7 May 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: MH-H, UCCL 01230)
I’m glad to have the letter from your uncle. There’s something charming about the lonely sublimity of being the prophet of a hitherto unsung race. There are so many prophets for the other guilds & races & religions that no one of them can become signally conspicuous, but I haven’t any rivals; my people have got to take me or go prophetless. If I live a year, I will make one more attempt to go down the river, for I shall will shall have lived in vain if I go silent out of the world & thus lengthen the list of the “lost arts.” Confidentially, I’m “laying” for a Monument.
Good! I’m glad you are shouting for Raymond; & if I were there I would look through the MS & see if there was a crevice where you might casually remark that Raymond has not taken a vague suggestion from the novel & by his genius created a fine original character from it, but has simply faithfully reproduced the Sellers that is in the book. For this fellow had the impudence to tell me in Boston (he got it from the newspapers) that the above was the state of the case2explanatory note——whereas the truth is that the finer points in Sellers’s character are a trifle above Raymond’s level.
Of course you do not need to say any of this at all, for no doubt it would have an ungracious look; & I think I am rather small potatoes myself for caring two cents whether if the world does hail Raymond as the gifted creator of Sellers. The actual truth is, that nobody created Sellers—I simply put him on paper as I found him in life (he is a relative of mine—but not my brother) & any scrub of a newspaper reporter could have done the same thing.3explanatory note
ShallⒶemendation I write Mr. D H Harkins the actor, or have you done so?
I wish Clarence King would put his Pike County people on4explanatory note
This letter answered two from Howells (CU-MARK), which replied to the three that Clemens had sent between 23 and 26 April:
The story Howells alluded to on 27 April was “Private Theatricals,” which the Atlantic Monthly began to run serially in November 1875 (Howells 1875–76). With his 4 May letter Howells enclosed a 1 May letter from Pittsburgh from his cousin, Charles F. Dean, son of his maternal uncle Alexander (Alec):
Father desires me to write to you and thank you for your kind remembrance of him in sending him the manuscript of Mark Twain’s “Old Times on the Mississippi” He has read his articles on this subject with a keen appreciation. It vividly recalls an experience in his life about which he is never tired of talking. He has unanimously resolved that Mark is the “Prince of Wits” the “King of Jesters.” Father and Uncle William and the boys have some hearty laughs over the “cub-pilot’s” adventures all of which they appreciate and enjoy as we “land-lubbers” do not. We have not seen his fifth article yet but I suppose it will be copied into some of our papers before long.
William Dean was Alexander’s brother; both had been in the steamboat business (see 20 Feb 75 to Howells, n. 1click to open link). Howells’s brother-in-law, Augustus Dennis Shepard (1835–1913), was married to Elinor Howells’s sister, the former Joanna Elizabeth Mead (1842–1914). He was treasurer of his father’s firm, the National Bank Note Company, on Wall Street in New York (Thurston, 121; Howells 1979 [bib00431], 228 n. 2, 464; Wilson 1874, 959, 1196).
Clemens had talked with Raymond in Boston, most probably on 18 or 20 April, while staying with Howells in nearby Cambridge. From 19 April through 1 May Raymond was at Boston’s Globe Theatre “for twelve evenings and four matinees” of the Gilded Age play (“Amusements,” Boston Advertiser, 19 Apr 75, 1 May 75, 1). The Boston Advertiser of 19 April omitted mention of Clemens’s part in creating Colonel Sellers, remarking only that “Mr. Raymond’s impersonation of this character may now fairly be called celebrated; it has excited the admiration of the keenest critics and the enthusiasm of the largest audiences; and, by common consent, has taken its place among the few portraits of distinctively American types” (“Music and the Drama,” 2). And on 21 April the Advertiser further observed:
Mark Twain’s dramatized version of his novel, “The Gilded Age,” is, on the whole, a poor affair. . . . Colonel Mulberry Sellers of Hawkeye, Missouri, is a true character-creation and a real representative and typical American. . . . The credit of conceiving Colonel Sellers fairly belongs to Mr. Clemens, but it is safe to say that the character would never have made a strong impression upon the public mind if the author had not been fortunate enough to find an illustrator of his idea in such an artist as Mr. John T. Raymond. The conception needed the individuality and concreteness of a dramatic performance to make it telling; and at the same time,—as the part is carried by the playwright to the very verge of caricature, and sometimes over the line,—it would have become a mere extravagant absurdity in the hands of an actor of ordinary insight and judgment. Mr. Raymond seems completely to have grasped the dramatist’s idea, to have enlarged and enriched that idea by his own observation of life, and then to have given expression to his perfectly rounded and consistent conception in a performance full of vitality and force, of picturesqueness and humor, and even of lively imagination. . . . The impersonation compels attention and admiration at once. (“Music and the Drama,” 2)
Howells had enjoyed Raymond’s 1 May final matinee performance, as he told his father the following day:
I went yesterday afternoon to Mark Twain’s play of Colonel Sellers, and was immensely pleased. The character is the whole piece, nearly, but it is quite enough. There was one delicious scene in court, where Sellers is witness in behalf of the young lady who has killed her bigamous husband, which was ineffable. He delivers his testimony in a stump speech, and every now and then becomes so carried away by his own eloquence that he turns round and addresses the jury. “Why, gentlemen of the Jury!” and it takes the whole force of the law to stop him. He would be a good witness for the Beecher trial. (Howells 1979 [bib01004], 95)
For Howells’s Atlantic review of the play, see the next letter and Howells’s Review of Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old click to open link.
The letter breaks off at this point, at the end of page 4; the remainder has not been found. Clarence King (1842–1901) was a geologist and mining engineer who studied the Comstock lode and explored California from 1863 to 1866. Since 1867 he had been in charge of a congressionally funded survey of the mountain ranges from eastern Colorado to southern California, the results of which were issued in seven volumes (1870–80). Between May and December 1871 he published seven sketches in the Atlantic, which were collected—together with several additional sketches—in Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, published in 1872. One of the sketches—titled “Wayside Pikes” in the November Atlantic and “The Newtys of Pike” in the book—described an encounter with a family of colorful characters who had emigrated from Pike County, Missouri, in 1850 (Clarence King 1871 [bib13628], 1871 [bib13629], 1871 [bib13630], 1871 [bib13631]; 1872, 94–111). Howells praised the book in an April 1872 Atlantic review:
We leave wholly to science the estimation of Mr. King’s services to geology and geography; for our pleasure in him is chiefly, we own, a literary pleasure, and if we were to tell the whole truth, perhaps our readers would be shocked to know how much we value the extraordinary beauty and vigor of his descriptions above the facts described. We accept the information he gives with mute gratitude, but we must needs exclaim at the easy charm of his style, the readiness of his humor, the quickness of his feeling for character. His “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada” is mainly the record of his ascent of different peaks of that chain, in language so vivid that it all seems an experience of the reader’s; and interspersing these memories of Mount Tyndall and Shasta and Whitney and Yosemite and Merced are such sketches of life, Pike and Digger and Californian, as make us wish from him the fullest study of varieties of human nature which we as yet know only by glimpses. (Howells 1872, 500)
Several years later, on 4 January 1879, Howells wrote King a letter of introduction to President Rutherford B. Hayes, in which he praised King’s command of the “graces of the Pike dialect,” and remarked, “If you know his book, ‘Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevadas,’ as well as I do, you must share my sole grief against him, namely, that a man who can give us such literature, should be content to be merely a great scientist” (Howells 1979, 217; for a further discussion of Pike County dialect, see L5 , 35 n. 2). In 1887 Clemens wanted to include a piece by King in Mark Twain’s Library of Humor (SLC 1888), noting on a copy of Bret Harte’s Drift from Two Shores: “We must have Clarence King in full strength. | SLC | The Newtys of Pike, for instance” (marginalia in Harte 1878, copyright page, NPV). King denied permission to reprint the “forgotten pages,” claiming that he had always regretted “the sketch in question” and suggesting that if Clemens “would like to include any of my geology as American humor I consent humbly but willingly but I must decline to be privy to anything which might perpetuate my only lapse into humor” (21 July 87 to Webster, CtHT-W).
MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]).
L6 , 473–77; MTHL , 1:81–82.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.