Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Mark Twain to Walt Whitman, 24 May 1889

Date: May 24, 1889

Whitman Archive ID: yal.00104

Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Contributors to digital file: Blake Bronson-Bartlett, Caterina Bernardini, Alex Ashland, and Stephanie Blalock



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Hartford,
May 24/89.

To Walt Whitman:1

You have lived just the seventy years which are greatest in the world's history & richest in benefit & advancement to its peoples. These seventy years have done much more to widen the interval between man & the other animals than was accomplished by any five centuries which preceded them.

What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine, & the amazing, infinitely varied & innumerable products of coal tar,2 those latest & strangest marvels of a marvelous age. And you have seen even greater births than these; for you have seen the application of anæsthesia to surgery-practice, whereby the ancient dominion of pain, which began with the first created life, came to an end in this earth forever; you have seen the slave set free, you have seen monarchy banished from France, & reduced in England to a machine which makes an imposing show of diligence & attention to business, but isn't connected with the works. Yes, you have indeed seen much—but tarry yet a while, for the greatest is yet to come. Wait thirty years, & then look out over the earth! You shall see marvels upon marvels added to these whose nativity you have witnessed; & conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Result—Man at almost his full stature at last!—& still growing, visibly growing while you look. In that day, who that hath a throne, or a gilded privilege not attainable by his neighbor, let him procure him slippers & get ready to dance, for there is going to be music. Abide, & see these things!

Thirty of us who honor & love you, offer the opportunity. We have among us 600 years, good & sound, left in the bank of life. Take 30 of them—the richest birth-day gift ever offered to poet in this world—& sit down & wait. Wait till you see that great figure appear, & catch the far glint of the sun upon his banner; then you may depart satisfied, as knowing you have seen him for whom the earth was made, & that he will proclaim that human wheat is worth more than human tares, & proceed to reorganize human values on that basis.


Mark Twain


Correspondent:
Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), better know by his pen name, Mark Twain, had attended Whitman's New York lecture in April of 1887. He also contributed to Thomas Donaldson's fund for the purchase of a horse and buggy for Whitman (see Whitman's September 22, 1885 letter [note 4]), as well as to the fund to build Whitman a private cottage (see Whitman's October 7, 1887 letter to Sylvester Baxter). Twain was reported in the Boston Herald of May 24, 1887, to have said: "What we want to do is to make the splendid old soul comfortable" (Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs: Comrades [1931], 268).

Notes:

1. Twain's letter was one of numerous addresses and letters prepared for Whitman's seventieth birthday celebration on May 31, 1889, in Camden. These writings were collected and edited by Horace Traubel in a volume titled Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman. It included a photo of Sidney Morse's 1887 clay bust of Whitman as the frontispiece. The book was published in 1889 by Philadelphia publisher David McKay. [back]

2. Coal tar, a by-product of coal processing, had a number of medical and industrial uses, including treating skin problems like psoriasis and seborrheic dermatitis. [back]


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