May – Correspondence between Clemens and Howells substantially lessened during the year. Sam’s preoccupation with all aspects of business and several speaking engagements, together with Howells’ new duties for “The Editor’s Study” in Harper’s Monthly, and his increasing activism in such matters as the Haymarket fiasco may explain this change. In the May issue of Harper’s, Howells continued championing Tolstoi (a rather controversial stance for that day), and prefaced mention of Twain’s popularity and the need for realism in literature. Here is a segment, which may be easily applied to our times [LXXIV p.987]:

Of subordinate fiction, of the sort which neither informs nor nourishes, a correspondent writes us, in sad conviction of the fact that the great mass of those who can read and write seem to ask for nothing better: “Do you think our novel-reading public cares much for any masterpiece? It appears to me that the ordinary or uncultivated mind revolts from anything much higher than itself. Here is another lofty stair to climb; here is a new dialect of thought, and even of language, to struggle with; here is somebody insulting us by speaking a foreign tongue.” There is suggestion in this, and truth enough for serious pause; and yet we think that it hardly does justice to the power of the ordinary mind to appreciate the best. Much of the best fails of due recognition, but enough of the best gets it to make us hopeful that when literature comes close to life, even ordinary minds will feel and know its charm. We think that our humorists, in the fame of the greatest, whose pseudonym is at this moment as well known, in America at least, as the name of Shakespeare. We need not blink any of his shortcomings in recognizing that his books are masterpieces of humor; they are so, and yet our public does care for them in prodigious degree, and it cares for them because incomparably more and better than any other American books they express a familiar and almost universal quality of the American mind, they faithfully portray a phase of American life, which they reflect in its vast kindliness and good-will, its shrewdness and its generosity, its informality, which is not formlessness; under every fantastic disguise they are honest and true. That is all we ask of fiction — sense and truth; we cannot prophesy that every novel which has them will have the success of The Innocents Abroad or of Roughing It, but we believe recognition wide and full will await it. Let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires; let it show the different interests in their true proportions; let it forbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism and prejudice, but frankly own these for what they are, in whatever figures and occasions they appear; let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know — the language of unaffected people everywhere — and we believe that even its masterpieces will find a response in all readers.

The Clemens girls owned many if not all of the Rollo books by Jacob Abbott. Sam’s notebook entry ascribed to May 1887 by Gribben [5]:

Write a Rollo with Jonas in it who is sodden with piety & self-righteousness [MTNJ 3: 293].