FOREWORD

A SUPERSTITION, nursed and nourished by a number
of persons—most of them too young to have known
Mark Twain, too perverse to accept the simple and the
obvious, is that because of restrictions laid upon him by
his wife, by W, D. Howells, and later by those to whose
care he trusted his manuscripts, he has not been permit-
ted to have his say.

Now this is a good way from the truth. Mark Twain
had his say; as much as any author could have it, thirty,
forty, fifty years ago. When restricted at all it was chiefly
through his own expressed wish to observe the conven-
tions and convictions of that more orthodox, more timid
and delicate (possibly more immaculate), day.

It is true, as I have elsewhere freely set down, that
Howells, and especially Mrs. Clemens, usually "edited"
his manuscripts, and it is also true that the manuscripts
profited, and never, I believe, suffered through their sug-
gestions. His own taste was unreliable—as unreliable as
that of any genius: he was likely to mistake cheap banali-
ties for choice bits of humor. His advisers prevailed upon
him to eliminate, on occasion, and knowing this, a sus-
picious minority, hankering for revelations, call for Mark
Twain, unsuppresscd, unexpurgaied, unedited. The re-
sult of such a procedure would be rather dismal: the
eliminations would disturb nobody's refined sensibilities:
they would do worse: they would sadden, disenchant,
and bore the reader. Some of those that got by his editors
might better have been spared.

Mark Twain never wrote for publication anything sa-
lacious or suggestive or bordering on the indecent. He

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