for
weakness--or let us say a cutting edge--but the old vulgar monosyllabic
words bit like the blow of a pioneer's ax--and Mark was like that. Then
I think 1601 came out of Mark's instinctive humor, satire and hatred of
puritanism. But there is more than this; with all its humor there is a
sense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake.
Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself--no more
obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries. Every
word used in 1601 was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of their
vocabulary--and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent,
but only as language to express his meaning. No act of nature is obscene
in itself--but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior
purpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive.
I think he delighted, too, in shocking--giving resounding slaps on what
Chaucer would quite simply call 'the bare erse.'"

Quite aside from this Chaucerian "erse" slapping, Clemens had also a
semi-serious purpose, that of reproducing a past time as he saw it in
Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, and other writers of the Elizabethan era.
Fireside Conversation was an exercise in scholarship illumined by a keen
sense of character. It was made especially effective by the artistic
arrangement of widely-gathered material into a compressed picture of
a phase of the manners and even the minds of the men and women "in the
spacious times of great Elizabeth."

Mark Twain made of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance,
carried over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for
mere delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it
deals. That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is
apparent from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where
he refers to the conversation at the famous Round Table thus:

"Many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great
assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen of the land would have
made a Comanche blush. Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea.
However, I had read Tom Jones and Roderick Random and other books of
that kind and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in
England had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the
morals and conduct which such talk implies, clear up to one hundred
years ago; in fact clear into our own nineteenth c