Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of…

Every chapter of Pudd’nhead Wilson opens with a maxim from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar”, the sayings of David Wilson, a clever lawyer whom the people of Dawson’s Landing, on the Mississippi, branded a fool when they failed to understand one of his jokes. This one heads chapter XII, “The Shame of Judge Driscoll”, in which the proud old judge learns that his nephew Tom, kicked in public by one of two Italian twins, has sued his attacker instead of fighting a duel.

The maxim goes on with a comic example: if ignorance of fear were courage, the flea would be “incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God”, since it attacks beings as huge to it as armies to a child. Only a creature that is part coward deserves to be called brave.

Twain wrote the novel in the early 1890s, while living in Europe, and published it in 1894. Behind its satire lies a dark story of two babies, one free and one enslaved, switched in their cradles.

Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter XII (Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar), 1894

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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