In Florence, that winter, Clemens began dictating to his secretary some autobiographical chapters.This was the work which was "not to see print until I am dead." He found it a pleasant, lazy occupation and wrote his delight in it to Howells in a letter which seems not to have survived.In his reply, Howells wrote: "You do stir me mightily with the hope of dictating and I will try it when I get the chance.But there is the tempermental difference.You are dramatic and unconscious; you count the thing more than yourself; I am cursed with consciousness to the core, and can't say myself out; I am always saying myself in, and setting myself above all that I say, as of more worth.Lately I have felt as if I were rotting with egotism.I don't admire myself; I am sick of myself; but I can't think of anything else.Here I am at it now, when I ought to be rejoicing with you at the blessing you have found....I'd like, immensely, to read your autobiography.You always rather bewildered me by your veracity, and I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself.But all of it? The black truth which we all know of ourselves in our hearts, or only the whity-brown truth of the pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront? Even you won't tell the black heart's--truth.The man who could do it would be famed to the last day the sun shone upon."We gather from Mark Twain's answer that he was not deceiving himself in the matter of his confessions.
To W.D.Howells, in New York:
VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE, March 14, '04.
DEAR HOWELLS,--Yes, I set up the safeguards, in the first day's dictating; taking this position: that an autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author is raking dust upon it, the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.
The summer in England! you can't ask better luck than that.Then you will run over to Florence; we shall all be hungry to see you-all.We are hunting for another villa, (this one is plenty large enough but has no room in it) but even if we find it I am afraid it will be months before we can move Mrs.Clemens.Of course it will.But it comforts us to let on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep hope alive in her.
Good-bye, with love, Amen.
Yours ever MARK.
News came of the death of Henry M.Stanley, one of Mark Twain's oldest friends.Clemens once said that he had met Stanley in St.
Louis where he (Clemens) had delivered a lecture which Stanley had reported.In the following letter he fixes the date of their meeting as early in 1867, which would be immediately after Mark Twain's return from California, and just prior to the Quaker City excursion--a fact which is interesting only because it places the two men together when each was at the very beginning of a great career.
To Lady Stanley, in England:
VILLA DI QUARTO, FIRENZE, May 11, '04.
DEAR LADY STANLEY,--I have lost a dear and honored friend--how fast they fall about me now, in my age! The world has lost a tried and proved hero.And you--what have you lost? It is beyond estimate--we who know you, and what he was to you, know that.How far he stretches across my life! I knew him when his work was all before him five years before the great day that he wrote his name far-away up on the blue of the sky for the world to see and applaud and remember; I have known him as friend and intimate ever since.It is 37 years.I have known no other friend and intimate so long, except John Hay--a friendship which dates from the same year and the same half of it, the first half of 1867.I grieve with you and with your family, dear Lady Stanley, it is all I can do; but that Ido out of my heart.It would be we, instead of I, if Mrs.Clemens knew, but in all these 20 months that she has lain a prisoner in her bed we have hidden from her all things that could sadden her.Many a friend is gone whom she still asks about and still thinks is living.
In deepest sympathy I beg the privilege of signing myself Your friend, S.L.CLEMENS.
To Rev.J.H.Twichell, in Hartford:
VILLA DI QUARTO, May 11, '04
DEAR JOE,--Yours has this moment arrived--just as I was finishing a note to poor Lady Stanley.I believe the last country-house visit we paid in England was to Stanley's.Lord, how my friends and acquaintances fall about me now, in my gray-headed days! Vereschagin, Mommsen, Dvorak, Lenbach, Jokai--all so recently, and now Stanley.I had known Stanley 37years.Goodness, who is it I haven't known! As a rule the necrologies find me personally interested--when they treat of old stagers.Generally when a man dies who is worth cabling, it happens that I have run across him somewhere, some time or other.
Oh, say! Down by the Laurentian Library there's a marble image that has been sitting on its pedestal some 450 Years, if my dates are right--Cosimo I.I've seen the back of it many a time, but not the front; but yesterday I twisted my head around after we had driven by, and the profane exclamation burst from my mouth before I could think: "there's Chauncey Depew!"I mean to get a photo of it--and use it if it confirms yesterday's conviction.That's a very nice word from the Catholic Magazine and I am glad you sent it.I mean to show it to my priest--we are very fond of him.He is a stealing man, and is also learnedly scientific.He invented the thing which records the seismatic disturbances, for the peoples of the earth.And he's an astronomer and has an observatory of his own.
Ah, many's the cry I have, over reflecting that maybe we could have had Young Harmony for Livy, and didn't have wit enough to think of it.