MARK “NO GENTLEMAN”
Mark didn’t resort to profanity when he wanted to lambaste man or measure. I once heard him say to Mrs. Clemens: “I will write him that ‘his mind is all caked up, that as an idiot he is simply immeasurable.’
“And I will call him a snug person full of pedantic proclivities; and further, ‘a long-eared animal’ (and striking an attitude)—‘a mule hostler with his pate full of axle grease.’”
“All right,” said gentle Mrs. Livy, “do so by all means, but take care not to send the letter.”
“Livy, dear, let me get it off my chest,” pleaded Mark, “for ‘Hotel Normandie, Paris,’ would be just the place to date such an epistle from. Don’t you remember the ‘Madame’s screech’ to the effect that ‘one must expect neither tact nor delicacy from Mark Twain?’”
The “Madame” referred to was Madam Blanc, the critic of one of the chief French reviews, already mentioned.
“The vagabond and adventurer, who from crown to sole remained a gentleman” (I forget from which magazine this is quoted) fairly reveled “in the French Madame’s abomination of his lowly self.”
MARK, POETRY, AND ART
Like other authors, Mark was not indifferent to praise. I think he liked best an essay in a Vienna review which hailed him as “the journalist of belles-lettres who has made the commonplaces literary, even as Emerson rendered the commonplaces philosophic.” “A French writer has accused him of denying that there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages,” continues the essay, “yet his Joan of Arc is the most wonderfully lyric-dramatic prose I can recall.”
“There are lots of people who know me better than I do myself,” was Mark’s comment on the above, and followed it up with a yarn on life in “old Nevada,” when he rode several miles behind a prairie schooner “because of a red petticoat fluttering in the breeze at the tail end.”