LETTERS, 1883, TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS.A GUEST OF THE MARQUIS OF LORNE.
THE HISTORY GAME.A PLAY BY HOWELLS AND MARK TWAINMark Twain, in due season, finished the Mississippi book and placed it in Osgood's hands for publication.It was a sort of partnership arrangement in which Clemens was to furnish the money to make the book, and pay Osgood a percentage for handling it.It was, in fact, the beginning of Mark Twain's adventures as a publisher.
Howells was not as happy in Florence as he had hoped to be.The social life there overwhelmed him.In February he wrote: "Our two months in Florence have been the most ridiculous time that ever even half-witted people passed.We have spent them in chasing round after people for whom we cared nothing, and being chased by them.
My story isn't finished yet, and what part of it is done bears the fatal marks of haste and distraction.Of course, I haven't put pen to paper yet on the play.I wring my hands and beat my breast when I think of how these weeks have been wasted; and how I have been forced to waste them by the infernal social circumstances from which I couldn't escape."Clemens, now free from the burden of his own book, was light of heart and full of ideas and news; also of sympathy and appreciation.
Howells's story of this time was "A Woman's Reason." Governor Jewell, of this letter, was Marshall Jewell, Governor of Connecticut from 1871 to 1873.Later, he was Minister to Russia, and in 1874was United States Postmaster-General.
To W.D.Howells, in Florence:
HARTFORD, March 1st, 1883.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We got ourselves ground up in that same mill, once, in London, and another time in Paris.It is a kind of foretaste of hell.
There is no way to avoid it except by the method which you have now chosen.One must live secretly and cut himself utterly off from the human race, or life in Europe becomes an unbearable burden and work an impossibility.I learned something last night, and maybe it may reconcile me to go to Europe again sometime.I attended one of the astonishingly popular lectures of a man by the name of Stoddard, who exhibits interesting stereopticon pictures and then knocks the interest all out of them with his comments upon them.But all the world go there to look and listen, and are apparently well satisfied.And they ought to be fully satisfied, if the lecturer would only keep still, or die in the first act.But he described how retired tradesmen and farmers in Holland load a lazy scow with the family and the household effects, and then loaf along the waterways of the low countries all the summer long, paying no visits, receiving none, and just lazying a heavenly life out in their own private unpestered society, and doing their literary work, if they have any, wholly uninterrupted.If you had hired such a boat and sent for us we should have a couple of satisfactory books ready for the press now with no marks of interruption, vexatious wearinesses, and other hellishnesses visible upon them anywhere.We shall have to do this another time.We have lost an opportunity for the present.Do you forget that Heaven is packed with a multitude of all nations and that these people are all on the most familiar how-the-hell-are-you footing with Talmage swinging around the circle to all eternity hugging the saints and patriarchs and archangels, and forcing you to do the same unless you choose to make yourself an object of remark if you refrain?
Then why do you try to get to Heaven? Be warned in time.
We have all read your two opening numbers in the Century, and consider them almost beyond praise.I hear no dissent from this verdict.I did not know there was an untouched personage in American life, but I had forgotten the auctioneer.You have photographed him accurately.
I have been an utterly free person for a month or two; and I do not believe I ever so greatly appreciated and enjoyed--and realized the absence of the chains of slavery as I do this time.Usually my first waking thought in the morning is, "I have nothing to do to-day, I belong to nobody, I have ceased from being a slave." Of course the highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor.
Therefore I labor.But I take my time about it.I work one hour or four as happens to suit my mind, and quit when I please.And so these days are days of entire enjoyment.I told Clark the other day, to jog along comfortable and not get in a sweat.I said I believed you would not be able to enjoy editing that library over there, where you have your own legitimate work to do and be pestered to death by society besides;therefore I thought if he got it ready for you against your return, that that would be best and pleasantest.
You remember Governor Jewell, and the night he told about Russia, down in the library.He was taken with a cold about three weeks ago, and Istepped over one evening, proposing to beguile an idle hour for him with a yarn or two, but was received at the door with whispers, and the information that he was dying.His case had been dangerous during that day only and he died that night, two hours after I left.His taking off was a prodigious surprise, and his death has been most widely and sincerely regretted.Win.E.Dodge, the father-in-law of one of Jewell's daughters, dropped suddenly dead the day before Jewell died, but Jewell died without knowing that.Jewell's widow went down to New York, to Dodge's house, the day after Jewell's funeral, and was to return here day before yesterday, and she did--in a coffin.She fell dead, of heart disease, while her trunks were being packed for her return home.