MARK TWAIN'S BODY TO BE HERE TODAY
Friends Will Attend Simple Services in Brick Presbyterian Church - Burial in
Elmira.
FORTUNE FOR DAUGHTER
Publisher Believes It Will Be Large - Death of Author is Mourned in Many Lands.
Special to The New York Times.
REDDING, Conn., April 22. - New York friends of Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) will have opportunity to pay their respects to his memory tomorrow afternoon. His body is to arrive at the Grand Central Station on the Pittsfield Express at noon, and at 4 o'clock simple funeral services will be held in the Brick Presbyterian church at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventy Street. At these relatives and as many of Mr. Clemens's friends as possible will be present. Afterward the body will be taken to Elmira, N. Y., where, after another simple service, it will be buried beside those of his wife and children.
Jarvis Langdon, nephew of Mr. Clemens, said this afternoon that if Mrs. Gabrilowitsch, the only surviving member of the immediate family, had consulted only her own wishes, there would have been no public funeral, but only a simple service at Elmira. When arrangements were discussed, however, she said she felt that her father belonged to the public to a large extent, and that the public had certain rights in regard to him at a time like the present. She therefore consented to a semi-public service in New York.
Albert Bigelow Paine, one of Mr. Clemens's literary executors, left on the early morning train for new York to consult E. E. Loomis, one of the trustees of the will, and the firm of Harper & Brothers, who have the public services in charge. When he returned at 5 o'clock he announced that final arrangements had been made. He said the coffin had been chosen, a severely plain one of mahogany. F. E. Duneka of the publishing firm completed the arrangements for the funeral.
The Journey to New York.
The body will be taken to the West Redding Station at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning and placed on board the Pittsfield express. It will be accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Gabrilowitsch, Mr. Paine, and servants who have been in Mr. Clemens's service for many years. All business will be suspended in this vicinity, and the villagers and farmers from the surrounding hills will assemble. On the arrival of the body in New York it will be taken to the Brick Presbyterian Church.
The church service will consist of little more than a brief address by Dr. Henry Van Dyke of Princeton, and there will be no pallbearers. There will probably be no music.
At the conclusion of the services the body will be taken to Elmira, N. Y., in Lake Forest, the private car of E. E. Loomis, Vice President of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. Services will be held at the home of Gen. Langdon, and the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell of Hartford, a life-long friend of Mr. Clemens, will make an address.
Late today the body was prepared for burial and dressed in the white cashmere which Mr. Clemens so constantly wore in the later years of his life. It lies in his many-windowed room on the second floor. Some of the persons of the neighborhood were permitted to see the body today.
Fortune Left to Daughter.
According to Albert Bigelow Paine, the will is to be read in about a week. He believes that Mrs. Gabrilowitsch will be the sole heir, and will be asked by a codicil to make provision for some of the older servants. Katie Leary has been housekeeper for twenty-nine years. The trustees are E. E. Loomis, Jarvis Langdon, and Z. S. Freeman of the Liberty National Bank.
The house was not barred and shuttered today, but looked cheerful in the Spring sunshine, as Mr. Clemens would have wished it. The doors and windows downstairs were wide open and the sunlight was allowed to flood in. All the windows of his room were open, and breezes played through their curtains. The whole atmosphere was strikingly typical of the genial man who had made a dwelling there. After the suspense and anxiety of the week the worn-out watchers spent the day in rest. Mr. and Mrs. Gabrilowitsch remained in their apartments all day. The nephew, Jarvis Langdon, was about the house doing what was necessary.
During the day so many telegrams of sympathy poured in that the telegraph operator in the little station at Redding used up all his forms. Some of the more prominent names represented were: President Taft, ex-President Roosevelt, William Dean Howells, H. M. Alden, Melville E. Stone, William Milligan Sloan, Robert Underwood Johnson, Archdeacon J. Townsend Russell, W. R. Coe, Brander Matthews, Frank A. Munsey, Henry Watterson, George Barr McCutcheon, George W. Cable, Walter Scott, Lynn Roby Meeking, and Capt. Horace E. Bixby, the Mississippi pilot who fifty years ago "taught" Mark Twain the river.
A message was received form the authorities of Hannibal, Mo., Mark Twain's boyhood home, asking that his body be taken there for burial. Mrs. Gabrilowitsch in reply said that as the family burial ground was in Elmira, N. Y., it was thought best that the body be taken there.
A Prayer Not Yet Published.
Dan Beard, the artist and naturalist, who lives only a half mile from Stormfield, was a caller. He went to leave his own and his wife's cards. Afterward he grew reminiscent, and sitting on a large rock, where he said Mark Twain had often sat, he told a few stories of the dead author.
He said Mark Twain has shown him one day a draft of a prayer. Mr. Beard was much impressed and asked the author why he did not publish it.
"Ah," said Mark Twain, "that must not be published until after my death. While a man is alive he cannot speak the truth, but when he is dead it is different." Then he went on to tell in his peculiar drawl: "I showed this to my secretary, and she said: 'Do not publish it; it is blasphemy.' I showed it to my daughter. 'Father,' she said, 'do not publish it; it is blasphemy.' Then in despair, I showed it to my butler. He said: 'Mr. Clemens, do not publish it; it is blasphemy.' So I added four lines and then they were all satisfied."
Mr. Beard told a recent experience the humorist had confided to him. He was walking up Fifth Avenue when a little girl about 10 years old slipped her hand in his and started to match his stride.
"I'm awful glad to see you," she said.
"Are you? said he. "That's very nice."
"Yes," she answered. "I knew you right away." They continued to the next corner chatting, he proud that he could be so well known that a little girl like this could pick him out. Suddenly a horrible thought struck him and he stopped. "Who am I?" he asked, turning around. "Why," answered his companion, "Buffalo Bill, of course."
An effort was made to get the text of the prayer mentioned by Dan Beard, but Mr. Paine said he did not know of the manuscript. Mr. Paine is one of Mark Twain's literary executors, there being another.
_____
MOURNED IN MANY LANDS.
Germans Ranked Him Next to Busch - His Works in Chinese.
Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
BERLIN, April 22. - Mark Twain's death has been widely and sympathetically noted in Germany, where his works have been outranked in popularity only by those of the Fatherland's own humorist, Wilhelm Busch, whom the deceased American most resembled. All of Mr. Clemens's books were translated into the language which he ridiculed so brilliantly. His celebrated onslaught on the tongue where Goethe and Schiller contrived to sing has been enjoyed by Germans almost as much as Americans.
During one of Mr. Clemens's sojourns in Berlin fifteen years ago he attended a course of lectures on the history of German literature in the classes of Prof. Eric Schmidt, now Lord Rector of the university, who will be Mr. Roosevelt's host on May 12. Speaking to the writer of this dispatch in London ten years ago, Mr. Clemens was asked what he considered his best story, and said, " 'Huckleberry Finn,' undoubtedly."
The same Summer I learned that Sir Chichen Lofengluh, then the Chinese Minister to London, was engaged in translating a set of Mr. Clemens's works in Chinese.
_____
Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
LONDON, April 22. - Expressions of regret in Great Britain on the death of Mark Twain attain almost to the dimensions of a national tribute to he man - as The Daily Mail says - "whose humor was, like his honor, clean and of good intent and another rich contribution to the common heritage of the English-speaking nations."
The Times says: "Mark Twain is dead, and no one will ever make his
jokes again, for they were the result of his particular character and particular
experience."
_____
BERLIN, April 22. - Extended appreciations of Mark Twain appear in today's journals. The Lokal Anzeiger says: "Not only English-speaking peoples, but the whole world of culture grieves that he has gone."
The Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, in a two-column estimate of Mr. Clemens's work expresses the opinion that the American Author was loved in Germany more than is the whole body of French and English humorists, because his humor turned fundamentally upon serious and earnest conceptions of life. The paper says that the American works most widely read in Germany are probably those of Emerson and Mark Twain.
The Tageblatt says: "Among the humorists of the nineteenth century mark Twain was the most successful because he employed all the means of skillful conqueror, swift attack, surprise, and finally, the moderation of a humane conqueror. He surprises, seizes, and overwhelms, but hurts nobody, disturbs nobody's peace."
The Deutsche Tages Zeitung has this to say of Mr. Clemens: "None equal him in embodying the typical Yankee qualities, especially Yankee humor, which is too grotesque for the German taste."
The Kreuz Zeitung comments: "Mark Twain probably was the most popular American author, and he was also popular in Europe, where the grotesque boldness of his humor received unstinted admiration. He was received everywhere in Europe as the prince of humorists."
The Boersen-Courier describes Mr. Clemens as "America's classic humorist," and the Boersen Zeitung says: "We can well call him a great benefactor to humanity, for who has given our serious, anxious age so many hours of innocent mirth?"
_____
LONDON, April 22. - "The American Chaucer" is The Evening Standard's estimate of Mark Twain's position in literature. Today the paper says:
"Like Chaucer he kept a hospitable heart for what was good and healthy.
Since the death of Charles Dickens no writer of English has been so universally
read, and at the moment of his death Mark Twain was known as only one other
living writer was known. Mark Twain and Count Tolstoy are inheritors of
worldwide fame."
_____
ROME, April 22. - The whole press of Rome gives much space today to the death of Mark Twain, recalling the months he spent in Italy, the death of his wife at Florence, and the recent visit to Rome of his daughter Clara and her husband, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, on their honeymoon.
_____
VIENNA, April 22. - Intelligence of the death of Mark Twain was received with universal regret in this city, where he had numerous friends and acquaintances. The newspapers publish lengthy obituary notices and recall incidents of his residence here in the Winter of 1897-98.
_____
ROOSEVELT IS GRIEVED.
_____
Mark Twain's Achievements a Reason for National Pride.
PARIS, April 22. - Former President Roosevelt was greatly pained to hear of the death of Mark Twain.
"It is with sincere grief that I learned of the death of this great American author," he said. "His position, like that of Joel Chandler Harris, was unique, not only in American letters but in the literary of the world. He was not only a great humorist, but a great philosopher, and his writings form one of the assets in America's contributions to the world of achievement of which we have a right as a nation to be genuinely proud."
In the pigskin library which Mr. Roosevelt carried through the jungles
of Africa were two of the late author's books, "Huckleberry Finn"
and "Tom Sawyer," and Mr. Roosevelt says that he read both of
them several times and always with the greatest interest.
_____
HIS ESTATE PROBABLY LARGE.
Publisher Says Mark Twain's Income in Late Years Was Enormous.
Mark Twain's royalties from books, which have sold in larger number than the works of any other American author, left him at his death a wealthy man. A member of the firm of Harper & Brothers, who for ten years have been his publishers, discussed his books and royalties yesterday afternoon.
"There have been published in America of Mark Twain's books," he said, "about 5,000,000 or 5,500,000 copies. And these do not take into consideration publications abroad, which have been made in many languages. While we do not care to announce the figures Mr. Clemens received for his stories that appeared in our magazines, still it may be said that his royalties were larger than those of any other contemporaneous author, and that his books had a larger sale even in the last year than any other writer of the period.
"Mr. Clemens's income of late years was enormous, and he always had large sums of ready money at his command. It is hardly probable that with such intimate friends as the late H. H. Rogers to advise him he failed to invest this money wisely and to his advantage.
"A short time ago Mr. Clemens desired to have his books a part of every household library, and entered into a contract with us to publish them at $25 for a set of twelve volumes. He received only a small royalty on this edition, but its sales astonished both himself and us, and we had counted on something extraordinary, too.
"Mr. Clemens's books will sell for years to come both in this country and abroad, as he is more highly rated in Europe than he is in his own country. There he is counted a great philosopher, while here he is known at preset chiefly as a humorist."
_____
MARK TWAIN OF LONG AGO.
One Old Friend Says He Was Almost Eighty Years Old.
SALT LAKE CITY, April 22. - "Mark Twain lacked only seven months and nine days of four score years of age," said Judge C. C. Goodwin, a veteran editor, in commenting on the death of the humorist. Judge Goodwin was one of the brilliant company who gathered at the Comstock lode in the old days.
"I know he said that he was only 75," continued the Judge, "but when we were in Virginia City, Nev., Mark was older than I was, and I am 78. Here is the record of it." He opened a book of biographies by Amelia J. Carver, published in 1889. There it was: "Samuel L. Clemens, Born November 30, 1830."
"I did not go on The Virginia City Enterprise until Clemens left it," said Judge Goodwin, "but I never ceased to hear from him. He first wrote a burlesque Fourth of July oration, which was published in Aurora (Nev.) paper. As I remember it, it began:
" 'I was sired by the great American Eagle and born by a Continental dam.' This pleased Joseph T. Goodman, editor of The Virginia City Enterprise. He wrote to Clemens, telling him that if he were not making more than The Enterprise was paying he would be welcomed to the staff of the paper. One day a man came into the editorial sanctum. He wore a dilapidated hat, jeans, a hickory shirt, and carried a roll of blankets.
"That was Mark Twain's entrance into literature. Except for his experience on The Enterprise, it is doubtful if he would ever have been known as a genius."
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