I am enclosing an order for half of my (your) Founders shares.You are not to refuse them this time, though you have done it twice before.They are yours, not mine, and for your family's sake if not your own you cannot in these cloudy days renounce this property which is so clearly yours and theirs.You have been generous long enough; be just, now to yourself.Mr.Rogers is off yachting for 5 or 6 weeks--I'll get them when he returns.The head of the house joins me in warmest greetings and remembrances to you and Mrs.MacAlister.
Ever yours, Mark.
May 8.Great Scott! I never mailed this letter! I addressed it, put "Registered" on it--then left it lying unsealed on the arm of my chair, and rushed up to my bed quaking with a chill.I've never been out of the bed since--oh, bronchitis, rheumatism, two sets of teeth aching, land, I've had a dandy time for 4 weeks.And to-day--great guns, one of the very worst!...
I'm devilish sorry, and I do apologise--for although I am not as slow as you are about answering letters, as a rule, I see where I'm standing this time.
Two weeks ago Jean was taken down again--this time with measles, and Ihaven't been able to go to her and she hasn't been able to come to me.
But Mrs.Clemens is making nice progress, and can stand alone a moment or two at a time.
Now I'll post this.
MARK
The two letters that follow, though written only a few days apart, were separated in their arrival by a period of seven years.The second letter was, in some way, mislaid and not mailed; and it was not until after the writer of it was dead that it was found and forwarded.
Mark Twain could never get up much enthusiasm for the writings of Scott.His praise of Quentin Durward is about the only approval he ever accorded to the works of the great romanticist.
To Brander Matthews, in New York:
NEW YORK CITY, May 4, '03.
DEAR BRANDER,--I haven't been out of my bed for four weeks, but--well, Ihave been reading, a good deal, and it occurs to me to ask you to sit down, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, and jot me down a certain few literary particulars for my help and elevation.Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make Colombian lectures out of the results and do your students a good turn.
1.Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English--English which is neither slovenly or involved?
2.Are there passages whose English is not poor and thin and commonplace, but is of a quality above that?
3.Are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox-fire, make believe?
4.Has he heroes and heroines who are not cads and cadesses?
5.Has he personages whose acts and talk correspond with their characters as described by him?
6.Has he heroes and heroines whom the reader admires, admires, and knows why?
7.Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous?
8.Does he ever chain the reader's interest, and make him reluctant to lay the book down?
9.Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood and flow of his own dilutions, ceases from being artificial, and is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere and in earnest?
10.Did he know how to write English, and didn't do it because he didn't want to?
11.Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another one, or did he run so much to wrong because he didn't know the right one when he saw it?
13.Can you read him? and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day--an era of sentimentality and sloppy romantics--but land! can a body do it today?
Brander, I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter.
I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, and as far as chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, and I can no longer hold my head up nor take my nourishment.
Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; and such wax figures and skeletons and spectres.Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-and-water humbugs.
And oh, the poverty of the invention! Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them.Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation--elaborates, and elaborates, and elaborates, till if you live to get to it you don't believe in it when it happens.
I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I can't stand any more Mannering--I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, and not quit this great study rashly.He was great, in his day, and to his proper audience; and so was God in Jewish times, for that matter, but why should either of them rank high now? And do they?--honest, now, do they? Dam'd if Ibelieve it.
My, I wish I could see you and Leigh Hunt!
Sincerely Yours S.L.CLEMENS.
To Brander Matthews, in New York:
RIVERDALE, May 8,'03 (Mailed June, 1910).
DEAR BRANDER,--I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dulness since I broke into Sir Walter and lost my temper.I finished Guy Mannering--that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows jabbering around a single flesh-and-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist's stage properties--finished it and took up Quentin Durward, and finished that.
It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the College of journalism to sit under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.
I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?
Yrs ever MARK.
In 1903, preparations were going on for a great world's fair, to be held in St.Louis, and among other features proposed was a World's Literary Convention, with a week to be set apart in honor of Mark Twain, and a special Mark Twain Day in it, on which the National Association would hold grand services in honor of the distinguished Missourian.A letter asking his consent to the plan brought the following reply.
To T.F.Gatts, of Missouri:
NEW YORK, May 30, 1903.