15 May 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (New York Telegrapher, 22 May 75, UCCL 11144)
Your paragraph about old jokes encountered me just as I was thinking in a similar vein upon the same subject.1explanatory note You remember “Punch’s” joke: “Advice to people about to marry.—Don’t!” I was astonished two years ago to run across that same joke in some old author, who was dead, petrified (& Ⓐemendation perhaps damned) before Socrates’s time.2explanatory note It never occurred to me before, but I would give something to know what they are going to do with the petrified people at the general resurrection. It seems to me I would polish them. However, my judgment may be at fault in this; &, besides, I do not think a mere man ought to be trying to make suggestions in a matter of this kind, when he has had no experience in resurrections. But, if you believe me, there are plenty of people with no better manners than to do it. In my opinion, such persons are entitled to no respect whatever.
George Cumming, an operator with the Western Union Company in New York City, was an occasional contributor to the Telegrapher, a union weekly issued from 1864 to 1877 in New York (Mott 1938, 92). On 22 May it reprinted the paragraph Clemens alluded to, identifying its source as “one of Mr. Cumming’s letters to the Springfield (Ohio) Republic”:
One queer fact about many of our current stories, squibs, paragraphs, etc., is their ancient origin. Is it not Wendell Phillips who says in his lecture on “Lost Arts,” in illustrating the Solomonian proverb, “There is nothing new under the sun,” that even our jokes are as old as the hills, and that out of the thousands of novels published the plots can all be traced back to a foundation ages ago, to a few romances, perhaps less than a dozen in number. Phillips also claims the proverbial Irish bull to be not Hibernian at all but Greek. Who knows how much further the Grecians could trace it? Fancy Socrates splitting his sides over a story we still rehash as new. Hence the expression, no doubt, “He’s a Greek refugee from Cork.” (“A Letter from Mark Twain,” 125)
Clemens had recently been reading aloud to Olivia from The Dialogues of Plato, edited by Benjamin Jowett. He had given her the four-volume set as a Christmas gift in 1874 (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1873, copy inscribed to OLC at NvU; OLC to Langdon, 9 May 75, CtHMTH; Gribben, 2:549).
“A Letter from Mark Twain,” New York Telegrapher, 22 May 75, 125. Copy-text is a microfilm edition of the newspaper in the Library of Congress (DLC). The original letter may have been written on monogram letterhead.
L6 , 480–481.