by Mark Twain
But here at last was one of those dreadful conversations which commended itself to me as being absolutely real, and as being the kind of talk which ladies and gentlemen did actually indulge in in those pleasant and lamented ancient days now gone from us forever. I was immediately full of a desire to practise my archaics, and contrive one of those stirring conversations out of my own head. I thought I would practise on Twichell. I have always practised doubtful things on Twichell from the beginning, thirty-nine years ago.
So I contrived that meeting of the illustrious personages in Queen Elizabeth’s private parlor, and started a most picturesque and lurid and scandalous conversation between them. The Queen’s cup-bearer, a dried-up old nobleman, was present to take down the talk—not that he wanted to do it, but because it was the Queen’s desire and he had to. He loathed all those people because they were of offensively low birth, and because they hadn’t a thing to recommend them except their incomparable brains. He dutifully set down everything they said, and commented upon their words and their manners with bitter scorn and indignation. I put into the Queen’s mouth, and into the mouths of those other people, grossnesses not to be found outside of Rabelais, perhaps. I made their stateliest remarks reek with them, and all this was charming to me—delightful, delicious—but their charm was as nothing to that which was afforded me by that outraged old cup-bearer’s comments upon them.
It is years since I have seen a copy of “1601.” I wonder if it would be as funny to me now as it was in those comparatively youthful days when I wrote it. It made a fat letter. I bundled it up and mailed it to Twichell in Hartford. And in the fall, when we returned to our home in Hartford and Twichell and I resumed the Saturday ten-mile walk to Talcott Tower and back, every Saturday, as had been our custom for years, we used to carry that letter along. There was a grove of hickory trees by the roadside, six miles out, and close by it was the only place in that whole region where the fringed gentian grew. On our return from the Tower we used to gather the gentians, then lie down on the grass upon the golden carpet of fallen hickory leaves and get out that letter and read it by the help of these poetical surroundings. We used to laugh ourselves lame and sore over the cup-bearer’s troubles. I wonder if we could laugh over them now? We were so young then!—and maybe there was not so much to laugh at in the letter as we thought there was.
However, in the winter Dean Sage came to Twichell’s on a visit, and Twichell, who was never able to keep a secret when he knew it ought to be revealed, showed him the letter. Sage carried it off. He was greatly tickled with it himself, and he wanted to know how it might affect other people. He was under the seal of confidence, and could not show the letter to any one—still he wanted to try it on a dog, as the stage phrase is, and he dropped it in the aisle of the smoking-car accidentally, and sat down near-by to wait for results. The letter traveled from group to group around the car, and when he finally went and claimed it, he was convinced that it possessed literary merit. So he got a dozen copies privately printed in Brooklyn. He sent one to David Gray, in Buffalo; one to a friend in Japan; one to Lord Houghton, in England; and one to a Jewish rabbi in Albany, a very learned man and an able critic and lover of old-time literatures.
“1601” was privately printed in Japan and in England, and by and by we began to hear from it. The learned rabbi said it was a masterpiece in its verities and in its imitation of the obsolete English of Elizabeth’s day. And the praises delivered to me by the poet, David Gray, were very precious. He said “Put your name to it. Don’t be ashamed of it. It is a great and fine piece of literature and deserves to live, and will live. Your ‘Innocents Abroad’ will presently be forgotten, but this will survive. Don’t be ashamed; don’t be afraid. Leave the command in your will that your heirs shall put on your tombstone these words, and these alone: ‘He wrote the immortal “1601”.’”
When we sailed for Europe in 1891 I left those sumptuous West Point copies hidden away in a drawer of my study, where I thought they would be safe. We were gone nearly ten years, and whenever anybody wanted a copy I promised it—the promise to be made good when we should return to America. In Berlin I promised one to Rudolph Lindau, of the Foreign Office. He still lives, but I have not been able to make that promise good. I promised one to Mommsen, and one to William Walter Phelps, who was our Minister at the Berlin court. These are dead, but maybe they don’t miss “1601” where they are. When I went lecturing around the globe I promised “1601” pretty liberally—these promises all to be made good when I should return home.
In 1890 I had published in Harper’s Monthly a sketch called “Luck,” the particulars of which had been furnished to Twichell by a visiting English army chaplain. The next year, in Rome, an English gentleman introduced himself to me on the street and said “Do you know who the chief figure in that ‘Luck’ sketch is?” “No,” I said, “I don’t.” “Well,” he said, “it is Lord Wolseley—and don’t you go to England if you value your scalp.” In Venice another English gentleman said the same to me. These gentlemen said “Of course Wolseley is not to blame for the stupendous luck that has chased him up ever since he came shining out of Sandhurst in that most unexpected and victorious way, but he will recognize himself in that sketch, and so will everybody else, and if you venture into England he will destroy you.”
In 1900, in London, I went to the Fourth of July banquet, arriving after eleven o’clock at night, at a time when the place was emptying itself. Choate was presiding. An English admiral was speaking, and some two or three hundred men were still present. I was to speak, and I moved along down behind the chairs which had been occupied by guests, toward Choate. These chairs were now empty. When I had reached within three chairs of Choate, a handsome man put out his hand and said “Stop. Sit down here. I want to get acquainted with you. I am Lord Wolseley.” I was falling, but he caught me, and I explained that I was often taken that way. We sat and chatted together and had a very good time—and he asked me for a copy of “1601,” and I was very glad to get off so easy. I said he should have it as soon as I reached home.
We reached home the next year, and not a sign of those precious masterpieces could be found on the premises anywhere. And so all those promises remain unfulfilled to this day. Two or three days ago I found out that they have reappeared, and are safe in our house in New York. But I shall not make any of those promises good until I shall have had an opportunity to examine that masterpiece and see whether it really is a masterpiece or not. I have my doubts—though I had none a quarter of a century ago. In that day I believed “1601” was inspired.
* Reverend Joseph H. Twichell—“uncle” by courtesy.
Monday, August 6, 1906
Goes back to the failure of Charles L. Webster and Company—First meeting with H. H. Rogers—His sympathy, and assistance—Mr. Clemens in three years pays off a hundred cents on the dollar.
Let us go back three months, now, and take up—no, let him wait. I could not do him justice this morning, for I feel at peace with all the human race. It is best to wait for a more favorable time. We must not be inadequate with that man—we must boil him in oil. I know I get these soft spells too often, but I was born so—I cannot change my disposition. By my count, estimating from the time when I began these dictations two years ago, in Italy, I have been in the right mood for competently and exhaustively feeding fat my ancient grudges in the cases of only thirteen deserving persons—one woman and twelve men. It makes good reading. Whenever I go back and re-read those little biographies and characterizations it cheers me up, and I feel that I have not lived in vain. The work was well done. The art of it is masterly. I admire it more and more every time I examine it. I do believe I have flayed and mangled and mutilated those people beyond the dreams of avarice.
Those chapters will not see print for fifty or seventy-five years to come—but that is no matter, my enjoyment was in the writing of them, not in the unhappiness they could afford to those people or their children. I should like to read them privately to those
people, and I shall hope for that opportunity; but their families have done me no harm, and my heirs and assigns must not publish any of those chapters while any of the wives and children are still living. They have my permission to publish them after that. I don’t mind grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and they themselves won’t mind. I did not write those malignant chapters in malice entirely—a part of my motive was to do those people good. It seemed to me that if I could read the chapters to them privately it would go far to acclimate them for the Hereafter.
No, I could not do that man justice this morning. Let him go. I seem to be out of vitriol; I suppose I have sprung a leak somewhere. I seem to be full of peace, affection, and the joy of life. Let us go back to history, and resume where we left off, six or seven weeks ago, with the failure of Charles L. Webster and Company.
My wife and I realized that we were really ruined this time, and quite completely. In my account, in a previous chapter, of the many fortunes which I had for years been wasting in foolish speculations, I have not intimated that the losses ever seriously embarrassed us, and indeed they did not. But the case was different now. In six or seven years Charles L. Webster and Company and James W. Paige the composing-machine adventurer, had between them swallowed up a quarter of a million dollars, half of it mine, half of it my wife’s. The great panic of ’93–’94 was on. Our incomes, like most other people’s, were crippled. Moreover, we were under the heavy burden of debt left behind by the dead Webster firm. It was in these black days that I stumbled accidentally upon H. H. Rogers one evening in the lobby of the Murray Hill Hotel, whither Dr. Clarence C. Rice and I had gone on some errand or other, I do not now remember what. However, Henry Rogers interested himself in my troubles at once, and set himself the task of piloting me out of them. It was not a holiday job, for even a Standard Oil veteran; but his was a cool and capable head, and he was not disturbed by the complications and perplexities that were driving me toward insanity. It cost him several weeks of diligent hard work, and one trip to Chicago, to pull me out of the Paige entanglement and set that matter permanently straight. It cost him five years of intricate and bothersome work to pull me out of the Webster complications and abolish them out of my life for good and all.
Personally I never had anything to do with straightening out those involved and vexatious Webster complexities. I sat around idle; sometimes here, sometimes with the family in Europe, and latterly decorating the globe’s circumference with a garland of lectures, delivered in the interest of the Webster creditors. He did the whole of it himself. We were not legally liable for much of that great Webster indebtedness, but Mrs. Clemens and I considered ourselves morally liable for the whole of it, and we believed that if I could have four years’ time I could earn enough to pay it all off at a hundred cents on the dollar. I was only fifty-eight; I was in good repair; and we elected to pay a hundred cents. Now I wish to make particular note of this fact: of all our business friends, there was only one who approved the hundred cents proposition, encouraged us in it, and said “Hold your grip and go ahead.” That was Henry Rogers. We held our grip and went ahead. In something short of three years we earned the money—forwarding it to Mr. Rogers as fast as we acquired it—and then we were out of debt. We had paid a hundred cents on the dollar, and owed no one a penny.
In the beginning Mrs. Clemens wanted to turn over her house to the creditors—land, furniture and all—a property which had cost more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and which she had paid for out of her own pocket. She was determined to do this, but Mr. Rogers would not permit it—and of course I wouldn’t. It cost her a pang to relinquish that idea, but she was not able to help herself.
I have said in a previous chapter that at the meeting of Webster creditors Mr. Rogers insisted on making Mrs. Clemens a preferred creditor, and in giving her my copyrights in satisfaction of an indebtedness of sixty-five thousand dollars which she had lent to Webster and Company upon the firm’s notes, from time to time. He secured his point, and the copyrights went to Mrs. Clemens. That was the far-sightedest thing Mr. Rogers has ever done for me. All values were flat at that time; no kind of property was salable; you couldn’t even give it away to a really bright and intelligent person. My books were no exception to the rule. They seemed permanently dead. I was not able to regard them as property. But Mr. Rogers stood to it that when the panic should be over they would revive, and would presently furnish a steady income and be as valuable as before. It turned out that he was right.
It is odd that he, a man of affairs, a purely business man, a man whose intellectual activities had been concerned all his life solely with finance and vast material commercial operations, should have been able to forecast with such certainty and such confidence the future of such a thing as a pile of paralysed old books. It is odd, and yet it is hardly surprising, for he carries a most remarkable head upon his shoulders, and it has long ago ceased to surprise me when it does surprising things. I think he was the only person alive who considered those old books a valuable asset, but the result has verified his judgment. Within two or three years after the prediction the books had revived and had begun to furnish my family an ample support; time has not diminished the figure, but enlarged it. My wife and I could have been persuaded to let the copyrights go; but nothing would have come of it, for Mr. Rogers would not have allowed the books to get away from us, and he is a very willful man. He is the reason that my literature affords a generous support for my children, and will continue to afford it after I am gone until the Government needs their bread and butter and takes it from them under the only dishonorable copyright law that exists upon the planet outside of England.
Tuesday, August 7, 1906
Mr. Clemens expresses his gratitude to Mr. Rogers—Describes the man as one of the three handsomest men in America.
Who saves my soul does me a service; who saves my family’s bread and butter does me a service that is worth thirty of it. For I am well acquainted with my soul, and know its value to a farthing. To Reverend Joseph H. Twichell I owe thanks for the impending halo, to Mr. Rogers I owe gratitude. A person’s soul is not an asset of serious importance, now that hell has become so doubtful. In this world we can get along without it, and many, many of us do. Its condition and prospects interest us in a colorless and perfunctory way, Sundays, but do not go to the heart and set a grip upon it. It is the peril of the wife and children’s bread and butter that does that. When the bread and butter of one’s dearest in all the world is in danger, that person realizes that he stands in the presence of a tremendous reality, and that by comparison with this sharp and searching exigency, the saving of his soul is a light matter and can be put off to another time. I will take up these theological aspects in a future chapter and thresh them out—but for the present I will return to business.
There are many and various kinds of sacrifice which a person can make for his friend, but I think the highest and greatest of them is his sacrifice of time and labor in the cause. Mr. Rogers gave a part of his time, daily, during several weeks, to the straightening out of my Paige entanglements; he gave many weeks of his time to the arranging of an agreement between the American Publishing Company and the Harpers whereby I got the use of my Harper books in a completed set to be issued by the former Company; he had the Webster matter on his hands for five years; three years ago he labored at another contract between the two publishing firms and myself during a good many weeks, and at last got it accomplished and signed—a contract which released me from slavery to two masters and left me in the happier condition of servant to only one—the Harper Corporation. Any one who has served two masters in this world will understand the almost inestimable value of this modification.
Mr. Rogers’s time is worth several thousand dollars an hour, and I have had almost daily use of it for thirteen years; he has not charged me anything for it, therefore I stand morally indebted to him in the sum of several millions of dollars. He could have sold it to great corporations for that—but I am awar
e that he is always squandering his time and talent and labor in a spendthrift fashion upon his friends, and so I argue that he gets more pleasure and more satisfaction out of working for his friends for nothing than he would get out of working for those other people at Standard Oil wages.
Mr. Rogers is a very handsome man, symmetrically formed, compactly constructed; he is warm-hearted, affectionate, and as sensitive as a woman. He has a wellspring of humor in him that never runs dry, and an infallible perception of humor in others. He is sixty-seven years old by the almanac, but otherwise only twenty-five, and is as lively and companionable as any other youth of his age. When he is conducting a stern business matter with his peers, his eye knows how to take care of its affairs, but when none but friends are around it is as frank and as candid as an eagle’s; and out of it looks—if my affection is not deceiving me—the spirit of that which resides within: high-mindedness, honor, honesty.
His pictures do not do him justice. It is the common fault of pictures. Thirteen years ago, when I first knew him, he and two others were the especially handsome men of America. Those others were Choate and Twichell. I was not in the competition at that time. I think that those three are still the handsomest men in America, though this cannot be determined by their pictures, because of the inadequacy of pictures in general. Half an hour ago a darling little creature, in summer frock and with her hair hanging in plaited tails down her back, arrived here, and I put my arm around her shoulders and snuggled her head against my breast and inquired, and acquired, her name. Presently she said,