volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him,
and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt
secure of a good night's rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which
Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be
glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom
science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every
breast to burst forth, he began to read. It was curious to watch his
triumph with the house. His carefully studied effects would reach the
first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the
standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to
the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it
fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. He was
such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple
instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately
intended from his unerring knowledge. He was the most consummate public
performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him
lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he
probably would not have been on the stage. He was fond of private
theatricals, and liked to play in them with his children and their
friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his as 'The Prince and the
Pauper;' but I never saw him in any of these scenes. When he read his
manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary,
recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that an actor added fully
half to the character the author created. With my own hurried and
half-hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on him from
unprinted chapters (say, out of 'The Undiscovered Country' or 'A Modern
Instance') he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything. He was
realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so.
What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine,
and we ought to use every genuine art to that end.