Who Is Mark Twain?

by Mark Twain

  THE CHRISTENING.

  Ah, my friends, he is but a little fellow. A very little fellow. Yes—a v-e-r-y little fellow. But! [With a severe glance around.] What of that! I ask you, What of that! [From this point, gradually begin to rise—and soar—and be pathetic, and impassioned, and all that.] Is it a crime to be little? Is it a crime, that you cast upon him these cold looks of disparagement? Oh, reflect, my friends—reflect! Oh, if you but had the eye of poesy, which is the eye of prophecy, you would fling your gaze afar down the stately march of his possible future, and then what might ye not see! What? ye disparage him because he is little? Oh, consider the mighty ocean! ye may spread upon its shoreless bosom the white-winged fleets of all the nations, and lo they are but as a flock of insects lost in the awful vacancies of interstellar space! Yet the mightiest ocean is made of little things; drops—tiny little drops—each no bigger than the tear that rests upon the cheek of this poor child! And oh, my friends, consider the mountain ranges, the giant ribs that girdle the great globe and hold its frame together—and what are they? Compacted grains of sand—little grains of sand, each no more than a freight for a gnat! And oh, consider the constellations!—the flashing suns, countless for multitude, that swim the stupendous deeps of space, glorifying the midnight skies with their golden splendors—what are they? Compacted motes! specks! impalpable atoms of wandering star-dust arrested in their vagrant flight and welded into solid worlds! Little things; yes, they are made of little things. And he—oh, look at him! Little, is he?—and ye would disparage him for it! Oh, I beseech you, cast the eye of poesy, which is the eye of prophecy, into his future! Why, he may become a poet!—the grandest the world has ever seen—Homer, Shakspeare, Dante, compacted into one!—and send down the procession of the ages songs that shall contest immortality with human speech itself! Or, he may become a great soldier!—the most illustrious in the annals of his race—Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander compacted into one!—and carry the victorious banner of his country from sea to sea, and from land to land, until it shall float at last unvexed over the final stronghold of a conquered world!—oh, heir of imperishable renown! Or, he may become a—a—he—he—[struggle desperately, here, to think of something else that he may become, but without success—the audience getting more and more distressed and worried about you all the time]—he may become—he—[suddenly] but what is his name?

  Papa [with impatience and exasperation]. His name, is it? Well, his name’s Mary Ann!

  MARK TWAIN

  THE WALT WHITMAN CONTROVERSY

  SIR: I have seen, thus far, only one remotely reasonable argument in justification of the law’s letting old obscene books alone and tomahawking new ones. It is this: the old ones merely (and innocently) mirrored the life of their times, and the indecencies in them were not written with the intent to defile the reader’s mind. Hence they were harmless. That is the one apparently reasonable argument which I have thus far encountered. But when you come to examine it carefully, it seems to be quite insufficient. For this reason: we surely do not make laws against the intent of obscene writings, but against their probable effect. If this is true, it seems to follow that we ought to condemn all indecent literature, regardless of its date. Because a book was harmless a hundred years ago, it does not follow that it is harmless to-day. A century or so ago, the foulest writings could not soil the English mind, because it was already defiled past defilement; but those same writings find a very different clientage to work upon now. Those books are not dead; among us they are bought and sold and read, every day.

  If you will allow that the question of real importance is, Which are more harmful, the old bad books or the new bad books? permit me, then, to note some particulars, and institute some comparisons.

  I begin with a glance among my book shelves, and at the end of five minutes I have selected and laid out the following volumes—and without a doubt I could have found them in your library in less time:

  Tom Jones.

  Joseph Andrews.

  Smollett’s Works.

  Shakspeare.

  Byron.

  Burns.

  Gulliver’s Travels.

  Walpole’s Letters.

  Mémoires de Casanova.

  De Foe’s Moll Flanders.

  Balzac’s Droll Tales.

  Rabelais.

  The Heptameron.

  The Decameron.

  Arabian Nights.

  Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles.

  The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter.

  Of course I could find a good deal more of this sort of literature in my library and yours, but this batch is sufficient for my purpose.

  Next, I turned my attention to new bad books. At the moment, I was able to call only three to mind—Swinburne’s and Oscar Wilde’s Poems, and Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Did I lay out these with the others? No—for I didn’t have them. Have you? Are they handy for the average young man or Miss to get at? Perhaps not. Are those others? Yes, many of them.

  Now I think I can show, by a few extracts, that in the matters of coarseness, obscenity, and power to excite salacious passion, Walt Whitman’s book is refined and colorless and impotent, contrasted with that other and more widely read batch of literature.

  In “Leaves of Grass,” the following passage has horrified Mr. Oliver Stevens by its coarseness:

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  [We are obliged to omit it.—ED. POST.]

  It does seem unnecessarily broad, it is true; but observe how pale and delicate it is when you put it alongside this passage from Rabelais—thirteenth chapter. (Hotten’s London edition is illustrated by Doré, and the pictures have carried it all over the world):

  “‘How is that?’ said Grangousier. ‘I have,’ answered Gargantua, ‘by a long and curious experience, found out a means to—’”

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  [We think it best to omit the rest of it.—ED. POST.]

  Or this, from Gulliver’s Travels, (chapter V, Brobdignag,) a book which is in everybody’s house and is daily read by old and young alike:

  “Neither did they [the naked young maids of honor,] at all scruple, while I was by,—”

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  [We cannot venture to complete the above extract.—ED. POST.]

  Now what do you really think of those?—especially the one from the popular Doré Rabelais. Yet you know that that isn’t the nastiest thing in American libraries, by any means. No, for there is a story told in the Heptameron, and retold in several other books, which easily surpasses it in filthiness. Under the title of “Merrie Jests of King Louis the Eleventh,” it appears in Balzac’s “Droll Tales,” (illustrated by Doré,) and may be found and consulted in almost anybody’s house—for the Droll Tales are in the shelves of a multitude of elegant people who wouldn’t dare to be caught sheltering a copy of Leaves of Grass in these fastidious days.

  But enough of obscenity; you perceive, yourself, that Whitman knows nothing about the genuine article. Let us now consider erotic matters. Whitman’s offenses in this line are contained in the following passages:

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  [All things considered, it seems best to omit them.—ED. POST.]

  In our households, one young person in a hundred and fifty thousand has the opportunity to read those passages; but every creature in every household in America has the opportunity to read the following lines from Shakspeare (Venus and Adonis),—and it won’t stir him up, either, because it was not written with the intent to stir people up:

  “The boar!” quoth she; whereat a sudden pale,

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  Usurps her cheeks; she trembles at his tale, And on his neck—

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  [This is not proper matter for the columns of the EVENING POST, and we must be excused from printing the remainder of the passage.—ED. POST.]

&nbs
p; Is that healthy poetry for the young? Is there an educated young fellow of nineteen, in the United States, who has not read Venus and Adonis? I pray you let us not deceive ourselves: he does not exist. You diligently hunted out all the improprieties in Shakspeare and the Bible before you were nineteen—you remember it well, now that I call your attention to it—and do you believe that you and I were any more opulently stocked with the naturalest kind of human nature than is this new generation? Go to; the thought is foolishness.

  Now, let us plunge into the Heptameron—at random—it is all alike. Try this, from Tale XLVI:

  “Going up a little wooden staircase, he found—”

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  [It is too strong; we cannot print it.—ED. POST.]

  After that, Whitman is delicate enough, isn’t he? Now try this, (The Venial Sin,) from Balzac’s Droll Tales—illustrated by Doré, and to be found everywhere:

  “This time the said youth ***, and even ventured so far as to verify if—”

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  [But that is even stronger; we cannot consent to complete the quotation.—ED. POST.]

  How does “The Venial Sin” strike you? Does anything in Leaves of Grass approach it for evil effectiveness? And while you have the Droll Tales in your hand, please glance at the second picture on page 211. And read the story, too, by way of conviction. Boccaccio is in everybody’s library, and is praised by Macaulay and other great authorities. I have an English copy, but have mislaid it; so if you will allow me, I will make an extract from a French copy which was lent me by a neighboring clergyman some time ago. It is a story about a verdant young girl and a young hermit. Try this passage:

  “L’hermite se déshabille aussitôt, et le petit ange d’en faire autant. Quand ils sont tout nus l’un et l’autre, Rustique se met à genoux, et fait placer la pauvre innocente vis-à-vis de lui, dans la même situation. Là les mains jointes, il promène ses regards sur—”

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  [It is impossible to print the rest—we must be excused.—ED. POST.]

  It is rather a long story, but I thought I would put it all in, just to show that when it comes to doing the erotic, Walt Whitman’s ink is altogether too pale. Now let us finish by dipping just once into that richest of all rich mines—I mean, of this kind of literature—Casanova’s Memoires. From chapter V:

  “Ravi d’avoir savouré * * * * * * que je venais de goûter complètement pour la première fois, je—”

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  [This is too horrible; let it stop there; we cannot finish the story. We are sorry we cannot better assist our correspondent to make out his argument, but indeed his citations, admirable as they are for the purpose in view, are altogether too strong for a newspaper like ours.—ED. POST.]

  There—I have finished my quotations. And now I suspect that you will not dare to print them in full. As likely as not, you will cut them down to next to nothing, or even leave them out altogether. But if you do, I shall not complain; for such a course will formidably fortify my position, since it will show that you know, quite well, that antiquity and absence of evil intent can’t take the harmfulness out of indelicate literature. Yes, you know that indecent literature is indecent literature; and that the effects produced by it are exactly the same, whether the writing was done yesterday or a thousand centuries ago; and that these effects are the same, whether the writer’s intent was evil or innocent.

  Whitman’s noble work

  DISCUSSION GUIDE

  In both “An Incident” (1887) and “Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture” (1895), Twain discusses notions of his own fame. How did his perception of his fame change from one essay to the next? Do you get the impression that Twain wants to be a celebrity?

  What does “Conversations with Satan” tell us about Twain’s ideas of consumerism? What is the point of the story about the cigars? How does it relate to his initial discussion with Satan about German heaters?

  In “The Privilege of the Grave,” Twain writes, “Free speech is the privilege of the dead, the monopoly of the dead. They can speak their honest minds without offending” (page 58). What is Twain saying about the right to free speech in America? Do you agree with him? Why or why not?

  In “The Quarrel in the Strong-Box,” Twain writes, “This fable teaches us that the character of the Equality established by our laws is commonly misunderstood on both sides of the water; and not oftener by the ignorant than by the ostensibly wise” (page 76). What does this statement mean? What point is he making with this essay?

  The essay “Dr. Van Dyke as a Man and as a Fisherman” retells an argument between Twain and Henry van Dyke, a Presbyterian clergyman, in which the two men discuss their different views of mankind. With whom did you side in the argument? Why?

  What do we learn about Twain’s religious beliefs from the two essays “The Missionary in World-Politics” and “Dr. Van Dyke as a Man and as a Fisherman”? Explain what Twain means when he writes at the end of “The Missionary in World-Politics”: “The time is grave. The future is blacker than has been any future which any person now living has tried to peer into” (page 109).

  What is the moral of the story “The Undertaker’s Tale”? Who is the “pleasant new acquaintance” (page 111) who tells the story?

  In “Professor Mahaffy on Equality,” Twain argues against Mahaffy’s take on the American notion of freedom. Who do you agree with? Are all men in America born free? In what different ways could someone be considered “not free” without being a slave?

  The essay “Interviewing the Interviewer” takes on the sensational media of Twain’s day. Has the media changed since the essay was written in 1870? Which of Twain’s arguments is still relevant today? Which is not?

  Why do you think this collection of Twain’s writing was titled Who Is Mark Twain? What do we learn about the author from these writings?

  Many of Twain’s essays express his views about issues of the media, religion, and politics of his time. Do you feel that his commentaries apply to modern-day issues? Which of his essays feel like they could have been written in the twenty-first century?

  About the Author

  SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS was born on November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri. He attended the ordinary western common school until he was twelve, the last of his formal schooling. In a span of fifteen years he was successively a typesetter, a steamboat pilot, a soldier for three weeks, a silver miner, a newspaper reporter, and a bohemian in San Francisco known as “Mark Twain.” But in 1865, deeply in debt, he acknowledged a talent for “literature, of a low order, i.e., humorous.” In the next forty years, he published more than a dozen books and hundreds of shorter works, including his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  WWW.TWAINIA.COM

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  Praise for

  WHO IS MARK TWAIN?

  “What’s most remarkable about this collection of Twain’s work is that, more than 100 years after he wrote these stories, they remain not only remarkably funny but remarkably modern…. Ninety-nine years after his death, Twain still manages to get the last laugh.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “As funny and insightful as any of his published and well-known works, these essays take on the federal government, religion, race, fame, and even the literary canon with a sharp-eyed clarity we can chuckle over as we read while feeling uncomfortable knowing that they feel all too contemporary.”

  —The Daily Beast

  “Most of all, though, Who Is Mark Twain? is worth reading for the sheer pleasure of rediscovering why this writer was so popular in his day.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Twain once famously wrote: ‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’ This book proves that he continues to enjoy literary immort
ality.”

  —South Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “Who Is Mark Twain? possesses one inestimable virtue: its author is never dull…. He was, in the phrase of his friend William Dean Howells, ‘the Lincoln of our literature’ but also a writer to rival Samuel Beckett in gallows humor and philosophical bleakness. At the heart of his work lies that greatest of all American qualities: irreverence.”

  —Washington Post

  “Who Is Mark Twain? captures the folksy icon’s furious but often repressed compulsion to tell the world what he really thought of its tedious platitudes and received wisdom…. Twain’s wit and lethally precise powers of description are on full display.”

  —NPR

  “Twain’s voice can often seem surprisingly germane and culturally savvy, even after a century. This volume is a timely contribution to the enterprise of keeping Twain’s spirit alive.”

  —St. Louis Dispatch

  ALSO BY MARK TWAIN

  The Innocents Abroad