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.”
