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 times--but the
privileges of Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed
within the past eighty or ninety years. Fielding and Smollet could
portray the beastliness of their day in the beastliest language; we have
plenty of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are not allowed
to approach them very near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech.
But not so with Art. The brush may still deal freely with any subject;
however revolting or indelicate. It makes a body ooze sarcasm at every
pore, to go about Rome and Florence and see what this last generation
has been doing with the statues. These works, which had stood in
innocent nakedness for ages, are all fig-leaved now. Yes, every one of
them. Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can help
noticing it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous. But the comical
thing about it all, is, that the fig-leaf is confined to cold and pallid
marble, which would be still cold and unsuggestive without this sham and
ostentatious symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blooded paintings which do
really need it have in no case been furnished with it.
“At the door of the Ufizzi, in Florence, one is confronted by statues
of a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with accumulated
grime--they hardly suggest human beings--yet these ridiculous creatures
have been thoughtfully and conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious
generation. You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little gallery
that exists in the world.... and there, against the wall, without
obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the
vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses--Titian's Venus.
It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed--no, it is the
attitude of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe the
attitude, there would be a fine howl--but there the Venus lies, for
anybody to gloat over that wants to--and there she has a right to lie,
for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges. I saw young
girls stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and
absorbedly at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a
pathetic interest. How I should like to describe her--just to see what
a holy indignation I could stir up in the world--just to hear the
unreflecting average man deliver himself about my grossness and
coarseness, and all that.
“In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures of blood,
carnage, oozing brains, putrefaction--pictures portraying intolerable
suffering--pictures alive with every conceivable horror, wrought out in
dreadful detail--and similar pictures are being put on the canvas every
day and publicly exhibited--without a growl from anybody--for they
are innocent, they are inoffensive, being works of art. But suppose
a literary artist ventured to go into a painstaking and elaborate
description of one of these grisly things--the critics would skin him
alive. Well, let it go, it cannot be helped; Art retains her privileges,
Literature has lost hers. Somebody else may cipher out the whys and the
wherefores and the consistencies of it--I haven't got time.”