Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass

[Nineteen-year-old Samuel Clemens, not yet Mark Twain, moved to Keokuk, Iowa, in 1854 to join his older brother, Orion, who’d established himself there to start a newspaper. Up to this time, Samuel Clemens had worked as a typesetter, first for Orion in Hannibal, then on his own on the east coast (New York and Philadelphia), but in Keokuk, the young man turned his hand to writing short, humorous pieces. By 1856, Clemens had become good enough at his new vocation to be commissioned by the Keokuk Saturday Post to write a series of humorous letters relating his adventures on the way to South American. Clemens never made it to South America, but his three letters—under the pseudonym of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass—en route down the Mississippi ran in his brother’s paper back in Iowa. In one, Clemens took up the conceit of a sort of amateur drama critic and filed this “review” of Julius Caesar in St. Louis.

[The letter below is written in what may have been Clemens first attempt to emulate local dialect. Snodgrass, furthermore, is a country bumpkin, a rube in the big city. Today we might find this portrait precious or even degrading, but it was the fashion of the day and quite popular. Though Clemens displays flashes of the wit and charm that would imbue the writing of Mark Twain a decade later, this is clearly a juvenile and amateur attempt by a very young writer just feeling out his literary persona and voice. (Like his later writing, too, the author here uses language which today is considered unacceptable. I have not censored the text, however.) This letter also marks one of Clemens’s early attempts to confront a life-long fascination that he never quite mastered—the theater.]

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KEOKUK SATURDAY POST, November 1, 1856
CORRESPONDENCE
Saint Louis, Oct. 18, 1856

MISTER EDITORS —

I want to enlighten you a leetle. I've been to the Theater—and I jest want to tell you how they do things down here to Saint Louis—the Mound City, as they call it, owin to its proximity to the Iron mountain and Pilot Knob.

Last night as I was a settin in the parlor of my Dutch boardin house in Fourth street (I board among the crouters so as to observe human natur in a forren aspeck) one of my hairy friends proposed that we mought as well go down and see Mr. Nealy play Julius Cesar. Now I had see Mr. Belding's Atheneum in Keokuk, and allers had a hankerin to get inside of it—so I told the Dutchman (who is for all the world like other humans, eats like 'em, looks something like 'em, and drinks a good deal more like 'em) that I was anxious to patronize the Drammer.

We hadn't gone more'n about six squares till we come to a tremenjous dirt-colored house, with carriages, and omnibuses, and niggers, and penut boys tearin around in front of it, indiscriminate like, and Dutch (I couldn't put in his name without using up too many of your type) said that was the place. We bought some green tickets and follered some fellers up nigh unto four hundred flights of stairs, and finally got into the concern, which was built into three or four round stories, with men and fiddlers in the first, along with a right smart chance of ragged boys, eatin penuts and cussin like militia majors. The second story had men and gals in it, and above there was nothing but masculine genders. We very naturally went into the second story, and got round where the side of the house (least ways I thought it was part of the house) was painted to represent Alexandria, or Venice, or some other small village settin in the water.

Gee Whillikens! Mister Editors, if you could a been there jest then, you'd a thought that either old Gabriel had blowed his horn, or else there was houses to rent in that locality. I reckon there was nigh onto forty thousand people setting in that theatre—and sich an other fannin, and blowin, and scrapon, and gigglin, I hain't seen since I arrived in the United States. Gals! Bless your soul, there was gals there of every age and sex, from three months up to a hundred years, and every cherubim of 'em had a fan and an opery glass and a-tongue—probably two or three of the latter weepon, from the racket they made. No use to try to estimate the oceans of men and mustaches—-the place looked like a shoe brush shop.

Presently, about a thousand fellers commenced hammerin on the benches and hollerin "Music," and then the fiddlers laid themselves out, and went at it like forty millions of wood sawyers at two dollars and a half a cord. When they got through the people hollered and stamped and whistled like they do at a demercratic meeting, when the speaker says something they don't understand. Well, thinks I, now I've got an old coarse comb in my pocket, and I wonder if it wouldn't take them one-hoss fiddlers down a peg and bring down the house, too, if I'd jest give 'em a tech of "Auld Lang Syne" on it. No sooner said than done, and out come the old comb and a piece of paper to put on it. I "hem'd and haw'd" to attract attention, like, and commenced Doo-doo—do-doo—do-doo. "He, he, he," snickered the gals. "Ha, ha, ha," roared the mustaches. "Put him out." "Let him alone." "Go it, old Country." "Say, when did you get down? " and the devil himself couldn't a hearn that comb. I tell you now, I was riled. I throwed the comb at a little man that wasn't sayin nothin and ris right up. "Gentlemen and Ladies," says I, "I want to explain. I'm a peacable stranger from Keokuk, and my name is Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass—" "Go it, Snodgrass." "Oh, what a name." "Say, old Country, whar'd you get that hat?" Darn my skin if I wasn't mad. I jerked off my coat and jumped at the little man and, says I, "You nasty, sneakin degenerate great grandson of a ring tailed monkey, I kin jest lam—" "Hold on there, my friend, jest pick up your coat and follow me," says a military lookin gentleman with a club in his hand, tappin me on the shoulder. He was a police. He took me out and after I explained to him how St. Louis would fizzle out if Keokuk got offended at her, he let me go back, makin me promise not to make any more music durin the evening. So I let 'em holler their darndest when I took my seat, but never let on like I heard 'em.

Pretty soon a little bell rung, and they rolled up the side of the house with Alexandria on it, showin a mighty fine city, with houses, and streets, and sich, but nary a fire plug—all as natural as life. This was Rome. Then a lot of onery lookin fellers come a tearin down one of the streets, hurrayin and swingin their clubs, and said they were going to see Julius Cesar come into town. After this they shoved Rome out of the way, and showed the inside of a splendid palace, they call it, and then some soldiers with bob-tailed tin coats on (high water coats we used to call 'em in Keokuk) come in, then some gals (with high water dresses on) and then some more soldiers, and so on, gals and soldiers and soldiers and gals, till it looked like all the Free Masons and Daughters of Temperance in the world had turned out. Finally Mr. Cesar hisself come in with a crown on, folks called it, but it looked to my unsofisticated vision like a hat without any crown about it. He had a little talk with Antony, durin which he was uncommon severe on a Mr. Cashus (who was a standin within three feet of him, but the derned fool didn't hear a word of it) reflectin on his personal appearance—saying he had a "lean and hungry look," which was mighty mean in him to say, though he was in fact, for the feller couldn't a looked more like a shadder if he'd a boarded all his life at a Keokuk hotel. It's no use expatiating on every thing they done, so I'll jest mention a few of the things which I happened to see when the gal that sot in front of me took her turkey's tail head dress out of the way a minute to say somethin to the owner of an invisable mustash that had got wilted by coming out into the night air.

Arter a spell, a lot of fellers come out, along with Mr. Cashus, and they all laid their heads together like as many lawyers when they are gettin ready to prove that a man's heirs ain't got any right to his property. Presently Mr. Brutus come a marchin in as grand as a elephant in a menagerie of monkeys, and then the people stamped like Jehu. I kinda liked his looks. He 'peared like a man and a gentleman. The gal with the turkey's tail clapped her spy-glass to her eye, and says, "Ther's Brutus—oh, what a mien he has." I didn't like that, so leanin forward, says I, "Madam, beggin your pardon, them other fellers is a consarned sight meaner'n him. There's that Cashus—" "Hold your tongue, sir," yelled the wilted mustasch—and in half a second there was enough double-barrelled opery glasses leveled at me to a blowed me into chunks no bigger'n a mustard seed if they'd only been loaded. Rememberin the music scrape, I dried up and kept quiet, letten the fellers in the lower story holler at me as much as they wanted. Dr. H. had been settin purty close to me, and 1 thought I'd get him to explain this time, but I found he'd gone out between the acts to see a intimate friend, and hadn't got back yet. Cashus and the other fellers was for killin Cesar and makin sausage meat of him cause they couldn't be kings and emperors while he was alive, but Brutus didn't like that way of doin the thing—he jist wanted to kill him like a christian, jist for the good of Rome. Then the people stomped again. It 'peared to me kind of curus that they should kick up sich a noise every time any body raved around and ripped out somethin hifalutin, but went half asleep when anybody was tellin about poor Cesar's virtues.

Arter that, Misses Brutus come out when the other fellars was gone, and like Mr. Clennam at the Circumlocution Office, she "wanted to know." But it warn't no use—Brutus warn't going to publish jest then, and it 'pears that wimmin was the only newspapers they had in those days. You see all them fellers was conspirators, got together to conspirit a little again Cesar, and Brutus didn't consider it healthy to tell the secret to everybody. (Mr. Editors, as I'm acquainted with a right smart chance of gals in Keokuk, why, if it's jest as convenient, I'd ruther you wouldn't send your paper only to the men, this week.) At last it come time to remove Mr. Cesar from office, like they say the Buchaneers are going to do the Fremonsters extinguish him entirely,—so all the conspirators got around the throne, and directly Cesar come steppin in, putting on as many airs as if he was mayor of Alexandria. Arter he had sot on the throne awhile they all jumped on him at once like a batch of Irish on a sick nigger. He fell on the floor with a percussion that would a made him feel like he'd been ridin bare back on a Keokuk livery stable horse for a month, if he'd lived. When he drapped, the turkey tailed gal flinched, and grunted a sympathetic "ugh," and everybody in the neighborhood laughed at her. But it wasn't the gal's fault—she had for once got wrapped up in the play, and I spose that was the only part she entirely comprehended, cause I seen her slip down in the street the other day.

Finally, the play was done, and I reached over to the wilted mustache, and says I: "Squire, can you tell me what Mr. Cesar's agoin to play next?" He wheeled hisself around sudden, and says he: "Don Cesar—he be damn'd, sir." "Oh, gracious sakes, don't swear so hard," says I, horrerfied. "I ain't swearin," says he, and he pinted out the play on the bill of fare—"I said Don Cesar de Bazan, sir." I seen through it, then, in a minnit, so I told him it was sufficient—no apologies wasn't necessary.

I changed my seat now, and took a pew in front, so I could see plumb back into the kitchen of the concern, if they should take away the cities and woods and things. Proppin my feet up on the railin, I thought I'd take it comfortable like. Jest then, them fellers in the pit, as they call it (and I guess, Mr. Editors, some of 'em'll get into a dern sight deeper pit than that, afore you git to heaven) went to hollerin "Boots. Boots. Boots." like all natur. Thinks I, that's fun, and I went to hollerin too, though I didn't know what it meant. When I got at it they all pitched in louder'n ever, and that gal like to a shook all her tail feathers out a laughin. Dutch says to me, "Take your feet down, you dern ledderhet, it's you vot makes all dish fuss." Dang my buttons if I wasn't a rarin and chargin when I found they was makin fun of me, and I ris right up, puttin my hat on the extreme side of my head, and stickin my thums in the armholes of my vest, and commenced a little oration, so—"Gentlemen and Ladies—I'm a peacable stranger from Keokuk, and my name is Thomas Jefferson—" "Put him out." "Hurrah for old Keokuk." "Go it, Snodgrass," yelled the purgatory fellers, and in a twinklin a couple of police had sot me down in the street, advisin me to go to the devil and not come back there any more. Now, Mister Editors, Saint Louis may fizzle out and be derned.

Yours, with lacerated feelins,

—THOMAS JEFFERSON SNODGRASS

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Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass
[pseud. Samuel L. Clemens, AKA Mark Twain],
“CORRESPONDENCE: Saint Louis, Oct. 18, 1856,”
Keokuk Saturday Post [Keokuk, IA] 1 Nov. 1856: 4.

Samuel L. Clemens’s Letter to the Muscatine 'Journal'

[In 1855, the 19-year-old Samuel L. Clemens, later to be known worldwide as Mark Twain, wrote a letter to a small paper in Muscatine, Iowa, edited by his older brother Orion. Clemens described what he had seen back east, including an amateur production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in St. Louis. As young as he was, Clemens was self-assured enough to think that he knew how theater ought to be staged, and he was especially critical of the actors who appeared in the performance he’d seen. [At the time of the letter, the country was seeing some political and social turmoil, some of it in the form of the American Party, a nativist political movement often called the Know Nothings. Clemens's remarks in the letter display, among other attitudes, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Irish sentiments that we today might find distasteful. I haven’t edited the text of Clemens’s letter; these and other views, not uncommon in that era, remain for us to read and make of what we will.]

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Muscatine [IA] Tri-Weekly Journal, February 28, 1855 CORRESPONDENCE OF THE "JOURNAL" St. Louis, Feb. 16, 1855 Eds. Journal: Whether it is because of the wagon loads of valentines, or the huge heaps of delayed mail matter that have just come to hand, I cannot say; but there has been a heavy run on our Post Office for about a week. It is almost impossible to get into the office at all, so great is the rush—and to get to the deliveries, after ten in the morning is an impossibility. For a week or so, nothing could be seen in the bookstores but thousands upon thousands of valentines. One of our stationers has sold about $1,200 worth of this kind of nonsense. A widow woman with five children, destitute of money, half starved and almost naked, reached this city yesterday from some where in Arkansas, and were on their way to join some relatives in Illinois. They had suffered dreadfully from cold and fatigue during their journey, and were truly objects of charity. The sight brought to mind the handsome sum our preacher collected in church last Sunday to obtain food and raiment for the poor, ignorant heathen in some far off part of the world; I thought, too, of the passage in the Bible instructing the disciples to carry their good works into all the world—beginning first at Jerusalem. An extension of the city limits seems to be exciting a good deal of attention just now, and meetings are held every day or two to consider the subject. The first train went through from Washington, on the Pacific railroad, on the 9th. The cars started from the new depot in Seventh street. The work on this road is progressing finely, and I hear no more complaint about a want of funds. A new evening paper is about to be started here, to be called the Evening Mirror. I do not know who are to be its editors. A new Catholic paper (bad luck to it) is also soon to be established, for the purpose of keeping the Know Nothing organ straight. The livery stable of T. Turner, Broadway, near Carr street, was burned on the night of the 14th. Seventeen or eighteen horses perished, among which were "Know Nothing," worth $800, and another fine horse valued at $500. The whole loss is about $13,000, with an insurance of $8,000. The building burned very rapidly, and threw a light into my room (it was but a square and a half distant) sufficient to read by. Though half-asleep, I could hear the shrieks of the poor horses as they madly struggled to escape from the cruel element. Policemen are queer animals and have remarkably nice notions as to the great law of self-preservation. I doubt if the man is now living that ever caught one at a riot. To find "a needle in a hay stack" is a much easier matter than to scare up one of these gentry when he's wanted.—Late last night, hearing a fuss in the street, I got up to see what was the matter. I saw a man—somewhat inebriated—marching up the street, armed with a barrel stave, and driving a woman before him. He was talking very energetically, and applying the aforesaid stave most industriously to the poor woman's shoulders. The following remarks, which I overheard, will serve to enlighten you as to his reason for "lamming" the lady: "Curse you! (bang I went the stave;) by this kind of conduct (energetic application of the stave,) you have grieved me till you have broken my heart!; (bang!) and I'll break your d—d neck for it!" (bang!—bang!—bang!) And thus the gentleman amused himself until out of sight and hearing, and failed to stumble upon a single policeman. I felt sorry for the poor heart-broken creature, and wished with all my heart it might please Providence to remove him from his troubles by putting it into the Sheriff's head to hang the scoundrel before morning. On this beast's account am I sorry that there is no purgatory for the brute creation. A Thespian Society, called the Young Men's Dramatic Association, have played once or twice lately at the Varieties Theatre. I saw them play "The Merchant of Venice." I had always thought that this was a comedy, until they made a farce of it. The prompters found it a hard matter to get the actors on the stage, and when they did get them on, it was harder still to get them off again. "Jessica" was always "thar" when she wasn't wanted, and never would turn up when her services were required. They'll do better next time. Rev. Dr. Cox will deliver the last of his course of historical lectures before the Young Men's Christian Association, soon. He is an eloquent and interesting speaker, and never fails to attract large audiences.

S.L.C.

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Samuel L. Clemens, Correspondence of the “Journal,” Tri-Weekly Journal [Muscatine, IA] 28 Feb. 1855: 2. [This letter will serve as an introduction of sorts to another one Clemens wrote a year later for another Iowa newspaper. It’s more pointedly about theater, but the Muscatine Journal letter may have given the young writer the security to write it. While this Samuel Clemens may have seen himself as a reporter, chronicling events as he saw them, the Samuel Clemens of the later letter is clearly a budding writer and humorist. I will post the subsequent letter in a few days; come back and see where Clemens was heading.]

Mark Twain & The Little Church Around The Corner

On Tuesday, 20 December 1870, a well-known and beloved actor, George Holland, died at his home in New York City. Holland, born in London on 6 December 1791, began his acting career, after some years in the silk and lace trades, in 1817--at the relatively late age of 25. He remained on the stage for 53 years--despite a somewhat inauspicious start. In Holland’s third stage engagement, his appearance was so unsuited to the role he was playing, having allowed some “brother actors” to do his hair and make-up, that he was laughed off the stage and stayed away from acting for a time. He returned, however, and became one of London’s best-known actors. In 1826, Holland received an invitation from Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), manager of New York’s Chatham Theater (and father of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth) who’d been touring England that year, to come to the United States to work. In 1827, Holland sailed for New York. His first U.S. appearance on 12 September at the Bowery Theatre in the role of Jerry, man of many disguises, in A Day after the Fair (a brief comic opera apparently of Holland’s own composition) was a hit with audiences and he continued to tour the country, playing theater cities like Boston, Louisville, Charleston, Philadelphia, and New Orleans (where he stayed for eight years). Before finding a permanent home, Holland toured for 16 years, becoming popular and famous for his comic singing and feats of ventriloquism. He associated with the best actors in the country, working with the likes of Charlotte Cushman. He returned to New York in 1843 and spent eight years as a member of the company at Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre; in 1855, he joined the company at Wallack’s Theatre in New York and performed burlesques and farces there for the most part until 1868 when he went to work for Augustin Daly. His last engagement, at Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre, was on 12 January 1870 in Olive Logan’s farce Surf. His age was telling on him, but even then his mere appearance on a stage was met with applause. At a benefit performance for him on 16 May, he uttered his last words from a stage: “God bless you!” Despite his popularity and acting success, Holland, the father of six children (four of whom also became actors, including his son Joseph Jefferson Holland), never accumulated wealth and lived in near poverty all his life. He was 79 when he died, a man, the New York Times observed, “without a stain on his name, or the performance of any part in the drama of life over the memory of which those who loved him need blush.”

On Thursday, 22 December, Holland’s long-time friend Joseph Jefferson (for whom Holland’s son was named), the renowned comic actor, and Holland’s second son, Edmund, tried to arrange for his funeral at the Church of the Atonement, an Episcopal church at Madison Avenue and 28th Street, where the actor’s widow was a parishioner. The rector, Rev. Dr. William Tufnell Sabine (1838-1913), however, wouldn't conduct the funeral service at his church because Jefferson’s friend was a “play-actor.” Jefferson then asked Sabine, “Well, sir, in this dilemma is there no other church to which you can direct me from which my friend can be buried?” The pastor recommended "a little church around the corner where they do that sort of thing." “Then, if this be so,” Jefferson responded, “God bless ‘the little church around the corner!’” That church, another Episcopal house of worship, was the Church of the Transfiguration at 5th and 29th, which became known thereafter as "The Little Church Around the Corner" and became the unofficial actors' chapel. There Rev. Dr. George Hendric Houghton (1820-97) agreed wholeheartedly to perform the funeral for Holland at his church. Holland was buried from the Little Church Around the Corner on Friday, 23 December, while “many a well-known comedian . . . sat silent and dejected in the gloom.” Accounts of the service described it as “thoroughly consonant with the life and character of the deceased . . . as plain and unostentatious as possible.”

Jefferson (1829-1905; actually Joseph Jefferson III) was the best-known member of an acting family that stretched back to the 18th century and a British actor curiously named Thomas Jefferson (1732-1807). One of the latter’s sons, Joseph Jefferson I (1774-1832), came to the United States in 1795 and stayed, becoming a popular and famous actor in New York. Joseph Jefferson III started on stage at the age of four and toured with his family until he went out on his own. He eventually became nationally known--and critically praised--for playing Rip Van Winkle in Dion Boucicault’s adaptation of Washington Irving’s story, which Jefferson first performed in London in 1865. (Jefferson had compiled his own adaptation from other plays as early as 1859.) The role remained Jefferson’s repertory mainstay for some 40 years. Four of his children also went on the stage.

In an interview published in the New York Times a week later, Rev. Sabine acknowledged that he “had a distaste for officiating” at the funerals of “play-actors.” He even stated that he “always warned professing members of my congregation to keep away from theatres and not to have anything to do with them.” (Sabine must have followed his own advice since he claimed not to have known the man he spoke to had been Joseph Jefferson, one of the country’s most beloved actors.) Though Sabine said that he didn’t think there was any general prohibition in the Episcopal Church against burying actors from the church--he’d been willing, he’d told Jefferson, to conduct a funeral service at Holland’s home--nor was he certain how other Episcopal clergy felt on the subject, he “did not care to be mixed up in” a church service for a “play-actor” because “I don’t think that [theaters] teach moral lessons.”

After Holland’s death and funeral, the tale made its way into the press. The New York Times reported it on 29 December and the story appeared in papers around the country. Another local paper denounced Sabine’s “insolence, bigotry and ignorance.” When actors were social outcasts in many circles, seen as dissolute, disreputable, and immoral people, Rev. Houghton's kindness appealed to the conscience of the nation. (Houghton, an avid abolitionist, had created a congregation that served the neglected, downtrodden, and oppressed of the city, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or nationality. Before emancipation, Houghton harbored runaway slaves and in 1863, during the draft riots, he gave sanctuary to African Americans hounded by the mobs. Actors were among the outcasts to whom Houghton ministered at his church.) Even though Houghton had no interest in theater himself, having attended a play only one time when he was 15, actors started coming to the church. Jefferson's description stuck (though there’s some dispute about what the famous comedian actually said), and soon songs and plays about "The Little Church Around the Corner" became popular. A number of famous theater folk were married or buried there, including Vernon and Irene Castle, the Astair/Rogers of their day (married), and Edwin Booth (buried, with Joseph Jefferson as a pallbearer).

Prompted by the incident, theater writer William Winter, the renowned (if highly conservative) reviewer for the New York Tribune, set about arranging a testimonial to Holland as a benefit for his widow and children. In his speech, Winter said of acting as a profession:

The art itself is as ancient as civilization, and is honorable with the honor of celestial gifts and of beautiful achievements. It has developed genius. It has fired patriotism. It has commemorated virtue. It has extolled freedom. It has stimulated culture. It has soothed the troubles of care-worn minds. It has stored literature with gems of thought and feeling; and it has enriched history and biography with character and wit.

No less a figure than Mark Twain was incensed by the episode and wrote a reproach in his regular column for the February 1871 issue of The Galaxy, a monthly magazine of literature and entertainment for which he worked in 1870-71. (The founders of Galaxy were William Conant Church and his brother Francis Pharcellus Church. Perhaps you recognize that latter: he became an editorial writer at the New York Sun, where brother William was an editor, and wrote the famous 1897 response, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" [see ROT, 25 December 2009].) The Times also published Twain’s essay on 17 January 1871, apparently in advance of the magazine’s appearance. In his essay, entitled “The Indignity Put upon the Remains of George Holland by the Rev. Mr. Sabine,” Twain railed against the “Cardiff giant of self-righteousness . . . crowded into [Sabine’s] pigmy skin.” (The Cardiff giant, which Twain invokes as a metaphor, was a famous hoax. It purported to be the petrified remains of a 10-foot-tall man unearthed in Cardiff, New York, in December 1869 but was revealed as a fake in February 1870.) While Twain excoriated Sabine for his uncharitable judgment of Holland, which he labeled “a ludicrous satire . . . upon Christian charity,” the writer lavishly praised the actor for “mak[ing] his audience go and do right, and be just, merciful, and charitable--because by his living, breathing, feeling pictures, he showed them what it was to do these things, and how to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward!” Twain went on to extend his defense of Holland’s moral stance to the whole of the theatrical field, arguing that plays like King Lear and Othello are more effective lessons on “filial ingratitude” and “harboring a pampered and unanalyzed jealousy” than “ever a sermon preached.”

Twain, in fact, “averred” that

nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the American people to-day, got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the gospel of Christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the Christmas story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers, and NOT from the drowsy pulpit!

(We have to acknowledge, of course, that Twain was writing when theater was the popular entertainment of the age. Today we’d have to compare the priest’s presence to that of movies and, more obviously, TV. What would that do to Twain’s argument, I wonder? I wonder, too, what Twain would make of contemporary Hollywood in general and I keep thinking that he was deliberately overlooking Restoration comedy which celebrated naughtiness.)

While Twain denied that he was dismissing the good efforts of priests and preachers, he observed that the time preachers are before their audiences and can influence them (“twice a week--nearly two hours, altogether”) is minuscule by comparison to the access actors and playwrights have to their “large” audiences (“seven times a week--28 or 30 hours altogether”). The writer went on to include “the novels and newspapers [that] plead, and argue, and illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade, and supplicate, at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day, and all day long, and far into the night.” Oh, Twain did “give the pulpit its full share of credit in elevating and ennobling the people” . . . by “boring” them “with uninflammable truisms about doing good” and so on, but he reserved his most extravagant praise for actors and, specifically, Holland:

Honored and honorable old George Holland, whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled it brim full of gratitude . . . .

Twain concluded by characterizing Sabine’s denial of funeral rites to Holland as the actor “figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile!”

Sabine, by the way, went on to become a bishop in the Episcopal Church in 1907! The Church of the Atonement, however, no longer stands; it merged with another church in 1880. On the other hand, the Church of the Transfiguration, which Houghton founded in 1848, prospered and has been expanded considerably. In 1923, the Episcopal Actors' Guild, of which many prominent actors in New York and Hollywood have been members, was founded and headquartered at the church and in 1973, the Little Church Around the Corner became a National Landmark.