by Mark Twain
I said it was because I had found out that I was a Christian for revenue only, and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble.
She pressed me to her breast and comforted me. I gathered, from what she said, that if I would continue in that condition I would never be lonesome.
Monday, August 27, 1906
Two instances of remarkable memory for names and faces—General Grant’s and King Edward’s.
Several weeks ago, in Chapter XLI, I spoke of how rare a thing a good memory for names and faces is. I wish to recall now, under that head, an incident or two.
About the middle of the last quarter of the last century I received a distressed letter from my London publisher, in which he said that the Internal Revenue Office had sent him a bill of ten pounds, a tax due upon my English copyrights. Mr. Chatto was a good deal troubled about this, and asked me what course he should pursue. He said that in all his experience the like of this case had not occurred before; that this was the first he had heard that a foreign copyright was taxable. I asked him to refrain from arguing the matter, pay the bill, charge it to me, then ask the Internal Revenue Office to tell us all about it. Chatto had said that there was no mention of a copyright tax in the English statutes, so I was full of an infantile curiosity to know under what title or designation my literature—and mine alone—had been found worthy of this high distinction.
Several weeks went by; then I received from that Internal Revenue Office a sheet of brown wrapping-paper the size of a quilt, and on it was pasted, or printed, some hundreds of numbered paragraphs in small type, each paragraph specifying by name a taxable article, and also specifying the tax that had been inflicted upon it. It took me a long time to read all the paragraphs, and when I got through it seemed to me that not one purchasable or sellable article in use in our modern civilization had escaped the sharp eye of the law-maker. Every individual thing, great and small, from the brass pin to the ocean liner, had been searched out and required to contribute to the revenues of the State. No, there was one thing that had been overlooked, and apparently only one—copyright had not been mentioned.
I wrote the Internal Revenue and asked under what head my copyrights had been taxed, and he replied that they had been taxed by authority of Paragraph D, Section 14. I examined Paragraph D, Section 14, with an eager curiosity, and was grieved to find that the British Government had coldly singled me out from all the multitude of foreign authors and had levied upon my literature under the head of “Classified Products of Gas Factories.” I do not remember that those were the exact words, but I have correctly delivered the sense of them. I was regarded by those unfeeling people in the Revenue Office as a literary gas factory.
To amuse myself, I wrote a letter to Queen Victoria about this matter. It was a rambling, good-natured, leather-headed letter, such as a copiously ignorant person, reared in the backwoods of a democracy and innocent of the restrictions of high etiquette, might write, in a purely friendly way, to a crowned head. In it I stated the details of my grievance and suggested that my humiliating misfortune could not have happened if her Majesty had been at home and attending to her manifold duties in her proverbially faithful way; and I think I implored her to take hold of my case personally, and require the Revenue Office to remove the attainder—if it was an attainder—and restore to me my abolished dignity. With the innocence of a person acquainted only with the unartful diplomacy of the farm and the corner grocery, I tried to get on the good side of her Majesty with a few compliments. I said I had called upon her at Buckingham Palace once, and had been greatly disappointed in not finding her in, but would call again some day and hope for better fortune. I said I had never had the honor of personal acquaintanceship with any member of the Royal Family except the Lord Mayor, but that I had once had the pleasure of meeting the Prince of Wales. It was one day when I was coming down the Strand on top of a ‘bus and he was coming up the Strand at the head of a temperance procession, and he would probably remember me because I had on my new frieze overcoat with brass buttons—and so on, a lot of other nonsense of this calibre. About this time the Harpers applied to me for some nonsense, and I sent this screed and they published it in the Drawer, under the head of “An Open Letter to the Queen.”
However, I am getting too far along. There is another matter which perhaps I should have mentioned first. In the beginning of General Grant’s first term as President, I came East from the Pacific Coast to bring the manuscript of “The Innocents Abroad,” and in the course of business I went down to Washington. Near the White House, one morning, I encountered Senator Stewart of Nevada. He asked me if I would like to see the President. Naturally I said I would. General Grant was the tallest figure in Christendom, at that time, and I had never seen him. I supposed that Stewart merely meant to intrude me into the White House and furnish me a distant look at the President. That he would actually introduce me was a thing which could not occur to me, for I was a totally unknown and inconsequential wanderer from the distant Pacific; the President had never heard of me, and couldn’t by any possibility feel any interest in me. Stewart went blundering into the President’s private office, by authority of a rude privilege sacred to Senators. There was no one there but the President. He was bent over his desk and was busily writing. He had on a long and much wrinkled and crumpled linen duster, whose tails he had liberally used as a pen-wiper—so liberally, indeed, that the multitude of black streaks suggested the flight of Saxon arrows at the battle of Senlac. With native American independence of the proprieties, Stewart marched me forward, stood over the President, and said—
“Mr. President, allow me to introduce to you Mr. Clemens.”
The President slowly raised his head, turned his face, and looked sternly up at me for as much as an hour and a half, without winking. I do not mean that it was really that long; I only mean that it seemed that long. When I had endured it as long as I could, and when it seemed to me that somebody must rupture that devastating silence or I should die, I said hesitatingly,
“Mr. President, I am embarrassed—are you?”
Then the faintest twinkle flickered in his eye for just a single moment—and I and it vanished so nearly together that nobody could have told which of us got off the premises first.
Years afterward I had a telegraphic call to go out to Chicago and attend a great Grant banquet and respond to the toast of “The Babies.” General Grant was arriving from the Pacific, after his memorable circumnavigation of the globe, and he was to be entertained in proper state and splendor, during three days, by the Army of the Tennessee, which was the first army he had ever commanded. In an earlier chapter I have already told how Chicago was packed and jammed with people during those three days. I arrived in the evening. There was to be a grand procession the next morning. At ten o’clock on the said morning I crowded my way through the packed halls and corridors of the hotel, and presently arrived at a place on the second floor where a spacious platform had been built out and decorated with flags. It seemed to me that that would be a good vantage-ground from which to view the procession. It was empty; it looked inviting, and I walked out on it. As far away as I could see, in every direction, the sidewalks, the windows and the roofs were black and parti-colored with masses of human beings of the two sexes. That platform had been built for General Grant; those people knew it, and when I stepped out there they took me for him, and in my life I have never had so enthusiastic a welcome as that one, nor one which made me prouder, or gave me more delight. The music of a distant band came floating down on the air and I looked up the street and saw the procession coming. Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan, in full uniform, was riding at the head of it, and a vast wave of welcome and applause moved with him and marked his progress, step by step, as he came. When he had arrived within fifty or a hundred yards of my platform the Mayor of Chicago, linked arm in arm with General Grant, marched out upon the platform, followed by many generals in uniform, and by the Reception Committee, gay and fine in the fluttering badge
s of their office. The Mayor saw me there, and it turned out that his notions of etiquette were no better than those betrayed by Senator Stewart on the only other time that I had seen the hero of our great war, for instead of taking me to General Grant, he brought General Grant to me, and said:
“General, allow me to introduce to you Mr. Clemens.”
General Grant fixed that same stern look upon my face which had congealed the blood in it in a bygone day; he allowed it to do its crumbling and disintegrating work upon me for an hour and a half—then he said,
“Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed—are you?”
However, I have wandered far from my other incident; I must get back to it. In 1891 or ’92 we were spending the summer at Nauheim, in Germany, and one day Twichell and I mounted the tally-ho coach and went over to Homburg to watch the crowd of invalids take the waters at the springs. There I ran across the British Ambassador to the Court of Berlin, whom I knew very well, and he asked me if I would like to meet the Prince of Wales. There could be but one answer. He said the Prince was around somewhere, and he would go and find him. He ought to have taken me with him, but not even ambassadors know as much about etiquette as I do. He disappeared among the shrubbery, and presently appeared again escorting the present King of England. He introduced me to him and I said the proper thing, for I have been carefully trained, and I always know what the proper thing to say is. I said,
“I am very glad to know your Royal Highness.”
He said,
“Mr. Clemens, I am very glad to meet you—again.”
The word gave me a little start. It saddened me, too, for it seemed plain that he was mistaking me for some other random commoner. I said,
“Why, have you met me before, sir?”
He smiled a very pleasant smile and said,
“Why yes, don’t you remember the time when you were coming down the Strand on top of the ’bus and I was coming up the Strand at the head of a temperance procession, and you had on your new frieze overcoat with the brass buttons?”
As I have already said, the ability to remember names and faces is a most rare one—and I think that the two illustrations of it which I have placed before the reader are especially and particularly extraordinary. And I think that the case of the King is still more extraordinary than that of General Grant, for the King remembered my face although he had never really seen it before at all.
When the people drink the Homburg waters the regulations framed by the doctors require them to walk a mile in order to enlarge the effects. The Prince started on his mile and invited me to accompany him. I have had much social commerce with royalties in my time, and I have always found them quite human and pleasant and unpretentious. The Prince of Wales was rather especially so. His talk was easy, and happy, and flowing, and it was traversed by a spontaneous and delicate vein of humor that gave it a charm not to be overlooked or underestimated by the professional humorist. He was perfectly natural and human; and if he was at any time embarrassed by my presence I was not able to discover it. I could easily have been embarrassed by his, but, by grace of his courtesy, I was not.
I wonder if he has ever read W. W. Jacobs’s “Dialstone Lane.” I hope so. It is a book which all monarchs gifted with an appreciation of light and delicate and bubbling and inexhaustible humor ought to read, and thereby relieve for a time the weight of the burdens they bear. I think it is the one purely humorous story in our language that hasn’t a defect.
Tuesday, August 28, 1906
Higbie’s reply to Mr. Clemens’s criticism of his article—The holiday at Bar Harbor, where an incident brings to Mr. Clemens’s memory his scheme for teaching impromptu oratory, which he tried long ago at the Fellow-Craftsmen’s Club—The same scheme is tried on board Mr. Rogers’s yacht at Bar Harbor.
Higbie’s reply has come, and I recognize with satisfaction that I was not mistaken about him. He hid himself, temporarily, behind his sad attempt at literature, and was odiously artificial. But the real Higbie, the genuine Higbie, the manly Higbie, the common-sense Higbie, was there all the time; and in his letter just received he has come out from behind that mask and is his own self again, and lovable and welcome. I was uncompromisingly frank with him—I had to be, and he was worthy of that honorable treatment. He has taken his medicine like a man, and I believed he would.
This letter of his is in strong and agreeable contrast with his deadly literature. His literature is not literature, but his letter is. His literature came from a vacuum; his letter comes from his heart. Speech that comes from the heart is sure to be literature; there is no power in artless spelling and uncouth phrasing that can take that great quality out of it. It is a refreshment, in a world of insincerities and shallow vanities, to come across a man who can ask for a criticism and mean it when he asks it. I shall leave his spelling untinkered, for, being honest spelling, it has a dignity of its own. This cannot hurt him, for it will not see print while he is alive. Higbie and his letters and his literature will have interest for readers in the far future, when they shall have gathered about them the mellowing haze of a long perspective. Let them lie here and wait. Their day will come.
Greenville, Plumas Co., California.
Aug. 18, 1906.
S. L. Clemens.
Dublin, N.H.
Yours of no date rec. Am not much disapointed that you condemn the article. I had sense enough to see for myself, that it was a crude affair, and sent it to you for aprovel, or condemnation, and am glad you condemn it, for the reason that you saw something that would mak you rediculous, and all the money in North America wouldnt tempt me to have it published for that reason alone. I saw so much trash in Publications lately that I ran away with the foolish Idea that mine might pass muster, that was a poor excuse for not having a higher Ideal of good Literature wasent it? What part did you consider made you rediculous? I certainly had no intention to do so, but I sent it you for that verry purpose, and dont you think for a moment, that I take offence at your critisism. I asked for it, and got it straight from the shoulder, and thank you for it. I may be foolish enough to re-write it some time, and perhaps get it in better shape, in mean time let it rest.
With great respt
C. H. Higbie.
I have been away on a holiday for ten days, at sea in Mr. Rogers’s yacht with some other young people, and when we were lying at anchor at Bar Harbor an incident occurred that fetched up out of the sub-cellars of my memory a matter which had lain buried there and forgotten for a quarter of a century.
In that old day somebody started a club called the Fellow-Craftsmen’s Club, and I attended its first banquet, upon invitation. I think it was its last banquet, too, as I have never heard of it since. It probably died that night—and it may be that I helped to kill it. There were sixty-five men present, and Gilder was in the chair. Gilder was pretty young at that time, and pretty timid, and correspondingly diffident—not ungraceful qualities, and they still adorn him in a modified degree. Major J. B. Pond was alive in those days, and very much alive. He had been a lecture agent for some years, and was always diligently fussing around in the interest of his vocation and inflicting new talent upon the public. In the matter of pushing and advertising and over-praising his clients he was conscienceless. During the banquet I asked him to go and say to Gilder, in his private ear, that he had brought with him a young Southerner, unknown, but full of talent, who had invented a scheme for teaching impromptu oratory, and it would be a great benevolence to a struggling young fellow if Gilder would allow him to get up there and explain his invention and persuade the Fellow-Craft Club to take him under its wing and find him some classes to teach.
It was a gross and degraded proposition, in every way indelicate and offensive, and naturally it shocked Gilder, who tried to beg off; but Pond stuck to him and I can see the pair yet—the vast Pond bending over the lean and gentle Gilder, buzzing industriously at his ear—and Gilder making pathetic gestures revealing what he was suffering. Gilder said,
“Po
nd, I can’t think of such a thing. Can’t you see, yourself, that it is unthinkable? It is an atrocity. These people wouldn’t stand it for a moment. You are always trying to crowd your goods in everywhere that there is a chance to advertise them, but this is no place for it. It would be indecent. If I should try to intrude this obscure adventurer upon these men they would rightly regard it as an impertinence, and they would resent it. Now go away, and drop the matter.”
But Pond didn’t go away. He still buzzed and buzzed, and begged and implored, and at last Gilder surrendered. When speech-making time came he got up and haltingly and hesitatingly informed the banqueteers that there was present among them an unknown young man from the South who would like the privilege of placing before them an invention of his for qualifying novices to get up, upon call, and make speeches upon any subject without previous preparation, and without diffidence or embarrassment. This young man——
Mr. Pond sang out,
“Langhorne—Mr. Samuel Langhorne.”
These are my first two names, but nobody happened to notice that. Gilder proceeded,
“With your permission, gentlemen, I will ask Mr. Langhorne—”
He got no further. He was interrupted by a rising wave of dissent which went on rising until it broke into a storm. Gilder stood there defeated, and uncertain as to what he might better do—but I got up at that point, and, being recognized, was most heartily received, because the club thought they were now rid of Mr. Langhorne, and consequently they were properly grateful. I said something like this:
“I am Langhorne—that is my middle name. I am the inventor of the scheme which has been mentioned, and I think it a good one and likely to be of great benefit to the world; still this hope may be disappointed, and therefore I can’t afford to use my real name, lest in trying to acquire a new and possibly valuable reputation I destroy the valuable one which I already possess, and yet fail to replace it with a new one. I propose to take classes and teach, under this apparently fictitious name. I wish to describe my scheme to you and prove its value by illustration. The scheme is founded upon a certain fact—a fact which long experience has convinced me is a fact, and not a fiction of my imagination. That fact is this: those speakers who are called upon at a banquet after the regular toasts have been responded to, are generally merely called upon by name and requested to get up and talk—that is all. No text is furnished them and they are in a difficult situation, apparently—but only apparently. The situation is not difficult at all, in fact, for they are usually men who know that they may be possibly called upon, therefore they go to the banquet prepared—after a certain fashion. The speeches which these volunteers make are all of a pattern. They consist of three first-rate anecdotes—first-water jewels, so to speak, set in the midst of a lot of rambling and incoherent talk, where they flash and sparkle and delight the house. The speech is made solely for the sake of the anecdotes whereas they shamelessly pretend that the anecdotes are introduced upon sudden inspiration, to illustrate the reasonings advanced in the speech. There are no reasonings in the speech. The speech wanders along in a random and purposeless way for a while; then, all of a sudden, the speaker breaks out as with an unforeseen and happy inspiration and says ‘How felicitously what I have just been saying is illustrated in the case of the man who’—then he explodes his first anecdote. It’s a good one—so good that a storm of delighted laughter sweeps the house and so disturbs its mental balance for the moment that it fails to notice that the anecdote didn’t illustrate what the man had been saying—didn’t illustrate anything at all, indeed, but was dragged in by the scruff of the neck and had no relation to the subject which the speaker was pretending to talk about. He doesn’t allow the laughter to entirely subside before he is off and hammering away at his speech again. He doesn’t wait, because that would be dangerous. It would give the house time to reflect; then it would see that the anecdote did not illustrate anything. He goes flitting airily along in his speech in the same random way as before, and presently has another of those inspirations and breaks out again with his ‘How felicitously what I have just been saying is illustrated in the case of the man who’—then he lets fly his second anecdote, and again the house goes down with a crash. Before it can recover its senses he is away again, and cantering gaily toward the home stretch, filling the air with a stream of empty words that have no connection with anything; and finally he has his third inspiration, introduced with the same set form, ‘How felicitously what I have just been saying is illustrated in the case of the man who’—then he lets fly his last and best anecdote and sits down under tempests and earthquakes of laughter, and everybody in his neighborhood seizes his hand and shakes it cordially and tells him it was a splendid speech—splendid.