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Mark Twain, A Biography Vol II, Part 1: 1875 - 1886
CXXXVIII. Many Undertakings
by Paine, Albert Bigelow
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To write a detailed biography of Mark Twain at this period would be to
defy perusal. Even to set down all the interesting matters, interesting
to the public of his time, would mean not only to exhaust the subject,
but the reader. He lived at the top of his bent, and almost anything
relating to him was regarded as news. Daily and hourly he mingled with
important matters or spoke concerning them. A bare list of the
interesting events of Mark Twain's life would fill a large volume.
He was so busy, so deeply interested himself, so vitally alive to every
human aspect. He read the papers through, and there was always enough to
arouse his indignation--the doings of the human race at large could be
relied upon to do that--and he would write, and write, to relieve
himself. His mental Niagara was always pouring away, turning out
articles, essays, communications on every conceivable subject, mainly
with the idea of reform. There were many public and private abuses, and
he wanted to correct them all. He covered reams of paper with lurid
heresies--political, religious, civic--for most of which there was no
hope of publication.
Now and then he was allowed to speak out: An order from the Post-office
Department at Washington concerning the superscription of envelopes
seemed to him unwarranted. He assailed it, and directly the nation was
being entertained by a controversy between Mark Twain and the Postmaster-
General's private secretary, who subsequently receded from the field.
At another time, on the matter of postage rates he wrote a paper which
began: "Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member
of Congress. But I repeat myself."
It is hardly necessary to add that the paper did not appear.
On the whole, Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print,
and such of these papers as are preserved to-day form a curious
collection of human documents. Many of them could be printed to-day,
without distress to any one. The conditions that invited them are
changed; the heresies are not heresies any more. He may have had some
thought of their publication in later years, for once he wrote:
Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put
them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then
all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the result.
I have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me
entirely. It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and
admire the trouble it would make for me and the family. I will
leave it behind and utter it from the grave. There is a free speech
there, and no harm to the family.
It is too late and too soon to print most of these things; too late to
print them for their salutary influence, too soon to print them as
literature.
He was interested in everything: in music, as little as he knew of it.
He had an ear for melody, a dramatic vision, and the poetic conception of
sound. Reading some lilting lyric, he could fancy the words marching to
melody, and would cast about among his friends for some one who could
supply a tuneful setting. Once he wrote to his friend the Rev. Dr.
Parker, who was a skilled musician, urging him to write a score for
Tennyson's "Bugle Song," outlining an attractive scheme for it which the
order of his fancy had formulated. Dr. Parker replied that the "Bugle
Song," often attempted, had been the despair of many musicians.
He was interested in business affairs. Already, before the European
trip, he had embarked in, and disembarked from, a number of pecuniary
ventures. He had not been satisfied with a strictly literary income.
The old tendency to speculative investment, acquired during those
restless mining days, always possessed him. There were no silver mines
in the East, no holes in the ground into which to empty money and effort;
but there were plenty of equivalents--inventions, stock companies, and
the like. He had begun by putting five thousand dollars into the
American Publishing Company; but that was a sound and profitable venture,
and deserves to be remembered for that reason.
Then a man came along with a patent steam generator which would save
ninety per cent. of the fuel energy, or some such amount, and Mark Twain
was early persuaded that it would revolutionize the steam manufactures of
the world; so he put in whatever bank surplus he had and bade it a
permanent good-by.
Following the steam generator came a steam pulley, a rather small
contrivance, but it succeeded in extracting thirty-two thousand dollars
from his bank account in a period of sixteen months.
By the time he had accumulated a fresh balance, a new method of marine
telegraphy was shown him, so he used it up on that, twenty-five thousand
dollars being the price of this adventure.
A watch company in western New York was ready to sell him a block of
shares by the time he was prepared to experiment again, but it did not
quite live to declare the first dividend on his investment.
Senator John P. Jones invited him to join in the organization of an
accident insurance company, and such was Jones's confidence in the
venture that he guaranteed Clemens against loss. Mark Twain's only
profit from this source was in the delivery of a delicious speech, which
he made at a dinner given to Cornelius Walford, of London, an insurance
author of repute. Jones was paying back the money presently, and about
that time came a young inventor named Graham Bell, offering stock in a
contrivance for carrying the human voice on an electric wire. At almost
any other time Clemens would eagerly have welcomed this opportunity; but
he was so gratified at having got his money out of the insurance venture
that he refused to respond to the happy "hello" call of fortune. In some
memoranda made thirty years later he said:
I declined. I said I didn't want anything more to do with wildcat
speculation. Then he [Bell] offered the stock to me at twenty-five. I
said I didn't want it at any price. He became eager; insisted that I
take five hundred dollars' worth. He said he would sell me as much as I
wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my
hands and measure it in a plug hat; said I could have a whole hatful for
five hundred dollars. But I was the burnt child, and I resisted all
these temptations-resisted them easily; went off with my check intact,
and next day lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to a friend
who was going to go bankrupt three days later.
About the end of the year I put up a telephone wire from my house down to
the Courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first one
that was ever used in a private house in the world.
That had been only a little while before he sailed for Europe. When he
returned he would have been willing to accept a very trifling interest in
the telephone industry for the amount of his insurance salvage.
He had a fresh interest in patents now, and when his old friend Dan Slote
got hold of a new process for engraving--the kaolatype or "chalk-plate"
process--which was going to revolutionize the world of illustration, he
promptly acquired a third interest, and eventually was satisfied with
nothing short of control. It was an ingenious process: a sheet of
perfectly smooth steel was coated with a preparation of kaolin (or china
clay), and a picture was engraved through the coating down to the steel
surface. This formed the matrix into which the molten metal was poured
to make the stereotype plate, or die, for printing. It was Clemens's
notion that he could utilize this process for the casting of brass dies
for stamping book covers--that, so applied, the fortunes to be made out
of it would be larger and more numerous. Howells tells how, at one time,
Clemens thought the "damned human race" was almost to be redeemed by a
process of founding brass without air-bubbles in it. This was the time
referred to and the race had to go unredeemed; for, after long, worried,
costly experimenting, the brass refused to accommodate its nature to the
new idea, while the chalk plate itself, with all its subsidiary and
auxiliary possibilities, was infringed upon right and left, and the
protecting patent failed to hold. The process was doomed, in any case.
It was barely established before the photographic etching processes,
superior in all ways, were developed and came quickly into use. The
kaolatype enterprise struggled nobly for a considerable period. Clemens
brought his niece's husband, young Charles L. Webster, from Fredonia to
manage it for him, and backed it liberally. Webster was vigorous, hard-
working, and capable; but the end of each month showed a deficit, until
Clemens was from forty to fifty thousand dollars out of pocket in his
effort to save the race with chalk and brass. The history of these
several ventures (and there were others), dismissed here in a few
paragraphs, would alone make a volume not without interest, certainly not
without humor. Following came the type-setting machine, but we are not
ready for that. Of necessity it is a longer, costlier story.
Mrs. Clemens did not share his enthusiasm in these various enterprises.
She did not oppose them, at least not strenuously, but she did not
encourage them. She did not see their need. Their home was beautiful;
they were happy; he could do his work in deliberation and comfort. She
knew the value of money better than he, cared more for it in her own way;
but she had not his desire to heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in
torrential golden showers. She was willing to let well enough alone.
Clemens could not do this, and suffered accordingly. In the midst of
fair home surroundings and honors we find him writing to his mother:
Life has come to be a very serious matter with me. I have a
badgered, harassed feeling a good part of my time. It comes mainly
from business responsibilities and annoyances.
He had no moral right to be connected with business at all. He had a
large perception of business opportunity, but no vision of its
requirements--its difficulties and details. He was the soul of honor,
but in anything resembling practical direction he was but a child.
During any period of business venture he was likely to be in hot water:
eagerly excited, worried, impatient; alternately suspicious and over-
trusting, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset.
Yet never, even to the end of his days, would he permanently lose faith
in speculative ventures. Human traits are sometimes modified, but never
eliminated. The man who is born to be a victim of misplaced confidence
will continue to be one so long as he lives and there are men willing to
victimize him. The man who believes in himself as an investor will
uphold that faith against all disaster so long as he draws breath and has
money to back his judgments.
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