Of course, the writing of such a piece as 1601 raised
the question of freedom of expression for the creative
artist.
Although little discussed at that time, it was a question
which intensely interested Mark, and for a fuller
appreciation of Mark’s position one must keep
in mind the year in which 1601 was written, 1876.
There had been nothing like it before in American
literature; there had appeared no Caldwells, no Faulkners,
no Hemingways. Victorian England was gushing
Tennyson. In the United States polite letters
was a cult of the Brahmins of Boston, with William
Dean Howells at the helm of the Atlantic. Louisa
May Alcott published Little Women in 1868-69, and Little
Men in 1871. In 1873 Mark Twain led the van
of the debunkers, scraping the gilt off the lily in
the Gilded Age.
In 1880 Mark took a few pot shots at license in Art
and Literature in his Tramp Abroad, “I wonder
why some things are? For instance, Art is allowed
as much indecent license to-day as in earlier times—but
the privileges of Literature in this respect have
been sharply curtailed within the past eighty or ninety
years. Fielding and Smollet could portray the
beastliness of their day in the beastliest language;
we have plenty of foul subjects to deal with in our
day, but we are not allowed to approach them very
near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech.
But not so with Art. The brush may still deal
freely with any subject; however revolting or indelicate.
It makes a body ooze sarcasm at every pore, to go
about Rome and Florence and see what this last generation
has been doing with the statues. These works,
which had stood in innocent nakedness for ages, are
all fig-leaved now. Yes, every one of them.
Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody
can help noticing it now, the fig-leaf makes it so
conspicuous. But the comical thing about it
all, is, that the fig-leaf is confined to cold and
pallid marble, which would be still cold and unsuggestive
without this sham and ostentatious symbol of modesty,
whereas warm-blooded paintings which do really need
it have in no case been furnished with it.
“At the door of the Ufizzi, in Florence, one
is confronted by statues of a man and a woman, noseless,
battered, black with accumulated grime—they
hardly suggest human beings—yet these ridiculous
creatures have been thoughtfully and conscientiously
fig-leaved by this fastidious generation. You
enter, and proceed to that most-visited little gallery
that exists in the world.... and there, against the
wall, without obstructing rag or leaf, you may look
your fill upon the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest
picture the world possesses—Titian’s
Venus. It isn’t that she is naked and
stretched out on a bed—no, it is the attitude
of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to
describe the attitude, there would be a fine howl—but
there the Venus lies, for anybody to gloat over that
