The inclosed is not fancy, it is history; except that the little girl was
a passing stranger, and not kin to any of the parties. I read the incident
in Carlyle's Cromwell a year ago, and made a note in my note-book;
stumbled on the note to-day, and wrote up the closing scene of a possible
tragedy, to see how it might work.
If we made this colonel a grand fellow, and gave him a wife to suit—hey?
It's right in the big historical times—war; Cromwell in big,
picturesque power, and all that."
Come, let's do this tragedy, and do it well. Curious, but didn't Florence
want a Cromwell? But Cromwell would not be the chief figure here.
It was the closing scene of that pathetic passage in history from which he would later make his story, “The Death Disc.” Howells was too tired and too occupied to undertake immediately a new dramatic labor, so Clemens went steaming ahead alone.
My billiard-table is stacked up with books relating to the Sandwich
Islands; the walls are upholstered with scraps of paper penciled
with notes drawn from them. I have saturated myself with knowledge
of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and
fascinating people. And I have begun a story. Its hidden motive
will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature: that
the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what
apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its
place; meanwhile abolished and obliterated it. I start Bill
Ragsdale at eleven years of age, and the heroine at four, in the
midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and
amazing customs and superstitions, three months before the arrival
of the missionaries and—the erection of a shallow Christianity upon
the ruins of the old paganism.
Then these two will become educated Christians and highly civilized.
And then I will jump fifteen years and do Ragsdale's leper business.
When we come to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the
story, all ready to our hand.
He made elaborate preparations for the Sandwich Islands story, which he and Howells would dramatize later, and within the space of a few weeks he actually did dramatize 'The Prince and the Pauper' and 'Tom Sawyer', and was prodding Webster to find proper actors or managers; stipulating at first severe and arbitrary terms, which were gradually modified, as one after another of the prospective customers found these dramatic wares unsuited to their needs. Mark Twain was one of the most dramatic creatures that ever lived, but he lacked the faculty of stage arrangement of the dramatic idea. It is one of the commonest defects in the literary make-up; also one of the hardest to realize and to explain.
The winter of 1883-84 was a gay one in the Clemens home. Henry Irving was among those entertained, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Aldrich and his wife, Howells of course, and George W. Cable. Cable had now permanently left the South for the promised land which all authors of the South and West seek eventually, and had in due course made his way to Hartford. Clemens took Cable's fortunes in hand, as he had done with many another, invited him to his home, and undertook to open negotiations with the American Publishing Company, of which Frank Bliss was now the manager, for the improvement of his fortunes.
Cable had been giving readings from his stories and had somewhere picked up the measles. He suddenly came down with the complaint during his visit to Clemens, and his case was a violent one. It required the constant attendance of a trained nurse and one or two members of the household to pull him through.
In the course of time he was convalescent, and when contagion was no longer to be feared guests were invited in for his entertainment. At one of these gatherings, Cable produced a curious book, which he said had been lent to him by Prof. Francis Bacon, of New Haven, as a great rarity. It was a little privately printed pamphlet written by a Southern youth, named S. Watson Wolston, a Yale student of 1845, and was an absurd romance of the hyperflorid, grandiloquent sort, entitled, “Love Triumphant, or the Enemy Conquered.” Its heroine's name was Ambulinia, and its flowery, half-meaningless periods and impossible situations delighted Clemens beyond measure. He begged Cable to lend it to him, to read at the Saturday Morning Club, declaring that he certainly must own the book, at whatever cost. Henry C. Robinson, who was present, remembered having seen a copy in his youth, and Twichell thought he recalled such a book on sale in New Haven during his college days. Twichell said nothing as to any purpose in the matter; but somewhat later, being in New Haven, he stepped into the old book-store and found the same proprietor, who remembered very well the book and its author. Twichell rather fearfully asked if by any chance a copy of it might still be obtained.
“Well,” was the answer, “I undertook to put my cellar in order the other day, and found about a cord of them down there. I think I can supply you.”