Hay, Pike County Ballads.

"Is there any other explanation," asks Van Wyck Brooks, "'of his
Elizabethan breadth of parlance?' Mr. Howells confesses that he
sometimes blushed over Mark Twain's letters, that there were some which,
to the very day when he wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could
not bear to reread. Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years,
while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon 'having that swearing out
in 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 riotous 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 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 t