The Life & Times of Mark Twain - 4 Biographical Works in One Edition. Марк Твен
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— but she would have understood it. It would have had no difficulties for her on that score; also she would have found a tireless pleasure in analyzing and discussing its problems.
Mark Twain.
(To be Continued.)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCXVI.
JUNE 7, 1907.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY. — XIX.
From Susy’s Biography of Me.
March 23, ‘86. — The other day was my birthday, and I had a little birthday party in the evening and papa acted some very funny charades with Mr. Gherhardt, Mr. Jesse Grant (who had come up from New York and was spending the evening with us) and Mr. Frank Warner. One of them was “on his knees” honys-sneeze. There were a good many other funny ones, all of which I dont remember. Mr. Grant was very pleasant, and began playing the charades in the most delightful way.
Susy’s spelling has defeated me, this time. I cannot make out what “honys-sneeze” stands for. Impromptu charades were almost a nightly pastime of ours, from the children’s earliest days — they played in them with me when they were only five or six years old. As they increased in years and practice their love for the sport almost amounted to a passion, and they acted their parts with a steadily increasing ability. At first they required much drilling; but later they were generally ready as soon as the parts were assigned, and they acted them according to their own devices. Their stage facility and absence of constraint and selfconsciousness in the “Prince and Pauper” was a result of their charading practice.
At ten and twelve Susy wrote plays, and she and Daisy Warner and Clara played them in the library or upstairs in the schoolroom, with only themselves and the servants for audience. They were of a tragic and tremendous sort, and were performed with great energy and earnestness. They were dramatized (freely) from English history, and in them Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth had few holidays. The clothes were borrowed from the mother’s wardrobe and the gowns were longer than necessary, but that was not regarded as a defect. In one of these plays Jean (three years old, perhaps) was Sir Francis Bacon. She was not dressed for the part, and did not have to say anything, but sat silent and decorous at a tiny table and was kept busy signing death-warrants. It was a really important office, for few entered those plays and got out of them alive.
March 26. — Mamma and Papa have been in New York for two or three days, and Miss Corey has been staying with us. They are coming home to-day at two o’clock.
Papa has just begun to play chess, and he is very fond of it, so he has engaged to play with Mrs. Charles Warner every morning from 10 to 12, he came down to supper last night, full of this pleasant prospect, but evidently with something on his mind. Finally he said to mamma in an appologetical tone, Susy Warner and I have a plan.
“Well” mamma said “what now, I wonder?”
Papa said that Susy Warner and he were going to name the chess after some of the old bible heroes, and then play chess on Sunday.
April 18, ‘86. — Mamma and papa Clara and Daisy have gone to New York to see the “Mikado.” They are coming home tonight at half past seven.
Last winter when Mr. Cable was lecturing with papa, he wrote this letter to him just before he came to visit us.
Dear Uncle, — That’s one nice thing about me, I never bother any one, to offer me a good thing twice. You dont ask me to stay over Sunday, but then you dont ask me to leave Saturday night, and knowing the nobility of your nature as I do — thank you, I’ll stay till Monday morning.
Your’s and the dear familie’s
George W. Cable.
[December 22, 1906.] It seems a prodigious while ago! Two or three nights ago I dined at a friend’s house with a score of other men, and at my side was Cable — actually almost an old man, really almost an old man, that once so young chap! 62 years old, frost on his head, seven grandchildren in stock, and a brand-new wife to re-begin life with!
[Dictated Nov. 19, 1906.]
Ever since papa and mamma were married, papa has written his books and then taken them to mamma in manuscript and she has expergated them. Papa read “Huckleberry Finn” to us in manuscript just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mamma to expergate, while he went off up to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I would be sitting with mamma while she was looking the manuscript over, and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some delightfully dreadful part must be scratched out. And I remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was dreadful, that Clara and I used to delight in, and oh with what dispair we saw mamma turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would be almost ruined without it. But we gradually came to feel as mamma did.
It would be a pity to replace the vivacity and quaintness and felicity of Susy’s innocent free spelling with the dull and petrified uniformities of the spelling-book. Nearly all the grimness it taken out of the “expergating” of my books by the subtle mollification accidentally infused into the word by Susy’s modification of the spelling of it.
I remember the special case mentioned by Susy, and can see the group yet — two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence that was so fascinatingly dreadful and the other third of it patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the pleaders; but I do not remember what the condemned phrase was. It had much company, and they all went to the gallows; but it is possible that that specially dreadful one which gave those little people so much delight was cunningly devised and put into the book for just that function, and not with any hope or expectation that it would get by the “expergator” alive. It is possible, for I had that custom.
Susy’s quaint and effective spelling falls quite opportunely into to-day’s atmosphere, which is heavy with the rumblings and grumblings and mutterings of the Simplified Spelling Reform. Andrew Carnegie started this storm, a couple of years ago, by moving a simplifying of English orthography, and establishing a fund for the prosecution and maintenance of the crusade. He began gently. He addressed a circular to some hundreds of his friends, asking them to simplify the spelling of a dozen of our badly spelt words — I think they were only words which end with the superfluous ugh. He asked that these friends use the suggested spellings in their private correspondence.
By this, one perceives that the beginning was sufficiently quiet and unaggressive.
Next stage: a small committee was appointed, with Brander Matthews for managing director and spokesman. It issued a list of three hundred words, of average silliness as to spelling, and proposed new and sane spellings for these words. The President of the United States, unsolicited, adopted these simplified three hundred officially, and ordered that they be used in the official documents of the Government. It was now remarked, by all the educated and the thoughtful except the clergy that Sheol was to pay. This was most justly and comprehensively descriptive. The indignant British lion rose, with a roar that was heard across the Atlantic, and stood there on his little isle, gazing, red-eyed, out over the glooming seas, snow-flecked with driving spindrift, and lathing his tail — a most scary spectacle to see.
The lion was outraged because we, a nation of children, without any grownup people among us, with no property in the language, but using it merely by courtesy of its owner the English nation, were trying to defile the sacredness of it by removing from it peculiarities which had been its ornament and which had made it holy and beautiful for ages.
In truth there is a certain sardonic propriety in preserving our orthography, since ours is a mongrel language which