Transcriber’s Note:

The few footnotes have been collected at the end of each chapter, and are linked for ease of reference.

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s [note] at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.

The title and author, as well as the publication date, have been added to the image of the front cover.

Any corrections are indicated using an underline highlight. Placing the cursor over the correction will produce the original text in a small popup.

Any corrections are indicated as hyperlinks, which will navigate the reader to the corresponding entry in the corrections table in the note at the end of the text.

EUROPE AND ELSEWHERE

AND I ROSE TO RECEIVE MY GUEST, AND BRACED MYSELF FOR THE
THUNDERCRASH AND THE BRIMSTONE STENCH WHICH
SHOULD ANNOUNCE HIS ARRIVAL

(See p. [326])

EUROPE

AND ELSEWHERE

By

MARK TWAIN

WITH AN APPRECIATION BY

BRANDER MATTHEWS

AND AN INTRODUCTION BY

ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

EUROPE AND ELSEWHERE

Copyright, 1923

By The Mark Twain Company

Printed in the U.S.A.

First Edition

E-X

CONTENTS

AN APPRECIATION

(This “Biographical Criticism” was prepared by Prof. Brander Matthews, as an introduction to the Uniform Edition of Mark Twain’s Works, published in 1899).

It is a common delusion of those who discuss contemporary literature that there is such an entity as the “reading public,” possessed of a certain uniformity of taste. There is not one public; there are many publics--as many, in fact, as there are different kinds of taste; and the extent of an author’s popularity is in proportion to the number of these separate publics he may chance to please. Scott, for example, appealed not only to those who relished romance and enjoyed excitement, but also to those who appreciated his honest portrayal of sturdy characters. Thackeray is preferred by ambitious youth who are insidiously flattered by his tacit compliments to their knowledge of the world, by the disenchanted who cannot help seeing the petty meannesses of society, and by the less sophisticated in whom sentiment has not gone to seed in sentimentality. Dickens in his own day bid for the approval of those who liked broad caricature (and were therefore pleased with Stiggins and Chadband), of those who fed greedily on plentiful pathos (and were therefore delighted with the deathbeds of Smike and Paul Dombey and Little Nell) and also of those who asked for unexpected adventure (and were therefore glad to disentangle the melodramatic intrigues of Ralph Nickleby).

In like manner the American author who has chosen to call himself Mark Twain has attained to an immense popularity because the qualities he possesses in a high degree appeal to so many and so widely varied publics--first of all, no doubt, to the public that revels in hearty and robust fun, but also to the public which is glad to be swept along by the full current of adventure, which is sincerely touched by manly pathos, which is satisfied by vigorous and exact portrayal of character, and which respects shrewdness and wisdom and sanity and a healthy hatred of pretense and affectation and sham. Perhaps no one book of Mark Twain’s--with the possible exception of Huckleberry Finn--is equally a favorite with all his readers; and perhaps some of his best characteristics are absent from his earlier books or but doubtfully latent in them. Mark Twain is many sided; and he has ripened in knowledge and in power since he first attracted attention as a wild Western funny man. As he has grown older he has reflected more; he has both broadened and deepened. The writer of “comic copy” for a mining-camp newspaper has developed into a liberal humorist, handling life seriously and making his readers think as he makes them laugh, until to-day Mark Twain has perhaps the largest audience of any author now using the English language. To trace the stages of this evolution and to count the steps whereby the sagebrush reporter has risen to the rank of a writer of world-wide celebrity, is as interesting as it is instructive.

I

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born November 30, 1835, at Florida, Missouri. His father was a merchant who had come from Tennessee and who removed soon after his son’s birth to Hannibal, a little town on the Mississippi. What Hannibal was like and what were the circumstances of Mr. Clemen’s boyhood we can see for ourselves in the convincing pages of Tom Sawyer. Mr. Howells has called Hannibal “a loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town”; and Mr. Clemens, who silently abhorred slavery, was of a slave-owning family.

When the future author was but twelve his father died, and the son had to get his education as best he could. Of actual schooling he got little and of book learning still less, but life itself is not a bad teacher for a boy who wants to study, and young Clemens did not waste his chances.[chances.] He spent six years in the printing office of the little local paper,--for, like not a few others on the list of American[American] authors that stretches from Benjamin Franklin to William Dean Howells, he began his connection with literature by setting type. As a journeyman printer the lad wandered from town to town and rambled even as far east as New York.

When he was nineteen he went back to the home of his boyhood and presently resolved to become a pilot on the Mississippi. How he learned the river he has told us in Life on the Mississippi, wherein his adventures, his experiences, and his impressions while he was a cub pilot are recorded with a combination of precise veracity and abundant humor which makes the earlier chapters of that marvelous book a most masterly fragment of autobiography. The life of a pilot was full of interest and excitement and opportunity, and what young Clemens saw and heard and divined during the years when he was going up and down the mighty river we may read in the pages of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson. But toward the end of the ’fifties the railroads began to rob the river of its supremacy as a carrier; and in the beginning of the ’sixties the Civil War broke out and the Mississippi no longer went unvexed to the sea. The skill, slowly and laboriously acquired, was suddenly rendered useless, and at twenty-five the young man found himself bereft of his calling. As a border state, Missouri was sending her sons into the armies of the Union and into the armies of the Confederacy, while many a man stood doubting, not knowing which way to turn. The ex-pilot has given us the record of his very brief and inglorious service as a soldier of the South. When this escapade was swiftly ended, he went to the Northwest with his brother, who had been appointed Territorial Secretary of Nevada. Thus the man who had been born on the borderland of North and South, who had gone East as a jour-printer, who had been again and again up and down the Mississippi, now went West while he was still plastic and impressionable; and he had thus another chance to increase that intimate knowledge of American life and American character which is one of the most precious of his possessions.

While still on the river he had written a satiric letter or two which found their way into print. In Nevada he went to the mines and lived the life he has described in Roughing It, but when he failed to “strike it rich,” he naturally drifted into journalism and back into a newspaper office again. The Virginia City Enterprise was not overmanned, and the newcomer did all sorts of odd jobs, finding time now and then to write a sketch which seemed important enough to permit of his signature. He now began to sign himself Mark Twain, taking the name from a call of the man who heaves the lead on a Mississippi River steamboat, and who cries, “By the mark, three,” “Mark Twain,” and so on. The name of Mark Twain soon began to be known to those who were curious in newspaper humor. After a while he was drawn across the mountains to San Francisco, where he found casual employment on the Morning Call, and where he joined himself to a little group of aspiring literators which included Mr. Bret Harte, Mr. Noah Brooks, Mr. Charles Henry Webb, and Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard.

It was in 1867 that Mr. Webb published Mark Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras; and it was in 1867 that the proprietors of the Alta California supplied him with the funds necessary to enable him to become one of the passengers on the steamer Quaker City, which had been chartered to take a select party on what is now known as the Mediterranean trip. The weekly letters, in which he set forth what befell him on this journey, were printed in the Alta Sunday after Sunday, and were copied freely by the other Californian papers. These letters served as the foundation of a book published in 1869 and called The Innocents Abroad, a book which instantly brought to the author celebrity and cash.

Both of these valuable aids to ambition were increased by his next step, his appearance on the lecture platform. Mr. Noah Brooks, who was present at his first attempt, has recorded that Mark Twain’s “method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel. His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences, the surprise that spread over his face when the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word painting, were unlike anything of the kind they had ever known.” In the thirty years since that first appearance the method has not changed, although it has probably matured. Mark Twain is one of the most effective of platform speakers and one of the most artistic, with an art of his own which is very individual and very elaborate in spite of its seeming simplicity.

Although he succeeded abundantly as a lecturer, and although he was the author of the most widely circulated book of the decade, Mark Twain still thought of himself only as a journalist; and when he gave up the West for the East he became an editor of the Buffalo Express, in which he had bought an interest. In 1870 he married; and it is perhaps not indiscreet to remark that his was another of those happy unions of which there have been so many in the annals of American authorship. In 1871 he removed to Hartford, where his home has been ever since; and at the same time he gave up newspaper work.

In 1872 he wrote Roughing It, and in the following year came his first sustained attempt at fiction, The Gilded Age, written in collaboration with Mr. Charles Dudley Warner. The character of “Colonel Mulberry Sellers” Mark Twain soon took out of this book to make it the central figure of a play which the late John T. Raymond acted hundreds of times throughout the United States, the playgoing public pardoning the inexpertness of the dramatist in favor of the delicious humor and the compelling veracity with which the chief character was presented. So universal was this type and so broadly recognizable its traits that there were few towns wherein the play was presented in which some one did not accost the actor who impersonated the ever-hopeful schemer to declare: “I’m the original of Sellers! Didn’t Mark ever tell you? Well, he took the Colonel from me!”

Encouraged by the welcome accorded to this first attempt at fiction, Mark Twain turned to the days of his boyhood and wrote Tom Sawyer, published in 1875. He also collected his sketches, scattered here and there in newspapers and magazines. Toward the end of the ’seventies he went to Europe again with his family; and the result of this journey is recorded in A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880. Another volume of sketches, The Stolen White Elephant, was put forth in 1882; and in the same year Mark Twain first came forward as a historical novelist--if The Prince and the Pauper can fairly be called a historical novel. The year after, he sent forth the volume describing his Life on the Mississippi; and in 1884 he followed this with the story in which that life has been crystallized forever, Huckleberry Finn, the finest of his books, the deepest in its insight, and the widest in its appeal.

This Odyssey of the Mississippi was published by a new firm, in which the author was a chief partner, just as Sir Walter Scott had been an associate of Ballantyne and Constable. There was at first a period of prosperity in which the house issued the Personal Memoirs of Grant, giving his widow checks for $350,000 in 1886, and in which Mark Twain himself published A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, a volume of Merry Tales, and a story called The American Claimant, wherein “Colonel Sellers” reappears. Then there came a succession of hard years; and at last the publishing house in which Mark Twain was a partner failed, as the publishing house in which Walter Scott was a partner had formerly failed. The author of Huckleberry Finn at sixty found himself suddenly saddled with a load of debt, just as the author of Waverley had been burdened full threescore years earlier; and Mark Twain stood up stoutly under it, as Scott had done before him. More fortunate than the Scotchman, the American has lived to pay the debt in full.

Since the disheartening crash came, he has given to the public a third Mississippi River tale, Pudd’nhead Wilson, issued in 1894; and a third historical novel Joan of Arc, a reverent and sympathetic study of the bravest figure in all French history, printed anonymously in Harper’s Magazine and then in a volume acknowledged by the author in 1896. As one of the results of a lecturing tour around the world he prepared another volume of travels, Following the Equator, published toward the end of 1897. Mention must also be made of a fantastic tale called Tom Sawyer Abroad, sent forth in 1894, of a volume of sketches, The Million Pound Bank-Note, assembled in 1893, and also of a collection of literary essays, How to Tell a Story, published in 1897.

This is but the barest outline of Mark Twain’s life--such a brief summary as we must have before us if we wish to consider the conditions under which the author has developed and the stages of his growth. It will serve, however, to show how various have been his forms of activity--printer, pilot, miner, journalist, traveler, lecturer, novelist, publisher--and to suggest the width of his experience of life.

II

A humorist is often without honor in his own country. Perhaps this is partly because humor is likely to be familiar, and familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps it is partly because (for some strange reason) we tend to despise those who make us laugh, while we respect those who make us weep--forgetting that there are formulas for forcing tears quite as facile as the formulas for forcing smiles. Whatever the reason, the fact is indisputable that the humorist must pay the penalty of his humor; he must run the risk of being tolerated as a mere fun maker, not to be taken seriously, and unworthy of critical consideration. This penalty has been paid by Mark Twain. In many of the discussions of American literature he is dismissed as though he were only a competitor of his predecessors, Artemus Ward and John Phœnix, instead of being, what he is really, a writer who is to be classed--at whatever interval only time may decide--rather with Cervantes and Molière.

Like the heroines of the problem plays of the modern theater, Mark Twain has had to live down his past. His earlier writing gave but little promise of the enduring qualities obvious enough in his later works. Mr. Noah Brooks has told us how he was advised, if he wished to “see genuine specimens of American humor, frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious,” to look up the sketches which the then almost unknown Mark Twain was printing in a Nevada newspaper. The humor of Mark Twain is still American, still frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious; but it is riper now and richer, and it has taken unto itself other qualities existing only in germ in these firstlings of his muse. The sketches in The Jumping Frog and the letters which made up The Innocents Abroad are “comic copy,” as the phrase is in newspaper offices--comic copy not altogether unlike what John Phœnix had written and Artemus Ward, better indeed than the work of these newspaper humorists (for Mark Twain had it in him to develop as they did not), but not essentially dissimilar.

And in the eyes of many who do not think for themselves, Mark Twain is only the author of these genuine specimens of American humor. For when the public has once made up its mind about any man’s work, it does not relish any attempt to force it to unmake this opinion and to remake it. Like other juries, it does not like to be ordered to reconsider its verdict as contrary to the facts of the case. It is always sluggish in beginning the necessary readjustment, and not only sluggish, but somewhat grudging. Naturally it cannot help seeing the later works of a popular writer from the point of view it had to take to enjoy his earlier writings. And thus the author of Huckleberry Finn and Joan of Arc is forced to pay a high price for the early and abundant popularity of The Innocents Abroad.

No doubt, a few of his earlier sketches were inexpensive in their elements; made of materials worn threadbare by generations of earlier funny men, they were sometimes cut in the pattern of his predecessors. No doubt, some of the earliest of all were crude and highly colored, and may even be called forced, not to say violent. No doubt, also, they did not suggest the seriousness and the melancholy which always must underlie the deepest humor, as we find it in Cervantes and Molière, in Swift and in Lowell. But even a careless reader, skipping through the book in idle amusement, ought to have been able to see in The Innocents Abroad that the writer of that liveliest of books of travel was no mere merry-andrew, grinning through a horse collar to make sport for the groundlings; but a sincere observer of life, seeing through his own eyes and setting down what he saw with abundant humor, of course, but also with profound respect for the eternal verities.

George Eliot in one of her essays calls those who parody lofty themes “debasers of the moral currency.” Mark Twain is always an advocate of the sterling ethical standard. He is ready to overwhelm an affectation with irresistible laughter, but he never lacks reverence for the things that really deserve reverence. It is not at the Old Masters that he scoffs in Italy, but rather at those who pay lip service to things which they neither enjoy nor understand. For a ruin or a painting or a legend that does not seem to him to deserve the appreciation in which it is held he refuses to affect an admiration he does not feel; he cannot help being honest--he was born so. For meanness of all kinds he has a burning contempt; and on Abelard he pours out the vials of his wrath. He has a quick eye for all humbugs and a scorching scorn for them; but there is no attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx. He is not taken in by the glamour of Palestine; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his feet: but he knows that he is standing on holy ground; and there is never a hint of irreverence in his attitude.

A Tramp Abroad is a better book than The Innocents Abroad; it is quite as laughter-provoking, and its manner is far more restrained. Mark Twain was then master of his method, sure of himself, secure of his popularity; and he could do his best and spare no pains to be certain that it was his best. Perhaps there is a slight falling off in Following the Equator; a trace of fatigue, of weariness, of disenchantment. But the last book of travels has passages as broadly humorous as any of the first; and it proves the author’s possession of a pithy shrewdness not to be suspected from a perusal of its earliest predecessor. The first book was the work of a young fellow rejoicing in his own fun and resolved to make his readers laugh with him or at him; the latest book is the work of an older man, who has found that life is not all laughter, but whose eye is as clear as ever and whose tongue is as plain-spoken.

These three books of travel are like all other books of travel in that they relate in the first person what the author went forth to see. Autobiographic also are Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, and they have always seemed to me better books than the more widely circulated travels. They are better because they are the result of a more intimate knowledge of the material dealt with. Every traveler is of necessity but a bird of passage; he is a mere carpetbagger; his acquaintance with the countries he visits is external only; and this acquaintanceship is made only when he is a full-grown man. But Mark Twain’s knowledge of the Mississippi was acquired in his youth; it was not purchased with a price; it was his birthright; and it was internal and complete. And his knowledge of the mining camp was achieved in early manhood when the mind is open and sensitive to every new impression. There is in both these books a fidelity to the inner truth, a certainty of touch, a sweep of vision, not to be found in the three books of travels. For my own part I have long thought that Mark Twain could securely rest his right to survive as an author on those opening chapters in Life on the Mississippi in which he makes clear the difficulties, the seeming impossibilities, that fronted those who wished to learn the river. These chapters are bold and brilliant, and they picture for us forever a period and a set of conditions, singularly interesting and splendidly varied, that otherwise would have had to forego all adequate record.

III

It is highly probable that when an author reveals the power of evoking views of places and of calling up portraits of people such as Mark Twain showed in Life on the Mississippi, and when he has the masculine grasp of reality Mark Twain made evident in Roughing It, he must needs sooner or later turn from mere fact to avowed fiction and become a story-teller. The long stories which Mark Twain has written fall into two divisions--first, those of which the scene is laid in the present, in reality, and mostly in the Mississippi Valley, and second, those of which the scene is laid in the past, in fantasy mostly, and in Europe.

As my own liking is a little less for the latter group, there is no need for me now to linger over them. In writing these tales of the past Mark Twain was making up stories in his head; personally I prefer the tales of his in which he has his foot firm on reality. The Prince and the Pauper has the essence of boyhood in it; it has variety and vigor; it has abundant humor and plentiful pathos; and yet I for one would give the whole of it for the single chapter in which Tom Sawyer lets the contract for whitewashing his aunt’s fence.

Mr. Howells has declared that there are two kinds of fiction he likes almost equally well--“a real novel and a pure romance”; and he joyfully accepts A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court as “one of the greatest romances ever imagined.” It is a humorous romance overflowing with stalwart fun; and it is not irreverent, but iconoclastic, in that it breaks not a few disestablished idols. It is intensely American and intensely nineteenth century and intensely democratic--in the best sense of that abused adjective. The British critics were greatly displeased with the book;--and we are reminded of the fact that the Spanish still somewhat resent Don Quixote because it brings out too truthfully the fatal gap in the Spanish character between the ideal and the real. So much of the feudal still survives in British society that Mark Twain’s merry and elucidating assault on the past seemed to some almost an insult to the present.

But no critic, British or American, has ventured to discover any irreverence in Joan of Arc, wherein, indeed, the tone is almost devout and the humor almost too much subdued. Perhaps it is my own distrust of the so-called historical novel, my own disbelief that it can ever be anything but an inferior form of art, which makes me care less for this worthy effort to honor a noble figure. And elevated and dignified as is the Joan of Arc, I do not think that it shows us Mark Twain at his best; although it has many a passage that only he could have written, it is perhaps the least characteristic of his works. Yet it may well be that the certain measure of success he has achieved in handling a subject so lofty and so serious, will help to open the eyes of the public to see the solid merits of his other stories, in which his humor has fuller play and in which his natural gifts are more abundantly displayed.

Of these other stories three are “real novels,” to use Mr. Howells’s phrase; they are novels as real as any in any literature. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson are invaluable contributions to American literature--for American literature is nothing if it is not a true picture of American life and if it does not help us to understand ourselves. Huckleberry Finn is a very amusing volume, and a generation has read its pages and laughed over it immoderately; but it is very much more than a funny book; it is a marvelously accurate portrayal of a whole civilization. Mr. Ormsby, in an essay which accompanies his translation of Don Quixote, has pointed out that for a full century after its publication that greatest of novels was enjoyed chiefly as a tale of humorous misadventure, and that three generations had laughed over it before anybody suspected that it was more than a mere funny book. It is perhaps rather with the picaresque romances of Spain that Huckleberry Finn is to be compared than with the masterpiece of Cervantes; but I do not think it will be a century or take three generations before we Americans generally discover how great a book Huckleberry Finn really is, how keen its vision of character, how close its observation of life, how sound its philosophy, and how it records for us once and for all certain phases of Southwestern society which it is most important for us to perceive and to understand. The influence of slavery, the prevalence of feuds, the conditions and the circumstances that make lynching possible--all these things are set before us clearly and without comment. It is for us to draw our own moral, each for himself, as we do when we see Shakespeare acted.

Huckleberry Finn, in its art, for one thing, and also in its broader range, is superior to Tom Sawyer and to Pudd’nhead Wilson, fine as both these are in their several ways. In no book in our language, to my mind, has the boy, simply as a boy, been better realized than in Tom Sawyer. In some respects Pudd’nhead Wilson is the most dramatic of Mark Twain’s longer stories, and also the most ingenious; like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, it has the full flavor of the Mississippi River, on which its author spent his own boyhood, and from contact with the soil of which he always rises reinvigorated.

It is by these three stories, and especially by Huckleberry Finn, that Mark Twain is likely to live longest. Nowhere else is the life of the Mississippi Valley so truthfully recorded. Nowhere else can we find a gallery of Southwestern characters as varied and as veracious as those Huck Finn met in his wanderings. The histories of literature all praise the Gil Blas of Le Sage for its amusing adventures, its natural characters, its pleasant humor, and its insight into human frailty; and the praise is deserved. But in everyone of these qualities Huckleberry Finn is superior to Gil Blas. Le Sage set the model of the picaresque novel, and Mark Twain followed his example; but the American book is richer than the French--deeper, finer, stronger. It would be hard to find in any language better specimens of pure narrative, better examples of the power of telling a story and of calling up action so that the reader cannot help but see it, than Mark Twain’s account of the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud, and his description of the shooting of Boggs by Sherburn and of the foiled attempt to lynch Sherburn afterward.

These scenes, fine as they are, vivid, powerful, and most artistic in their restraint, can be matched in the two other books. In Tom Sawyer they can be paralleled by the chapter in which the boy and the girl are lost in the cave, and Tom, seeing a gleam of light in the distance, discovers that it is a candle carried by Indian Joe, the one enemy he has in the world. In Pudd’nhead Wilson the great passages of Huckleberry Finn are rivaled by that most pathetic account of the weak son willing to sell his own mother as a slave “down the river.” Although no one of the books is sustained throughout on this high level, and although, in truth, there are in each of them passages here and there that we could wish away (because they are not worthy of the association in which we find them), I have no hesitation in expressing here my own conviction that the man who has given us four scenes like these is to be compared with the masters of literature; and that he can abide the comparison with equanimity.

IV

Perhaps I myself prefer these three Mississippi Valley books above all Mark Twain’s other writings (although with no lack of affection for those also) partly because these have the most of the flavor of the soil about them. After veracity and the sense of the universal, what I best relish in literature is this native aroma, pungent, homely, and abiding. Yet I feel sure that I should not rate him so high if he were the author of these three books only. They are the best of him, but the others are good also, and good in a different way. Other writers have given us this local color more or less artistically, more or less convincingly: one New England and another New York, a third Virginia, and a fourth Georgia, and a fifth Wisconsin; but who so well as Mark Twain has given us the full spectrum of the Union? With all his exactness in reproducing the Mississippi Valley, Mark Twain is not sectional in his outlook; he is national always. He is not narrow; he is not Western or Eastern; he is American with a certain largeness and boldness and freedom and certainty that we like to think of as befitting a country so vast as ours and a people so independent.

In Mark Twain we have “the national spirit as seen with our own eyes,” declared Mr. Howells; and, from more points of view than one, Mark Twain seems to me to be the very embodiment of Americanism. Self-educated in the hard school of life, he has gone on broadening his outlook as he has grown older. Spending many years abroad, he has come to understand other nationalities, without enfeebling his own native faith. Combining a mastery of the commonplace with an imaginative faculty, he is a practical idealist. No respecter of persons, he has a tender regard for his fellow man. Irreverent toward all outworn superstitions, he has ever revealed the deepest respect for all things truly worthy of reverence. Unwilling to take pay in words, he is impatient always to get at the root of the matter, to pierce to the center, to see the thing as it is. He has a habit of standing upright, of thinking for himself, and of hitting hard at whatsoever seems to him hateful and mean; but at the core of him there is genuine gentleness and honest sympathy, brave humanity and sweet kindliness. Perhaps it is boastful for us to think that these characteristics which we see in Mark Twain are characteristics also of the American people as a whole; but it is pleasant to think so.

Mark Twain has the very marrow of Americanism. He is as intensely and as typically American as Franklin or Emerson or Hawthorne. He has not a little of the shrewd common sense and the homely and unliterary directness of Franklin. He is not without a share of the aspiration and the elevation of Emerson; and he has a philosophy of his own as optimistic as Emerson’s. He possesses also somewhat of Hawthorne’s interest in ethical problems, with something of the same power of getting at the heart of them; he, too, has written his parables and apologues wherein the moral is obvious and unobtruded. He is uncompromisingly honest; and his conscience is as rugged as his style sometimes is.

No American author has to-day at his command a style more nervous, more varied, more flexible, or more various than Mark Twain’s. His colloquial ease should not hide from us his mastery of all the devices of rhetoric. He may seem to disobey the letter of the law sometimes, but he is always obedient to the spirit. He never speaks unless he has something to say; and then he says it tersely, sharply, with a freshness of epithet and an individuality of phrase, always accurate, however unacademic. His vocabulary is enormous, and it is deficient only in the dead words; his language is alive always, and actually tingling with vitality. He rejoices in the daring noun and in the audacious adjective. His instinct for the exact word is not always unerring, and now and again he has failed to exercise it; but there is in his prose none of the flatting and sharping he censured in Fenimore Cooper’s. His style has none of the cold perfection of an antique statue; it is too modern and too American for that, and too completely the expression of the man himself, sincere and straightforward. It is not free from slang, although this is far less frequent than one might expect; but it does its work swiftly and cleanly. And it is capable of immense variety. Consider the tale of the Blue Jay in A Tramp Abroad, wherein the humor is sustained by unstated pathos; what could be better told than this, with every word the right word and in the right place? And take Huck Finn’s description of the storm when he was alone on the island, which is in dialect, which will not parse, which bristles with double negatives, but which none the less is one of the finest passages of descriptive prose in all American literature.

V

After all, it is as a humorist pure and simple that Mark Twain is best known and best beloved. In the preceding pages I have tried to point out the several ways in which he transcends humor, as the word is commonly restricted, and to show that he is no mere fun maker. But he is a fun maker beyond all question, and he has made millions laugh as no other man of our century has done. The laughter he has aroused is wholesome and self-respecting; it clears the atmosphere. For this we cannot but be grateful. As Lowell said, “let us not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take the profoundest satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity.” There is no laughter in Don Quixote, the noble enthusiast whose wits are unsettled; and there is little on the lips of Alceste the misanthrope of Molière; but for both of them life would have been easier had they known how to laugh. Cervantes himself, and Molière also, found relief in laughter for their melancholy; and it was the sense of humor which kept them tolerantly interested in the spectacle of humanity, although life had pressed hardly on them both. On Mark Twain also life has left its scars; but he has bound up his wounds and battled forward with a stout heart, as Cervantes did, and Molière. It was Molière who declared that it was a strange business to undertake to make people laugh; but even now, after two centuries, when the best of Molière’s plays are acted, mirth breaks out again and laughter overflows.

It would be doing Mark Twain a disservice to liken him to Molière, the greatest comic dramatist of all time; and yet there is more than one point of similarity. Just as Mark Twain began by writing comic copy which contained no prophecy of a masterpiece like Huckleberry Finn, so Molière was at first the author only of semiacrobatic farces on the Italian model in no wise presaging Tartuffe and The Misanthrope. Just as Molière succeeded first of all in pleasing the broad public that likes robust fun, and then slowly and step by step developed into a dramatist who set on the stage enduring figures plucked out of the abounding life about him, so also has Mark Twain grown, ascending from The Jumping Frog to Huckleberry Finn, as comic as its elder brother and as laughter-provoking, but charged also with meaning and with philosophy. And like Molière again, Mark Twain has kept solid hold of the material world; his doctrine is not of the earth earthy, but it is never sublimated into sentimentality. He sympathizes with the spiritual side of humanity, while never ignoring the sensual. Like Molière, Mark Twain takes his stand on common sense and thinks scorn of affectation of every sort. He understands sinners and strugglers and weaklings; and he is not harsh with them, reserving his scorching hatred for hypocrites and pretenders and frauds.

At how long an interval Mark Twain shall be rated after Molière and Cervantes it is for the future to declare. All that we can see clearly now is that it is with them that he is to be classed--with Molière and Cervantes, with Chaucer and Fielding, humorists all of them, and all of them manly men.

INTRODUCTION

A number of articles in this volume, even the more important, have not heretofore appeared in print. Mark Twain was nearly always writing--busily trying to keep up with his imagination and enthusiasm: A good many of his literary undertakings remained unfinished or were held for further consideration, in time to be quite forgotten. Few of these papers were unimportant, and a fresh interest attaches to them to-day in the fact that they present some new detail of the author’s devious wanderings, some new point of observation, some hitherto unexpressed angle of his indefatigable thought.

The present collection opens with a chapter from a book that was never written, a book about England, for which the author made some preparation, during his first visit to that country, in 1872. He filled several notebooks with brief comments, among which appears this single complete episode, the description of a visit to Westminster Abbey by night. As an example of what the book might have been we may be sorry that it went no farther.

It was not, however, quite in line with his proposed undertaking, which had been to write a more or less satirical book on English manners and customs. Arriving there, he found that he liked the people and their country too well for that, besides he was so busy entertaining, and being entertained, that he had little time for critical observation. In a letter home he wrote:

I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven’t done much but attend dinners and make speeches. I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make after-dinner speeches here.

England at this time gave Mark Twain an even fuller appreciation than he had thus far received in his own country. To hunt out and hold up to ridicule the foibles of hosts so hospitable would have been quite foreign to his nature. The notes he made had little satire in them, being mainly memoranda of the moment....

“Down the Rhône,” written some twenty years later, is a chapter from another book that failed of completion. Mark Twain, in Europe partly for his health, partly for financial reasons, had agreed to write six letters for the New York Sun, two of which--those from Aix and Marienbad--appear in this volume. Six letters would not make a book of sufficient size and he thought he might supplement them by making a drifting trip down the Rhône, the “river of angels,” as Stevenson called it, and turning it into literature.

The trip itself proved to be one of the most delightful excursions of his life, and his account of it, so far as completed, has interest and charm. But he was alone, with only his boatman (the “Admiral”) and his courier, Joseph Very, for company, a monotony of human material that was not inspiring. He made some attempt to introduce fictitious characters, but presently gave up the idea. As a whole the excursion was too drowsy and comfortable to stir him to continuous effort; neither the notes nor the article, attempted somewhat later, ever came to conclusion.

Three articles in this volume, beginning with “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” were published in the North American Review during 1901-02, at a period when Mark Twain had pretty well made up his mind on most subjects, and especially concerning the interference of one nation with another on matters of religion and government. He had recently returned from a ten years’ sojourn in Europe and his opinion was eagerly sought on all public questions, especially upon those of international aspect. He was no longer regarded merely as a humorist, but as a sort of Solon presiding over a court of final conclusions. A writer in the Evening Mail said of this later period:

Things have reached the point where, if Mark Twain is not at a public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement.

His old friend, W. D. Howells, expressed an amused fear that Mark Twain’s countrymen, who in former years had expected him to be merely a humorist, should now, in the light of his wider acceptance abroad, demand that he be mainly serious.

He was serious enough, and fiercely humorous as well, in his article “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and in those which followed it. It seemed to him that the human race, always a doubtful quantity, was behaving even worse than usual. On New Year’s Eve, 1900-01, he wrote:

A GREETING FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY

I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chau, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocracies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.

Certain missionary activities in China, in particular, invited his attention, and in the first of the Review articles he unburdened himself. A masterpiece of pitiless exposition and sarcasm, its publication stirred up a cyclone. Periodicals more or less orthodox heaped upon him denunciation and vituperation. “To My Missionary Critics,” published in the Review for April, was his answer. He did not fight alone, but was upheld by a vast following of liberal-minded readers, both in and out of the Church. Edward S. Martin wrote him:

How gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us who understands the rarity of plain truth, and who delights to utter it, and has the gift of doing so without cant, and with not too much seriousness.

The principals of the primal human drama, our biblical parents of Eden, play a considerable part in Mark Twain’s imaginative writings. He wrote “Diaries” of both Adam and Eve, that of the latter being among his choicest works. He was generally planning something that would include one or both of the traditional ancestors, and results of this tendency express themselves in the present volume. Satan, likewise, the picturesque angel of rebellion and defeat, the Satan of Paradise Lost, made a strong appeal and in no less than three of the articles which follow the prince of error variously appears. For the most part these inventions offer an aspect of humor; but again the figure of the outcast angel is presented to us in an attitude of sorrowful kinship with the great human tragedy.

Albert Bigelow Paine

EUROPE AND ELSEWHERE

A MEMORABLE MIDNIGHT EXPERIENCE
(1872)

“Come along--and hurry. Few people have got originality enough to think of the expedition I have been planning, and still fewer could carry it out, maybe, even if they did think of it. Hurry, now. Cab at the door.”

It was past eleven o’clock and I was just going to bed. But this friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was not a doubt in my mind that his “expedition” had merit in it. I put on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.

“Where is it? Where are we going?”

“Don’t worry. You’ll see.”

He was not inclined to talk. So I thought this must be a weighty matter. My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully under the surface. I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers, as we thundered down the long streets, but it was of no use--I am always lost in London, day or night. It was very chilly--almost bleak. People leaned against the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter. The crowds grew thinner and thinner and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away. The sky was overcast and threatening. We drove on, and still on, till I wondered if we were ever going to stop. At last we passed by a spacious bridge and a vast building with a lighted clock tower, and presently entered a gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice. Then we alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited. In a little while footsteps were heard and a man emerged from the darkness and we dropped into his wake without saying anything. He led us under an archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a tall iron gate, which he locked behind us. We followed him down this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than by anything we could very distinctly see. At the end of it we came to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a little bull’s-eye lantern. Then he unlocked the gate--and I wished he had oiled it first, it grated so dismally. The gate swung open and we stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared cavern carved out of the solid darkness. The conductor and my friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise. For the moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the silence seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom. I looked my inquiry!

“It is the tomb of the great dead of England--Westminster Abbey.”

(One cannot express a start--in words.) Down among the columns--ever so far away, it seemed--a light revealed itself like a star, and a voice came echoing through the spacious emptiness:

“Who goes there!”

“Wright!”

The star disappeared and the footsteps that accompanied it clanked out of hearing in the distance. Mr. Wright held up his lantern and the vague vastness took something of form to itself--the stately columns developed stronger outlines, and a dim pallor here and there marked the places of lofty windows. We were among the tombs; and on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting, standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness--reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning, some warning us away. Effigies, they were--statues over the graves; but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows. Now a little half-grown black-and-white cat squeezed herself through the bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by the time or the place--unimpressed by the marble pomp that sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn of history more than twelve hundred years ago. And she followed us about and never left us while we pursued our work. We wandered hither and thither, uncovered, speaking in low voices, and stepping softly by instinct, for any little noise rang and echoed there in a way to make one shudder. Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon that, and kept up a running commentary that showed that there was nothing about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of interest. He is a man in authority--being superintendent of the works--and his daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the great pile. Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would say:

“Observe the height of the Abbey--one hundred and three feet to the base of the roof--I measured it myself the other day. Notice the base of this column--old, very old--hundreds and hundreds of years; and how well they knew how to build in those old days. Notice it--every stone is laid horizontally--that is to say, just as nature laid it originally in the quarry--not set up edgewise; in our day some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and flake. Architects cannot teach nature anything. Let me remove this matting--it is put there to preserve the pavement; now, there is a bit of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before time and sacrilegious idlers marred it. Now there, in the border, was an inscription once; see, follow the circle--you can trace it by the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an A, and there is an O, and yonder another A--all beautiful old English capitals--there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left, now. Now move along in this direction, if you please. Yonder is where old King Sebert the Saxon, lies--his monument is the oldest one in the Abbey; Sebert died in 616, and that’s as much as twelve hundred and fifty years ago--think of it!--twelve hundred and fifty years. Now yonder is the last one--Charles Dickens--there on the floor with the brass letters on the slab--and to this day the people come and put flowers on it. Why, along at first they almost had to cart the flowers out, there were so many. Could not leave them there, you know, because it’s where everybody walks--and a body wouldn’t want them trampled on, anyway. All this place about here, now, is the Poet’s Corner. There is Garrick’s monument, and Addison’s, and Thackeray’s bust--and Macaulay lies there. And here, close to Dickens and Garrick, lie Sheridan and Doctor Johnson--and here is old Parr--Thomas Parr--you can read the inscription:

“Tho: Par of Y Covnty of Sallop Borne A :1483. He Lived in Y Reignes of Ten Princes, viz: K. Edw. 4 K. Ed. 5. K. Rich 3. K. Hen. 7. K. Hen. 8. Edw. 6. QVV. Ma. Q. Eliz. K. IA. and K. Charles, Aged 152 Yeares, And Was Buryed Here Novemb. 15. 1635.

“Very old man indeed, and saw a deal of life. (Come off the grave, Kitty, poor thing; she keeps the rats away from the office, and there’s no harm in her--her and her mother.) And here--this is Shakespeare’s statue--leaning on his elbow and pointing with his finger at the lines on the scroll:

“The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve,

And, like the baseless fabric of a vision,

Leave not a wrack behind.

“That stone there covers Campbell the poet. Here are names you know pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the ‘Elegy,’ and Butler who wrote ‘Hudibras,’ and Edmund Spencer, and Ben Jonson--there are three tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got ‘O Rare Ben Jonson’ cut on them--you were standing on one of them just now--he is buried standing up. There used to be a tradition here that explains it. The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present of eighteen inches of English ground, and the king said yes, and asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey. Well, the king wouldn’t go back on his word, and so there he is sure enough--stood up on end. Years ago, in Dean Buckland’s time--before my day--they were digging a grave close to Jonson and they uncovered him and his head fell off. Toward night the clerk of the works hid the head to keep it from being stolen, as the ground was to remain open till next day. Presently the dean’s son came along and he found a head, and hid it away for Jonson’s. And by and by along comes a stranger, and he found a head, too, and walked off with it under his cloak, and a month or so afterward he was heard to boast that he had Ben Jonson’s head. Then there was a deal of correspondence about it, in the Times, and everybody distressed. But Mr. Frank Buckland came out and comforted everybody by telling how he saved the true head, and so the stranger must have got one that wasn’t of any consequence. And then up speaks the clerk of the works and tells how he saved the right head, and so Dean Buckland must have got a wrong one. Well, it was all settled satisfactorily at last, because the clerk of the works proved his head. And then I believe they got that head from the stranger--so now we have three. But it shows you what regiments of people you are walking over--been collecting here for twelve hundred years--in some places, no doubt, the bones are fairly matted together.

“And here are some unfortunates. Under this place lies Anne, queen of Richard III, and daughter of the Kingmaker, the great Earl of Warwick--murdered she was--poisoned by her husband. And here is a slab which you see has once had the figure of a man in armor on it, in brass or copper, let into the stone. You can see the shape of it--but it is all worn away now by people’s feet; the man has been dead five hundred years that lies under it. He was a knight in Richard II’s time. His enemies pressed him close and he fled and took sanctuary here in the Abbey. Generally a man was safe when he took sanctuary in those days, but this man was not. The captain of the Tower and a band of men pursued him and his friends and they had a bloody fight here on this floor; but this poor fellow did not stand much of a chance, and they butchered him right before the altar.”

We wandered over to another part of the Abbey, and came to a place where the pavement was being repaired. Every paving stone has an inscription on it and covers a grave. Mr. Wright continued:

“Now, you are standing on William Pitt’s grave--you can read the name, though it is a good deal worn--and you, sir, are standing on the grave of Charles James Fox. I found a very good place here the other day--nobody suspected it--been curiously overlooked, somehow--but--it is a very nice place indeed, and very comfortable” (holding his bull’s eye to the pavement and searching around). “Ah, here it is--this is the stone--nothing under here--nothing at all--a very nice place indeed--and very comfortable.”

Mr. Wright spoke in a professional way, of course, and after the manner of a man who takes an interest in his business and is gratified at any piece of good luck that fortune favors him with; and yet with[with] all that silence and gloom and solemnity about me, there was something about his idea of a nice, comfortable place that made the cold chills creep up my back. Presently we began to come upon little chamberlike chapels, with solemn figures ranged around the sides, lying apparently asleep, in sumptuous marble beds, with their hands placed together above their breasts--the figures and all their surroundings black with age. Some were dukes and earls, some where kings and queens, some were ancient abbots whose effigies had lain there so many centuries and suffered such disfigurement that their faces were almost as smooth and featureless as the stony pillows their heads reposed upon. At one time while I stood looking at a distant part of the pavement, admiring the delicate tracery which the now flooding moonlight was casting upon it through a lofty window, the party moved on and I lost them. The first step I made in the dark, holding my hands before me, as one does under such circumstances, I touched a cold object, and stopped to feel its shape. I made out a thumb, and then delicate fingers. It was the clasped, appealing hands of one of those reposing images--a lady, a queen. I touched the face--by accident, not design--and shuddered inwardly, if not outwardly; and then something rubbed against my leg, and I shuddered outwardly and inwardly both. It was the cat. The friendly creature meant well, but, as the English say, she gave me “such a turn.” I took her in my arms for company and wandered among the grim sleepers till I caught the glimmer of the lantern again. Presently, in a little chapel, we were looking at the sarcophagus, let into the wall, which contains the bones of the infant princes who were smothered in the Tower. Behind us was the stately monument of Queen Elizabeth, with her effigy dressed in the royal robes, lying as if at rest. When we turned around, the cat, with stupendous simplicity, was coiled up and sound asleep upon the feet of the Great Queen! Truly this was reaching far toward the millennium when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. The murderer of Mary and Essex, the conqueror of the Armada, the imperious ruler of a turbulent empire, become a couch, at last, for a tired kitten! It was the most eloquent sermon upon the vanity of human pride and human grandeur that inspired Westminster preached to us that night.

We would have turned puss out of the Abbey, but for the fact that her small body made light of railed gates and she would have come straight back again. We walked up a flight of half a dozen steps and, stopping upon a pavement laid down in 1260, stood in the core of English history, as it were--upon the holiest ground in the British Empire, if profusion of kingly bones and kingly names of old renown make holy ground. For here in this little space were the ashes, the monuments and gilded effigies, of ten of the most illustrious personages who have worn crowns and borne scepters in this realm. This royal dust was the slow accumulation of hundreds of years. The latest comer entered into his rest four hundred years ago, and since the earliest was sepulchered, more than eight centuries have drifted by. Edward the Confessor, Henry the Fifth, Edward the First, Edward the Third, Richard the Second, Henry the Third, Eleanor, Philippa, Margaret Woodville--it was like bringing the colossal[colossal] myths of history out of the forgotten ages and speaking to them face to face. The gilded effigies were scarcely marred--the faces were comely and majestic, old Edward the First looked the king--one had no impulse to be familiar with him. While we were contemplating the figure of Queen Eleanor lying in state, and calling to mind how like an ordinary human being the great king mourned for her six hundred years ago, we saw the vast illuminated clock face of the Parliament House tower glowering at us through a window of the Abbey and pointing with both hands to midnight. It was a derisive reminder that we were a part of this present sordid, plodding, commonplace time, and not august relics of a bygone age and the comrades of kings--and then the booming of the great bell tolled twelve, and with the last stroke the mocking clock face vanished in sudden darkness and left us with the past and its grandeurs again.

We descended, and entered the nave of the splendid Chapel of Henry VII. Mr. Wright said:

“Here is where the order of knighthood was conferred for centuries; the candidates sat in these seats; these brasses bear their coats of arms; these are their banners overhead, torn and dusty, poor old things, for they have hung there many and many a long year. In the floor you see inscriptions--kings and queens that lie in the vault below. When this vault was opened in our time they found them lying there in beautiful order--all quiet and comfortable--the red velvet on the coffins hardly faded any. And the bodies were sound--I saw them myself. They were embalmed, and looked natural, although they had been there such an awful time. Now in this place here, which is called the chantry, is a curious old group of statuary--the figures are mourning over George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was assassinated by Felton in Charles I’s time. Yonder, Cromwell and his family used to lie. Now we come to the south aisle and this is the grand monument to Mary Queen of Scots, and her effigy--you easily see they get all the portraits from this effigy. Here in the wall of the aisle is a bit of a curiosity pretty roughly carved:

Wm. WEST TOOME

SHOWER

1698

“William West, tomb shower, 1698. That fellow carved his name around in several places about the Abbey.”

This was a sort of revelation to me. I had been wandering through the Abbey, never imagining but that its shows were created only for us--the people of the nineteenth century. But here is a man (become a show himself now, and a curiosity) to whom all these things were sights and wonders a hundred and seventy-five years ago. When curious idlers from the country and from foreign lands came here to look, he showed them old Sebert’s tomb and those of the other old worthies I have been speaking of, and called them ancient and venerable; and he showed them Charles II’s tomb as the newest and latest novelty he had; and he was doubtless present at the funeral. Three hundred years before his time some ancestor of his, perchance, used to point out the ancient marvels, in the immemorial way and then say: “This, gentlemen, is the tomb of his late Majesty Edward the Third--and I wish I could see him alive and hearty again, as I saw him twenty years ago; yonder is the tomb of Sebert the Saxon king--he has been lying there well on to eight hundred years, they say. And three hundred years before this party, Westminster was still a show, and Edward the Confessor’s grave was a novelty of some thirty years’ standing--but old “Sebert” was hoary and ancient still, and people who spoke of Alfred the Great as a comparatively recent man pondered over Sebert’s grave and tried to take in all the tremendous meaning of it when the “toome shower” said, “This man has lain here well nigh five hundred years.” It does seem as if all the generations that have lived and died since the world was created have visited Westminster to stare and wonder--and still found ancient things there. And some day a curiously clad company may arrive here in a balloon ship from some remote corner of the globe, and as they follow the verger among the monuments they may hear him say: “This is the tomb of Victoria the Good Queen; battered and uncouth as it looks, it once was a wonder of magnificence--but twelve hundred years work a deal of damage to these things.”

As we turned toward the door the moonlight was beaming in at the windows, and it gave to the sacred place such an air of restfulness and peace that Westminster was no longer a grisly museum of moldering vanities, but her better and worthier self--the deathless mentor of a great nation, the guide and encourager of right ambitions, the preserver of just fame, and the home and refuge for the nation’s best and bravest when their work is done.

TWO MARK TWAIN EDITORIALS

(Written 1869 and 1870, for the Buffalo Express, of which Mark Twain became editor and part owner)

I
“SALUTATORY”

Being a stranger, it would be immodest and unbecoming in me to suddenly and violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express without a single explanatory word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But this explanatory word shall be as brief as possible. I only wish to assure parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal, that I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not going to introduce any startling reforms, or in any way attempt to make trouble. I am simply going to do my plain, unpretending duty, when I cannot get out of it; I shall work diligently and honestly and faithfully at all times and upon all occasions, when privation and want shall compel me to do it; in writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience; I shall witheringly rebuke all forms of crime and misconduct, except when committed by the party inhabiting my own vest; I shall not make use of slang or vulgarity upon any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon second thought, I will not even use it then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading--though to speak truly I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it. I shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political editor who is already excellent, and only needs to serve a term in the penitentiary in order to be perfect. I shall not write any poetry, unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.

Such is my platform. I do not see any earthly use in it, but custom is law, and custom must be obeyed, no matter how much violence it may do to one’s feelings. And this custom which I am slavishly following now is surely one of the least necessary that ever came into vogue. In private life a man does not go and trumpet his crime before he commits it, but your new editor is such an important personage that he feels called upon to write a “salutatory” at once, and he puts into it all that he knows, and all that he don’t know, and some things he thinks he knows but isn’t certain of. And he parades his list of wonders which he is going to perform; of reforms which he is going to introduce, and public evils which he is going to exterminate; and public blessings which he is going to create; and public nuisances which he is going to abate. He spreads this all out with oppressive solemnity over a column and a half of large print, and feels that the country is saved. His satisfaction over it, something enormous. He then settles down to his miracles and inflicts profound platitudes and impenetrable wisdom upon a helpless public as long as they can stand it, and then they send him off consul to some savage island in the Pacific in the vague hope that the cannibals will like him well enough to eat him. And with an inhumanity which is but a fitting climax to his career of persecution, instead of packing his trunk at once he lingers to inflict upon his benefactors a “valedictory.” If there is anything more uncalled for than a “salutatory,” it is one of those tearful, blubbering, long-winded “valedictories”--wherein a man who has been annoying the public for ten years cannot take leave of them without sitting down to cry a column and a half. Still, it is the custom to write valedictories, and custom should be respected. In my secret heart I admire my predecessor for declining to print a valedictory, though in public I say and shall continue to say sternly, it is custom and he ought to have printed one. People never read them any more than they do the “salutatories,” but nevertheless he ought to have honored the old fossil--he ought to have printed a valedictory. I said as much to him, and he replied:

“I have resigned my place--I have departed this life--I am journalistically dead, at present, ain’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, wouldn’t you consider it disgraceful in a corpse to sit up and comment on the funeral?”

I record it here, and preserve it from oblivion, as the briefest and best “valedictory” that has yet come under my notice.

Mark Twain.

P. S.--I am grateful for the kindly way in which the press of the land have taken notice of my irruption into regular journalistic life, telegraphically or editorially, and am happy in this place to express the feeling.

II
A TRIBUTE TO ANSON BURLINGAME

(February, 1870)

On Wednesday, in St. Petersburg, Mr. Burlingame died after a short illness. It is not easy to comprehend, at an instant’s warning, the exceeding magnitude of the loss which mankind sustains in this death--the loss which all nations and all peoples sustain in it. For he had outgrown the narrow citizenship of a state and become a citizen of the world; and his charity was large enough and his great heart warm enough to feel for all its races and to labor for them. He was a true man, a brave man, an earnest man, a liberal man, a just man, a generous man, in all his ways and by all his instincts a noble man; he was a man of education and culture, a finished conversationalist, a ready, able, and graceful speaker, a man of great brain, a broad and deep and weighty thinker. He was a great man--a very, very great man. He was imperially endowed by nature; he was faithfully befriended by circumstances, and he wrought gallantly always, in whatever station he found himself.

He was a large, handsome man, with such a face as children instinctively trust in, and homeless and friendless creatures appeal to without fear. He was courteous at all times and to all people, and he had the rare and winning faculty of being always interested in whatever a man had to say--a faculty which he possessed simply because nothing was trivial to him which any man or woman or child had at heart. When others said harsh things about even unconscionable and intrusive bores after they had retired from his presence, Mr. Burlingame often said a generous word in their favor, but never an unkind one.

A chivalrous generosity was his most marked characteristic--a large charity, a noble kindliness that could not comprehend narrowness or meanness. It is this that shows out in his fervent abolitionism, manifested at a time when it was neither very creditable nor very safe to hold such a creed; it was this that prompted him to hurl his famous Brooks-and-Sumner speech in the face of an astonished South at a time when all the North was smarting under the sneers and taunts and material aggressions of admired and applauded Southerners. It was this that made him so warmly espouse the cause of Italian liberty--an espousal so pointed and so vigorous as to attract the attention of Austria, which empire afterward declined to receive him when he was appointed Austrian envoy by Mr. Lincoln. It was this trait which prompted him to punish Americans in China when they imposed upon the Chinese. It was this trait which moved him, in framing treaties, to frame them in the broad interest of the world, instead of selfishly seeking to acquire advantages for his own country alone and at the expense of the other party to the treaty, as had always before been the recognized “diplomacy.” It was this trait which was and is the soul of the crowning achievements of his career, the treaties with America and England in behalf of China. In every labor of this man’s life there was present a good and noble motive; and in nothing that he ever did or said was there anything small or base. In real greatness, ability, grandeur of character, and achievement, he stood head and shoulders above all the Americans of to-day, save one or two.

Without any noise, or any show, or any flourish, Mr. Burlingame did a score of things of shining mark during his official residence in China. They were hardly heard of away here in America. When he first went to China, he found that with all their kingly powers, American envoys were still not of much consequence in the eyes of their countrymen of either civil or official position. But he was a man who was always “posted.” He knew all about the state of things he would find in China before he sailed from America. And so he took care to demand and receive additional powers before he turned his back upon Washington. When the customary consular irregularities placidly continued and he notified those officials that such irregularities must instantly cease, and they inquired with insolent flippancy what the consequence might be in case they did not cease, he answered blandly that he would dismiss them, from the highest to the lowest! (He had quietly come armed with absolute authority over their official lives.) The consular irregularities ceased. A far healthier condition of American commercial interests ensued there.

To punish a foreigner in China was an unheard-of thing. There was no way of accomplishing it. Each Embassy had its own private district or grounds, forced from the imperial government, and into that sacred district Chinese law officers could not intrude. All foreigners guilty of offenses against Chinamen were tried by their own countrymen, in these holy places, and as no Chinese testimony was admitted, the culprit almost always went free. One of the very first things Mr. Burlingame did was to make a Chinaman’s oath as good as a foreigner’s; and in his ministerial court, through Chinese and American testimony combined, he very shortly convicted a noted American ruffian of murdering a Chinaman. And now a community accustomed to light sentences were naturally startled when, under Mr. Burlingame’s hand, and bearing the broad seal of the American Embassy, came an order to take him out and hang him!

Mr. Burlingame broke up the “extra-territorial” privileges (as they were called), as far as our country was concerned, and made justice as free to all and as untrammeled in the metes and bounds of its jurisdiction, in China, as ever it was in any land.

Mr. Burlingame was the leading spirit in the co-operative policy. He got the Imperial College established. He procured permission for an American to open the coal mines of China. Through his efforts China was the first country to close her ports against the war vessels of the Southern Confederacy; and Prince Kung’s order, in this matter, was singularly energetic, comprehensive, and in earnest. The ports were closed then, and never opened to a Southern warship afterward.

Mr. Burlingame “construed” the treaties existing between China and the other nations. For many years the ablest diplomatists had vainly tried to come to a satisfactory understanding of certain obscure clauses of these treaties, and more than once powder had been burned in consequences of failure to come to such understandings. But the clear and comprehensive intellect of the American envoy reduced the wordy tangle of diplomatic phrases to a plain and honest handful of paragraphs, and these were unanimously and thankfully accepted by the other foreign envoys, and officially declared by them to be a thorough and satisfactory elucidation of all the uncertain clauses in the treaties.

Mr. Burlingame did a mighty work, and made official intercourse with China lucid, simple, and systematic, thenceforth for all time, when he persuaded that government to adopt and accept the code of international law by which the civilized nations of the earth are guided and controlled.

It is not possible to specify all the acts by which Mr. Burlingame made himself largely useful to the world during his official residence in China. At least it would not be possible to do it without making this sketch too lengthy and pretentious for a newspaper article.

Mr. Burlingame’s short history--for he was only forty-seven--reads like a fairy tale. Its successes, its surprises, its happy situations, occur all along, and each new episode is always an improvement upon the one which went before it.

He begins life an assistant in a surveying party away out on the Western frontier; then enters a branch of a Western college; then passes through Harvard with the honors; becomes a Boston lawyer and looks back complacently from his high perch upon the old days when he was a surveyor nobody in the woods; becomes a state senator, and makes laws; still advancing, goes to the Constitutional Convention and makes regulations wherewith to rule the makers of laws; enters Congress and smiles back upon the Legislature and the Boston lawyer, and from these smiles still back upon the country surveyor, recognizes that he is known to fame in Massachusetts; challenges Brooks and is known to the nation; next, with a long stride upward, he is clothed with ministerial dignity and journeys to the under side of the world to represent the youngest in the court of the oldest of the nations; and finally, after years go by, we see him moving serenely among the crowned heads of the Old World, a magnate with secretaries and undersecretaries about him, a retinue of quaint, outlandish Orientals in his wake, and a long following of servants--and the world is aware that his salary is unbelievably enormous, not to say imperial, and likewise knows that he is invested with power to make treaties with all the chief nations of the earth, and that he bears the stately title of Ambassador, and in his person represents the mysterious and awful grandeur of that vague colossus, the Emperor of China, his mighty empire and his four hundred millions of subjects! Down what a dreamy vista his backward glance must stretch, now, to reach the insignificant surveyor in the Western woods!

He was a good man, and a very, very great man. America lost a son, and all the world a servant, when he died.

THE TEMPERANCE CRUSADE AND
WOMAN’S RIGHTS
(1873)

The women’s crusade against the rum sellers continues. It began in an Ohio village early in the new year, and has now extended itself eastwardly to the Atlantic seaboard, 600 miles, and westwardly (at a bound, without stopping by the way,) to San Francisco, about 2,500 miles. It has also scattered itself along down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers southwardly some ten or twelve hundred miles. Indeed, it promises to sweep, eventually, the whole United States, with the exception of the little cluster of commonwealths which we call New England. Puritan New England is sedate, reflective, conservative, and very hard to inflame.

The method of the crusaders is singular. They contemn the use of force in the breaking up of the whisky traffic. They only assemble before a drinking shop, or within it, and sing hymns and pray, hour after hour--and day after day, if necessary--until the publican’s business is broken up and he surrenders. This is not force, at least they do not consider it so. After the surrender the crusaders march back to headquarters and proclaim the victory, and ascribe it to the powers above. They rejoice together awhile, and then go forth again in their strength and conquer another whisky shop with their prayers and hymns and their staying capacity (pardon the rudeness), and spread that victory upon the battle flag of the powers above. In this generous way the crusaders have parted with the credit of not less than three thousand splendid triumphs, which some carping people say they gained their own selves, without assistance from any quarter. If I am one of these, I am the humblest. If I seem to doubt that prayer is the agent that conquers these rum sellers, I do it honestly, and not in a flippant spirit. If the crusaders were to stay at home and pray for the rum seller and for his adoption of a better way of life, or if the crusaders even assembled together in a church and offered up such a prayer with a united voice, and it accomplished a victory, I would then feel that it was the praying that moved Heaven to do the miracle; for I believe that if the prayer is the agent that brings about the desired result, it cannot be necessary to pray the prayer in any particular place in order to get the ear, or move the grace, of the Deity. When the crusaders go and invest a whisky shop and fall to praying, one suspects that they are praying rather less to the Deity than at the rum man. So I cannot help feeling (after carefully reading the details of the rum sieges) that as much as nine tenths of the credit of each of the 3,000 victories achieved thus far belongs of right to the crusaders themselves, and it grieves me to see them give it away with such spendthrift generosity.

I will not afflict you with statistics, but I desire to say just a word or two about the character of this crusade. The crusaders are young girls and women--not the inferior sort, but the very best in the village communities. The telegraph keeps the newspapers supplied with the progress of the war, and thus the praying infection spreads from town to town, day after day, week after week. When it attacks a community it seems to seize upon almost everybody in it at once. There is a meeting in a church, speeches are made, resolutions are passed, a purse for expenses is made up, a “praying band” is appointed; if it be a large town, half a dozen praying bands, each numbering as many as a hundred women, are appointed, and the working district of each band marked out. Then comes a grand assault in force, all along the line. Every stronghold of rum is invested; first one and then another champion ranges up before the proprietor and offers up a special petition for him; he has to stand meekly there behind his bar, under the eyes of a great concourse of ladies who are better than he is and are aware of it, and hear all the secret iniquities of his business divulged to the angels above, accompanied by the sharp sting of wishes for his regeneration, which imply an amount of need for it which is in the last degree uncomfortable to him. If he holds out bravely, the crusaders hold out more bravely still--or at least more persistently; though I doubt if the grandeur of the performance would not be considerably heightened if one solitary crusader were to try praying at a hundred rum sellers in a body for a while, and see how it felt to have everybody against her instead of for her. If the man holds out the crusaders camp before his place and keep up the siege till they wear him out. In one case they besieged a rum shop two whole weeks. They built a shed before it and kept up the praying all night and all day long every day of the fortnight, and this in the bitterest winter weather, too. They conquered.

You may ask if such an investment and such interference with a man’s business (in cases where he is “protected” by a license) is lawful? By no means. But the whole community being with the crusaders, the authorities have usually been overawed and afraid to execute the laws, the authorities being, in too many cases, mere little politicians, and more given to looking to chances of re-election than fearlessly discharging their duty according to the terms of their official oaths.

Would you consider the conduct of these crusaders justifiable? I do--thoroughly justifiable. They find themselves voiceless in the making of laws and the election of officers to execute them. Born with brains, born in the country, educated, having large interests at stake, they find their tongues tied and their hands fettered, while every ignorant whisky-drinking foreign-born savage in the land may hold office, help to make the laws, degrade the dignity of the former and break the latter at his own sweet will. They see their fathers, husbands, and brothers sit inanely at home and allow the scum of the country to assemble at the “primaries,” name the candidates for office from their own vile ranks, and, unrebuked, elect them. They live in the midst of a country where there is no end to the laws and no beginning to the execution of them. And when the laws intended to protect their sons from destruction by intemperance lie torpid and without sign of life year after year, they recognize that here is a matter which interests them personally--a matter which comes straight home to them. And since they are allowed to lift no legal voice against the outrageous state of things they suffer under in this regard, I think it is no wonder that their patience has broken down at last, and they have contrived to persuade themselves that they are justifiable in breaking the law of trespass when the laws that should make the trespass needless are allowed by the voters to lie dead and inoperative.

I cannot help glorying in the pluck of these women, sad as it is to see them displaying themselves in these unwomanly ways; sad as it is to see them carrying their grace and their purity into places which should never know their presence; and sadder still as it is to see them trying to save a set of men who, it seems to me, there can be no reasonable object in saving. It does not become us to scoff at the crusaders, remembering what it is they have borne all these years, but it does become us to admire their heroism--a heroism that boldly faces jeers, curses, ribald language, obloquy of every kind and degree--in a word, every manner of thing that pure-hearted, pure-minded women such as these are naturally dread and shrink from, and remains steadfast through it all, undismayed, patient, hopeful, giving no quarter, asking none, determined to conquer and succeeding. It is the same old superb spirit that animated that other devoted, magnificent, mistaken crusade of six hundred years ago. The sons of such women as these must surely be worth saving from the destroying power of rum.

The present crusade will doubtless do but little work against intemperance that will be really permanent, but it will do what is as much, or even more, to the purpose, I think. I think it will suggest to more than one man that if women could vote they would vote on the side of morality, even if they did vote and speak rather frantically and furiously; and it will also suggest that when the women once made up their minds that it was not good to leave the all-powerful “primaries” in the hands of loafers, thieves, and pernicious little politicians, they would not sit indolently at home as their husbands and brothers do now, but would hoist their praying banners, take the field in force, pray the assembled political scum back to the holes and slums where they belong, and set up some candidates fit for decent human beings to vote for.

I dearly want the women to be raised to the political altitude of the negro, the imported savage, and the pardoned thief, and allowed to vote. It is our last chance, I think. The women will be voting before long, and then if a B. F. Butler can still continue to lord it in Congress; if the highest offices in the land can still continue to be occupied by perjurers and robbers; if another Congress (like the forty-second) consisting of 15 honest men and 296 of the other kind can once more be created, it will at last be time, I fear, to give over trying to save the country by human means, and appeal to Providence. Both the great parties have failed. I wish we might have a woman’s party now, and see how that would work. I feel persuaded that in extending the suffrage to women this country could lose absolutely nothing and might gain a great deal. For thirty centuries history has been iterating and reiterating that in a moral fight woman is simply dauntless, and we all know, even with our eyes shut upon Congress and our voters, that from the day that Adam ate of the apple and told on Eve down to the present day, man, in a moral fight, has pretty uniformly shown himself to be an arrant coward.

I will mention casually that while I cannot bring myself to find fault with the women whom we call the crusaders, since I feel that they, being politically fettered, have the natural right of the oppressed to rebel, I have a very different opinion about the clergymen who have in a multitude of instances attached themselves to the movement, and by voice and act have countenanced and upheld the women in unlawfully trespassing upon whisky mills and interrupting the rum sellers’ business. It seems to me that it would better become clergymen to teach their flocks to respect the laws of the land, and urge them to refrain from breaking them. But it is not a new thing for a thoroughly good and well-meaning preacher’s soft heart to run away with his soft head.

O’SHAH

(A series of news letters describing a visit to England by the

Shah of Persia)

I
THE ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND

London, June 18, 1873.

“Would you like to go over to Belgium and help bring the Shah to England?”

I said I was willing.

“Very well, then; here is an order from the Admiralty which will admit you on board Her Majesty’s ship Lively, now lying at Ostend, and you can return in her day after to-morrow.”

That was all. That was the end of it. Without stopping to think, I had in a manner taken upon myself to bring the Shah of Persia to England. I could not otherwise regard the conversation I had just held with the London representative of the New York Herald. The amount of discomfort I endured for the next two or three hours cannot be set down in words. I could not eat, sleep, talk, smoke with any satisfaction. The more I thought the thing over the more oppressed I felt. What was the Shah to me, that I should go to all this worry and trouble on his account? Where was there the least occasion for taking upon myself such a responsibility? If I got him over all right, well. But if I lost him? if he died on my hands? if he got drowned? It was depressing, any way I looked at it. In the end I said to myself, “If I get this Shah over here safe and sound I never will take charge of another one.” And yet, at the same time I kept thinking: “This country has treated me well, stranger as I am, and this foreigner is the country’s guest--that is enough, I will help him out; I will fetch him over; I will land him in London, and say to the British people, ‘Here is your Shah; give me a receipt.’”

I felt easy in my mind now, and was about to go to bed, but something occurred to me. I took a cab and drove downtown and routed out that Herald representative.

“Where is Belgium?” said I.

“Where is Belgium? I never heard such a question!”

“That doesn’t make any difference to me. If I have got to fetch this Shah I don’t wish to go to the wrong place. Where is Belgium? Is it a shilling fare in a cab?”

He explained that it was in foreign parts--the first place I have heard of lately which a body could not go to in a cab for a shilling.

I said I could not go alone, because I could not speak foreign languages well, could not get up in time for the early train without help, and could not find my way. I said it was enough to have the Shah on my hands; I did not wish to have everything piled on me. Mr. Blank was then ordered to go with me. I do like to have somebody along to talk to when I go abroad.

When I got home I sat down and thought the thing all over. I wanted to go into this enterprise understandingly. What was the main thing? That was the question. A little reflection informed me. For two weeks the London papers had sung just one continual song to just one continual tune, and the idea of it all was “how to impress the Shah.” These papers had told all about the St. Petersburg splendors, and had said at the end that splendors would no longer answer; that England could not outdo Russia in that respect; therefore some other way of impressing the Shah must be contrived. And these papers had also told all about the Shahstic reception in Prussia and its attendant military pageantry. England could not improve on that sort of thing--she could not impress the Shah with soldiers; something else must be tried. And so on. Column after column, page after page of agony about how to “impress the Shah.” At last they had hit upon a happy idea--a grand naval exhibition. That was it! A man brought up in Oriental seclusion and simplicity, a man who had never seen anything but camels and such things, could not help being surprised and delighted with the strange novelty of ships. The distress was at an end. England heaved a great sigh of relief; she knew at last how to impress the Shah.

My course was very plain, now, after that bit of reflection. All I had to do was to go over to Belgium and impress the Shah. I failed to form any definite plan as to the process, but I made up my mind to manage it somehow. I said to myself, “I will impress this Shah or there shall be a funeral that will be worth contemplating.”

I went to bed then, but did not sleep a great deal, for the responsibilities were weighing pretty heavily upon me. At six o’clock in the morning Mr. Blank came and turned me out. I was surprised at this, and not gratified, for I detest early rising. I never like to say severe things, but I was a good deal tried this time. I said I did not mind getting up moderately early, but I hated to be called day before yesterday. However, as I was acting in a national capacity and for a country that I liked, I stopped grumbling and we set out. A grand naval review is a good thing to impress a Shah with, but if he would try getting up at six o’clock in the morning--but no matter; we started.

We took the Dover train and went whistling along over the housetops at the rate of fifty miles an hour, and just as smoothly and pleasantly, too, as if we were in a sleigh. One never can have anything but a very vague idea of what speed is until he travels over an English railway. Our “lightning” expresses are sleepy and indolent by comparison. We looked into the back windows of the endless ranks of houses abreast and below us, and saw many a homelike little family of early birds sitting at their breakfasts. New views and new aspects of London were about me; the mighty city seemed to spread farther and wider in the clear morning air than it had ever done before. There is something awe-inspiring about the mere look of the figures that express the population of London when one comes to set them down in a good large hand--4,000,000! It takes a body’s breath away, almost.

We presently left the city behind. We had started drowsy, but we did not stay so. How could we, with the brilliant sunshine pouring down, the balmy wind blowing through the open windows, and the Garden of Eden spread all abroad? We swept along through rolling expanses of growing grain--not a stone or a stump to mar their comeliness, not an unsightly fence or an ill-kept hedge; through broad meadows covered with fresh green grass as clean swept as if a broom had been at work there--little brooks wandering up and down them, noble trees here and there, cows in the shade, groves in the distance and church spires projecting out of them; and there were the quaintest old-fashioned houses set in the midst of smooth lawns or partly hiding themselves among fine old forest trees; and there was one steep-roofed ancient cottage whose walls all around, and whose roof, and whose chimneys, were clothed in a shining mail of ivy leaves!--so thoroughly, indeed, that only one little patch of roof was visible to prove that the house was not a mere house of leaves, with glass windows in it. Imagine those dainty little homes surrounded by flowering shrubs and bright green grass and all sorts of old trees--and then go on and try to imagine something more bewitching.

By and by we passed Rochester, and, sure enough, right there, on the highest ground in the town and rising imposingly up from among clustering roofs, was the gray old castle--roofless, ruined, ragged, the sky beyond showing clear and blue through the glassless windows, the walls partly clad with ivy--a time-scarred, weather-beaten old pile, but ever so picturesque and ever so majestic, too. There it was, a whole book of English history. I had read of Rochester Castle a thousand times, but I had never really believed there was any such building before.

Presently we reached the sea and came to a stand far out on a pier; and here was Dover and more history. The chalk cliffs of England towered up from the shore and the French coast was visible. On the tallest hill sat Dover Castle, stately and spacious and superb, looking just as it has always looked any time these ten or fifteen thousand years--I do not know its exact age, and it does not matter, anyway.

We stepped aboard the little packet and steamed away. The sea was perfectly smooth, and painfully brilliant in the sunshine. There were no curiosities in the vessel except the passengers and a placard in French setting forth the transportation fares for various kinds of people. The lithographer probably considered that placard a triumph. It was printed in green, blue, red, black, and yellow; no individual line in one color, even the individual letters were separately colored. For instance, the first letter of a word would be blue, the next red, the next green, and so on. The placard looked as if it had the smallpox or something. I inquired the artist’s name and place of business, intending to hunt him up and kill him when I had time; but no one could tell me. In the list of prices first-class passengers were set down at fifteen shillings and four pence, and dead bodies at one pound ten shillings and eight pence--just double price! That is Belgian morals, I suppose. I never say a harsh thing unless I am greatly stirred; but in my opinion the man who would take advantage of a dead person would do almost any odious thing. I publish this scandalous discrimination against the most helpless class among us in order that people intending to die abroad may come back by some other line.

We skimmed over to Ostend in four hours and went ashore. The first gentleman we saw happened to be the flag lieutenant of the fleet, and he told me where the Lively lay, and said she would sail about six in the morning. Heavens and earth. He said he would give my letter to the proper authority, and so we thanked him and bore away for the hotel. Bore away is good sailor phraseology, and I have been at sea portions of two days now. I easily pick up a foreign language.

Ostend is a curious, comfortable-looking, massively built town, where the people speak both the French and the Flemish with exceeding fluency, and yet I could not understand them in either tongue. But I will write the rest about Ostend in to-morrow’s letter.

We idled about this curious Ostend the remainder of the afternoon and far into the long-lived twilight, apparently to amuse ourselves, but secretly I had a deeper motive. I wanted to see if there was anything here that might “impress the Shah.” In the end I was reassured and content. If Ostend could impress him, England could amaze the head clear off his shoulders and have marvels left that not even the trunk could be indifferent to.

These citizens of Flanders--Flounders, I think they call them, though I feel sure I have eaten a creature of that name or seen it in an aquarium or a menagerie, or in a picture or somewhere--are a thrifty, industrious race, and are as commercially wise and farsighted as they were in Edward the Third’s time, and as enduring and patient under adversity as they were in Charles the Bold’s. They are prolific in the matter of children; in some of the narrow streets every house seemed to have had a freshet of children, which had burst through and overflowed into the roadway. One could hardly get along for the pack of juveniles, and they were all soiled and all healthy. They all wore wooden shoes, which clattered noisily on the stone pavements. All the women were hard at work; there were no idlers about the houses. The men were away at labor, no doubt. In nearly every door women sat at needlework or something of that marketable nature--they were knitting principally. Many groups of women sat in the street, in the shade of walls, making point lace. The lace maker holds a sort of pillow on her knees with a strip of cardboard fastened on it, on which the lace pattern has been punctured. She sticks bunches of pins in the punctures and about them weaves her web of threads. The numberless threads diverge from the bunch of pins like the spokes of a wheel, and the spools from which the threads are being unwound form the outer circle of the wheel. The woman throws these spools about her with flying fingers, in and out, over and under one another, and so fast that you can hardly follow the evolutions with your eyes. In the chaos and confusion of skipping spools you wonder how she can possibly pick up the right one every time, and especially how she can go on gossiping with her friends all the time and yet never seem to miss a stitch. The laces these ingenious Flounders were making were very dainty and delicate in texture and very beautiful in design.

Most of the shops in Ostend seemed devoted to the sale of sea shells. All sorts of figures of men and women were made of shells; one sort was composed of grotesque and ingenious combinations of lobster claws in the human form. And they had other figures made of stuffed frogs--some fencing, some barbering each other, and some were not to be described at all without indecent language. It must require a barbarian nature to be able to find humor in such nauseating horrors as these last. These things were exposed in the public windows where young girls and little children could see them, and in the shops sat the usual hairy-lipped young woman waiting to sell them.

There was a contrivance attached to the better class of houses which I had heard of before, but never seen. It was an arrangement of mirrors outside the window, so contrived that the people within could see who was coming either up or down the street--see all that might be going on, in fact--without opening the window or twisting themselves into uncomfortable positions in order to look.

A capital thing to watch for unwelcome (or welcome) visitors with, or to observe pageants in cold or rainy weather. People in second and third stories had, also, another mirror which showed who was passing underneath.

The dining room at our hotel was very spacious and rather gorgeous. One end of it was composed almost entirely of a single pane of plate glass, some two inches thick--for this is the plate-glass manufacturing region, you remember. It was very clear and fine. If one were to enter the place in such a way as not to catch the sheen of the glass, he would suppose that the end of the house was wide open to the sun and the storms. A strange boyhood instinct came strongly upon me, and I could not really enjoy my dinner, I wanted to break that glass so badly. I have no doubt that every man feels so, and I know that such a glass must be simply torture to a boy.

This dining room’s walls were almost completely covered with large oil paintings in frames.

It was an excellent hotel; the utmost care was taken that everything should go right. I went to bed at ten and was called at eleven to “take the early train.” I said I was not the one, so the servant stirred up the next door and he was not the one; then the next door and the next--no success--and so on till the reverberations of the knocking were lost in the distance down the hall, and I fell asleep again. They called me at twelve to take another early train, but I said I was not the one again, and asked as a favor that they would be particular to call the rest next time, but never mind me. However, they could not understand my English; they only said something in reply to signify that, and then went on banging up the boarders, none of whom desired to take the early train.

When they called me at one, it made my rest seem very broken, and I said if they would skip me at two I would call myself--not really intending to do it, but hoping to beguile the porter and deceive him. He probably suspected that and was afraid to trust me, because when he made his rounds at that hour he did not take any chances on me, but routed me out along with the others. I got some more sleep after that, but when the porter called me at three I felt depressed and jaded and greatly discouraged. So I gave it up and dressed myself. The porter got me a cup of coffee and kept me awake while I drank it. He was a good, well-meaning sort of Flounder, but really a drawback to the hotel, I should think.

Poor Mr. Blank came in then, looking worn and old. He had been called for all the different trains, too, just as I had. He said it was a good enough hotel, but they took too much pains. While we sat there talking we fell asleep and were called again at four. Then we went out and dozed about town till six, and then drifted aboard the Lively.

She was trim and bright, and clean and smart; she was as handsome as a picture. The sailors were in brand-new man-of-war costume, and plenty of officers were about the decks in the state uniform of the service--cocked hats, huge epaulettes, claw-hammer coats lined with white silk--hats and coats and trousers all splendid with gold lace. I judged that these were all admirals, and so got afraid and went ashore again. Our vessel was to carry the Shah’s brother, also the Grand Vizier, several Persian princes, who were uncles to the Shah, and other dignitaries of more or less consequence. A vessel alongside was to carry the luggage, and a vessel just ahead (the Vigilant) was to carry nobody but just the Shah and certain Ministers of State and servants and the Queen’s special ambassador, Sir Henry Rawlinson, who is a Persian scholar and talks to the Shah in his own tongue.

I was very glad, for several reasons, to find that I was not to go in the same ship with the Shah. First, with him not immediately under my eye I would feel less responsibility for him; and, secondly, as I was anxious to impress him, I wanted to practice on his brother first.

THE SHAH’S QUARTERS

On the afterdeck of the Vigilant--very handsome ship--a temporary cabin had been constructed for the sole and special use of the Shah, temporary but charmingly substantial and graceful and pretty. It was about thirty feet long and twelve wide, beautifully gilded, decorated and painted within and without. Among its colors was a shade of light green, which reminds me of an anecdote about the Persian party, which I will speak of in to-morrow’s letter.

It was getting along toward the time for the Shah to arrive from Brussels, so I ranged up alongside my own ship. I do not know when I ever felt so ill at ease and undecided. It was a sealed letter which I had brought from the Admiralty, and I could not guess what the purport of it might be. I supposed I was intended to command the ship--that is, I had supposed it at first, but, after seeing all those splendid officers, I had discarded that idea. I cogitated a good deal, but to no purpose. Presently a regiment of Belgian troops arrived and formed in line along the pier. Then a number of people began to spread down carpets for fifty yards along the pier, by the railway track, and other carpets were laid from these to the ships. The gangway leading on board my ship was now carpeted and its railings were draped with bright-colored signal flags. It began to look as if I was expected; so I walked on board. A sailor immediately ran and stopped me, and made another sailor bring a mop for me to wipe my feet on, lest I might soil the deck, which was wonderfully clean and nice. Evidently I was not the person expected, after all. I pointed to the group of officers and asked the sailor what the naval law would do to a man if he were to go and speak to some of those admirals--for there was an awful air of etiquette and punctilio about the premises; but just then one of those officers came forward and said that if his instinct was correct an Admiralty order had been received giving me a passage in the ship; and he also said that he was the first lieutenant, and that I was very welcome and he would take pains to make me feel at home, and furthermore there was champagne and soda waiting down below; and furthermore still, all the London correspondents, to the number of six or seven, would arrive from Brussels with the Shah, and would go in our ship, and if our passage were not a lively one, and a jolly and enjoyable one, it would be a very strange thing indeed. I could have jumped for joy if I had not been afraid of breaking some rule of naval etiquette and getting hanged for it.

Now the train was signaled, and everybody got ready for the great event. The Belgian regiment straightened itself up, and some two hundred Flounders arrived and took conspicuous position on a little mound. I was a little afraid that this would impress the Shah; but I was soon occupied with other interests. The train of thirteen cars came tearing in, and stopped abreast the ships. Music and guns began an uproar. Odd-looking Persian faces and felt hats (brimless stovepipes) appeared at the car windows.

Some gorgeous English officials fled down the carpet from the Vigilant. They stopped at a long car with the royal arms upon it, uncovered their heads, and unlocked the car door. Then the Shah stood up in it and gave us a good view. He was a handsome, strong-featured man, with a rather European fairness of complexion; had a mustache, wore spectacles, seemed of a good height and graceful build and carriage, and looked about forty or a shade less. He was very simply dressed--brimless stovepipe and close-buttoned dark-green military suit, without ornament. No, not wholly without ornament, for he had a band two inches wide worn over his shoulder and down across his breast, scarf fashion, which band was one solid glory of fine diamonds.

A Persian official appeared in the Shah’s rear and enveloped him in an ample quilt--or cloak, if you please--which was lined with fur. The outside of it was of a whitish color and elaborately needle-worked in Persian patterns like an India shawl. The Shah stepped out and the official procession formed about him and marched him down the carpet and on board the Vigilant to slow music. Not a Flounder raised a cheer. All the small fry swarmed out of the train now.

The Shah walked back alongside his fine cabin, looking at the assemblage of silent, solemn Flounders; the correspondent of the London Telegraph was hurrying along the pier and took off his hat and bowed to the “King of Kings,” and the King of Kings gave a polite military salute in return. This was the commencement of the excitement. The success of the breathless Telegraph man made all the other London correspondents mad, every man of whom flourished his stovepipe recklessly and cheered lustily, some of the more enthusiastic varying the exercise by lowering their heads and elevating their coat tails. Seeing all this, and feeling that if I was to “impress the Shah” at all, now was my time, I ventured a little squeaky yell, quite distinct from the other shouts, but just as hearty. His Shahship heard and saw and saluted me in a manner that was, I considered, an acknowledgment of my superior importance. I do not know that I ever felt so ostentatious and absurd before. All the correspondents came aboard, and then the Persian baggage came also, and was carried across to the ship alongside of ours. When she could hold no more we took somewhere about a hundred trunks and boxes on board our vessel. Two boxes fell into the water, and several sailors jumped in and saved one, but the other was lost. However, it probably contained nothing but a few hundred pounds of diamonds and things.

At last we got under way and steamed out through a long slip, the piers on either side being crowded with Flounders; but never a cheer. A battery of three guns on the starboard pier boomed a royal salute, and we swept out to sea, the Vigilant in the lead, we right in her wake, and the baggage ship in ours. Within fifteen minutes everybody was well acquainted; a general jollification set in, and I was thoroughly glad I had come over to fetch the Shah.

II
MARK TWAIN EXECUTES HIS CONTRACT AND DELIVERS
THE SHAH IN LONDON

London, June 19, 1873.

SOME PERSIAN FINERY

Leaving Ostend, we went out to sea under a clear sky and upon smooth water--so smooth, indeed, that its surface was scarcely rippled. I say the sky was clear, and so it was, clear and sunny; but a rich haze lay upon the water in the distance--a soft, mellow mist, through which a scattering sail or two loomed vaguely. One may call such a morning perfect.

The corps of correspondents were well jaded with their railway journey, but after champagne and soda downstairs with the officers, everybody came up refreshed and cheery and exceedingly well acquainted all around. The Persian grandees had meantime taken up a position in a glass house on the afterdeck, and were sipping coffee in a grave, Oriental way. They all had much lighter complexions and a more European cast of features than I was prepared for, and several of them were exceedingly handsome, fine-looking men.

They all sat in a circle[circle] on a sofa (the deckhouse being circular), and they made a right gaudy spectacle. Their breasts were completely crusted with gold bullion embroidery of a pattern resembling frayed and interlacing ferns, and they had large jeweled ornaments on their breasts also. The Grand Vizier came out to have a look around. In addition to the sumptuous gold fernery on his breast he wore a jeweled star as large as the palm of my hand, and about his neck hung the Shah’s miniature, reposing in a bed of diamonds, that gleamed and flashed in a wonderful way when touched by the sunlight. It was said that to receive the Shah’s portrait from the Shah was the highest compliment that could be conferred upon a Persian subject. I did not care so much about the diamonds, but I would have liked to have the portrait very much. The Grand Vizier’s sword hilt and the whole back of the sheath from end to end were composed of a neat and simple combination of some twelve or fifteen thousand emeralds and diamonds.

“IMPRESSING” A PERSIAN GENERAL

Several of the Persians talked French and English. One of them, who was said to be a general, came up on the bridge where some of us were standing, pointed to a sailor, and asked me if I could tell him what that sailor was doing?

I said he was communicating with the other ships by means of the optical telegraph--that by using the three sticks the whole alphabet could be expressed. I showed him how A, B and C were made, and so forth. Good! This Persian was “impressed”! He showed it by his eyes, by his gestures, by his manifest surprise and delight. I said to myself, if the Shah were only here now, the grand desire of Great Britain could be accomplished. The general immediately called the other grandees and told them about this telegraphic wonder. Then he said:

“Now does everyone on board acquire this knowledge?”

“No, only the officers.”

“And this sailor?”

“He is only the signalman. Two or three sailors on board are detailed for this service, and by order and direction of the officers they communicate with the other ships.”

“Very good! very fine! Very great indeed!”

These men were unquestionably impressed. I got the sailor to bring the signal book, and the matter was fully explained, to their high astonishment; also the flag signals, and likewise the lamp signals for night telegraphing. Of course, the idea came into my head, in the first place, to ask one of the officers to conduct this bit of instruction, but I at once dismissed it. I judged that this would all go to the Shah, sooner or later. I had come over on purpose to “impress the Shah,” and I was not going to throw away my opportunity. I wished the Queen had been there; I would have been knighted, sure. You see, they knight people here for all sorts of things--knight them, or put them into the peerage and make great personages of them. Now, for instance, a king comes over here on a visit; the Lord Mayor and sheriffs do him becoming honors in the city, and straightway the former is created a baronet and the latter are knighted. When the Prince of Wales recovered from his illness one of his chief physicians was made a baronet and the other was knighted. Charles II made duchesses of one or two female acquaintances of his for something or other--I have forgotten now what it was. A London shoe-maker’s apprentice became a great soldier--indeed, a Wellington--won prodigious victories in many climes and covered the British arms with glory all through a long life; and when he was 187 years old they knighted him and made him Constable of the Tower. But he died next year and they buried him in Westminster Abbey. There is no telling what that man might have become if he had lived. So you see what a chance I had; for I have no doubt in the world that I have been the humble instrument, under Providence, of “impressing the Shah.” And I really believe that if the Queen comes to hear of it I shall be made a duke.

Friends intending to write will not need to be reminded that a duke is addressed as “Your Grace”; it is considered a great offense to leave that off.

A PICTURESQUE NAVAL SPECTACLE

When we were a mile or so out from Ostend conversation ceased, an expectant look came into all faces, and opera glasses began to stand out from above all noses. This impressive hush lasted a few minutes, and then some one said:

“There they are!”

“Where?”

“Away yonder ahead--straight ahead.”

Which was true. Three huge shapes smothered in the haze--the Vanguard, the Audacious, and the Devastation--all great ironclads. They were to do escort duty. The officers and correspondents gathered on the forecastle and waited for the next act. A red spout of fire issued from the Vanguard’s side, another flashed from the Audacious. Beautiful these red tongues were against the dark haze. Then there was a long pause--ever so long a pause and not a sound, not the suspicion of a sound; and now, out of the stillness, came a deep, solemn “boom! boom!” It had not occurred to me that at so great a distance I would not hear the report as soon as I saw the flash. The two crimson jets were very beautiful, but not more so than the rolling volumes of white smoke that plunged after them, rested a moment over the water, and then went wreathing and curling up among the webbed rigging and the tall masts, and left only glimpses of these things visible, high up in the air, projecting as if from a fog.

Now the flashes came thick and fast from the black sides of both vessels. The muffled thunders of the guns mingled together in one continued roll, the two ships were lost to sight, and in their places two mountains of tumbled smoke rested upon the motionless water, their bases in the hazy twilight and their summits shining in the sun. It was good to be there and see so fine a spectacle as that.

THE NAVAL SALUTE

We closed up fast upon the ironclads. They fell apart to let our flotilla come between, and as the Vigilant ranged up the rigging of the ironclads was manned to salute the Shah. And, indeed, that was something to see. The shrouds, from the decks clear to the trucks, away up toward the sky, were black with men. On the lower rounds of these rope ladders they stood five abreast, holding each other’s hands, and so the tapering shrouds formed attenuated pyramids of humanity, six pyramids of them towering into the upper air, and clear up on the top of each dizzy mast stood a little creature like a clothes pin--a mere black peg against the sky--and that mite was a sailor waving a flag like a postage stamp. All at once the pyramids of men burst into a cheer, and followed it with two more, given with a will; and if the Shah was not impressed he must be the offspring of a mummy.

And just at this moment, while we all stood there gazing---

However breakfast was announced and I did not wait to see.

THE THIRTY-FOUR-TON GUNS SPEAK

If there is one thing that is pleasanter than another it is to take breakfast in the wardroom with a dozen naval officers. Of course, that awe-inspiring monarch, the captain, is aft, keeping frozen state with the Grand Viziers when there are any on board, and so there is nobody in the wardroom to maintain naval etiquette. As a consequence none is maintained. One officer, in a splendid uniform, snatches a champagne bottle from a steward and opens it himself; another keeps the servants moving; another opens soda; everybody eats, drinks, shouts, laughs in the most unconstrained way, and it does seem a pity that ever the thing should come to an end. No individual present seemed sorry he was not in the ship with the Shah. When the festivities had been going on about an hour, some tremendous booming was heard outside. Now here was a question between duty and broiled chicken. What might that booming mean? Anguish sat upon the faces of the correspondents. I watched to see what they would do, and the precious moments were flying. Somebody cried down a companionway:

“The Devastation is saluting!”

The correspondents tumbled over one another, over chairs, over everything in their frenzy to get on deck, and the last gun reverberated as the last heel disappeared on the stairs. The Devastation, the pride of England, the mightiest war vessel afloat, carrying guns that outweigh any metal in any service, it is said (thirty-five tons each), and these boys had missed that spectacle--at least I knew that some of them had. I did not go. Age has taught me wisdom. If a spectacle is going to be particularly imposing I prefer to see it through somebody else’s eyes, because that man will always exaggerate. Then I can exaggerate his exaggeration, and my account of the thing will be the most impressive.

But I felt that I had missed my figure this time, because I was not sure which of these gentlemen reached the deck in time for a glimpse and which didn’t. And this morning I cannot tell by the London papers. They all have imposing descriptions of that thing, and no one of them resembles another. Mr. X’s is perhaps the finest, but he was singing a song about “Spring, Spring, Gentle Spring,” all through the bombardment, and was overexcited, I fear.

The next best was Mr. Y’s; but he was telling about how he took a Russian battery, along with another man, during the Crimean War, and he was not fairly through the story till the salute was over, though I remember he went up and saw the smoke. I will not frame a description of the Devastation’s salute, for I have no material that I can feel sure is reliable.

THE GRAND SPECTACULAR CLIMAX

When we first sailed away from Ostend I found myself in a dilemma; I had no notebook. But “any port in a storm,” as the sailors say. I found a fair, full pack of ordinary playing cards in my overcoat pocket--one always likes to have something along to amuse children with--and really they proved excellent to take notes on, although bystanders were a bit inclined to poke fun at them and ask facetious questions. But I was content; I made all the notes I needed. The aces and low “spot” cards are very good indeed to write memoranda on, but I will not recommend the Kings and Jacks.

SPEAKING BY THE CARDS

Referring to the seven of hearts, I find that this naval exhibition and journey from Ostend to Dover is going to cost the government £500,000. Got it from a correspondent. It is a round sum.

Referring to the ace of diamonds, I find that along in the afternoon we sighted a fresh fleet of men-of-war coming to meet us. The rest of the diamonds, down to the eight spot (nines and tens are no good for notes) are taken up with details of that spectacle. Most of the clubs and hearts refer to matters immediately following that, but I really can hardly do anything with them because I have forgotten what was trumps.

THE SPECTACLE

But never mind. The sea scene grew little by little, until presently it was very imposing. We drew up into the midst of a waiting host of vessels. Enormous five-masted men-of-war, great turret ships, steam packets, pleasure yachts--every sort of craft, indeed--the sea was thick with them; the yards and riggings of the warships loaded with men, the packets crowded with people, the pleasure ships rainbowed with brilliant flags all over and over--some with flags strung thick on lines stretching from bowsprit to foremast, thence to mainmast, thence to mizzenmast, and thence to stern. All the ships were in motion--gliding hither and thither, in and out, mingling and parting--a bewildering whirl of flash and color. Our leader, the vast, black, ugly, but very formidable Devastation, plowed straight through the gay throng, our Shah-ships following, the lines of big men-of-war saluting, the booming of the guns drowning the cheering, stately islands of smoke towering everywhere. And so, in this condition of unspeakable grandeur, we swept into the harbor of Dover, and saw the English princes and the long ranks of red-coated soldiers waiting on the pier, civilian multitudes behind them, the lofty hill front by the castle swarming with spectators, and there was the crash of cannon and a general hurrah all through the air. It was rather a contrast to silent Ostend and the unimpressible Flanders.

THE SHAH “IMPRESSED” AT LAST

The Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Arthur received the Shah in state, and then all of us--princes, Shahs, ambassadors, Grand Viziers and newspaper correspondents--climbed aboard the train and started off to London just like so many brothers.

From Dover to London it was a sight to see. Seventy miles of human beings in a jam--the gaps were not worth mentioning--and every man, woman, and child waving hat or handkerchief and cheering. I wondered--could not tell--could not be sure--could only wonder--would this “impress the Shah”? I would have given anything to know. But--well, it ought--but--still one could not tell.

And by and by we burst into the London Railway station--a very large station it is--and found it wonderfully decorated and all the neighboring streets packed with cheering citizens. Would this impress the Shah? I--I--well, I could not yet feel certain.

The Prince of Wales received the Shah--ah, you should have seen how gorgeously the Shah was dressed now--he was like the sun in a total eclipse of rainbows--yes, the Prince received him, put him in a grand open carriage, got in and made him sit over further and not “crowd,” the carriage clattered out of the station, all London fell apart on either side and lifted a perfectly national cheer, and just at that instant the bottom fell out of the sky and forty deluges came pouring down at once!

The great strain was over, the crushing suspense at an end. I said, “Thank God, this will impress the Shah.”

Now came the long files of Horse Guards in silver armor. We took the great Persian to Buckingham Palace. I never stirred till I saw the gates open and close upon him with my own eyes and knew he was there. Then I said:

“England, here is your Shah; take him and be happy, but don’t ever ask me to fetch over another one.”

This contract has been pretty straining on me.

III
THE SHAH AS A SOCIAL STAR

London, June 21, 1873.

After delivering the Shah at the gates of that unsightly pile of dreary grandeur known as Buckingham Palace I cast all responsibility for him aside for the time being, and experienced a sense of relief and likewise an honest pride in my success, such as no man can feel who has not had a Shah at nurse (so to speak) for three days.

It is said by those who ought to know that when Buckingham Palace was being fitted up as a home for the Shah one of the chief rooms was adorned with a rich carpet which had been designed and manufactured especially to charm the eye of His Majesty. The story goes on to say that a couple of the Persian suite came here a week ago to see that all things were in readiness and nothing overlooked, and that when they reached that particular room and glanced at the lovely combination of green figures and white ones in that carpet they gathered their robes carefully up about their knees and then went elaborately tiptoeing about the floor with the aspect and anxiety of a couple of cats hunting for dry ground in a wet country, and they stepped only on the white figures and almost fainted whenever they came near touching a green one. It is said that the explanation is that these visiting Persians are all Mohammedans, and green being a color sacred to the descendants of the Prophet, and none of these people being so descended, it would be dreadful profanation for them to defile the holy color with their feet. And the general result of it all was that carpet had to be taken up and is a dead loss.

Man is a singular sort of human being, after all, and his religion does not always adorn him. Now, our religion is the right one, and has fewer odd and striking features than any other; and yet my ancestors used to roast Catholics and witches and warm their hands by the fire; but they would be blanched with horror at the bare thought of breaking the Sabbath, and here is a Persian monarch who never sees any impropriety in chopping a subject’s head off for the mere misdemeanor of calling him too early for breakfast, and yet would be consumed with pious remorse if unheeding foot were to chance to step upon anything so green as you or I, my reader.

Oriental peoples say that women have no souls to save and, almost without my memory, many American Protestants said the same of babies. I thought there was a wide gulf between the Persians and ourselves, but I begin to feel that they are really our brothers after all.

After a day’s rest the Shah went to Windsor Castle and called on the Queen. What that suggests to the reader’s mind is this:--That the Shah took a hand satchel and an umbrella, called a cab and said he wanted to go to the Paddington station; that when he arrived there the driver charged him sixpence too much, and he paid it rather than have trouble; that he tried now to buy a ticket, and was answered by a ticket seller as surly as a hotel clerk that he was not selling tickets for that train yet; that he finally got his ticket, and was beguiled of his satchel by a railway porter at once, who put it into a first-class carriage and got a sixpence, which the company forbids him to receive; that presently when the guard (or conductor) of the train came along the Shah slipped a shilling into his hand and said he wanted to smoke, and straightway the guard signified that it was all right; that when the Shah arrived at Windsor Castle he rang the bell, and when the girl came to the door asked her if the Queen was at home, and she left him standing in the hall and went to see; that by and by she returned and said would he please sit down in the front room and Mrs. Guelph would be down directly; that he hung his hat on the hatrack, stood his umbrella up in the corner, entered the front room and sat down on a haircloth chair; that he waited and waited and got tired; that he got up and examined the old piano, the depressing lithographs on the walls and the album of photographs of faded country relatives on the center table, and was just about to fall back on the family Bible when the Queen entered briskly and begged him to sit down and apologized for keeping him waiting, but she had just got a new girl and everything was upside down, and so forth and so on; but how are the family, and when did he arrive, and how long should he stay and why didn’t he bring his wife. I knew that that was the picture which would spring up in the American reader’s mind when it was said the Shah went to visit the Queen, because that was the picture which the announcement suggested to my own mind.

But it was far from the facts, very far. Nothing could be farther. In truth, these people made as much of a to do over a mere friendly call as anybody else would over a conflagration. There were special railway trains for the occasion; there was a general muster of princes and dukes to go along, each one occupying room 40; there were regiments of cavalry to clear the way; railway stations were turned into flower gardens, sheltered with flags and all manner of gaudy splendor; there were multitudes of people to look on over the heads of interminable ranks of policemen standing shoulder to shoulder and facing front; there was braying of music and booming of cannon. All that fuss, in sober truth, over a mere off-hand friendly call. Imagine what it would have been if he had brought another shirt and was going to stay a month.

AT THE GUILDHALL

Truly, I am like to suffocate with astonishment at the things that are going on around me here. It is all odd, it is all queer enough, I can tell you; but last night’s work transcends anything I ever heard of in the way of--well, how shall I express it? how can I word it? I find it awkward to get at it. But to say it in a word--and it is a true one, too, as hundreds and hundreds of people will testify--last night the Corporation of the City of London, with a simplicity and ignorance which almost rise to sublimity, actually gave a ball to a Shah who does not dance. If I would allow myself to laugh at a cruel mistake, this would start me. It is the oddest thing that has happened since I have had charge of the Shah. There is some excuse for it in the fact that the Aldermen of London are simply great and opulent merchants, and cannot be expected to know much about the ways of high life--but then they could have asked some of us who have been with the Shah.

The ball was a marvel in its way. The historical Guildhall was a scene of great magnificence. There was a high dais at one end, on which were three state chairs under a sumptuous canopy; upon the middle one sat the Shah, who was almost a Chicago conflagration of precious stones and gold bullion lace. Among other gems upon his breast were a number of emeralds of marvelous size, and from a loop hung an historical diamond of great size and wonderful beauty. On the right of the Shah sat the Princess of Wales, and on his left the wife of the Crown Prince of Russia. Grouped about the three stood a full jury of minor princes, princesses, and ambassadors hailing from many countries.

THE TWO CORRALS

The immense hall was divided in the middle by a red rope. The Shah’s division was sacred to blue blood, and there was breathing room there; but the other corral was but a crush of struggling and perspiring humanity. The place was brilliant with gas and was a rare spectacle in the matter of splendid costumes and rich coloring. The lofty stained-glass windows, pictured with celebrated episodes in the history of the ancient city, were lighted from the outside, and one may imagine the beauty of the effect. The great giants, Gog and Magog (whose origin and history, curiously enough, are unknown even to tradition), looked down from the lofty gallery, but made no observation. Down the long sides of the hall, with but brief spaces between, were imposing groups of marble statuary; and, contrasted with the masses of life and color about them, they made a picturesque effect. The groups were statues (in various attitudes) of the Duke of Wellington. I do not say this knowingly, but only supposingly; but I never have seen a statue in England yet that represented anybody but the Duke of Wellington, and, as for the streets and terraces and courts and squares that are named after him or after selections from his 797 titles, they are simply beyond the grasp of arithmetic. This reminds me that, having named everything after Wellington that there was left to name in England (even down to Wellington boots), our British brothers, still unsatisfied, still oppressed with adulation, blandly crossed over and named our Californian big trees Wellington, and put it in Latin at that. They did that, calmly ignoring the fact that we, the discoverers and owners of the trees, had long ago named them after a larger man. However, if the ghost of Wellington enjoys such a proceeding, possibly the ghost of Washington will not greatly trouble itself about the matter. But what really disturbs me is that, while Wellington is justly still in the fashion here, Washington is fading out of the fashion with us. It is not a good sign. The idols we have raised in his stead are not to our honor.

Some little dancing was done in the sacred corral in front of the Shah by grandees belonging mainly to “grace-of-God” families, but he himself never agitated a foot. The several thousand commoner people on the other side of the rope could not dance any more than sardines in a box. Chances to view the Guildhall spectacle were so hungered for that people offered £5 for the privilege of standing three minutes in the musicians’ gallery and were refused. I cannot convey to you an idea of the inordinate desire which prevails here to see the Shah better than by remarking that speculators who held four-seat opera boxes at Covent Garden Theater to-night were able to get $250 for them. Had all the seats been sold at auction the opera this evening would have produced not less than one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in gold! I am below the figures rather than above them. The greatest house (for money) that America ever saw was gathered together upon the occasion of Jenny Lind’s first concert at Castle Garden. The seats were sold at auction and produced something over twenty thousand dollars.

I am by no means trying to describe the Guildhall affair of last night. Such a crush of titled swells; such a bewildering array of jeweled uniforms and brilliant feminine costumes; such solemn and awful reception ceremonies in the library; such grim and stately imposing addresses and Persian replies; such imposing processional pageantry later on; such depressing dancing before the apathetic Shah; such ornate tables and imperial good cheer at the banquet--it makes a body tired to merely think of trying to put all that on paper. Perhaps you, sir, will be good enough to imagine it, and thus save one who respects you and honors you five columns of solid writing.

THE LUNATIC ASYLUM IS BLESSED WITH A GLIMPSE

As regards the momentous occasion of the opera, this evening, I found myself in a grievous predicament, for a republican. The tickets were all sold long ago, so I must either go as a member of the royal family or not at all. After a good deal of reflection it seemed best not to mix up with that class lest a political significance might be put upon it. But a queer arrangement had been devised whereby I might have a glimpse of the show, and I took advantage of that. There is an immense barn-like glass house attached to the rear of the theater, and that was fitted up with seats, carpets, mirrors, gas, columns, flowers, garlands, and a meager row of shrubs strung down the sides on brackets--to create an imposing forest effect, I suppose. The place would seat ten or twelve hundred people. All but a hundred paid a dollar and a quarter a seat--for what? To look at the Shah three quarters of a minute, while he walked through to enter the theater. The remaining hundred paid $11 a seat for the same privilege, with the added luxury of rushing on the stage and glancing at the opera audience for one single minute afterward, while the chorus sung “God Save the Queen!” We are all gone mad, I do believe. Eleven hundred five-shilling lunatics and a hundred two-guinea maniacs. The Herald purchased a ticket and created me one of the latter, along with two or three more of the staff.

Our cab was about No. 17,342 in the string that worked its slow way through London and past the theater. The Shah was not to come till nine o’clock, and yet we had to be at the theater by half past six, or we would not get into the glass house at all, they said. We were there on time, and seated in a small gallery which overlooked a very brilliantly dressed throng of people. Every seat was occupied. We sat there two hours and a half gazing and melting. The wide, red-carpeted central aisle below offered good display ground for officials in fine uniforms, and they made good use of it.

ROYALTY ARRIVES

By and by a band in showy uniform came in and stood opposite the entrance. At the end of a tedious interval of waiting trumpets sounded outside, there was some shouting, the band played half of “God Save the Queen,” and then the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and a dozen gorgeous Persian officials entered. After a little the young Prince Arthur came, in a blue uniform, with a whole broadside of gold and silver medals on his breast--for good behavior, punctuality, accurate spelling, penmanship, etc., I suppose, but I could not see the inscriptions. The band gave him some bars of “God Save the Queen,” too, while he stood under us talking, with altogether unroyal animation, with the Persians--the crowd of people staring hungrily at him the while--country cousins, maybe, who will go home and say, “I was as close to him as I am to that chair this minute.”

Then came the Duke of Teck and the Princess Mary, and the band God-Save-the-Queen’d them also. Now came the Prince of Wales and the Russian Tsarina--the royal anthem again, with an extra blast at the end of it. After them came a young, handsome, mighty giant, in showy uniform, his breast covered with glittering orders, and a general’s chapeau, with a flowing white plume, in his hand--the heir to all the throne of all the Russias. The band greeted him with the Russian national anthem, and played it clear through. And they did right; for perhaps it is not risking too much to say that this is the only national air in existence that is really worthy of a great nation.

And at last came the long-expected millennium himself, His Imperial Majesty the Shah, with the charming Princess of Wales on his arm. He had all his jewels on, and his diamond shaving brush in his hat front. He shone like a window with the westering sun on it.

WHAT THE ASYLUM SAW

The small space below us was full now--it could accommodate no more royalty. The august procession filed down the aisle in double rank, the Shah and the Princess of Wales in the lead, and cheers broke forth and a waving of handkerchiefs as the Princess passed--all said this demonstration was meant for her. As the procession disappeared through the farther door, the hundred eleven-dollar maniacs rushed through a small aperture, then through an anteroom, and gathered in a flock on the stage, the chorus striking up “God Save the Queen” at the same moment.

We stood in a mighty bandbox, or a Roman coliseum, with a sea of faces stretching far away over the ground floor, and above them rose five curving tiers of gaudy humanity, the dizzy upper tier in the far distance rising sharply up against the roof, like a flower garden trying to hold an earthquake down and not succeeding. It was a magnificent spectacle, and what with the roaring of the chorus, the waving of handkerchiefs, the cheering of the people, the blazing gas, and the awful splendor of the long file of royalty, standing breast to breast in the royal box, it was wonderfully exhilarating, not to say exciting.

The chorus sang only three-quarters of a minute--one stanza--and down came the huge curtain and shut out the fairyland. And then all those eleven-dollar people hunted their way out again.

A NATION DEMENTED

We are certainly gone mad. We scarcely look at the young colossus who is to reign over 70,000,000 of people and the mightiest empire in extent which exists to-day. We have no eyes but for this splendid barbarian, who is lord over a few deserts and a modest ten million of ragamuffins--a man who has never done anything to win our gratitude or excite our admiration, except that he managed to starve a million of his subjects to death in twelve months. If he had starved the rest I suppose we would set up a monument to him now.

The London theaters are almost absolutely empty these nights. Nobody goes, hardly. The managers are being ruined. The streets for miles are crammed with people waiting whole long hours for a chance glimpse of the Shah. I never saw any man “draw” like this one.

Is there any truth in the report that your bureaus are trying to get the Shah to go over there and lecture? He could get $100,000 a night here and choose his own subject.

I know a showman who has got a pill that belonged to him, and which for some reason he did not take. That showman will not take any money for that pill. He is going to travel with it. And let me tell you he will get more engagements than he can fill in a year.

IV
MARK TWAIN HOOKS THE PERSIAN OUT OF
THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

London, June 26, 1873.

I suppose I am the only member of the Shah’s family who is not wholly broken down and worn out; and, to tell the truth, there is not much of me left. If you have ever been limited to four days in Paris or Rome or Jerusalem and been “rushed” by a guide you can form a vague, far-away sort of conception of what the Shah and the rest of us have endured during these late momentous days. If this goes on we may as well get ready for the imperial inquest.

When I was called at five o’clock the other morning to go to Portsmouth, and remembered that the Shah’s incessant movements had left me only three hours’ sleep that night, nothing but a sense of duty drove me forth. A cab could not be found, nor a carriage in all London. I lost an hour and a half waiting and trying, then started on foot and lost my way; consequently I missed one train by a good while, another one by three minutes, and then had more than half an hour to spare before another would go. Most people had had a similar experience, and there was comfort in that. We started at last, and were more than three hours going seventy-two miles. We stopped at no stations, hardly, but we halted every fifteen minutes out in the woods and fields for no purpose that we could discover. Never was such an opportunity to look at scenery. There were five strangers in our car, or carriage, as the English call it, and by degrees their English reserve thawed out and they passed around their sherry and sandwiches and grew sociable.

One of them had met the Russian General of Police in St. Petersburg, and found him a queer old simple-hearted soldier, proud of his past and devoted to his master, the present Tsar, and to the memory of his predecessor, Nicholas. The English gentleman gave an instance of the old man’s simplicity which one would not expect in a chief of police. The general had been visiting London and been greatly impressed by two things there--the admirable police discipline and the museum. It transpired that the museum he referred to was not that mighty collection of marvels known to all the world as the British Museum, but Mme. Toussaud’s Waxworks Show; and in this waxwork show he had seen a figure of the Emperor Nicholas. And did it please him? Yes, as to the likeness; for it was a good likeness and a commanding figure; but--“Mon Dieu! try to fancy it, m’sieu--dressed in the uniform of a simple colonel of infantry!--the great Nicholas of Russia, my august late master, dressed in a colonel’s uniform!”

The old general could not abide that. He went to the proprietor and remonstrated against this wanton indignity. The proprietor was grieved; but it was the only Russian uniform he could get, and----

“Say no more!” said the general. “May I get you one?”