We are spoken of (by Englishmen) as a thin-skinned people.It is you who are thin-skinned.An Englishman may write with the most brutal frankness about any man or institution among us and we republish him without dreaming of altering a line or a word.But England cannot stand that kind of a book written about herself.It is England that is thin-skinned.It causeth me to smile when I read the modifications of my language which have been made in my English editions to fit them for the sensitive English palate.
Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of offense that you might not lack the nerve to print it just as it stands.
I am going to get the proofs to you just as early as I can.I want you to read it carefully.If you can publish it without altering a single word, go ahead.Otherwise, please hand it to J.R.Osgood in time for him to have it published at my expense.
This is important, for the reason that the book was not written for America; it was written for England.So many Englishmen have done their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level of manhood in turn.
Very truly yours, S.L.CLEMENS.
The English nation, at least a considerable portion of it, did not wish to be "pried up to a higher level of manhood" by a Connecticut Yankee.
The papers pretty generally denounced the book as coarse; in fact, a vulgar travesty.Some of the critics concluded that England, after all, had made a mistake in admiring Mark Twain.Clemens stood this for a time and then seems to have decided that something should be done.One of the foremost of English critics was his friend and admirer; he would state the case to him fully and invite his assistance.
To Andrew Lang, in London:
[First page missing.]
1889
They vote but do not print.The head tells you pretty promptly whether the food is satisfactory or not; and everybody hears, and thinks the whole man has spoken.It is a delusion.Only his taste and his smell have been heard from--important, both, in a way, but these do not build up the man; and preserve his life and fortify it.
The little child is permitted to label its drawings "This is a cow this is a horse," and so on.This protects the child.It saves it from the sorrow and wrong of hearing its cows and its horses criticized as kangaroos and work benches.A man who is white-washing a fence is doing a useful thing, so also is the man who is adorning a rich man's house with costly frescoes; and all of us are sane enough to judge these performances by standards proper to each.Now, then, to be fair, an author ought to be allowed to put upon his book an explanatory line:
"This is written for the Head; "This is written for the Belly and the Members." And the critic ought to hold himself in honor bound to put away from him his ancient habit of judging all books by one standard, and thenceforth follow a fairer course.
The critic assumes, every time, that if a book doesn't meet the cultivated-class standard, it isn't valuable.Let us apply his law all around: for if it is sound in the case of novels, narratives, pictures, and such things, it is certainly sound and applicable to all the steps which lead up to culture and make culture possible.It condemns the spelling book, for a spelling book is of no use to a person of culture;it condemns all school books and all schools which lie between the child's primer and Greek, and between the infant school and the university; it condemns all the rounds of art which lie between the cheap terra cotta groups and the Venus de Medici, and between the chromo and the Transfiguration; it requires Whitcomb Riley to sing no more till he can sing like Shakespeare, and it forbids all amateur music and will grant its sanction to nothing below the "classic."Is this an extravagant statement? No, it is a mere statement of fact.
It is the fact itself that is extravagant and grotesque.And what is the result? This--and it is sufficiently curious: the critic has actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and Homer than the little everybody's-poet whose rhymes are in all mouths today and will be in nobody's mouth next generation; and the Latin classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation Army; and the Venus de Medici than the plaster-cast peddler; the superstition, in a word, that the vast and awful comet that trails its cold lustre through the remote abysses of space once a century and interests and instructs a cultivated handful of astronomers is worth more to the world than the sun which warms and cheers all the nations every day and makes the crops to grow.