1. Mark Twain in Eruption , 214-17.

2. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography , II, 786.

3. Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 1 , 16.

4. See Twain's defenses of Forrest quoted in Pat M. Ryan, Jr., "Mark Twain: Frontier Theatre Critic," Arizona Quarterly 16 (1960): 201; also see Twain's piece praising Forrest in The Washoe Giant in San Francisco , 101-2. Twain revised his estimation of Forrest—linking his acting to an "adolescent taste" that America had outgrown—in one of the originally unpublished passages of Life on the Mississippi (1883). See Life on the Mississippi, Illustrated by Thomas Hart Benton, with an Introduction by Edward Wagenknecht and a Number of Previously Suppressed Passages, Now Printed for the First Time, and Edited with a Note by Willis Wager (New York: Heritage Press, 1944), 393.

5. As Jerry Wayne Thomason reports in his dissertation, "Colonel Sellers," there exist four versions of the play (none in Twain's hand): two in the Mark Twain Papers (one of which Thomason reproduces in his thesis); a copyrighted script in the Library of Congress; and a typescript in the Stanford University Theatre Collection.

6. On the playwriting, see Schirer, Mark Twain and the Theatre .

7. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 81.

8. William Dean Howells, "Drama," Atlantic Monthly 35 (1875): 749-51. Howells's opinion was in accord with some other, early, reviewers of the play. The New York Times (September 17, 1874) said Raymond "assumed this role with an earnestness which insured his success" and an "absence of selfconsciousness" that made the "personation as artistic as it was striking." The Rochester, New York, Union and Advertiser (September 1, 1874) said Raymond ''appears to have caught the very inspiration of the author's meaning"; and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (September 1, 1874) said that Twain and Charles Dudley Warner "have found in Mr. Raymond the faithful interpreter of their conception" (quoted in Thomason, "Colonel Sellers," 333).

9. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 82. It seems indeed to have become a commonplace in criticism of Colonel Sellers that the play was weak, but Raymond's fleshing out of Sellers was superb. George H. Jessop, for example, asserted that "the author had only created a shell into which Raymond infused his vigorous and glowing individuality, animating it into bustling, scheming life" (in Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses , V, 234). And reviewer after reviewer wrote that the role of Sellers was "admirably adapted," "suited," or "fitted" to Raymond's "talent," "style," or "personality"—implying that the success of the play lay largely in the self that Raymond brought to his part. (See the reviews of the play quoted by Thomason, "Colonel Sellers," 26, 307, 309.)

10. Mark Twain-Howells Letters , I, 82-83. Also see the slightly tongue-in-cheek curtain speech Twain gave on opening night, in which he complains that Raymond transforms all the pathos and "tragedy" in Sellers into laughs ( Mark Twain Speaking , 88).

11. Mark Twain's Autobiography , ed. Paine, I, 89-90.

12. As a member of the Players Club, Twain attended dinners in the late 1880s with Boucicault, Coquelin, and Irving (see Mark Twain Speaking , 240-41, 338-39). Twain's connection with Irving deepened in the 1890s, when Twain not only dined with Irving but also enlisted the actor as a financial backer for the Paige typesetting machine (see Love Letters , 278, and Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain , 305).

13. Diderot's text, with Irving's introduction, is bound together with Archer's in The Paradox of Acting by Denis Diderot and Masks or Faces? by William Archer , intro. Lee Strasberg (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957). Coquelin's essay, with an 1887 review of it by Henry James, was reprinted as part of the series "Papers on Acting," published by the Dramatic Museum: Constant Coquelin, Art and the Actor , trans. Abby Langdon Alger (New York: Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1915). The series also includes Joseph Talma, Reflexions on the Actor's Art , intro. Sir Henry Irving (New York: Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1915), and The Art of Acting: A Discussion by Constant Coquelin, Henry Irving and Dion Boucicault (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), which reprints the 1887 discussions. For a helpful account of the influence of Diderot and Coquelin in the late nineteenth century, with special reference to the writings of Henry James, see Steven H. Jobe, "Henry James and the Philosophic Actor," American Literature 62 (1990): 32-43; also see D. J. Gordon and John Stokes, "The Reference of The Tragic Muse ," in The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James , ed. John Goode (London: Methuen, 1972), 127-32, for an account (again with special reference to James) of the dispute in the journals, and the assertion that ''through the eighties no-one interested in acting or the theatre could forget the terms of reference of such discussions" (127). Finally, Benjamin McArthur, in Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), writes of the resurgence in the 188os of "the debate over head versus heart," precipitated partly by Diderot and Archer and given a new dimension by late-nineteenth-century interest in automatism, suggestion, and hypnotism (180-86).

14. See Art of Acting , 47, and Irving's introduction to Diderot's Paradox , 7.

15. On the general tendency in the nineteenth century for the language of physiology and the body to surface in discussions of actors' emotional expression, and for a discussion of the influence of Darwin on theories of acting (including William Archer's), see Joseph R. Roach, "Darwin's Passion: The Language of Expression on Nature's Stage," Discourse 13 (fall-winter 1990-91): 40-57.

16. Adventures of Tom Sawyer , 71-73.

17. The Prince and the Pauper , 54.

18. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 254.

19. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , ed. Bernard L. Stein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 320-25.

20. On both the longer history of "nature and art" in acting and Diderot's early versions of this opposition, see Joseph R. Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 23-29, 148-49.

21. Many of the actors Archer surveyed for Masks or Faces voiced this cliché or some version of it; see, for example, 129.

22. Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins , ed. Sidney E. Berger (New York: Norton, 1980).

23. See, for recent considerations of these matters, Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson, eds., Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), especially the essays by Myra Jehlen, Michael Rogin, and Susan Gillman (Gillman's is a slightly different version of her chapter on Pudd'nhead Wilson in Dark Twins ). Also see Brook Thomas, "Tragedies of Race, Training, Birth, and Communities of Competent Pudd'nheads," American Literary History 1 (1989): 754-85, and Lee Clark Mitchell," 'De Nigger in You': Race or Training in Pudd'nhead Wilson ?" Nineteenth-Century Literature 42 (1987): 295-312.

24. The idea that an actor could generate an emotion by duplicating its physical expression has a longer history—Archer associates it especially with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (173). But late-nineteenth-century psychology put it on a different footing. William James, whose theory of the emotions made them epiphenomena of bodily responses, wrote similarly that "if our theory be true, a necessary corollary of it ought to be that any voluntary arousal of the so-called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us the emotion itself" ( The Principles of Psychology , vol. 2 [1890; rpt. New York: Dover, 1950], 462).

25. For a discussion related to my point that, for Twain, generating emotion or identity through mechanical manipulation of the body threatened the integrity of the self, see Walter Benn Michaels, "An American Tragedy, or the Promise of American Life," Representations 25 (winter 1989): 71-98. Michaels argues, particularly in reference to the writings of S. Weir Mitchell, that the belief that mechanical imitation of facial emotional expression could generate actual emotion posed a severe threat to ideas of individuality and originality (85-86).

26. Mark Twain in Eruption , 243.

27. Ibid., 198.

26. Mark Twain in Eruption , 243.

27. Ibid., 198.