Complete Letters of Mark Twain | Page 9

to work out his fancies and put
them into visible form.
It was not so easy to work at Hartford; there was too much going on.
The Clemens home was a sort of general headquarters for literary folk,
near and far, and for distinguished foreign visitors of every sort.
Howells and Aldrich used it as their half-way station between Boston
and New York, and every foreign notable who visited America made a
pilgrimage to Hartford to see Mark Twain. Some even went as far as
Elmira, among them Rudyard Kipling, who recorded his visit in a
chapter of his American Notes. Kipling declared he had come all the

way from India to see Mark Twain.
Hartford had its own literary group. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived
near the Clemens home; also Charles Dudley Warner. The Clemens and
Warner families were constantly associated, and The Gilded Age,
published in 1873, resulted from the friendship of Warner and Mark
Twain. The character of Colonel Sellers in that book has become
immortal, and it is a character that only Mark Twain could create, for,
though drawn from his mother's cousin, James Lampton, it
embodies--and in no very exaggerated degree--characteristics that were
his own. The tendency to make millions was always imminent;
temptation was always hard to resist. Money-making schemes are
continually being placed before men of means and prominence, and
Mark Twain, to the day of his death, found such schemes fatally
attractive.
It was because of the Sellers characteristics in him that he invested in a
typesetting-machine which cost him nearly two hundred thousand
dollars and helped to wreck his fortunes by and by. It was because of
this characteristic that he invested in numberless schemes of lesser
importance, but no less disastrous in the end. His one successful
commercial venture was his association with Charles L. Webster in the
publication of the Grant Memoirs, of which enough copies were sold to
pay a royalty of more than four hundred thousand dollars to Grant's
widow-- the largest royalty ever paid from any single publication. It
saved the Grant family from poverty. Yet even this triumph was a
misfortune to Mark Twain, for it led to scores of less profitable book
ventures and eventual disaster.
Meanwhile he had written and published a number of books. Tom
Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi,
Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
were among the volumes that had entertained the world and inspired it
with admiration and love for their author. In 1878-79 he had taken his
family to Europe, where they spent their time in traveling over the
Continent. It was during this period that he was joined by his intimate
friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, of Hartford, and the two made a
journey, the story of which is told in A Tramp Abroad.
In 1891 the Hartford house was again closed, this time indefinitely, and
the family, now five in number, took up residence in Berlin. The

typesetting-machine and the unfortunate publishing venture were
drawing heavily on the family finances at this period, and the cost of
the Hartford establishment was too great to be maintained. During the
next three years he was distracted by the financial struggle which ended
in April, 1894, with the failure of Charles L. Webster & Co. Mark
Twain now found himself bankrupt, and nearly one hundred thousand
dollars in debt. It had been a losing fight, with this bitter ending always
in view; yet during this period of hard, hopeless effort he had written a
large portion of the book which of all his works will perhaps survive
the longest--his tender and beautiful story of Joan of Arc. All his life
Joan had been his favorite character in the world's history, and during
those trying months and years of the early nineties--in Berlin, in
Florence, in Paris--he was conceiving and putting his picture of that
gentle girl-warrior into perfect literary form. It was published in
Harper's Magazine--anonymously, because, as he said, it would not
have been received seriously had it appeared over his own name. The
authorship was presently recognized. Exquisitely, reverently, as the
story was told, it had in it the, touch of quaint and gentle humor which
could only have been given to it by Mark Twain.
It was only now and then that Mark Twain lectured during these years.
He had made a reading tour with George W. Cable during the winter of
1884-85, but he abominated the platform, and often vowed he would
never appear before an audience again. Yet, in 1895, when he was sixty
years old, he decided to rebuild his fortunes by making a reading tour
around the world. It was not required of him to pay his debts in full.
The creditors were willing