of Arc–that lovely creature that started a great career at thirteen, but
whose greatness arrived when she was eighteen; and merely, because she
was a girl he can not see the divinity in her, and so he paints a
peasant, a coarse and lubberly figure–the figure of a cotton-bale, and
he clothes that in the coarsest raiment of the peasant region just like a
fish woman, her hair cropped short like a Russian peasant, and that face
of hers, which should be beautiful and which should radiate all the
glories which are in the spirit and in her heart that expression in that
face is always just the fixed expression of a ham.
But now Mr. Beard has intimated a moment ago, and so has Sir Purdon-
Clarke also, that the artist, the, illustrator, does not often get the
idea of the man whose book he is illustrating. Here is a very remarkable
instance of the other thing in Mr. Beard, who illustrated a book of mine.
You may never have heard of it. I will tell you about it now–A Yankee
in King Arthur’s Court.
Now, Beard got everything that I put into that book and a little more
besides. Those pictures of Beard’s in that book–oh, from the first page
to the last is one vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the
servilities of our poor human race, and also at the professions and the
insolence of priest-craft and king-craft–those creatures that make
slaves of themselves and have not the manliness to shake it off. Beard
put it all in that book. I meant it to be there. I put a lot of it
there and Beard put the rest.
What publisher of mine in Hartford had an eye for the pennies, and he
saved them. He did not waste any on the illustrations. He had a very
good artist–Williams–who had never taken a lesson in drawing.
Everything he did was original. The publisher hired the cheapest wood-
engraver he could find, and in my early books you can see a trace of
that. You can see that if Williams had had a chance he would have made
some very good pictures. He had a good heart and good intentions.
I had a character in the first book he illustrated–The Innocents Abroad.
That was a boy seventeen or eighteen years old–Jack Van Nostrand–a New
York boy, who, to my mind, was a very remarkable creature. He and I
tried to get Williams to understand that boy, and make a picture of Jack
that would be worthy of Jack.
Jack was a most singular combination. He was born and reared in New York
here. He was as delicate in his feelings, as clean and pure and refined
in his feelings as any lovely girl that ever was, but whenever he
expressed a feeling he did it in Bowery slang, and it was a most curious
combination–that delicacy of his and that apparent coarseness. There
was no coarseness inside of Jack at all, and Jack, in the course of
seventeen or eighteen years, had acquired a capital of ignorance that was
marvellous–ignorance of various things, not of all things. For
instance, he did not know anything about the Bible. He had never been in
Sunday-school. Jack got more out of the Holy Land than anybody else,
because the others knew what they were expecting, but it was a land of
surprises to him.
I said in the book that we found him watching a turtle on a log, stoning
that turtle, and he was stoning that turtle because he had read that “The
song of the turtle was heard in the land,” and this turtle wouldn’t sing.
It sounded absurd, but it was charged on Jack as a fact, and as he went
along through that country he had a proper foil in an old rebel colonel,
who was superintendent and head engineer in a large Sunday-school in
Wheeling, West Virginia. That man was full of enthusiasm wherever he
went, and would stand and deliver himself of speeches, and Jack would
listen to those speeches of the colonel and wonder.
Jack had made a trip as a child almost across this continent in the first