You can’t imagine how brilliant and beautiful
that new brass fender is, and how perfectly naturally
it takes its place under the carved oak. How
they did scour it up before they sent it! I lied
a good deal about it when I came home—so
for once I kept a secret and surprised Livy on a Christmas
morning!
I haven’t done a stroke of work since the Atlantic
dinner; have only moped around. But I’m
going to try tomorrow. How could I ever have.
Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But
then I am God’s fool, and all His works must
be contemplated with respect.
Livy and I join in the warmest regards to you and
yours,
Yrs
ever,
Mark.
Longfellow, in his reply, said: “I do not
believe anybody was much hurt. Certainly I was
not, and Holmes tells me he was not. So I think
you may dismiss the matter from your mind without
further remorse.”
Holmes wrote: “It never occurred to me
for a moment to take offense, or feel wounded by your
playful use of my name.”
Miss Ellen Emerson replied for her father (in a letter
to Mrs. Clemens) that the speech had made no impression
upon him, giving at considerable length the impression
it had made on herself and other members of the family.
Clearly, it was not
the principals who were hurt, but only those who
held them in awe, though
one can realize that this would not make it
much easier for Mark
Twain.
Letters from Europe, 1878-79.
Tramping with Twichell. Writing
A new travel book. Life
in Munich
Whether the unhappy occurrence at the
Whittier dinner had anything to do with Mark
Twain’s resolve to spend a year or two in Europe
cannot be known now. There were other good
reasons for going, one in particular being a
demand for another book of travel. It was also
true, as he explains in a letter to his mother, that
his days were full of annoyances, making it difficult
for him to work. He had a tendency to invest
money in almost any glittering enterprise that
came along, and at this time he was involved in the
promotion of a variety of patent rights that
brought him no return other than assessment and
vexation.
Clemens’s mother was by
this time living with her son Onion and his
wife, in Iowa.
To Mrs. Jane Clemens,
in Keokuk, Iowa:
Hartford,
Feb. 17, 1878 My dear mother,—I
suppose I am the worst correspondent in the whole
world; and yet I grow worse and worse all the time.
My conscience blisters me for not writing you, but
it has ceased to abuse me for not writing other folks.
