MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1907-1910


VOLUME VI.



By Mark Twain



ARRANGED WITH COMMENT
BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE






Contents

XLVI.
LETTERS 1907-08. A DEGREE FROM OXFORD. THE NEW HOME AT REDDING.

XLVII.
LETTERS, 1909. TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS. LIFE AT STORMFIELD. COPYRIGHT EXTENSION. DEATH OF JEAN CLEMENS

XLVIII.
LETTERS OF 1910. LAST TRIP TO BERMUDA. LETTERS TO PAINE. THE LAST LETTER.






XLVI. LETTERS 1907-08. A DEGREE FROM OXFORD. THE NEW HOME AT REDDING.

     The author, J. Howard Moore, sent a copy of his book, The Universal     Kinship, with a letter in which he said: “Most humorists have no     anxiety except to glorify themselves and add substance to their     pocket-books by making their readers laugh.  You have shown, on many     occasions, that your mission is not simply to antidote the     melancholy of a world, but includes a real and intelligent concern     for the general welfare of your fellowman.”     The Universal Kinship was the kind of a book that Mark Twain     appreciated, as his acknowledgment clearly shows.






To Mr. J. Howard Moore:

                                                       Feb. 2, '07.

DEAR MR. MOORE, The book has furnished me several days of deep pleasure and satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions and reflections and resentments by doing it lucidly and fervently and irascibly for me.

There is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we have gone backward as many grades. That evolution is strange, and to me unaccountable and unnatural. Necessarily we started equipped with their perfect and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute; we have no real, morals, but only artificial ones—morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural and hellish instincts. Yet we are dull enough to be vain of them. Certainly we are a sufficiently comical invention, we humans.

                         Sincerely Yours,                                   S. L. CLEMENS.
     Mark Twain's own books were always being excommunicated by some     librarian, and the matter never failed to invite the attention and     amusement of the press, and the indignation of many correspondents.     Usually the books were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the morals of which     were not regarded as wholly exemplary.  But in 1907 a small library,     in a very small town, attained a day's national notoriety by putting     the ban on Eve's Diary, not so much on account of its text as for     the chaste and exquisite illustrations by Lester Ralph.  When the     reporters came in a troop to learn about it, the author said: “I     believe this time the trouble is mainly with the pictures.  I did     not draw them.  I wish I had—they are so beautiful.”     Just at this time, Dr. Will                        
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