September 13 Tuesday – In Kaltenleutgeben, Austria, Sam wrote to Joe Twichell [MTP].

Dear Joe,—You are mistaken; people don’t send us the magazines. No—Harper, Century & McClure do; an example I should like to recommend to other publishers. And so I thank you very much for sending me Brander’s article [a recent Twichell letter not extant]. When you say “I like Brander Matthews; he impresses me as a man of parts & power,” I back you, right up to the hub—I feel the same way—.And when you say he has earned your gratitude for cuffing me for my crimes against the Leather stockings and the Vicar, I ain’t making any objection. Dern your gratitude!

His article is as sound as a nut. Brander knows literature, & loves it; he can talk about it and keep his temper; he can state his case so lucidly & fairly & so forcibly that you have to agree with him, even when you don’t agree with him; & he can discover & praise such merits as a book has, even when they are half a dozen diamonds scattered through an acre of mud. And so he has a right to be a critic.

To detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me. I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin.

Sam wrote of Vienna mourning for the late Empress Elisabeth, assassinated on Sept. 10; the funeral was to be on Sept. 17, and, after being invited by the Hotel Krantz, he anticipated being able to watch the cortége from a “sumptuous view” there [Paine’s 1917 Mark Twain’s Letters p. 666-8]. Note: Sam wrote a short article, “The Memorable Assassination,” which he finished on Sept. 26 and offered to Edward Bok, of the Ladies’ Home Journal. It was not published in Sam’s lifetime and collected in What Is Man? and Other Stories (1917).