I have just been writing to a friend in Hartford' who treated what Iimagine was a similar case surgically last fall, and produced a permanent cure.If this is a like case, Charley must go to him.
If relief fails there, he must take the required rest, whether the business can stand it or not.
It is most pleasant to hear such prosperous accounts of Sam and Mary, I do not see how Sam could well be more advantageously fixed.He can grow up with that paper, and achieve a successful life.
It is not all holiday here with Susie and Clara this time.They have to put in some little time every day on their studies.Jean thinks she is studying too, but I don't know what it is unless it is the horses; she spends the day under their heels in the stables--and that is but a continuation of her Hartford system of culture.
With love from us all to you all.
Affectionately SAM.
Mark Twain had a few books that he read regularly every year or two.
Among these were 'Pepys's Diary', Suetonius's 'Lives of the Twelve Caesars', and Thomas Carlyle's 'French Revolution'.He had a passion for history, biography, and personal memoirs of any sort.In his early life he had cared very little for poetry, but along in the middle eighties he somehow acquired a taste for Browning and became absorbed in it.
A Browning club assembled as often as once a week at the Clemens home in Hartford to listen to his readings of the master.He was an impressive reader, and he carefully prepared himself for these occasions, indicating by graduated underscorings, the exact values he wished to give to words and phrases.Those were memorable gatherings, and they must have continued through at least two winters.It is one of the puzzling phases of Mark Twain's character that, notwithstanding his passion for direct and lucid expression, he should have found pleasure in the poems of Robert Browning.
To W.D.Howells, in Boston:
ELMIRA, Aug.22, '87.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps.When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment (and Taine and St.Simon): and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.Carlyle teaches no such gospel so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences.
People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey.I wonder how they can lie so.
It comes of practice, no doubt.They would not say that of Dickens's or Scott's books.Nothing remains the same.When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for.Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn't altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.
Well, that's loss.To have house and Bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss-for a moment.But there are compensations.You tilt the tube skyward and bring planets and comets and corona flames a hundred and fifty thousand miles high into the field.
Which I see you have done, and found Tolstoi.I haven't got him in focus yet, but I've got Browning....
Ys Ever MARK.
Mention has been made already of Mark Twain's tendency to absentmindedness.He was always forgetting engagements, or getting them wrong.Once he hurried to an afternoon party, and finding the mistress of the house alone, sat down and talked to her comfortably for an hour or two, not remembering his errand at all.It was only when he reached home that he learned that the party had taken place the week before.It was always dangerous for him to make engagements, and he never seemed to profit by sorrowful experience.
We, however, may profit now by one of his amusing apologies.
To Mrs.Grover Cleveland, in Washington:
HARTFORD, Nov.6, 1887.