27 May 1865
“A Voice for Setchell” appeared in the Californian immediately adjacent to the previous sketch, “How I Went to the Great Race between Lodi and Norfolk” (no. 103). It was probably Bret Harte who introduced it by saying that “a correspondent of The Californian, whose style its readers will probably recognize, sends us the following.” Although the sketch was signed merely “X,” the familiar style and the presence of a clipping of it in the Yale Scrapbook are sufficient to establish that Clemens was its author.1
The sketch is an enthusiastic encomium of Dan Setchell, a comedian and monologuist of exceptional ability. Setchell had begun acting in 1853 on the New York stage. He made a name in such plays as H. J. Conway's adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Winter's Tale, in which he played the clown. Opening the summer season of 1863 at the Winter Garden in John Maddison Morton's farce A Regular Fix, he played the lead role of Hugh De Brass and was an immediate hit. Another great success that season was Frank Wood's burlesque Leah, the Forsook, in which Setchell played the shrewish maiden Leah. Setchell arrived in San Francisco on 27 April 1865. He drew crowded houses and won almost universal approval there and in the interior during the remainder of the year. He excelled as Van Dunder in John Poole's comedy The Old Dutch Governor, as Mr. Beetle in Tom Taylor's The Babes in the Woods, and as [begin page 170] Madam Vanderpants in Wanted, One Thousand Milliners. On June 19 he would appear as the title character in the first stage production of Artemus, Showman, a play written expressly for Setchell by Frederick G. Maeder and Thomas B. MacDonough. Perhaps his most appreciated role was one made famous by William Burton: Captain Ned Cuttle in John Brougham's dramatization of Dombey and Son, a play Clemens knew well. Late in January 1866, at the age of thirty-five, Setchell sailed for New Zealand and was lost at sea.2
Setchell was a good friend of Artemus Ward's (who also died young, at thirty-three, in 1867) and may have influenced his platform style. Joseph T. Goodman in 1892 repeated the rumor that “Dan Setchell, the prince of comedians . . . had schooled [Artemus Ward] in his art,” but said that he preferred “to believe that the style of Artemus was native to himself, as were his airy flights of fancy.” In any case, both Setchell and Ward were comedians, masters of the technique Clemens himself had defined as early as June 1864 when he wrote that the “first virtue of a comedian . . . is to do humorous things with grave decorum and without seeming to know that they are funny.”3
“A Voice for Setchell” arose from the same impulse that prompted Clemens to write “Enthusiastic Eloquence” (no. 111), published in the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle less than a month later. Clemens there defends another “low” art, the banjo music of Tommy Bree and Sam Pride, calling it “genuine music—music that will . . . break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose,” just as in the present sketch he defends Setchell's comic acting and, by implication, the genuine importance of humor and humorists. In fact, ever since his “slinking” period in San Francisco the previous winter, Clemens had been struggling with his own vocation as a humorist. Five months after this sketch appeared he was depressed, in debt, and still rebellious toward what he described for Orion as his “ ‘call’ to literature, of a low order—i.e. humorous.”4 Clemens' defense of Setchell, and his feelings about their common vocation, give this slight sketch its importance.
Significantly, the piece is a direct answer to Albert S. Evans' denigration of Setchell's comic acting. Writing as “Amigo” in the Gold Hill [begin page 171] News, Evans had, just two weeks earlier, called Setchell a “low comedian” whose style suited “the class which usually seeks amusement in entertainments not frequented to any great extent by ladies.” Evans' attitude softened somewhat a week later, but he still insisted that Setchell was “not to Burton's standard by a long ways,” a remark to which Clemens alludes in his penultimate paragraph. These criticisms came uncomfortably close to Clemens' own low opinion of his calling, but such an attack seems always to have called up his greatest powers in defense. When the Reverend Mr. Sabine refused to bury George Holland, the actor, in 1871, Clemens attacked him too for failing to see that “actors were made for a high and good purpose, and that they accomplish the object of their creation and accomplish it well.”5 He was now engaged in a struggle to believe that about himself, and his defense of Setchell therefore illuminates the most famous creation of this period, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (no. 119), written in October 1865.6
My voice is for Setchell. What with a long season of sensational, snuffling dramatic bosh, and tragedy bosh, and electioneering bosh, and a painful depression in stocks that was anything but bosh, the people were settling down into a fatal melancholy, and growing prematurely old—succumbing to imaginary miseries and learning to wear the habit of unhappiness like a garment— when Captain Cuttle Setchell appeared in the midst of the gloom, and broke the deadly charm with a wave of his enchanted hook and the spell of his talismanic words, “Awahst! awahst! awahst!” And since that night all the powers of dreariness combined have not been able to expel the spirit of cheerfulness he invoked. Therefore, my voice is still for Setchell. I have experienced more real pleasure, and more physical benefit, from laughing naturally andⒶemendation unconfinedly at his funny personations and extempore speeches than I have from all the operas and tragedies I have endured, and all the blue mass pillsⒺexplanatory note I have swallowed in six months. As a comedian, this man is the best the coast has seen, and is above criticism; and therefore one feels at liberty to laugh at any effort of his which seems funny, without stopping to undergo that demoralizing process of first considering whether some other great comedian, somewhere else, hasn't done the same thing a shade funnier, some time or other, years ago.
Mr. Setchell has established his reputation here, and a powerful verdict has been rendered in his favor. All who have seen good [begin page 173] acting, and know what they are doing, endorse this verdict. True, I have heard one man say he was not as good as BurtonⒺexplanatory note in “Captain Cuttle,” and another that he had seen better actors in A Regular Fix, but then I attached no great importance to the opinions of these critics, because the first named (judging by the date of Burton's death) could not have been above thirteen years of age when that renowned actor appeared for the last time upon any earthly stage, and the other was reared and educated in Little Rock, Arkansas, and therefore has not had as good an opportunity of forming a correct dramatic taste as if he had resided in London all his life. At least, such is my opinion, though I do not insist upon it.
One reason why I do not weaken before these two critics, is because every time Mr. Setchell plays, crowds flock to hear him, and no matter what he plays those crowds invariably laugh and applaud extravagantly.Ⓐemendation That kind of criticism can always be relied upon as sound, and not only sound but honest.Ⓐemendation
The first printing in the Californian 3 (27 May 1865): 9 is copy-text. Copies: Bancroft; PH from Yale; PH of the Yale Scrapbook, p. 51. Since Mark Twain preserved a clipping of the Californian in the Yale Scrapbook, he may have considered reprinting it in JF1. Probably sometime in January or February 1867, however, he struck through the clipping, and did not reprint it in JF1 or elsewhere. There are no textual notes.