Mark Twain's Letters Part 42

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Just as soon as you consented I realized all the atrocity of my request, and straightway blushed and weakened. I telegraphed my theatrical agent to come here and carry off the MS and copy it.

But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows: dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your remuneration, half of the first $6000 which I receive for its representation on the stage.

You could alter the plot entirely, if you chose. I could help in the work, most cheerfully, after you had arranged the plot. I have my eye upon two young girls who can play "Tom" and "Huck." I believe a good deal of a drama can be made of it. Come--can't you tackle this in the odd hours of your vacation? or later, if you prefer?

I do wish you could come down once more before your holiday. I'd give anything!

Yrs ever, MARK.

Howells wrote that he had no time for the dramatization and urged Clemens to undertake it himself. He was ready to read the story, whenever it should arrive. Clemens did not hurry, however, The publication of Tom Sawyer could wait.

He already had a book in press--the volume of Sketches New and Old, which he had prepared for Bliss several years before.

Sketches was issued that autumn, and Howells gave it a good notice--possibly better than it deserved.

Considered among Mark Twain's books to-day, the collection of sketches does not seem especially important. With the exception of the frog story and the "True Story" most of those included--might be spared. Clemens himself confessed to Howells that He wished, when it was too late, that he had destroyed a number of them. The book, however, was distinguished in a special way: it contains Mark Twain's first utterance in print on the subject of copyright, a matter in which he never again lost interest. The absurdity and injustice of the copyright laws both amused and irritated him, and in the course of time he would be largely instrumental in their improvement. In the book his open pet.i.tion to Congress that all property rights, as well as literary ownership, should be put on the copyright basis and limited to a "beneficent term of forty-two years," was more or less of a joke, but, like so many of Mark Twain's jokes, it was founded on reason and justice.

He had another idea, that was not a joke: an early plan in the direction of international copyright. It was to be a pet.i.tion signed by the leading American authors, asking the United States to declare itself to be the first to stand for right and justice by enacting laws against the piracy of foreign books. It was a rather utopian scheme, as most schemes for moral progress are, in their beginning. It would not be likely ever to reach Congress, but it would appeal to Howells and his Cambridge friends. Clemens wrote, outlining his plan of action.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Sept. 18, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My plan is this--you are to get Mr. Lowell and Mr.

Longfellow to be the first signers of my copyright pet.i.tion; you must sign it yourself and get Mr. Whittier to do likewise. Then Holmes will sign--he said he would if he didn't have to stand at the head. Then I'm fixed. I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages and send him personally to every author of distinction in the country, and corral the rest of the signatures. Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed (about a thousand copies) and move upon the President and Congress in person, but in the subordinate capacity of a party who is merely the agent of better and wiser men--men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at.

I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush--but still I would frame it.)

Next I would get a prime leader in Congress: I would also see that votes enough to carry the measure were privately secured before the bill was offered. This I would try through my leader and my friends there.

And then if Europe chose to go on stealing from us, we would say with n.o.ble enthusiasm, "American lawmakers do steal but not from foreign authors--Not from foreign authors!"

You see, what I want to drive into the Congressional mind is the simple fact that the moral law is "Thou shalt not steal"--no matter what Europe may do.

I swear I can't see any use in robbing European authors for the benefit of American booksellers, anyway.

If we can ever get this thing through Congress, we can try making copyright perpetual, some day. There would be no sort of use in it, since only one book in a hundred millions outlives the present copyright term--no sort of use except that the writer of that one book have his rights--which is something.

If we only had some G.o.d in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get Him into the Const.i.tution, it would be better all around.

The only man who ever signed my pet.i.tion with alacrity, and said that the fact that a thing was right was all-sufficient, was Rev. Dr.

Bushnell.

I have lost my old pet.i.tion, (which was brief) but will draft and enclose another--not in the words it ought to be, but in the substance.

I want Mr. Lowell to furnish the words (and the ideas too,) if he will do it.

Say--Redpath beseeches me to lecture in Boston in November--telegraphs that Beecher's and Nast's withdrawal has put him in the tightest kind of a place. So I guess I'll do that old "Roughing It" lecture over again in November and repeat it 2 or 3 times in New York while I am at it.

Can I take a carriage after the lecture and go out and stay with you that night, provided you find at that distant time that it will not inconvenience you? Is Aldrich home yet?

With love to you all Yrs ever, S. L. C.

Of course the pet.i.tion never reached Congress. Holmes's comment that governments were not in the habit of setting themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue, was shared by too many others. The pet.i.tion was tabled, but Clemens never abandoned his purpose and lived to see most of his dream fulfilled. Meantime, Howells's notice of the Sketches appeared in the Atlantic, and brought grateful acknowledgment from the author.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Oct. 19, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--That is a perfectly superb notice. You can easily believe that nothing ever gratified me so much before. The newspaper praises bestowed upon the "Innocents Abroad" were large and generous, but somehow I hadn't confidence in the critical judgement of the parties who furnished them. You know how that is, yourself, from reading the newspaper notices of your own books. They gratify a body, but they always leave a small pang behind in the shape of a fear that the critic's good words could not safely be depended upon as authority.

Yours is the recognized critical Court of Last Resort in this country; from its decision there is no appeal; and so, to have gained this decree of yours before I am forty years old, I regard as a thing to be right down proud of. Mrs. Clemens says, "Tell him I am just as grateful to him as I can be." (It sounds as if she were grateful to you for heroically trampling the truth under foot in order to praise me but in reality it means that she is grateful to you for being bold enough to utter a truth which she fully believes all competent people know, but which none has heretofore been brave enough to utter.) You see, the thing that gravels her is that I am so persistently glorified as a mere buffoon, as if that entirely covered my case--which she denies with venom.

The other day Mrs. Clemens was planning a visit to you, and so I am waiting with a pleasurable hope for the result of her deliberations. We are expecting visitors every day, now, from New York; and afterward some are to come from Elmira. I judge that we shall then be free to go Bostonward. I should be just delighted; because we could visit in comfort, since we shouldn't have to do any shopping--did it all in New York last week, and a tremendous pull it was too.

Mrs. C. said the other day, "We will go to Cambridge if we have to walk; for I don't believe we can ever get the Howellses to come here again until we have been there." I was gratified to see that there was one string, anyway, that could take her to Cambridge. But I will do her the justice to say that she is always wanting to go to Cambridge, independent of the selfish desire to get a visit out of you by it. I want her to get started, now, before children's diseases are fashionable again, because they always play such hob with visiting arrangements.

With love to you all Yrs Ever S. L. CLEMENS.

Mark Twain's trips to Boston were usually made alone. Women require more preparation to go visiting, and Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Howells seem to have exchanged visits infrequently. For Mark Twain, perhaps, it was just as well that his wife did not always go with him; his absent-mindedness and boyish ingenuousness often led him into difficulties which Mrs. Clemens sometimes found embarra.s.sing.

In the foregoing letter they were planning a visit to Cambridge. In the one that follows they seem to have made it--with certain results, perhaps not altogether amusing at the moment.

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

Oct. 4, '75.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We had a royal good time at your house, and have had a royal good time ever since, talking about it, both privately and with the neighbors.

Mrs. Clemens's bodily strength came up handsomely under that cheery respite from household and nursery cares. I do hope that Mrs. Howells's didn't go correspondingly down, under the added burden to her cares and responsibilities. Of course I didn't expect to get through without committing some crimes and hearing of them afterwards, so I have taken the inevitable lashings and been able to hum a tune while the punishment went on. I "caught it" for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her coffee when it was "a good deal better than we get at home." I "caught it" for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS when the printers are done with it. I "caught it" once more for personating that drunken Col. James. I "caught it" for mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shame-facedly, that I had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr.

Houghton, &c., &c., &c., the Madam was simply speechless for the s.p.a.ce of a minute. Then she said:

"How could you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--"

"Oh, Howells won't mind it! You don't know Howells. Howells is a man who--" She was gone. But George was the first person she stumbled on in the hall, so she took it out of George. I was glad of that, because it saved the babies.

I've got another rattling good character for my novel! That great work is mulling itself into shape gradually.