Saratoga Evening Journal 2-21-1885

Twain and Cable.

It would not be easy to find two more dissimilar gentlemen on the
platform together than Mark Twain and George W. Cable.  Their appearance
in Saratoga last night was an event that will be long remembered by the
large and delighted audience.  Both possess a large parish of readers,
and are among the most successful literary men of the day, Mr. Twain as
a pure humorist, and Mr. Cable as a writer of fiction in a field almost
entirely new.  There is humor in Cable's writings, and the evident
demand of his audiences for fun was indicated in his selection mostly of
those passages which are characterized rather for humor than sentiment,
although his last selection from “Dr. Sevier,” the ride of “Mary
Richling,” was intensely dramatic and was given with intense dramatic
power.

Opinions will differ as to Cable's readings.  His characters are not
familiar, if we except the very pretty portraiture of “Kate Riley,” and
Cable himself has a delicate tinge of provincialism about him, which
would not please everybody.  We like the man himself.  He is tempered
steel.  He is both a genius and an artist.  His pen has limned
characters, unique in American literature, and as antique, clean cut and
classic as a Florentine jewel or a portrait from a Venetian palace.  And
yet they are types of American life, that strange, quaint, passionate
life that slumbered, flashed, glittered and burned, and has well nigh
turned to ashes in the antique streets and quarters of a city almost as
foreign and unknown to Americans as Madrid or Seville.  In his brief
selections last night Mr. Cable presented, so far as time allowed, his
own conceptions of a few of the characters from his last story, “Dr.
Sevier.”  They are not, by any means, the best that he has created or
depicted.  But they were admirably personated.

As to Mark Twain, it is needless to say that he carried the house by
storm with his dry, infectious and irresistible humor.  There is more in
most of Twain's jests and humorous turns than in those of many
humorists, in that they are almost all reinforced by auxilliary [sic] or
sub-jokes, an annex, as it were to each joke, so that you hardly catch
the report of one and begin to enjoy it when, like an echo, or a
reverberation, or rather, like a repeating rifle, along come other jokes
following close on the heels of their file leaders, (our metaphor is a
little mixed) and each one apparently healthier and heartier than its
predecessor.  He will string more wit, and jokes, and humor, and fun on
a single climacteric sentence than any one that we know of.  And what a
style the man has. It inspires confidence in the absolute unreliability
of what he is going to say, the moment he appears on the platform and
gravely takes you in with his severely sober but twinkling glance.  He
makes you the confidant of his villainies and his trials in a way that
you cannot resist, and when the cold-blooded wretch has compromised you,
he has you at his mercy and you can't get away, and he knows it.  The
first thing he did last night was to gain the sympathy of his dupes by
reciting to them his struggles with German genders.  Then he gave the
details and disasters of a “little game” that he attempted to practice
on an unprotected female in Switzerland; and then he recounted his
experince in Nevada as a “fighting editor,” which must have made some of
the Saratoga fighters burn with jealousy as he displayed the
bloodthirsty traits in his editorial character.  The entertainment was
concluded with a blood-curdling ghost story which fairly startled his
audience out of their seats.  


I got this courtesy: 
Teri Blasko
Local History Librarian
Saratoga Room
Saratoga Springs Public Library