FOREWORD
still more remarkable, preserved. These little books are
now offered in full. A man in his diary, if anywhere, can
have his say. He is talking to himself—his thought and
his language are strictly his own. Some of the things that
Mark Twain set down in that privacy were hardly suited
to the unadorned cheek of polite society in that purer
pre-war day. Now all is changed. How tolerant the world
has grown in a few years. A spade is no longer just a
garden implement: the utterance that twenty years ago
was regarded as too highly seasoned for the "general" has
become its daily nourriture.
In his journal, Mark Twain recorded in random phrase
and fashion whatever seemed to him worth noting. Those
expecting the salacious are likely to be disappointed.
Those hoping for furtive indecencies are certain to be. As
already suggested, Mark Twain was nothing if not frank,
and he was a master of Anglo-Saxon word and phrase.
He had little taste for the refinements of suggestion. In
the pages that follow he pauses here and there to free his
mind: politics, religion, the divine right of kings, person-
alities, he has something to say of these. He is not always
consistent—only the dull-minded are that—inconsistency
being one of the chief attributes of gods. He doesn't al-
ways agree with the world as he finds it—its conventions
and its faiths—he doesn't always agree with himself.
Tragedy, comedy, heresy—his notebooks make up the
record. The entries, whatever their interest, or lack of it
—are as he left them, and they bring us about as near as
we shall ever get to this remarkable man, easily the most
remarkable of his time.
albert bigelow paine