an instant,' he would never had had cause to suffer from his having
'loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion.' Mark Twain's verbal
Rabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not
having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left
thereto ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of
forbidden words. Consider the famous book, 1601, that fireside
conversation in the time of Queen Elizabeth: is there any obsolete verbal
indecency in the English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly
resurrected and assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment
and who could not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for
him the roitous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve,
and he poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the
waste of a priceless psychic material!" Thus, Brooks lumps 1601 with
Mark Twain's "bawdry," and interprets it simply as another indication of
frustration.


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