rather inordinately vain of it. At that time it had been privately
printed in several countries, among them Japan. A sumptuous edition on
large paper, rough-edged, was made by Lieut. C. E. S. Wood at West Point
–an edition of 50 copies–and distributed among popes and kings and such
people. In England copies of that issue were worth twenty guineas when I
was there six years ago, and none to be had.”
FROM THE DEPTHS
Mark Twain’s irreverence should not be misinterpreted: it was an
irreverence which bubbled up from a deep, passionate insight into the
well-springs of human nature. In 1601, as in ‘The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg,’ and in ‘The Mysterious Stranger,’ he tore the masks off
human beings and left them cringing before the public view. With the
deftness of a master surgeon Clemens dealt with human emotions and
delighted in exposing human nature in the raw.
The spirit and the language of the Fireside Conversation were rooted deep
in Mark Twain’s nature and in his life, as C. E. S. Wood, who printed
1601 at West Point, has pertinently observed,
“If I made a guess as to the intellectual ferment out of which 1601 rose
I would say that Mark’s intellectual structure and subconscious graining
was from Anglo-Saxons as primitive as the common man of the Tudor period.
He came from the banks of the Mississippi–from the flatboatmen, pilots,
roustabouts, farmers and village folk of a rude, primitive people–as
Lincoln did.
“He was finished in the mining camps of the West among stage drivers,
gamblers and the men of ’49. The simple roughness of a frontier people
was in his blood and brain.
“Words vulgar and offensive to other ears were a common language to him.
Anyone who ever knew Mark heard him use them freely, forcibly,
picturesquely in his unrestrained conversation. Such language is
forcible as all primitive words are. Refinement seems to make for
weakness–or let us say a cutting edge–but the old vulgar monosyllabic
words bit like the blow of a pioneer’s ax–and Mark was like that. Then
I think 1601 came out of Mark’s instinctive humor, satire and hatred of
puritanism. But there is more than this; with all its humor there is a
sense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake.
Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself–no more
obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries. Every
word used in 1601 was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of their
vocabulary–and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent, but
only as language to express his meaning. No act of nature is obscene in
itself–but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior
purpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive.
I think he delighted, too, in shocking–giving resounding slaps on what
Chaucer would quite simply call ‘the bare erse.'”
Quite aside from this Chaucerian “erse” slapping, Clemens had also a
semi-serious purpose, that of reproducing a past time as he saw it in
Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, and other writers of the Elizabethan era.
Fireside Conversation was an exercise in scholarship illumined by a keen
sense of character. It was made especially effective by the artistic
arrangement of widely-gathered material into a compressed picture of a
phase of the manners and even the minds of the men and women “in the
spacious times of great Elizabeth.”
Mark Twain made of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance, carried
over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for mere
delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it deals.
That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is apparent
from chapter four of ‘A Yankee At King Arthur’s Court,’ where he refers
to the conversation at the famous Round Table thus:
“Many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great
assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen of the land would have made
a Comanche blush. Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea.
However, I had read Tom Jones and Roderick Random and other books of that