“I never greatly envied anybody but the dead,”
he said, when he had looked at her. “I
always envy the dead.”
The coveted estate of silence, time’s only absolute
gift, it was the one benefaction he had ever considered
worth while.
Yet the years were not unkindly to Mark Twain.
They brought him sorrow, but they brought him likewise
the capacity and opportunity for large enjoyment,
and at the last they laid upon him a kind of benediction.
Naturally impatient, he grew always more gentle, more
generous, more tractable and considerate as the seasons
passed. His final days may be said to have been
spent in the tranquil light of a summer afternoon.
His own end followed by a few months that of his daughter.
There were already indications that his heart was
seriously affected, and soon after Jean’s death
he sought the warm climate of Bermuda. But his
malady made rapid progress, and in April he returned
to Stormfield. He died there just a week later,
April 21, 1910.
Any attempt to designate Mark Twain’s place
in the world’s literary history would be presumptuous
now. Yet I cannot help thinking that he will
maintain his supremacy in the century that produced
him. I think so because, of all the writers
of that hundred years, his work was the most human
his utterances went most surely to the mark.
In the long analysis of the ages it is the truth that
counts, and he never approximated, never compromised,
but pronounced those absolute verities to which every
human being of whatever rank must instantly respond.
His understanding of subjective human nature—the
vast, unwritten life within—was simply
amazing. Such knowledge he acquired at the fountainhead—that
is, from himself. He recognized in himself an
extreme example of the human being with all the attributes
of power and of weakness, and he made his exposition
complete.
The world will long miss Mark Twain; his example and
his teaching will be neither ignored nor forgotten.
Genius defies the laws of perspective and looms larger
as it recedes. The memory of Mark Twain remains
to us a living and intimate presence that today, even
more than in life, constitutes a stately moral bulwark
reared against hypocrisy and superstition—a
mighty national menace to sham.
MarkTwain’s letters
EARLY LETTERS, 1853. NEW YORK AND PHILADELPHIA
We have no record of Mark Twain’s
earliest letters. Very likely they were
soiled pencil notes, written to some school sweetheart
—to “Becky Thatcher,” perhaps—and
tossed across at lucky moments, or otherwise,
with happy or disastrous results. One of those
smudgy, much-folded school notes of the Tom Sawyer
period would be priceless to-day, and somewhere
among forgotten keepsakes it may exist, but we
shall not be likely to find it. No letter of
his boyhood, no scrap of his earlier writing,
