Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 6 (1907-1910)
by Mark Twain
- Pages
- about 44
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 49 min at 250 wpm
From the opening
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.
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.
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.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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