1601: Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors

FIGS FOR FIG LEAVES!

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 wants to – and there she has a right to lie, for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges. I saw young girls stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and absorbedly at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic interest. How I should like to describe her – just to see what a holy indignation I could stir up in the world – just to hear the unreflecting average man deliver himself about my grossness and coarseness, and all 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 have happened – I used words such as were used at that time – 1601. I sent it anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the sender!”

“But that man was a praiser of Rabelais and had been saying, ‘O that we had a Rabelais!’ I judged that I could furnish him one.”

“Then I took it to one of the greatest, best and most learned of Divines [Rev. Joseph H. Twichell] and read it to him. He came within an ace of killing himself with laughter (for between you and me the thing was dreadfully funny. I don’t often write anything that I laugh at myself, but I can hardly think of that thing without laughing). That old Divine said it was a piece of the finest kind of literary art – and David Gray of the Buffalo Courier said it ought to be printed privately and left behind me when I died, and then my fame as a literary artist would last.”

FRANKLIN J. MEINE