With the publication of “The Innocents” in the summer of 1869 Mark Twain came to the halfway point. Out of his wide experience he had developed the habits of an observer and he had learned how to write. He had earned a reputation as a newspaper man, and he had published his most famous short story, “The Jumping Frog,” using his talent in spinning a yarn[35] after his own fashion. His lecturing had met with unqualified success; the new book was selling beyond all expectation—67,000 copies in the first year; and he was happily married to Olivia Langdon, his balance wheel, his severest critic, and the friend of all his closest friends.
The story of the rest of his life is a record of varied and spectacular fortunes. His home from 1871 to 1891 was in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was a neighbor of Charles Dudley Warner and an intimate of the Reverend Joseph Twitchell (the original of Harris in “A Tramp Abroad”), and where William Dean Howells, his friend of over forty years, often visited him. There was a kind of lavishness in everything he did. He built a mansion, made money with ease, spent it profusely, and invested it with the care-free optimism of Colonel Sellers himself. New inventions fascinated him and made him an easy victim for the fluent promoter, so that what was left from his ventures with the Buffalo Express and the Webster Publishing Company went into other enterprises, of which the Paige typesetting machine was the most disastrous for this ex-printer. After his failure for a large amount, a later friend, Henry H. Rogers, took his affairs in hand and by good management enabled Mark Twain to meet all debts and enjoy a very handsome income during his later years.
The ups and downs of business distracted him but did not baffle him. He traveled extensively, living abroad during most of the decade between 1891 and 1901. He made cordial friends wherever he went, but he was not weaned by them away from the old cronies of the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific coast. He accepted honors from Yale twice and from the University of Missouri, and in 1907 was the subject of a four-weeks’ ovation from all England when he went over to receive the degree of Doctor of Letters from Oxford. His opinion was sought on public questions and he was importuned for speeches on every sort of occasion; but his last years were shadowed by a succession of bereavements. In 1903 Mrs. Clemens died. Two children died in childhood, a third under tragic circumstances in 1909, and the surviving daughter was married and far away most of the time. His chief personal solace was found in his friendships with several schoolgirls.
During those years after my wife’s death I was washing about on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making in high and holy causes, and these things furnished me intellectual cheer and entertainment; but they got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry and dusty. I had reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so I began to adopt some.
He died of angina pectoris in 1910.
Mark Twain’s reputation was built on his humor. He came to his maturity in a fruitful decade just after the Civil War, when a crop of newspaper men were coming out with a recklessly fresh, informal jocularity which was related to the old American humor, but a great departure from it. They were all unconscious of making any contribution to American literature. They never could have written books which would have won the attention of Irving’s readers and the perusers of the old Annuals and the admirers of the Knickerbocker courtliness. They wrote for the world of Horace Greeley and the elder James Gordon Bennett, caring nothing for beauty of style or for any kind of literary tradition. They wrote under odd pen names like “John Phœnix,” who preceded them by ten years—“Petroleum V. Nasby,” “Artemus Ward,” “Orpheus C. Kerr,” “Max Adler,” and “M. Quad” serving as fancy dress for Locke, Browne, Newell, Clark, and Lewis. They drew their material from the common people, as Lincoln had done with all his anecdotes, putting it in the idiom of the common people and frequently distorting it into illiterate spelling, as Lowell had done in “The Biglow Papers.” This disturbed and shocked the lovers of a refined literature—men like Stedman, for example, who wrote to Bayard Taylor, “The whole country, owing to contagion of our American newspaper ‘exchange’ system, is flooded, deluged, swamped, beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic [bathos], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit.” But it was an irresistible tide that threw up on its waves something more than froth or flotsam, in the shape of a few real treasures from the deep—and the rarest was Mark Twain.
Had there been no such journalistic tide this original genius would still have gone on his original way. What these other men did was much more to put the public into a humor for Mark Twain than to lead Mark Twain in his approach to the public. He started as the others did, allowing an undercurrent of seriousness to appear now and then in the flow of his extravagance. His platform experience taught him by the immediate response of the audience what were the most effective methods.
All Tully’s rules and all Quintilian’s too,
He by the light of listening faces knew.
And his rapt audience, all unconscious, lent