18 March 1861 • St. Louis, Mo. (Transcript and MS, damage emended:
MTL , 1:45–47, and NPV, UCCL 00022)
(SUPERSEDED)
YourⒶemendation last has just come to hand. It reminds me strongly of Tom Hood’s letters to his family, (which I have been reading lately).2explanatory note But yours only remind me of his, for although there is a striking likeness, your humour is much finer than his, and far better expressed. Tom Hood’s wit, (in his letters) has a savor of labor about it which is very disagreeable. Your letter is good. That portion of it wherein the old sow figures is the very best thing I have seen lately. Its quiet style resembles Goldsmith’s “Citizen of the World,” and “Don Quixote,”—which are my beau ideals of fine writing.
You have paid the preacher! Well, that is good, also. What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.
Pamela and I have just returned from a visit to the most wonderfully beautiful painting which this city has ever seen—Church’s “Heart of the Andes”—which represents a lovely valley with its rich vegetation in all the bloom and glory of a tropical summer—dotted with birds and flowers of all colors and shades of color, and sunny slopes, and shady corners, and twilight groves, and cool cascades—all grandly set off with a majestic mountain in the background with its gleaming summit clothed in everlasting ice and snow! I have seen it several times, but it is always a new picture—totally new—you seem to see nothing the second time which you saw the first. We took the opera glass, and examined its beauties minutely, for the naked eye cannot discern the little wayside flowers, and soft shadows and patches of sunshine, and half-hidden bunches of grass and jets of water which form some of its most enchanting features. There is no slurring of perspective effect about it—the most distant—the minutest object in it has a marked and distinct personality—so that you may count the very leaves on the trees. When you first see the tame, ordinary-looking picture, your first impulse is to turn your back upon it, and say “Humbug”—but your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in—and appreciate it in its fulness—and understand how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands. You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections—your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something—you hardly know what—will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief. You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture—it remains with you still. It is in my mind now—and the smallest feature could not be removed without my detecting it. So much for the “Heart of the Andes.”3explanatory note
Ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls for allowing me to embrace and kiss them—and she was horrified at the Schottische as performed by Miss Castle and me. She was perfectly willingⒶemendation for me to dance until 12 o’clock at the imminent peril of my going to sleep on the after watch—but then she would top off with a very inconsistent sermon on dancing in general; ending with a terrific broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies, the Schottische.4explanatory note
I took Ma and the girls in a carriage, round that portion of New Orleans where the finest gardens and residences are to be seen, and although it was a blazing hot dusty day, they seemed hugely delighted. To use an expression which is commonly ignored in polite society, they were “hell-bent” on stealing some of the luscious-looking oranges from branches which overhung the fences, but I restrained them. They were not aware before that shrubbery could be made to take any queer shape which a skilful gardener might choose to twist it into, so they found not only beauty but novelty in their visit. We went out to Lake Pontchartrain in the cars.
P. S. Ma has got a ($25) check for the money and asked me to enclose it.
P. P. S.—I owe Mollie one!
In the absence of all but a few fragments of the original manuscript, the principal source for this letter is Paine’s text in MTL , where he printed the year as 1860—probably a guess necessitated by the manuscript’s giving place and day but no year. The correct year is established by Clemens’s subsequent reference to Church’s Heart of the Andes, first exhibited in St. Louis between 27 February and 21 March 1861 (“Amusements,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 27 Feb and 18 Mar 61, 4).
Clemens was probably referring to Thomas Hood’s Up the Rhine (1839), an epistolary novel recounting a family’s holiday in Germany (see Brashear, 218–22).
Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) first exhibited this painting in the spring of 1859 at his New York studio, drawing crowds of thousands willing to pay twenty-five cents to view it. After showings in London and Edinburgh, Heart of the Andes was returned to New York and subsequently exhibited in Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis (Huntington, 5–6). Clemens’s “several” visits to see it at the Western Academy of Art must have occurred between 15 and 18 March (see note 4). Almost thirty years later Clemens became friends with Church, visiting him at Olana, his mansion on the Hudson River (Church to SLC, 16 Dec 87, CU-MARK).
Clemens had taken his mother, a Miss Castle from St. Louis, and an otherwise unidentified young woman to New Orleans aboard the Alonzo Child. On 27 February, the Child left St. Louis carrying twenty to thirty couples of young people from Boonville, Missouri—for many years Captain David DeHaven’s home—for a pleasure trip south. “They were a gay party, and came in a body as a special compliment to Captain D. DeHaven, who has just resumed command of his fine boat, after a protracted illness” (“River News,” St. Louis Evening News, 28 Feb 61, 3). The Child reached New Orleans on 6 March, departed two days later, and arrived back in St. Louis on 15 March. A “fine band of music,” which presumably played for the schottische (a dance similar to the polka), reportedly accompanied the party (“River News,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 16 Mar 61, 4). Paine identified the third guest, with varying degrees of certainty, as Clemens’s cousin Ella Creel (see MTB , 1:156, and MTL , 1:47).
The rationale for emendations to remove MTL styling is given on pp. 458–59. Since, so far as is known, the MS has always remained in the family’s possession, probably a family member was the one who cut it apart, but exactly who that person was, and why and when the MS was cut, remain unknown. Someone could have cut off the complimentary close and signature that were boldly inscribed in purple ink, to save them as a souvenir, but since a family member would probably have recognized that these were not written by Clemens, this seems unlikely. A stronger possibility is that someone cut away part of the text altogether, perhaps to suppress it. Support for this conjecture comes from calculations, based on the length of the lines in the MS fragment, of the amount of MTL text that must have been on each of the four MS pages, from which it appears that the fourth MS page contained as much as three fewer lines than each of the first three MS pages, and that therefore the text in MTL may silently omit not only the postscripts but up to three other lines, or about twenty words, as well. If this is what happened, the most likely point where such a cut might have been made seems to be following the now somewhat abrupt ending of the last paragraph (118.5). But if what looks like a shortfall in the calculated length of the fourth MS page was due to some other cause—the space could have been filled by the now missing top of Clemens’s elaborate signature flourish, for example, or the calculations, based as they are on a small sample, may be in error for undetectable reasons—then the text as we have it may be complete, and the motivation of the person who cut the MS apart must be sought elsewhere.
MTL , 1:45–47, is copy-text for ‘St. Louis . . . willing’ (116.1–118.2) and for ‘at . . . cars.’ (118.5–15); MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV), is copy-text for ‘for . . . aimed’ (118.2–4) and for ‘Your . . . one!’ (118.16–19). The surviving MS is a fragment cut from the bottom of the last leaf, which, as the illustration shows, was inscribed on both sides. Calculations based on a comparison of the partial MS text with the text published in MTL indicate that the MS was probably originally four pages, presumably two leaves inscribed on both sides, and that the surviving fragment is about one-fourth of the second leaf. The remainder of the MS is missing.
L1 , 116–120; in addition to the copy-text, MTB , 1:155 and 156, and Paine, 224, excerpts.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61. Orion traced over Clemens’s faint complimentary close and signature in the purple ink he used in 1880 when numbering the pages of many of his brother’s letters for inclusion in his own autobiography. Traces of the same ink below the cut edge of the MS fragment where Orion made changes (discussed in the entry for 118.1–2) indicate that the MS was physically intact at that time. The MS must also have been intact when the transcript was made from which the MTL text derives, since MTL includes text both from the portion of the MS now lost and from the surviving fragment. It cannot now be determined, however, when the MS was cut apart, or whether Paine made the transcript himself directly from the MS or relied on a transcript made by someone else. Even if he never saw the whole MS, Paine probably had access to the surviving fragment, as he did to all the other MSS that are now in the McKinney Family Papers, although he might not have recognized it as part of this letter.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.