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13 January, 2012
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My Mark Twain
IX.
by Howells, William Dean
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He was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine
instinct, which would have pleased Lowell, of never putting his hands on
you--fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a
girl's, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion; he did not paw
you with them to show his affection, as so many of us Americans are apt
to do. Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of
us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final personality was
something exquisite. His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps,
from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his
ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his
rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that
was what in the last analysis he was. They might come away loathing or
hating him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the
most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men. He was
Southwestern, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights
as against ours, but I never saw a man more regardful of negroes. He had
a yellow butler when I first began to know him, because he said he could
not bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering George
were those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore. He loved to
rely upon George, who was such a broken reed in some things, though so
stanch in others, and the fervent Republican in politics that Clemens
then liked him to be. He could interpret Clemens's meaning to the public
without conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth
to the person denied his presence. His general instructions were that
this presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft
heart of George was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up
into the billiard-room saying that Mr. Smith wished to see Clemens. Upon
inquiry, Mr. Smith developed no ties of friendship, and Clemens said,
"You go and tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn't come down to see the Twelve
Apostles." George turned from the threshold where he had kept himself,
and framed a paraphrase of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith
away content with himself and all the rest of the world.
The part of him that was Western in his Southwestern origin Clemens kept
to the end, but he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew.
No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no
one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticized,
pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal. He held himself responsible for
the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he
explained, in paying the way of a negro student through Yale, that he was
doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every
black man. He said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to
see him or know his name; it was quite enough that he was a negro. About
that time a colored cadet was expelled from West Point for some point of
conduct "unbecoming an officer and gentleman," and there was the usual
shabby philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro
could never feel the claim of honor. The man was fifteen parts white,
but, "Oh yes," Clemens said, with bitter irony, "it was that one part
black that undid him." It made him a "nigger" and incapable of being a
gentleman. It was to blame for the whole thing. The fifteen parts white
were guiltless.
Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he
was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history.
He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that "it was not yet time" to
philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must "wait till
its passions had cooled," and "the clouds of strife had cleared away."
He maintained that the time would never come when we should see its
motives and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour
to ascertain them in lasting verity. Picturesquely and dramatically he
portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the
distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on
fable.
He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor in his contempt which
those who knew him best appreciated most. The late Noah Brooks, who had
been in California at the beginning of Clemens's career, and had
witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it,
once said to me that he would rather have any one else in the world down
on him than Mark Twain. But as Clemens grew older he grew more merciful,
not to the wrong, but to the men who were in it. The wrong was often the
source of his wildest drolling. He considered it in such hopelessness of
ever doing it justice that his despair broke in laughter.
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