fully. In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon. He bought an interest in the Express of Buffalo, New York, where he stayed a year. Then he moved to Hartford. In 1873 he travelled abroad and lectured in London. A later journey in 1878 bore fruit in "A Tramp Abroad." In 1885 he put his fortune and brains into the publishing house of Charles L. Webster & Company. He was the publisher - indeed, the instigator and editor - of Grant's "Memoirs," which was hugely successful. But the business failed and Clemens assumed the debts of the firm, which he paid off by a lecturing tour in 1895-96. He spent the next few years in Europe. After his return to this country he lived in New York and later at "Stormfield" in Redding, Connecticut. His works are: The Celebrated Jumping Frog, 1867; Innocents Abroad, 1869; Roughing It, 1872; The Gilded Age (with Charles Dudley Warner), 1873; Sketches, 1875; Tom Sawyer, 1876; Sketches, 1878; A Tramp Abroad, 1880; The Prince and the Pauper, 1882; The Stolen White Elephant, Etc., 1882; Life on the Mississippi, 1883; Huckleberry Finn, 1884; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889; Merry Tales, 1892; The American Claimant, 1892; The £1,000,000 Bank Note, 1893; Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894; Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894; Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1895; Following the Equator, 1897; The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, 1899; To the Person Sitting in Darkness, 1901; A Double-Barrelled Detective Story, 1902; King Leopold's Soliloquy, 1905; Eve's Diary, 1906; Christian Science, 1907; Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, 1909; Is Shakespeare Dead?, 1909; Speeches, 1910. Mark Twain's biography in three volumes is by his appointed Boswell, Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine; Mark Twain's "Autobiography" is to be published complete, it is understood, twenty-five years after his death; parts of it have appeared in the North American Review. Mr. Howell's "My Mark Twain" is a beautiful book. An admirable appreciation is Professor Brander Matthews's introduction to the complete edition of Mark Twain's Works. Another first-rate essay is that by Professor William Lyon Phelps in "Essays on Modern Novelists." CHAPTER XIV HOWELLS IN 1877 the Atlantic Monthly gave a dinner in honour of Whittier's birthday. Mr. Howells presided. Among the honoured guests were Holmes, Longfellow, and Emerson. The lion of the party, though nobody present knew it, was Mark Twain. He told an absurd story which may be read with elucidations in the volume of his "Speeches." An account of the episode is given by Mr. Howells in "My Mark Twain." The story represents a western miner telling a stranger about three "litry cusses" who came to his cabin, and who called themselves Mr. Emerson, Mr. Longfellow, and Doctor Holmes. Mark Twain assumed that because these three distinguished old gentlemen were present at the table, in the midst of an immaculate civilization, the miner's yarn of three impossible hoboes representing themselves as Mr. Longfellow, Doctor Holmes, and Mr. Emerson, would be funny enough and would make everybody feel jolly and take another drink. An arctic chill congealed the story as it fell from Mark Twain's lips. Nobody was offended, really offended, but everybody was dismal, except the three fine old men of whom the other guests were abjectly, pitifully afraid. Literature was sensible enough, for it can always behave in a manly fashion; but the appreciation of literature, that is, the social respect for local greatness, was so unsure of itself, so cringing and abashed by reputation, that it had no true dignity, only a Bostonian stiffness. Evidently few large-minded and easy-natured people were present at that dinner. Professor Child was not there. He read Clemens's speech next day in the newspaper and chuckled - the only human laugh known to have been evoked in all New England by Mark Twain's tragic drollery. Clemens himself, a sensitive, self-scrutinizing, gentle man, was deeply distressed, and he suffered long after he left Boston and returned to America. Mr. Howells, the toastmaster, not only felt the normal discomfort which every toastmaster feels when somebody whom "we have with us to-night" makes a fizzle, but continued for thirty-five years to deplore Mark Twain's disastrous blunder. He seems not to understand yet what happened; he does not, by his account, perceive that Mark Twain was the only young man present who behaved like a wholesome human being, and that his one mistake was in believing that he had been invited to a pleasant celebration. The occasion was really a funeral. Literature was being buried in Boston. In thirty-five years it has not been reborn there. This little "disaster," unimportant in itself, towers like Bunker Hill monument in the literary landscape, marking the defeat of the local forces. It symbolizes the passing of an era; it is a mile-stone as well as a tomb-stone. To read the record of that dinner is to pull the lava off an intellectual Pompeii. Everything in the Boston mind is just as it was; not a thought has been engendered in any nativeborn literary intellect since 1877. Old Boston stands there with the paralyzed gestures of death-in-life survival; it has not even decayed; it is simply arrested, moveless, permanent, caught just in the moment when it was putting its last loaf of literary bread into the oven. It is real bread, a little soggy with the weight of the ashes, but well baked and with a quaint lingering savour. This is old Boston. The million beings who go about the streets to-day and do the business of thriving modern Boston are a new people, like the Italians who walk above the graves of Rome; and these new Bostonians have not yet begun to make literature. Mark Twain escaped the fall of ashes and lava and returned to the universe of nature and humanity. One other man, Mr. Howells, was rescued. Having been born in Ohio, he was in part immune against the catastrophe that overtook all thoroughgoing literary Bostonians. His American birth and training preserved him. But he has never been the man he might have been if he had not come under the enervating spell of obsolete pieties. Nature made him witty, genial, sympathetic, observant, and endowed him with an infallible ear for the rhythms of English prose. To read any of the beautiful pages of "Venetian Life" (the book in which he is nearest to being a poet, for in those days romance and youth were still a generous current in his soul) - then to read "The Flight of Pony Baker," a delicious boy's book which proves that he was incorrigibly young at sixty-five - then to read any of his twenty novels - is to get an impression of a man of rare and diversified gifts born to be one of the great interpreters of human life. But |