_ Dr. John Brown's son, whom Mark Twain and his wife had known in 1873
as "Jock," sent copies of Dr. John Brown and His Sister Isabella, by
E. T. McLaren. It was a gift appreciated in the Clemens home.
To Mr. John Brown, in Edinburgh, Scotland:
HARTFORD, Feby 11, 1890.
DEAR MR. BROWN,--Both copies came, and we are reading and re-reading the
one, and lending the other, to old time adorers of "Rab and his Friends."
It is an exquisite book; the perfection of literary workmanship. It says
in every line, "Don't look at me, look at him"--and one tries to be good
and obey; but the charm of the painter is so strong that one can't keep
his entire attention on the developing portrait, but must steal side-
glimpses of the artist, and try to divine the trick of her felicitous
brush. In this book the doctor lives and moves just as he was. He was
the most extensive slave-holder of his time, and the kindest; and yet he
died without setting one of his bondmen free. We all send our very, very
kindest regards.
Sincerely yours
S. L. CLEMENS.
If Mark Twain had been less interested in the type-setting machine
he might possibly have found a profit that winter in the old Sellers
play, which he had written with Howells seven years before. The
play had eventually been produced at the Lyceum Theatre in New York,
with A. P. Burbank in the leading role, and Clemens and Howells as
financial backers. But it was a losing investment, nor did it pay
any better when Clemens finally sent Burbank with it on the road.
Now, however, James A. Herne, a well-known actor and playwright,
became interested in the idea, after a discussion of the matter with
Howells, and there seemed a probability that with changes made under
Herne's advisement the play might be made sensible and successful.
But Mark Twain's greater interest was now all in the type-machine,
and certainly he had no money to put into any other venture. His
next letter to Goodman is illuminating--the urgency of his need for
funds opposed to that conscientiousness which was one of the most
positive forces of Mark Twain's body spiritual. The Mr. Arnot of
this letter was an Elmira capitalist.
To Jos. T. Goodman, in California:
HARTFORD, March 31, '90.
DEAR JOE,--If you were here, I should say, "Get you to Washington and beg
Senator Jones to take the chances and put up about ten or "--no, I
wouldn't. The money would burn a hole in my pocket and get away from me
if the furnisher of it were proceeding upon merely your judgment and mine
and without other evidence. It is too much of a responsibility.
But I am in as close a place to-day as ever I was; $3,000 due for the
last month's machine-expenses, and the purse empty. I notified Mr. Arnot
a month ago that I should want $5,000 to-day, and his check arrived last
night; but I sent it back to him, because when he bought of me on the 9th
of December I said that I would not draw upon him for 3 months, and that
before that date Senator Jones would have examined the machine and
approved, or done the other thing. If Jones should arrive here a week or
ten days from now (as he expects to do,) and should not approve, and
shouldn't buy any royalties, my deal with Arnot would not be
symmetrically square, and then how could I refund? The surest way was to
return his check.
I have talked with the madam, and here is the result. I will go down to
the factory and notify Paige that I will scrape together $6,000 to meet
the March and April expenses, and will retire on the 30th of April and
return the assignment to him if in the meantime I have not found
financial relief.
It is very rough; for the machine does at last seem perfect, and just a
bird to go! I think she's going to be good for 8,000 ems an hour in the
hands of a good ordinary man after a solid year's practice. I may be in
error, but I most solidly believe it.
There's an improved Mergenthaler in New York; Paige and Davis and I
watched it two whole afternoons.
With the love of us all,
MARK.
Arnot wrote Clemens urging him to accept the check for five thousand
dollars in this moment of need. Clemens was probably as sorely
tempted to compromise with his conscience as he had ever been in his
life, but his resolution field firm.
To M. H. Arnot, in Elmira, N. Y.:
MR. M. H. ARNOT
DEAR SIR,--No--no, I could not think of taking it, with you unsatisfied;
and you ought not to be satisfied until you have made personal
examination of the machine and had a consensus of testimony of
disinterested people, besides. My own perfect knowledge of what is
required of such a machine, and my perfect knowledge of the fact that
this is the only machine that can meet that requirement, make it
difficult for me to realize that a doubt is possible to less well-posted
men; and so I would have taken your money without thinking, and thus
would have done a great wrong to you and a great one to myself. And now
that I go back over the ground, I remember that where I said I could get
along 3 months without drawing on you, that delay contemplated a visit
from you to the machine in the interval, and your satisfaction with its
character and prospects. I had forgotten all that. But I remember it
now; and the fact that it was not "so nominated in the bond" does not
alter the case or justify me in making my call so prematurely. I do not
know that you regarded all that as a part of the bargain--for you were
thoroughly and magnanimously unexacting--but I so regarded it,
notwithstanding I have so easily managed to forget all about it.
You so gratified me, and did me so much honor in bonding yourself to me
in a large sum, upon no evidence but my word and with no protection but
my honor, that my pride in that is much stronger than my desire to reap a
money advantage from it.
With the sincerest appreciation I am Truly yours
S L. CLEMENS.
P. S. I have written a good many words and yet I seem to have failed to
say the main thing in exact enough language--which is, that the
transaction between us is not complete and binding until you shall have
convinced yourself that the machine's character and prospects are
satisfactory.
I ought to explain that the grippe delayed us some weeks, and that we
have since been waiting for Mr. Jones. When he was ready, we were not;
and now we have been ready more than a month, while he has been kept in
Washington by the Silver bill. He said the other day that to venture out
of the Capitol for a day at this time could easily chance to hurt him if
the bill came up for action, meantime, although it couldn't hurt the
bill, which would pass anyway. Mrs. Jones said she would send me two or
three days' notice, right after the passage of the bill, and that they
would follow as soon as I should return word that their coming would not
inconvenience us. I suppose I ought to go to New York without waiting
for Mr. Jones, but it would not be wise to go there without money.
The bill is still pending.
The Mergenthaler machine, like the Paige, was also at this time in
the middle stages of experimental development. It was a slower
machine, but it was simpler, less expensive, occupied less room.
There was not so much about it to get out of order; it was not so
delicate, not so human. These were immense advantages.
But no one at this time could say with certainty which typesetter
would reap the harvest of millions. It was only sure that at least
one of them would, and the Mergenthaler people were willing to trade
stock for stock with the Paige company in order to insure financial
success for both, whichever won. Clemens, with a faith that never
faltered, declined this offer, a decision that was to cost him
millions.
Winter and spring had gone and summer had come, but still there had
been no financial conclusion with Jones, Mackay, and the other rich
Californians who were to put up the necessary million for the
machine's manufacture. Goodman was spending a large part of his
time traveling back and forth between California and Washington,
trying to keep business going at both ends. Paige spent most of his
time working out improvements for the type-setter, delicate
attachments which complicated its construction more and more.
To Joe T. Goodman, in Washington:
HARTFORD, June 22, '90.
DEAR JOE,--I have been sitting by the machine 2 hours, this afternoon,
and my admiration of it towers higher than ever. There is no sort of
mistake about it, it is the Big Bonanza. In the 2 hours, the time lost
by type-breakage was 3 minutes.
This machine is totally without a rival. Rivalry with it is impossible.
Last Friday, Fred Whitmore (it was the 28th day of his apprenticeship on
the machine) stacked up 49,700 ems of solid nonpareil in 8 hours, and the
type-breaking delay was only 6 minutes for the day.
I claim yet, as I have always claimed, that the machine's market (abroad
and here together,) is today worth $150,000,000 without saying anything
about the doubling and trebling of this sum that will follow within the
life of the patents. Now here is a queer fact: I am one of the
wealthiest grandees in America--one of the Vanderbilt gang, in fact--and
yet if you asked me to lend you a couple of dollars I should have to ask
you to take my note instead.
It makes me cheerful to sit by the machine: come up with Mrs. Goodman and
refresh yourself with a draught of the same.
Ys ever
MARK.
The machine was still breaking the types now and then, and no doubt
Paige was itching to take it to pieces, and only restrained by force
from doing so. He was never thoroughly happy unless he was taking
the machine apart or setting it up again. Finally, he was allowed
to go at it--a disasterous permission, for it was just then that
Jones decided to steal a day or two from the Silver Bill and watch
the type-setter in operation. Paige already had it in parts when
this word came from Goodman, and Jones's visit had to be called off.
His enthusiasm would seem to have weakened from that day. In July,
Goodman wrote that both Mackay and Jones had become somewhat
diffident in the matter of huge capitalization. He thought it
partly due, at least, to "the fatal delays that have sicklied over
the bloom of original enthusiasm." Clemens himself went down to
Washington and perhaps warmed Jones with his eloquence; at least,
Jones seemed to have agreed to make some effort in the matter a
qualified promise, the careful word of a wary politician and
capitalist. How many Washington trips were made is not certain, but
certainly more than one. Jones would seem to have suggested forms
of contracts, but if he came to the point of signing any there is no
evidence of it to-day.
Any one who has read Mark Twain's, "A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court," has a pretty good idea of his opinion of kings in
general, and tyrants in particular. Rule by "divine right," however
liberal, was distasteful to him; where it meant oppression it
stirred him to violence. In his article, "The Czar's Soliloquy," he
gave himself loose rein concerning atrocities charged to the master
of Russia, and in a letter which he wrote during the summer of 1890,
he offered a hint as to remedies. The letter was written by
editorial request, but was never mailed. Perhaps it seemed too
openly revolutionary at the moment.
Yet scarcely more than a quarter of a century was needed to make it
"timely." Clemens and his family were spending some weeks in the
Catskills when it was written.
An unpublished letter on the Czar.
ONTEORA, 1890.
TO THE EDITOR OF FREE RUSSIA,--I thank you for the compliment of your
invitation to say something, but when I ponder the bottom paragraph on
your first page, and then study your statement on your third page, of the
objects of the several Russian liberation-parties, I do not quite know
how to proceed. Let me quote here the paragraph referred to:
"But men's hearts are so made that the sight of one voluntary victim for
a noble idea stirs them more deeply than the sight of a crowd submitting
to a dire fate they cannot escape. Besides, foreigners could not see so
clearly as the Russians how much the Government was responsible for the
grinding poverty of the masses; nor could they very well realize the
moral wretchedness imposed by that Government upon the whole of educated
Russia. But the atrocities committed upon the defenceless prisoners are
there in all their baseness, concrete and palpable, admitting of no
excuse, no doubt or hesitation, crying out to the heart of humanity
against Russian tyranny. And the Tzar's Government, stupidly confident
in its apparently unassailable position, instead of taking warning from
the first rebukes, seems to mock this humanitarian age by the aggravation
of brutalities. Not satisfied with slowly killing its prisoners, and
with burying the flower of our young generation in the Siberian desserts,
the Government of Alexander III. resolved to break their spirit by
deliberately submitting them to a regime of unheard-of brutality and
degradation."
When one reads that paragraph in the glare of George Kennan's
revelations, and considers how much it means; considers that all earthly
figures fail to typify the Czar's government, and that one must descend
into hell to find its counterpart, one turns hopefully to your statement
of the objects of the several liberation-parties--and is disappointed.
Apparently none of them can bear to think of losing the present hell
entirely, they merely want the temperature cooled down a little.
I now perceive why all men are the deadly and uncompromising enemies of
the rattlesnake: it is merely because the rattlesnake has not speech.
Monarchy has speech, and by it has been able to persuade men that it
differs somehow from the rattlesnake, has something valuable about it
somewhere, something worth preserving, something even good and high and
fine, when properly "modified," something entitling it to protection from
the club of the first comer who catches it out of its hole. It seems a
most strange delusion and not reconcilable with our superstition that man
is a reasoning being. If a house is afire, we reason confidently that it
is the first comer's plain duty to put the fire out in any way he can--
drown it with water, blow it up with dynamite, use any and all means to
stop the spread of the fire and save the rest of the city. What is the
Czar of Russia but a house afire in the midst of a city of eighty
millions of inhabitants? Yet instead of extinguishing him, together with
his nest and system, the liberation-parties are all anxious to merely
cool him down a little and keep him.
It seems to me that this is illogical--idiotic, in fact. Suppose you had
this granite-hearted, bloody-jawed maniac of Russia loose in your house,
chasing the helpless women and little children--your own. What would you
do with him, supposing you had a shotgun? Well, he is loose in your
house-Russia. And with your shotgun in your hand, you stand trying to
think up ways to "modify" him.
Do these liberation-parties think that they can succeed in a project
which has been attempted a million times in the history of the world and
has never in one single instance been successful--the "modification" of a
despotism by other means than bloodshed? They seem to think they can.
My privilege to write these sanguinary sentences in soft security was
bought for me by rivers of blood poured upon many fields, in many lands,
but I possess not one single little paltry right or privilege that come
to me as a result of petition, persuasion, agitation for reform, or any
kindred method of procedure. When we consider that not even the most
responsible English monarch ever yielded back a stolen public right until
it was wrenched from them by bloody violence, is it rational to suppose
that gentler methods can win privileges in Russia?
Of course I know that the properest way to demolish the Russian throne
would be by revolution. But it is not possible to get up a revolution
there; so the only thing left to do, apparently, is to keep the throne
vacant by dynamite until a day when candidates shall decline with thanks.
Then organize the Republic. And on the whole this method has some large
advantages; for whereas a revolution destroys some lives which cannot
well be spared, the dynamite way doesn't. Consider this: the
conspirators against the Czar's life are caught in every rank of life,
from the low to the high. And consider: if so many take an active part,
where the peril is so dire, is this not evidence that the sympathizers
who keep still and do not show their hands, are countless for multitudes?
Can you break the hearts of thousands of families with the awful Siberian
exodus every year for generations and not eventually cover all Russia
from limit to limit with bereaved fathers and mothers and brothers and
sisters who secretly hate the perpetrator of this prodigious crime and
hunger and thirst for his life? Do you not believe that if your wife or
your child or your father was exiled to the mines of Siberia for some
trivial utterances wrung from a smarting spirit by the Czar's intolerable
tyranny, and you got a chance to kill him and did not do it, that you
would always be ashamed to be in your own society the rest of your life?
Suppose that that refined and lovely Russian lady who was lately stripped
bare before a brutal soldiery and whipped to death by the Czar's hand in
the person of the Czar's creature had been your wife, or your daughter or
your sister, and to-day the Czar should pass within reach of your hand,
how would you feel--and what would you do? Consider, that all over vast
Russia, from boundary to boundary, a myriad of eyes filled with tears
when that piteous news came, and through those tears that myriad of eyes
saw, not that poor lady, but lost darlings of their own whose fate her
fate brought back with new access of grief out of a black and bitter past
never to be forgotten or forgiven.
If I am a Swinburnian--and clear to the marrow I am--I hold human nature
in sufficient honor to believe there are eighty million mute Russians
that are of the same stripe, and only one Russian family that isn't.
MARK TWAIN.
Type-setter matters were going badly. Clemens still had faith in
Jones, and he had lost no grain of faith in the machine. The money
situation, however, was troublesome. With an expensive
establishment, and work of one sort or another still to be done on
the machine, his income would not reach. Perhaps Goodman had
already given up hope, for he does not seem to have returned from
California after the next letter was written--a colorless letter--
in which we feel a note of resignation. The last few lines are
sufficient.
To Joe T. Goodman, in California:
DEAR JOE,--...... I wish you could get a day off and make those two or
three Californians buy those privileges, for I'm going to need money
before long.
I don't know where the Senator is; but out on the Coast I reckon.
I guess we've got a perfect machine at last. We never break a type, now,
and the new device for enabling the operator to touch the last letters
and justify the line simultaneously works, to a charm.
With love to you both,
MARK
The year closed gloomily enough. The type-setter seemed to be
perfected, but capital for its manufacture was not forthcoming.
The publishing business of Charles L. Webster & Co. was returning
little or no profit. Clemens's mother had died in Keokuk at the end
of October, and his wife's mother, in Elmira a month later. Mark
Twain, writing a short business letter to his publishing manager,
Fred J. Ball, closed it: "Merry Xmas to you!--and I wish to God I
could have one myself before I die." _