The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete



To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Sept. 22, '89.
DEAR HOWELLS,--It is immensely good of you to grind through that stuff
for me; but it gives peace to Mrs. Clemens's soul; and I am as grateful
to you as a body can be. I am glad you approve of what I say about the
French Revolution. Few people will. It is odd that even to this day
Americans still observe that immortal benefaction through English and
other monarchical eyes, and have no shred of an opinion about it that
they didn't get at second-hand.

Next to the 4th of July and its results, it was the noblest and the
holiest thing and the most precious that ever happened in this earth.
And its gracious work is not done yet--not anywhere in the remote
neighborhood of it.

Don't trouble to send me all the proofs; send me the pages with your
corrections on them, and waste-basket the rest. We issue the book
Dec. 10; consequently a notice that appears Dec. 20 will be just in good
time.

I am waiting to see your Study set a fashion in criticism. When that
happens--as please God it must--consider that if you lived three
centuries you couldn't do a more valuable work for this country, or a
humaner.

As a rule a critic's dissent merely enrages, and so does no good; but by
the new art which you use, your dissent must be as welcome as your
approval, and as valuable. I do not know what the secret of it is,
unless it is your attitude--man courteously reasoning with man and
brother, in place of the worn and wearisome critical attitude of all this
long time--superior being lecturing a boy.

Well, my book is written--let it go. But if it were only to write over
again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; and
they keep multiplying and multiplying; but now they can't ever be said.
And besides, they would require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell.
Ys Ever
MARK.


The type-setting machine began to loom large in the background.
Clemens believed it perfected by this time. Paige had got it
together again and it was running steadily--or approximately so
--setting type at a marvelous speed and with perfect accuracy. In
time an expert operator would be able to set as high as eight
thousand ems per hour, or about ten times as much as a good
compositor could set and distribute by hand. Those who saw it were
convinced--most of them--that the type-setting problem was solved by
this great mechanical miracle. If there were any who doubted, it
was because of its marvelously minute accuracy which the others only
admired. Such accuracy, it was sometimes whispered, required
absolutely perfect adjustment, and what would happen when the great
inventor--"the poet in steel," as Clemens once called him--was no
longer at hand to supervise and to correct the slightest variation.
But no such breath of doubt came to Mark Twain; he believed the
machine as reliable as a constellation.

But now there was need of capital to manufacture and market the
wonder. Clemens, casting about in his mind, remembered Senator
Jones, of Nevada, a man of great wealth, and his old friend, Joe
Goodman, of Nevada, in whom Jones had unlimited confidence. He
wrote to Goodman, and in this letter we get a pretty full exposition
of the whole matter as it stood in the fall of 1889. We note in
this communication that Clemens says that he has been at the machine
three years and seven months, but this was only the period during
which he had spent the regular monthly sum of three thousand
dollars. His interest in the invention had begun as far back as
1880.


To Joseph T. Goodman, in Nevada:

Private. HARTFORD, Oct. 7, '89.
DEAR JOE,-I had a letter from Aleck Badlam day before yesterday,
and in answering him I mentioned a matter which I asked him to consider
a secret except to you and John McComb,--[This is Col. McComb, of the
Alta-California, who had sent Mark Twain on the Quaker City
excursion]--as I am not ready yet to get into the newspapers.

I have come near writing you about this matter several times, but it
wasn't ripe, and I waited. It is ripe, now. It is a type-setting
machine which I undertook to build for the inventor (for a consideration).
I have been at it three years and seven months without losing a day, at a
cost of $3,000 a month, and in so private a way that Hartford has known
nothing about it. Indeed only a dozen men have known of the matter.
I have reported progress from time to time to the proprietors of the
N. Y. Sun, Herald, Times, World, Harper Brothers and John F. Trow; also
to the proprietors of the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe. Three
years ago I asked all these people to squelch their frantic desire to
load up their offices with the Mergenthaler (N. Y. Tribune) machine, and
wait for mine and then choose between the two. They have waited--with no
very gaudy patience--but still they have waited; and I could prove to
them to-day that they have not lost anything by it. But I reserve the
proof for the present--except in the case of the N. Y. Herald; I sent an
invitation there the other day--a courtesy due a paper which ordered
$240,000 worth of our machines long ago when it was still in a crude
condition. The Herald has ordered its foreman to come up here next
Thursday; but that is the only invitation which will go out for some
time yet.

The machine was finished several weeks ago, and has been running ever
since in the machine shop. It is a magnificent creature of steel, all of
Pratt & Whitney's super-best workmanship, and as nicely adjusted and as
accurate as a watch. In construction it is as elaborate and complex as
that machine which it ranks next to, by every right--Man--and in
performance it is as simple and sure.

Anybody can set type on it who can read--and can do it after only 15
minutes' instruction. The operator does not need to leave his seat at
the keyboard; for the reason that he is not required to do anything but
strike the keys and set type--merely one function; the spacing,
justifying, emptying into the galley, and distributing of dead matter is
all done by the machine without anybody's help--four functions.

The ease with which a cub can learn is surprising. Day before yesterday
I saw our newest cub set, perfectly space and perfectly justify 2,150 ems
of solid nonpareil in an hour and distribute the like amount in the same
hour--and six hours previously he had never seen the machine or its
keyboard. It was a good hour's work for 3-year veterans on the other
type-setting machines to do. We have 3 cubs. The dean of the trio is a
school youth of 18. Yesterday morning he had been an apprentice on the
machine 16 working days (8-hour days); and we speeded him to see what he
could do in an hour. In the hour he set 5,900 ems solid nonpareil, and
the machine perfectly spaced and justified it, and of course distributed
the like amount in the same hour. Considering that a good fair
compositor sets 700 and distributes 700 in the one hour, this boy did the
work of about 8 x a compositors in that hour. This fact sends all other
type-setting machines a thousand miles to the rear, and the best of them
will never be heard of again after we publicly exhibit in New York.

We shall put on 3 more cubs. We have one school boy and two compositors,
now,--and we think of putting on a type writer, a stenographer, and
perhaps a shoemaker, to show that no special gifts or training are
required with this machine. We shall train these beginners two or three
months--or until some one of them gets up to 7,000 an hour--then we will
show up in New York and run the machine 24 hours a day 7 days in the
week, for several months--to prove that this is a machine which will
never get out of order or cause delay, and can stand anything an anvil
can stand. You know there is no other typesetting machine that can run
two hours on a stretch without causing trouble and delay with its
incurable caprices.

We own the whole field--every inch of it--and nothing can dislodge us.

Now then, above is my preachment, and here follows the reason and purpose
of it. I want you to run over here, roost over the machine a week and
satisfy yourself, and then go to John P. Jones or to whom you please, and
sell me a hundred thousand dollars' worth of this property and take ten
per cent in cash or the "property" for your trouble--the latter, if you
are wise, because the price I ask is a long way short of the value.

What I call "property" is this. A small part of my ownership consists of
a royalty of $500 on every machine marketed under the American patents.
My selling-terms are, a permanent royalty of one dollar on every
American-marketed machine for a thousand dollars cash to me in hand paid.
We shan't market any fewer than 5,000 machines in 15 years--a return of
fifteen thousand dollars for one thousand. A royalty is better than
stock, in one way--it must be paid, every six months, rain or shine; it
is a debt, and must be paid before dividends are declared. By and by,
when we become a stock company I shall buy these royalties back for stock
if I can get them for anything like reasonable terms.

I have never borrowed a penny to use on the machine, and never sold a
penny's worth of the property until the machine was entirely finished and
proven by the severest tests to be what she started out to be--perfect,
permanent, and occupying the position, as regards all kindred machines,
which the City of Paris occupies as regards the canvas-backs of the
mercantile marine.

It is my purpose to sell two hundred dollars of my royalties at the above
price during the next two months and keep the other $300.

Mrs. Clemens begs Mrs. Goodman to come with you, and asks pardon for not
writing the message herself--which would be a pathetically-welcome
spectacle to me; for I have been her amanuensis for 8 months, now, since
her eyes failed her. Yours as always
MARK.


While this letter with its amazing contents is on its way to
astonish Joe Goodman, we will consider one of quite a different,
but equally characteristic sort. We may assume that Mark Twain's
sister Pamela had been visiting him in Hartford and was now making
a visit in Keokuk.


To Mrs. Moffett, in Keokuk:

HARTFORD, Oct 9, '89.
DEAR PAMELA,--An hour after you left I was suddenly struck with a
realizing sense of the utter chuckle-headedness of that notion of mine:
to send your trunk after you. Land! it was idiotic. None but a lunatic
would, separate himself from his baggage.

Well, I am soulfully glad the baggage fetcher saved me from consummating
my insane inspiration. I met him on the street in the afternoon and paid
him again. I shall pay him several times more, as opportunity offers.

I declined the invitation to banquet with the visiting South American
Congress, in a polite note explaining that I had to go to New York today.
I conveyed the note privately to Patrick; he got the envelope soiled,
and asked Livy to put on a clean one. That is why I am going to the
banquet; also why I have disinvited the boys I thought I was going to
punch billiards with, upstairs to-night.

Patrick is one of the injudiciousest people I ever struck. And I am the
other.
Your Brother
SAM.


The Yankee was now ready for publication, and advance sheets were
already in the reviewers' hands. Just at this moment the Brazilian
monarchy crumbled, and Clemens was moved to write Sylvester Baxter,
of the Boston Herald, a letter which is of special interest in its
prophecy of the new day, the dawn of which was even nearer than he
suspected.


DEAR MR. BAXTER, Another throne has gone down, and I swim in oceans of
satisfaction. I wish I might live fifty years longer; I believe I should
see the thrones of Europe selling at auction for old iron. I believe I
should really see the end of what is surely the grotesquest of all the
swindles ever invented by man-monarchy. It is enough to make a graven
image laugh, to see apparently rational people, away down here in this
wholesome and merciless slaughter-day for shams, still mouthing empty
reverence for those moss-backed frauds and scoundrelisms, hereditary
kingship and so-called "nobility." It is enough to make the monarchs and
nobles themselves laugh--and in private they do; there can be no question
about that. I think there is only one funnier thing, and that is the
spectacle of these bastard Americans--these Hamersleys and Huntingtons
and such--offering cash, encumbered by themselves, for rotten carcases
and stolen titles. When our great brethren the disenslaved Brazilians
frame their Declaration of Independence, I hope they will insert this
missing link: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all monarchs
are usurpers, and descendants of usurpers; for the reason that no throne
was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised, of the only
body possessing the legitimate right to set it up--the numerical mass of
the nation."

You already have the advance sheets of my forthcoming book in your hands.
If you will turn to about the five hundredth page, you will find a state
paper of my Connecticut Yankee in which he announces the dissolution of
King Arthur's monarchy and proclaims the English Republic. Compare it
with the state paper which announces the downfall of the Brazilian
monarchy and proclaims the Republic of the United States of Brazil, and
stand by to defend the Yankee from plagiarism. There is merely a
resemblance of ideas, nothing more. The Yankee's proclamation was
already in print a week ago. This is merely one of those odd
coincidences which are always turning up. Come, protect the Yank from
that cheapest and easiest of all charges--plagiarism. Otherwise, you
see, he will have to protect himself by charging approximate and
indefinite plagiarism upon the official servants of our majestic twin
down yonder, and then there might be war, or some similar annoyance.

Have you noticed the rumor that the Portuguese throne is unsteady, and
that the Portuguese slaves are getting restive? Also, that the head
slave-driver of Europe, Alexander III, has so reduced his usual monthly
order for chains that the Russian foundries are running on only half time
now? Also that other rumor that English nobility acquired an added
stench the other day--and had to ship it to India and the continent
because there wasn't any more room for it at home? Things are working.
By and by there is going to be an emigration, may be. Of course we shall
make no preparation; we never do. In a few years from now we shall have
nothing but played-out kings and dukes on the police, and driving the
horse-cars, and whitewashing fences, and in fact overcrowding all the
avenues of unskilled labor; and then we shall wish, when it is too late,
that we had taken common and reasonable precautions and drowned them at
Castle Garden.


There followed at this time a number of letters to Goodman, but as
there is much of a sameness in them, we need not print them all.
Clemens, in fact, kept the mails warm with letters bulging with
schemes for capitalization, and promising vast wealth to all
concerned. When the letters did not go fast enough he sent
telegrams. In one of the letters Goodman is promised "five hundred
thousand dollars out of the profits before we get anything
ourselves." One thing we gather from these letters is that Paige
has taken the machine apart again, never satisfied with its
perfection, or perhaps getting a hint that certain of its
perfections were not permanent. A letter at the end of November
seems worth preserving here.


To Joseph T. Goodman, in California:

HARTFORD, Nov. 29, '89.
DEAR JOE, Things are getting into better and more flexible shape every
day. Papers are now being drawn which will greatly simplify the raising
of capital; I shall be in supreme command; it will not be necessary for
the capitalist to arrive at terms with anybody but me. I don't want to
dicker with anybody but Jones. I know him; that is to say, I want to
dicker with you, and through you with Jones. Try to see if you can't be
here by the 15th of January.

The machine was as perfect as a watch when we took her apart the other
day; but when she goes together again the 15th of January we expect her
to be perfecter than a watch.

Joe, I want you to sell some royalties to the boys out there, if you can,
for I want to be financially strong when we go to New York. You know the
machine, and you appreciate its future enormous career better than any
man I know. At the lowest conceivable estimate (2,000 machines a year,)
we shall sell 34,000 in the life of the patent--17 years.

All the family send love to you--and they mean it, or they wouldn't say
it.
Yours ever
MARK.


The Yankee had come from the press, and Howells had praised it in
the "Editor's Study" in Harper's Magazine. He had given it his
highest commendation, and it seems that his opinion of it did not
change with time. "Of all fanciful schemes of fiction it pleases me
most," he in one place declared, and again referred to it as
"a greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale."

In more than one letter to Goodman, Clemens had urged him to come
East without delay. "Take the train, Joe, and come along," he wrote
early in December. And we judge from the following that Joe had
decided to come.


To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Dec. 23, '89.
DEAR HOWELLS,--The magazine came last night, and the Study notice is just
great. The satisfaction it affords us could not be more prodigious if
the book deserved every word of it; and maybe it does; I hope it does,
though of course I can't realize it and believe it. But I am your
grateful servant, anyway and always.

I am going to read to the Cadets at West Point Jan. 11. I go from here
to New York the 9th, and up to the Point the 11th. Can't you go with me?
It's great fun. I'm going to read the passages in the "Yankee" in which
the Yankee's West Point cadets figure--and shall covertly work in a
lecture on aristocracy to those boys. I am to be the guest of the
Superintendent, but if you will go I will shake him and we will go to the
hotel. He is a splendid fellow, and I know him well enough to take that
liberty.

And won't you give me a day or two's visit toward the end of January?
For two reasons: the machine will be at work again by that time, and we
want to hear the rest of the dream-story; Mrs. Clemens keeps speaking
about it and hankering for it. And we can have Joe Goodman on hand again
by that time, and I want you to get to know him thoroughly. It's well
worth it. I am going to run up and stay over night with you as soon as I
can get a chance.

We are in the full rush of the holidays now, and an awful rush it is,
too. You ought to have been here the other day, to make that day perfect
and complete. All alone I managed to inflict agonies on Mrs. Clemens,
whereas I was expecting nothing but praises. I made a party call the day
after the party--and called the lady down from breakfast to receive it.
I then left there and called on a new bride, who received me in her
dressing-gown; and as things went pretty well, I stayed to luncheon.
The error here was, that the appointed reception-hour was 3 in the
afternoon, and not at the bride's house but at her aunt's in another part
of the town. However, as I meant well, none of these disasters
distressed me.
Yrs ever
MARK.


The Yankee did not find a very hearty welcome in England. English
readers did not fancy any burlesque of their Arthurian tales, or
American strictures on their institutions. Mark Twain's publishers
had feared this, and asked that the story be especially edited for
the English edition. Clemens, however, would not listen to any
suggestions of the sort.


To Messrs. Chatto & Windus, in London, Eng.:

GENTLEMEN,--Concerning The Yankee, I have already revised the story
twice; and it has been read critically by W. D. Howells and Edmund
Clarence Stedman, and my wife has caused me to strike out several
passages that have been brought to her attention, and to soften others.
Furthermore, I have read chapters of the book in public where Englishmen
were present and have profited by their suggestions.

Now, mind you, I have taken all this pains because I wanted to say a
Yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural props,
and yet make a book which you would be willing to print exactly as it
comes to you, without altering a word.

We are spoken of (by Englishmen) as a thin-skinned people. It is you who
are thin-skinned. An Englishman may write with the most brutal frankness
about any man or institution among us and we republish him without
dreaming of altering a line or a word. But England cannot stand that
kind of a book written about herself. It is England that is
thin-skinned. It causeth me to smile when I read the modifications of my
language which have been made in my English editions to fit them for the
sensitive English palate.

Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of
offense that you might not lack the nerve to print it just as it stands.
I am going to get the proofs to you just as early as I can. I want you
to read it carefully. If you can publish it without altering a single
word, go ahead. Otherwise, please hand it to J. R. Osgood in time for
him to have it published at my expense.

This is important, for the reason that the book was not written for
America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their
sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to
me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good
intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level of
manhood in turn.
Very truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.


The English nation, at least a considerable portion of it, did not wish
to be "pried up to a higher level of manhood" by a Connecticut Yankee.
The papers pretty generally denounced the book as coarse; in fact, a
vulgar travesty. Some of the critics concluded that England, after all,
had made a mistake in admiring Mark Twain. Clemens stood this for a time
and then seems to have decided that something should be done. One of the
foremost of English critics was his friend and admirer; he would state
the case to him fully and invite his assistance.


To Andrew Lang, in London:

[First page missing.]

1889
They vote but do not print. The head tells you pretty promptly whether
the food is satisfactory or not; and everybody hears, and thinks the
whole man has spoken. It is a delusion. Only his taste and his smell
have been heard from--important, both, in a way, but these do not build
up the man; and preserve his life and fortify it.

The little child is permitted to label its drawings "This is a cow this
is a horse," and so on. This protects the child. It saves it from the
sorrow and wrong of hearing its cows and its horses criticized as
kangaroos and work benches. A man who is white-washing a fence is doing
a useful thing, so also is the man who is adorning a rich man's house
with costly frescoes; and all of us are sane enough to judge these
performances by standards proper to each. Now, then, to be fair, an
author ought to be allowed to put upon his book an explanatory line:
"This is written for the Head;" "This is written for the Belly and the
Members." And the critic ought to hold himself in honor bound to put
away from him his ancient habit of judging all books by one standard, and
thenceforth follow a fairer course.

The critic assumes, every time, that if a book doesn't meet the
cultivated-class standard, it isn't valuable. Let us apply his law all
around: for if it is sound in the case of novels, narratives, pictures,
and such things, it is certainly sound and applicable to all the steps
which lead up to culture and make culture possible. It condemns the
spelling book, for a spelling book is of no use to a person of culture;
it condemns all school books and all schools which lie between the
child's primer and Greek, and between the infant school and the
university; it condemns all the rounds of art which lie between the cheap
terra cotta groups and the Venus de Medici, and between the chromo and
the Transfiguration; it requires Whitcomb Riley to sing no more till he
can sing like Shakespeare, and it forbids all amateur music and will
grant its sanction to nothing below the "classic."