XII. Letters 1872-73. Mark Twain In England. London Honors. Acquaintance With Dr. John Brown. A Lecture Triumph. “The Gilded Age”
Clemens did, in fact, sail for England on the given date, and was lavishly received there. All literary London joined in giving him a good time. He had not as yet been received seriously by the older American men of letters, but England made no question as to his title to first rank. Already, too, they classified him as of the human type of Lincoln, and reveled in him without stint. Howells writes: “In England, rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord Mayors, Lord Chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts.”
He was treated so well and enjoyed it all so much that he could not write a book – the kind of book he had planned. One could not poke fun at a country or a people that had welcomed him with open arms. He made plenty of notes, at first, but presently gave up the book idea and devoted himself altogether to having a good time.
He had one grievance – a publisher by the name of Hotten, a sort of literary harpy, of which there were a great number in those days of defective copyright, not merely content with pilfering his early work, had reprinted, under the name of Mark Twain, the work of a mixed assortment of other humorists, an offensive volume bearing the title, Screamers and Eye-openers, by Mark Twain.
They besieged him to lecture in London, and promised him overflowing houses. Artemus Ward, during his last days, had earned London by storm with his platform humor, and they promised Mark Twain even greater success. For some reason, however, he did not welcome the idea; perhaps there was too much gaiety. To Mrs. Clemens he wrote:
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To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:
London, Sep. 15, 1872.
Livy, darling, everybody says lecture-lecture-lecture – but I have not the least idea of doing it – certainly not at present. Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to America, is coming to talk business to me tomorrow, though I have sent him word once before, that I can’t be hired to talk here, because I have no time to spare.
There is too much sociability – I do not get along fast enough with work. Tomorrow I lunch with Mr. Toole and a Member of Parliament – Toole is the most able Comedian of the day. And then I am done for a while. On Tuesday I mean to hang a card to my keybox, inscribed—“Gone out of the City for a week”—and then I shall go to work and work hard. One can’t be caught in a hive of 4,000,000 people, like this.
I have got such a perfectly delightful razor. I have a notion to buy some for Charley, Theodore and Slee – for I know they have no such razors there. I have got a neat little watch-chain for Annie—$20.
I love you my darling. My love to all of you.
Saml.
That Mark Twain should feel and privately report something of his triumphs we need not wonder at. Certainly he was never one to give himself airs, but to have the world’s great literary center paying court to him, who only ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling. It is gratifying to find evidence of human weakness in the following heart-to-heart letter to his publisher, especially in view of the relating circumstances.
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To Elisha Bliss, in Hartford:
London, Sept. 28, 1872.
Friend bliss, – I have been received in a sort of tremendous way, tonight, by the brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the Sheriffs of London – mine being (between you and me) a name which was received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long list of guests was called.
I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and assistance of my excellent friend Sir John Bennett – and I want you to paste the enclosed in a couple of the handsomest copies of the “Innocents” and “Roughing It,” and send them to him. His address is:
“Sir John Bennett, Cheapside, London.”
Yrs Truly,
S. L. Clemens.
The “relating circumstances” were these: At the abovementioned dinner there had been a roll-call of the distinguished guests present, and each name had been duly applauded. Clemens, conversing in a whisper with his neighbor, Sir John Bennett, did not give very close attention to the names, applauding mechanically with the others.
Finally, a name was read that brought out a vehement hand-clapping. Mark Twain, not to be outdone in cordiality, joined vigorously, and kept his hands going even after the others finished. Then, remarkng the general laughter, he whispered to Sir John: “Whose name was that we were just applauding?”
“Mark Twain’s.”
We may believe that the “friendly support” of Sir John Bennett was welcome for the moment. But the incident could do him no harm; the diners regarded it as one of his jokes, and enjoyed him all the more for it.
He was ready to go home by November, but by no means had he had enough of England. He really had some thought of returning there permanently. In a letter to Mrs. Crane, at Quarry Farm, he wrote:
“If you and Theodore will come over in the Spring with Livy and me, and spend the summer you will see a country that is so beautiful that you will be obliged to believe in Fairyland….. and Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder. I would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you over.”
In a letter home, to his mother and sister, we get a further picture of his enjoyment.
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To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett:
London, Nov. 6, 1872.
My dear mother and sister, – I have been so everlasting busy that I couldn’t write – and moreover I have been so unceasingly lazy that I couldn’t have written anyhow. I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven’t done much but attend dinners and make speeches. But have had a jolly good time and I do hate to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely at home – and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make after-dinner speeches here. I have made hundreds of friends; and last night in the crush of the opening of the New Guild-hall Library and Museum, I was surprised to meet a familiar face every few steps. Nearly 4,000 people, of both sexes, came and went during the evening, so I had a good opportunity to make a great many new acquaintances.
Livy is willing to come here with me next April and stay several months – so I am going home next Tuesday. I would sail on Saturday, but that is the day of the Lord Mayor’s annual grand state dinner, when they say 900 of the great men of the city sit down to table, a great many of them in their fine official and court paraphernalia, so I must not miss it. However, I may yet change my mind and sail Saturday. I am looking at a fine Magic lantern which will cost a deal of money, and if I buy it Sammy may come and learn to make the gas and work the machinery, and paint pictures for it on glass. I mean to give exhibitions for charitable purposes in Hartford, and charge a dollar a head.
In a hurry,
Ys affly,
Sam.
He sailed November 12th on the Batavia, arriving in New York two weeks later. There had been a presidential election in his absence. General Grant had defeated Horace Greeley, a result, in some measure at least, attributed to the amusing and powerful pictures of the cartoonist, Thomas Nast. Mark Twain admired Greeley’s talents, but he regarded him as poorly qualified for the nation’s chief executive. He wrote:
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To Th. Nast, in Morristown, N. J.:
Hartford, Nov. 1872.
Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for Grant – I mean, rather, for civilization and progress. Those pictures were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year’s vast events that man is unquestionably yourself. We all do sincerely honor you, and are proud of you.
Mark Twain.
Perhaps Mark Twain was too busy at this time to write letters. His success in England had made him more than ever popular in America, and he could by no means keep up with the demands on him. In January he contributed to the New York Tribune some letters on the Sandwich Islands, but as these were more properly articles they do not seem to belong here.
He refused to go on the lecture circuit, though he permitted Redpath to book him for any occasional appearance, and it is due to one of these special engagements that we have the only letter preserved from this time. It is to Howells, and written with that exaggeration with which he was likely to embellish his difficulties. We are not called upon to believe that there were really any such demonstrations as those ascribed to Warner and himself.
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To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Farmington ave, Hartford Feb. 27.
My dear Howells, – I am in a sweat and Warner is in another. I told Redpath some time ago I would lecture in Boston any two days he might choose provided they were consecutive days—
I never dreamed of his choosing days during Lent since that was his special horror – but all at once he telegraphs me, and hollers at me in all manner of ways that I am booked for Boston March 5 of all days in the year – and to make matters just as mixed and uncertain as possible, I can’t find out to save my life whether he means to lecture me on the 6th or not.
Warner’s been in here swearing like a lunatic, and saying he had written you to come on the 4th, – and I said, “You leather-head, if I talk in Boston both afternoon and evening March 5, I’ll have to go to Boston the 4th,”—and then he just kicked up his heels and went off cursing after a fashion I never heard of before.
Now let’s just leave this thing to Providence for 24 hours – you bet it will come out all right.
Yours ever,
Mark.
He was writing a book with Warner at this time – The Gilded Age – the two authors having been challenged by their wives one night at dinner to write a better book than the current novels they had been discussing with some severity. Clemens already had a story in his mind, and Warner agreed to collaborate in the writing. It was begun without delay. Clemens wrote the first three hundred and ninety-nine pages, and read there aloud to Warner, who took up the story at this point and continued it through twelve chapters, after which they worked alternately, and with great enjoyment. They also worked rapidly, and in April the story was completed. For a collaboration by two men so different in temperament and literary method it was a remarkble performance.
Another thing Mark Twain did that winter was to buy some land on Farmington Avenue and begin the building of a home. He had by no means given up returning to England, and made his plans to sail with Mrs. Clemens and Susy in May. Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira[15] a girlhood friend of Mrs. Clemens – was to accompany them.
The Daily Graphic heard of the proposed journey, and wrote, asking for a farewell word. His characteristic reply is the only letter of any kind that has survived from that spring.
*****
To the Editor of “The Daily Graphic,” in New York City:
Hartford, Apl. 17, 1873.
Ed. Graphic, – Your note is received. If the following two lines which I have cut from it are your natural handwriting, then I understand you to ask me “for a farewell letter in the name of the American people.” Bless you, the joy of the American people is just a little premature; I haven’t gone yet. And what is more, I am not going to stay, when I do go.
Yes, it is true. I am only going to remain beyond the sea, six months, that is all. I love stir and excitement; and so the moment the spring birds begin to sing, and the lagging weariness of summer to threaten, I grow restless, I get the fidgets; I want to pack off somewhere where there’s something going on. But you know how that is – you must have felt that way. This very day I saw the signs in the air of the coming dullness, and I said to myself, “How glad I am that I have already chartered a steamship!” There was absolutely nothing in the morning papers. You can see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were:
By telegraph
A Father Killed by His Son
A Bloody Fight in Kentucky
A Court House Fired, and
Negroes Therein Shot while Escaping
A Louisiana Massacre
An Eight-year-old murderer
Two to Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive!
A Town in a State of General Riot
A Lively Skirmish in Indiana
(and thirty other similar headings.)
The items under those headings all bear date yesterday, Apl. 16 (refer to your own paper) – and I give you my word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I to myself this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; there don’t appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this progressive nation gone to sleep? Have I got to stand another month of this torpidity before I can begin to browse among the lively capitals of Europe?
But never mind-things may revive while I am away. During the last two months my next-door neighbor, Chas. Dudley Warner, has dropped his “Back-Log Studies,” and he and I have written a bulky novel in partnership. He has worked up the fiction and I have hurled in the facts. I consider it one of the most astonishing novels that ever was written. Night after night I sit up reading it over and over again and crying. It will be published early in the Fall, with plenty of pictures. Do you consider this an advertisement? – and if so, do you charge for such things when a man is your friend?
Yours truly,
Sam L. Clemens,
“Mark Twain.”
An amusing, even if annoying, incident happened about the time of Mark Twain’s departure. A man named Chew related to Twichell a most entertaining occurrence. Twichell saw great possibilities in it, and suggested that Mark Twain be allowed to make a story of it, sharing the profits with Chew. Chew agreed, and promised to send the facts, carefully set down. Twichell, in the mean time, told the story to Clemens, who was delighted with it and strongly tempted to write it at once, while he was in the spirit, without waiting on Chew. Fortunately, he did not do so, for when Chew’s material came it was in the form of a clipping, the story having been already printed in some newspaper. Chew’s knowledge of literary ethics would seem to have been slight. He thought himself entitled to something under the agreement with Twichell. Mark Twain, by this time in London, naturally had a different opinion.
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To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
London, June 9, ’73.
Dear old Joe, – I consider myself wholly at liberty to decline to pay Chew anything, and at the same time strongly tempted to sue him into the bargain for coming so near ruining me. If he hadn’t happened to send me that thing in print, I would have used the story (like an innocent fool) and would straightway have been hounded to death as a plagiarist. It would have absolutely destroyed me. I cannot conceive of a man being such a hopeless ass (after serving as a legislative reporter, too) as to imagine that I or any other literary man in his senses would consent to chew over old stuff that had already been in print. If that man weren’t an infant in swaddling clothes, his only reply to our petition would have been, “It has been in print.” It makes me as mad as the very Old Harry every time I think of Mr. Chew and the frightfully narrow escape I have had at his hands. Confound Mr. Chew, with all my heart! I’m willing that he should have ten dollars for his trouble of warming over his cold victuals – cheerfully willing to that – but no more. If I had had him near when his letter came, I would have got out my tomahawk and gone for him. He didn’t tell the story half as well as you did, anyhow.
I wish to goodness you were here this moment – nobody in our parlor but Livy and me, – and a very good view of London to the fore. We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments in the Langham Hotel, 3rd floor, our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place and our parlor having a noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland Place and the crook that joins it to Regent Street.)
9 P.M. Full twilight – rich sunset tints lingering in the west.
I am not going to write anything – rather tell it when I get back. I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I’ve got, anyway. And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.
Lovingly,
Mark.
P. S. – Am luxuriating in glorious old Pepy’s Diary, and smoking.
Letters are exceedingly scarce through all this period. Mark Twain, now on his second visit to London, was literally overwhelmed with honors and entertainment; his rooms at the Langham were like a court. Such men as Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John Millais, and Charles Kingsley hastened to call. Kingsley and others gave him dinners. Mrs. Clemens to her sister wrote: “It is perfectly discouraging to try to write you.”
The continuous excitement presently told on her. In July all further engagements were canceled, and Clemens took his little family to Scotland, for quiet and rest. They broke the journey at York, and it was there that Mark Twain wrote the only letter remaining from this time.
*****
Fragment of a letter to Mrs. Jervis Langdon, of Elmira, N. Y.:
For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date, say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque ruin of St. Mary’s Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed and caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor’s soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this moment.
Their destination was Edinburgh, where they remained a month. Mrs. Clemens’s health gave way on their arrival there, and her husband, knowing the name of no other physician in the place, looked up Dr. John Brown, author of Rab and His Friends, and found in him not only a skilful practitioner, but a lovable companion, to whom they all became deeply attached. Little Susy, now seventeen months old, became his special favorite. He named her Megalops, because of her great eyes.
Mrs. Clemens regained her strength and they returned to London. Clemens, still urged to lecture, finally agreed with George Dolby to a week’s engagement, and added a promise that after taking his wife and daughter back to America he would return immediately for a more extended course. Dolby announced him to appear at the Queen’s Concert Rooms, Hanover Square, for the week of October 13–18, his lecture to be the old Sandwich Islands talk that seven years before had brought him his first success. The great hall, the largest in London, was thronged at each appearance, and the papers declared that Mark Twain had no more than “whetted the public appetite” for his humor. Three days later, October 1873, Clemens, with his little party, sailed for home. Half-way across the ocean he wrote the friend they had left in Scotland:
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To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh:
Mid-Atlantic, Oct. 30, 1873.
Our dear friend the doctor, – We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there’s twenty-two hundred miles of restless water between us, now, besides the railway stretch. And yet you are so present with us, so close to us that a span and a whisper would bridge the distance.
The first three days were stormy, and wife, child, maid, and Miss Spaulding were all sea-sick 25 hours out of the 24, and I was sorry I ever started. However, it has been smooth, and balmy, and sunny and altogether lovely for a day or two now, and at night there is a broad luminous highway stretching over the sea to the moon, over which the spirits of the sea are traveling up and down all through the secret night and having a genuine good time, I make no doubt.
Today they discovered a “collie” on board! I find (as per advertisement which I sent you) that they won’t carry dogs in these ships at any price. This one has been concealed up to this time. Now his owner has to pay £10 or heave him overboard. Fortunately the doggie is a performing doggie and the money will be paid. So after all it was just as well you didn’t intrust your collie to us.
A poor little child died at midnight and was buried at dawn this morning – sheeted and shotted, and sunk in the middle of the lonely ocean in water three thousand fathoms deep. Pity the poor mother.
With our love.
S. L. Clemens.
Mark Twain was back in London, lecturing again at the Queen’s Concert Rooms, after barely a month’s absence. Charles Warren Stoddard, whom he had known in California, shared his apartment at the Langham, and acted as his secretary – a very necessary office, for he was besieged by callers and bombarded with letters.
He remained in London two months, lecturing steadily at Hanover Square to full houses. It is unlikely that there is any other platform record to match it. One letter of this period has been preserved. It is written to Twichell, near the end of his engagement.
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To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
London, Jan. 5 1874.
My dear old Joe, – I knew you would be likely to graduate into an ass if I came away; and so you have – if you have stopped smoking. However, I have a strong faith that it is not too late, yet, and that the judiciously managed influence of a bad example will fetch you back again.
I wish you had written me some news – Livy tells me precious little. She mainly writes to hurry me home and to tell me how much she respects me: but she’s generally pretty slow on news. I had a letter from her along with yours, today, but she didn’t tell me the book is out. However, it’s all right. I hope to be home 20 days from today, and then I’ll see her, and that will make up for a whole year’s dearth of news. I am right down grateful that she is looking strong and “lovelier than ever.” I only wish I could see her look her level best, once – I think it would be a vision.
I have just spent a good part of this day browsing through the Royal Academy Exhibition of Landseer’s paintings. They fill four or five great salons, and must number a good many hundreds. This is the only opportunity ever to see them, because the finest of them belong to the queen and she keeps them in her private apartments. Ah, they’re wonderfully beautiful! There are such rich moonlights and dusks in “The Challenge” and “The Combat;” and in that long flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or sunrise – for no man can ever tell tother from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the water). And there is such a grave analytical profundity in the faces of “The Connoisseurs;” and such pathos in the picture of the fawn suckling its dead mother, on a snowy waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way he makes animals absolute flesh and blood – insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could tell which was which.
I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest a cartoon for Punch. It was this. In one of the Academy salons (in the suite where these pictures are), a fine bust of Landseer stands on a pedestal in the centre of the room. I suggest that some of Landseer’s best known animals be represented as having come down out of their frames in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning attitudes.
Well, old man, I am powerful glad to hear from you and shall be powerful glad to see you and Harmony. I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are large enough. I always felt cramped in Hanover Square Rooms, but I find that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious place, and wonder that I could fill it so long.
I am hoping to be back in 20 days, but I have so much to go home to and enjoy with a jubilant joy, that it seems hardly possible that it can ever come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.
I have read the novel[16] here, and I like it. I have made no inquiries about it, though. My interest in a book ceases with the printing of it.
With a world of love,
Sam.