The author, J. Howard Moore, sent a
copy of his book, The Universal Kinship, with
a letter in which he said: “Most humorists
have no anxiety except to glorify themselves
and add substance to their pocket-books by making
their readers laugh. You have shown, on many
occasions, that your mission is not simply to
antidote the melancholy of a world, but includes
a real and intelligent concern for the general
welfare of your fellowman.”
The Universal Kinship
was the kind of a book that Mark Twain
appreciated, as his
acknowledgment clearly shows.
To Mr. J.
Howard Moore:
Feb.
2, ’07. Dear Mr. Moore, The book has furnished
me several days of deep pleasure and satisfaction;
it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since
it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished
opinions and reflections and resentments by doing
it lucidly and fervently and irascibly for me.
There is one thing that always puzzles me: as
inheritors of the mentality of our reptile ancestors
we have improved the inheritance by a thousand grades;
but in the matter of the morals which they left us
we have gone backward as many grades. That evolution
is strange, and to me unaccountable and unnatural.
Necessarily we started equipped with their perfect
and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute;
we have no real, morals, but only artificial ones—morals
created and preserved by the forced suppression of
natural and hellish instincts. Yet we are dull
enough to be vain of them. Certainly we are a
sufficiently comical invention, we humans.
Sincerely
Yours,
S.
L. Clemens.
Mark Twain’s own books were always
being excommunicated by some librarian, and the
matter never failed to invite the attention and amusement
of the press, and the indignation of many correspondents.
Usually the books were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn,
the morals of which were not regarded as wholly
exemplary. But in 1907 a small library, in
a very small town, attained a day’s national
notoriety by putting the ban on Eve’s Diary,
not so much on account of its text as for the
chaste and exquisite illustrations by Lester Ralph.
When the reporters came in a troop to learn
about it, the author said: “I believe
this time the trouble is mainly with the pictures.
I did not draw them. I wish I had—they
are so beautiful.”
Just at this time, Dr. William Lyon
Phelps, of Yale, was giving a literary talk to
the Teachers’ Club, of Hartford, dwelling on
the superlative value of Mark Twain’s writings
for readers old and young. Mrs. F. G. Whitmore,
an old Hartford friend, wrote Clemens of the
things that Phelps had said, as consolation for Eve’s
latest banishment. This gave him a chance
to add something to what he had said to the reporters.
To Mrs. Whitmore,
in Hartford:
