by Mark Twain
I will make a diversion here, and get back upon my track again later.
While I was away with G. W. Cable, giving public readings in the theatres, lecture halls, skating rinks, jails and churches of the country, the travel was necessarily fatiguing and therefore I ceased from writing letters excepting to my wife and children. This foretaste of heaven, this relief from the fret of letter-answering, was delightful, but it finally left me in the dark concerning things which I ought to have been acquainted with at the moment.
Among these the affairs of Karl Gerhardt, the young artist, should be mentioned.
I had started out on this reading pilgrimage the day after the Presidential election: that is to say, I had started on the 5th of November and had visited my home only once between that time and the 2d of March following.
During all these four months Gerhardt had been waiting for the verdict of that dilatory committee, and had taken it out in waiting: that is to say, he had sat still and done nothing to earn his bread. He had been tirelessly diligent in asking for work in the line of his art, and had used all possible means in that direction: he had written letters to every man he could hear of who was likely to need a mortuary monument for himself, or his friends, or acquaintances, and had also applied for the chance of a competition for a soldiers’ monument—for all things of this sort—but always without success; the natural result, as his name was not known. He had no reputation.
When I closed my reading campaign at Washington, the last day of February, I came home and found the state of things which I have just spoken of. Gerhardt had waited four long months on that committee which would have needed four centuries in which to make up its mind, and I was thoroughly provoked. I told him that he ought to have had more pride than to permit me to support him and his family during all that time with no assistance from his idle hands. He said that he had wanted to work and had felt the humiliation of the state of things as much as any one could, but that he had been afraid of the effect which it might have if it became known that this artist who was applying for statues and monuments was not to be found in a studio but in some one’s workshop. I said I thought the argument had not a leg to stand on, that he ought to have made it his business to find something to do: that he ought to have been shoveling snow, sawing wood, all these four months, and that the revelation that he had been so engaged would have been a credit to him in anybody’s eyes whose respect was worth anything. It was hard to have to talk to him so plainly, but it was manifest that mere hints were valueless when leveled at him: I had tried them before. He said he would find some work to do immediately.
He came back the next day and said he had got work at Pratt & Whitney’s shop and could go on corresponding with people about statues without interfering with that work.
It seemed to me that Gerhardt compactly filled James Redpath’s definition of an artist: “A man who has a sense of beauty and no sense of duty.”
Once, J. Q. A. Ward, in speaking of his early struggles to get a status as a sculptor, had told me that he had made his beginning by hanging around the studios of sculptors of repute and picking up odd jobs of journey work in them, for the sake of the bread he could gain in that way. I had turned this suggestion over to Gerhardt, but his reply from Paris had been an almost indignant scouting of the idea, as being a thing which no true artist could bring himself to do; and I saw by that that Gerhardt was a true artist because he was manifestly determined not to do it.
I may as well say here and be done with it that my connection with Gerhardt had very little sentiment in it, from my side of the house, and no romance. I took hold of his case, in the first place, solely because I had become convinced that he had it in him to become a very capable sculptor. I was not adopting a child, I was not adding a member to the family, I was merely taking upon myself a common duty—the duty of helping a man who was not able to help himself. I never expected him to be grateful, I never expected him to be thankful—my experience of men had long ago taught me that one of the surest ways of begetting an enemy was to do some stranger an act of kindness which should lay upon him the irritating sense of an obligation. Therefore my connection with Gerhardt had nothing sentimental or romantic about it. I told him in the first place that if the time should ever come when he could pay back to me the money expended upon him and pay it without inconvenience to himself, I should expect it at his hands, and that when it was paid I should consider the account entirely requited—sentiment and all: that that act would leave him free from any obligation to me. It was well all round that things had taken that shape in the beginning and had kept it, for, if the foundation had been sentiment, that sentiment would have grown sour when I saw that he did not want to work for a living in outside ways when art had no living to offer. It had saved me from applying in his case a maxim of mine that whenever a man preferred being fed by any other man to starving in independence he ought to be shot.
One evening Gerhardt appeared in the library and I hoped he had come to say he was getting along very well at the machine shop and was contented; so I was disappointed when he said he had come to show me a small bust he had been making, in clay, of General Grant, from a photograph. I was the more irritated for the reason that I had never seen a portrait of General Grant—in oil, water-colors, crayon, steel, wood, photograph, plaster, marble or any other material,—that was to me at all satisfactory; and, therefore, I could not expect that a person who had never even seen the General could accomplish anything worth considering in the way of a likeness of him.
However, when he uncovered the bust my prejudices vanished at once. The thing was not correct in its details, yet it seemed to me to be a closer approach to a good likeness of General Grant than any one which I had ever seen before. Before uncovering it Gerhardt had said he had brought it in the hope that I would show it to some member of the General’s family, and get that member to point out its chief defects for correction; but I had replied that I could not venture to do that, for there was a plenty of people to pester these folks without me adding myself to the number. But a glance at the bust had changed all that in an instant. I said I would go to New York in the morning and ask the family to look at the bust and that he must come along to be within call in case they took enough interest in the matter to point out the defects.
We reached the General’s house at one o’clock the next afternoon, and I left Gerhardt and the bust below and went up stairs to see the family.
And now, for the first time, the thought came into my mind, that perhaps I was doing a foolish thing, that the family must of necessity have been pestered with such matters as this so many times that the very mention of such a thing must be nauseating to them. However, I had started and so I might as well finish. Therefore I said I had a young artist down stairs who had been making a small bust of the General from a photograph and I wished they would look at it, if they were willing to do me that kindness.
Jesse Grant’s wife spoke up with eagerness and said “Is it the artist who made the bust of you that is in Huckleberry Finn?” I said, yes. She said with great animation, “How good it was of you, Mr. Clemens, to think of that!” She expressed this lively gratitude to me in various ways until I began to feel somehow a great sense of merit in having originated this noble idea of having a bust of General Grant made by so excellent an artist. I will not do my sagacity the discredit of saying that I did anything to remove or modify this impression that I had originated the idea and carried it out to its present state through my own ingenuity and diligence.
Mrs. Jesse Grant added, “How strange it is; only two nights ago I dreamed that I was looking at your bust in Huckleberry Finn and thinking how nearly perfect it was, and then I thought that I conceived the idea of going to you and asking you if you could not hunt up that artist and get him to make a bust of father!”
Things were going on very handsomely!
The persons present were Colonel Fred Grant, Mrs. Jesse Grant, and Dr. Douglas.
I went down for Gerha
rdt and he brought up the bust and uncovered it. All of the family present exclaimed over the excellence of the likeness, and Mrs. Jesse Grant expended some more unearned gratitude upon me.
The family began to discuss the details and then checked themselves and begged Gerhardt’s pardon for criticising. Of course he said that their criticisms were exactly what he wanted and begged them to go on. The General’s wife said that in that case they would be glad to point out what seemed to them inaccuracies, but that he must not take their speeches as being criticisms upon his art at all. They found two inaccuracies: in the shape of the nose and the shape of the forehead. All were agreed that the forehead was wrong, but there was a lively dispute about the nose. Some of those present contended that the nose was nearly right—the others contended that it was distinctly wrong. The General’s wife knelt on the ottoman to get a clearer view of the bust and the others stood about her—all talking at once. Finally the General’s wife said, hesitatingly, with the mien of one who is afraid he is taking a liberty and asking too much—“If Mr. Gerhardt could see the General’s nose and forehead himself, that would dispose of this dispute at once”; finally, “The General is in the next room—would Mr. Gerhardt mind going in there and making the correction himself?”
Things were indeed progressing handsomely!
Of course, Mr. Gerhardt lost no time in expressing his willingness.
While the controversy was going on concerning the nose and the forehead, Mrs. Fred Grant joined the group, and then presently each of the three ladies in turn disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a handful of photographs and hand-painted miniatures of the General.
These pictures had been made in every quarter of the world. One of them had been painted in Japan. But, good as many of these pictures were they were worthless as evidence for the reason that they contradicted each other in every detail.
The photograph apparatus had lied as distinctly and as persistently as had the hands of the miniature-artists. No two noses were alike and no two foreheads were alike.
We stepped into the General’s room—all but General Badeau and Dr. Douglas.
The General was stretched out in a reclining chair with his feet supported upon an ordinary chair. He was muffled up in dressing gowns and afghans with his black woolen skull-cap on his head.
The ladies took the skull-cap off and began to discuss his nose and his forehead and they made him turn this way and that way and the other way to get different views and profiles of his features. He took it all patiently and made no complaint. He allowed them to pull and haul him about in their own affectionate fashion without a murmur. Mrs. Fred Grant, who is very beautiful and of the most gentle and loving character, was very active in this service and very deft with her graceful hands in arranging and re-arranging the General’s head for inspection and repeatedly called attention to the handsome shape of his head—a thing which reminds me that Gerhardt had picked up an old plug hat of the General’s down stairs and had remarked upon the perfect oval shape of the inside of it, this oval being so uniform that the wearer of the hat could never be able to know by the feel of it whether he had it right-end in front or wrong-end in front, whereas the average man’s head is broad at one end and narrow at the other.
The General’s wife placed him in various positions, none of which satisfied her, and finally she went to him and said—“Ulyss! Ulyss! Can’t you put your feet to the floor?” He did so at once and straightened himself up.
During all this time, the General’s face wore a pleasant, contented and, I should say, benignant aspect, but he never opened his lips once. As had often been the case before, so now, his silence gave ample room to guess at what was passing in his mind—and to take it out in guessing. I will remark, in passing, that the General’s hands were very thin, and they showed, far more than did his face, how his long siege of confinement and illness and insufficient food had wasted him. He was at this time suffering great and increasing pain from the cancer at the root of his tongue, but there was nothing ever discoverable in the expression of his face to betray this fact as long as he was awake. When asleep his face would take advantage of him and make revelations.
At the end of fifteen minutes Gerhardt said he believed he could correct the defects now. So, we went back to the other room.
Gerhardt went to work on the clay image, everybody standing round, observing and discussing with the greatest interest.
Presently, the General astonished us by appearing there, clad in his wraps, and supporting himself in a somewhat unsure way upon a cane. He sat down on the sofa and said he could sit there if it would be for the advantage of the artist.
But his wife would not allow that. She said that he might catch cold. She was for hurrying him back at once to his invalid chair. He succumbed, and started back, but at the door he turned and said:
“Then can’t Mr. Gerhardt bring the clay in here and work?”
This was several hundred times better fortune than Gerhardt could have dreamed of. He removed his work to the General’s room at once. The General stretched himself out in his chair, but said that if that position would not do, he would sit up. Gerhardt said it would do very well, indeed; especially if it were more comfortable to the sitter than any other would be.
The General watched Gerhardt’s swift and noiseless fingers for some time with manifest interest in his face, and no doubt this novelty was a valuable thing to one who had spent so many weeks that were tedious with sameness and unemphasized with change or diversion. By and bye, one eyelid began to droop occasionally; then everybody stepped out of the room excepting Gerhardt and myself and I moved to the rear where I would be out of sight and not be a disturbing element.
Harrison, the General’s old colored body-servant, came in presently and remained a while watching Gerhardt, and then broke out with great zeal and decision:
“That’s the General! Yes, sir! That’s the General! Mind! I tell you! That’s the General!”
Then he went away, and the place became absolutely silent.
Within a few minutes afterwards the General was sleeping, and for two hours he continued to sleep tranquilly, the serenity of his face disturbed only at intervals by a passing wave of pain. It was the first sleep he had had for several weeks uninduced by narcotics.
To my mind this bust, completed at this sitting, has in it more of General Grant than can be found in any other likeness of him that has ever been made since he was a famous man. I think it may rightly be called the best portrait of General Grant that is in existence. It has also a feature which must always be a remembrancer to this nation of what the General was passing through during the long weeks of that spring. For, into the clay image went the pain which he was enduring but which did not appear in his face when he was awake. Consequently, the bust has about it a suggestion of patient and brave and manly suffering which is infinitely touching.
At the end of two hours General Badeau entered abruptly and spoke to the General and this woke him up. But for this animal’s interruption he might have slept as much longer possibly.
Gerhardt worked on as long as it was light enough to work and then he went away. He was to come again, and did come the following day; but, at the last moment, Colonel Fred Grant would not permit another sitting. He said that the face was so nearly perfect that he was afraid to allow it to be touched again, lest some of the excellence might be refined out of it, instead of adding more excellence to it. He called attention to an oil painting on the wall down stairs and asked if we knew that man. We couldn’t name him—had never seen his face before. “Well,” said Colonel Grant, “that was a perfect portrait of my father once: it was given up by all the family to be the best that had ever been made of him. We were entirely satisfied with it, but the artist, unhappily, was not: he wanted to do a stroke or two to make it absolutely perfect and he insisted on taking it back with him. After he had made those finishing touches it didn’t resemble my father or any one else. We took it, and have always kept it
as a curiosity. But with that lesson behind us we will save this bust from a similar fate.”
He allowed Gerhardt to work at the hair, however: he said he might expend as much of his talent on that as he pleased but must stop there.
Gerhardt finished the hair to his satisfaction but never touched the face again. Colonel Grant required Gerhardt to promise that he would take every pains with the clay bust and then return it to him to keep as soon as he had taken a mould from it. This was done.
Gerhardt prepared the clay as well as he could for permanent preservation and gave it to Colonel Grant.
Up to the present day, May 22, 1885, no later likeness of General Grant of any kind has been made from life and if this shall chance to remain the last ever made of him from life, coming generations can properly be grateful that one so nearly perfect of him was made after the world learned his name.
Grant’s Memoirs
1885. (Spring.)
Some time after the contract for General Grant’s book was completed, I found that nothing but a verbal understanding existed between General Grant and the Century Company giving General Grant permission to use his Century articles in his book. There is a law of custom which gives an author the privilege of using his magazine article in any way he pleases after it shall have appeared in the magazine, and this law of custom is so well established that an author never expects to have any difficulty about getting a magazine copyright transferred to him whenever he shall ask for it with the purpose in view of putting it in a book. But in the present case I was afraid that the Century Company might fall back upon their legal rights and ignore the law of custom, in which case we should be debarred from using General Grant’s Century articles in his book—an awkward state of things, because he was now too sick a man to re-write them. It was necessary that something should be done in this matter, and done at once.