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13 January, 2012
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My Mark Twain
XX.
by Howells, William Dean
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He satisfied the impassioned demand of his nature for incessant
activities of every kind by taking a personal as well as a pecuniary
interest in the inventions of others. At one moment "the damned human
race" was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without
air bubbles in it; if this could once be accomplished, as I understood,
or misunderstood, brass could be used in art-printing to a degree
hitherto impossible. I dare say I have got it wrong, but I am not
mistaken as to Clemens's enthusiasm for the process, and his heavy losses
in paying its way to ultimate failure. He was simultaneously absorbed in
the perfection of a type-setting machine, which he was paying the
inventor a salary to bring to a perfection so expensive that it was
practically impracticable. We were both printers by trade, and I could
take the same interest in this wonderful piece of mechanism that he
could; and it was so truly wonderful that it did everything but walk and
talk. Its ingenious creator was so bent upon realizing the highest ideal
in it that he produced a machine of quite unimpeachable efficiency. But
it was so costly, when finished, that it could not be made for less than
twenty thousand dollars, if the parts were made by hand. This sum was
prohibitive of its introduction, unless the requisite capital could be
found for making the parts by machinery, and Clemens spent many months in
vainly trying to get this money together. In the mean time simpler
machines had been invented and the market filled, and his investment of
three hundred thousand dollars in the beautiful miracle remained
permanent but not profitable. I once went with him to witness its
performance, and it did seem to me the last word in its way, but it had
been spoken too exquisitely, too fastidiously. I never heard him devote
the inventor to the infernal gods, as he was apt to do with the geniuses
he lost money by, and so I think he did not regard him as a traitor.
In these things, and in his other schemes for the 'subiti guadagni' of
the speculator and the "sudden making of splendid names" for the
benefactors of our species, Clemens satisfied the Colonel Sellers nature
in himself (from which he drew the picture of that wild and lovable
figure), and perhaps made as good use of his money as he could. He did
not care much for money in itself, but he luxuriated in the lavish use of
it, and he was as generous with it as ever a man was. He liked giving it,
but he commonly wearied of giving it himself, and wherever he lived he
established an almoner, whom he fully trusted to keep his left hand
ignorant of what his right hand was doing. I believe he felt no finality
in charity, but did it because in its provisional way it was the only
thing a man could do. I never heard him go really into any sociological
inquiry, and I have a feeling that that sort of thing baffled and
dispirited him. No one can read The Connecticut Yankee and not be aware
of the length and breadth of his sympathies with poverty, but apparently
he had not thought out any scheme for righting the economic wrongs we
abound in. I cannot remember our ever getting quite down to a discussion
of the matter; we came very near it once in the day of the vast wave of
emotion sent over the world by 'Looking Backward,' and again when we were
all so troubled by the great coal strike in Pennsylvania; in considering
that he seemed to be for the time doubtful of the justice of the
workingman's cause. At all other times he seemed to know that whatever
wrongs the workingman committed work was always in the right.
When Clemens returned to America with his family, after lecturing round
the world, I again saw him in New York, where I so often saw him while he
was shaping himself for that heroic enterprise. He would come to me, and
talk sorrowfully over his financial ruin, and picture it to himself as
the stuff of some unhappy dream, which, after long prosperity, had
culminated the wrong way. It was very melancholy, very touching, but the
sorrow to which he had come home from his long journey had not that
forlorn bewilderment in it. He was looking wonderfully well, and when I
wanted the name of his elixir, he said it was plasmon. He was apt, for a
man who had put faith so decidedly away from him, to take it back and pin
it to some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort. Once, when he was
well on in years, he came to New York without glasses, and announced that
he and all his family, so astigmatic and myopic and old-sighted, had, so
to speak, burned their spectacles behind them upon the instruction of
some sage who had found out that they were a delusion. The next time he
came he wore spectacles freely, almost ostentatiously, and I heard from
others that the whole Clemens family had been near losing their eyesight
by the miracle worked in their behalf. Now, I was not surprised to learn
that "the damned human race" was to be saved by plasmon, if anything, and
that my first duty was to visit the plasmon agency with him, and procure
enough plasmon to secure my family against the ills it was heir to for
evermore. I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the
investments which he had made from "the substance of things hoped for,"
and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after paying off
the creditors of his late publishing firm, he had to do something with
his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of
plasmon.
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