Last year, the centenary of Mark Twain’s death, the University of California at Berkeley published the first volume of Twain’s Autobiography. In 1899, he justified the hundred-year embargo thus: “A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way.” This did not, to the disappointment of our degraded age, mean the freedom to be salacious. It meant the freedom to talk without reservation or self-editing—Twain dictated these memoirs to a stenographer—and it did lead him into folly now and again. Take this bit of patent foolishness:
In the matter of slavish imitation, man is the monkey’s superior all the time. The average man is destitute of independence of opinion. He is not interested in contriving an opinion of his own, by study and reflection, but is only anxious to find out what his neighbor’s opinion is and slavishly adopt it. A generation ago, I found out that the latest review of a book was pretty sure to be just a reflection of the earliest review of it. . . . I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value—certainly no large value.
This is ludicrous. As any fool knows, the thing to do is not to copy the earliest review of a book but to combine each successive review,
