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DISAPPEARANCE OF LITERATURE
ADDRESS AT THE DINNER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY CLUB, AT
SHERRY'S, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 20, 1900
Mr. Clemens spoke to the toast "The Disappearance of
Literature." Doctor Gould presided, and in introducing
Mr. Clemens said that he (the speaker), when in Germany, had to
do a lot of apologizing for a certain literary man who was
taking what the Germans thought undue liberties with their
language.
It wasn't necessary for your chairman to apologize for me in Germany.
It wasn't necessary at all. Instead of that he ought to have impressed
upon those poor benighted Teutons the service I rendered them. Their
language had needed untangling for a good many years. Nobody else seemed
to want to take the job, and so I took it, and I flatter myself that I
made a pretty good job of it. The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting
up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world
when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But
that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it
down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it
away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they
just shovel in German. I maintain that there is no necessity for
apologizing for a man who helped in a small way to stop such mutilation.
We have heard a discussion to-night on the disappearance of literature.
That's no new thing. That's what certain kinds of literature have been
doing for several years. The fact is, my friends, that the fashion in
literature changes, and the literary tailors have to change their cuts or
go out of business. Professor Winchester here, if I remember fairly
correctly what he said, remarked that few, if any, of the novels produced
to-day would live as long as the novels of Walter Scott. That may be his
notion. Maybe he is right; but so far as I am concerned, I don't care if
they don't.
Professor Winchester also said something about there being no modern
epics like Paradise Lost. I guess he's right. He talked as if he was
pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody would
suppose that he never had read it. I don't believe any of you have ever
read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you
just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester
says, and it meets his definition of a classic--something that everybody
wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Professor Trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearance of
literature. He said that Scott would outlive all his critics. I guess
that's true. The fact of the business is, you've got to be one of two
ages to appreciate Scott. When you're eighteen you can read Ivanhoe, and
you want to wait until you are ninety to read some of the rest. It takes
a pretty well-regulated, abstemious critic to live ninety years.
But as much as these two gentlemen have talked about the disappearance of
literature, they didn't say anything about my books. Maybe they think
they've disappeared. If they do, that just shows their ignorance on the
general subject of literature. I am not as young as I was several years
ago, and maybe I'm not so fashionable, but I'd be willing to take my
chances with Mr. Scott to-morrow morning in selling a piece of literature
to the Century Publishing Company. And I haven't got much of a pull
here, either. I often think that the highest compliment ever paid to my
poor efforts was paid by Darwin through President Eliot, of Harvard
College. At least, Eliot said it was a compliment, and I always take the
opinion of great men like college presidents on all such subjects as
that.
I went out to Cambridge one day a few years ago and called on President
Eliot. In the course of the conversation he said that he had just
returned from England, and that he was very much touched by what he
considered the high compliment Darwin was paying to my books, and he went
on to tell me something like this:
"Do you know that there is one room in Darwin's house, his bedroom, where
the housemaid is never allowed to touch two things? One is a plant he is
growing and studying while it grows" (it was one of those insect-
devouring plants which consumed bugs and beetles and things for the
particular delectation of Mr. Darwin) "and the other some books that lie
on the night table at the head of his bed. They are your books, Mr.
Clemens, and Mr. Darwin reads them every night to lull him to sleep."
My friends, I thoroughly appreciated that compliment, and considered it
the highest one that was ever paid to me. To be the means of soothing to
sleep a brain teeming with bugs and squirming things like Darwin's was
something that I had never hoped for, and now that he is dead I never
hope to be able to do it again. |
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