Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  Our clothes were pretty shabby, but that was no matter; we were in the fashion; the rest of the slender population were dressed as we were. Our boys hadn’t had a cent for several months, and hadn’t needed one, their credit being perfectly good for bacon, coffee, flour, beans and molasses. If there was any difference, Jim was the worst dressed of the three of us; if there was any discoverable difference in the matter of age, Jim’s shreds were the oldest; but he was a gallant creature, and his style and bearing could make any costume regal. One day we were in the decayed and naked and rickety inn when a couple of musical tramps appeared; one of them played the banjo, and the other one danced unscientific clog-dances and sang comic songs that made a person sorry to be alive. They passed the hat and collected three or four dimes from the dozen bankrupt pocket-miners present. When the hat approached Jim he said to me, with his fine millionaire air,

  “Let me have a dollar.”

  I gave him a couple of halves. Instead of modestly dropping them into the hat, he pitched them into it at the distance of a yard, just as in the ancient novels milord the Duke doesn’t hand the beggar a benefaction, but “tosses” it to him, or flings it at his feet—and it is always a “purse of gold.” In the novel, the witnesses are always impressed; Jim’s great spirit was the spirit of the novel; to him the half-dollars were a purse of gold; like the Duke, he was playing to the gallery, but the parallel ends there. In the Duke’s case, the witnesses knew he could afford the purse of gold, and the largest part of their admiration consisted in envy of the man who could throw around purses of gold in that fine and careless way. The miners admired Jim’s handsome liberality, but they knew he couldn’t afford what he had done, and that fact modified their admiration. Jim was worth a hundred of Bret Harte, for he was a man, and a whole man. In his little exhibition of vanity and pretense he exposed a characteristic which made him resemble Harte, but the resemblance began and ended there.

  I come to the Harte incident now. When our play was in a condition to be delivered to Parsloe, the lessee of it, I had occasion to go to New York, and I stopped at the St. James Hotel, as usual. Harte had been procrastinating; the play should have been in Parsloe’s hands a day or two earlier than this, but Harte had not attended to it. About seven in the evening he came into the lobby of the hotel, dressed in an ancient gray suit so out of repair that the bottoms of his trowsers were frazzled to a fringe; his shoes were similarly out of repair, and were sodden with snow-slush and mud, and on his head, and slightly tipped to starboard, rested a crumpled and gallus little soft hat which was a size or two too small for him; his bright little red necktie was present, and rather more than usually cheery and contented and conspicuous. He had the play in his hand. Parsloe’s theatre was not three minutes’ walk distant; I supposed he would say,

  “Come along—let’s take the play to Parsloe.”

  But he didn’t; he stepped up to the counter, offered his parcel to the clerk, and said, with the manner of an earl,

  “It is for Mr. Parsloe—send it to the theatre.”

  The clerk looked him over austerely and said, with the air of a person who is presenting a checkmating difficulty,

  “The messenger’s fee will be ten cents.”

  Harte said,

  “Call him.”

  Which the clerk did. The boy answered the call, took the parcel and stood waiting for orders. There was a certain malicious curiosity visible in the clerk’s face. Harte turned toward me, and said,

  “Let me have a dollar.”

  I handed it to him. He handed it to the boy and said,

  “Run along.”

  The clerk said, “Wait, I’ll give you the change.”

  Harte gave his hand a ducal wave and said,

  “Never mind it. Let the boy keep it.”

  Bret Harte continued: he avoids voting either for Tilden or Hayes because each has promised him a consulship; sends his son to John McCullough with letter of introduction; Mr. Clemens denounces him in the Players Club.

  Edward Everett Hale wrote a book which made a great and pathetic sensation when it issued from the press in the lurid days when the Civil War was about to break out and the North and South were crouched for a spring at each other’s throats. It was called “A Man Without a Country.” Harte, in a mild and colorless way, was that kind of a man—that is to say, he was a man without a country; no, not man—man is too strong a term: he was an invertebrate without a country. He hadn’t any more passion for his country than an oyster has for its bed; in fact not so much, and I apologize to the oyster. The higher passions were left out of Harte; what he knew about them he got from books. When he put them into his own books they were imitations; often good ones, often as deceptive to people who did not know Harte as are the actor’s simulation of passions on the stage when he is not feeling them but is only following certain faithfully studied rules for their artificial reproduction. On the 7th of November 1876—I think it was the 7th—he suddenly appeared at my house in Hartford and remained there during the following day—election day. As usual, he was tranquil; he was serene; doubtless the only serene and tranquil voter in the United States; the rest—as usual in our country—were excited away up to the election limit, for that vast political conflagration was blazing at white heat which was presently to end in one of the Republican party’s most cold-blooded swindles of the American people—the stealing of the Presidential chair from Mr. Tilden, who had been elected, and the conferring of it upon Mr. Hayes, who had been defeated. I was an ardent Hayes man, but that was natural, for I was pretty young at the time. I have since convinced myself that the political opinions of a nation are of next to no value, in any case, but that what little rag of value they possess is to be found among the old, rather than among the young. I was as excited and inflamed as was the rest of the voting world, and I was surprised when Harte said he was going to remain with us until the day after the election; but not much surprised, for he was such a careless creature that I thought it just possible that he had gotten his dates mixed. There was plenty of time for him to correct his mistake, and I suggested that he go back to New York and not lose his vote. But he said he was not caring about his vote; that he had come away purposely, in order that he might avoid voting and yet have a good excuse to answer the critics with. Then he told me why he did not wish to vote. He said that through influential friends he had secured the promise of a consulate from Mr. Tilden, and the same promise from Mr. Hayes; that he was going to be taken care of no matter how the contest might go, and that his interest in the election began and ended there. He said he could not afford to vote for either of the candidates, because the other candidate might find it out and consider himself privileged to cancel his pledge. It was a curious satire upon our political system! Why should a President care how an impending Consul had voted? Consulships are not political offices; naturally and properly a Consul’s qualifications should begin and end with fitness for the post; and in an entirely sane political system the question of a man’s political complexion could have nothing to do with the matter. However, the man who was defeated by the nation was placed in the Presidential chair, and the man without a country got his consulship.

  Harte had no feeling, for the reason that he had no machinery to feel with. John McCullough, the tragedian, was a man of high character; a generous man, a lovable man, and a man whose truthfulness could not be challenged. He was a great admirer of Harte’s literature, and in the early days in San Francisco he had had a warm fondness for Harte himself; as the years went by, this fondness cooled to some extent, a circumstance for which Harte was responsible. However, in the days of Harte’s consulship McCullough’s affection for him had merely undergone a diminution; it had by no means disappeared; but by and by something happened which abolished what was left of it. John McCullough told me all about it. One day a young man appeared in his quarters in New York and said he was Bret Harte’s son, and had just arrived from England with a letter of introduction and recommendation from his father�
�and he handed the letter to McCullough. McCullough greeted him cordially, and said,

  “I was expecting you, my boy. I know your errand, through a letter which I have already received from your father; and by good luck I am in a position to satisfy your desire. I have just the place for you, and you can consider yourself on salary from to-day, and now.”

  Young Harte was eloquently grateful, and said,

  “I knew you would be expecting me, for my father promised me that he would write you in advance.”

  McCullough had Harte’s letter in his pocket, but he did not read it to the lad. In substance it was this:

  “My boy is stage-struck and wants to go to you for help, for he knows that you and I are old friends. To get rid of his importunities, I have been obliged to start him across the water equipped with a letter strongly recommending him to your kindness and protection, and begging you to do the best you can to forward his ambition, for my sake. I was obliged to write the letter, I couldn’t get out of it, but the present letter is to warn you, beforehand, to pay no attention to the other one. My son is stage-struck, but he isn’t of any account, and will never amount to anything; therefore don’t bother yourself with him; it wouldn’t pay you for your lost time and sympathy.”

  John McCullough stood by the boy and pushed his fortunes on the stage, and was the best father the lad ever had.

  I have said more than once, in these pages, that Harte had no heart and no conscience, and I have also said that he was mean and base. I have not said, perhaps, that he was treacherous, but if I have omitted that remark I wish to add it now.

  All of us, at one time or another, blunder stupidly into indiscreet acts and speeches; I am not an exception; I have done it myself. About a dozen years ago, I drifted into the Players Club one night and found half a dozen of the boys grouped cosily in a private corner sipping punches and talking. I joined them and assisted. Presently Bret Harte’s name was mentioned, and straightway that mention fired a young fellow who sat at my elbow, and for the next ten minutes he talked as only a person can talk whose subject lies near his heart. Nobody interrupted; everybody was interested. The young fellow’s talk was made up of strong and genuine enthusiasms; its subject was praise—praise of Mrs. Harte and her daughters. He told how they were living in a little town in New Jersey, and how hard they worked, and how faithfully, and how cheerfully, and how contentedly, to earn their living—Mrs. Harte by teaching music, the daughters by exercising the arts of drawing, embroidery, and such things—I, meantime, listening as eagerly as the rest, for I was aware that he was speaking the truth, and not overstating it.

  But presently he diverged into eulogies of the ostensible head of that deserted family, Bret Harte. He said that the family’s happiness had one defect in it; the absence of Harte. He said that their love and their reverence for him was a beautiful thing to see and hear; also their pity of him on account of his enforced exile from them. He also said that Harte’s own grief, because of this bitter exile, was beautiful to contemplate; that Harte’s faithfulness in writing, by every steamer, was beautiful, too; that he was always longing to come home in his vacations, but his salary was so small that he could not afford it; nevertheless, in his letters he was always promising himself this happiness in the next steamer, or the next one after that one; and that it was pitiful to see the family’s disappointment when the named steamers kept on arriving without him; that his self-sacrifice was an ennobling spectacle; that he was man enough, and fine enough, to deny himself in order that he might send to the family every month, for their support, that portion of his salary which a more selfish person would devote to the Atlantic voyage.

  Up to this time I had “stood the raise,” as the poker players say, but now I broke out and called the young fellow’s hand—as the pokers also say. I couldn’t help it. I saw that he had been misinformed. It seemed to be my duty to set him right. I said,

  “Oh that be hanged! There’s nothing in it. Bret Harte has deserted his family, and that is the plain English of it. Possibly he writes them, but I am not weak enough to believe it until I see the letters; possibly he is pining to come home to his deserted family, but no one that knows him will believe that. But there is one thing about which I think there can be no possibility of doubt—and that is, that he has never sent them a dollar, and has never intended to send them a dollar. Bret Harte is the most contemptible, poor little soulless blatherskite that exists on the planet to-day——”

  I had been dimly aware, very vaguely aware, by fitful glimpses of the countenances around me, that something was happening. It was I that was happening, but I didn’t know it. But when I had reached the middle of that last sentence somebody seized me and whispered into my ear, with energy,

  “For goodness sake shut up! This young fellow is Steele. He’s engaged to one of the daughters.”

  Bret Harte concluded—Newspaper item regarding his daughter—Mr. Clemens shows that she is not responsible for her unfortunate condition, as she inherited her temperament from her father; also shows that no one is responsible for his actions, because of the law of temperament: the lower animals are not responsible for their peculiar traits, why should human beings be responsible for theirs, when they inherit them from the lower animals?

  Ten or twelve days ago, this Associated Press telegram appeared in the twenty-three hundred daily newspapers of the United States, and of course was cabled to Europe:

  JESSAMY BRET HARTE A PAUPER

  * * *

  Daughter of Sierra Poet in the Poorhouse at Portland, Me.

  PORTLAND, Me., Jan. 28.—Mrs. W. H. Steele, formerly Jessamy Bret Harte, daughter of the poet Bret Harte, has been sent to the Portland poorhouse, ill, penniless and apparently friendless.

  It is alleged by her husband, who is now somewhere in the West, that his wife’s tastes were so expensive that he couldn’t keep her in funds. He says he sent her $15 a week but this wasn’t enough.

  About a year ago Mrs. Steele came here under the patronage of local society women to give readings from her father’s works. Since that time she has borrowed and spent money freely until now she is hopelessly in debt.

  She first lived at the Sherwood, a fashionable apartment house. Then she rented a summer cottage at Cape Elizabeth, which she had to give up for lack of funds. This winter she got apartments at the Lafayette, the biggest hotel in the city, but finally went away from there. A fashionable family had her as guest for a week until yesterday, when she became an object of charity.

  She wants to go to London, but the city will pay her fare to New York only.

  Who is to blame for this tragedy? That poor woman? I think not. She came by her unwise and unhappy ways legitimately; they are an inheritance; she got them from her father, along with her temperament. Temperament is a law, and that which it commands its possessor must obey; restraint, training, and environment can dull its action or suppress it for a time—long or short according to circumstances—but that is the most, and the best, that can be done with it; nothing can ever permanently modify it, by even a shade, between the cradle and the grave. Is this girl responsible for the results of her temperament? She did not invent her temperament herself; she was not consulted in the matter; she was allowed no more choice in the character of it than she was allowed in the selection of the color of her hair. Bret Harte transmitted his unfortunate temperament to her. Was he to blame for this? I cannot see that he was. He was not allowed a choice in the sort of temperament he was to confer upon her. To take up the next detail: was he to blame for the unhappy results of his own temperament? If he was, I fail to see how. He did not invent his temperament; he was not allowed a voice in the selection of it. Did he inherit it from his parents?—from his grandparents?—from his great-grandparents? If so, were they responsible for the results of their temperament? I think not. If we could trace Harte’s unlucky inheritance all the way back to Adam, I think we should still have to confess that all the transmitters of it were blameless, since none of them ever had
a voice in the choice of the temperament they were to transmit. As I have said, it is my conviction that a person’s temperament is a law, an iron law, and has to be obeyed, no matter who disapproves; manifestly, as it seems to me, temperament is a law of God, and is supreme, and takes precedence of all human laws. It is my conviction that each and every human law that exists has one distinct purpose and intention, and only one: to oppose itself to a law of God and defeat it, degrade it, deride it, and trample upon it. We find no fault with the spider for ungenerously ambushing the fly and taking its life; we do not call it murder; we concede that it did not invent its own temperament, its own nature, and is therefore not blamable for the acts which the law of its nature requires and commands. We even concede this large point: that no art and no ingenuity can ever reform the spider and persuade her to cease from her assassinations. We do not blame the tiger for obeying the ferocious law of the temperament which God lodged in him, and which the tiger must obey. We do not blame the wasp for her fearful cruelty in half paralysing a spider with her sting and then stuffing the spider down a hole in the ground to suffer there many days, while the wasp’s nursery gradually torture the helpless creature through a long and miserable death by gnawing rations from its person daily; we concede that the wasp is strictly and blamelessly obeying the law of God as required by the temperament which He has put into her. We do not blame the fox, the blue jay, and the many other creatures that live by theft; we concede that they are obeying the law of God promulgated by the temperament with which He provided for them. We do not say to the ram and the goat “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” for we know that ineradicably embedded in their temperament—that is to say in their born nature—God has said to them “Thou shalt commit it.”