CHAPTER XIX
HANNIBAL AND MARK TWAIN
If black slaves are no longer bought and sold there, if the river trade has dwindled, if the railroad and the factory have come, bringing a larger population with them, if the town now has a hundred-thousand-dollar city hall, a country club, and "fifty-six passenger trains daily," it is, at all events, a pleasure to record the fact that Hannibal, Missouri, retains to-day that look of soft and shambling picturesqueness suitable to an old river town, and essential to the "St. Petersburg" of fiction—the perpetual dwelling place of those immortal boys, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
Should this characterization of the town fail to meet with the approval of the Hannibal Commercial Club, I regret it, for I honor the Commercial Club because of its action toward the preservation of a thing so uncommercial as the boyhood home of Mark Twain. But, after all, the club must remember that, in its creditable effort to build up a newer and finer Hannibal, a Hannibal of brick and granite, it is running counter to the sentimental interests of innumerable persons who, though most of them have never seen the old town and never will, yet think of it as given to them by Mark Twain, with a peculiar tenderness, as though it were a Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn among the cities—a ragged, happy boy of a town, which ought never, never to grow up.
There is no more charming way of preserving the memory of an artist than through the preservation of the house in which he lived, and that is especially true where the artist was a literary man and where the house has figured in his writings. What memorial to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, for example, could equal the one in Portsmouth, N. H., where is preserved the house in which the "Bad Boy" of the "Diary" used to live, even to the furniture and the bedroom wall paper mentioned in the book? And what monuments to Washington Irving could touch quite the note that is touched by that old house in Tarrytown, N. Y., or that other old house in Irving Place, in the city of New York, where the Authors' League of America now has its headquarters?
With the exception of Stratford-on-Avon, I do not know of a community so completely dominated by the memory of a great man of letters as is the city of Hannibal by the memory of Mark Twain. There is, indeed, a curious resemblance to be traced between the two towns. I don't mean a physical resemblance, for no places could be less alike than the garden town where Shakespeare lived and the pathetic wooden village of the early west in which nine years of Mark Twain's boyhood were spent. The resemblance is only in the majestic shadows cast over them by their great men.
Thus, the hotel in Stratford is called The Shakespeare Hotel, while that in Hannibal is The Mark Twain. Stratford has the house in which Shakespeare was born; Hannibal the house in which Mark Twain lived—the house of Tom Sawyer. Stratford has the cottage of Anne Hathaway; Hannibal that of Becky Thatcher. And Hannibal has, furthermore, one possession which lovers of the delightful Becky will hope may long be spared to it—it possesses, in the person of Mrs. Laura Hawkins Frazer, who is now matron of the Home for the Friendless, the original of Becky.
It is said that a memorial tablet, intended to mark the birthplace of Eugene Field in St. Louis, was placed, not only upon the wrong house, but upon a house in the wrong street. Mark Twain unveiled the tablet; one can fancy the spirits of these two Missouri literary men meeting somewhere and smiling together over that. But if the shade of Mark Twain should undertake to chaff that of the poet upon the fact that mortals had erred as to the location of his birthplace, the shade of Field would not be able to retort in kind, for—thanks partly to the fact that Mark Twain was known for a genius while he was yet alive, and partly to the indefatigable labors of his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine—a vast fund of accurate information has been preserved, covering the life of the great Missourian, from the time of his birth in the little hamlet of Florida, Mo., to his death in Reading, Conn. No; if the shade of Field should wish to return the jest, it would probably call the humorist's attention to a certain memorial tablet in the Mark Twain house in Hannibal. But of that presently.
I have said that the Commercial Club honored Mark Twain's memory. That is true. But the Commercial Club would not be a Commercial Club if it did not also wish the visitor to take into consideration certain other matters. In effect it says to him: "Yes, indeed, Mark Twain spent the most important part of his boyhood here. But we wish you to understand that Hannibal is a busy, growing town. We have the cheapest electric power in the Mississippi Valley. We offer free factory sites. We—"