“‘Life’s a yawning Nitchevo,
The Shadow of a single nought,
The Dream of a Flea,
A Drama by Teufelsdroeckh.’”
I confess I heard this, too, for the first time; possibly Mark got off the fireworks all by his loneness, pour passer le temps.
“Howells introduced me to Heine,” he explained during the entr’acte. “I am glad he did, for I never found in his writings ‘the bitter Jew who emptied all the insult in his soul on Aryan heads.’ But then I read Heine only for his glittering wit, the scintillating glow of his fancy.”
MARK AND THE ENGLISH HACK-WRITER
A Berlin cartoon paper, “Ulk,” once represented Twain as “an Arthurian Knight, canned up to the neck in armour,” galloping after kill-joys and such, and picking them up with his lance and warhooping like wild. That’s what he would like to have done to the hack of a London publishing house, who had interfered with his copy, striking out sentences, and words, and substituting his own “insular ignorance” wherever Mark’s broad humanity ran amuck of public opinion as he, the hack, understood it.
Mark told me that he spent three days “abolishing that cad” (quoting from Carlyle) and I think he added:
“I gave him at least part of the Hades and brimstone he deserved. There were such moving passages as ‘monumental ass,’ ‘masticator of commonplaces,’ ‘offspring of a court fool,’ ‘clownish idiot,’ etc. All the hatred, all the venom that was in my system I let loose upon that damn’ fool, squirted it into him with all the force that I was capable of. Oh, I laid him out. If he had had the chance to read the letter, his own mother would not have recognized him.