March 26 Sunday – At 21 Fifth Ave. in N.Y.C. Sam wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Dear Col. Higginson,—I early learned that you would be my neighbor in the Summer & I rejoiced, recognizing in you & your family a large asset. I hope for frequent intercourse between the two households. I shall have my youngest daughter with me. The other one will go from the rest-cure in this city to the rest-cure in Norfolk Conn. & we shall not see her before autumn. We have not seen her since the middle of October.
Jean (the youngest daughter) went to Dublin & saw the house & came back charmed with it. I know the Thayers of old—manifestly there is no lack of attractions up there. Mrs. Thayer & I were shipmates in a wild excursion perilously near 40 years ago.
You say you “send with this” the story. Then it should be here but it isn’t, when I send a thing with another thing, the one thing goes but the thing doesn’t, I find it later—still on the premises. Will you look it up now & send it?
Aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit. I am tired of waiting for that man to get old [MTP: Paine’s 1917 Mark Twain’s Letters, p.771]. Note: of course, Mrs. Thayer was once Emiline Beach and shipmate on the Quaker City / Sincerely yours …
Isabel Lyon’s journal: As I walked along the hall just now I heard Mr. Clemens’s dear voice call “Come up Aldrich!” and then I had a glimpse of Mr. Aldrich’s baldish head and stalwart shoulders as he came up the stairs. (He’d been waiting for Count Lewenhaupt the osteopath to go.) The good splendid laughing of the two men comes up to me here. If human beings could be “machines” what rarely fine machines they’d be—some. In today’s Sun there is an interview with Col. Harvey and he said a lot of worthwhile things—best to me was of course what he said about Mr. Clemens in his bed—“the biggest bed he ever saw.”
This morning when I went into Mr. Clemens’s room he asked me something about Moses and the 10 Commandments, and that led up to making Mr. Clemens say “If those ten Commandments had never been written, man would be making some for himself. He has to have a code—he’d be saying, Thou shalt not sit up all night. Thou shalt not drink coffee at midnight. Thou shalt not eat cabbage & beans. They would all be commandments that he is in need of and he wouldn’t be happy if he wasn’t making them to break”
A couple of nights ago Mr. Clemens was speaking of the way in which certain words always elude him. One of the words is “stimulate”—he said that he has not used that word 3 times in all his wirtings. Another word is the equivalent for reimburse i.e. “indemnify”. The word never reaches him when he is most in need of it and he cannot always have a thesaurus at his elbow [MTP: TS 47-48]. Also in part, Gribben 562, Fables of Man 121.
Isabel Lyon’s journal # 2: “Today Mr. Clemens saw Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Poultney Bigelow, Mr. Moncure D. Conway, Mr. Gilder, & Prof. Sloane. / Mr. Clemens is writing an appreciation of Mr. Howells” [MTP TS 9].
March 26 – early April – In a supplement to a June, 1913 American Post review, the tale is told of Sam attending a performance of Benjamin Chapin playing Lincoln on stage. NY Times (Mar. 25, p. X1) gives the first week’s performance began on Mar. 26. The article and a letter (uncollected) Sam sent to Chapin’s secretary.
MARK TWAIN AND PARTY
ATTEND “LINCOLN”
By One of the Party
August Belmont, Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain), Clarence H. Mackay, Robert Collier and other members of the Executive Committee of the Lincoln Farm Association, were holding a session when the proposal was made that they attend Benjamin Chapin’s four act character play, “Lincoln,” then running for the first time in New York, at the Liberty Theatre.
This group of men dined together before the play. When it came time to attend the performance, Mark Twain refused to go. His friends urged, but he was obdurate. General Horace Porter, formerly ambassador to France, and a friend of Mr. Lincoln’s, and Mr. William Dean Howells, the novelist joined the party, and Mark Twain finally went with the others, but went reluctantly, declaring that he did not want some young buck in stage costume and makeup to muss up his own mental picture and memory of Lincoln. When the curtain went up on the first act he sat far back in the box but in a few minutes he came forward and was soon lost in the play.
After the third act he asked to be taken back upon the stage that he might meet Mr. Chapin, and, behind the scenes, as if he could not shake off the illusion that it was the real living Lincoln, he addressed Mr. Chapin as Lincoln: “I am very glad to meet you again, Mr. President. You haven’t changed much in all these years.”
On leaving the theatre that evening he walked down the aisle (with the writer of this account, who had dined with the party and heard Mark Twain’s opposition to going), and he made this comment: “I wanted to keep my memory and thought of Lincoln unmarred by any disappointment in seeing a make-up imitation. But I am glad that I came, very glad. I feel as though I had spent an evening with Lincoln at the White House. I think I know Lincoln a little more intimately now. Mr. Chapin certainly gave a remarkable performance—he got me over the footlights.”
The next morning Mr. Chapin’s secretary received the following letter from Mr. Clemens:
“In the beginning of the first act, while Mr. Chapin did seem to me to be a very close and happy imitation of Mr. Lincoln, it was only an imitation. But at that point the miracle began. Little by little, step by step, by an imperceptible evolution the artificial Lincoln dissolved away and the living and real Lincoln was before my eyes and remained real until the end. I apply to it, that strong word ‘miracle’ because I think it justified. I think that I have not before seen so interesting a spectacle as this steady growth and transformation of an unreality into a reality.”