SAMUEL L. CLEMENS -- "MARK TWAIN."

 

            MOST of the intelligent people of the world are familiar with the personal appearance of Mark Twain, as he was on earth. Of medium height and weight, dark complexion, eyes and hair like an Indian, a strong, expressive face, a beautiful head, as a man; and one, who, when a baby, must have been a mother's darling ; and as she held him to her breast she fondly believed that he would grow up to be not only bright and respectable, but a wonder among his fellow-men. I have an idea that a mother's thought, if intense enough, makes its impression upon the child before or after birth, and that that impression lasts and in a measure controls the child through all its life. And I am ready to believe that what was best in Mark Twain came of that impression.

            Abraham Lincoln was born in squalor ; his childhood was so pitiable that men recoil when they read the story of it. Through one fierce winter the rude house in which he lived had but three sides to it, the fourth was open to the pitiless winds that swept across the Indiana prairies. But perhaps it was through that open side of the house that the great angel came, and noting the rude cradle within, bent and touched the lips of the sleeping child with the signet of immortality. But it is more acceptable to believe that the mother, destitute of all other treasures save that baby, so yearned with love about it and so impressed her life upon it that as the years went by, the fruition of those hopes was reached and that thus the man became immortal.

            Mark Twain was born in Florida, Monroe county, Missouri. There is nothing to show that he was different from the other boys around him.

            Missouri was crude in many ways when he was a boy, but it had great old forests which gave out nuts and wild bees in the autumn, and there were fields where "roasting ears," cantaloupes and watermelons grew, and forest and field supplied plenty of joys to boyhood. The chances, too, are that

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Mark fell in love very early, and possibly that event of his life was later the inspiration of 'Tom Sawyer." Then he wandered off to the big river in Missouri and by a sort of natural gravity we hear of him first as an assistant pilot on a Mississippi steamboat. Later, I believe, he became a real pilot, though an old man has been reported recently as saying that he taught him what he knew I as a pilot, but told him that he never would be a good one that he was too funny.

            The first I heard of him was when he began to write communications for the Territorial Enterprise, published in Virginia City, and his communications were signed "Mark Twain." There is a little interim between the time that he ceased to be a pilot and the time when he became a miner in Nevada that I cannot connect by any data that I can secure. It was whispered that early in 1861 he was for a time in the Rebel army. It is possible that he was one of the Missouri State guards. If he was, he grew tired of the work pretty soon. It is quite possible that he had an experience like another Missourian a learned judge that I once knew. He told me that they organized a Confederate company or two in St. Joe, that they raised the Confederate flag over the courthouse, and when they met by day or by night they were wont to say to each other, "We would like to see a Yankee army try to lower

that flag." Then he added:

            "One morning a special train pulled into St. Joe, five companies of General Lyon's regular soldiers "detrained," and forming; in column marched to the courthouse. The colonel in command detailed a lieutenant to go up and take down the flag and substitute the American flag. It was done, the lieutenant returned and took his place. Then, by order, the command saluted the old flag, and taking the Confederate flag with them, marched back to the train, boarded it and pulled out of town."

            "Then he said : 'We looked in each other's faces. None of us felt like going up and taking down that flag, for we had seen, though on a small scale, the real flag, borne by real soldiers, under real discipline, and somehow the idea came into our minds that we were not very much warriors after all, and

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that there were several lessons which we would have to learn before we could call ourselves thorough veteran soldiers, irrepressible and invincible."

            Maybe Mark Twain had a little experience like that, but that is mere speculation. I know nothing about it except that by his own confession he was once a Confederate soldier.

            The first I ever heard of him in Nevada was after the territory was organized. James W. Nye of New York (the famous Nye) was appointed governor and Orion Clemens, a brother of Mark Twain, was appointed secretary of the territory. At that time Carson, the capitol, was a young town. The increase in houses did not keep up with the increase in people. Most of the houses were of the original California style -- rude boards outside, and the partitions made, not out of studding and lath and plaster, but of canvas covered with paper, which houses had the disadvantage of taking all privacy away from the occupants. It was in one of these houses that Orion Clemens was installed on his arrival in Carson. His room was fitted up with mahogany or black walnut furniture -- black walnut was the rage in those days -- and there one day the occupants in the next room heard a man come into the secretary's office, heard him push a chair to one side, heard something very much like what is heard when a man puts his feet on the table, and then they heard a drawling voice say :

            "You're playin' Hades out here, Brother Orion, are you not ? Fine furniture, fine office, everything. But they'll drop on you after a while, Brother Orion. They will find out about you, about half as much as I know now, and you'd better go back to your oxen. Oxen are your strong suit, Brother Orion."

            With Nye, when he came from New York, came a young man named Robert Howland. He was one of those : "Don't- care-a-cent" young men, ready for any lark, afraid of nothing in the world; jolly, cordial, a man for men to like at first sight and for women to be charmed with. He and Mark Twain soon contracted a friendship for each other, and when the news came in from Aurora, one hundred miles south of Carson, of the great discoveries in that camp, these two young men formed a partnership and in some way got to Aurora.

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            There they bought or built a rude cabin and passed the cold winter therein. Years later Bob used to tell that in that bleak winter it was the wont of Mark Twain and himself to go out at night, steal the empty fruit cans, oyster cans, empty champagne bottles and bottles that once held booze, from the rear of saloons and boarding houses, carry and pile them up in the rear of their own cabin to give it an opulent look, that passers- by in the daylight might say, "My, but those fellows must be flush with money!"

            As the Fourth of July grew near, Mark wrote a Fourth of July oration, signed it '"Mark Twain," and sent it to the local paper, in which it was copied. It began with the words, "I was sired by the great American Eagle and borne by a continental dam." This struck the fancy of Joseph T. Goodman, the owner and editor of the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, and he wrote to Mark that if he was not making more money mining than he would as local reporter on the Enterprise, he would hold a place for him. A few days later, when Mr. Goodman was entertaining some friends in the sanctum, a man walked in, shod in stogy shoes, wearing Kentucky jean pants, a hickory shirt and a straw hat, all very much travel worn, and in addition had a roll of ancient blankets on one shoulder. He shrugged that shoulder, dropped the blankets, and staring from one man to another, finally drawled out, "My name is Clemens." That was Mark's introduction to real journalism in Nevada.

            But in a few days Mark was clothed and in his right mind and just here a word about his nom de plume. The most authentic account that we have of it was Mark's explanation that a bright man used to write stories in New Orleans and sign them "Mark Twain," and when the man died Mark stole the nom de plume. He gave other reasons during his lifetime. One was that it was to shorten the work of the territorial legislature of Nevada so that members could refer to him, not as "that disreputable, lying, characterless, character-smashing, unscrupulous fiend who reports for the Territorial Enterprise, but as 'Mark Twain'." Another story was that he got it from a roustabout on the steamboat, when they were

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near dangerous banks and the lead had to be thrown, and he would report ''Mark one" or "Mark Twain." It is no matter whether he invented it or stole it, he wronged no one else and he made the title so famous that thousands know it who do not know his real name.

            That coming to the Enterprise was the making of Mark Twain. I doubt very much whether he ever would have been famous at all except for his experience there. He found an atmosphere different from what he ever dreamed of being in. The office was filled with bright men, the town was filled with bright men. There he saw men that had made fortunes quickly, others who were trying to make fortunes quickly, and he saw other men who never had fortunes and never expected them. And he would hear them rail at the millionaires and say that the fact that they had money was a sure sign of how little God thought of money, judging by the men he gave it to. R. M. Daggett was on the Enterprise, and from his example he learned that when it was necessary to call a man names, there were no expletives too long or too expressive to be hurled in rapid succession to emphasize the utter want of character of the man assailed. Dan De Quille was working with him, too.

            He used to write famous stories on almost any subject, and he knew all about the gift of using adjectives. It was contagious in that office. It reached to the composing room. There were typesetters there who could hurl anathemas at bad copy which would have frightened a Bengal tiger. The news editor could damn a mutilated dispatch in twenty-four languages.

            There was a compositor named Jim Connely. At that time the Enterprise was a six-day newspaper. Jim used to work faithfully through the week, but Saturday night he would "load up." Sometimes the load would last him over Sunday, and when he reached the office Monday morning he was a little trembly. One Monday morning he tried to distribute type for a few minutes, but laid down the stick, saying that his eyes were bad, wondering if he was going to be blind before he died, and thought he would go outside and take a spin around the block and see if he would not feel better. He

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did so. Probably he partook of three or four jolts while going around the block, for when he came back and picked up his composing stick, another printer asked him how his eyes were. He answered, "Fine." The rear windows of the Enterprise looked over the lower hills and out upon the twenty-six mile desert beyond. And as Jim said, "Fine!" he pointed out of a window and said : "Can you see that gray wolf on the twenty-six mile desert? I see him plain."

            That was the character of society that Mark was introduced to, and outside there were the brightest lawyers, doctors and the shrewdest men of affairs in the world, and Mark got pointers from them all. If he wrote a good thing they would praise him and tell him to keep on. that there was something in him sure. If Homer nodded with him sometimes they would hold him up to scorn the next day; but he noticed through all that nothing was too extravagant for them in the way of description, and nothing too fine.

            Mark Twain did not like a joke a bit if he was the victim. The boys of the Enterprise office made him a formal presentation of a meerschaum pipe. He was exceedingly pleased, but when he found next day that he could buy any number of such pipes at $1.50 each, it filled his soul with a desire to murder somebody, and he did not outgrow the feeling for a month.

            Wells Fargo's coach was robbed of $25.000 at the Mound House, half way between Virginia City and Carson. A week later some of the wild chaps in Virginia City held up Mark Twain on the divide between Virginia City and Gold Hill and took his watch and money. He thought it was a genuine hold-up, and decided to go the next evening to San Francisco for a brief vacation. As he was sitting in the coach in front of the International Hotel waiting for the hour of departure, the same gang, headed by George Birdsall, approached the stage and passed him a package done up in paper. He tore the paper open and saw inside his watch, and realized that his robbery was all a fake, and with his drawl said:

            "It is all right, gentlemen, but you did it a damn sight too well for amateurs. Never mind this little dab of mine, but

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what did you do with the $25,000 that you took from Wells Fargo last week?"

            He was in San Francisco when that city suffered a severe shock of earthquake. It happened one Sabbath morning about ten o'clock and Mark wrote a description of it to the Enterprise. The files of the Enterprise were burned and the letter, I believe, is lost to all the world : but some things about it seemed to me at the time about the j oiliest writing that ever Mark Twain did. I believe I can recall a few paragraphs of it from memory almost word for word. He said :

            'When that earthquake came on Sunday morning last there was but one man in San Francisco that showed any presence of mind, and he was over in Oakland. He did just what I thought of doing, what I would have done had I had any opportunity -- he went down out of his pulpit and embraced a woman. The newspapers said it was his wife. Maybe it was, but if it was it was a pity. It would have shown so much more presence of mind to have embraced some other gentleman's wife.

            "A young man came down from the fifth story of a house on Stockton street, with no clothing on except a knitted undershirt, which came about as near concealing his person as the tin foil does a champagne bottle. Men shouted to him, little boys yelled at him, and women besought him to take their sunbonnets, their aprons, their hoop skirts, anything in the world and cover himself up and not stand there distracting people's attention from the earthquake. He looked all around and then he looked clown at himself, and then he went upstairs. I am told he went up lively.

            ''Pete Hopkins was shaken off of Telegraph Hill, and on his way down landed on a three-story brick house (Hopkins weighed four hundred and thirty pounds), and the papers, always misrepresenting things, ascribed the destruction of the house to the earthquake."

            And so the letter ran on and on for a column and a half of the old, long, wide columns of the Enterprise, and every line was punctuated with fun.

            He finally went to Honolulu for a vacation. There he

SAMUEL L. CLEMENS -- "MARK TWAIN."

completed a lecture which he had been preparing, and returning to San Francisco, delivered it. A great hit was in the advertising, which announced that the doors would be open at 7:30 o'clock and the trouble would begin at eight. A little later he joined an excursion party to the Mediterranean and its shores, from which he wrote the famous "Innocents Abroad." He took the manuscript to a portly publisher in New York, and, throwing it down on his desk with his card, said : "I'd like to get that stuck into antimony." (Types are made of antimony.) The publisher looked at the manuscript, then glanced at the card, then looking up to Mark, said : "Who are your references, Mr. Clemens?'' He replied : "I haven't any in the world. There are only two men I could apply to. One is Joe Goodman, the other is Jerry Driscoll, and they would not count, because they'd lie for me just as I'd lie for them."

            Since then the world has known the history of Mark Twain. As I said above, it was the making of Mark Twain to go to work on the Enterprise. It opened a new world to him. All his life before he had been mostly with ordinary people, but there he found the majority of people were bright as dollars, as brave as lions, all alert, all generous, all ready to give credit where credit was due and none afraid to criticise anybody or anything else. And over all was the steadying influence of Mr. Joseph T. Goodman, the owner and editor of the paper. I think Mark Twain out of pure gratitude to him should have left him a part of his fortune. Goodman himself is as brave a man as ever lived, a thorough journalist, with magnificent journalistic judgment, and he steadied Mark through the years and was Mark's particular inspiration. Indeed, the affection of Twain for Goodman all his life was made clear in his own autobiography.

            When he went east and his first book came out and he was hailed as a genius, he might have gone to the dogs had he not met the woman who became his wife and who was his salvation. That changed the whole course of his life, awakened new hopes, changed all his prospects; gave him to see how much there was in a refined life. Then when he made his

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home in Hartford and all his associates were refined and educated people, the change from his former life was an epoch to him ; and still there are some things about him which are a mystery to those who knew him well. There is no evidence that in his boyhood he was fond of study or fond of literature ; he wrote nothing that attracted especial attention until after he was thirty years of age.

            It is not strange that he wrote so many humorous things, but the style of his writing is a perpetual mystery. Where did he get that? His English was always perfect, and it was of a high class which draws readers to his work every day.

            We wish for the sake of his fame that he would oftener have done what Shakespeare did -- all at once break out in a dozen lines of such majesty and beauty that it thrills people and always will. However, his fame is secure enough; his work was a distinct addition to the literature of the United States. But could some one have followed him about and taken down his remarks every day and compiled them in a book, it would outsell all his works, for he was funnier every hour in his conversation than anything he ever wrote.

            I met "Josh Billings" as he came west a few days before he died. I said : "Of course, Mr. Shaw, you know Mark Twain?"

            "Oh, yes," was the reply. : T went to his hotel in New York last week to see him and was told that he was over in Jersey lecturing, but would be back about midnight.

            "Mark had a parlor and bed-room and out of the parlor another bed-room opened. They gave me this bed-room. I retired, leaving the door open. About 2 a. m. Mark came in. He turned up the gas, came to my bedside and said, 'Hello, Josh.' I asked him where he had been. 'Over in Jersey lecturing,' was his answer. I asked him if he had a good time.

            "With a look of sorrow, he said : 'Had a devil of a time. Just before the lecture was to begin, a young man came to me and asked me to come with him. He led me to where there was a hole in the drop curtain, and with much emotion said, 'Please look through this. The old gentleman with the white hair to the left of the center aisle, in an orchestra chair, is my

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father.' Then with a gulp he explained that the old gentleman had been afflicted with a settled melancholy for a long time, and that if I could say anything to rouse him it would be an immense favor to the whole family. I said, 'All right.' The curtain went up and my lecture began. After two or three minutes I shot a joke at the audience, but meant it for the old man. It didn't faze him. A little later I tried another joke at him; it didn't faze him. Still a little later I gathered myself up and hurled my masterpiece at him. The audience yelled, but the old man didn't even smile. Then I thought that I could not devote all my time to him, that something was due the audience, and so went on and finished my lecture.

            "Then the young man came and in a soft voice inquired if I had succeeded in arousing the interest of the father.

            " 'Not a blamed bit,' I replied. 'He sat there as though he did not hear a word."

            " I guess he didn't,' said the Reuben. 'A powder mill explosion twenty years ago smashed the drums in his ears and since then he has been as deaf as a post.' Here Mark added, 'And I had no weapons'."

            When the Lusitania first came to New York, he was invited aboard the great ship and shown around. When the inspection was over, he casually remarked that he would tell Noah about that ship.

            I hope he has found Noah now, and all the rest of the "old boys" that have gone over on the other side ; and if he has, I predict that whether it is up above or down below, a ripple of laughter will follow his footsteps in either place through all eternity.