Produced by Betsie Bush, Chuck Greif, Martin Pettit, John
Greenman, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DXCVIII.
SEPTEMBER 7, 1906
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--I.[1]
BY MARK TWAIN.
PREFATORY NOTE.--Mr. Clemens began to write his autobiography many
years ago, and he continues to add to it day by day. It was his
original intention to permit no publication of his memoirs until
after his death; but, after leaving "Pier No. 70," he concluded
that a considerable portion might now suitably be given to the
public. It is that portion, garnered from the quarter-million of
words already written, which will appear in this REVIEW during the
coming year. No part of the autobiography will be published in book
form during the lifetime of the author.--EDITOR N. A. R.
INTRODUCTION.
I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future
autobiographies when it is published, after my death, and I also intend
that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its
form and method--a form and method whereby the past and the present are
constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire
up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel. Moreover,
this autobiography of mine does not select from my life its showy
episodes, but deals mainly in the common experiences which go to make up
the life of the average human being, because these episodes are of a
sort which he is familiar with in his own life, and in which he sees his
own life reflected and set down in print. The usual, conventional
autobiographer seems to particularly hunt out those occasions in his
career when he came into contact with celebrated persons, whereas his
contacts with the uncelebrated were just as interesting to him, and
would be to his reader, and were vastly more numerous than his
collisions with the famous.
Howells was here yesterday afternoon, and I told him the whole scheme of
this autobiography and its apparently systemless system--only apparently
systemless, for it is not really that. It is a deliberate system, and
the law of the system is that I shall talk about the matter which for
the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else
the moment its interest for me is exhausted. It is a system which
follows no charted course and is not going to follow any such course. It
is a system which is a complete and purposed jumble--a course which
begins nowhere, follows no specified route, and can never reach an end
while I am alive, for the reason that, if I should talk to the
stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never
be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me
in my lifetime. I told Howells that this autobiography of mine would
live a couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take
a fresh start and live the rest of the time.
He said he believed it would, and asked me if I meant to make a library
of it.
I said that that was my design; but that, if I should live long enough,
the set of volumes could not be contained merely in a city, it would
require a State, and that there would not be any multi-billionaire
alive, perhaps, at any time during its existence who would be able to
buy a full set, except on the instalment plan.
Howells applauded, and was full of praises and endorsement, which was
wise in him and judicious. If he had manifested a different spirit, I
would have thrown him out of the window. I like criticism, but it must
be my way.
I.
Back of the Virginia Clemenses is a dim procession of ancestors
stretching back to Noah's time. According to tradition, some of them
were pirates and slavers in Elizabeth's time. But this is no discredit
to them, for so were Drake and Hawkins and the others. It was a
respectable trade, then, and monarchs were partners in it. In my time I
have had desires to be a pirate myself. The reader--if he will look deep
down in his secret heart, will find--but never mind what he will find
there; I am not writing his Autobiography, but mine. Later, according to
tradition, one of the procession was Ambassador to Spain in the time of
James I, or of Charles I, and married there and sent down a strain of
Spanish blood to warm us up. Also, according to tradition, this one or
another--Geoffrey Clement, by name--helped to sentence Charles to death.
I have not examined into these traditions myself, partly because I was
indolent, and partly because I was so busy polishing up this end of the
line and trying to make it showy; but the other Clemenses claim that
they have made the examination and that it stood the test. Therefore I
have always taken for granted that I did help Charles out of his
troubles, by ancestral proxy. My instincts have persuaded me, too.
Whenever we have a strong and persistent and ineradicable instinct, we
may be sure that it is not original with us, but inherited--inherited
from away back, and hardened and perfected by the petrifying influence
of time. Now I have been always and unchangingly bitter against Charles,
and I am quite certain that this feeling trickled down to me through the
veins of my forebears from the heart of that judge; for it is not my
disposition to be bitter against people on my own personal account I am
not bitter against Jeffreys. I ought to be, but I am not. It indicates
that my ancestors of James II's time were indifferent to him; I do not
know why; I never could make it out; but that is what it indicates. And
I have always felt friendly toward Satan. Of course that is ancestral;
it must be in the blood, for I could not have originated it.
... And so, by the testimony of instinct, backed by the assertions of
Clemenses who said they had examined the records, I have always been
obliged to believe that Geoffrey Clement the martyr-maker was an
ancestor of mine, and to regard him with favor, and in fact pride. This
has not had a good effect upon me, for it has made me vain, and that is
a fault. It has made me set myself above people who were less fortunate
in their ancestry than I, and has moved me to take them down a peg, upon
occasion, and say things to them which hurt them before company.
A case of the kind happened in Berlin several years ago. William Walter
Phelps was our Minister at the Emperor's Court, then, and one evening he
had me to dinner to meet Count S., a cabinet minister. This nobleman was
of long and illustrious descent. Of course I wanted to let out the fact
that I had some ancestors, too; but I did not want to pull them out of
their graves by the ears, and I never could seem to get the chance to
work them in in a way that would look sufficiently casual. I suppose
Phelps was in the same difficulty. In fact he looked distraught, now and
then--just as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by
accident, and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough.
But at last, after dinner, he made a try. He took us about his
drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a rude
and ancient engraving. It was a picture of the court that tried Charles
I. There was a pyramid of judges in Puritan slouch hats, and below them
three bare-headed secretaries seated at a table. Mr. Phelps put his
finger upon one of the three, and said with exulting indifference--
"An ancestor of mine."
I put my finger on a judge, and retorted with scathing languidness--
"Ancestor of mine. But it is a small matter. I have others."
It was not noble in me to do it. I have always regretted it since. But
it landed him. I wonder how he felt? However, it made no difference in
our friendship, which shows that he was fine and high, notwithstanding
the humbleness of his origin. And it was also creditable in me, too,
that I could overlook it. I made no change in my bearing toward him, but
always treated him as an equal.
But it was a hard night for me in one way. Mr. Phelps thought I was the
guest of honor, and so did Count S.; but I didn't, for there was nothing
in my invitation to indicate it. It was just a friendly offhand note, on
a card. By the time dinner was announced Phelps was himself in a state
of doubt. Something had to be done; and it was not a handy time for
explanations. He tried to get me to go out with him, but I held back;
then he tried S., and he also declined. There was another guest, but
there was no trouble about him. We finally went out in a pile. There was
a decorous plunge for seats, and I got the one at Mr. Phelps's left, the
Count captured the one facing Phelps, and the other guest had to take
the place of honor, since he could not help himself. We returned to the
drawing-room in the original disorder. I had new shoes on, and they were
tight. At eleven I was privately crying; I couldn't help it, the pain
was so cruel. Conversation had been dead for an hour. S. had been due at
the bedside of a dying official ever since half past nine. At last we
all rose by one blessed impulse and went down to the street door without
explanations--in a pile, and no precedence; and so, parted.
The evening had its defects; still, I got my ancestor in, and was
satisfied.
Among the Virginian Clemenses were Jere. (already mentioned), and
Sherrard. Jere. Clemens had a wide reputation as a good pistol-shot, and
once it enabled him to get on the friendly side of some drummers when
they wouldn't have paid any attention to mere smooth words and
arguments. He was out stumping the State at the time. The drummers were
grouped in front of the stand, and had been hired by the opposition to
drum while he made his speech. When he was ready to begin, he got out
his revolver and laid it before him, and said in his soft, silky way--
"I do not wish to hurt anybody, and shall try not to; but I have got
just a bullet apiece for those six drums, and if you should want to play
on them, don't stand behind them."
Sherrard Clemens was a Republican Congressman from West Virginia in the
war days, and then went out to St. Louis, where the James Clemens branch
lived, and still lives, and there he became a warm rebel. This was after
the war. At the time that he was a Republican I was a rebel; but by the
time he had become a rebel I was become (temporarily) a Republican. The
Clemenses have always done the best they could to keep the political
balances level, no matter how much it might inconvenience them. I did
not know what had become of Sherrard Clemens; but once I introduced
Senator Hawley to a Republican mass meeting in New England, and then I
got a bitter letter from Sherrard from St. Louis. He said that the
Republicans of the North--no, the "mudsills of the North"--had swept
away the old aristocracy of the South with fire and sword, and it ill
became me, an aristocrat by blood, to train with that kind of swine. Did
I forget that I was a Lambton?
That was a reference to my mother's side of the house. As I have already
said, she was a Lambton--Lambton with a p, for some of the American
Lamptons could not spell very well in early times, and so the name
suffered at their hands. She was a native of Kentucky, and married my
father in Lexington in 1823, when she was twenty years old and he
twenty-four. Neither of them had an overplus of property. She brought
him two or three negroes, but nothing else, I think. They removed to the
remote and secluded village of Jamestown, in the mountain solitudes of
east Tennessee. There their first crop of children was born, but as I
was of a later vintage I do not remember anything about it. I was
postponed--postponed to Missouri. Missouri was an unknown new State and
needed attractions.
I think that my eldest brother, Orion, my sisters Pamela and Margaret,
and my brother Benjamin were born in Jamestown. There may have been
others, but as to that I am not sure. It was a great lift for that
little village to have my parents come there. It was hoped that they
would stay, so that it would become a city. It was supposed that they
would stay. And so there was a boom; but by and by they went away, and
prices went down, and it was many years before Jamestown got another
start. I have written about Jamestown in the "Gilded Age," a book of
mine, but it was from hearsay, not from personal knowledge. My father
left a fine estate behind him in the region round about
Jamestown--75,000 acres.[2] When he died in 1847 he had owned it about
twenty years. The taxes were almost nothing (five dollars a year for the
whole), and he had always paid them regularly and kept his title
perfect. He had always said that the land would not become valuable in
his time, but that it would be a commodious provision for his children
some day. It contained coal, copper, iron and timber, and he said that
in the course of time railways would pierce to that region, and then the
property would be property in fact as well as in name. It also produced
a wild grape of a promising sort. He had sent some samples to Nicholas
Longworth, of Cincinnati, to get his judgment upon them, and Mr.
Longworth had said that they would make as good wine as his Catawbas.
The land contained all these riches; and also oil, but my father did not
know that, and of course in those early days he would have cared nothing
about it if he had known it. The oil was not discovered until about
1895. I wish I owned a couple of acres of the land now. In which case I
would not be writing Autobiographies for a living. My father's dying
charge was, "Cling to the land and wait; let nothing beguile it away
from you." My mother's favorite cousin, James Lampton, who figures in
the "Gilded Age" as "Colonel Sellers," always said of that land--and
said it with blazing enthusiasm, too,--"There's millions in
it--millions!" It is true that he always said that about everything--and
was always mistaken, too; but this time he was right; which shows that a
man who goes around with a prophecy-gun ought never to get discouraged;
if he will keep up his heart and fire at everything he sees, he is bound
to hit something by and by.
Many persons regarded "Colonel Sellers" as a fiction, an invention, an
extravagant impossibility, and did me the honor to call him a
"creation"; but they were mistaken. I merely put him on paper as he was;
he was not a person who could be exaggerated. The incidents which looked
most extravagant, both in the book and on the stage, were not inventions
of mine but were facts of his life; and I was present when they were
developed. John T. Raymond's audiences used to come near to dying with
laughter over the turnip-eating scene; but, extravagant as the scene
was, it was faithful to the facts, in all its absurd details. The thing
happened in Lampton's own house, and I was present. In fact I was myself
the guest who ate the turnips. In the hands of a great actor that
piteous scene would have dimmed any manly spectator's eyes with tears,
and racked his ribs apart with laughter at the same time. But Raymond
was great in humorous portrayal only. In that he was superb, he was
wonderful--in a word, great; in all things else he was a pigmy of the
pigmies.
The real Colonel Sellers, as I knew him in James Lampton, was a pathetic
and beautiful spirit, a manly man, a straight and honorable man, a man
with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man born to be
loved; and he was loved by all his friends, and by his family
worshipped. It is the right word. To them he was but little less than a
god. The real Colonel Sellers was never on the stage. Only half of him
was there. Raymond could not play the other half of him; it was above
his level. That half was made up of qualities of which Raymond was
wholly destitute. For Raymond was not a manly man, he was not an
honorable man nor an honest one, he was empty and selfish and vulgar and
ignorant and silly, and there was a vacancy in him where his heart
should have been. There was only one man who could have played the whole
of Colonel Sellers, and that was Frank Mayo.[3]
It is a world of surprises. They fall, too, where one is least expecting
them. When I introduced Sellers into the book, Charles Dudley Warner,
who was writing the story with me, proposed a change of Seller's
Christian name. Ten years before, in a remote corner of the West, he had
come across a man named Eschol Sellers, and he thought that Eschol was
just the right and fitting name for our Sellers, since it was odd and
quaint and all that. I liked the idea, but I said that that man might
turn up and object. But Warner said it couldn't happen; that he was
doubtless dead by this time, a man with a name like that couldn't live
long; and be he dead or alive we must have the name, it was exactly the
right one and we couldn't do without it. So the change was made.
Warner's man was a farmer in a cheap and humble way. When the book had
been out a week, a college-bred gentleman of courtly manners and ducal
upholstery arrived in Hartford in a sultry state of mind and with a
libel suit in his eye, and _his_ name was Eschol Sellers! He had never
heard of the other one, and had never been within a thousand miles of
him. This damaged aristocrat's programme was quite definite and
businesslike: the American Publishing Company must suppress the edition
as far as printed, and change the name in the plates, or stand a suit
for $10,000. He carried away the Company's promise and many apologies,
and we changed the name back to Colonel Mulberry Sellers, in the plates.
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen. Even the existence of
two unrelated men wearing the impossible name of Eschol Sellers is a
possible thing.
James Lampton floated, all his days, in a tinted mist of magnificent
dreams, and died at last without seeing one of them realized. I saw him
last in 1884, when it had been twenty-six years since I ate the basin of
raw turnips and washed them down with a bucket of water in his house. He
was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old
breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail
wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart,
the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all
there; and before I could turn around he was polishing up his Aladdin's
lamp and flashing the secret riches of the world before me. I said to
myself, "I did not overdraw him by a shade, I set him down as he was;
and he is the same man to-day. Cable will recognize him." I asked him to
excuse me a moment, and ran into the next room, which was Cable's; Cable
and I were stumping the Union on a reading tour. I said--
"I am going to leave your door open, so that you can listen. There is a
man in there who is interesting."
I went back and asked Lampton what he was doing now. He began to tell me
of a "small venture" he had begun in New Mexico through his son; "only a
little thing--a mere trifle--partly to amuse my leisure, partly to keep
my capital from lying idle, but mainly to develop the boy--develop the
boy; fortune's wheel is ever revolving, he may have to work for his
living some day--as strange things have happened in this world. But it's
only a little thing--a mere trifle, as I said."
And so it was--as he began it. But under his deft hands it grew, and
blossomed, and spread--oh, beyond imagination. At the end of half an
hour he finished; finished with the remark, uttered in an adorably
languid manner:
"Yes, it is but a trifle, as things go nowadays--a bagatelle--but
amusing. It passes the time. The boy thinks great things of it, but he
is young, you know, and imaginative; lacks the experience which comes of
handling large affairs, and which tempers the fancy and perfects the
judgment. I suppose there's a couple of millions in it, possibly three,
but not more, I think; still, for a boy, you know, just starting in
life, it is not bad. I should not want him to make a fortune--let that
come later. It could turn his head, at his time of life, and in many
ways be a damage to him."
Then he said something about his having left his pocketbook lying on the
table in the main drawing-room at home, and about its being after
banking hours, now, and--
I stopped him, there, and begged him to honor Cable and me by being our
guest at the lecture--with as many friends as might be willing to do us
the like honor. He accepted. And he thanked me as a prince might who
had granted us a grace. The reason I stopped his speech about the
tickets was because I saw that he was going to ask me to furnish them to
him and let him pay next day; and I knew that if he made the debt he
would pay it if he had to pawn his clothes. After a little further chat
he shook hands heartily and affectionately, and took his leave. Cable
put his head in at the door, and said--
"That was Colonel Sellers."
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.
[2] Correction. 1906: it was above 100,000, it appears.
[3] Raymond was playing "Colonel Sellers" in 1876 and along there. About
twenty years later Mayo dramatized "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and played the
title role delightfully.
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DXCIX.
SEPTEMBER 21, 1906.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--II.
BY MARK TWAIN.
II.
My experiences as an author began early in 1867. I came to New York from
San Francisco in the first month of that year and presently Charles H.
Webb, whom I had known in San Francisco as a reporter on _The Bulletin_,
and afterward editor of _The Californian_, suggested that I publish a
volume of sketches. I had but a slender reputation to publish it on, but
I was charmed and excited by the suggestion and quite willing to venture
it if some industrious person would save me the trouble of gathering the
sketches together. I was loath to do it myself, for from the beginning
of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where
the industry ought to be. ("Ought to was" is better, perhaps, though
the most of the authorities differ as to this.)
Webb said I had some reputation in the Atlantic States, but I knew quite
well that it must be of a very attenuated sort. What there was of it
rested upon the story of "The Jumping Frog." When Artemus Ward passed
through California on a lecturing tour, in 1865 or '66, I told him the
"Jumping Frog" story, in San Francisco, and he asked me to write it out
and send it to his publisher, Carleton, in New York, to be used in
padding out a small book which Artemus had prepared for the press and
which needed some more stuffing to make it big enough for the price
which was to be charged for it.
It reached Carleton in time, but he didn't think much of it, and was not
willing to go to the typesetting expense of adding it to the book. He
did not put it in the waste-basket, but made Henry Clapp a present of
it, and Clapp used it to help out the funeral of his dying literary
journal, _The Saturday Press_. "The Jumping Frog" appeared in the last
number of that paper, was the most joyous feature of the obsequies, and
was at once copied in the newspapers of America and England. It
certainly had a wide celebrity, and it still had it at the time that I
am speaking of--but I was aware that it was only the frog that was
celebrated. It wasn't I. I was still an obscurity.
Webb undertook to collate the sketches. He performed this office, then
handed the result to me, and I went to Carleton's establishment with it.
I approached a clerk and he bent eagerly over the counter to inquire
into my needs; but when he found that I had come to sell a book and not
to buy one, his temperature fell sixty degrees, and the old-gold
intrenchments in the roof of my mouth contracted three-quarters of an
inch and my teeth fell out. I meekly asked the privilege of a word with
Mr. Carleton, and was coldly informed that he was in his private office.
Discouragements and difficulties followed, but after a while I got by
the frontier and entered the holy of holies. Ah, now I remember how I
managed it! Webb had made an appointment for me with Carleton; otherwise
I never should have gotten over that frontier. Carleton rose and said
brusquely and aggressively,
"Well, what can I do for you?"
I reminded him that I was there by appointment to offer him my book for
publication. He began to swell, and went on swelling and swelling and
swelling until he had reached the dimensions of a god of about the
second or third degree. Then the fountains of his great deep were broken
up, and for two or three minutes I couldn't see him for the rain. It was
words, only words, but they fell so densely that they darkened the
atmosphere. Finally he made an imposing sweep with his right hand, which
comprehended the whole room and said,
"Books--look at those shelves! Every one of them is loaded with books
that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I
don't. Good morning."
Twenty-one years elapsed before I saw Carleton again. I was then
sojourning with my family at the Schweitzerhof, in Luzerne. He called on
me, shook hands cordially, and said at once, without any preliminaries,
"I am substantially an obscure person, but I have at least one
distinction to my credit of such colossal dimensions that it entitles me
to immortality--to wit: I refused a book of yours, and for this I stand
without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century."
It was a most handsome apology, and I told him so, and said it was a
long-delayed revenge but was sweeter to me than any other that could be
devised; that during the lapsed twenty-one years I had in fancy taken
his life several times every year, and always in new and increasingly
cruel and inhuman ways, but that now I was pacified, appeased, happy,
even jubilant; and that thenceforth I should hold him my true and valued
friend and never kill him again.
I reported my adventure to Webb, and he bravely said that not all the
Carletons in the universe should defeat that book; he would publish it
himself on a ten per cent. royalty. And so he did. He brought it out in
blue and gold, and made a very pretty little book of it, I think he
named it "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other
Sketches," price $1.25. He made the plates and printed and bound the
book through a job-printing house, and published it through the American
News Company.
In June I sailed in the _Quaker City_ Excursion. I returned in November,
and in Washington found a letter from Elisha Bliss, of the American
Publishing Company of Hartford, offering me five per cent. royalty on a
book which should recount the adventures of the Excursion. In lieu of
the royalty, I was offered the alternative of ten thousand dollars cash
upon delivery of the manuscript. I consulted A. D. Richardson and he
said "take the royalty." I followed his advice and closed with Bliss. By
my contract I was to deliver the manuscript in July of 1868. I wrote the
book in San Francisco and delivered the manuscript within contract time.
Bliss provided a multitude of illustrations for the book, and then
stopped work on it. The contract date for the issue went by, and there
was no explanation of this. Time drifted along and still there was no
explanation. I was lecturing all over the country; and about thirty
times a day, on an average, I was trying to answer this conundrum:
"When is your book coming out?"
I got tired of inventing new answers to that question, and by and by I
got horribly tired of the question itself. Whoever asked it became my
enemy at once, and I was usually almost eager to make that appear.
As soon as I was free of the lecture-field I hastened to Hartford to
make inquiries. Bliss said that the fault was not his; that he wanted to
publish the book but the directors of his Company were staid old fossils
and were afraid of it. They had examined the book, and the majority of
them were of the opinion that there were places in it of a humorous
character. Bliss said the house had never published a book that had a
suspicion like that attaching to it, and that the directors were afraid
that a departure of this kind would seriously injure the house's
reputation; that he was tied hand and foot, and was not permitted to
carry out his contract. One of the directors, a Mr. Drake--at least he
was the remains of what had once been a Mr. Drake--invited me to take a
ride with him in his buggy, and I went along. He was a pathetic old
relic, and his ways and his talk were also pathetic. He had a delicate
purpose in view and it took him some time to hearten himself
sufficiently to carry it out, but at last he accomplished it. He
explained the house's difficulty and distress, as Bliss had already
explained it. Then he frankly threw himself and the house upon my mercy
and begged me to take away "The Innocents Abroad" and release the
concern from the contract. I said I wouldn't--and so ended the interview
and the buggy excursion. Then I warned Bliss that he must get to work or
I should make trouble. He acted upon the warning, and set up the book
and I read the proofs. Then there was another long wait and no
explanation. At last toward the end of July (1869, I think), I lost
patience and telegraphed Bliss that if the book was not on sale in
twenty-four hours I should bring suit for damages.
That ended the trouble. Half a dozen copies were bound and placed on
sale within the required time. Then the canvassing began, and went
briskly forward. In nine months the book took the publishing house out
of debt, advanced its stock from twenty-five to two hundred, and left
seventy thousand dollars profit to the good. It was Bliss that told me
this--but if it was true, it was the first time that he had told the
truth in sixty-five years. He was born in 1804.
III.
... This was in 1849. I was fourteen years old, then. We were still
living in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, in the
new "frame" house built by my father five years before. That is, some of
us lived in the new part, the rest in the old part back of it--the "L."
In the autumn my sister gave a party, and invited all the marriageable
young people of the village. I was too young for this society, and was
too bashful to mingle with young ladies, anyway, therefore I was not
invited--at least not for the whole evening. Ten minutes of it was to be
my whole share. I was to do the part of a bear in a small fairy play. I
was to be disguised all over in a close-fitting brown hairy stuff proper
for a bear. About half past ten I was told to go to my room and put on
this disguise, and be ready in half an hour. I started, but changed my
mind; for I wanted to practise a little, and that room was very small. I
crossed over to the large unoccupied house on the corner of Main and
Hill streets,[4] unaware that a dozen of the young people were also
going there to dress for their parts. I took the little black slave boy,
Sandy, with me, and we selected a roomy and empty chamber on the second
floor. We entered it talking, and this gave a couple of half-dressed
young ladies an opportunity to take refuge behind a screen undiscovered.
Their gowns and things were hanging on hooks behind the door, but I did
not see them; it was Sandy that shut the door, but all his heart was in
the theatricals, and he was as unlikely to notice them as I was myself.
That was a rickety screen, with many holes in it, but as I did not know
there were girls behind it, I was not disturbed by that detail. If I had
known, I could not have undressed in the flood of cruel moonlight that
was pouring in at the curtainless windows; I should have died of shame.
Untroubled by apprehensions, I stripped to the skin and began my
practice. I was full of ambition; I was determined to make a hit; I was
burning to establish a reputation as a bear and get further engagements;
so I threw myself into my work with an abandon that promised great
things. I capered back and forth from one end of the room to the other
on all fours, Sandy applauding with enthusiasm; I walked upright and
growled and snapped and snarled; I stood on my head, I flung
handsprings, I danced a lubberly dance with my paws bent and my
imaginary snout sniffing from side to side; I did everything a bear
could do, and many things which no bear could ever do and no bear with
any dignity would want to do, anyway; and of course I never suspected
that I was making a spectacle of myself to any one but Sandy. At last,
standing on my head, I paused in that attitude to take a minute's rest.
There was a moment's silence, then Sandy spoke up with excited interest
and said--
"Marse Sam, has you ever seen a smoked herring?"
"No. What is that?"
"It's a fish."
"Well, what of it? Anything peculiar about it?"
"Yes, suh, you bet you dey is. _Dey eats 'em guts and all!_"
There was a smothered burst of feminine snickers from behind the screen!
All the strength went out of me and I toppled forward like an undermined
tower and brought the screen down with my weight, burying the young
ladies under it. In their fright they discharged a couple of piercing
screams--and possibly others, but I did not wait to count. I snatched my
clothes and fled to the dark hall below, Sandy following. I was dressed
in half a minute, and out the back way. I swore Sandy to eternal
silence, then we went away and hid until the party was over. The
ambition was all out of me. I could not have faced that giddy company
after my adventure, for there would be two performers there who knew my
secret, and would be privately laughing at me all the time. I was
searched for but not found, and the bear had to be played by a young
gentleman in his civilized clothes. The house was still and everybody
asleep when I finally ventured home. I was very heavy-hearted, and full
of a sense of disgrace. Pinned to my pillow I found a slip of paper
which bore a line that did not lighten my heart, but only made my face
burn. It was written in a laboriously disguised hand, and these were its
mocking terms:
"You probably couldn't have played _bear_, but you played _bare_ very
well--oh, very very well!"
We think boys are rude, unsensitive animals, but it is not so in all
cases. Each boy has one or two sensitive spots, and if you can find out
where they are located you have only to touch them and you can scorch
him as with fire. I suffered miserably over that episode. I expected
that the facts would be all over the village in the morning, but it was
not so. The secret remained confined to the two girls and Sandy and me.
That was some appeasement of my pain, but it was far from
sufficient--the main trouble remained: I was under four mocking eyes,
and it might as well have been a thousand, for I suspected all girls'
eyes of being the ones I so dreaded. During several weeks I could not
look any young lady in the face; I dropped my eyes in confusion when any
one of them smiled upon me and gave me greeting; and I said to myself,
"_That is one of them_," and got quickly away. Of course I was meeting
the right girls everywhere, but if they ever let slip any betraying sign
I was not bright enough to catch it. When I left Hannibal four years
later, the secret was still a secret; I had never guessed those girls
out, and was no longer expecting to do it. Nor wanting to, either.
One of the dearest and prettiest girls in the village at the time of my
mishap was one whom I will call Mary Wilson, because that was not her
name. She was twenty years old; she was dainty and sweet, peach-bloomy
and exquisite, gracious and lovely in character, and I stood in awe of
her, for she seemed to me to be made out of angel-clay and rightfully
unapproachable by an unholy ordinary kind of a boy like me. I probably
never suspected her. But--
The scene changes. To Calcutta--forty-seven years later. It was in 1896.
I arrived there on my lecturing trip. As I entered the hotel a divine
vision passed out of it, clothed in the glory of the Indian
sunshine--the Mary Wilson of my long-vanished boyhood! It was a
startling thing. Before I could recover from the bewildering shock and
speak to her she was gone. I thought maybe I had seen an apparition, but
it was not so, she was flesh. She was the granddaughter of the other
Mary, the original Mary. That Mary, now a widow, was up-stairs, and
presently sent for me. She was old and gray-haired, but she looked young
and was very handsome. We sat down and talked. We steeped our thirsty
souls in the reviving wine of the past, the beautiful past, the dear and
lamented past; we uttered the names that had been silent upon our lips
for fifty years, and it was as if they were made of music; with reverent
hands we unburied our dead, the mates of our youth, and caressed them
with our speech; we searched the dusty chambers of our memories and
dragged forth incident after incident, episode after episode, folly
after folly, and laughed such good laughs over them, with the tears
running down; and finally Mary said suddenly, and without any leading
up--
"Tell me! What is the special peculiarity of smoked herrings?"
It seemed a strange question at such a hallowed time as this. And so
inconsequential, too. I was a little shocked. And yet I was aware of a
stir of some kind away back in the deeps of my memory somewhere. It set
me to musing--thinking--searching. Smoked herrings. Smoked herrings. The
peculiarity of smo.... I glanced up. Her face was grave, but there was a
dim and shadowy twinkle in her eye which--All of a sudden I knew! and
far away down in the hoary past I heard a remembered voice murmur, "Dey
eats 'em guts and all!"
"At--last! I've found one of you, anyway! Who was the other girl?"
But she drew the line there. She wouldn't tell me.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] That house still stands.
IV.
... But it was on a bench in Washington Square that I saw the most of
Louis Stevenson. It was an outing that lasted an hour or more, and was
very pleasant and sociable. I had come with him from his house, where I
had been paying my respects to his family. His business in the Square
was to absorb the sunshine. He was most scantily furnished with flesh,
his clothes seemed to fall into hollows as if there might be nothing
inside but the frame for a sculptor's statue. His long face and lank
hair and dark complexion and musing and melancholy expression seemed to
fit these details justly and harmoniously, and the altogether of it
seemed especially planned to gather the rays of your observation and
focalize them upon Stevenson's special distinction and commanding
feature, his splendid eyes. They burned with a smouldering rich fire
under the penthouse of his brows, and they made him beautiful.
* * * * *
I said I thought he was right about the others, but mistaken as to Bret
Harte; in substance I said that Harte was good company and a thin but
pleasant talker; that he was always bright, but never brilliant; that in
this matter he must not be classed with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, nor must
any other man, ancient or modern; that Aldrich was always witty, always
brilliant, if there was anybody present capable of striking his flint at
the right angle; that Aldrich was as sure and prompt and unfailing as
the red-hot iron on the blacksmith's anvil--you had only to hit it
competently to make it deliver an explosion of sparks. I added--
"Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and
humorous sayings. None has equalled him, certainly none has surpassed
him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed these children of
his fancy. Aldrich was always brilliant, he couldn't help it, he is a
fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is not speaking, you
know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and glimmering around in him;
when he speaks the diamonds flash. Yes, he was always brilliant, he will
always be brilliant; he will be brilliant in hell--you will see."
Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, "I hope not."
"Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a
transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset."
* * * * *
There on that bench we struck out a new phrase--one or the other of us,
I don't remember which--"submerged renown." Variations were discussed:
"submerged fame," "submerged reputation," and so on, and a choice was
made; "submerged renown" was elected, I believe. This important matter
rose out of an incident which had been happening to Stevenson in Albany.
While in a book-shop or book-stall there he had noticed a long rank of
small books, cheaply but neatly gotten up, and bearing such titles as
"Davis's Selected Speeches," "Davis's Selected Poetry," Davis's this and
Davis's that and Davis's the other thing; compilations, every one of
them, each with a brief, compact, intelligent and useful introductory
chapter by this same Davis, whose first name I have forgotten. Stevenson
had begun the matter with this question:
"Can you name the American author whose fame and acceptance stretch
widest in the States?"
I thought I could, but it did not seem to me that it would be modest to
speak out, in the circumstances. So I diffidently said nothing.
Stevenson noticed, and said--
"Save your delicacy for another time--you are not the one. For a
shilling you can't name the American author of widest note and
popularity in the States. But I can."
Then he went on and told about that Albany incident. He had inquired of
the shopman--
"Who is this Davis?"
The answer was--
"An author whose books have to have freight-trains to carry them, not
baskets. Apparently you have not heard of him?"
Stevenson said no, this was the first time. The man said--
"Nobody has heard of Davis: you may ask all around and you will see. You
never see his name mentioned in print, not even in advertisement; these
things are of no use to Davis, not any more than they are to the wind
and the sea. You never see one of Davis's books floating on top of the
United States, but put on your diving armor and get yourself lowered
away down and down and down till you strike the dense region, the
sunless region of eternal drudgery and starvation wages--there you'll
find them by the million. The man that gets that market, his fortune is
made, his bread and butter are safe, for those people will never go back
on him. An author may have a reputation which is confined to the
surface, and lose it and become pitied, then despised, then forgotten,
entirely forgotten--the frequent steps in a surface reputation. At
surface reputation, however great, is always mortal, and always killable
if you go at it right--with pins and needles, and quiet slow poison, not
with the club and tomahawk. But it is a different matter with the
submerged reputation--down in the deep water; once a favorite there,
always a favorite; once beloved, always beloved; once respected, always
respected, honored, and believed in. For, what the reviewer says never
finds its way down into those placid deeps; nor the newspaper sneers,
nor any breath of the winds of slander blowing above. Down there they
never hear of these things. Their idol may be painted clay, up then at
the surface, and fade and waste and crumble and blow away, there being
much weather there; but down below he is gold and adamant and
indestructible."
V.
This is from this morning's paper:
MARK TWAIN LETTER SOLD.
_Written to Thomas Nast, it Proposed a Joint Tour._
A Mark Twain autograph letter brought $43 yesterday at the auction
by the Merwin-Clayton Company of the library and correspondence of
the late Thomas Nast, cartoonist. The letter is nine pages
note-paper, is dated Hartford, Nov. 12, 1877, and it addressed to
Nast. It reads in part as follows:
Hartford, _Nov. 12_.
MY DEAR NAST: I did not think I should ever stand on a platform
again until the time was come for me to say I die innocent. But the
same old offers keep arriving that have arriven every year, and
been every year declined--$500 for Louisville, $500 for St. Louis,
$1,000 gold for two nights in Toronto, half gross proceeds for New
York, Boston, Brooklyn, &c. I have declined them all just as usual,
though sorely tempted as usual.
Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, but
because (1) travelling alone is so heart-breakingly dreary, and (2)
shouldering the whole show is such cheer-killing responsibility.
Therefore I now propose to you what you proposed to me in November,
1867--ten years ago, (when I was unknown,) viz.; That you should
stand on the platform and make pictures, and I stand by you and
blackguard the audience. I should enormously enjoy meandering
around (to big towns--don't want to go to little ones) with you for
company.
The letter includes a schedule of cities and the number of
appearances planned for each.
This is as it should be. This is worthy of all praise. I say it myself
lest other competent persons should forget to do it. It appears that
four of my ancient letters were sold at auction, three of them at
twenty-seven dollars, twenty-eight dollars, and twenty-nine dollars
respectively, and the one above mentioned at forty-three dollars. There
is one very gratifying circumstance about this, to wit: that my
literature has more than held its own as regards money value through
this stretch of thirty-six years. I judge that the forty-three-dollar
letter must have gone at about ten cents a word, whereas if I had
written it to-day its market rate would be thirty cents--so I have
increased in value two or three hundred per cent. I note another
gratifying circumstance--that a letter of General Grant's sold at
something short of eighteen dollars. I can't rise to General Grant's
lofty place in the estimation of this nation, but it is a deep happiness
to me to know that when it comes to epistolary literature he can't sit
in the front seat along with me.
This reminds me--nine years ago, when we were living in Tedworth Square,
London, a report was cabled to the American journals that I was dying. I
was not the one. It was another Clemens, a cousin of mine,--Dr. J. Ross
Clemens, now of St. Louis--who was due to die but presently escaped, by
some chicanery or other characteristic of the tribe of Clemens. The
London representatives of the American papers began to flock in, with
American cables in their hands, to inquire into my condition. There was
nothing the matter with me, and each in his turn was astonished, and
disappointed, to find me reading and smoking in my study and worth next
to nothing as a text for transatlantic news. One of these men was a
gentle and kindly and grave and sympathetic Irishman, who hid his sorrow
the best he could, and tried to look glad, and told me that his paper,
the _Evening Sun_, had cabled him that it was reported in New York that
I was dead. What should he cable in reply? I said--
"Say the report is greatly exaggerated."
He never smiled, but went solemnly away and sent the cable in those
words. The remark hit the world pleasantly, and to this day it keeps
turning up, now and then, in the newspapers when people have occasion to
discount exaggerations.
The next man was also an Irishman. He had his New York cablegram in his
hand--from the New York _World_--and he was so evidently trying to get
around that cable with invented softnesses and palliations that my
curiosity was aroused and I wanted to see what it did really say. So
when occasion offered I slipped it out of his hand. It said,
"If Mark Twain dying send five hundred words. If dead send a thousand."
Now that old letter of mine sold yesterday for forty-three dollars. When
I am dead it will be worth eighty-six.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DC.
OCTOBER 5, 1906.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--III.
BY MARK TWAIN.
VI.
To-morrow will be the thirty-sixth anniversary of our marriage. My wife
passed from this life one year and eight months ago, in Florence, Italy,
after an unbroken illness of twenty-two months' duration.