"It did not fascinate him as did the story of the wandering prince. He persevered only as the story moved him.... Apparently, he had not yet acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to friends." And quite naturally! His artistic self-respect had been so little developed, had been, in fact, so baffled and abashed by all this mauling and fumbling that he could take no pride in a book which was, precisely, the mirror of the unregenerate past he was doing his best to live down. Behold Mrs. Clemens, then, in the rôle of critic and censor. A memorandum Mark Twain made at the time when he and she were going over the proofs of "Following the Equator" shows us how she conceived of her task. It is in the form of a dialogue between them: Page 1,020, 9th line from the top. I think some other word would be better than "stench." You have used that pretty often. But can't I get it in _any_where? You've knocked it out every time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble, good word. Page 1,038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave boy. It's out, and my father is whitewashed. Page 1,050, 2nd line from the bottom. Change "breech-clout." It's a word that you love and I abominate. I would take that and "offal" out of the language. You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy. We can see from this that to Mrs. Clemens virility was just as offensive as profanity, that she had no sense of the difference between virility and profanity and vulgarity, that she had, in short, no positive taste, no independence of judgment at all. We can see also that she had no artistic ideal for her husband, that she regarded his natural liking for bold and masculine language, which was one of the outward signs of his latent greatness, merely as a literary equivalent of bad manners, as something that endangered their common prestige in the eyes of conventional public opinion. She condemned his writings, says Mr. Paine, specifically, "for the offense they might give in one way or another"; and that her sole object, however unconscious, in doing this was to further him, not as an artist but as a popular success, and especially as a candidate for gentility, is proved by the fact that she made him, as we observe in the incident of his father and the slave boy, whitewash not only himself but his family history also. And in all this Mr. Howells seconded her. "It skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't afford to indulge in," he reminds our shorn Samson in one of his letters; and again, "I'd have that swearing out in an instant," the "swearing" in this case being what he himself admits is "so exactly the thing Huck would say"--namely, "they comb me all to hell." As for Mark Twain himself, he took it as meekly as a lamb. Mr. Paine tells of a certain story he had written that was disrespectful to the Archbishop of Canterbury.