I bored through Middlemarch during the past week, with its labored and tedious analyses of feelings and motives, its paltry and tiresome people, its unexciting and uninteresting story, and its frequent blinding flashes of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, and what not, and nearly died from the overwork.I wouldn't read another of those books for a farm.
I did try to read one other--Daniel Deronda.I dragged through three chapters, losing flesh all the time, and then was honest enough to quit, and confess to myself that I haven't any romance literature appetite, as far as I can see, except for your books.
But what I started to say, was, that I have just read Part II of Indian Summer, and to my mind there isn't a waste line in it, or one that could be improved.I read it yesterday, ending with that opinion; and read it again to-day, ending with the same opinion emphasized.I haven't read Part I yet, because that number must have reached Hartford after we left;but we are going to send down town for a copy, and when it comes I am to read both parts aloud to the family.It is a beautiful story, and makes a body laugh all the time, and cry inside, and feel so old and so forlorn; and gives him gracious glimpses of his lost youth that fill him with a measureless regret, and build up in him a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no chance ever to get back there again! That is the thing that hurts.Well, you have done it with marvelous facility and you make all the motives and feelings perfectly clear without analyzing the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does.
I can't stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and those people; I see what they are at a hundred years before they get to it and they just tire me to death.And as for "The Bostonians," I would rather be damned to John Bunyan's heaven than read that.
Yrs Ever MARK
It is as easy to understand Mark Twain's enjoyment of Indian Summer as his revolt against Daniel Deronda and The Bostonians.He cared little for writing that did not convey its purpose in the simplest and most direct terms.It is interesting to note that in thanking Clemens for his compliment Howells wrote: "What people cannot see is that I analyze as little as possible; they go on talking about the analytical school, which I am supposed to belong to, and I want to thank you for using your eyes.....Did you ever read De Foe's 'Roxana'? If not, then read it, not merely for some of the deepest insights into the lying, suffering, sinning, well-meaning human soul, but for the best and most natural English that a book was ever written in."General Grant worked steadily on his book, dictating when he could, making brief notes on slips of paper when he could no longer speak.
Clemens visited him at Mt.McGregor and brought the dying soldier the comforting news that enough of his books were already sold to provide generously for his family, and that the sales would aggregate at least twice as much by the end of the year.
This was some time in July.On the 23d of that month General Grant died.Immediately there was a newspaper discussion as to the most suitable place for the great chieftain to lie.Mark Twain's contribution to this debate, though in the form of an open letter, seems worthy of preservation here.
To the New York "Sun," on the proper place for Grant's Tomb:
To THE EDITOR OP' THE SUN:--SIR,--The newspaper atmosphere is charged with objections to New York as a place of sepulchre for General Grant, and the objectors are strenuous that Washington is the right place.They offer good reasons--good temporary reasons--for both of these positions.
But it seems to me that temporary reasons are not mete for the occasion.
We need to consider posterity rather than our own generation.We should select a grave which will not merely be in the right place now, but will still be in the right place 500 years from now.
How does Washington promise as to that? You have only to hit it in one place to kill it.Some day the west will be numerically strong enough to move the seat of government; her past attempts are a fair warning that when the day comes she will do it.Then the city of Washington will lose its consequence and pass out of the public view and public talk.It is quite within the possibilities that, a century hence, people would wonder and say, "How did your predecessors come to bury their great dead in this deserted place?"But as long as American civilisation lasts New York will last.I cannot but think she has been well and wisely chosen as the guardian of a grave which is destined to become almost the most conspicuous in the world's history.Twenty centuries from now New York will still be New York, still a vast city, and the most notable object in it will still be the tomb and monument of General Grant.
I observe that the common and strongest objection to New York is that she is not "national ground." Let us give ourselves no uneasiness about that.Wherever General Grant's body lies, that is national ground.
S.L.CLEMENS.
ELMIRA, July 27.
The letter that follows is very long, but it seems too important and too interesting to be omitted in any part.General Grant's early indulgence in liquors had long been a matter of wide, though not very definite, knowledge.Every one had heard how Lincoln, on being told that Grant drank, remarked something to the effect that he would like to know what kind of whisky Grant used so that he might get some of it for his other generals.Henry Ward Beecher, selected to deliver a eulogy on the dead soldier, and doubtless wishing neither to ignore the matter nor to make too much of it, naturally turned for information to the publisher of Grant's own memoirs, hoping from an advance copy to obtain light.
To Henry Ward Beecher,.Brooklyn:
ELMIRA, N.Y.Sept.11, '85.
MY DEAR MR.BEECHER,--My nephew Webster is in Europe making contracts for the Memoirs.Before he sailed he came to me with a writing, directed to the printers and binders, to this effect: