To
Charles C. Converse
30? April 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(Paraphrase: Buffalo Express, 9 May 70, UCCL 11733)
In reply, I wrote this pleasant-spoken gentleman that I had just telegraphed to New York for the Independent article, so that I could set Dr. T. right, before as many of the public as I could reach, (for it seemed perfectly plain that I had been wronging him,) and I said I wished to make this reparation “intelligently [&] immediately,” without waiting a month for the Galaxy to issue again.1
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in
church, and a working man should enter the door at the other end,
would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the
sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer
for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is,
if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing up of the
common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of
Christendom sick at their stomach. If you are going to kill the
church thus with bad smells, I will have nothing to do with this
work of evangelization. (SLC 1870 [MT00901], 721) Probably on 30 April, Clemens received the following
letter, subsequently published in “Personal,” his
long follow-up to “About Smells” in the Buffalo
Express of 9 May (SLC 1870 [MT00907]): Brooklyn, April 28. Mark Twain, Galaxy Office, New York:
Dear Sir: Rev[.] T. de Witt Talmage is a
representative democratic preacher, whom to see in a
“spike-tailed coat and kids” would astonish
his friends quite as much as does your apparent misconception of his
real character and views touching the free-church question. Will you
please read his entire article in the Independent from which you quote in the Galaxy for May and favor your readers with such a
memorandum as it may suggest, and greatly oblige, Yours truly, C——C——, Of Mr. Talmage’s Church. The writer was Charles Crozat Converse
(1832–1918), a lawyer and composer, whose father, Maxey
Manning Converse, had been a prominent Elmira music teacher (Towner, 284). Clemens’s
reply was probably immediate, but is known to survive only in his own
paraphrase of it, also published in “Personal.”
There he further explained that a second letter from Converse reached
him in Elmira (about 4 May) and “the next day I dropped
everything else and wrote a full explanation of how the Advance had defrauded me into wronging Dr.
Talmage.” But when he “was just about to mail this
for publication in the Independent, (and had even
enveloped and directed it,)” an “Eastern mail
brought me Dr. Talmage’s original Independent article in full, and I waited to read
it.” That was probably on 6 May at the latest. On reading
Talmage’s article, Clemens decided not to send his drafted
“reparation” because: I was sorrowfully disappointed—for alas!
the most analytical mind in the world could not tell which was the
Doctor’s sarcasm and which was his “real
earnest!” It was plain that the Advance had right fair reason for regarding as a serious
utterance a paragraph which Dr. T. stated to be
“irony.” I am not questioning Dr.
T.’s honesty, now. On the contrary I am satisfied that he
really looks upon his little paragraph as irony, and very fair irony
at that, but it is certainly the opaquest sarcasm that ever got into
print. Any unprejudiced man who will read Dr. T.’s Independent article and then get its author
or a parishioner to explain it to him, will say that the Rev. Dr.
Talmage has no business meddling with a pen. Writing is not his
specialty. . . . Rev. Dr. Talmage is not a bad man. I have
credible evidence that he is a very excellent man and that his heart
is really in the freeing of the churches. . . . I, for one, am sorry
I criticised him harshly—no, not that. But I am sincerely
sorry that he ever hurled that execrable column of decomposed
grammar, irreverence and incipient lunacy into print and so betrayed
me into unchivalrously attacking a literary cripple. (SLC 1870 [MT00907]) Clemens instead wrote and immediately mailed
“Personal” to Buffalo, where it was presumably
received on Saturday, 7 May, typeset on Sunday, and published on Monday,
9 May.
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L4, 123–124.
Emendations and textual notes:
& • and
