that.
“In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures of blood, carnage,
oozing brains, putrefaction–pictures portraying intolerable suffering–
pictures alive with every conceivable horror, wrought out in dreadful
detail–and similar pictures are being put on the canvas every day and
publicly exhibited–without a growl from anybody–for they are innocent,
they are inoffensive, being works of art. But suppose a literary artist
ventured to go into a painstaking and elaborate description of one of
these grisly things–the critics would skin him alive. Well, let it go,
it cannot be helped; Art retains her privileges, Literature has lost
hers. Somebody else may cipher out the whys and the wherefores and the
consistencies of it–I haven’t got time.”
PROFESSOR SCENTS PORNOGRAPHY
Unfortunately, 1601 has recently been tagged by Professor Edward
Wagenknecht as “the most famous piece of pornography in American
literature.” Like many another uninformed, Prof. W. is like the little
boy who is shocked to see “naughty” words chalked on the back fence,
and thinks they are pornography. The initiated, after years of wading
through the mire, will recognize instantly the significant difference
between filthy filth and funny “filth.” Dirt for dirt’s sake is
something else again. Pornography, an eminent American jurist has
pointed out, is distinguished by the “leer of the sensualist.”
“The words which are criticised as dirty,” observed justice John M.
Woolsey in the United States District Court of New York, lifting the ban
on Ulysses by James Joyce, “are old Saxon words known to almost all men
and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally
and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical
and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe.” Neither was there
“pornographic intent,” according to justice Woolsey, nor was Ulysses
obscene within the legal definition of that word.
“The meaning of the word ‘obscene,'” the Justice indicated, “as legally
defined by the courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to
sexually impure and lustful thoughts.
“Whether a particular book would tend to excite such impulses and
thoughts must be tested by the court’s opinion as to its effect on a
person with average sex instincts–what the French would call ‘l’homme
moyen sensuel’–who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role
of hypothetical reagent as does the ‘reasonable man’ in the law of torts
and ‘the learned man in the art’ on questions of invention in patent
law.”
Obviously, it is ridiculous to say that the “leer of the sensualist”
lurks in the pages of Mark Twain’s 1601.
DROLL STORY
“In a way,” observed William Marion Reedy, “1601 is to Twain’s whole
works what the ‘Droll Stories’ are to Balzac’s. It is better than the
privately circulated ribaldry and vulgarity of Eugene Field; is, indeed,
an essay in a sort of primordial humor such as we find in Rabelais, or in
the plays of some of the lesser stars that drew their light from
Shakespeare’s urn. It is humor or fun such as one expects, let us say,
from the peasants of Thomas Hardy, outside of Hardy’s books. And, though
it be filthy, it yet hath a splendor of mere animalism of good spirits…
I would say it is scatalogical rather than erotic, save for one touch
toward the end. Indeed, it seems more of Rabelais than of Boccaccio or
Masuccio or Aretino–is brutally British rather than lasciviously
latinate, as to the subjects, but sumptuous as regards the language.”
Immediately upon first reading, John Hay, later Secretary of State, had
proclaimed 1601 a masterpiece. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain’s
biographer, likewise acknowledged its greatness, when he said, “1601 is a
genuine classic, as classics of that sort go. It is better than the
gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps in some day to come, the taste
that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literary
refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writing of Mark
Twain. Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of
environment and point of view.”
“It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not,” wrote
Clemens in his notebook in 1879. “I built a conversation which could