2 December 1865
This brief sketch was part of Clemens' third and last letter to the Napa County Reporter. It was written in San Francisco on 30 November 1865 and published two days later in Napa City.
Dion Boucicault's second Irish drama, the popular Arrah-na-Pogue, ran for almost two months at San Francisco's Metropolitan Theatre during the fall of 1865. First produced in Dublin late in 1864, the play was revised by Boucicault for the London and New York productions the following year. In San Francisco it regularly drew large audiences and was enthusiastically reviewed in the local press. Arrah-no-Poke, Charles Henry Webb's clever but superficial parody of Boucicault's work, opened on November 15 at the Academy of Music. It was blessed with an excellent cast, including Dan Setchell and Harry Wall, who, according to Webb himself, joined with Bret Harte in contributing ideas for the parody. To some critics Arrah-no-Poke augured well for a future school of California playwrights, and its financial success doubtless stimulated Clemens' interest in writing for the stage.1 The benefit performance for Webb, alluded to in Clemens' sketch, occurred on Monday night, November 27, three days before he wrote his letter to the Reporter.
Charles Henry Webb, the founder and first editor of the Californian, had been a friend of Clemens' for almost two years. Experienced as a whaler, a journalist for the New York Times, and a war correspondent, he had arrived in San Francisco in April 1863. He became the city editor for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, where Clemens first knew him, be- [begin page 381] fore founding the Californian in May 1864. He returned to New York in 1866, leaving San Francisco on the steamer Sacramento on April 18. During the three years that he remained in the West he contributed regularly to the Golden Era and the Sacramento Union using the pen names “Inigo” and “John Paul” respectively. He also contributed to and edited the Californian in three separate stints: from 29 May through 3 September 1864, from 26 November 1864 through 15 April 1865, and from 6 January 1866 until his departure in April.2 In addition to Arrah-no-Poke he also wrote the stage comedy Our Friend from Victoria.
Although it was Bret Harte who first solicited Clemens' work for the Californian, Webb did publish several of Clemens' sketches in late 1864 and early 1865, and he publicly supported his friend's talents on a number of occasions. When the New York Round Table praised Mark Twain as the “foremost among the merry gentlemen of the California press,” Webb greeted the notice as one who had long known what New Yorkers had only just discovered:
To my thinking Shakspeare had no more idea that he was writing for posterity than Mark Twain has at the present time, and it sometimes amuses me to think how future Mark Twain scholars will puzzle over that gentleman's present hieroglyphics and occasionally eccentric expressions. Apropos, of Twain, who is a man of Mark, I am glad to see that his humor has met with recognition at the East, and that mention is made of him in that critical journal, the Round Table. They may talk of coarse humor, if they please, but in his case it is simply the strength of the soil—the germ is there and it sprouts good and strong. To my mind Mark Twain and Dan Setchell are the Wild Humorists of the Pacific.3
This comment was written on November 1, just one month before Clemens returned the compliment—somewhat less emphatically—in “Webb's Benefit.”
Webb continued to foster Clemens' interests in 1866 and 1867, partly by republishing selections from his letters to the Sacramento Union in the Californian, but most importantly by serving as editor and publisher of the 1867 Jumping Frog book. Webb had already published Liffith Lank in book form on 3 January 1867 when Clemens arrived in New York nine days later. Webb recalled the situation this way:
My friend Mark Twain coming East while I was publishing my own works, and being desirous of getting before the public, I undertook to publish a book for him—moved to a belief in its success from the fact [begin page 382] that nearly all the principal publishers in the United States had refused it. This selection from his miscellaneous writings was given to the world as The Jumping Frog of Calaveras and Other Sketches, by Mark Twain, a book of some 220 pages. It made an immediate success, and the copyright to-day would be worth to any publisher $5000 a year. At the request of the author, who wished to use some of the sketches in another form, and suppress others entirely, the stereotype plates were melted down about a year since, and The Jumping Frog has disappeared as a book from the trade forever.4
Webb published St. Twel'mo a few days after the Jumping Frog book, and he later published two collections of his own work, John Paul's Book (1874) and Parodies, Prose and Verse (1876).
The Academy of Music was well filled on Monday night, the occasion being the benefit of C. H. Webb, author of the new burlesque, “Arrah-no-PokeⒶemendation.” I believe no play written on the Coast has paid the author as much coin as Mr. Webb has made out of this. During the interval between the pieces, Mr. Setchell read a humorous letter from Webb, which was received with hearty laughter, and then followed it up with a speech which was kindly received, until the orator ventured to branch out into a fine flight of eloquence; the audience would not stand that. The venerable expression, “through storm and sunshine,” delivered with some little elocutionary flourish, evoked a burst of laughter which swept the house like a tornado. Now isn't it infamous that a professed humorist can never attempt anything fine,Ⓐemendation but people will at once imagine there is a joke about it somewhere, and laugh accordingly. I did once see an audience fooled by a humorist, though, or at least badly perplexed. An actress at the Opera House was playing the part of a houseless, friendless, persecuted and heart-broken young girl, and had so wrought upon the audience with her distress, that many were in tears. To heighten the effect, the playwright had put into the mouth of an humble character, the words,—“Poor thing, how she sighs!” Mr. BarryⒺexplanatory note delivered these with touching pathos—so far so good—but he could not resist the temptation to add, in an undertone, “Ah me, how she sighs!—if she keeps on increasing her size this way, she'll over- [begin page 384] size her grief eventually and die, poor creature!” The sorrowing maiden let her sad face droop gently behind her hand, and Mr. Barry assumed an air of severe and inflexible gravity, and so the audience dared venture upon nothing further than to look exceedingly uncertain. One irreverent man in the corner, did ejaculate “Oh, geewhillikens!” in a subdued tone of dissent, but he received no encouragement from the perplexed audience, and he pushed the matter no further.
The first printing in the Napa County Reporter for 2 December 1865 (p. 2) is copy-text. Copy: PH from Bancroft. There are no textual notes.