19 February 1863
“Ye Sentimental Law Student” is of particular interest for Mark Twain's early career. According to Joseph T. Goodman, it was the “first special article” to which the author signed the name “Mark Twain,” and it appeared in the Enterprise on 19 February 1863. Goodman remembered the title only as “The Sugar Loaf,” and some scholars have therefore presumed that the text was lost.1 But this inexact title clearly refers to Sugar-Loaf Peak, where the Unreliable composed (and lost) his valentine in praise of the view. Our text is taken from Kate Milnor Rabb's The Wit and Humor of America, which reprinted the sketch in 1907; but the reliability of Rabb's text is in doubt. For instance, Mark Twain's allusion in the first sentence to an unidentified summit suggests that at least one previous sentence has been omitted. And despite Goodman's explicit testimony that the sketch was signed, Mark Twain's signature does not appear in Rabb.2
In this sketch Clemens draws heavily on the humor of scrambled vocabularies. He fastens upon the Unreliable a Babel of tongues: “the beautiful language of love and the infernal phraseology of the lawⒺexplanatory note,” intermixed throughout with the platitudes of romantic landscape description and echoes of pious church rhetoric and the Bible. Clemens undoubtedly had in mind that genre of romantic and preromantic poetry in which a solitary observer climbs a hill and meditates on the view, thinks elevated thoughts, and then tries to render the sublime landscape in a painterly description. Solon Lycurgus observes the basic conventions of this kind of poetry: writing in solitude, imaginatively identifying with a beloved absent one, moving [begin page 216] from sorrow and despair to delight and hope, and then absentmindedly leaving his composition lying about to be discovered by the next passerby. Gazing around him in “holy delight,” he is a comic replica of such figures as the speaker in Coleridge's “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” who stands thinking of his absent friend and
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing roundOn the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.3
One can find similar romantic figures in the novels of Scott. For instance, Reuben Butler in The Heart of Midlothian has (like Solon Lycurgus) a penchant for picturesque scenery, and at one point he retreats to Arthur's Seat, a mountain just outside Edinburgh, to watch the sunrise. And in Red-gauntlet the young lawyer Alan Fairford, like Solon, prefers wandering the countryside to his legal studies.
Mark Twain's audience would have recognized Solon's attitudinizing about the landscape as patently absurd. The conical Sugar-Loaf Peak, in Six Mile Cañon just east of Virginia City, is dwarfed by Mount Davidson to the west and by other peaks in the vicinity. From that modest height Solon describes what cannot be seen: the vast extent of the “softly tinted” Carson River valley, from the river's source in the Sierra Nevada southwest of Virginia City to the valley's northeastern extremity near the Carson Sink—“the loveliest picture,” mantled in “purple glory,” with which “the hand of the Creator has adorned the earth.” In October 1863 the unidentified local of the Enterprise reported that only barren mountainous wastes were visible in any direction from even the top of Mount Davidson. Yet, he remarked, “a great deal has been said and written eulogistic of the view from the summit. . . . In the name of truth and reason, let us have no more of it.”4 Solon's letter is a travesty of such excursions into unreality, a mock paean to God's creation. Clemens may even have been recalling a passage from Genesis: “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden. . . . And a river went out of Eden to water the garden.”5
Eds. Enterprise—I found the following letter, or Valentine, or whatever it is, lying on the summit, where it had been dropped unintentionally, I think. It was written on a sheet of legal cap, and each line was duly commenced within the red mark which traversed the sheet from top to bottom. Solon appeared to have had some trouble getting his effusion started to suit him. He had begun it, “Know all men by these presents,” and scratched it out again; he had substituted, “Now at this day comes the plaintiff, by his attorney,” and scratched that out also; he had tried other sentences of like character, and gone on obliterating them, until, through much sorrow and tribulation, he achieved the dedication which stands at the head of his letter, and to his entire satisfaction, I do cheerfully hope. But what a villain a man must be to blend together the beautiful language of love and the infernal phraseology of the law in one and the same sentence! I know but one of God's creatures who would be guilty of such depravity as this: I refer to the Unreliable. I believe the Unreliable to be the very lawyer's-cub who sat upon the solitary peak, all soaked in beer and sentiment, and concocted the insipid literary hash I am talking about. The handwriting closely resembles his semi-Chinese tarantula tracks.
Sugar Loaf Peak, February 14, 1863.
To the loveliness to whom these presents shall come, greeting:—This is a lovely day, my own Mary; its unencumbered sunshine reminds me of your happy face, and in the imagination the same doth [begin page 218] now appear before me. Such sights and scenes as this ever remind me, the party of the second part, of you, my Mary, the peerless party of the first part. The view from the lonely and segregated mountain peak, of this portion of what is called and known as Creation, with all and singular the hereditaments and appurtenances thereunto appertaining and belonging, is inexpressively grand and inspiring; and I gaze, and gaze, while my soul is filled with holy delight, and my heart expands to receive thy spirit-presence, as aforesaid. Above me is the glory of the sun; around him float the messenger clouds, ready alike to bless the earth with gentle rain, or visit it with lightning, and thunder, and destruction; far below the said sun and the messenger clouds aforesaid, lying prone upon the earth in the verge of the distant horizon, like the burnished shield of a giant, mine eyes behold a lake, which is described and set forth in maps as the Sink of Carson; nearer, in the great plain, I see the Desert, spread abroad like the mantle of a Colossus, glowing by turns, with the warm light of the sun, hereinbefore mentioned, or darkly shaded by the messenger clouds aforesaid; flowing at right angles with said Desert, and adjacent thereto, I see the silver and sinuous thread of the river, commonly called Carson, which winds its tortuous course through the softly tinted valley, and disappears amid the gorges of the bleak and snowy mountains—a simile of man!—leaving the pleasant valley of Peace and Virtue to wander among the dark defiles of Sin, beyond the jurisdiction of the kindly beaming sun aforesaid! And about said sun, and the said clouds, and around the said mountains, and over the plain and the river aforesaid, there floats a purple glory—a yellow mist—as airy and beautiful as the bridal veil of a princess, about to be wedded according to the rites and ceremonies pertaining to, and established by, the laws or edicts of the kingdom or principality wherein she doth reside, and whereof she hath been and doth continue to be, a lawful sovereign or subject. Ah! my Mary, it is sublime! it is lovely! I have declared and made known, and by these presents do declare and make known unto you, that the view from Sugar Loaf Peak, as hereinbefore described and set forth, is the loveliest picture with which the hand of the Creator has adorned the earth, according to the best of my knowledge and belief, so help me God.
[begin page 219]Given under my hand, and in the spirit-presence of the bright being whose love has restored the light of hope to a soul once groping in the darkness of despair, on the day and year first above written.
(Signed)
Solon Lycurgus.
Law Student, and Notary Public in and for the said County of Storey, and Territory of Nevada.
To Miss Mary Links, Virginia (and may the laws have her in their holy keeping).
The first printing appeared in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise for 19 February 1863. A unique copy of the Enterprise page containing the sketch is in the possession of Ruth Hermann (416 Zion St., Nevada City, California, 95959), but is not available to us at the time of going to press. (The sketch, reproduced from this clipping, will appear in a forthcoming book by Mrs. Hermann, entitled Virginia City, Nevada, Revisited.) The sketch also survives in the only known reprinting of the Enterprise in Kate Milnor Rabb, ed., The Wit and Humor of America, 5 vols. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1907), 5:1818–1820, which is necessarily copy-text. Copy: PH from Library of Congress. There are no textual notes or emendations.
The source of Rabb's text and the nature of her printer's copy are not known. She may have used for her source Enterprise clippings, reprints of the Enterprise, or a typescript or transcript made from either of these; the printer's copy itself was probably typed, but may have been identical with her source. For one of the five Mark Twain sketches that she reprints we still have an Enterprise printing to compare her text with. The record of her reliability is not encouraging: in “Letter from Carson City” (no. 40) Rabb's text makes at least seventeen substantive errors (omissions and sophistications) as well as twenty-six errors in accidentals. She changes “clatter” to “chatter,” “from whence” to “from which,” “that” to “its,” and “baskets” to “bushels.” In addition, she omits the last phrase of the piece entirely. Internal evidence in “Ye Sentimental Law Student” indicates that she made similar mistakes in this piece as well (see the headnote).