Beginning at the star with the words, “The criticisms were just.”  Mrs. Clemens says, “Don’t ask that of Mr. Howells—­it will be disagreeable to him.”  I hadn’t thought of it, but I will bet two to one on the correctness of her instinct.  We shall see.

Will you cut that paragraph out of this letter and precede it with the remarks suggested (or with better ones,) and send it to the Globe or some other paper?  You can’t do me a bigger favor; and yet if it is in the least disagreeable, you mustn’t think of it.  But let me know, right away, for I want to correct this thing before it grows stale again.  I explained myself to only one critic (the World)—­the consequence was a noble notice of the play.  This one called on me, else I shouldn’t have explained myself to him.

I have been putting in a deal of hard work on that play in New York, but it is full of incurable defects.

My old Plunkett family seemed wonderfully coarse and vulgar on the stage, but it was because they were played in such an outrageously and inexcusably coarse way.  The Chinaman is killingly funny.  I don’t know when I have enjoyed anything as much as I did him.  The people say there isn’t enough of him in the piece.  That’s a triumph—­there’ll never be any more of him in it.

John Brougham said, “Read the list of things which the critics have condemned in the piece, and you have unassailable proofs that the play contains all the requirements of success and a long life.”

That is true.  Nearly every time the audience roared I knew it was over something that would be condemned in the morning (justly, too) but must be left in—­for low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can’t support the play by itself.

There was as much money in the house the first two nights as in the first
ten of Sellers.  Haven’t heard from the third—­I came away. 
                                   Yrs ever,
          
                                   Mark.

In a former letter we have seen how Mark Twain, working on a story that was to stand as an example of his best work, and become one of his surest claims to immortality (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), displayed little enthusiasm in his undertaking.  In the following letter, which relates the conclusion of his detective comedy, we find him at the other extreme, on very tiptoe with enthusiasm over something wholly without literary value or dramatic possibility.  One of the hall-marks of genius is the inability to discriminate as to the value of its output.  “Simon Wheeler, Amateur Detective” was a dreary, absurd, impossible performance, as wild and unconvincing in incident and dialogue as anything out of an asylum could well be.  The title which he first chose for it, “Balaam’s Ass,” was properly in keeping with the general scheme.  Yet Mark Twain, still warm with the creative