I knew Mark Twain very well. He and Bret Harte were, I suppose, the two most famous American authors who ever came to our at-homes at No. 32. Bret Harte, though he was such a typically American writer, spent all the latter part of his life in England. I first met him at Rudolph Lehmann’s hospitable dinner-table. No one could fail to be struck with Bret Harte. He was so alert, so handsome, and though his plumes—his hair was thick and sleek to the day he died—were of an exquisite snow-white, he had a healthy, fresh-coloured face, and a slender, youthful figure, always dressed like a well-off young man. He used to come to our house with the Vaudeveldes. Madame Vaudevelde, herself an authoress, and the daughter of a famous ambassador, kept a suite of rooms in her great house in Lancaster Gate for his use, whenever he was in London.
“Don’t you ever go back to California nowadays?” I asked him once.
“No. I dare say that if I saw the new California, with all its go-aheadness and modernness, I should lose the old California that I knew, whereas now it has never changed for me. I can picture everything just as it was when I left it.”
He retained his vogue to the end. Any magazine would pay him at the rate of a couple of pounds for every hundred words. They used to say that the Bank of England would accept his manuscripts as banknotes. He never failed to charm, whether he was telling some story at a dinner-party, or talking to some undistinguished woman, young and beautiful or old and plain, who had asked to be introduced to him as a celebrity—and a celebrity Francis Bret Harte certainly was, for he founded a whole school in English literature.
Mark Twain was also very kind, but when I was in New York he was living at Hartford, the capital of the adjoining State of Connecticut. He described himself to me as a “wooden nutmeg,” in allusion to a former thriving industry of the State. I met him when he was engaged to entertain a ladies’ school at New York. That did not cost nothing. The idea seemed to me very American, that an author at the height of his fame, as Mark Twain then was—for he was fifty-five years old, and it was twenty-one years since he leapt into fame with The Jumping Frog, should accept an engagement to “give a talk” in a private house. The school received good value for its fee. He not only gave them an hour’s entrancing address, but he stayed on till quite a late train, having anybody and everybody introduced to him, and being cordial to them all. Nor was his cordiality short-lived. I had done nothing then, except publish a few books of verse. Yet we became and remained till the day of his death, twenty years later, familiar friends. This was before I received that memorable invitation from Oliver Wendell Holmes to be his guest at the monthly meeting of the Saturday Club at Boston, where Mark Twain proved that the English were mentioned in the Bible.[[2]] He told story after story in that address, but I don’t remember any of them. They were all good in tendency, that was one thing; there was no making fun of anything that was good or noble or sincere with him. He was, like our own humorist, Jerome, intensely serious in his soul, and he was projecting a big book about the Bible—as a publisher, for he was already in the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster & Co., who were producing the huge Library of American Literature, of which E. C. Stedman was joint editor.
[2]. When challenged to prove it, he read out the text, “For the meek shall inherit the earth.”
In order to make all great men authors, it had the idea to give the most famous sayings of historical Americans, where they had not written anything. In this way Abraham Lincoln became an author. I expect that it was that encyclopædia which years afterwards brought the house of Charles L. Webster & Co. down, though it was sold “on subscription,” with thousands of copies ordered before the book was begun. Mark Twain found himself responsible for debts of fifty thousand pounds. I met him soon afterwards, and began condoling with him on his losses as a publisher. He replied, “I am no publisher, nor ever was. I only put the money up for them to play with.”
To make up his losses to him, a leading American firm—I seem to recollect that it was the Harpers, but I may be wrong—made him a gigantic “syndicate” proposal for all rights, which brought in large sums of money.
When I met him then, he had just come off ship-board. I asked him how he was.
“Better’n I ever was in my life. I’ve gotten a new lease.”