DEAR MRS. CLEMENS,—At New Year's our family always meets, to spend
two days together. To-day my father came last, and brought with him
Mr. Clemens's letter, so that I read it to the assembled family, and
I have come right up-stairs to write to you about it. My sister
said, “Oh, let father write!” but my mother said, “No, don't wait
for him. Go now; don't stop to pick that up. Go this minute and
write. I think that is a noble letter. Tell them so.” First let
me say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of our
minds. The night of the dinner, my father says, he did not hear Mr.
Clemens's speech. He was too far off, and my mother says that when
she read it to him the next day it amused him. But what you will
want is to know, without any softening, how we did feel. We were
disappointed. We have liked almost everything we have ever seen
over Mark Twain's signature. It has made us like the man, and we
have delighted in the fun. Father has often asked us to repeat
certain passages of The Innocents Abroad, and of a speech at a
London dinner in 1872, and we all expect both to approve and to
enjoy when we see his name. Therefore, when we read this speech it
was a real disappointment. I said to my brother that it didn't seem
good or funny, and he said, “No, it was unfortunate. Still some of
those quotations were very good”; and he gave them with relish and
my father laughed, though never having seen a card in his life, he
couldn't understand them like his children. My mother read it
lightly and had hardly any second thoughts about it. To my father
it is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quite
understood it, and he forgets easily and entirely. I think it
doubtful whether he writes to Mr. Clemens, for he is old and long
ago gave up answering letters, I think you can see just how bad, and
how little bad, it was as far as we are concerned, and this lovely
heartbreaking letter makes up for our disappointment in our much-
liked author, and restores our former feeling about him.
ELLEN T. EMERSON.
The sorrow dulled a little as the days passed. Just after Christmas Clemens wrote to Howells:
I haven't done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner. But I'm
going to try to-morrow. How could I ever——
Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool,
and all his work must be contemplated with respect.
So long as that unfortunate speech is remembered there will be differences of opinion as to its merits and propriety. Clemens himself, reading it for the first time in nearly thirty years, said:
“I find it gross, coarse—well, I needn't go on with particulars. I don't like any part of it, from the beginning to the end. I find it always offensive and detestable. How do I account for this change of view? I don't know.”
But almost immediately afterward he gave it another consideration and reversed his opinion completely. All the spirit and delight of his old first conception returned, and preparing it for publication, he wrote: —[North American Review, December, 1907, now with comment included in the volume of “Speeches.” (Also see Appendix O, at the end of last volume.)—I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot it hasn't a single defect in it, from the first word to the last. It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere.]
It was altogether like Mark Twain to have those two absolutely opposing opinions in that brief time; for, after all, it was only a question of the human point of view, and Mark Twain's points of view were likely to be as extremely human as they were varied.
Of course the first of these impressions, the verdict of the fresh mind uninfluenced by the old conception, was the more correct one. The speech was decidedly out of place in that company. The skit was harmless enough, but it was of the Comstock grain. It lacked refinement, and, what was still worse, it lacked humor, at least the humor of a kind suited to that long-ago company of listeners. It was another of those grievous mistakes which genius (and not talent) can make, for genius is a sort of possession. The individual is pervaded, dominated for a time by an angel or an imp, and he seldom, of himself, is able to discriminate between his controls. A literary imp was always lying in wait for Mark Twain; the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the 'outre', the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia Clemens had to labor hardest against: the cheapening of his own high purpose with an extravagant false note, at which sincerity, conviction, and artistic harmony took wings and fled away. Notably he did a good burlesque now and then, but his fame would not have suffered if he had been delivered altogether from his besetting temptation.