Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on Charles Dickens, 'Only a Man')

“He brought up handsomely in the centre and faced the opera glasses. His pictures are hardly handsome, and he, like everybody else, is less handsome than his pictures. That fashion he has of brushing his hair and goatee so resolutely forward gives him a comical Scotch-terrier look about the face, which is rather heightened than otherwise by his portentous dignity and gravity. But that queer old head took on a sort of beauty, bye and bye, and a fascinating interest, as I thought of the wonderful mechanism within it, the complex but exquisitely adjusted machinery that could create men and women, and put the breath of life into them and alter all their ways and actions, elevate them, degrade them, murder them, marry them, conduct them through good and evil, through joy and sorrow, on their long march from the cradle to the grave, and never lose its godship over them, never make a mistake! I almost imagined I could see the wheels and pulleys work. This was Dickens -- Dickens. There was no question about that, and yet it was not right easy to realize it. Somehow this puissant god seemed to be only a man, after all. How the great do tumble from their high pedestals when we see them in common human flesh, and know that they eat pork and cabbage and act like other men.”—Mark Twain, “The Great Dickens,” in the San Francisco daily Alta California, February 2, 1868

With a major project needing to be delivered in the next couple of days, I won’t be able to indulge in my usual commentary at the moment. But I couldn’t resist the temptation at least to note today’s bicentennial of the birth of Charles Dickens with this excerpt from an early work by another great writer, Mark Twain, catching the older British author on his American tour.