my gee-gee went by that poetic
name) I found it was only a piece of burlap displayed for art’s sake.”
“Did I curse ART?” demanded Mark, looking around the circle.
MARK SHEDS LIGHT ON ENGLISH HISTORY
We had set out to look at the rich collections of jewels, curiosities
and “other loot” (Mark’s description) hoarded by the (late) Hapsburgs
in the immense pile called _Hofburg_, when the author of “Joan of Arc,”
then in the making, switched me off to another room.
“Let’s go and dig out the Witch Hammer,” he said. “Wonder whether they
have a new edition at the Imperial Library.”
I forget now which edition of that murderous book we examined, but
I do remember some of the figures we jotted down at the librarian’s
suggestion. The Witch Hammer, that is, a voluminous “treatise for
discovering, torturing, maiming and burning witches,” was first
published, we learned, in 1487, and twenty-eight editions were put
through the press during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
Later Mark listened to my reading from the Latin text with so stern a
mien I suggested that he looked like a Grand Inquisitor.
“I pity your ignorance,” he drawled, “Torquemada and the rest didn’t
think of being unhappy _re_ those auto-da-fes, for every witch-fire
lit by their orders meant a warm jingle in their own pockets. When
they tortured an accused person, the cost of the proceedings was
collected by the sheriff, ditto when they burned some old lady, or a
child maybe--it was all grist to their mill, for the Grand Inquisitor
got a rake-off on all prosecutions, and in those good old days it cost
more to break a human being on the wheel than to feed him and care for
him in jail. The great Napoleon, you once told me, found some three
hundred crowned leeches infesting Germany when he started to break up
their little game. What do you suppose they lived on, those kinglets,
princes, graves and dukes--on the dog tax? No, most of them lived
on the interest of the fortunes their ancestors had accumulated by
prosecuting and burning witches.”
Some years later Mark related the story of our search for the Witch
Hammer before a motley crowd of litterateurs at Brown’s Hotel, London.
“Fine,” said Bram Stoker, “tell us some more; I have a short story on
witchcraft in hand.”
“In that case,” said Mark, “don’t forget Henry VIII, Elizabeth and the
first James. Wife-killing Henry started the witch-burning business
in ‘merry’ England, Elizabeth revived the sport, and the son of Mary
Stuart, whose Bible lies on every drawing-room table at home, used both
pen and axe to exterminate witches and ‘demons.’ I read up closely on
the subject when I got down to Joan of Arc’s trial.”
Some of our English friends didn’t seem pleased with Mark’s
reminiscences of British intolerance. “What about Salem?” asked one of
them.
“Oh, Salem,” replied Mark, drawing out the word like a rubber band,
“you needn’t get cocky about Salem. The Massachusetts witchcraft
delusion was only an echo of your own English persecutions, and a flash
in the pan at that. I have the data in my booklet here. Admitted we
fool Americans _did_ hang twenty-two and tortured some fifty people
under the English-German-Spanish witchcraft acts--to our shame and
disgrace--compare these figures with the records of man and woman
burnings ordered by your ‘bloody Mary’ alone. On the very morning of
the day when the old cat died, seven or eight Britishers were billed
to be reduced to cinders at Smithfield (where you buy your steak
nowadays), and if the devil hadn’t made room for her Majesty in hell
before noon, there would have been so many more martyrs.”
He turned to Stoker. “Bram,” he said, “the only satisfactory way to do
a witchcraft story is to filch it bodily from Balzac. The Frenchman got
the thing down to perfection in one of his Droll yarns--I know a shop
in the Strand where you can buy a pirated edition--reproduced by the
camera--for half a crown.”
“Hold,” he added, “I can give you the recipe of the witch salve, so
called. Fisher and I dug it up at the Berlin Royal Library. It was a
compound of hemlock, mandragora, henbane and belladonna. No wonder it
set persons, thus embalmed all over the naked body, crazy, tickled
them to indulge in all sorts of insane antics, that lent themselves to
devilish interpretation at a period when every tenth person aspired to
boom a religion of his own.”
MARK EXPLAINS DEAN SWIFT
“I wish somebody would kick me for a damned _Treppenwitz_,” said Mark
Twain, gazing into a bookseller’s shop window Unter den Linden.
“The Herr _Schutzmann_ (traffic policeman) will oblige; just say--”
Mark glanced at the whiskered giant bestriding his ill-shaped cattle at
the intersection of Friedrich Strasse.
“No, thank you, I won’t _lese majeste_ on a Friday,” replied Mark,
“besides, I don’t like the cop’s boot.” (In before-1918 days, you need
but say, ‘Verdammt Kaiser,’ in Berlin, to get knocked down, arrested,
and sent up for months and months.)
“What’s _Treppenwitz_?”
“I didn’t know myself until Harry Thurston Peck told me. It’s the
wisdom that comes to you going down the stairs, or the elevator, after
making a fool of yourself higher up--an afterthought, as it were.”
“And what’s the afterthought _now_?”
“See that book?” (pointing), “no, not that, the yellowback, by Prof.
Borkowsky--one more guy trying to explain Jonathan Swift. I forgot
when his Deanship lived and died, but they must have been at it for
centuries. And without examining the new volume, I bet I can tell its
contents: more highfalutin’ tommyrot about the Dean’s vagaries in
erotics and small beer politics. There must be a considerable library
on the subject, every new author threshing the old straw a tenth time,
and adding mystery trimmings of his own. I always promised myself to
submit _my_ theories on Swift and his harem at a first-class insanity
shop, but I forgot to ask Krafft-Ebing in Vienna, and now I let Virchow
pass.”
I was going to say something obvious, but Mark stopped me. “I know
Virchow’s special line, but that man is wise on every conceivable
subject, and I am quite sure he would have borne me out, namely, that
Swift’s character can be explained on the theory that he was a Sadist
and a Masochist in one. If Swift, as he wrote to an acquaintance, ‘died
of rage like a poisoned rat in a hole,’ I am sure he enjoyed it. God
knows that man gave more pain to his lady loves, Stella, Vanessa and
the rest, than all the Romeos in Shakespeare. They say that he killed
Vanessa by frightening her to death; he certainly murdered Stella
morally by letting her pass for his mistress. Still these two women and
others, whose names I forget, were proud of the torments inflicted upon
them. I wish I had asked Virchow, when he invited the audience to put
questions to him at the end of the lecture.”
MARK IN TRAGEDY AND COMEDY
We had lunch with some of the Herald boys at _Cafe des Ambassadeurs_,
Champs-Elysees, when Dick Benet, editor of “Dalziel’s News,” joined us.
Dick, “contrary to his usual morosity, acted the gay and debonair,”
to quote Clemens, who suggested that “he must have given the boss the
toothache by managing to get his salary raised a hundred francs per
annum.”
There was much hilarity about that, for we all knew “the boss” for a
skinflint, and Mark told a succession of funny stories about his own
salary grabs on the “Virginia Enterprise” and other impecunious sheets.
All were keenly alive to the treat, only Dick seemed absent-minded,
pulling out his watch every little while and keeping an eye on the door.
“You are not afraid of a bum-bailiff _now_,” suggested Mark.
“Neither now, nor at any future time,” replied Dick. “Fact is, the wife
promised to meet me here and I have an engagement at two o’clock which
I mustn’t miss under any circumstances whatever.” Our friend seemed to
be lying under some pressure or excitement.
At one-fifteen a tall, stylish Frenchwoman entered, and Dick rushed
up to her with outstretched hands. “So glad you came in time,” he
murmured. He slurred over the introductions, drew his wife on to the
seat next to him, and whispered to her.
At fifteen minutes to two (we adduced the figures later by comparing
notes) two strangers in high silk toppers walked up to Dick, saying:
“It’s time, Monsieur.”
Dick nodded, rose, bent over his wife and kissed her on the mouth. Then
he shook hands all around, and with some more adieux walked away with
his friends. We saw him seated in a cabriolet, then leave it abruptly.
“Victoire, my love, I am so sorry,” he said, rushing back and covering
his wife’s face with kisses--“so sorry to leave you.”
One more lingering kiss and he was gone.
* * * * *
Half an hour later Mark and I passed by Dalziel’s News Bureau, as a man
came out of the counting room to paste up “the latest.”
“Let’s see what it is,” said Mark. “Maybe King Leopold is dead, and I
mustn’t miss putting on court mourning for HIM.” This is what we read
on the bulletin-board:
“Monsieur Richard Benet, the editor of Dalziel’s, was killed in a duel
with ---- at 2:15 this afternoon. _R. I. P._”
Mark was visibly affected. “That poor woman,” he kept saying; “a stroke
out of the blue. But Dick felt that he was taking leave of her for
good; that accounts for his repeated: ‘I’m so sorry.’” And much more to
that effect.
To get Clemens’ mind off the melancholy affair, I suggested “Swithin.”
“Done,” said Mark, “and we will take him out to supper, for I bet he
hasn’t got a sou marquis in his jeans.”
“Swithin” was Mark’s pet name for a Franco-American writer whose real
name happened to recall the legend of a Saint, a groundhog, and several
kinds of weather.
Meanwhile the heat had taken on a Sahara hue. “It seems to me we are
not walking, we are _dripping_,” remarked Clemens, as we climbed the
four stairs to the studio. We had been told to walk right in, and we
did, accidentally upsetting the screen that separated the anteroom from
the office.
Tableau! Here was “Swithin” and his secretary, the one dictating, the
other thumping the typewriter and both--stark naked.
“Don’t mention it,” broke in Mark. “_Puris naturalibus_ is the only way
to face this hellish temperature--a white man’s solitary chance to get
even with civilization! If there were a bathtub, a few banana trees and
a fire-spitting mountain around, I would think myself in the Sandwich
Islands.
“Talking of sandwiches,” he added, “hustle into your tailor-mades and
come out for a bite. You must be fearfully hungry--working on a day
like this?”
“Swithin” didn’t have to be told twice. He dashed into the adjoining
room for his clothes, but returned after a little while, still _en
nature_, and swearing like the whole Flanders army. He searched
presses, drawers, nooks and corners with hands and eyes.
“Anything missing?” mocked Mark.
“Only my duds--I bet those confounded roommates of mine--(followed a
string of epithets that wouldn’t look well in print) stole and pawned
them, for they had neither cigarette nor lunch money this morning.”
“Come to think,” put in the secretary, “I saw Monsieur Hector leave
with a bundle.”
“My jeans, coat and vest,” shrieked “Swithin,” tearing his hair, while
Mark writhed with laughter.
“And there were fifteen or twenty sous in an inside pocket besides,”
moaned “Swithin.”
“I know Monsieur Hector’s hang-out,” said the secretary, “and if you
like I will go and choke the pawn tickets out of the pair.”
“Couldn’t do better if you tried,” opined Mark, “for no doubt by this
time they have devoured the proceeds of their brigandage. Hurry, before
they sell the tickets.”
We found Hector and his brother-bandit behind a magnum of fake
champagne, gourmandizing at the Dead Cat, a newly opened restaurant
destined to become famous in Bohemia.
“Sure,” they said, “we _borrowed_ old Swithin’s old clothes, but
expected to bring them back before seven. We are now waiting for the
angel who promised to relieve our financial distress, which is only
momentary, of course.”
They gave up the tickets willingly enough, and we repaired to _Mont de
Piété_ in Rue Lepic.
“Mountain of Pity--a queer name for a hock shop,” said Mark when
I related the redemption of Swithin’s clothes. “I once knew a
three-hundred-pound Isaac in ’Frisco, but that is another story.”
“AMBITION IS A JADE THAT MORE THAN ONE MAN CAN RIDE”
We had been talking about changing one’s luck at the Eccentric Club,
London, and Mark said: “All is personal effort, there is no such thing
as anything interfering for one’s advantage or the opposite.”
“Guess you are about right,” said Stoker. “There was Loie Fuller, an
indifferent soubrette before she became the goddess of beauty and
chained Anatole France and the rest to her chariot. I remember meeting
her one afternoon in the Strand, looking for a cable office. Only a
few hours previous I had heard that poor Loie was on her uppers, her
manager having cheated her, leaving her penniless in Berlin. And,
worse luck, I didn’t know a thing she could do in London, or even the
provinces, just then. That, you can imagine, made me feel quite gawky.”
“Well, you had a right to be a sob sister,” interpolated Mark.
“She didn’t give me the chance, not she,” emphasized Bram, “for,
grabbing me by the arm, with tears rolling down her cheeks, she
whispered in a choked voice: ‘Father is dead, Father is dead! Lend me
ten shillings to cable to New York, please.’ She added: ‘Poor Father.
But now I _will_ succeed, _I swear it, Father_.’
“And two or three weeks later she created the serpentine dance, earning
such blurbs as ‘the chastest and most expressive of dancers, who
restored to us the lost wonders of Greek mimicry.’”
“I hear she is about to open her own theatre in Paris now,” announced
the Standard critic.
“That’s the stuff,” said Mark. “Loie, like myself--both
red-headed--knew that ambition is a horse that more than one can ride.
I grabbed that idea ’way back in the seventies when Artemus Ward came
down lecturing Virginia way. Art was a success and I liked the lordly
nonchalance with which he spent two or three hundred dollars on a tear.
I helped him spend plenty, I assure you, but when Art and the brown
taste in my mouth had gone, I took stock.
“‘Sam,’ I said to myself, quite familiar-like, ‘Sam, your mental
adipose is as good as his, and in originality you can beat him dead.’
“After these encouraging remarks, I set to work making good,” concluded
Mark.
MARK AS A TRANSLATOR
Mark conquered Germany before he became one of the favorite literary
sons of Austria. “I often wonder that they take to my brand of humor
so well,” he told me more than once in Vienna--“I mean AFTER MY GERMAN
TRIUMPHS, for if Vienna Bookland hates anything worse than German
Bookland, I haven’t come across the likes of it. Each capital thinks
itself a Boston and each calls the other Kalamazoo, or dead Indian Town.
“But I’m not ungrateful,” continued Mark, “and to prove it, I studied
hard and established the identity of the fatherlandish author whom both
Vienna and Berlin admired (though nobody reads him, of course): Goethe.”
“Goethe was Englished before I tackled him, but I happened on a passage
in Faust that, it seemed to me, was not done justice to. So I summoned
the family to a powwow and between us, and a heap of dictionaries, we
rendered the disputed and immortal lines ‘thus classic’:
“‘What hypocrites and such can’t do without--
Cheese it--ne’er mention it aloud.’
“Bayard” (Taylor) “would have burst with envy if he had lived long
enough to see how happily I interpreted Goethe without itching for
translator’s laurels or royalties.”
“Let’s see the original, Mark.”
“Here it is:
“‘Man darf es nicht vor keuschen Ohren nennen,
Was keusche Hertzen nicht entbehren können.’
“_Vers libre_ with a vengeance, eh?” chuckled Mark. “And why in thunder
shouldn’t that mean verse liberally handled?”
“If I translated your version of Goethe back into German, do you
suppose the Fatherlanders would understand it?”
“No,” said honest Mark, “but I do understand _their_ translations
of _my_ lingo--I am told they make me appear like a native German
writer, in fact Moritz Busch called me the most translatable of foreign
authors, to my face--but Goethe was a poet, and a prose man, like me,
can never do justice to a poetry man of Goethe’s distinction. Look at
these German translations of Shakespeare--they think them classic--they
get my eyes in flood with laughter.”
MARK IN ENGLAND
On another page I have jotted down some sayings of Mark’s relating
why he “steadfastly refused” to bull the French and Italian literary
markets. That in England it was different, goes without saying, and
George Moore once explained Mark’s English popularity to me.
“It’s his peculiar power of presenting pathetic situations without
slush,” insisted “the last Victorian” in his manner of finality.
Mark was visibly tickled when I read the Moore estimate from the cuff
on which I had jotted it down.
He pondered a short while on “the adjectives,” then drawled slowly:
“The English are good sports, you know.”
Here are a few more opinions of English men of letters which I gathered
off and on.
Davison Dalziel, M. P., editor of “The Standard,” London: “I agree
with ‘The Spectator’ that Mark Twain is the most popular writer in the
English tongue because he added more plentifully and more generously to
the gayety of the empire of our language than any other author, living
or dead.”
Moberly Bell, late editor of “The Times,” London (in winter of 1899):
“Mark Twain succeeded with us because he is a fearless upholder of all
that is clean, honest, noble and straightforward in letters as well
as in life. He once told me that he ‘qualified as the first yellow
journalist.’ I wish to God he had remained the first and only one.”
That was before Mr. Bell negotiated for the sale of “The Times” to Lord
Northcliffe.
William Heinemann, the late famous London publisher, who could never
get hold of any of Mark Twain’s books for publication:
“An author as well beloved as he is popular and famous. Wit, scholar,
orator, millionaire perhaps” (that was before the Webster period), “yet
I have seen a letter of his in which he stated point blank: ‘I would
rather be a pilot than anything else in the world,’ and that letter was
penned after two hundred thousand copies of ‘Innocents Abroad’ had been
sold.”
WHY MARK WAS UNCOMFORTABLE IN THE KING OF SWEDEN’S PRESENCE
“And how did you like the King of Sweden?” I heard Lord Roberts ask
Clemens at the Army and Navy Club, one afternoon.
“Well, frankly, if I must suffer myself to have intercourse with kings,
I prefer the Prince of Wales,” replied Mark.
Then somebody told a story about the Swedish Majesty’s last sojourn in
Norway. There, at a railway station, Oscar ran against a crusty old
farmer who thought himself a lot better than a mere king and kept his
hat on.
“Don’t you know enough to bare your head in the presence of the King?”
demanded Oscar.
“You bare your head and I’ll bare mine,” replied the farmer. “My family
has been here a great many hundred years longer than yours.”
Thereupon Oscar got so enraged he knocked the farmer’s hat off with a
sweep of his cane and if bystanders hadn’t interfered the King would
have been pummeled “handsome” then and there.
“I am glad I doffed my hat before Oscar came in,” said Mark.
MARK’S IDEA OF HIGH ART
“This here earth is governed like a military despoty,” said Mark Twain
when we were sitting outside a Ringstrasse restaurant in Vienna one
afternoon. He was eyeing the procession of army officers, with pretty
girls upon their arms, passing to and fro.
“And if you had the ordering of things, would your soul have meandered
into one of these jackanapes in monkey jackets and corsets, and czackos
and busbies and things?” inquired Susan, the wit’s witty young daughter.
“No, darling, but I would have loved to live in the time of Shakespeare
and Queen Elizabeth, the best dressed period of the world. You
know I like color and flummery and all such things--I was born
red-headed--maybe that accounts for my passion for the gorgeous and
ornamental.”
“Tell the company about the riot of colors you delight in,” said Susan.
“I saw it only once,” replied Mark, “and it was rather uncomfortable,
even painful, to the other creature, namely, a tortoise-shell cat that
accidentally had dropped into a tomato stew. As pussy tried to get
out, pawing like the baby after the Ivory soap, there was a display of
rainbows, spectrums, chromatics, prisms, pigments, and plain everyday
paints and stains such as I have run across in a few Italian picture
galleries only.”