doubt. No one seems to be born with it. One hot day, at home in
Hartford, when she was a little child, her mother borrowed her fan
several times (a Japanese one, value five cents), refreshed herself with
it a moment or two, then handed it back with a word of thanks. Susy knew
her mother would use the fan all the time if she could do it without
putting a deprivation upon its owner. She also knew that her mother
could not be persuaded to do that. A relief most be devised somehow;
Susy devised it. She got five cents out of her money-box and carried it
to Patrick, and asked him to take it down-town (a mile and a half) and
buy a Japanese fan and bring it home. He did it--and thus thoughtfully
and delicately was the exigency met and the mother's comfort secured. It
is to the child's credit that she did not save herself expense by
bringing down another and more costly kind of fan from up-stairs, but
was content to act upon the impression that her mother desired the
Japanese kind--content to accomplish the desire and stop with that,
without troubling about the wisdom or unwisdom of it.
Sometimes, while she was still a child, her speech fell into quaint and
strikingly expressive forms. Once--aged nine or ten--she came to her
mother's room, when her sister Jean was a baby, and said Jean was crying
in the nursery, and asked if she might ring for the nurse. Her mother
asked:
"Is she crying hard?"--meaning cross, ugly.
"Well, no, mamma. It is a weary, lonesome cry."
It is a pleasure to me to recall various incidents which reveal the
delicacies of feeling that were so considerable a part of her budding
character. Such a revelation came once in a way which, while creditable
to her heart, was defective in another direction. She was in her
eleventh year then. Her mother had been making the Christmas purchases,
and she allowed Susy to see the presents which were for Patrick's
children. Among these was a handsome sled for Jimmy, on which a stag was
painted; also, in gilt capitals, the word "Deer." Susy was excited and
joyous over everything, until she came to this sled. Then she became
sober and silent--yet the sled was the choicest of all the gifts. Her
mother was surprised, and also disappointed, and said:
"Why, Susy, doesn't it please you? Isn't it fine?"
Susy hesitated, and it was plain that she did not want to say the thing
that was in her mind. However, being urged, she brought it haltingly
out:
"Well, mamma, it _is_ fine, and of course it _did_ cost a good
deal--but--but--why should that be mentioned?"
Seeing that she was not understood, she reluctantly pointed to that word
"Deer." It was her orthography that was at fault, not her heart. She had
inherited both from her mother.
MARK TWAIN.
(_To be Continued._)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCI.
OCTOBER 19, 1906.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY.--IV.
BY MARK TWAIN.
When Susy was thirteen, and was a slender little maid with plaited tails
of copper-tinged brown hair down her back, and was perhaps the busiest
bee in the household hive, by reason of the manifold studies, health
exercises and recreations she had to attend to, she secretly, and of her
own motion, and out of love, added another task to her labors--the
writing of a biography of me. She did this work in her bedroom at night,
and kept her record hidden. After a little, the mother discovered it and
filched it, and let me see it; then told Susy what she had done, and how
pleased I was, and how proud. I remember that time with a deep
pleasure. I had had compliments before, but none that touched me like
this; none that could approach it for value in my eyes. It has kept that
place always since. I have had no compliment, no praise, no tribute from
any source, that was so precious to me as this one was and still is. As
I read it _now_, after all these many years, it is still a king's
message to me, and brings me the same dear surprise it brought me
then--with the pathos added, of the thought that the eager and hasty
hand that sketched it and scrawled it will not touch mine again--and I
feel as the humble and unexpectant must feel when their eyes fall upon
the edict that raises them to the ranks of the noble.
Yesterday while I was rummaging in a pile of ancient note-books of mine
which I had not seen for years, I came across a reference to that
biography. It is quite evident that several times, at breakfast and
dinner, in those long-past days, I was posing for the biography. In
fact, I clearly remember that I _was_ doing that--and I also remember
that Susy detected it. I remember saying a very smart thing, with a good
deal of an air, at the breakfast-table one morning, and that Susy
observed to her mother privately, a little later, that papa was doing
that for the biography.
I cannot bring myself to change any line or word in Susy's sketch of me,
but will introduce passages from it now and then just as they came in
their quaint simplicity out of her honest heart, which was the beautiful
heart of a child. What comes from that source has a charm and grace of
its own which may transgress all the recognized laws of literature, if
it choose, and yet be literature still, and worthy of hospitality. I
shall print the whole of this little biography, before I have done with
it--every word, every sentence.
The spelling is frequently desperate, but it was Susy's, and it shall
stand. I love it, and cannot profane it. To me, it is gold. To correct
it would alloy it, not refine it. It would spoil it. It would take from
it its freedom and flexibility and make it stiff and formal. Even when
it is most extravagant I am not shocked. It is Susy's spelling, and she
was doing the best she could--and nothing could better it for me....
Susy began the biography in 1885, when I was in the fiftieth year of my
age, and she just entering the fourteenth of hers. She begins in this
way:
We are a very happy family. We consist of Papa, Mamma, Jean, Clara
and me. It is papa I am writing about, and I shall have no trouble
in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a _very_ striking
character.
But wait a minute--I will return to Susy presently.
In the matter of slavish imitation, man is the monkey's superior all the
time. The average man is destitute of independence of opinion. He is not
interested in contriving an opinion of his own, by study and reflection,
but is only anxious to find out what his neighbor's opinion is and
slavishly adopt it. A generation ago, I found out that the latest review
of a book was pretty sure to be just a reflection of the _earliest_
review of it; that whatever the first reviewer found to praise or
censure in the book would be repeated in the latest reviewer's report,
with nothing fresh added. Therefore more than once I took the precaution
of sending my book, in manuscript, to Mr. Howells, when he was editor of
the "Atlantic Monthly," so that he could prepare a review of it at
leisure. I knew he would say the truth about the book--I also knew that
he would find more merit than demerit in it, because I already knew that
that was the condition of the book. I allowed no copy of it to go out to
the press until after Mr. Howells's notice of it had appeared. That book
was always safe. There wasn't a man behind a pen in all America that had
the courage to find anything in the book which Mr. Howells had not
found--there wasn't a man behind a pen in America that had spirit enough
to say a brave and original thing about the book on his own
responsibility.
I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama,
is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real
value--certainly no large value. When Charles Dudley Warner and I were
about to bring out "The Gilded Age," the editor of the "Daily Graphic"
persuaded me to let him have an advance copy, he giving me his word of
honor that no notice of it would appear in his paper until after the
"Atlantic Monthly" notice should have appeared. This reptile published a
review of the book within three days afterward. I could not really
complain, because he had only given me his word of honor as security; I
ought to have required of him something substantial. I believe his
notice did not deal mainly with the merit of the book, or the lack of
it, but with my moral attitude toward the public. It was charged that I
had used my reputation to play a swindle upon the public; that Mr.
Warner had written as much as half of the book, and that I had used my
name to float it and give it currency; a currency--so the critic
averred--which it could not have acquired without my name, and that this
conduct of mine was a grave fraud upon the people. The "Graphic" was not
an authority upon any subject whatever. It had a sort of distinction, in
that it was the first and only illustrated daily newspaper that the
world had seen; but it was without character; it was poorly and cheaply
edited; its opinion of a book or of any other work of art was of no
consequence. Everybody knew this, yet all the critics in America, one
after the other, copied the "Graphic's" criticism, merely changing the
phraseology, and left me under that charge of dishonest conduct. Even
the great Chicago "Tribune," the most important journal in the Middle
West, was not able to invent anything fresh, but adopted the view of the
humble "Daily Graphic," dishonesty-charge and all.
However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and
missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the
burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself.
But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a
crime, and I am not unused to that.
What I have been travelling toward all this time is this: the first
critic that ever had occasion to describe my personal appearance
littered his description with foolish and inexcusable errors whose
aggregate furnished the result that I was distinctly and distressingly
unhandsome. That description floated around the country in the papers,
and was in constant use and wear for a quarter of a century. It seems
strange to me that apparently no critic in the country could be found
who could look at me and have the courage to take up his pen and destroy
that lie. That lie began its course on the Pacific coast, in 1864, and
it likened me in personal appearance to Petroleum V. Nasby, who had been
out there lecturing. For twenty-five years afterward, no critic could
furnish a description of me without fetching in Nasby to help out my
portrait. I knew Nasby well, and he was a good fellow, but in my life I
have not felt malignant enough about any more than three persons to
charge those persons with resembling Nasby. It hurts me to the heart. I
was always handsome. Anybody but a critic could have seen it. And it
had long been a distress to my family--including Susy--that the critics
should go on making this wearisome mistake, year after year, when there
was no foundation for it. Even when a critic wanted to be particularly
friendly and complimentary to me, he didn't dare to go beyond my
clothes. He never ventured beyond that old safe frontier. When he had
finished with my clothes he had said all the kind things, the pleasant
things, the complimentary things he could risk. Then he dropped back on
Nasby.
Yesterday I found this clipping in the pocket of one of those ancient
memorandum-books of mine. It is of the date of thirty-nine years ago,
and both the paper and the ink are yellow with the bitterness that I
felt in that old day when I clipped it out to preserve it and brood over
it, and grieve about it. I will copy it here, to wit:
A correspondent of the Philadelphia "Press," writing of one of
Schuyler Colfax's receptions, says of our Washington correspondent:
"Mark Twain, the delicate humorist, was present: quite a lion, as
he deserves to be. Mark is a bachelor, faultless in taste, whose
snowy vest is suggestive of endless quarrels with Washington
washerwomen; but the heroism of Mark is settled for all time, for
such purity and smoothness were never seen before. His lavender
gloves might have been stolen from some Turkish harem, so delicate
were they in size; but more likely--anything else were more likely
than that. In form and feature he bears some resemblance to the
immortal Nasby; but whilst Petroleum is brunette to the core, Twain
is golden, amber-hued, melting, blonde."
Let us return to Susy's biography now, and get the opinion of one who is
unbiassed:
_From Susy's Biography._
Papa's appearance has been described many times, but very
incorrectly. He has beautiful gray hair, not any too thick or any
too long, but just right; a Roman nose, which greatly improves the
beauty of his features; kind blue eyes and a small mustache. He has
a wonderfully shaped head and profile. He has a very good
figure--in short, he is an extrodinarily fine looking man. All his
features are perfect, except that he hasn't extrodinary teeth. His
complexion is very fair, and he doesn't ware a beard. He is a very
good man and a very funny one. He _has_ got a temper, but we all of
us have in this family. He is the loveliest man I ever saw or ever
hope to see--and oh, so absent-minded. He does tell perfectly
delightful stories. Clara and I used to sit on each arm of his
chair and listen while he told us stories about the pictures on the
wall.
I remember the story-telling days vividly. They were a difficult and
exacting audience--those little creatures.
Along one side of the library, in the Hartford home, the bookshelves
joined the mantelpiece--in fact there were shelves on both sides of the
mantelpiece. On these shelves, and on the mantelpiece, stood various
ornaments. At one end of the procession was a framed oil-painting of a
cat's head, at the other end was a head of a beautiful young girl,
life-size--called Emmeline, because she looked just about like that--an
impressionist water-color. Between the one picture and the other there
were twelve or fifteen of the bric-à-brac things already mentioned; also
an oil-painting by Elihu Vedder, "The Young Medusa." Every now and then
the children required me to construct a romance--always impromptu--not a
moment's preparation permitted--and into that romance I had to get all
that bric-à-brac and the three pictures. I had to start always with the
cat and finish with Emmeline. I was never allowed the refreshment of a
change, end-for-end. It was not permissible to introduce a bric-à-brac
ornament into the story out of its place in the procession.
These bric-à-bracs were never allowed a peaceful day, a reposeful day, a
restful Sabbath. In their lives there was no Sabbath, in their lives
there was no peace; they knew no existence but a monotonous career of
violence and bloodshed. In the course of time, the bric-à-brac and the
pictures showed wear. It was because they had had so many and such
tumultuous adventures in their romantic careers.
As romancer to the children I had a hard time, even from the beginning.
If they brought me a picture, in a magazine, and required me to build a
story to it, they would cover the rest of the page with their pudgy
hands to keep me from stealing an idea from it. The stories had to come
hot from the bat, always. They had to be absolutely original and fresh.
Sometimes the children furnished me simply a character or two, or a
dozen, and required me to start out at once on that slim basis and
deliver those characters up to a vigorous and entertaining life of
crime. If they heard of a new trade, or an unfamiliar animal, or
anything like that, I was pretty sure to have to deal with those things
in the next romance. Once Clara required me to build a sudden tale out
of a plumber and a "bawgunstrictor," and I had to do it. She didn't
know what a boa-constrictor was, until he developed in the tale--then
she was better satisfied with it than ever.
_From Susy's Biography._
Papa's favorite game is billiards, and when he is tired and wishes
to rest himself he stays up all night and plays billiards, it seems
to rest his head. He smokes a great deal almost incessantly. He has
the mind of an author exactly, some of the simplest things he cant
understand. Our burglar-alarm is often out of order, and papa had
been obliged to take the mahogany-room off from the alarm
altogether for a time, because the burglar-alarm had been in the
habit of ringing even when the mahogany-room was closed. At length
he thought that perhaps the burglar-alarm might be in order, and he
decided to try and see; accordingly he put it on and then went down
and opened the window; consequently the alarm bell rang, it would
even if the alarm had been in order. Papa went despairingly
upstairs and said to mamma, "Livy the mahogany-room won't go on. I
have just opened the window to see."
"Why, Youth," mamma replied "if you've opened the window, why of
coarse the alarm will ring!"
"That's what I've opened it for, why I just went down to see if it
would ring!"
Mamma tried to explain to papa that when he wanted to go and see
whether the alarm would ring while the window was closed he
_mustn't_ go and open the window--but in vain, papa couldn't
understand, and got very impatient with mamma for trying to make
him believe an impossible thing true.
This is a frank biographer, and an honest one; she uses no sand-paper on
me. I have, to this day, the same dull head in the matter of conundrums
and perplexities which Susy had discovered in those long-gone days.
Complexities annoy me; they irritate me; then this progressive feeling
presently warms into anger. I cannot get far in the reading of the
commonest and simplest contract--with its "parties of the first part,"
and "parties of the second part," and "parties of the third
part,"--before my temper is all gone. Ashcroft comes up here every day
and pathetically tries to make me understand the points of the lawsuit
which we are conducting against Henry Butters, Harold Wheeler, and the
rest of those Plasmon buccaneers, but daily he has to give it up. It is
pitiful to see, when he bends his earnest and appealing eyes upon me and
says, after one of his efforts, "Now you _do_ understand _that_, don't
you?"
I am always obliged to say, "I _don't_, Ashcroft. I wish I could
understand it, but I don't. Send for the cat."
In the days which Susy is talking about, a perplexity fell to my lot one
day. F. G. Whitmore was my business agent, and he brought me out from
town in his buggy. We drove by the _porte-cochère_ and toward the
stable. Now this was a _single_ road, and was like a spoon whose handle
stretched from the gate to a great round flower-bed in the neighborhood
of the stable. At the approach to the flower-bed the road divided and
circumnavigated it, making a loop, which I have likened to the bowl of
the spoon. As we neared the loop, I saw that Whitmore was laying his
course to port, (I was sitting on the starboard side--the side the house
was on), and was going to start around that spoon-bowl on that left-hand
side. I said,
"Don't do that, Whitmore; take the right-hand side. Then I shall be next
to the house when we get to the door."
He said, "_That_ will not happen in _any case_, it doesn't make any
difference which way I go around this flower-bed."
I explained to him that he was an ass, but he stuck to his proposition,
and I said,
"Go on and try it, and see."
He went on and tried it, and sure enough he fetched me up at the door on
the very side that he had said I would be. I was not able to believe it
then, and I don't believe it yet.
I said, "Whitmore, that is merely an accident. You can't do it again."
He said he could--and he drove down into the street, fetched around,
came back, and actually did it again. I was stupefied, paralyzed,
petrified, with these strange results, but they did not convince me. I
didn't believe he could do it another time, but he did. He said he could
do it all day, and fetch up the same way every time. By that time my
temper was gone, and I asked him to go home and apply to the Asylum and
I would pay the expenses; I didn't want to see him any more for a week.
I went up-stairs in a rage and started to tell Livy about it, expecting
to get her sympathy for me and to breed aversion in her for Whitmore;
but she merely burst into peal after peal of laughter, as the tale of my
adventure went on, for her head was like Susy's: riddles and
complexities had no terrors for it. Her mind and Susy's were analytical;
I have tried to make it appear that mine was different. Many and many a
time I have told that buggy experiment, hoping against hope that I would
some time or other find somebody who would be on my side, but it has
never happened. And I am never able to go glibly forward and state the
circumstances of that buggy's progress without having to halt and
consider, and call up in my mind the spoon-handle, the bowl of the
spoon, the buggy and the horse, and my position in the buggy: and the
minute I have got that far and try to turn it to the left it goes to
ruin; I can't see how it is ever going to fetch me out right when we get
to the door. Susy is right in her estimate. I can't understand things.
That burglar-alarm which Susy mentions led a gay and careless life, and
had no principles. It was generally out of order at one point or
another; and there was plenty of opportunity, because all the windows
and doors in the house, from the cellar up to the top floor, were
connected with it. However, in its seasons of being out of order it
could trouble us for only a very little while: we quickly found out that
it was fooling us, and that it was buzzing its blood-curdling alarm
merely for its own amusement. Then we would shut it off, and send to New
York for the electrician--there not being one in all Hartford in those
days. When the repairs were finished we would set the alarm again and
reestablish our confidence in it. It never did any real business except
upon one single occasion. All the rest of its expensive career was
frivolous and without purpose. Just that one time it performed its duty,
and its whole duty--gravely, seriously, admirably. It let fly about two
o'clock one black and dreary March morning, and I turned out promptly,
because I knew that it was not fooling, this time. The bath-room door
was on my side of the bed. I stepped in there, turned up the gas, looked
at the annunciator, and turned off the alarm--so far as the door
indicated was concerned--thus stopping the racket. Then I came back to
bed. Mrs. Clemens opened the debate:
"What was it?"
"It was the cellar door."
"Was it a burglar, do you think?"
"Yes," I said, "of course it was. Did you suppose it was a Sunday-school
superintendent?"
"No. What do you suppose he wants?"
"I suppose he wants jewelry, but he is not acquainted with the house and
he thinks it is in the cellar. I don't like to disappoint a burglar whom
I am not acquainted with, and who has done me no harm, but if he had
had common sagacity enough to inquire, I could have told him we kept
nothing down there but coal and vegetables. Still it may be that he is
acquainted with the place, and that what he really wants is coal and
vegetables. On the whole, I think it is vegetables he is after."
"Are you going down to see?"
"No; I could not be of any assistance. Let him select for himself; I
don't know where the things are."
Then she said, "But suppose he comes up to the ground floor!"
"That's all right. We shall know it the minute he opens a door on that
floor. It will set off the alarm."
Just then the terrific buzzing broke out again. I said,
"He has arrived. I told you he would. I know all about burglars and
their ways. They are systematic people."
I went into the bath-room to see if I was right, and I was. I shut off
the dining-room and stopped the buzzing, and came back to bed. My wife
said,
"What do you suppose he is after now?"
I said, "I think he has got all the vegetables he wants and is coming up
for napkin-rings and odds and ends for the wife and children. They all
have families--burglars have--and they are always thoughtful of them,
always take a few necessaries of life for themselves, and fill out with
tokens of remembrance for the family. In taking them they do not forget
us: those very things represent tokens of his remembrance of us, and
also of our remembrance of him. We never get them again; the memory of
the attention remains embalmed in our hearts."
"Are you going down to see what it is he wants now?"