|
When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good.
That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time
takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than
likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about
the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in
both.
- Letter to unidentified person, 6 November 1886 |
 AI image created by R. Kent Rasmussen |
|
My first impulse was to "revise" this book before putting it on exhibition in so permanent a place as the Tauchnitz Series; but my second and wiser one was to leave it undoctored. This book is the book of a youth on his first travels, -- of a boy, I may even say; for although I really had a man's age, I was a boy, and a callow boy, too, in all other respects. Years have since gone by, I have become a man, I have travelled a good deal, I have learned something and unlearned more, -- now how is a man going to revise a boy's book, and not make a botch of it? The thing is not possible. I should simply knock out a compact brick of ignorance here and there, and insert an ineffectual clod of unsure learning; I should knock out the boy's chipper confidence, and insert the man's chilly caution; I should knock out the boy's unwitting irreverence, and insert the man's fraudful sermon; I should sweep the boy's giddy enthusiasms all away, and insert the man's shorn and subjugated impulses and wary speech. The total result would be a good book to kindle a fire with. No, I could re-write the book, but I am not competent to revise it. It
is better to leave it as it is than try to improve it by letting it laugh
youthfully out of one corner of its mouth while I make it cry maturely
out of the other. |
For more insights on how The Innocents Abroad was written,
see:
Reminiscences of Senator William M. Stewart of
Nevada
and
New York Evening Post,
January 20, 1883 - How the 'Innocents Abroad' Was Written
Quotations | Newspaper Articles | Special Features | Links | Search