Of wine throughout the kingdom half in half.
When it is objected that this enterprise may put up the price of raisins, the answer comes pat:
Why then I’ll make it out of blackberries,
And it shall do the same. ’Tis but more art,
And the charge less.
There is a significant kinship between Ben Jonson and Mark Twain in the superb impossibility of their towering fantasies. But there is no true likeness between Meercraft, whose very name libels him as an unscrupulous exploiter of the eternal gullibility of mankind, and Colonel Sellers, who may have deceived others but who did so only because he had first deceived himself. Colonel Sellers was a man without guile; he was as sincere as he was frank; and he made no more profit out of his swift succession of vain imaginings than did those who were carried away by his magnificent self-confidence. The similarity between Ben Jonson’s crook and Mark’s enthusiast is only superficial; yet it may be worth noting that frenzied speculation was as characteristic of the golden age of England after the dispersal of the Armada as it was in the gilded age of America which was the aftermath of the Civil War. Moreover Ben Jonson and Mark Twain have this in common also, that they were both of them humorists of soaring exuberance and both of them realists of immitigable veracity.
IV
In the dramatization of the ‘Gilded Age’ Mark had a silent partner, the otherwise unknown Densmore. In the two other plays of his he was working in collaboration with associates of an assured fame, Howells and Bret Harte. In neither case was he fortunate in the alliance, for they were not experts in stage-craft, altho each of them had already ventured himself in the drama. What Mark needed, if he was to trot in double harness with a running mate, was an experienced playwright with an instinctive knowledge of the theater. When Mark yoked himself with Howells or with Harte, it was the blind leading the blind. The author of ‘Out of the Question’ and the author of ‘Two Men of Sandy Bar’ lacked just what the author of the ‘Gilded Age’ lacked,—practice in the application of the principles of playmaking.
The play written in collaboration with Bret Harte was called ‘Ah Sin,’ the name of the Heathen Chinee in ‘Plain Language from Truthful Jones.’ It was undertaken to enable Charles Parsloe, an actor now forgotten, to profit by the skill he had displayed in the small part of a Chinaman in Bret Harte’s earlier play, ‘Two Men of Sandy Bar,’ written for Stuart Robson, brought out in 1876 and withdrawn after a brief and inglorious career on the stage. Bret Harte did not know enough about playmaking to perceive that its failure had been due to its deficiency in that supporting skeleton of plot which is as necessary to a drama as the equally invisible steel-frame is to a skyscraper. But he was eager to try again, and he persuaded Mark to join him. Probably he had no need to be persuasive, since Mark had found his experience with the ‘Gilded Age’ exhilarating and profitable. Mark invited Harte to Hartford and they set to work. As I have always been curious about the secrets of collaboration, I asked Mark many years afterward, how they had gone about it. “Well,” he said, with his customary drawl, “Bret came to me at Hartford and we talked the whole thing out. Then Bret wrote the piece while I played billiards. Of course, I had to go over it and get the dialect right. Bret never did know anything about dialect.”