Really much of Mark’s wisdom began and ended in humor and vice versa. There was originality and penetration in everything he said. Howells has said of Mark: “If a trust of his own was betrayed—Clemens was ruthlessly, implacably resentful.” For my part, in thirty years, I never heard him speak ill of any living person, except one or two self-appointed editors.
I first met him in Chicago during the Grant celebration, November, 1879, when I heard him give the toast on babies, but I do not remember a word of his speech, for while it lasted I was sitting next to Grant and Grant kept me busy watching and attending his immutable and eloquent silence.
When Mark and I were fellow correspondents in Berlin, I met his wife and family frequently at their home, at the Hotel Royal, and on public occasions. The three girls, Jean, Susie, and Clara, were in their teens, and both lovely and lively. At that time the late William Walter Phelps of New Jersey was American minister in Berlin. We had been friends in America and Phelps had also known Mr. Clemens in the States socially. Like everybody else, he delighted in Mark’s stimulating company. Among other distinguished Americans in Berlin, in 1891, was Ward Hill Lamon, Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield law partner, later his private secretary, and Marshal of the District of Columbia during Lincoln’s administration. Lamon was the author of “The Life of Abraham Lincoln” and “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln.” These books the Lincoln family did not enjoy.
When the Clemenses went to live in Vienna, six years later, I happened to be correspondent at the Austrian capital for Dalziel’s News, London, and Galignani’s Messenger, Paris, and as Mark, used to the Berlin dialect, found it difficult “to acclimatize his German, making it chime in with the Vienna variety” (his own description), I was again much in demand as interpreter, pathfinder, and general cicerone.
In later years I met Mark repeatedly during his several London seasons, for, liking his society, I called at Brown’s or his apartment whenever he came to England, myself being engaged in literary work there. We were never on terms of particular intimacy—hail-fellows-well-met, yes! “Hello, Mark”—“Hello Henry W.—you here again?” We stuck verbally to the formula of the old Chicago days, and I was glad to be of use to him when it suited his fancy. Moreover, I was vastly interested in Mark’s books, short stories, and essays, but found him rarely inclined to talk shop unless it was the other fellow’s.
Rudyard Kipling he used to designate “the militant spokesman of the Anglo-Saxon races,” and he sometimes spoke with near-admiration of Bernard Shaw, “whose plays are popular from London to St. Petersburg, from Christiania to Madrid, from Havre to Frisco, and from Frisco to the Antipodes, while mine are nowhere.”
After I visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana he said to me: “Lucky dog, you have broken bread with the man who commands, and almost monopolizes, the thought of the world.”
That the universality of his humor and its humanity made him the peer of these great writers, of all his contemporaries in fact, seemed to be far from his thoughts. His verbal humor, like his fancy, was as simple in form and as direct in application as were the army orders of the great Napoleon. He liked to hear me say that, for he knew that some of my forbears had been individually attached to the person of the Emperor. But the most he ever said concerning his authorship and other writers in his own line was this:
“I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. Like you and Susie” (referring to his oldest daughter) “I can’t spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a ‘k’ to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.”
One more of his sayings: At the unveiling of a bronze tablet to Eugene Field, Mark uttered these words: