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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, by Archibald Henderson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Mark Twain
+
+Author: Archibald Henderson
+
+Release Date: August 21, 2006 [EBook #6873]
+Last Updated: February 24, 2018
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                               MARK TWAIN
+
+                         By Archibald Henderson
+
+                With Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn
+
+
+
+
+                    “Haply--who knows?--somewhere
+                    In Avalon, Isle of Dreams,
+                    In vast contentment at last,
+                    With every grief done away,
+                    While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait,
+                    And Moliere hangs on his words,
+                    And Cervantes not far off
+                    Listens and smiles apart,
+                    With that incomparable drawl
+                    He is jesting with Dagonet now.”
+
+                                        BLISS CARMAN.
+
+
+
+
+                                 PREFACE
+
+There are to-day, all over the world, men and women and children who owe
+a debt of almost personal gratitude to Mark Twain for the joy of his
+humour and the charm of his personality.  In the future they will, I
+doubt not, seek and welcome opportunities to acknowledge that debt.  My
+own experience with the works of Mark Twain is in no sense exceptional.
+From the days of early childhood, my feeling for Mark Twain, derived
+first solely from acquaintance with his works, was a feeling of warm
+and, as it were, personal affection.  With limitless interest and
+curiosity, I used to hear the Uncle Remus stories from the lips of one
+of our old family servants, a negro to whom I was devotedly attached.
+These stories were narrated to me in the negro dialect with such perfect
+naturalness and racial gusto that I often secretly wondered if the
+narrator were not Uncle Remus himself in disguise.  I was thus cunningly
+prepared, “coached” shall I say, for the maturer charms of Tom Sawyer
+and Huckleberry Finn.  With Uncle Remus and Mark Twain as my preceptors,
+I spent the days of my youth--excitedly alternating, spell-bound,
+between the inexhaustible attractions of Tom, Huck, Jim, Indian Joe, the
+Duke and the Dauphin, and their compeers on the one hand; and Brer
+Rabbit, Sis Cow, and a thousand other fantastic, but very real creatures
+of the animal kingdom on the other.
+
+I felt a strange sort of camaraderie, of personal attachment, for Mark
+Twain during all the years before I came into personal contact with him.
+It was the dictum of a distinguished English critic, to the effect that
+Huckleberry Finn was a literary masterpiece, which first awoke in me,
+then a mere boy, a genuine respect for literary criticism; for here was
+expressed an opinion which I had long secretly cherished, but somehow
+never dared to utter!
+
+My personal association with Mr. Clemens, comparatively brief though it
+was--an ocean voyage, meetings here and there, a brief stay as a guest
+in his home--gave me at last the justification for paying the debt
+which, with the years, had grown greater and more insistently
+obligatory.  I felt both relief and pleasure when he authorized me to
+pay that debt by writing an interpretation of his life and work.
+
+It is an appreciation originating in the heart of one who loved Mark
+Twain's works for a generation before he ever met Samuel L. Clemens.  It
+is an interpretation springing from the conviction that Mark Twain was a
+great American who comprehensively incorporated and realized his own
+country and his own age as no American has so completely done before
+him; a supreme humorist who ever wore the panache of youth, gaiety, and
+bonhomie; a brilliant wit who never dipped his darts in the poison of
+cynicism, misanthropy, or despair; constitutionally a reformer who,
+heedless of self, boldly struck for the right as he saw it; a
+philosopher and sociologist who intuitively understood the secret
+springs of human motive and impulse, and empirically demonstrated that
+intuition in works which crossed frontiers, survived translation, and
+went straight to the human, beneath the disguise of the racial; a genius
+who lived to know and enjoy the happy rewards of his own fame; a great
+man who saw life steadily and saw it whole.
+
+                                        ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.
+
+LONDON,
+August 5, 1910.
+
+
+NOTE.--The author esteems himself in the highest degree fortunate in
+having the co-operation of Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn.  All the
+illustrations, both autochrome and monochrome, are the work of Mr.
+Coburn.
+
+
+
+
+                                 CONTENTS
+
+PREFACE
+
+I.   INTRODUCTORY
+II.  THE MAN
+III. THE HUMORIST
+IV.  WORLD-FAMED GENIUS
+V.   PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST
+
+
+
+
+     “I've a theory that every author, while living, has a projection of
+     himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant
+     places, and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never
+     knew him in the flesh.  When the author dies, this phantom fades
+     away, not caring to continue business at the old stand.  Then the
+     dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature;
+     this impression may grow sharper or fainter according to the
+     fashions and new conditions of the time.”
+
+     Letter of THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH to WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+     of date December 23, 1901.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+In the past, the attitude of the average American toward Mark Twain has
+been most characteristically expressed in a sort of complacent and
+chuckling satisfaction.  There was pride in the thought that America,
+the colossal, had produced a superman of humour.  The national vanity
+was touched when the nations of the world rocked and roared with
+laughter over the comically primitive barbarisms of the funny man from
+the “Wild and Woolly West.”  Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an
+international comedian magically evoking the laughter of a world.  It
+would be a mis-statement to affirm that the works of Mark Twain were
+reckoned as falling within the charmed circle of “Literature.”  They
+were not reckoned in connexion with literature at all.
+
+The fingers of one hand number those who realized in Mark Twain one of
+the supreme geniuses of our age.  Even in the event of his death, when
+the flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown emptily wide, there
+is room for grave doubt whether a realization of the unique and
+incomparable position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters has fully
+dawned upon the American consciousness.  The literatures of England and
+Europe do not posit an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive
+crudity and apparently unstudied frankness as the work of Mark Twain.
+It is for American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic,
+and to demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great
+artist.  It would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain's appeal to
+posterity depends upon the dicta of literary criticism.  It would be
+absurd to deny that upon America rests the task of demonstrating, to a
+world willing enough to be convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the
+supreme and imperishable glories of American literature.
+
+At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can
+be attributed what a Frenchman would call _mondial eclat_ is
+surprisingly few.  It was not so many years ago that Rudyard Kipling,
+with vigorous, imperialistic note, won for himself the unquestioned
+title of militant spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon race.  That fame has
+suffered eclipse in the passage of time.  To-day, Bernard Shaw has a
+fame more world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the
+British Isles.  His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from
+Buda-Pesth to Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to
+Buenos Ayres.  Recently Zola, Ibsen and, Tolstoy constituted the
+literary hierarchy of the world--according to popular verdict.  Since
+Zola and Ibsen have passed from the scene, Tolstoy experts unchallenged
+the profoundest influence upon the thought and consciousness of the
+world.  This is an influence streaming less from his works than from his
+life, less from his intellect than from his conscience.  The _literati_
+bemoan the artist of an epoch prior to 'What is Art?'  The whole world
+pays tribute to the passionate integrity of Tolstoy's moral aspiration.
+
+     [While this book was going through the press, news has come of the
+     death of Tolstoy.]
+
+Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most
+widely read and most genuinely popular author in the world.  In a sense
+not easily misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the minds and hearts
+of the great mass of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if
+measured in terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is
+without a parallel.  The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the
+defiant opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends
+many an inviolable canon of European taste.  With all his incandescent
+wit and comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon
+the upper strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is
+perpetually standing in the light of the serious reformer.  Tolstoy's
+works are Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet
+his literary fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the
+magnificent futility of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal
+mysticism of his unrealizable hopes.
+
+If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal,
+it is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour.
+That eidolon of which Aldrich speaks--a compact of good humour, robust
+sanity, and large-minded humanity--has diligently “gone about in near
+and distant places,” everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk
+of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh.  The
+French have a way of speaking of an author's public as if it were a
+select and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a
+country like France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects,
+there is some reason for the phraseology.  In reality, the author
+appeals to many different “publics” or classes of readers--in proportion
+to the many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the
+catholicity of his tastes.  Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a
+boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of
+experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he
+points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to
+whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real
+psychological discovery of life.  With hearty laughter at the stupid
+irritations of self-conscious  virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid
+Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that
+innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the
+omnipresent influence of a “good example” and stilled the painless pangs
+of an unruly conscience.  With splendid satire for the base, with shrill
+condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the
+equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the
+growing body of reformers in all countries who would remedy the ills of
+democratic government with the knife of publicity.  The wisdom of human
+experience and of sagacious tolerance informing his books for the young,
+provokes the question whether these books are not more apposite to the
+tastes of experienced age than to the fancies of callow youth.  The
+navvy may rejoice in 'Life on the Mississippi'.  Youth and age may share
+without jealousy the abounding fun and primitive naturalness of
+'Huckleberry Finn'.  True lovers of adventure may revel in the masterly
+narrative of 'Tom Sawyer'.  The artist may bestow his critical meed of
+approval upon the beauty of 'Joan of Arc'.  The moralist may heartily
+validate the ethical lesson of 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'.
+Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible explosions of laughter to the
+horse-play of 'Roughing It', the colossal extravagance of 'The Innocents
+Abroad', the irreverence and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the
+hallowed confines of Camelot.  All may rejoice in the spontaneity and
+refreshment of truth; spiritually co-operate in forthright condemnation
+of fraud, peculation, and sham; and breathe gladly the fresh and bracing
+air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom.  The stevedore on the dock, the
+motor-man on the street car, the newsboy on the street, the riverman on
+the Mississippi--all speak with exuberant affection in memory of that
+quaint figure in his white suit, his ruddy face shining through wreaths
+of tobacco smoke and surmounted by a great halo of silvery hair.  In one
+day, as Mark Twain was fond of relating, an emperor and a _portier_ vied
+with each other in tributes of admiration and esteem for this man and
+his works.  It is Mark Twain's imperishable glory, not simply that his
+name is the most familiar of that of any author who has lived in our own
+times, but that it is remembered with infinite irrepressible zest.
+
+“We think of Mark Twain not as other celebrities, but as the man whom we
+knew and loved,” said Dr. Van Dyke in his Memorial Address.  “We
+remember the realities which made his life worth while, the strong and
+natural manhood that was in him, the depth and tenderness of his
+affections, his laughing enmity to all shams and pretences, his long and
+faithful witness to honesty and fair-dealing.
+
+“Those who know the story of Mark Twain's career know how bravely he
+faced hardships and misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet
+a debt of conscience, following the injunction of the New Testament, to
+provide not only things honest, but things 'honourable in the sight of
+all men.'
+
+“Those who know the story of his friendships and his family life know
+that he was one who loved much and faithfully, even unto the end.  Those
+who know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and
+irrepressible humour which was his gift, there was a foundation of
+serious thoughts and noble affections and desires.
+
+“Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour
+means the absence of depth and earnestness.  There are elements of the
+unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world
+which must seem humorous even to the highest mind.  Of these the Bible
+says: 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall
+hold them in derision.'  But the mark of this higher humour is that it
+does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only
+at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical.
+
+“Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his
+humour was infallible; but we say without doubt that he used his gift,
+not for evil, but for good.  The atmosphere of his work is clean and
+wholesome.  He made fun without hatred.  He laughed many of the world's
+false claimants out of court, and entangled many of the world's false
+witnesses in the net of ridicule.  In his best books and stories,
+coloured with his own experiences, he touched the absurdities of life
+with penetrating, but not unkindly, mockery, and made us feel somehow
+the infinite pathos of life's realities.  No one can say that he ever
+failed to reverence the purity, the frank, joyful, genuine nature of the
+little children, of whom Christ said, 'Of such is the kingdom of
+heaven.'
+
+“Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud.
+We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of
+the great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left
+such an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own
+sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust,
+happy in the fuller light.
+
+             “'Rest after toil, port after stormy seas,
+               Death after life doth greatly please.”'
+
+
+
+     “'We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime--the
+     thin air stifles'--I have forgotten who said it.  We cannot flush
+     always with the high ardour of the signers of the Declaration, nor
+     remain at the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry
+     continually, 'O Beautiful!  My country!'  Yet, in the long dull
+     interspans between these sacred moments we need some one to remind
+     us that we are a nation.  For in the dead vast and middle of the
+     years insidious foes are lurking--anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan
+     decadencies, the egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the
+     cold sickening of the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant
+     fraud and corruption.  When our countrymen migrate because we have
+     no kings or castles, we are thankful to any one who will tell us
+     what we can count on.  When they complain that our soil lacks the
+     humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful even for
+     the firing of a national joke heard round the world.  And when Mark
+     Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use
+     words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with
+     prairie fire and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on
+     all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by
+     Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the
+     Republic shall suffer no harm.”
+
+                                   STUART P. SHERMAN: “MARK TWAIN.”
+                                         The Nation, May 12, 1910.
+
+
+
+
+                                 THE MAN
+
+
+American literature, indeed I might say American life, can exhibit no
+example of supreme success from the humblest beginnings, so signal as
+the example of Mark Twain.  Lincoln became President of the United
+States, as did Grant and Johnson.  But assassination began for Lincoln
+an apotheosis which has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and
+adulation.  Grant was one of the great failures in American public life;
+and Johnson, brilliant but unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment.  Mark
+Twain enjoys the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive
+development, a deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of
+intellectual and spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his
+career.  From the standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of
+Mark Twain from a journeyman printer to a great author, from a
+merry-andrew to a world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy
+navigator on the vast and uncharted seas of human experience, may be
+taken as symbolic of the romance of American life.
+
+With a sort of mock--pride, Clemens referred at times to the ancestral
+glories of his house--the judge who condemned Charles I., and all those
+other notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed lustre upon the
+name of Clemens.  Yet he claimed that he had not examined into these
+traditions, chiefly because “I was so busy polishing up this end of the
+line and trying to make it showy.”  His mother, a “Lambton with a p,” of
+Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, a man of
+determination and force, in Lexington, in 1823; but neither was endowed
+with means, and their life was of the simplest.  From Jamestown, in the
+mountain solitudes of East Tennessee, they removed in 1829, much as
+Judge Hawkins is said to have done in 'The Gilded Age', settling at
+Florida, Missouri.  Here was born, on November 30, 1835, a few months
+after their arrival, Samuel Langhorne Clemens.  Long afterwards he
+stated that he had increased by one per cent. the population of this
+village of one hundred inhabitants, thereby doing more than the best man
+in history had ever done for any other town.
+
+Although weak and sickly, the child did not suffer from the hard life,
+and survived two other children, Margaret and Benjamin.  At different
+times his life was in danger, the local doctor always coming to the
+rescue.  He once asked his mother, after she had reached old age, if she
+hadn't been uneasy about him.  She admitted she had been uneasy about
+him the whole time.  But when he inquired further if she was afraid he
+would not live, she answered after a reflective pause--as if thinking
+out the facts--that she had been afraid he would!
+
+His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother of Samuel E. Moffett, the
+writer; and his brother Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was
+intimately associated with him in life and found a place in his
+writings.
+
+In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the unpromising life of Florida
+and removed to Hannibal, Missouri.  He was a stern, unbending man, a
+lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation; after his removal to
+Hannibal he became a Justice of the Peace, an office he filled with all
+the dignity of a local autocrat.  His forum was a “dingy” office,
+furnished with “a dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a
+puncheon bench.”  The solemnity of his manner in administering the law
+won for him, among his neighbours, the title of Judge.
+
+One need but recall the scenes in which Tom Sawyer was born and bred to
+realize in its actuality the model from which these scenes were drawn.
+“Sam was always a good-hearted boy,” his mother once remarked, “but he
+was a very wild and mischievous one, and, do what we would, we could
+never make him go to school.  This used to trouble his father and me
+dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much
+in the world as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and
+sober-minded as they were.”  At school, he “excelled only in spelling”;
+outside of school he was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn,
+mischievous and prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity
+afforded.  “Often his father would start him off to school,” his mother
+once said, “and in a little while would follow him to ascertain his
+whereabouts.  There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and
+Sam would take his position behind that, and as his father went past
+would gradually circle around it in such a way as to keep out of sight.
+Finally, his father and the teacher both said it was of no use to try to
+teach Sam anything, because he was determined not to learn.  But I never
+gave up.  He was always a great boy for history, and could never get
+tired of that kind of reading; but he hadn't any use for schoolhouses
+and text books.”
+
+Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a “loafing, out-at-elbows,
+down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi river town.”  Young Clemens
+accepted the institution of slavery as a matter of course, for his
+father was a slave-owner; and his mother's wedding dowry consisted in
+part of two or three slaves.  Judge Clemens was a very austere man; like
+so many other slave-holders, he silently abhorred slavery.  To his
+children, especially to Sam, as well as to his slaves, he was, however,
+a stern taskmaster.  Mark Twain has described the terms on which he and
+his father lived as a sort of armed neutrality.  If at times this
+neutrality was broken and suffering ensued, the breaking and the
+suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between them
+--his father doing the breaking and he the suffering!  Sam claimed to
+be a very backward, cautious, unadventurous boy.  But this modest
+estimate is subject to modification when we learn that once he jumped off
+a two-story stable; another time he gave an elephant a plug of tobacco,
+and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time he
+pretended to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion of every
+original conundrum in hearing of his father.  He begs the curious not to
+pry into the result--as it was of no consequence to any one but himself!
+
+The cave, so graphically described in Tom Sawyer, was one of Sam's
+favourite haunts; and his first sweetheart was Laura Hawkins, the Becky
+Thatcher of Tom's admiration.  “Sam was always up to some mischief,”
+ this lady once remarked in later life, when in reminiscential mood.
+“We attended Sunday-school together, and they had a system of rewards
+for saying verses after committing them to memory.  A blue ticket was
+given for ten verses, a red ticket for ten blue, a yellow for ten red,
+and a Bible for ten yellow tickets.  If you will count up, you will see
+it makes a Bible for ten thousand verses.  Sam came up one day with his
+ten yellow tickets, and everybody knew he had not said a verse, but had
+just got them by trading with the boys.  But he received his Bible with
+all the serious air of a diligent student!”
+
+Mark Twain, save when in humorous vein, has never pretended that his
+success was due to any marvellous qualities of mind, any indefatigable
+industry, any innate energy and perseverance.  I have good reason to
+recall his favourite theory, which he was fond of expounding, to the
+effect that circumstance is man's master.  He likened circumstance to
+the attraction of gravity; and declared that while it is man's privilege
+to argue with circumstance, as it is the honourable privilege of the
+falling body to argue with the attraction of gravity, it does no good:
+man has to obey.  Circumstance has as its working partner man's
+temperament, his natural disposition.  Temperament is not the creation
+of man, but an innate quality; over it he has no authority; for its acts
+he cannot be held responsible.  It cannot be permanently changed or even
+modified.  No power can keep it modified.  For it is inherent and
+enduring, as unchanging as the lines upon the thumb or the conformation
+of the skull.  Throughout his life, circumstance seemed like a watchful
+spirit, switching his temperament into those channels of experience and
+development leading unerringly to the career of the author.
+
+The death of Judge Clemens was the first link in the long chain of
+circumstance--for his son was at once taken from school and apprenticed
+to the editor and proprietor of the Hannibal Courier.  He was allowed
+the usual emolument of the office apprentice, “board and clothes, but no
+money”; and even at that, though the board was paid, the clothes rarely
+materialized.  Several weeks later his brother Orion returned to
+Hannibal, and in 1850 brought out a little paper called the 'Hannibal
+Journal.'  He took Sam out of the Courier office and engaged him for the
+Journal at $3.50 a week--though he was never able to pay a cent of the
+wages.  One of Mark's fellow-townsmen once confessed: “Yes, I knew him
+when he was a boy.  He was a printer's devil--I think that's what they
+called him--and they didn't miss it.”  At a banquet some years ago, Mark
+Twain aptly described at length his experiences as a printer's
+apprentice.  There were a thousand and one menial services he was called
+upon to perform.  If the subscribers paid at all, it was only sometimes
+--and then the town subscribers paid in groceries, the country
+subscribers in cabbages and cordwood.  If they paid, they were puffed in
+the paper; and if the editor forgot to insert the puff, the subscriber
+stopped the paper!  Every subscriber regarded himself as assistant
+editor, ex officio; gave orders as to how the paper was to be edited,
+supplied it with opinions, and directed its policy.  Of course, every
+time the editor failed to follow his suggestions, he revenged himself by
+stopping the paper!
+
+After some financial stress, the paper was moved into the Clemens home,
+a “two-story brick”; and here for several years it managed to worry
+along, spasmodically hovering between life and death.  Life was easy
+with the editors of that paper; for if they pied a form, they suspended
+until the next week.  They always suspended anyhow, every now and then,
+when the fishing was good; and always fell back upon the illness of the
+editor as a convenient excuse, Mark admitted that this was a paltry
+excuse, for the all-sufficing reason that a paper of that sort was just
+as well off with a sick editor as a well one, and better off with a dead
+one than with either of them.  At the age of fifteen he considered
+himself a skilled journeyman printer; and his faculty for comedic
+portrayal had already betrayed itself in occasional clumsy efforts.  In
+'My First Literary Venture', he narrates his experiences, amongst others
+how greatly he increased the circulation of the paper, and incensed the
+“inveterate woman-killer,” whose poetry for that week's paper read, “To
+Mary in H--l” (Hannibal).  Mark added a “snappy foot--note” at the
+bottom, in which he agreed to let the thing pass, for just that once;
+but distinctly warning Mr. J. Gordon Runnels that the paper had a
+character to sustain, and that in future, when Mr. Runnels wanted to
+commune with his friends in h--l, he must select some other medium for
+that communication!  Many were the humorous skits, crudely illustrated
+with cuts made from wooden blocks hacked out with his jack-knife, which
+the mischievous young “devil” inserted in his brother's paper.  Here we
+may discern the first spontaneous outcroppings of the genuine humorist.
+“It was on this paper, the 'Hannibal Journal',” says his biographer, Mr.
+Albert B. Paine, “that young Sam Clemens began his writings--burlesques,
+as a rule, of local characters and conditions--usually published in his
+brother's absence, generally resulting in trouble on his return.  Yet
+they made the paper sell, and if Orion had but realized his possession
+he might have turned his brother's talent into capital even then.”
+
+One evening in 1858, the boy, consumed with wanderlust, asked his mother
+for five dollars--to start on his travels.  He failed to receive the
+money, but he defiantly announced that he would go “anyhow.”  He had
+managed to save a tiny sum, and that night he disappeared and fled to St
+Louis.  There he worked in the composing-room of the Evening News for a
+time, and then started out “to see the world”--New York, where a little
+World's Fair was in progress.  He was somewhat better off than was
+Benjamin Franklin when he entered Philadelphia--for he had two or three
+dollars in pocket-change, and a ten-dollar bank-bill concealed in the
+lining of his coat.  For a time he sweltered in a villainous mechanics'
+boarding-house in Duane Street, and worked at starvation wages in the
+printing-office of Gray & Green.  Being recognized one day by a man from
+Hannibal, he fled to Philadelphia where he worked for some months as a
+“sub” on the 'Inquirer' and the 'Public Ledger'.  Next came a flying
+trip to Washington “to see the sights there,” and then back he went to
+the Mississippi Valley.  This journey to the “vague and fabled East”
+ really opened his eyes to the great possibilities that the world has in
+store for the traveller.
+
+Meantime, Orion had gone to Muscatine, Ohio, and acquired a small
+interest there; and, after his marriage, he and his wife went to Keokuk
+and started a little job printing-office.  Here Sam worked with his
+brother until the winter of 1856-7, when circumstance once again played
+the part of good fairy.  As he was walking along the street one snowy
+evening, his attention was attracted by a piece of paper which the wind
+had blown against the wall.  It proved to be a fifty-dollar bill; and
+after advertising for the owner for four days, he stealthily moved to
+Cincinnati in order “to take that money out of danger.”  Now comes the
+second crucial event in his life!
+
+For long the ambition for river life had remained with him--and now
+there seemed some possibility of realizing these ambitions.  He first
+wanted to be a cabin boy; then his ideal was to be a deck hand, because
+of his splendid conspicuousness as he stood on the end of the stage
+plank with a coil of rope in his hand.  But these were only day-dreams
+--he didn't admit, even to himself, that they were anything more than
+heavenly impossibilities.  But as he worked during the winter in the
+printing-office of Wrightson & Company of Cincinnati, he whiled away his
+leisure hours reading Lieutenant Herndon's account of his explorations
+of the Amazon, and became greatly interested in his description of the
+cocoa industry.  Now he set to work to map out a new and thrilling
+career.  The expedition sent out by the government to explore the Amazon
+had encountered difficulties and left unfinished the exploration of the
+country about the head-waters, thousands of miles from the mouth of the
+river.  It mattered not to him that New Orleans was fifteen hundred
+miles away from Cincinnati, and that he had only thirty dollars left.
+His mind was made up he would go on and complete the work of
+exploration.  So in April, 1857, he set sail for New Orleans on an
+ancient tub, called the Paul Jones.  For the paltry sum of sixteen
+dollars, he was enabled to revel in the unimagined glories of the main
+saloon.  At last he was under way--realizing his boyhood dream, unable
+to contain himself for joy.  At last he saw himself as that hero of his
+boyish fancy--a traveller.
+
+When he reached New Orleans, after the prolonged ecstasy of two weeks on
+a tiny Mississippi steamer, he discovered that no ship was leaving for
+Para, that there never had been one leaving for Para and that there
+probably would not be one leaving for Para that century.  A policeman
+made him, move, on, threatening to run him in if he ever caught him
+reflecting in the public street again.  Just as his money failed him,
+his old friend circumstance arrived, with another turning-point in his
+life--a new link.  On his way down the river he had met Horace Bixby; he
+turned to him in this hour of need.  It has been charged against Mark
+Twain that he was deplorably lazy--apocryphal anecdotes are still
+narrated with much gusto to prove it.  Think of a lazy boy undertaking
+the stupendous task of learning to know the intricate and treacherous
+secrets of the great river, to know every foot of the route in the dark
+as well as he knew his own face in the glass!  And yet he confesses that
+he was unaware of the immensity of the undertaking upon which he had
+embarked.
+
+“In 1852,” says Bixby, “I was chief pilot on the 'Paul Jones', a boat
+that made occasional trips from Pittsburg to New Orleans.  One day a
+tall, angular, hoosier-like young fellow, whose limbs appeared to be
+fastened with leather hinges, entered the pilot-house, and in a
+peculiar, drawling voice, said--
+
+“'Good mawnin, sir.  Don't you want to take er piert young fellow and
+teach 'im how to be er pilot?'
+
+“'No sir; there is more bother about it than it's worth.'
+
+“'I wish you would, mister.  I'm er printer by trade, but it don't 'pear
+to 'gree with me, and I'm on my way to Central America for my health.  I
+believe I'll make a tolerable good pilot, 'cause I like the river.'
+
+“'What makes you pull your words that way?'
+
+“'I don't know, mister; you'll have to ask my Ma.  She pulls hern too.
+Ain't there some way that we can fix it, so that you'll teach me how to
+be er pilot?'
+
+“'The only way is for money.'
+
+“'How much are you going to charge?
+
+“'Well, I'll teach you the river for $500.'
+
+“'Gee whillikens! he! he!  I ain't got $500, but I've got five lots in
+Keokuk, Iowa, and 2000 acres of land in Tennessee that is worth two bits
+an acre any time.  You can have that if you want it.'
+
+“I told him I did not care for his land, and after a while he agreed to
+pay $100 in cash (borrowed from his brother-in-law, William A. Moffett,
+of Virginia), $150 in twelve months, and the balance when he became a
+pilot.  He was with me for a long time, but sometimes took occasional
+trips with other pilots.”  And he significantly adds “He was always
+drawling out dry jokes, but then we did not pay any attention to him.”
+
+It cannot be thought accidental that Sam Clemens became a pilot.  Bixby
+became his mentor, the pilot-house his recitation-room, the steamboat
+his university, the great river the field of knowledge.
+
+In that stupendous course in nature's own college, he “learned the
+river” as schoolboy seldom masters his Greek or his mathematics.  With
+the naive assurance of youth, he gaily enters upon the task of
+“learning” some twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great
+Mississippi.  Long afterwards, he confessed that had he really known
+what he was about to require of his faculties, he would never have had
+the courage to begin.
+
+His comic sketches, published in the 'Hannibal Weekly Courier' in his
+brother's absence, furnish the first link, his apprenticeship to Bixby
+the second link in the chain of circumstance.  For two years and a half
+he sailed the river as a master pilot; his trustworthiness secured for
+him the command of some of the best boats on the river, and he was so
+skilful that he never met disaster on any of his trips.  He narrowly
+escaped it in 1861, for when Louisiana seceded, his boat was drafted
+into the Confederate service.  As he reached St. Louis, having taken
+passage for home, a shell came whizzing by and carried off part of the
+pilot-house.  It was the end of an era: the Civil War had begun.  The
+occupation of the pilot was gone; but the river had given up to him all
+of its secrets.  He was to show them to a world, in 'Life on the
+Mississippi' and 'Huckleberry Finn'.
+
+The story of the derivation of the famous _nom de guerre_ has often been
+narrated-and as often erroneously.  As the steamboat approaches a
+sandbank, snag, or other obstruction, the man at the bow heaves the lead
+and sings out, “By the mark, three,” “Mark twain,” etc.-meaning three
+fathoms deep, two fathoms, and so on.  The thought of adopting Mark
+Twain as a _nom de guerre_ was not original with Clemens; but the world
+owes him a debt of gratitude for making forever famous a name that, but
+for him, would have been forever lost.  “There was a man, Captain Isaiah
+Sellers, who furnished river news for the New Orleans Picayune, still
+one of the best papers in the South,” Mr. Clemens once confessed to
+Professor Wm. L. Phelps.  “He used to sign his articles Mark Twain.  He
+died in 1863.  I liked the name, and stole it.  I think I have done him
+no wrong, for I seem to have made this name somewhat generally known.”
+
+The inglorious escapade of his military career, at which he himself has
+poked unspeakable fun, and for which not even his most enthusiastic
+biographers have any excuse, was soon ended.  Had his heart really been
+enlisted on the side of the South, he would doubtless have stayed at his
+post.  In reality, he was at that time lacking in conviction; and in
+after life he became a thorough Unionist and Abolitionist.  In the
+summer of 1861, Governor Jackson of Missouri called for fifty thousand
+volunteers to drive out the Union forces.  While visiting in the small
+town where his boyhood had been spent, Hannibal, Marion County, young
+Clemens and some of his friends met together in a secret place one
+night, and formed themselves into a military company.  The spirited but
+untrained Tom Lyman was made captain; and in lieu of a first lieutenant
+--strange omission!--young Clemens was made second lieutenant.  These
+fifteen hardy souls proudly dubbed themselves the Marion Rangers.  No
+one thought of finding fault with such a name--it sounded too well.  All
+were full of notions as high-flown as the name of their company.  One of
+their number, named Dunlap, was ashamed of his name, because it had a
+plebeian sound to his ear.  So he solved the difficulty and gratified
+his aristocratic ambitions by writing it d'Unlap.  This may serve as a
+sample of the stuff of which the company was made.  Dunlap was by no
+means useless; for he invented hifalutin names for the camps, and
+generally succeeded in proposing a name that was, as his companions
+agreed, “no slouch.”
+
+There was no real organization, nobody obeyed orders, there was never a
+battle.  They retreated, according to the tale of the humorist, at every
+sign of the enemy.  In truth, this little band had plenty of stomach for
+fighting, despite its loose organization; and quite a number fought all
+through the war.  Mark Twain is doubtless correct in the main, in his
+assertion that he has not given an unfair picture of the conditions
+prevailing in many of the militia camps in the first months of the war
+between the states.  The men were raw and unseasoned, and even the
+leaders were lacking in the rudiments of military training and
+discipline.  The situation was strange and unprecedented, the terrors
+were none the less real that they were imaginary.  As Mark says, it took
+an actual collision with the enemy on the field of battle to change them
+from rabbits into soldiers.  Young Clemens, according to his nephew's
+account, was first detailed to special duty on the river because of his
+knowledge acquired as a pilot; it was not long before he was captured
+and paroled.  Again he was captured, this time sent to St. Louis, and
+imprisoned there in a tobacco warehouse.  Fearing recognition and tragic
+consequences, perhaps courtmartial and death, should he, during the
+formalities of exchange, be recognized by the command in Grant's army
+which first captured him, he made his escape, abandoned the cause which
+he afterwards spoke of as “the rebellion,” and went west as secretary to
+his brother Orion, lately appointed Territorial Secretary of Nevada by
+the President.
+
+A very credible and interesting biography of Mark Twain might be
+compiled from his own works; and 'Roughing It' is full of autobiography of
+a coloured sort, though in the main correct.  His joy in the prospect of
+that trip, the exciting details of the long journey, are all narrated
+with gusto and fine effect.  In the “unique sinecure” of the office of
+private secretary, he found he had nothing to do and no salary; so after
+a short time--the fear of being recognized by Union soldiers and shot
+for breaking his parole still haunting him--he, and a companion, went
+off together on a fishing jaunt to Lake Tahoe.  Everywhere he saw
+fortunes made in a moment.  He fell a prey to the prevailing excitement
+and went mad like all the rest.  Little wonder over the wild talk, when
+cartloads of solid silver bricks as large as pigs of lead were passing
+by every day before their very eyes.  The wild talk grew more frenzied
+from day to day.  And young Clemens yielded to no one in enthusiasm and
+excitement.  For vividness or picturesqueness of expression none could
+vie with him.  With three companions, he began “prospecting,” with the
+most indifferent success; and soon tiring of their situation, they moved
+on down to Esmeralda (now Aurora), on the other side of Carson City.
+Here new life seemed to inspire the party.  What mattered it if they
+were in debt to the butcher--for did they not own thirty thousand feet
+apiece in the “richest mines on earth”!  Who cared if their credit was
+not good with the grocer, so long as they revelled in mountains of
+fictitious wealth and raved in the frenzied cant of the hour over their
+immediate prospect of fabulous riches!  But at last the practical
+necessities of living put a sudden damper on their enthusiasm.  Clemens
+was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to work as a common
+labourer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board--after flour
+had soared to a dollar a pound and the rate on borrowed money had gone
+to eight per cent. a month.  This work was very exhausting, and after a
+week Clemens asked his employer for an advance of wages.  The employer
+replied that he was paying Clemens ten dollars a week, and thought that
+all he was worth.  How much did he want?  When Clemens replied that four
+hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was all he could reasonably
+ask, considering the hard times, he was ordered off the premises!  In
+after days, Mark only regretted that, in view of the arduous labours he
+had performed in that mill, he had not asked seven hundred thousand for
+his services!
+
+After a time, Mark and his friend Higbie established their claim to a
+mine, became mad with excitement, and indulged in the wildest dreams for
+the future.  Under the laws of the district, work of a certain character
+must be done upon the claim within ten days after location in order to
+establish the right of possession.  Mark was called away to the bedside
+of a sick friend, Higbie failed to receive Mark's note, and the work was
+never done--each thinking it was being properly attended to by the
+other.  On their return, they discovered that their claim was
+“re-located,” and that millions had slipped from their grasp!  The very
+stars in their courses seemed to fight to force young Clemens into
+literature.  Had Samuel Clemens become a millionaire at this time, it is
+virtually certain that there would have been no Mark Twain.
+
+After one day more of heartless prospecting, Clemens “dropped in” at the
+wayside post-office.  It was the hour of fate!  A letter awaited him
+there.  We cannot call it accident--it was the result of forces and
+events which had long been converging toward this end.  Samuel Clemens
+began his career as an itinerant, tramping “jour” printer.  He wrote for
+the papers on which he served as printer; and he actually read the
+matter he set up in type.  By observation on his travels, by study of
+the writing of others, Clemens acquired information, knowledge of life,
+and ingenuity of expression.  He hadn't served his ten--years'
+apprenticeship as a printer for nothing.  In the process of setting up
+tons of good and bad literature, he had learned--half unconsciously--to
+appraise and to discriminate.  In the same half-unconscious way, he was
+actually gaining some inkling of the niceties of style.  After he began
+“learning the river,” Clemens once wrote a funny sketch about Captain
+Sellers which made a genuine “hit” with the officers on the boat.  The
+sketch fell into the hands of the “river-editor” of the 'St. Louis
+Republican', found a place in that journal, and was widely copied
+throughout the West.  On the strength of it, Clemens became a sort of
+river reporter, and from time to time published memoranda and comic
+squibs in the 'Republican'.  That passion which a French critic has
+characterized as distinctively American, the passion for “seeing
+yourself in print,” still burned in Clemens, even during all the
+hardships of prospecting and milling.  At intervals he sent from the
+mining regions of “Washoe,” as all that part of Nevada was then called,
+humorous letters signed “Josh” to the 'Daily Territorial Enterprise' of
+Virginia City, at that time one of the most progressive and wide--awake
+newspapers in the West.
+
+The fateful letter which I have mentioned, contained an offer to Clemens
+from the proprietor of the 'Enterprise', of the position of city editor,
+at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week.  To Clemens at this time,
+this offer came as a perfect godsend.  Twenty-five dollars a week was
+nothing short of wealth, luxury.  His enthusiasm oozed away when he
+reflected over his ignorance and incompetence; and he gloomily recalled
+his repeated failures.  But necessity faced him; and opportunity knocks
+but once at every door.  His doubts were speedily resolved; and he
+afterwards confessed that, had he been offered at that time a salary to
+translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, he would unhesitatingly
+have accepted, despite some natural misgivings, and have tried to throw
+as much variety into it as he could for the money.  It was to fill a
+vacancy, caused by the absence of Dan De Quille, the regular reporter,
+on a visit to “the States,” that Clemens was offered this position; but
+he retained it after De Quille returned.  “Mark and I had our hands
+full,” relates De Quille, “and no grass grew under our feet.  There was
+a constant rush of startling events; they came tumbling over one another
+as though playing at leap-frog.  While a stage robbery was being written
+up, a shooting affray started; and perhaps before the pistol shots had
+ceased to echo among the surrounding hills, the firebells were banging
+out an alarm.”  A record of the variegated duties of these two, found in
+an old copy of the Territorial Enterprise of 1863, bears the
+unmistakable hallmarks of Mark Twain.  “Our duty is to keep the universe
+thoroughly posted concerning murders and street fights, and balls and
+theatres, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and
+school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and
+Bible societies, and hay wagons, and the thousand other things which it
+is within the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify
+into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a great daily
+newspaper.  Beyond this revelation everything connected with these two
+experiments of Providence must for ever remain an impenetrable mystery.”
+ An admirable picture of Mark Twain on his native heath, in the latter
+part of 1863, is given by Edward Peron Hingston, author of “The Genial
+Showman,” in the introduction to the English edition of “The Innocents
+Abroad.”
+
+The fame of the Western humorist had already reached the ears of
+Hingston; and as soon as he reached Virginia City, he went to the office
+of the 'Territorial Enterprise' and asked to be presented to Mark Twain.
+
+When he heard his name called by some one, Clemens called out:
+
+“Pass the gentleman into my den.  The noble animal is here.”
+
+The noble animal proved to be “a young man, strongly built, ruddy in
+complexion, his hair of a sunny hue, his eyes light and twinkling, in
+manner hearty, and nothing of the student about him--one who looked as
+if he could take his own part in a quarrel, strike a smart blow as
+readily as he could say a telling thing, bluffly jolly, brusquely
+cordial, off-handedly good-natured.”  The picture is detailed and vivid:
+
+     “Let it be borne in mind that from the windows of the newspaper
+     office the American desert was visible; that within a radius of ten
+     miles Indians were encamping amongst the sage--brush; that the
+     whole city was populated with miners, adventurers, Jew traders,
+     gamblers, and all the rough-and-tumble class which a mining town in
+     a new territory collects together, and it will be readily
+     understood that a reporter for a daily paper in such a place must
+     neither go about his duties wearing light kid gloves, nor be
+     fastidious about having gilt edges to his note-books.  In Mark
+     Twain I found the very man I had expected to see--a flower of the
+     wilderness, tinged with the colour of the soil, the man of thought
+     and the man of action rolled into one, humorist and hard-worker,
+     Momus in a felt hat and jack-boots.  In the reporter of the
+     'Territorial Enterprise' I became introduced to a Californian
+     celebrity, rich in eccentricities of thought, lively in fancy,
+     quaint in remark, whose residence upon the fringe of civilization
+     had allowed his humour to develop without restraint, and his speech
+     to be rarely idiomatic.”
+
+Under the influence of the example of the proprietors of the
+'Enterprise', strict stylistic disciplinarians of the Dana school of
+journalism, Clemens learned the advantages of the crisp, direct style
+which characterizes his writing.  As a reporter, he was really
+industrious in matters that met his fancy; but “cast-iron items”--for he
+hated facts and figures requiring absolute accuracy--got from him only
+“a lick and a promise.”  He was much interested in Tom Fitch's effort to
+establish a literary journal, 'The Weekly Occidental'.  Daggett's
+opening chapters of a wonderful story, of which Fitch, Mrs Fitch, J. T.
+Goodman, Dan De Quille, and Clemens were to write successive
+instalments, gave that paper the _coup de grace_ in its very first
+issue.  Of this wonderful novel, at the close of each instalment of
+which the “hero was left in a position of such peril that it seemed
+impossible he could be rescued, except through means and wisdom more
+than human”; of the Bohemian days of the “Visigoths,”--Clemens, De
+Quille, Frank May, Louis Aldrich, and their confreres; of the practical
+jokes played on each other, particularly the incident of the imitation
+meerschaum (“mere sham”) pipe, solemnly presented to Clemens by Steve
+Gillis, C. A. V. Putnam, D. E. M'Carthy, De Quille and others--all these
+belong to the fascinating domain of the biographer.  When Clemens was
+sent down to Carson City to report the meetings of the first Nevada
+Legislature, he began for the first time to sign his letters “Mark
+Twain.”  In his Autobiography he has explained that his function as a
+legislative correspondent was to dispense compliment and censure with
+impartial justice.  As his disquisitions covered about half a page each
+morning in the Enterprise, it is easy to understand that he was an
+“influence.”  Questioned by Carlyle Smith in regard to his choice of
+“Mark Twain,” Mr. Clemens replied: “I chose my pseudonym because to nine
+hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand it had no meaning, and
+also because it was short.  I was a reporter in the Legislature at the
+time, and I wished to save the Legislature time.  It was much shorter to
+say in their debates--for I was certain to be the occasion of some
+questions of privilege--'Mark Twain' than 'the unprincipled and lying
+Parliamentary Reporter of the 'Territorial Enterprise'.'”
+
+Already his name was known the whole length of the Pacific Coast; the
+Enterprise published many things from his pen which gave him local, and
+afterwards national, fame; such sketches as 'The Undertaker's Chat',
+'The Petrified Man' and 'The Marvellous Bloody Massacre' had attracted
+favourable and wide notice east of the Rocky Mountains.  But his career
+in Carson City came to a sudden close when he challenged the editor of
+the Virginia Union to a duel, the bloodless conclusion of which is
+narrated in the Autobiography.  But even a challenge to a duel was
+against the new law of Nevada; and obeying the warning of Governor
+North, the duellists crossed the border without ceremony, and stood not
+upon the order of their going.
+
+While Mark Twain was still with the Enterprise, he was in the habit of
+reserving all his “sketches” for the San Francisco newspapers, the
+'Golden Era' and the 'Morning Call'.  He now turns his steps to that
+storied city of “Frisco,” and was not long in extending his fame on that
+coast.  He was incorrigibly lazy, as George Barnes, the editor of the
+Call, soon discovered; and Kipling was told when he was in San Francisco
+that Mark was in the habit of coiling himself into a heap and meditating
+until the last minute, when he would produce copy having no relationship
+to the subject of his assignment--“which made the editor swear horribly,
+and the readers of 'The Call' ask for more.”  His love for practical
+joking during the California days brought him unpopularity; and one
+reads in a San Francisco paper of the early days: “There have been
+moments in the lives of various kind-hearted and respectable citizens of
+California and Nevada, when, if Mark Twain were before them as members
+of a vigilance committee for any mild crime, such as mule-stealing or
+arson, it is to be feared his shrift would have been short.  What a
+dramatic picture the idea conjures up, to be sure!  Mark, before these
+honest men, infuriated by his practical jokes, trying to show them what
+an innocent creature he was when it came to mules, or how the only
+policy of fire insurance he held had lapsed, how void of guile he was in
+any direction, and all with that inimitable drawl, that perplexed
+countenance and peculiar scraping of the left foot, like a boy speaking
+his first piece at school.”  If he just escaped disaster, he likewise
+just escaped millions; on one occasion, for the space of a few moments,
+he owned the famous Comstock Lode, which was, though he never suspected
+it, worth millions.  His trunkful of securities, which were eminently
+saleable at one time, proved to be of fictitious value when “the bottom
+dropped out” of the Nevada boom; and that silver mine, which he was
+commissioned to sell in New York, was finally sold for three million
+dollars!  It was, as Mark says, the blind lead over again.  Mark Twain
+had the true Midas touch; but the mine of riches he was destined to
+discover was a mine, not of gold or silver, but the mine of intellect
+and rich human experience.
+
+To The 'Golden Era', Mark Twain, like Prentice Mulford and Joaquin
+Miller, contributed freely; and after a time he became associated with
+Bret Harte on 'The Californian', Harte as editor at twenty dollars a
+week, and Mark receiving twelve dollars for an article.  Here
+forgathered that group of brilliant writers of the Pacific Slope,
+numbering Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, Charles Henry
+Webb, and Prentice Mulford among its celebrities; two of that remarkable
+coterie were soon destined to achieve world-wide fame.  “These ingenuous
+young men, with the fatuity of gifted people,” says Mr. Howells, “had
+established a literary newspaper in San Francisco, and they brilliantly
+co-operated in its early extinction.”  Of his first meeting with Mark
+Twain, Bret Harte has left a memorable picture:
+
+     “His head was striking.  He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose,
+     and even the aquiline eye--an eye so eagle-like that a second lid
+     would not have surprised me--of an unusual and dominant nature.
+     His eyebrows were very thick and bushy.  His dress was careless,
+     and his general manner was one of supreme indifference to
+     surroundings and circumstances.  Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam
+     Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a
+     number of newspaper articles contributed over the signature of
+     'Mark Twain.'”
+
+Mark tired of the life of literary drudgery in San Francisco--on one
+occasion he was reduced to a solitary ten--cent piece; and General John
+McComb wooed him back to journalism just as he was on the point of
+returning to his old work on the Mississippi River, this time as a
+Government pilot.  During the earlier years in San Francisco, he was in
+the habit of writing weekly letters to the 'Territorial Enterprise'
+--personals, market-chat, and the like.  But when he criticized the police
+department of San Francisco in the most scathing terms, the officials
+“found means for bringing charges that made the author's presence there
+difficult and comfortless.”  So he welcomed the opportunity to join
+Steve Gillis in a pilgrimage to the mountain home of Jim Gillis, his
+brother--a “sort of Bohemian infirmary.”  Mark Twain revelled in the
+delightful company of the original of Bret Harte's “Truthful James,” and
+he enjoyed the mining methods of Jackass Hill, like the true Bohemian
+that he was.  Soon after his arrival, Mark and Jim Gillis started out in
+search of golden pockets.  As De Quille says:
+
+     “They soon found and spent some days in working up the undisturbed
+     trail of an undiscovered deposit, They were on the 'golden
+     bee-line' and stuck to it faithfully, though it was necessary to carry
+     each sample of dirt a considerable distance to a small stream in
+     the bed of a canon in order to wash it.  However, Mark hungered and
+     thirsted to find a big rich pocket, and he pitched in after the
+     manner of Joe Bowers of old--just like a thousand of brick.
+
+     “Each step made sure by the finding of golden grains, they at last
+     came upon the pocket whence these grains had trailed out down the
+     slope of the mountain.  It was a cold, dreary drizzling day when
+     the 'home deposit' was found.  The first sample of dirt carried to
+     the stream and washed out yielded only a few cents.  Although the
+     right vein had been discovered, they had as yet found only the tail
+     end of the pocket.
+
+     “Returning to the vein, they dug a sample of the decomposed ore
+     from a new place, and were about to carry it down to the ravine and
+     test it, when the rain increased to a lively downpour.”
+
+Mark was chilled to the bone, and refused to carry another pail of
+water.  In slow, drawling tones he protested decisively:
+
+“Jim, I won't carry any more water.  This work is too disagreeable.
+Let's go to the house and wait till it clears up.”
+
+Gillis was eager to test the sample he had just taken out.
+
+“Bring just one more pail, Sam,” he urged.
+
+“I won't do it, Jim!” replied the now thoroughly disgusted Clemens.
+“Not a drop!  Not if I knew there were a million dollars in that pan!”
+
+Moved by Sam's dejected appearance--blue nose and humped back--and
+realizing doubtless that it was futile to reason with him further, Jim
+yielded and emptied the sacks of dirt just dug upon the ground.  They
+now started out for the nearest shelter, the hotel in Angel's Camp, kept
+by Coon Drayton, formerly a Mississippi River pilot.  Imagine the jests
+and shouts that went around as Mark and Coon vied with each other in
+narrating interesting experiences.  For three days the rain and the
+stories held out; and among those told by Drayton was a story of a frog.
+He narrated this story with the utmost solemnity as a thing that had
+happened in Angel's Camp in the spring of '49--the story of a frog
+trained by its owner to become a wonderful jumper, but which failed to
+“make good” in a contest because the owner of a rival frog, in order to
+secure the winning of the wager, filled the trained frog full of shot
+during its owner's absence.  This story appealed irresistibly to Mark as
+a first-rate story told in a first-rate way; he divined in it the magic
+quality unsuspected by the narrator--universal humour.  He made notes in
+order to remember the story, and on his return to the Gillis' cabin,
+“wrote it up.”  He wrote a number of other things besides, all of which
+he valued above the frog story; but Gillis thought it the best thing he
+had ever written.
+
+Meantime the rain had washed off the surface soil from their last pan,
+which they had left in their hurry.  Some passing miners were astonished
+to behold the ground glittering with gold; they appropriated it, but
+dared not molest the deposit until the expiration of the thirty-day
+claim-notice posted by Jim Gillis.  They sat down to wait, hoping that
+the claimants would not return.  At the expiration of the thirty days,
+the claim-jumpers took possession, and soon cleared out the pocket,
+which yielded twenty thousand dollars.  It was one of the most fortunate
+accidents in Mark Twain's career.  He came within one pail of water of
+comparative wealth; but had he discovered that pocket, he would probably
+have settled down as a pocketminer, and might have pounded quartz for
+the rest of his life.  Had his nerve held out a moment longer, he would
+never have gone to Angel's Camp, would never have heard The Story of the
+Jumping Frog, and would have escaped that sudden fame which this little
+story soon brought him.
+
+On his return to San Francisco, he dropped in one morning to see Bret
+Harte, and told him this story.  As Harte records:
+
+     “He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself
+     irresistible.  He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories,
+     and half-unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the
+     original narrator.  I asked him to tell it again to a friend who
+     came in, and they asked him to write it for 'The Californian'.  He
+     did so, and when published it was an emphatic success.  It was the
+     first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it
+     crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading.  The story was 'The
+     Jumping Frog of Calaveras.'  It is now known and laughed over, I
+     suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never
+     be as funny to anyone in print as it was to me, told for the first
+     time, by the unknown Twain himself, on that morning in the San
+     Francisco Mint.”
+
+When Artemus Ward passed through California on a literary tour in 1864,
+Mark Twain regaled him--as he regaled all worthy acquaintances--with his
+favourite story, 'The Jumping Frog'.  Ward was delighted with it.
+
+“Write it out,” he said, “give it all the necessary touches, and let me
+use it in a volume of sketches I am preparing for the press.  Just send
+it to Carleton, my publisher, in New York.”
+
+It arrived too late for Ward's book, and Carleton presented it to Henry
+Clapp, who published it in his paper, The Saturday Press of November 18,
+1864.  In his Autobiography, Mr. Clemens has narrated how 'The Jumping
+Frog' put a quietus on 'The Saturday Press', and was immediately copied
+in numerous newspapers in England and America.  He was always proud of
+the celebrity that story achieved; but he never sought to claim the
+credit for himself.  He freely admits that it was not Mark Twain, but
+the frog, that became celebrated.  The author, alas, remained in
+obscurity!
+
+Carleton afterwards confessed that he had lost the chance of a life
+--time by giving The Jumping Frog away; but Mark Twain's old friend,
+Charles Henry Webb, came to the rescue and published it.  About four
+thousand copies were sold in three years; but the real fame of the story
+was in its newspaper and magazine notoriety.  In 1872 it was translated
+into the 'Revue des Deux Mondes'; and it was almost as widely read in
+England, India, and Australia as it was in America.
+
+Meantime Mark Twain was still awaiting the rewards of journalism, and
+doing literary hack work of one sort or another.  In 1866 the
+proprietors of the 'Sacramento Union' employed him to write a series of
+letters from the Sandwich Islands.  The purpose of these letters was to
+give an account of the sugar industry.  Mark told the story of sugar,
+but, as was his wont, threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had
+nothing to do with sugar.  It was the extraneous matter, and not the
+sugar, that won him a wide audience on the Pacific Coast.  During these
+months of “luxurious vagrancy” he described in the most vivid way many
+of the most notable features of the Sandwich Islands.  Nowadays such
+letters would at once have been embodied in a volume.  In his 'My Debut
+as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has described in admirably graphic
+style his great “scoop” of the news of the Hornet disaster; how Anson
+Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried on a cot to the hospital,
+so that he could interview the half-dead sailors.  His bill--twenty
+dollars a week for general correspondence, and one hundred dollars a
+column for the Hornet story--was paid with all good will.  On the
+strength of this story, he hoped to become a “Literary Person,” and sent
+his account of the Hornet disaster to Harper's Magazine, where it
+appeared in December, 1866.  But alas! he could not give the banquet he
+was going to give to celebrate his debut as a “Literary Person.”  He had
+not written the “Mark Twain” distinctly, and when it appeared it had
+been transformed into “Mike Swain”!
+
+When Mark returned to San Francisco, he resolved to follow the example
+of Stoddard and Mulford, and “enter the lecture field.”  The “extraneous
+matter” in his letters to the Sacramento Union had made him “notorious”;
+and, as he put it, “San Francisco invited me to lecture.”  The historic
+account of that lecture, in 'Roughing It', is found elsewhere in this
+book.  Noah Brooks, editor of the Alta California, who was present at
+this lecture, has written the following graphic piece of description:
+“Mark Twain's method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel.  His
+slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his
+visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his
+sentences, and, above all, the surprise that spread over his face when
+the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the finer
+passages of his word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind they had
+ever known.  All this was original; it was Mark Twain.”  Employing D. E.
+McCarthy as his agent, Mark gave a number of lectures at various places
+on the Pacific Coast.  From this time forward we recognize in Mark Twain
+one of the supreme masters of the art of lecturing in our time.
+
+In December, 1866, he set out for New York, preparatory to the grand
+tour around the world.  His own account of the circular describing the
+projected trip is famous.  He had proposed, for twelve hundred dollars
+in gold,--at the rate of twenty dollars apiece, to write a series of
+letters for the 'Alta California'.  Brooks, the editor, fortified the
+grave misgivings of the proprietors over this proposition; but Colonel
+John McComb (then on the editorial staff) argued vehemently for Mark,
+and turned the scale in his favour.  While Mark was in New York, he was
+urged by Frank Fuller, whom he had known as Territorial Governor of
+Utah, to deliver a lecture--in order to establish his reputation on the
+Atlantic coast.  Fuller, an enthusiastic admirer of Mark Twain, overcame
+all objections, and engaged Cooper Union for the occasion.  Though few
+tickets were sold, Fuller cleverly succeeded in packing the hall by
+sending out a multitude of complimentary tickets to the school-teachers
+of New York City and the adjacent territory.  That lecture proved to be
+a supreme success--Mark's reputation as a lecturer on the Atlantic coast
+was assured.
+
+On June 10, 1867, the Quaker City set sail for its Oriental tour.  It
+bore on board a comparatively unknown person of the name of Clemens,
+who, in applying for passage, represented himself to be a Baptist
+minister in ill-health from San Francisco!
+
+It brought back a celebrity, destined to become famous throughout the
+world.  Prior to sailing he arranged to contribute letters to the 'New
+York Tribune' and the 'New York Herald', as well as to the 'Alta
+California'.
+
+“His letters to the 'Alta California',” says Noah Brooks, “made him
+famous.  It was my business to prepare one of these letters for the
+Sunday morning paper, taking the topmost letter from a goodly pile that
+was stacked in a pigeon-hole of my desk.  Clemens was an indefatigable
+correspondent, and his last letter was slipped in at the bottom of a
+tall stack.
+
+“It would not be quite accurate to say that Mark Twain's letters were
+the talk of the town; but it was very rarely that readers of the paper
+did not come into the office on Mondays to confide to the editors their
+admiration of the writer, and their enjoyment of his weekly
+contributions.  The California newspapers copied these letters, with
+unanimous approval and disregard of the copyrights of author and
+publisher.”
+
+It was the Western humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American
+intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations,
+which caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public.  It was a virgin
+field for the humorous observer; Europe had not yet become the
+playground of America.  It was rather a _terra incognita_, regarded with
+a sort of reverential ignorance by the average American tourist.  By the
+range of his humour, the pertinency of his observation, and the vigour
+of his expression he awoke immediate attention.  And he aroused a deeply
+sympathetic response in the hearts of Americans by his manly and
+outspoken expression--his respect for the worthy, the admirable, the
+praiseworthy, his scorn and detestation for the spurious, the specious
+and the fraudulent.  In this book, for the first time, he strikes the
+key-note of his life and thought, which sounds so clearly throughout all
+his later works.  It is the true beginning of his career.
+
+On his return to the United States in November, he resumed his newspaper
+work, this time at the National Capital.  On his arrival there he found
+a letter from Elisha Bliss, of the 'American Publishing Company',
+proposing a volume recounting the adventures of the “Excursion,” to be
+elaborately illustrated, and sold by subscription on a five per cent.
+royalty.  He eagerly accepted the offer and set to work on his notes.
+
+“I knew Mark Twain in Washington,” says Senator William M. Stewart of
+Nevada, in his reminiscences 'A Senator of the Sixties', “at a time when
+he was without money.  He told me his condition, and said he was very
+anxious to get out his book.  He showed me his notes, and I saw that
+they would make a great book, and probably bring him in a fortune.  I
+promised that I would 'stake' him until he had the book written.  I made
+him a clerk to my committee in the senate, which paid him six dollars
+per day; then I hired a man for one hundred dollars per month to do the
+work!”  His mischievously extravagant description of Mark Twain at this
+time is eminently worthy of record: “He was arrayed in a seedy suit which
+hung upon his lean frame in bunches, with no style worth mentioning.  A
+sheaf of scraggly, black hair leaked out of a battered, old, slouch hat,
+like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar
+butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth.  He
+had a very sinister appearance.  He was a man I had known around the
+Nevada mining camps several years before, and his name was Samuel L.
+Clemens.”
+
+It was during this winter that Mark wrote a number of humorous articles
+and sketches--'The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract', the
+account of his resignation as clerk of the Senate Committee on
+Conchology, and 'Riley--Newspaper Correspondent'.  His time was chiefly
+devoted to preparing the material for his book; but finding Washington
+too distracting, he returned to San Francisco and completed the
+manuscript therein July, 1868.  For a year the publication of the book
+was delayed, as recorded in the Autobiography; but it finally appeared
+in print following Mark's indignant telegram to Bliss that, if the book
+was not on sale in twenty-four hours, he would bring suit for damages.
+Mark Twain records that in nine months the book had taken the publishing
+house out of debt, advanced its stock from twenty-five to two hundred,
+and left seventy thousand dollars clear profit.  Eighty-five thousand
+copies were sold within sixteen months, the largest sale of a four
+dollar book ever achieved in America in so short a time up to that date.
+It is, miraculous to relate, still the leader in its own special field
+--a “bestseller” for forty years!
+
+The proprietors of the 'Alta California' were exceeding wroth when they
+heard that Clemens was preparing for publication the very letters which
+they had commissioned him to write and had printed in their own paper.
+They prepared to publish a cheap paper-covered edition of the letters,
+and sent the American Publishing Co. a challenge in the shape of an
+advance notice of their publication.  Clemens hurried back to San
+Francisco from the East, and soon convinced the proprietors of the 'Alta
+California' of the authenticity of his copyright.  The paper-covered
+edition was then and there abandoned forever.
+
+Before leaving the West to settle permanently in the East, Mark Twain
+was associated for a short time with the 'Overland Monthly', edited by
+Bret Harte.  In his review of 'The Innocents Abroad', Harte asserted
+that Clemens deserved “to rank foremost among Western humorists”; but he
+was grievously disappointed in the first few contributions from Clemens
+to the Overland Monthly--notably 'By Rail through France' (later
+incorporated in The Innocents Abroad)--because of their perfect gravity.
+At last, 'A Mediaeval Romance'--a story which has been said to contain
+the germ of 'A Connecticut Yankee', because of its burlesque of
+mediaevalism--won the enthusiastic approval of Bret Harte.
+
+From this time forward, Samuel L. Clemens is seen in a new environment,
+in association with new ideas and a new civilization.  The history of
+this second period does not fall within the scope of the present work.
+It has just been narrated with brilliancy and charm by his close
+associate and most intimate friend, Mr. William Dean Howells, in his
+admirable book 'My Mark Twain'.  In the subsequent portion of the
+present work attention will be directed solely to those features of Mark
+Twain's life which have a direct bearing upon his career as a man of
+letters, and which throw into relief the progressive development of his
+genius.
+
+The South and the West contributed to Mark Twain's development, and
+added to his store of vital experience, in greater measure than all the
+other influences of his life combined.  From the inexhaustible well of
+those experiences he drew ever fresh contributions for the satisfaction
+of the world.  His mind was stocked with the rich, crude ore of early
+experience--the romance and the reality of a life full of prismatic
+variations of colour.  The civilization of the East, its culture and
+refinement, tempered the genius of Mark Twain in conformity with the
+indispensable criteria of classic art.  Under the broadening influence
+of its persistent nationalism, he became more deeply, more profoundly,
+imbued with the comprehensive ideals of American democracy.  He never
+lost the first fine virginal spontaneity of his native style, never
+weakened in the vigour of his thought or in the primitiveness of his
+expression.  His contact with the East compassed the liberation of that
+vast fund of stored--up early experiences, acquired through grappling
+with life in many a rude encounter.
+
+Out of its own life, the East never contributed to Mark Twain's works,
+in any appreciably momentous way, either volume or immensity of fertile,
+suggestive human experience.  If we eliminate from the list of Mark
+Twain's works those books which have their roots deep set in the soil of
+South and West, we eliminate the most priceless assets of his art.
+Indeed, it may be doubted whether, were those works struck from the
+catalogue of his contributions, Mark Twain could justly rank as a great
+genius.  To his association with the South and the Southwest are due
+'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', and 'Life on the
+Mississippi'.  'The Jumping Frog' and 'Roughing It' belong peculiarly to
+the West, and even 'The Innocents Abroad' falls wholly within the period
+of Mark Twain's influence by the West, its standards, outlook, and
+localized viewpoint.
+
+Colonel Mulberry Sellers is a veritably human type, the embodiment,
+laughably lovable, of a temperamental phase of American character in the
+course of the national development.  But 'The Gilded Age' has long since
+disappeared from that small but tremendously significant group of works
+which are tentatively destined to rank as classics.  Much as I enjoy the
+satiric comedy of 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court', I have always felt
+that it set before Europe an American type which is neither elevating
+nor inspiring--nor national.  It tends to the gratification of England
+and Europe, even in the face of its democratic demolition of feudalistic
+survival, by sealing a certain cheap type of vulgarity with the national
+stamp.  One must, nevertheless, confess with regret that this type is
+the embodiment of an “ideal” still only too commonly cherished in
+America.  The national type, I take it, is found in such characters as
+Lincoln and Phillips Brooks, in Lee and Henry W. Grady, in Charles W.
+Eliot and Edwin A. Alderman, and not in a provincial 'Connecticut
+Yankee', jovial and whole--hearted though he be.  I say this without
+forgetting or minimizing for a moment the art displayed in effecting the
+devastating and illimitably humorous contrast of a present with a
+remotely past civilization.  'Joan of Arc' has no local association,
+being a pure work of the heart, the chivalric impulse of a noble spirit.
+'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', viewed from any standpoint, is a
+masterpiece; but its significance lies, not in the locality of its
+setting, but in the universality of its moral.
+
+In a word, it was the East which broadened and universalized the spirit
+of Mark Twain.  We shall see, later on, that it steadily fostered in him
+a spirit of true nationalism and hardy democracy.  But it was the South
+and the West which lavishly gave him of their most priceless riches, and
+thereby created in Mark Twain an unique and incomparable genius, the
+veritable type and embodiment of their inalienably individual life and
+civilization.  This first phase of the life of Mark Twain has been so
+strongly stressed here, because the first half of his life has always
+seemed to me to have been a period of--shall I say?--God-appointed
+preparation for the most significant and lastingly permanent work of the
+latter half, namely, the narration of the incidents of early experience,
+and the imaginative reminting of the gold of that experience.
+
+One has only to read Mark Twain's works to learn the real history of his
+life.  There were momentous episodes in the latter half of his career;
+but they were concerned with his life rather than with his art.  We
+cannot, indeed, say what or how profound is the effect of life and
+experience on art.  There was the happy marriage, the tragic losses of
+wife and children.  There were the associations with the culture and
+art circles of America and Europe--New England, New York, Berlin,
+Vienna, London, Glasgow; the academic degrees--Missouri, Yale; finally
+ancient Oxford for the first time conferring the coveted honour of its
+degree upon a humorist; the honours his own country delighted to bestow
+upon him.  And there too was that gallant struggle to pay off a
+tremendous debt, begun at sixty--and accomplished one year sooner than
+he expected--after the most spectacular and remarkable lecture tour in
+history.  The beautiful chivalric spirit of this great soul shone
+brightest in disaster.  He insisted that it was his wife who refused to
+compromise his debts for forty cents on the dollar--that it was she who
+declared it must be dollar for dollar; and when a fund was raised by his
+admirers to assist in lightening his burden, that it was his wife who
+refused to accept it, though he was willing enough to accept it as a
+welcome relief.
+
+As an American, I can say nothing more significantly characteristic of
+the man than that he was a good citizen.  He possessed in rich measure
+the consciousness of personal responsibility for the standards,
+government, and ideals of his town, his city, and his country.  Civic
+conscientiousness burned strong within him; and he fought to develop and
+to maintain breadth of public view and sanity of popular ideals.  Blind
+patriotism was impossible for this great American: he exposed the
+shallowness of popular enthusiasms and the narrowness of rampant
+spread-eagleism, without regard for consequence to himself or his
+popularity. What a tribute to his personality that, instead of suffering,
+he gained in popularity by his honest and downright outspokenness!  He
+wielded the lash of his bitter scorn and fearful irony upon the
+wrong-doer, the hypocrite, the fraud; and aroused public opinion to
+impatience with public abuse, open offence, and official discourtesy.
+
+Samuel Langhorne Clemens impressed me as the most complete and human
+individual I have ever known.  He was not a great thinker; his views
+were not “advanced”.
+
+The glory of his temperament was its splendid sanity, balance, and
+normality.  The homeliest virtues of life were his: republican virtue
+of simplicity; the domestic virtue of, personal purity and passionately
+simple regard for the sanctity of the marriage bond; the civic virtue of
+public honesty; the business virtue of stainless private honour.  Mark
+Twain was one of the supreme literary geniuses of his time.  But he was
+something even more than this.  He was not simply a great genius: he was
+a great man.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+          “Exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow; a joke
+          can be so big that it breaks the roof of the stars.
+          By simply going on being absurd, a thing can become
+          godlike; there is but one step from the ridiculous
+          to the sublime.”
+                       GILBERT K.  CHESTERTON: Charles Dickens.
+
+
+
+                               THE HUMORIST
+
+Not without wide significance in its bearing upon the general outlines
+of contemporary literature is the circumstance that Mark Twain served
+his apprenticeship to letters in the high school of journalism.  Like
+his contemporaries, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free
+play for his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal
+for the masses.  Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective
+only when he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece
+of his own invention.  Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native
+flavour of his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more
+sophisticated refinements of the purely literary.  Mark Twain never lost
+the ruddy glow of his first inspiration, and his style, to the very end,
+remained as it began--journalistic, untamed, primitive.
+
+Both Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw, who like Mark Twain have achieved
+comprehensive international reputations, have succeeded in preserving
+the early vigour and telling directness acquired in journalistic
+apprenticeship.  It was by the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his
+journalese that Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start.  That
+trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened
+verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the
+new journalism.  “The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which
+are 'not for an age, but for all time,'” says Bernard Shaw, “has his
+reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes
+trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare
+peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire
+hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a
+Norwegian parish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as
+if she were a lady living in the next street to him, are still alive and
+at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of
+academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and
+art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar
+obsession with the ephemeral.”  Mark Twain began his career by studying
+the people and period he knew in relation to his own life.  Jamestown,
+Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic,
+uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life
+and live again in the pages of his books.  Colonel Sellers, in the main
+correct but “stretched a little” here and there; Tom Sawyer, the
+“magerful” hero of boyhood; the shrewd and kindly Aunt Polly, drawn from
+his own mother; Huck Finn, with the tender conscience and the gentle
+heart--these and many another were drawn from the very life.  In writing
+of his time _a propos_ of himself, Mark Twain succeeded in telling the
+truth about humanity in general and for any time.
+
+In the main--though there are noteworthy exceptions--Mark Twain's works
+originated fundamentally in the facts of his own life.  He is a master
+humorist--which is only another way of saying that he is a master
+psychologist with the added gift of humour--because he looked upon
+himself always as a complete and well-rounded repository of universally
+human characteristics. _Humanus sum; et nil humanum mihi alienum est_
+--this might well have served for his motto.  It was his conviction that
+the American possessed no unique and peculiar human characteristics
+differentiating him from the rest of the world.  In the same way, he
+regarded himself as possessing no unique or peculiar human
+characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the human race.
+Like Omar he might have said “I myself am Heaven and Hell”----for within
+himself he recognized, in some form, at higher or lower power, every
+feature, trait, instinct, characteristic of which a human being is
+capable.  The last half century of his life, as he himself said in his
+Autobiography, had been constantly and faithfully devoted to the study
+of the human race.  His knowledge came from minute self-examination--for
+he regarded himself as the entire human race compacted together.  It was
+by concentrating his attention upon himself, by recognizing in himself
+the quintessential type of the race, that he succeeded in producing
+works of such pure naturalness and utter verity.  A humour which is at
+bottom good humour is always contagious; but there is a deeper and more
+universal appeal which springs from genial and unaffected representation
+of the human species, of the universal 'Genus Homo'.
+
+It has been said, by foreign critics, that the intellectual life of
+America in general takes its cue from the day, whilst the intellectual
+life of Europe derives from history.  If American literature be really
+“Journalism under exceptionally favourable conditions,” as defined by
+the Danish critic, Johannes V. Jensen, then must Mark Twain be a typical
+product of American literature.  A certain modicum of truth may rest in
+this startling and seemingly uncomplimentary definition.  Interpreted
+liberally, it may be taken to mean that America finds her key to the
+future in the immediate vital present, rather than in a remote and hazy
+past.  Mark Twain was a great creative genius because he saw himself,
+and so saw human nature, in the strong, searching light of the living
+present.  He is the greatest genius evolved by natural selection out of
+the ranks of American journalism.  Crude, rudimentary and boisterous as
+his early writing was, at times provincial and coarse, it bore upon its
+face the fresh stamp of contemporary actuality.
+
+To the American of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be
+placidly assured by our British critics that America is sublimely
+unconscious that her childhood is gone.  And this gay paradox is less
+arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour
+because she is lacking in self-knowledge.  There is a certain grimly
+comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British
+critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, which they
+would have us believe is a sort of premature senescence and decay.  The
+New World is pitied for her failure to know without illusion the
+futility of the hurried pursuit of wealth, of the passion for
+extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of all the hostages youth
+in America eternally gives to old age.  “America has produced great
+artists,” admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton.  Yet he maintains that “that
+fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility and the
+end of all things.  Whatever the American men of genius are, they are
+not young gods making a young world.  Is the art of Whistler a brave,
+barbaric art, happy and headlong?  Does Mr. Henry James infect us with
+the spirit of a schoolboy?  .  .  .  Out of America has come a sweet and
+startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.”  This sweet
+and startling cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr.
+Chesterton has chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two
+American geniuses who have lived outside their own country, absorbed the
+art ideals of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost
+touch with the youthful spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the
+ongoing rush and progress of America.  It is worthy of remark that Mr.
+James has always maintained that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only
+very primitive persons; and Whistler, with his acid _diablerie_, was
+wholly alien in spirit to the boisterous humour of Mark Twain.  That
+other brilliant but incoherent interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles
+Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America's pathetic
+senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case
+in the vehement assertion that America's greatest national interpreter
+is--Mark Twain!
+
+To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the
+humorist--with his shrieking Philistinism, his dominant sense for the
+colossally incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering,
+ludicrous contrast.  To the reflective, Mark Twain subsumed within
+himself a “certain surcharge and overplus of power, a buoyancy, and a
+sense of conquest” which typified the youth of America.  It is memorable
+that he breathed in his youth the bracing air of the prairie, shared the
+collective ardour of the Argonauts, felt the rising thrill of Western
+adventure, and expressed the crude and manly energy of navigation,
+exploration, and the daring hazard for new fortune.  To those who knew
+him in personal intimacy, the quality that was outstanding, omnipresent
+and eternally ineradicable from his nature was--paradoxical as it may
+sound--not humour, not wit, not irony, not a thousand other terms that
+might be associated with his name, but--the spirit of eternal youth.  It
+is comprehensively significant and conclusive that, to the day of her
+death, Mrs. Clemens never called her husband anything but the bright
+nickname--“Youth.”  Mark Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller
+of tales, pungent as stylist.  But he has achieved another sort of
+eminence that is peculiarly gratifying to Americans.  “They distinguish
+in his writings,” says an acute French critic, “exalted and sublimated
+by his genius, their national qualities of youth and of gaiety, of force
+and of faith; they love his philosophy, at once practical and high
+--minded.  They are fond of his simple style, animated with verve and
+spice, thanks to which his work is accessible to every class of readers.
+They think he describes his contemporaries with such an art of
+distinguishing their essential traits, that he manages to evoke, to
+create even, characters and types of eternal verity.  They profess for
+Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration that we have in France
+for Balzac.”
+
+Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that humour is a subject which
+has never had much interest for him, it is nothing more than a
+commonplace to say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist only,
+that the world seems to persist in regarding him.  The philosophy of his
+early life was what George Meredith has aptly termed the “philosophy of
+the Broad Grin.”  Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once said that “American
+humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the French, nor sharp and
+sensible and full of the realities of life like the Scotch, is simply
+the humour of imagination.  It consists in piling towers on towers and
+mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending
+it to the end of the world.”  This partial and somewhat conventional
+foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the
+cumulative and “sky-breaking” humour of the early Mark Twain.  Then no
+exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm too unreal, no climax
+too extreme.
+
+The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a
+lawless, untrammelled life.  Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but
+one remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of
+argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature.
+In the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic
+and sanguinary.  The refinements of art and civilization seemed
+effeminate, artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously
+at one another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of each other's
+plans, and gloried in their defiance of both man and God.  Deep in their
+hearts they cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and
+the afflicted, and generosity indescribable.  And yet they prided
+themselves upon their barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning
+bred of their wild life and sharpened in the struggle for existence.
+What, after all, is 'The Jumping Frog' but the elaborate narrative, in
+native vernacular, of a shrewd practical joke?  As Mark Twain first
+heard it, this story was a solemn recital of an interesting incident in
+the life of Angel's Camp.  It was Mark Twain who “created” the story: he
+endowed with the comic note of whimsicality that imaginative realization
+of _une chose vue_, which went round the world.  The humour of rustic
+shrewdness in criticism of art, so elaborately exploited in 'The
+Innocents Abroad', was displayed, perhaps invented, by Mark Twain in the
+early journalistic days in San Francisco.  In 'The Golden Era' an
+excellent example is found in the following observations upon a
+celebrated painting of Samson and Delilah, then on exhibition in San
+Francisco:
+
+“Now what is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at
+the Bank Exchange?  Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or
+the muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it
+the rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot?  No,
+sir.  The first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her feet.
+Them scissors is too modern; thar warn't no scissors like them in them
+days--by a d---d sight.”
+
+That was a brilliant and audacious conception, having the just
+proportion of sanguinary humour, embodied in Mark Twain's offer, during
+his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, to show his audience how the
+cannibals consume their food--if only some lady would lend him a live
+baby.  There is the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious
+anecdote of Higgins.
+
+Higgins was a simple creature, who used to haul rock; and on the day
+Judge Bagley fell down the court-house steps and broke his neck, Higgins
+was commissioned to carry the body in his wagon to the house of Mrs.
+Bagley and break the news to her as gently as possible.  When he
+arrived, he shouted until Mrs. Bagley came to the door, and then
+tactfully inquired if the Widder Bagley lived there!  When she
+indignantly replied in the negative, he gently humoured her whim; and
+inquired next if Judge Bagley lived there.  When she replied that he
+did, Higgins offered to bet that he didn't; and delicately inquired if
+the Judge were in.  On being assured that he was not in at present,
+Higgins triumphantly exclaimed that he expected as much.  Because he had
+the old Judge curled up out there in the wagon; and when Mrs. Bagley saw
+him, she would doubtless admit that about all that could comfort the
+Judge now would be an inquest!
+
+Mark Twain was so fond of this bloody and ghastly humour that, on one
+occasion, he utterly overreached himself and suffered serious
+consequences.  In the words of his fellow-journalist, Dan De Quille:
+
+     Mark Twain was fond of manufacturing items of the horrible style,
+     but on one occasion he overdid this business, and the disease
+     worked its own cure.  He wrote an account of a terrible murder,
+     supposed to have occurred at “Dutch Nick's,” a station on the
+     Carson River, where Empire City now stands.  He made a man cut his
+     wife's throat and those of his nine children, after which
+     diabolical deed the murderer mounted his horse, cut his own throat
+     from ear to ear, rode to Carson City (a distance of three and a
+     half miles) and fell dead in front of Peter Hopkins' saloon.
+
+     All the California papers copied the item, and several made
+     editorial comment upon it as being the most shocking occurrence of
+     the kind ever known on the Pacific Coast.  Of course rival Virginia
+     City papers at once denounced the item as a “cruel and idiotic
+     hoax.”  They showed how the publication of such “shocking and
+     reckless falsehoods” disgraced and injured the State, and they made
+     it as “sultry” as possible for the 'Enterprise' and its “fool
+     reporter.”
+
+     When the California papers saw all this and found they had been
+     sold, there was a howl from Siskiyou to San Diego.  Some papers
+     demanded the immediate discharge of the author of the item by the
+     'Enterprise' proprietors.  They said they would never quote another
+     line from that paper while the reporter who wrote the shocking item
+     remained on its force.  All this worried Mark as I had never before
+     seen him worried.  Said he: “I am being burned alive on both sides
+     of the mountains.”  We roomed together, and one night, when the
+     persecution was hottest, he was so distressed that he could not
+     sleep.  He tossed, tumbled, and groaned aloud.  So I set to work to
+     comfort him.  “Mark,” said I, “never mind this bit of a gale, it
+     will soon blow itself out.  This item of yours will be remembered
+     and talked about when all your other work is forgotten.  The murder
+     at Dutch Nick's will be quoted years from now as the big sell of
+     these times.”
+
+     Said Mark: “I believe you are right; I remember I once did a thing
+     at home in Missouri, was caught at it, and worried almost to death.
+     I was a mere lad, and was going to school in a little town where I
+     had an uncle living.  I at once left the town and did not return to
+     it for three years.  When I finally came back I found I was only
+     remembered as 'the boy that played the trick on the schoolmaster.'”
+
+     Mark then told me the story, began to laugh over it, and from that
+     moment “ceased to groan.”  He was not discharged, and in less than
+     a month people everywhere were laughing and joking about the
+     “murder at Dutch Nick's.”
+
+Out of that full, free Western life, with its tremendous hazards of
+fortune, its extravagant alternations from fabulous wealth to wretched
+poverty, its tremendous exaggerations and incredible contrasts, was
+evolved a humour as rugged, as mountainous, and as altitudinous as the
+conditions which gave it birth.  Mark Twain may be said to have created,
+and made himself master of, this new and fantastic humour which, in its
+exaggeration and elaboration, was without a parallel in the history of
+humorous narration.  At times it seemed little more than a sort of
+infectious and hilarious nonsense; but in reality it had behind it all
+the calculation of detail and elaboration.  There was something in it
+of the volcanic, as if at the bursting forth of some pentup force of
+primitive nature.  It consisted in piling Pelion on Ossa, until the
+structure toppled over of its own weight and fell with a stentorian
+crash of laughter which echoed among the stars.  Whenever Mark Twain
+conceived a humorous idea, he seemed capable of extracting from it
+infinite complications of successive and cumulative comedy.  This humour
+seemed like the mental functionings of some mad, yet inevitably logical
+jester; it grew from more to more, from extravagance to extravagance,
+until reason itself tired and gave over.  Such explosive stories as 'How
+I Edited an Agricultural Paper', 'A Genuine Mexican Plug', the
+deciphering of the Horace Greeley correspondence, 'The Facts in the Case
+of the Great Beef Contract', and many another, as Mr. Chesterton has
+pointed out, have one tremendous essential of great art.  “The
+excitement mounts up perpetually; they grow more and more comic, as a
+tragedy should grow more and more tragic.  The rack, tragic or comic,
+goes round until something breaks inside a man.  In tragedy it is his
+heart, or perhaps his stiff neck.  In farce I do not quite know what it
+is--perhaps his funny-bone is dislocated; perhaps his skull is slightly
+cracked.”  Mark Twain's mountainous humour, of this early type, never
+contains the element of final surprise, of the sudden, the unexpected,
+the _imprevu_.  We know what is coming, we surrender ourselves more and
+more to the mood of the narrator, holding ourselves in reserve until
+laughter, no longer to be restrained, bursts forth in a torrent of
+undignified and explosive mirth.  Perhaps no better example can be given
+than the description of the sad fate of the camel in 'A Tramp Abroad'.
+
+In Syria, at the head-waters of the Jordan, this camel had got hold of
+his overcoat; and after he finished contemplating it as an article of
+apparel, he began to inspect it as an article of diet.  In his
+inimitable manner, Mark describes the almost religious ecstasy of that
+camel as it devoured his overcoat piecemeal--first one sleeve, then the
+other, velvet collar, and finally the tails.  All went well until the
+camel struck a batch of manuscript--containing some of Mark's humorous
+letters for the home papers.  Their solid wisdom soon began to lie heavy
+on the camel's stomach: the jokes shook him until he began to gag and
+gasp, and finally he struck statements that not even a camel could
+swallow with impunity.  He died in horrible agony; and Mark found on
+examination that the camel had choked to death on one of the mildest
+statements of fact that he had ever offered to a trusting public!  Here
+Mark gradually works up to an anticipated climax by piling on effect
+after effect.  Our risibility is excited almost as much by the
+anticipation of the climax as by the recital.
+
+Admirable instances of the ludicrous incident, of the nonsensical
+recital, are found in the scene in 'Huckleberry Finn' dealing with the
+performance of the King's Cameleopard or Royal Nonesuch, the address on
+the occasion of the dinner in honour of the seventieth anniversary of
+John Greenleaf Whittier (an historic failure), and the Turkish bath in
+'The Innocents Abroad'.
+
+In this prison filled with hot air, an attendant sat him down by a tank
+of hot water and began to polish him all over with a coarse mitten.
+Soon Mark noticed a disagreeable smell, and realized that the more he
+was polished the worse he smelt.  He urged the attendant to bury him
+without unnecessary delay, as it was obvious that he couldn't possibly
+“keep” long in such warm weather.  But the phlegmatic attendant paid no
+attention to Mark's commands and continued to scrub with renewed vigour.
+Mark's consternation changed to alarm when he discovered that little
+cylinders, like macaroni, began to roll from under the mitten.  They
+were too white to be dirt.  He felt that he was gradually being pared
+down to a convenient size.  Realizing that it would take hours for the
+attendant to trim him down to the proper size, Mark indignantly ordered
+him to bring a jackplane at once and get the matter over.  To all his
+protests the attendant paid no attention at all.
+
+In one of the earliest critical articles about Mark Twain, which
+appeared in 'Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science and Art' for July
+4,1874, Mr. G. T. Ferris gives an excellent appreciation of his humour.
+“Of humour in its highest phase,” he says, “perhaps Bret Harte may be
+accounted the most puissant master among our contemporary American
+writers.  Of wit, we see next to none.  Mark Twain, while lacking the
+subtilty and pathos of the other, has more breadth, variety, and ease.
+His sketches of life are arabesque in their strange combinations.  Bits
+of bright, serious description, both of landscape and society, carry us
+along till suddenly we stumble on some master-stroke of grotesque and
+irresistible fun.  He understands the value of repose in art.  One tires
+of a page where every sentence sparkles with points, and the author is
+constantly attitudinizing for our amusement.  We like to be betrayed
+into laughter as much in books as in real life.  It is the unconscious,
+easy, careless gait of Mark Twain that makes his most potent charm.  He
+seems always to be catering as much to his own enjoyment as to that of
+the public.  He strolls along like a great rollicking schoolboy, bent on
+having a good time, and determined that his readers shall have it with
+him.”
+
+Mark Twain is the most daring of humorists.  He takes his courage in his
+hands for the wildest flights of fancy.  His humour is the caricature of
+situations, rather than of individuals; and he is not afraid to risk his
+characters in colossally ludicrous situations.  His art reveals itself
+in choosing ludicrous situations which contain such a strong colouring
+of naturalness that one's sense of reality is not outraged, but
+titillated.  Hence it is that his humour, in its earlier form, does not
+lend itself readily to quotation.  His early humour is not epigrammatic,
+but cumulative and extensive.  Each scene is a unit and must appear as
+such.  Andrew Lang not inaptly catches the note of Mark Twain's earlier
+manner, when he speaks of his “almost Mephistophelean coolness, an
+unwearying search after the comic sides of serious subjects, after the
+mean possibilities of the sublime--these with a native sense of
+incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration.”
+
+Mark Twain began his career as a wag; he rejoiced in being a fun-maker.
+He discarded the weird spellings and crude punning of his American
+forerunners; his object was not play upon words, but play upon ideas.
+He offered his public, as Frank R. Stockton pointed out, the pure ore of
+fun.  “If he puts his private mark on it, it will pass current; it does
+not require the mint stamp of the schools of humour.  He is never
+afraid of being laughed at.”  Indeed, that is a large part of his
+stock-in-trade; for throughout his entire career, nothing seemed to give
+him so much pleasure--though it is one of the lowest forms of humour--as
+making fun of himself.  In describing two monkeys that got into his room
+at Delhi, he said that when he awoke, one of them was before the glass
+brushing his hair, and the other one had his notebook, and was reading a
+page of humorous notes and crying.  He didn't mind the one with the
+hair-brush; but the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart.  He
+never forgave that monkey.  His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of
+Adam--only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric
+indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who “never bored,
+but he struck water”--is an admirable example of the mechanical fooling
+of self-ridicule.
+
+In his penetrating study, 'Mark Twain a Century Hence', published at the
+time of Mr. Clemens' death, Professor H. T. Peck makes this observation:
+“We must judge Mark Twain as a humorist by the very best of all he wrote
+rather than by the more dubious productions, in which we fail to see at
+every moment the winning qualities and the characteristic form of this
+very interesting American.  As one would not judge of Tennyson by his
+dramas, nor Thackeray by his journalistic chit-chat, nor Sir Walter
+Scott by those romances which he wrote after his fecundity had been
+exhausted, so we must not judge Mark Twain by the dozen or more
+specimens which belong to the later period, when he was ill at ease and
+growing old.  Let us rather go back with a sort of joy to what he wrote
+when he did so with spontaneity, when his fun was as natural to him as
+breathing, and when his humour was all American humour--not like that of
+Juvenal or Hierocles--acrid, or devoid of anything individual--but
+brimming over with exactly the same rich irresponsibility which belonged
+to Steele and Lamb and Irving.  It may seem odd to group a son of the
+New World and of the great West with those earlier classic figures who
+have been mentioned here; yet upon analysis it will be discovered that
+the humour of Mark Twain is at least first cousin to that which produced
+Sir Roger de Coverley and Rip Van Winkle and The Stout Gentleman.”
+
+The details of the Gambetta-Fourtou duel, in which Mark played a
+somewhat frightened second, have furnished untold amusement to
+thousands.  And his description of the inadvertent _faux pas_ he
+committed at his first public lecture is humorous for any age and
+society.  The sign announcing the lecture read--“Doors open at 7.  The
+Trouble will begin at 8.”  For three days, Mark had been in a state of
+frightful suspense.  Once his lecture had seemed humorous; but as the
+day approached, it seemed to him to be but the dreariest of fooling,
+without a vestige of real fun.  He was so panic-stricken that he
+persuaded three of his friends, who were giants in stature, genial and
+stormy voiced, to act as claquers and pound loudly at the faintest
+suspicion of a joke.  He bribed Sawyer, a half-drunk man, who had a
+laugh hung on a hair-trigger, to get off, naturally and easily during
+the course of the evening, as many laughs as he could.  He begged a
+popular citizen and his wife to take a conspicuous seat in a box, so
+that everybody could see them.  He explained that when he needed help,
+he would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, that he had given birth
+to an obscure joke.  Then, if ever, was her time--not to investigate,
+but to respond!
+
+The fateful night found him in the depths of dejection.  But heartened
+up by a crowded house, full even to the aisles, he bravely set in and
+proceeded to capture the house.  His claquers hammered madly whenever
+the very feeblest joke showed its head.  Sawyer supported their
+herculean efforts with bursts of stentorian laughter.  As Mark
+explained, not without a touch of pride, inferior jokes never fared so
+royally before.  But his hour of humiliation was at hand.  On delivering
+a bit of serious matter with impressive unction, to which the audience
+listened with rapt interest, he glanced involuntarily, as if for her
+approval, at his friend in the box.  He remembered the compact, but it
+was too late--he smiled in spite of himself.  Forth came her ringing
+laugh, peal after peal, which touched off the whole audience: the
+explosion was immense!  Sawyer choked with laughter, and the bludgeons
+performed like pile-drivers.  The little morsel of pathos was ruined;
+but what matter, so long as the audience took it as an intentional joke,
+and applauded it with unparalleled enthusiasm.  Mark wisely let it go at
+that!
+
+Reading through 'The Innocents Abroad' after many years, I find that it
+has not lost its power to provoke the most side-splitting laughter; and
+the same may be said of 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'Following the Equator',
+which, whilst not so boisterously comical, exhibit greater mastery and
+restraint.  His own luck, as Mark Twain observed on one occasion, had
+been curious all his literary life.  He never could tell a lie that
+anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.  Could
+there be a more accurate or more concise definition of the effect of his
+writings, in especial of his travel notes?  Like his mother, he too
+never used large words, but he had a natural gift for making small ones
+do effective work.  How delightfully human is his comment on the
+vagaries of woman's shopping!  Human nature he found very much the same
+all over the world; and he felt that it was so much like his dear native
+home to see a Venetian lady go into a store, buy ten cents' worth of
+blue ribbon, and then have it sent home in a scow.  It was such little
+touches of nature as this which, as he said, moved him to tears in those
+far-off lands.  In speaking of Palestine, he says that its holy places
+are not as deliriously beautiful as the books paint them.  Indeed, he
+asserts that if one be calm and resolute, he can look on their beauty
+and live!  He bequeathed his rheumatism to Baden-Baden.  It was little,
+but it was all he had to give.  His only regret was that he could not
+leave something more catching.
+
+There is nothing better in all of 'The Innocents Abroad' than his
+analysis of the theological hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.
+Disclaiming all intention to be frivolous, irreverent or blasphemous, he
+solemnly declared that his observations had taught him the real way the
+Holy Personages were ranked in Rome.  “The Mother of God,” otherwise the
+Virgin Mary, comes first, followed in order by the Deity, Peter, and
+some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and Martyrs.  Last of all came
+Jesus Christ the Saviour--but even then, always as an infant in arms!
+
+Who can ever forget the Mark Twain who kissed the Hawaiian stranger for
+his mother's sake, the while robbing him of his small change; who was so
+struck by the fine points of his Honolulan horse that he hung his hat on
+one of them; who rode glaciers as gaily as he rode Mexican plugs, and
+found diverting programmes of the Roman Coliseum, in the dust and
+rubbish of two thousand years ago!
+
+Samuel L. Clemens achieved instantaneous and world-wide popularity at a
+single bound by the creation of a fantastic and delightfully naive
+character known as “Mark Twain.”  At a somewhat later day, Bernard Shaw
+achieved world-wide fame by the creation of a legendary and fantastic
+wit known as “G. B. S.”  To the composition of “Mark Twain” went all the
+wild humour of ignorance--the boisterously comic admixture of the
+sanguinary and the stoical.  The humour of 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The
+Innocents Abroad' is the savage and naive humour of the mining camp, not
+the sophisticated humour of civilization.  It is significant that Mme.
+Blanc, a polished and refined intelligence, found the _nil admirari_
+attitude of “Mark Twain” no more enlightening nor suggestive than the
+stoicism of the North American Indian.  This mirthful and mock-innocent
+naivete, so alien to the delicate and subtle spirit of the French, found
+instant response in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples.
+The English and the Germans, no less than the Americans, rejoiced in
+this gay fellow with his combination of appealing ignorance and but
+half-concealed shrewdness.  They laughed at this unsophisticated _naif_,
+gazing in wide-eyed wonderment at all he saw; and they delighted in the
+consciousness that, behind this thin mask, lay an acute and searching
+intelligence revelling in the humorous havoc wrought by his keen
+perception of the contrasts and incongruities of life.  The note of this
+early humour is perfectly caught in the incident of the Egyptian mummy.
+Deliberately assumed ignorance of the grossest sort, by Mark Twain and
+his companions, had the most devastating effect upon the foreign guide
+--one of that countless tribe to all of whom Mark applied the generic name
+of Ferguson.  After driving Ferguson nearly mad with pretended
+ignorance, they finally asked him if the mummy was dead.  When Ferguson
+glibly replied that he had been dead three thousand years, he was
+dumbfounded at the fury of the “doctor” for being imposed upon with vile
+second-hand carcases.  The poor Frenchman was warned that if he didn't
+bring out a nice, fresh corpse at once, they would brain him!  No wonder
+that, later, when he was asked for a description of the party, Ferguson
+laconically remarked that they were lunatics!
+
+In speaking of contemporary society, Ibsen once remarked: “We have made
+a fiasco both in the heroic and the lover roles.  The only parts in
+which we have shown a little talent, are the naively comic; but with our
+more highly developed self-consciousness we shall no longer be fitted
+even for that.”  With time and “our more highly developed self
+--consciousness” have largely passed the novelty and the charm of this
+early naively comic humour of Mark Twain.  But it is as valid still, as
+it was in 1867, to record honestly the impressions directly communicated
+to one by the novelties, peculiarities, individual standards and ideals
+of other peoples and races.  Mark Twain spoke his mind with utter
+disregard for other people's opinions, the dicta of criticism or the
+authoritative judgment of the schools.  'The Innocents Abroad' is
+eminently readable, not alone for its humour, its clever journalism, its
+remarkably accurate and detailed information, and its fine descriptions.
+The rare quality, which made it “sell right along--like the Bible,” is
+that it is the vital record of a keen and searching intelligence.  Mark
+Twain found so many of the “masterpieces of the world” utterly
+unimpressive and meaningless to him, that he actually began to distrust
+the validity of his own impressions.  Every time he gloried to think
+that for once he had discovered an ancient painting that was beautiful
+and worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gave him was an infallible
+proof that it was not a beautiful picture, nor in any sense worthy of
+commendation!  He pours out the torrents of his ridicule, not
+indiscriminately upon the works of the old masters themselves--though he
+regarded Nature as the grandest of all the old masters--but upon those
+half-baked sycophants who bend the knee to an art they do not
+understand, an art of which they feign comprehension by mouthings full
+of cheap and meaningless tags.  As potent and effective as ever, in its
+fine comic irony, is that passage in which he expresses his “envy” of
+those people who pay lavish lip-service to scenes and works of art which
+their expressionless language shows they neither realize nor understand.
+He reserves his most biting condemnation for those second-hand critics
+who accept other people's opinions for their criteria, and rave over
+“beauty,” “soul,” “character,” “expression” and “tone” in wretched,
+dingy, moth-eaten pictures.  He hated with the heartiest detestation
+such people--whose sole ambition seemed to be to make a fine show of
+knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of
+inexpressive technical terms of art criticism.
+
+There is much, I fear, of misguided honesty in Mark Twain's records of
+foreign travel.  To the things which he personally reverenced, he was
+always reverential; and his expression of likes and dislikes, of
+prejudices and predilections, was honest and fearless.  Grant as we may
+the humorist's right to exaggerate and even to distort, for the purposes
+of his fun-making, it does not therefore follow that his judgments,
+however forthright or sincere, are valid, reputable criticisms.  One's
+enjoyment of his fresh and hilarious humour, his persistent fun-making
+is no whit impaired by the recognition that he was lacking in the
+faculty of historic imagination and in the finer artistic sense.  It is,
+in a measure, because of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of
+real knowledge, that he was enabled to evoke the laughter of the
+multitude.  “The Mississippi pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid,”
+ says Mr. S. P. Sherman, “refuses to sink his identity in the object
+contemplated--that, as Corporal Nym would have said, is the humour of
+it.  He is the kind of travelling companion that makes you wonder why
+you went abroad.  He turns the Old World into a laughing stock by
+shearing it of its storied humanity--simply because there is nothing in
+him to respond to the glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was
+Rome--simpler because nothing is holier to him than a joke.  He does not
+throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm; he laughs at art,
+history, and antiquity from the point of view of one who is ignorant of
+them and mightily well satisfied with his ignorance.”  This picture
+reminds us of the foreign critics of 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'A
+Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court': it is too partial and
+restricted.  The whole point of Mark Twain's humour, as exhibited in
+these travel notes, is missed in the statement that “he does not throw
+the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm”--for this might almost be
+taken as the “philosophy” of his books of foreign travel.  And yet Mr.
+Sherman's dictum, in its entirety, quite clearly provokes the question
+whether, as he intimates, the “overwhelming majority” of his
+fellow-citizens also were not mightily pleased with Mark Twain's point of
+view, and whether they did not enjoy themselves hugely in laughing, not
+at him, but with him.
+
+In commenting on the reasons for the broadening and deepening of his
+humour with the passage of time, Mr. Clemens once remarked to me: “I
+succeeded in the long run, where Shillaber, Doesticks, and Billings
+failed, because they never had an ideal higher than that of merely being
+funny.  The first great lesson of my life was the discovery that I had
+to live down my past.  When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier
+writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw
+and heard.  My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people
+laugh.  I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else
+--eager to betray them at the end with some monstrous absurdity or some
+extravagant anti-climax.  One night, after a lecture in the early days,
+Tom Fitch, the 'silver-tongued orator of Nevada,' said to me: 'Clemens,
+your lecture was magnificent.  It was eloquent, moving, sincere.  Never
+in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of
+descriptive narration.  But you committed one unpardonable sin--the
+unpardonable sin.  It is a sin you must never commit again.  You closed
+a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to
+a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax
+which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced.  My dear
+Clemens, whatever you do, never sell your audience.'  And that,”
+ continued Mr. Clemens, “was my first really profitable lesson.”
+
+It was the toning down of his youthful extravagance--Fitch's precept not
+to “sell” his audience, Mrs. Fairbanks' warning not to try their
+endurance of the irreverent too far--that had a markedly salutary effect
+upon Mark Twain's humorous writings.  There can be no doubt that the
+deep and lifelong friendship of Mr. Howells, expressing itself as
+occasion demanded in the friendliest criticism, had a subduing influence
+upon Mark Twain's tendency, as a humorist, to extravagance and headlong
+exaggeration.  In time he left the field of carpet-bag observation--the
+humorous depicting of things seen from the rear of an observation car,
+so to speak--and turned to fiction.  Now at last the long pent-up flood
+of observation upon human character and human characteristics found full
+vent.  'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn' are the romances of eternal
+youth, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.  They are freighted,
+however, with a wealth of pungent and humorous characterization that
+have made of them contemporary classics.  From ethical sophistication
+and moral truantry Mark Twain evolves an inexhaustible supply of humour.
+The revolt of mischievous and Bohemian boyhood against the stern
+limitations of formal Puritanism is, in a sense, a principle that he
+carried with him to the grave.  “There are no more vital passages in his
+fiction,” says Mr. Howells, “than those which embody character as it is
+affected for good as well as for evil by the severity of the local
+Sunday-schooling and church-going.”  Out of the pangs of conscience, the
+ingenious sedatives of sophistry, the numerous variations of the lie, he
+won a wholesome humour that left you thinking, by inversion, upon the
+moral involved.  Knowledge of human nature finds expression in forms
+made permanently effective through the arresting permeation of humour.
+The incident of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashing of the fence is the sort
+of thing over which boy and man alike can chuckle with satisfaction--for
+Tom Sawyer had discovered a great law of human action without knowing
+it, namely, that in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only
+necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.  Huck's reasoning about
+chicken stealing--the exquisitely comic shifting of ground from morality
+to expediency--is a striking example of the best type of Mark Twain's
+humour.  Following his father's example, Huck would occasionally “lift”
+ a chicken that wasn't roosting comfortable; for had his father not told
+him that even if he didn't want the chicken himself, he could always
+find somebody that did want it, and a good deed ain't never forgot?
+Huck confesses that he had never seen his Pap when he didn't want the
+chicken himself!
+
+The germ of Mark Twain's humour, wherever it is found, from 'The
+Innocents Abroad' to 'The Connecticut Yankee' and 'Captain Stormfield's
+Visit to Heaven', is found in the mental reactions resulting from
+stupendous and glaring contrasts.  First it is the Wild Western
+humorist, primitive and untamed, running amuck through the petrified
+formulas and encrusted traditions of Europe.  Then comes the fantastic
+juxtaposition of the shrewd Connecticut Yankee, with his comic
+irreverence and raucous sense of humour, his bourgeois limitations and
+provincial prejudices, to the Court of King Arthur, with its
+mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social narrowness.  How many
+have delighted in the Yankee's inimitable description of his feelings
+toward that classic damsel of the sixth century?  At first he got along
+easily with the girl; but after a while he began to feel for her a sort
+of mysterious and shuddery reverence.  Whenever she began to unwind one
+of those long sentences of hers, and got it well under way, he could
+never suppress the feeling that he was standing in the awful presence of
+the Mother of the German Language!
+
+Mark Twain ransacked the whole world of his own day, all countries,
+savage and civilized, for the display of effective and ludicrous
+contrast; and he opened up an illimitable field for humanizing satire,
+as Mr. Howells has said, in his juxtaposition of sociologic types
+thirteen centuries apart.  Not even heaven was safe from the
+comprehensive survey of his satire; and 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to
+Heaven' is a remarkable document,--a forthright lay sermon,--the
+conventional idea of heaven, the theologic conception of eternity, as
+heedlessly taught from the pulpit, thrown into comic, yet profoundly
+significant, relief against the background of the common-sense of a
+deeply human, thoroughly modern intelligence.
+
+Humour, as Thackeray has defined it, is a combination of wit and love.
+Certain it is that, in the case of Mark Twain, wit was a later
+development of his humour; the love was there all the time.  Mark Twain
+has not been recognized as a wit; for he was primarily a humorist, and
+only secondarily a wit.  But the passion for brief and pungent
+formulation of an idea grew upon him; and Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
+is a mine of homely and memorable aphorism, epigram, injunction.
+
+According to Mark Twain's classification, the comic story is English,
+the witty story French, the humorous story American.  While the other
+two depend upon matter, the humorous story depends for its effect upon
+the manner of telling.  The witty story and the comic story must be
+concise and end with a “point”; but the humorous story may be as
+leisurely as you please and have no particular destination.  Mark Twain
+always maintained that, while anyone could tell effectively a comic or a
+witty story, it required a person skilled in an art of a rare and
+distinctive character to tell a humorous story successfully.  Mark Twain
+was himself the supreme exemplar of the art of telling a humorous story.
+Take this little passage, for example, which convulsed one of his London
+audiences.  He was speaking of a high mountain that he had come across
+in his travels.  “It is so cold that people who have been there find it
+impossible to speak the truth; I know that's a fact (here a pause, a
+blank stare, a shake of the head, a little stroll across the platform, a
+sigh, a puff, a smothered groan), because--I've--(another pause)--been
+--(a longer pause)--there myself.”  Who could equal Mark Twain as a
+humorous narrator, in his recital of the alarums and excursions,
+criminations and recriminations, over the story of somebody else's dog
+he sold to General Miles for three dollars?  He delighted numerous
+audiences with his story of inveighing Mrs. Grover Cleveland at a White
+House reception into writing blindly on the back of a card “He didn't.”
+ When she turned it over she discovered that it bore on the other side,
+in Mrs. Clemens' handwriting, the startling words: “Don't wear your
+arctics in the White House.”  I shall never forget his recital of the
+story of how his enthusiasm oozed away at a meeting in behalf of foreign
+missions.  So moving was the fervid eloquence of the exhorter that,
+after fifteen minutes, if Mark Twain had had a blank cheque with him, he
+would gladly have turned it over, signed, to the minister, to fill out
+for any amount.  But it was a very warm evening, the eloquence of the
+minister was inexhaustible--and Mark Twain's enthusiasm for foreign
+missions slowly oozed away--one hundred dollars, fifty dollars, and even
+lower still--so that when the plate was actually passed around, Mark put
+in ten cents and took out a quarter!
+
+I was a witness in London, and at Oxford, in 1907, of the vast,
+spontaneous, national reception which Mark Twain received from the
+English people.  One incident of that memorable visit is a perfect
+example of that masterly power over an audience, that deep humanity,
+with which Mark Twain was endowed.  At the banquet presided over by the
+Lord Mayor of Liverpool, which was the signal of Mark Twain's farewell
+to the English people, his peroration was as follows:
+
+“Many and many a year ago I read an anecdote in Dana's Two Years Before
+the Mast.  A frivolous little self-important captain of a coasting-sloop
+in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade was always hailing every
+vessel that came in sight, just to hear himself talk and air his small
+grandeurs.  One day a majestic Indiaman came ploughing by, with course
+on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming
+with sailors, with macaws and monkeys and all manner of strange and
+romantic creatures populating her rigging, and thereto her freightage of
+precious spices lading the breeze with gracious and mysterious odours of
+the Orient.  Of course, the little coaster-captain hopped into the
+shrouds and squeaked a hail: 'Ship ahoy!  What ship is that, and whence
+and whither?' In a deep and thunderous bass came the answer back,
+through a speaking trumpet: The Begum of Bengal, a hundred and
+twenty-three days out from Canton homeward bound!  What ship is that?'
+The little captain's vanity was all crushed out of him, and most humbly
+he squeaked back: 'Only the Mary Ann--fourteen hours from Boston, bound
+for Kittery Point with--with nothing to speak of!'  That eloquent word
+'only' expressed the deeps of his stricken humbleness.
+
+“And what is my case?  During perhaps one hour in the twenty-four
+--not more than that--I stop and reflect.  Then I am humble, then I am
+properly meek, and for that little time I am 'only the Mary Ann'
+--fourteen hours out, and cargoed with vegetables and tin-ware; but all
+the other twenty-three my self-satisfaction rides high, and I am the
+stately Indiaman, ploughing the great seas under a cloud of sail, and
+laden with a rich freightage of the kindest words that were ever spoken
+to a wandering alien, I think; my twenty-six crowded and fortunate days
+multiplied by five; and I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and
+twenty-three days out from Canton--homeward bound!”
+
+Says “Charles Vale,” in describing the scene “The audience sat
+spellbound in almost painful silence, till it could restrain itself no
+longer; and when in rich, resonant, uplifted voice Mark Twain sang out
+the words: 'I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days
+out from Canton,' there burst forth a great cheer from one end of the
+room to the other.  It seemed an inopportune cheer, and for a moment it
+upset the orator: yet it was felicitous in opportuneness.  Slowly, after
+a long pause, came the last two words--like that curious, detached and
+high note in which a great piece of music suddenly ends--'Homeward
+bound.'  Again there was a cheer: but this time it was lower; it was
+subdued; it was the fitting echo to the beautiful words--with their
+double significance--the parting from a hospitable land, the return to
+the native land.  .  .  .  Only a great litterateur could have conceived
+such a passage: only a great orator could have so delivered it.”
+
+Mark Twain was the greatest master of the anecdote this generation has
+known.  He claimed the humorous story as an American invention, and one
+that has remained at home.  His public speeches were little mosaics in
+the finesse of their art; and the intricacies of inflection,
+insinuation, jovial innuendo which Mark Twain threw into his gestures,
+his implicative pauses, his suggestive shrugs and deprecative nods--all
+these are hopelessly volatilized and disappear entirely from the printed
+copy of his speeches.  He gave the most minute and elaborate study to
+the preparation of his speeches--polishing them dexterously and
+rehearsing every word, every gesture, with infinite care.  Yet his
+readiness and fertility of resource in taking advantage, and making
+telling use, of things in the speeches of those immediately preceding
+him, were striking evidences of the rapidity of his thought-processes.
+In Boston, when asked what he thought about the existence of a heaven or
+a hell, he looked grave for a moment, and then replied: “I don't want to
+express an opinion.  It's policy for me to keep silent.  You see, I have
+friends in both places.”  His speech introducing General Hawley of
+Connecticut to a Republican meeting at Elmira, New York, is an admirable
+example of his laconic art: “General Hawley is a member of my church at
+Hartford, and the author of 'Beautiful Snow.'  Maybe he will deny that.
+But I am only here to give him a character from his last place.  As a
+pure citizen, I respect him; as a personal friend of years, I have the
+warmest regard for him; as a neighbour, whose vegetable garden adjoins
+mine, why--why, I watch him.  As the author of 'Beautiful Snow,' he has
+added a new pang to winter.  He is a square, true man in honest
+politics, and I must say he occupies a mighty lonesome position.
+So broad, so bountiful is his character that he never turned a tramp
+empty-handed from his door, but always gave him a letter of introduction
+to me.  Pure, honest, incorruptible, that is Joe Hawley.  Such a man in
+politics is like a bottle of perfumery in a glue factory--it may modify
+the stench, but it doesn't destroy it.  I haven't said any more of him
+than I would say of myself.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is General
+Hawley.”
+
+Mr. Chesterton maintains that Mark Twain was a wit rather than a
+humorist--perhaps something more than a humorist.  “Wit,” he explains,
+“requires an intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic.  A
+wit must have something of the same running, working, and staying power
+as a mathematician or a metaphysician.  Moreover, wit is a fighting
+thing and a working thing.  A man may enjoy humour all by himself; he
+may see a joke when no one else sees it; he may see the point and avoid
+it.  But wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as
+well as see it.  All honest people saw the point of Mark Twain's wit.
+Not a few dishonest people felt it.”  The epigram, “Be virtuous, and you
+will be eccentric,” has become a catchword; and everyone has heard Mark
+Twain's reply to the reporter asking for advice as to what to cable his
+paper, which had printed the statement that Mark Twain was dead “Say
+that the statement is greatly exaggerated.”  He has admirably taken off
+humanity's enduring self-conceit in the statement that there isn't a
+Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had
+had its rights.  There is something peculiarly American in his warning
+to young girls not to marry--that is, not to excess!  His remarks on
+compliments have a delightful and naive freshness.  He points out how
+embarrassing compliments always are.  It is so difficult to take them
+naturally.  You never know what to say.  He had received many
+compliments in his lifetime, and they had always embarrassed him--he
+always felt that they hadn't said enough!
+
+The incident of Mark Twain's first meeting with Whistler is quaintly
+illustrative of one phase of his broader humour.  Mark Twain was taken
+by a friend to Whistler's studio, just as he was putting the finishing
+touches to one of his fantastic studies.  Confident of the usual
+commendation, Whistler inquired his guest's opinion of the picture.
+Mark Twain assumed the air of a connoisseur, and approaching the picture
+remarked that it did very well, but “he didn't care much for that
+cloud--”; and suiting the action to the word, appeared to be on the
+point of rubbing the cloud with his gloved finger.  In genuine horror,
+Whistler exclaimed: “Don't touch it, the paint's wet!”  “Oh, that's all
+right,” replied Mark with his characteristic drawl: “these aren't my
+best gloves, anyhow!”  Whereat Whistler recognized a congenial spirit,
+and their first hearty laugh together was the beginning of a friendly
+and congenial relationship.
+
+I recall an incident in connection with the writing of his
+Autobiography.  On more than one occasion, he declared that the
+Autobiography was going to be something awful--as caustic, fiendish, and
+devilish as he could make it.  Actually, he was in the habit of jotting
+on the margin of the page, opposite to some startling characterization
+or diabolic joke: “Not to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty)
+years after my death.”  One day I heard him vent his pent-up rage, in
+bitter and caustic words, upon a certain strenuous, limelight American
+politician.  I could not resist the temptation to ask him if this, too,
+were going into the Autobiography.  “Oh yes,” he replied, decisively.
+“Everything goes in.  I make no exceptions.  But,” he added
+reflectively, with the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye, “I shall make
+a note beside this passage: 'Not to be published until one hundred and
+fifty years after my death'!”
+
+Mark Twain had numerous “doubles” scattered about the world.  The number
+continually increased; once a month on an average, he would receive a
+letter from a new “double,” enclosing a photograph in proof of the
+resemblance.  Mark once wrote to one of these doubles as follows:
+
+MY DEAR SIR--
+
+Many thanks for your letter, with enclosed photograph.  Your resemblance
+to me is remarkable.  In fact, to be perfectly honest, you look more
+like me than I look like myself.  I was so much impressed by the
+resemblance that I have had your picture framed, and am now using it
+regularly, in place of a mirror, to shave by.
+
+                         Yours gratefully,
+                                        S. L. CLEMENS.
+
+Although not generally recognized, it is undoubtedly true that Mark
+Twain was a wit as well as a humorist.  He was the author of many
+epigrams and curt aphorisms which have become stock phrases in
+conversation, quoted in all classes of society wherever the English
+language is spoken.  His phrasing is unpretentious, even homely, wearing
+none of the polished brilliancy of La Rochefoucauld or Bernard Shaw; but
+Mark Twain's sayings “stick” because they are rooted in shrewdness and
+hard commonsense.
+
+Mark Twain's warning to the two burglars who stole his silverware from
+“Stormfield” and were afterwards caught and sent to the penitentiary, is
+very amusing, though not highly complimentary to American political
+life:
+
+“Now you two young men have been up to my house, stealing my tinware,
+and got pulled in by these Yankees up here.  You had much better have
+stayed in New York, where you have the pull.  Don't you see where you're
+drifting.  They'll send you from here down to Bridgeport jail, and the
+next thing you know you'll be in the United States Senate.  There's no
+other future left open to you.”
+
+The sign he posted after the visitation of these same burglars was a
+prominent ornament of the billiard room at “Stormfield “:
+
+                                  NOTICE
+
+                           To the next Burglar
+
+          There is nothing but plated-ware in this house, now
+          and henceforth.  You will find it in that brass thing
+          in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of
+          kittens.  If you want the basket, put the kittens in
+          the brass thing.
+
+          Do not make a noise, it disturbs the family.
+
+          You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that thing
+          which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think
+          they call it, or pergola, or something like that.
+
+          Please close the door when you go away!
+
+                                        Very truly yours,
+
+                                                  S. L. CLEMENS.
+
+Now these are examples of Mark Twain's humour, American humour, such as
+we are accustomed to expect from Mark Twain--humour not unmixed with a
+strong spice of wit.  But Mark Twain was capable of wit, pure and
+unadulterated, curt and concise.  I once saw him write in a young girl's
+birthday book an aphorism which he said was one of his favourites “Truth
+is our most valuable possession.  Let us economize it.”  The advice he
+once gave me as to the proper frame of mind for undergoing a surgical
+operation has always remained in my memory: “Console yourself with the
+reflection that you are giving the doctor pleasure, and that he is
+getting paid for it.”  Peculiarly memorable is his forthright dictum
+that the statue which advertises its modesty with a fig-leaf brings its
+modesty under suspicion.  His business motto--unfortunately, a motto
+that he never followed--has often been attributed, because of its canny
+shrewdness, to Mr. Andrew Carnegie.  The idea was to put all your eggs
+in one basket--and then--watch that basket!  His anti-Puritanical
+convictions find concrete expression in his assertion that few things
+are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.  Truly
+classic, in usage if not in form, is his happy saying that faith is
+believing what you know ain't so.  His definition of a classic as a book
+which people praise but don't read, is as frequently heard as are
+Biblical and Shakespearian tags.
+
+Mr. Clemens once told me that he had composed between two and three
+hundred maxims during his life.  Many of them, especially those from the
+old and new calendars of Pudd'nhead Wilson, bear the individual and
+peculiar stamp of Mark Twain's phraseology and outlook upon life
+--quaint, genial, and shrewd.  In pursuance of his deep-rooted belief in
+the omnipotent power of training, he remarked that the peach was once a
+bitter almond, the cauliflower nothing but cabbage with a college
+education.  He himself was not guiltless of that irreverence which he
+defined as disrespect for another man's god.  Women took an almost
+unholy delight in describing some of their undesirable acquaintances, in
+Mark Twain's phrase, as neither quite refined, nor quite unrefined, but
+just the kind of person that keeps a parrot!
+
+At times, Mark Twain realized the sanctifying power of illusions in a
+world of harsh realities; for he asserted that when illusions are gone
+you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.  A depressing sense of
+world-weariness sometimes overbore the native joyousness of his
+temperament; and he expressed his sense of deep gratitude to Adam, the
+first great benefactor of the race--because he had brought death into
+the world.  A funeral always gave Mark Twain a sense of spiritual
+uplift, a sense of thankfulness because the dead friend had been set
+free.  He thought it was far harder to live than to die.
+
+In one of his early sketches, there was admirable wit in the suggestion
+to the organist for a hymn appropriate to a sermon on the Prodigal Son:
+
+                   “Oh!  we'll all get blind drunk
+                    When Johnny comes marching home!”
+
+And in The Innocents Abroad there is the same sort of brilliant wit in
+the mad logic of his innocent query, on learning that St. Philip Neri's
+heart was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs: “I was
+curious to know what Philip had for dinner.”  Mark Twain was capable of
+epigrams worthy, in their dark levity, of Swift himself.  In speaking of
+Pudd'nhead Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said “Humour there is in almost
+every scene and every page; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam
+on the greatest Shakespearian tragedies--on the deep melancholy of
+Hamlet, the heartbreak of Lear.”  The greatest ironic achievements of
+Mark Twain, in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that
+Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'?  They reveal the
+power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist--or shall we rather
+say, ironic wit?  For they range all the way from the most mordant to
+the most pathetic irony--from Mephistophelean laughter to warm, human
+tears:
+
+                         “_Sunt lachrymae rerum._”
+
+“Make a reputation first by your more solid achievements,” counselled
+Oliver Wendell Holmes.  “You can't expect to do anything great with
+Macbeth, if you first come on flourishing Paul Pry's umbrella.”  Mark
+Twain has had to pay in full the penalty of comic greatness.  The world
+is loth to accept a popular character at any rating other than its own.
+Whosoever sets himself the task of amusing the world must realize the
+almost insuperable difficulty of inducing the world to regard him as a
+serious thinker.  Says Moliere--
+
+              “_C'est une etrange entreprise que celle
+               de faire rire les honnetes gens._”
+
+The strangeness of the undertaking is no less pronounced than the rigour
+of its obligations.  Mark Twain began his career as a professional
+humorist and fun-maker; he frankly donned the motley, the cap and bells.
+The man-in-the-street is not easily persuaded that the basis of the
+comic is, not uncommon nonsense, but glorified common-sense.  The French
+have a fine-flavoured distinction in _ce qui remue_ from _ce qui emeut_;
+and if _remuage_ is the defining characteristic of 'A Tramp Abroad',
+'Roughing It', and 'The Innocents Abroad', there is much of deep
+seriousness and genuine emotion in 'Life on the Mississippi', 'Tom
+Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'.  In the course of
+his lifetime, Mark Twain evolved from a fun-maker into a masterly
+humorist, from a sensational journalist into a literary artist.  In
+explanation of this, let us recall the steps in that evolution.  In his
+youth, this boy had no schooling worth speaking of; he lived in an
+environment that promised only stagnation and decay.  As the young boy,
+barefooted and dirty, watched the steamboats pass and repass upon the
+surface of that great inland deep, the Mississippi, he conceived the
+ambition and the ideal of learning to know and to master that mysterious
+water.  His dream, in time, was realized; he not only became a pilot,
+but--which is infinitely more significant--he changed from a callow,
+indolent, unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a man, a
+master of the river, with a knowledge which, in its accuracy and
+minuteness, was, for its purpose, all-sufficient and complete.
+
+I have always felt that, had it not been for this training in the great
+university of the Mississippi, Mark Twain might never have acquired that
+trained faculty for minute detail and descriptive elaboration without
+which his works, full of flaws as they are, might never have revealed
+the very real art which they betray.  For the art of Mark Twain is the
+art of taking infinite pains--the art of exactitude, precision and
+detail.  Humour per se is as ephemeral as the laugh--dying in the very
+moment of its birth.  Art alone can give it enduring vitality.  Mark
+Twain's native temperament, rich with humour and racy of the soil, drank
+in the wonder of the river and unfolded through communication with all
+its rude human devotees; the quick mind, the eager susceptibility,
+developed and matured through rigorous education in particularity and
+detail; and before his spirit the very beauties of Nature herself
+disappeared in face of a consuming sense of the work of the world that
+must be done.
+
+Mark Twain never wholly escaped the penalty that his reputation as a
+humorist compelled him to pay.  He became more than popular novelist,
+more than a jovial entertainer: he became a public institution, as
+unmistakable and as national as the Library of Congress or the
+Democratic Party.  Even in the latest years of his life, though long
+since dissociated in fact from the category of Artemus Ward, John
+Phoenix, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain could never
+be sure that his most solemn utterance might not be drowned in roars of
+thoughtless laughter.
+
+“It has been a very serious and a very difficult matter,” Mr. Clemens
+once said to me, “to doff the mask of humour with which the public is
+accustomed, in thought, to see me adorned.  It is the incorrigible
+practice of the public, in this or in any country, to see only humour in
+the humorist, however serious his vein.  Not long ago I wrote a poem,
+which I never dreamed of giving to the public, on account of its
+seriousness; but on being invited to address the women students of a
+certain great university, I was persuaded by a near friend to read this
+poem.  At the close of my lecture I said 'Now, ladies, I am going to
+read you a poem of mine'--which was greeted with bursts of uproarious
+laughter.  'But this is a truly serious poem,' I asseverated--only to be
+greeted with renewed and, this time, more uproarious laughter.  Nettled
+by this misunderstanding, I put the poem in my pocket, saying, 'Well,
+young ladies, since you do not believe me to be serious, I shall not
+read the poem'--at which the audience almost went into convulsions of
+laughter.”
+
+Humour is a function of nationality.  The same joke, as related by an
+American, a Scotchman, an Irishman, a Frenchman, carries with it a
+distinctive racial flavour and individuality of approach.  Indeed, it is
+open to question whether most humour is not essentially local in its
+nature, requiring some specialized knowledge of some particular
+locality.  It would be quite impossible for an Italian on his native
+heath to understand that great political satirist, “Mr. Dooley,” on the
+Negro Problem, for example.  After reading George Ade's Fables in Slang,
+Mr. Andrew Lang was driven to the desperate conclusion that humour
+varies with the parallels of latitude, a joke in Chicago being a riddle
+in London.
+
+If one would lay his finger upon the secret of Mark Twain's world-wide
+popularity as a humorist, he would find that secret, primarily, in the
+universality and humanity of his humour.  Mark Twain is a master in the
+art of broad contrast; incongruity lurks on the surface of his humour;
+and there is about it a staggering and cyclopean surprise.  But these
+are mere surface qualities, more or less common, though at lower power,
+to all forms of humour.  Nor is his international vogue as a humorist to
+be attributed to any tricks of style, to any breadth of knowledge, or
+even to any depth of intellectuality.  His hold upon the world is due to
+qualities, not of the head, but of the heart.  I once heard Mr. Clemens
+say that humour is the key to the hearts of men, for it springs from the
+heart; and worthy of record is his dictum that there is far more of
+feeling than of thought in genuine humour.
+
+Mark Twain succeeded in “tickling the midriff of the English-speaking
+races” with a single story; and in time he showed himself to be, not
+only a man of letters, but also a man of action.  His humour has been
+defined as the sunny break of his serious purpose.  Horace Walpole has
+said that the world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy to the
+man of feeling.  To the great humorist--to Mark Twain--the world was a
+tragi-comedy.  Like Smile Faguet, he seemed at times to feel that grief
+is the most real and important thing in the world--because it separates
+us from happiness.  He was an exemplar of the highest, truest, sincerest
+humour, perfectly fulfilling George Meredith's definition: “If you laugh
+all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a
+tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour, spare
+him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is the
+spirit of Humour that is moving you.”  Mark Twain's fun was
+light-hearted and insouciant, his pathos genuine and profound.  “He is,
+above all,” said that oldest of English journals, 'The Spectator', “the
+fearless upholder of all that is clean, noble, straightforward, innocent,
+and manly.  .  .  .  If he is a jester, he jests with the mirth of the
+happiest of the Puritans; he has read much of English knighthood, and
+translated the best of it into his living pages; and he has assuredly
+already won a high degree in letters in having added more than any writer
+since Dickens to the gaiety of the Empire of the English language.”
+
+Mark Twain's humour flowed warm from the heart.  He enjoyed to the
+utmost those two inalienable blessings: “laughter and the love of
+friends.”  He woke the laughter of an epoch and numbered a world for his
+friends.  “He is the true consolidator of nations,” said Mr. Augustine
+Birrell.  “His delightful humour is of the kind which dissipates and
+destroys national prejudices.  His truth and his honour, his love of
+truth and his love of honour, overflow all boundaries.  He has made the
+world better by his presence.”
+
+
+
+
+
+                       IV.  THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS
+
+
+          “Art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life,
+          but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the
+          whole world the art of common life--the art of a people
+          --universal art.”
+                                    TOLSTOY: What is Art?
+
+
+
+Some years ago a group of Mark Twain's friends, in a spirit of fun,
+addressed a letter to:
+
+                               MARK TWAIN
+                            GOD KNOWS WHERE.
+
+Though taking a somewhat circuitous route, the letter went unerringly to
+its goal; and it was not long before the senders of that letter received
+the laconic, but triumphant reply: “He did.”  They now turned the tables
+on the jubilant author, who equally as quickly received a letter
+addressed:
+
+                               MARK TWAIN
+                         THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE.
+
+It seemed that “he” did, too!
+
+In his lifetime Mark Twain won a fame that was literally world-wide
+--a fame, indeed, which seemed to extend to realms peopled by noted
+theological characters.  From very humble beginnings--he used
+facetiously to speak of coming up from the “very dregs of society”!
+--Mark Twain achieved international eminence and repute.  This
+accomplishment was due to the power of brain and personality alone.  In
+this sense, his career is unprecedented and unparalleled in the history
+of American literature.
+
+It is a mark of the democratic independence of America that she has
+betrayed a singular indifference to the appraisal of her literature at
+the hands of foreign criticism.  Upon her writers who have exhibited
+derivative genius--Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow--American
+criticism has lavished the most extravagant eulogiums.  The three
+geniuses who have made permanent contributions to world-literature, who
+have either embodied in the completest degree the spirit of American
+democracy, or who have had the widest following of imitators and
+admirers in foreign countries, still await their final and just deserts
+at the hands of critical opinion in their own land.  The genius of Edgar
+Allan Poe gave rise to schools of literature on the continent of Europe;
+yet in America his name must remain for years debarred from inclusion in
+a so-called Hall of Fame!  Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great
+interpreters and embodiments of America, represent the supreme
+contribution of democracy to universal literature.  In so far as it is
+legitimate for anyone to be denominated a “self-made man” in literature,
+these men are justly entitled to such characterization.  They owe
+nothing to European literature--their genius is supremely original,
+native, democratic.  The case of Mark Twain, which is our present
+concern, is a literary phenomenon which imposes upon criticism,
+peculiarly upon American criticism, the distinct obligation of tracing
+the steps in his unhalting climb to an eminence that was international
+in its character, and of defining those signal qualities, traits,
+characteristics--individual, literary, social, racial, national--which
+compassed his world-wide fame.  For if it be true that the judgment of
+foreign nations is virtually the judgment of posterity, then is Mark
+Twain already a classic.
+
+Upon the continent of Europe, Mark Twain first received notable
+recognition in France at the hands of that brilliant woman, Mme. Blanc
+(Th. Bentzon), who devoted so much of her energies to the popularization
+of American literature in Europe.  That one of her series of essays upon
+the American humorists which dealt with Mark Twain appeared in the
+'Revue des Deux Mondes' in 1872; in it appeared her admirable
+translation of 'The Jumping Frog'.  There is no cause for surprise that
+a scholarly Frenchwoman, reared on classic models and confined by rigid
+canons of art, should stand aghast at this boisterous, barbaric,
+irreverent jester from the wilds of America.  When it is remembered that
+Mark Twain began his career as one of the sage-brush writers and gave
+free play to his passion for horseplay, his desire to “lay a mine” for
+the other fellow, and his defiance of the traditional and the classic,
+it is not to be wondered at that Mme. Blanc, while honouring him with
+recognition in the most authoritative literary journal in the world,
+could not conceal an expression of amazement over his enthusiastic
+acceptance in English-speaking countries.
+
+     “Mark Twain's 'Jumping Frog' should be mentioned in the first place
+     as one of his most popular little stories--almost a type of the
+     rest.  It is, nevertheless, rather difficult for us to understand,
+     while reading this story, the 'roars of laughter' that it excited
+     in Australia and in India, in New York and in London; the numerous
+     editions of it which appeared; the epithet of 'inimitable' that the
+     critics of the English press have unanimously awarded to it.
+
+     “We may remark that a Persian of Montesquieu, a Huron of Voltaire,
+     even a simple Peruvian woman of Madame de Graffigny, reasons much
+     more wisely about European civilization than an American of San
+     Francisco.  The fact is, that it is not sufficient to have wit, or
+     even natural taste, in order to appreciate works of art.
+
+     “It is the right of humorists to be extravagant; but still common
+     sense, although carefully hidden, ought sometimes to make itself
+     apparent.  .  .  .  In Mark Twain the Protestant is enraged against
+     the pagan worship of broken marble statues--the democrat denies
+     that there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages.  The sublime
+     ruins of the Coliseum only impressed him with the superiority of
+     America, which punishes its criminals by forcing them to work for
+     the benefit of the State, over ancient Rome, which could only draw
+     from the punishments which it inflicted the passing pleasure of a
+     spectacle.
+
+     “In the course of this voyage in company with Mark Twain, we at
+     length discover, under his good-fellowship and apparent
+     ingenuousness, faults which we should never have expected.  He has
+     in the highest degree that fault of appearing astonished at
+     nothing--common, we may say, to all savages.  He confesses himself
+     that one of his great pleasures is to horrify the guides by his
+     indifference and stupidity.  He is, too, decidedly envious. . . .
+     We could willingly pardon him his patriotic self-love, often
+     wounded by the ignorance of Europeans, above all in what concerns
+     the New World, if only that national pride were without mixture of
+     personal vanity; but how comes it that Mark Twain, so severe upon
+     those poor Turks, finds scarcely anything to criticize in Russia,
+     where absolutism has nevertheless not ceased to flourish?  We need
+     not seek far for the cause of this indulgence: the Czar received
+     our ferocious republicans; the Empress, and the Grand Duchess Mary,
+     spoke to them in English.
+
+     “Taking the Pleasure Trip on the Continent altogether, does it
+     merit the success it enjoys?  In spite of the indulgence that we
+     cannot but show to the judgments of a foreigner; while recollecting
+     that those amongst us who have visited America have fallen,
+     doubtless, under the influence of prejudices almost as dangerous as
+     ignorance, into errors quite as bad--in spite of the wit with which
+     certain pages sparkle--we must say that this voyage is very far
+     below the less celebrated excursions of the same author in his own
+     country.”
+
+Three years later, Mme. Blanc returns to the discussion of Mark Twain,
+in an essay in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes', entitled 'L'age Dore en
+Amerique'--an elaborate review and analysis of The Gilded Age.  The
+savage charm and real simplicity of Mark Twain are not lacking in
+appeal, even to her sophisticated intelligence; and she is inclined to
+infer that jovial irony and animal spirits are qualities sufficient to
+amuse a young nation of people like the Americans who do not, like the
+French, pique themselves upon being blase.  According to her judgment,
+Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner are lacking in the requisite mental
+grasp for the “stupendous task of interpreting the great tableau of the
+American scene.”  Nor does she regard their effort at collaboration as a
+success from the standpoint of art.  The charm of Colonel Sellers wholly
+escapes her; she cannot understand the almost loving appreciation with
+which this cheaply gross forerunner of the later American industrial
+brigand was greeted by the American public.  The book repels her by
+“that mixture of good sense with mad folly--disorder”; but she praises
+Mark Twain's accuracy as a reporter.  The things which offend her
+sensibilities are the wilful exaggeration of the characters, and the
+jests which are so elaborately constructed that “the very theme itself
+disappears under the mass of embroidery which overlays it.”  “The
+audacities of a Bret Harte, the grosser temerities of a Mark Twain,
+still astonish us,” she concludes; “but soon we shall become accustomed
+to an American language whose savoury freshness is not to be disdained,
+awaiting still more delicate and refined qualities that time will
+doubtless bring.”
+
+In translating 'The Jumping Frog' into faultless French (giving Mark
+Twain the opportunity for that delightful retranslation into English
+which furnished delight for thousands), in reviewing with elaboration
+and long citations 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'The Gilded Age', Mme.
+Blanc introduced Mark Twain to the literary public of France; and Emile
+Blemont, in his 'Esquisses Americaines de Mark Twain' (1881), still
+further enhanced the fame of Mark Twain in France by translating a
+number of his slighter sketches.  In 1886, Eugene Forgues published in
+the 'Revue des Deux Mondes' an exhaustive review (with long citations)
+of 'Life on the Mississippi', under the title 'Les Caravans d'un
+humoriste'; and his prefatory remarks in regard to Mark Twain's fame in
+France at that time may be accepted as authoritative.  He pointed out
+the praiseworthy efforts that had been made to popularize these
+“transatlantic gaieties,” to import into France a new mode of comic
+entertainment.  Yet he felt that the peculiar twist of national
+character, the type of wit peculiar to a people and a country, the
+specialized conception of the _vis comica_ revealed in Mark Twain's
+works, confined them to a restricted milieu.  The result of all the
+efforts to popularize Mark Twain in France, he makes plain, was an
+almost complete check; for to the French taste Mark Twain's pleasantry
+appeared macabre, his wit brutal, his temperament dry to excess.  By
+some, indeed, his exaggerations were regarded as symptoms of mental
+alienation; and the originality of his verve did not succeed in giving a
+passport to the incoherence of his conceptions.  “It has been said,”
+ remarked M. Forgues, with keen perception, “that an academician slumbers
+in the depths of every Frenchman; and it was this which prevented the
+success of Mark Twain in France.  Humour, in France, has its laws and
+its restrictions.  So the French public saw in Mark Twain a gross
+jester, incessantly beating upon a tom-tom to attract the attention of
+the crowd.  They were tenacious in resisting all such blandishments
+.  .  .  .  As a humorist, Mark Twain was never appreciated in France.
+The appreciation he ultimately secured--an appreciation by no means
+inconsiderable, though in no sense comparable to that won in Anglo-Saxon
+and Germanic countries--was due to his sagacity and penetration as an
+observer, and to his marvellous faculty for calling up scenes and
+situations by the clever use of the novel and the _imprevu_.  There was,
+even to the Frenchman, a certain lively appeal in an intelligence
+absolutely free of convention, sophistication, or reverence for
+traditionary views _qua_ traditionary.”  Though at first the salt of
+Mark Twain's humour seemed to the French to be lacking in the Attic
+flavour, this new mode of comic entertainment, the leisurely exposition
+of the genially naive American, in time won its way with the _blase_
+Parisians.  Travellers who could find no copy of the Bible in the street
+bookstalls of Paris, were confronted everywhere with copies of 'Roughing
+It'.  When the authoritative edition of Mark Twain's works appeared in
+English, that authoritative French journal, the 'Mercure de France',
+paid him this distinguished tribute: “His public is as varied as
+possible, because of the versatility and suppleness of his talent which
+addresses itself successively to all classes of readers.  He has been
+called the greatest humorist in the world, and that is probably the
+truth; but he is also a charming and attractive story-teller, an alert
+romancer, a clever and penetrating observer, a philosopher without
+pretensions, and therefore all the more profound, and finally, a
+brilliant essayist.”
+
+Nevertheless, the observation of M. Forgues is just and authentic--the
+Attic flavour of _l'esprit Gaulois_ is alien to the loosely articulated
+structure of American humour.  The noteworthy criticism which Mark Twain
+directed at Paul Bourget's 'Outre Mer', and the subsequent controversy
+incident thereto, forced into light the racial and temperamental
+dissimilarities between the Gallic and the American _Ausschauung_.  Mr.
+Clemens once remarked to me that, of all continental peoples, the French
+were most alien to the spirit of his humour.  In 'Le Figaro', at the
+time of Mark Twain's death, this fundamental difference in taste once
+more comes to light: “It is as difficult for a Frenchman to understand
+Mark Twain as for a North American to admire La Fontaine.  At first
+sight, there is nothing in common between that highly specialized
+faculty which the Anglo-Saxons of the old and the new world designate
+under the name of humour, and that quality with us which we call wit
+(esprit).  And yet, at bottom, these two manifestations of the human
+genius, so different in appearance, have a common origin and reach the
+same result: they are, both of them, the glorification of good sense
+presented in pleasing and unexpected form.  Only, this form must
+necessarily vary with peoples who do not speak the same language and
+whose skulls are not fashioned in the same way.”
+
+In Italy, as in France, the peculiar _timbre_ of Mark Twain's humour
+found an audience not wholly sympathetic, not thoroughly _au courant_
+with his spirit.  “Translation, however accurate and conscientious,” as
+the Italian critic, Raffaele Simboli, has pointed out, “fails to render
+the special flavour of his work.  And then in Italy, where humorous
+writing generally either rests on a political basis or depends on risky
+phrases, Mark Twain's sketches are not appreciated because the spirit
+which breathes in them is not always understood.  The story of 'The
+Jumping Frog', for instance, famous as it is in America and England, has
+made little impression in France or Italy.”
+
+It was rather among the Germanic peoples and those most closely allied
+to them, the Scandinavians, that Mark Twain found most complete and
+ready response.  At first blush, it seems almost incredible that the
+writings of Mark Twain, with their occasional slang, their
+colloquialisms and their local peculiarities of dialect, should have
+borne translation so well into other languages, especially into German.
+It must, however, be borne in mind that, despite these peculiar features
+of his writings, they are couched in a style of most marked directness,
+simplicity and native English purity.  The ease with which his works
+were translated into foreign, especially the Germanic and allied
+tongues, and the eager delight with which they were read and
+comprehended by all classes, high and low, constitute perhaps the most
+signal conceivable tribute, not only to the humanity of his spirit, but
+to the genuine art of his marvellously forthright and natural style.
+It need be no cause for surprise that as early as 1872 he had secured
+Tauchnitz, of Leipzig, for his Continental agent.  German translations
+soon appeared of 'The Jumping Frog and Other Stories' (1874), 'The
+Gilded Age' (1874), 'The Innocents Abroad and The New Pilgrim's
+Progress' (1875), 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876).  A few years
+later his sketches, many of them, were translated into virtually all
+printed languages, notably into Russian and modern Greek; and his more
+extended works gradually came to be translated into German, French,
+Italian, and the languages of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula.
+
+The elements of the colossally grotesque, the wildly primitive, in Mark
+Twain's works, the underlying note of melancholy not less than the
+lawless Bohemianism, found sympathetic appreciation among the Germanic
+races.  George Meredith has likened the functionings of Germanic humour
+to the heavy-footed antics of a dancing bear.  Mark Twain's stories of
+the Argonauts, the miners and desperadoes, with their primitive,
+orgiastic existence; his narratives of the wild freedom of the life on
+the Mississippi, the lawless feuds and barbaric encounters--all appealed
+to the passion for the fantastic and the grotesque innate in the
+Germanic consciousness.  To the Europeans, this wild genius of the
+Pacific Slope seemed to function in a sort of unexplored fourth
+dimension of humour--vast and novel--of which they had never dreamed.
+It is noteworthy that Schleich, in his 'Psychopathik des Humors',
+reserved for American humour, with Mark Twain as its leading exponent,
+a distinct and unique category which he denominated _phantastischen,
+grossdimensionalen_.
+
+To the biographer belongs the task of describing, in detail, the lavish
+entertainment and open-hearted homage which were bestowed upon Mark
+Twain in German Europe.  In writing of Mark Twain and his popularity in
+Germanic countries, Carl von Thaler unhesitatingly asserts that Mark
+Twain was feted, wined and dined in Vienna, the Austrian metropolis, in
+an unprecedented manner, and awarded unique honours hitherto paid to no
+German writer.  In Berlin, the young Kaiser bestowed upon him the most
+distinguished marks of his esteem; and praised his works, in especial
+'Life on the Mississippi', with the intensest enthusiasm.  When Mark
+Twain received a command from the Kaiser to dine with him, his young
+daughter exclaimed that if it kept on like this, there soon wouldn't be
+anybody left for him to become acquainted with but God!  Mark said that
+it seemed uncomplimentary to regard him as unacquainted in that quarter;
+but of course his daughter was young, and the young always jump to
+conclusions without reflection.  After hearing the Kaiser's eulogy on
+'Life on the Mississippi', he was astounded and touched to receive a
+similar tribute, the same evening, from the portier of his
+lodging-house.  He loved to dwell upon this, in later years--declaring it
+the most extraordinary coincidence of his life that a crowned head and a
+portier, the very top of an empire and the very bottom of it, should have
+expressed the very same criticism, and delivered the very same verdict,
+upon one of his books, almost in the same hour and the same breath.
+
+The German edition of his works, in six volumes, published by Lutz of
+Stuttgart, in 1898, I believe, contained an introduction in which he was
+hailed as the greatest humorist in the world.  Among German critics he
+was regarded as second only to Dickens in drastic comic situation and
+depth of feeling.  Robinson Crusoe was held to exhibit a limited power
+of imagination in comparison with the ingenuity and inventiveness of Tom
+Sawyer.  At times the German critics confessed their inability to
+discover the dividing line between astounding actuality and fantastic
+exaggeration.  The descriptions of the barbaric state of Western America
+possessed an indescribable fascination for the sedate Europeans.  At
+times Mark Twain's bloody jests froze the laughter on their lips; and
+his “revolver-humour” made their hair stand on end.  Though realizing
+that the scenes and events described in 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry
+Finn', 'Roughing It', and 'Life on the Mississippi' could not have been
+duplicated in Europe, the German critics revelled in them none the less
+that “such adventures were possible only in America--perhaps only in the
+fancy of an American!”  “Mark Twain's greatest strength,” says Von
+Thaler, “lies in the little sketches, the literary snap-shots.  The
+shorter his work, the more striking it is.  He draws directly from life.
+No other writer has learned to know so many different varieties of men
+and of circumstances, so many strange examples of the Genus Homo, as he;
+no other has taken so strange a course of development.”  The deeper
+elements of Mark Twain's humour did not escape the attention of the
+Germans, nor fail of appreciation at their hands.  In his aphorisms,
+embodying at once genuine wit and experience of life, they discovered
+not merely the American author, but the universal human being; these
+aphorisms they found worthy of profound and lasting admiration.
+Sintenis found in Mark Twain a “living symptom of the youthful joy in
+existence”--a genius capable at will, despite his “boyish extravagance,”
+ of the virile formulation of fertile and suggestive ideas.  His latest
+critic in Germany wrote at the time of his death, with a genuine insight
+into the significance of his work: “Although Mark Twain's humour moves
+us to irresistible laughter, this is not the main point in his books;
+like all true humorists, _ist der Witz mit dem Weltschmerz verbunden_,
+he is a witness to higher thoughts and higher emotions, and his purpose
+is to expose bad morals and evil circumstances, in order to improve and
+ennoble mankind.”  The critic of the 'Berliner Zeitung' asserted that
+Mark Twain is loved in Germany more than all other humorists, English or
+French, because his humour “turns fundamentally upon serious and earnest
+conceptions of life.”  It is a tremendously significant fact that the
+works of American literature most widely read in Germany are the works
+of--striking conjunction!--Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain.
+
+The 'Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' fired the laugh heard round the
+world.  Like Byron, Mark Twain woke one morning to find himself famous.
+A classic fable, which had once evoked inextinguishable laughter in
+Athens, was unconsciously re-told in the language of Angel's Camp,
+Calaveras County, where history repeated itself with a precision of
+detail startling in its miraculous coincidence.  Despite the
+international fame thus suddenly won by this little fable, Mark Twain
+had yet to overcome the ingrained opposition of insular prejudice before
+his position in England and the colonies was established upon a sure and
+enduring footing.  In a review of 'The Innocents Abroad' in 'The
+Saturday Review' (1870), the comparison is made between the Americans
+who “do Europe in six weeks” and the most nearly analogous class of
+British travellers, with the following interesting conclusions: “The
+American is generally the noisier and more actively disagreeable, but,
+on the other hand, he often partially redeems his absurdity by a certain
+naivete and half-conscious humour.  He is often laughing in his sleeve
+at his own preposterous brags, and does not take himself quite so
+seriously as his British rival.  He is vulgar, and even ostentatiously
+and atrociously vulgar; but the vulgarity is mixed with a real
+shrewdness which rescues it from simple insipidity.  We laugh at him,
+and we would rather not have too much of his company; but we do not feel
+altogether safe in despising him.”  The lordly condescension and gross
+self-satisfaction here betrayed are but preliminaries to the ludicrous
+density of the subsequent reflections upon Mark Twain himself: “He
+parades his utter ignorance of Continental languages and manners, and
+expresses his very original judgments on various wonders of art and
+nature with a praiseworthy frankness.  We are sometimes left in doubt
+whether he is speaking in all sincerity or whether he is having a sly
+laugh at himself and his readers”!  It is quite evident that the large
+mass of English readers, represented by The Saturday Review, had not
+caught Mark Twain's tone; but even the reviewer is more than half won
+over by the infectiousness of this new American humour.  “Perhaps we
+have persuaded our readers by this time that Mr. Twain (sic) is a very
+offensive specimen of the vulgarest kind of Yankee.  And yet, to say the
+truth, we have a kind of liking for him.  There is a frankness and
+originality about his remarks which is (sic) pleasanter than the mere
+repetition of stale raptures; and his fun, if not very refined, is often
+tolerable in its way.  In short, his pages may be turned over with
+amusement, as exhibiting more or less consciously a very lively portrait
+of the uncultivated American tourist, who may be more obtrusive and
+misjudging, but is not quite so stupidly unobservant as our native
+product.  We should not choose either of them for our companions on a
+visit to a church or a picture--gallery, but we should expect most
+amusement from the Yankee as long as we could stand him.”  It was this
+review which gave Mark Twain the opening for his celebrated parody--a
+parody which, I have always thought, went far to opening the eyes of the
+British public to the true spirit of his humour.  Such irresistible fun
+could not fail of appreciation at the hands of a nation which regarded
+Dickens as their representative national author.
+
+Two years later, Mark Twain received in England an appreciative
+reception of well-nigh national character.  Whilst the literary and
+academic circles of America withheld their unstinted recognition of an
+author so primitive and unlettered, Great Britain received him with open
+arms.  He was a welcome guest at the houses of the exclusive; the
+highest dignitaries of public life, the authoritative journals, the
+leaders of fashion, of thought, and of opinion openly rejoiced in the
+breezy unconventionality, the fascinating daring, and the genial
+personality of this new variety of American genius.  His English
+publisher, John Camden Hotten, wrote in 1873: “How he dined with the
+Sheriff of London and Middlesex; how he spent glorious evenings with the
+wits and literati who gather around the festive boards of the
+Whitefriars and the Savage Clubs; how he moved in the gay throng at the
+Guildhall conversazione; how he feasted with the Lord Mayor of London;
+and was the guest of that ancient and most honourable body--the City of
+London Artillery--all these matters we should like to dwell upon.”  His
+public lectures, though not so popular as those of Artemus Ward, won him
+recognition as a master in all the arts of the platform.  Mr. H.  R.
+Haweis, who heard him once at the old Hanover Square Rooms, thus
+describes the occasion: “The audience was not large nor very
+enthusiastic.  I believe he would have been an increasing success had he
+stayed longer.  We had not time to get accustomed to his peculiar way,
+and there was nothing to take us by storm, as in Artemus Ward. . . . .
+He came on and stood quite alone.  A little table, with the traditional
+water-bottle and tumbler, was by his side.  His appearance was not
+impressive, not very unlike the representation of him in the various
+pictures in his 'Tramp Abroad'.  He spoke more slowly than any other man
+I ever heard, and did not look at his audience quite enough.  I do not
+think that he felt altogether at home with us, nor we with him.  We
+never laughed loud or long; no one went into those irrepressible
+convulsions which used to make Artemus pause and look so hurt and
+surprised.  We sat throughout expectant and on the _qui vive_, very well
+interested, and gently simmering with amusement.  With the exception of
+one exquisite description of the old Magdalen ivy--covered collegiate
+buildings at Oxford University, I do not think there was one thing worth
+setting down in print.  I got no information out of the lecture, and
+hardly a joke that would wear, or a story that would bear repeating.
+There was a deal about the dismal, lone silver--land, the story of the
+Mexican plug that bucked, and a duel which never came off, and another
+duel in which no one was injured; and we sat patiently enough through
+it, fancying that by and by the introduction would be over, and the
+lecture would begin, when Twain suddenly made his bow and went off!  It
+was over.  I looked at my watch; I was never more taken aback.  I had
+been sitting there exactly an hour and twenty minutes.  It seemed ten
+minutes at the outside.  If you have ever tried to address a public
+meeting, you will know what this means.  It means that Mark Twain is a
+consummate public speaker.  If ever he chose to say anything, he would
+say it marvellously well; but in the art of saying nothing in an hour,
+he surpasses our most accomplished parliamentary speakers.”
+
+The nation which had been reared upon the wit of Sidney Smith, the irony
+of Swift, the _gros sel_ of Fielding, the extravagance of Dickens, was
+ripe for the colossal incongruities and daring contrasts of Mark Twain.
+They recognized in him not only “the most successful and original wag of
+his day,” but also a rare genius who shared with Walt Whitman “the
+honour of being the most strictly American writer of what is called
+American literature.”  We read in a review of 'A Tramp Abroad',
+published in The Athenaeum in 1880: “Mark Twain is American pure and
+simple.  To the eastern motherland he owes but the rudiments, the
+groundwork, already archaic and obsolete to him, of the speech he has to
+write; in his turn of art, his literary method and aims, his
+intellectual habit and temper, he is as distinctly national as the
+Fourth of July.”  Mark Twain was admired because he was “a literary
+artist of exceptional skill”; and it was ungrudgingly acknowledged that
+“he has a keen sense of character and uncommon skill in presenting it
+dramatically; and he is also an admirable story-teller, with the
+anecdotic instinct and habit in perfection, and with a power of episodic
+narrative that is scarcely equalled, if at all, by Mr. Charles Reade
+himself.”  Indeed, from the early days of 'The Innocents Abroad', the
+“first transatlantic democratic utterance which found its way into the
+hearing of the mass of English people”; during the period of 'Tom
+Sawyer', “the completest boy in fiction,” the immortal 'Huckleberry
+Finn', “the standard picaresque novel of America--the least trammelled
+piece of literature in the language,” and 'Life on the Mississippi',
+vastly appreciated in England as in Germany for its _cultur-historisch_
+value; down to the day when Oxford University bestowed the coveted
+honour of its degree upon Mark Twain, and all England took him to their
+hearts with fervour and abandon--during this long period of almost four
+decades, Mark Twain progressively strengthened his hold upon the
+imagination of the English people and, like Charles Dickens before him,
+may be said to have become the representative author of the Anglo-Saxon
+race.  “The vast majority of readers here regard him,” said Mr. Sydney
+Brooks in 1907, “to a degree in which they regard no other living
+writer, as their personal friend, and love him for his tenderness, his
+masculinity, his unfailing wholesomeness even more than for his humour.”
+ To all who love and admire Mark Twain, these words in which he was
+welcomed to England in 1907 should stand as a symbol of that racial
+bond, that _entente cordiale_ of blood and heart, which he did so much
+to strengthen and secure.  “A compliment paid to Mark Twain is something
+more than a compliment to a great man, a great writer, and a great
+citizen.  It is a compliment to the American people, and one that will
+come home to them with peculiar gratification.  .  .  .  The feeling for
+Mark Twain among his own people is like that of the Scotch for Sir
+Walter eighty odd years ago, or like that of our fathers for Charles
+Dickens.  There is admiration in it, gratitude, pride, and, above all,
+an immense and intimate tenderness of affection.  To writers alone it is
+given to win a sentiment of this quality--to writers and occasionally,
+by the oddness of the human mind, to generals.  Perhaps one would best
+take the measure of the American devotion to Mark Twain by describing it
+as a compound of what Dickens enjoyed in England forty years ago, and of
+what Lord Roberts enjoys to-day, and by adding something thereto for the
+intensity of all transatlantic emotions.  The 'popularity' of statesmen,
+even of such a statesman as President Roosevelt, is a poor and
+flickering light by the side of this full flame of personal affection.
+It has gone out to Mark Twain not only for what he has written, for the
+clean, irresistible extravagance of his humour and his unfailing command
+of the primal feelings, for his tenderness, his jollity and his power to
+read the heart of boy and man and woman; not only for the tragedies and
+afflictions of his life so unconquerably borne; not only for his brave
+and fiery dashes against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home and
+abroad; but also because his countrymen feel him to be, beyond all other
+men, the incarnation of the American spirit.”
+
+Mark Twain achieved a position of supreme eminence as a representative
+national author which is without a parallel in the history of American
+literature.  This position he achieved directly by his appeal to the
+great mass of the people, despite the _dicta_ of the _literati_.  At a
+time when England and Europe were throwing wide the doors to Mark Twain,
+the culture of his own land was regarding him with slighting
+condescension, or with mildly quizzical unconcern.  Boston regarded him
+with fastidious and frigid disapproval, Longfellow and Lowell found
+little in him to admire or approve.  There were notable exceptions, as
+Mr. Howells has recently pointed out--Charles Eliot Norton, Professor
+Francis J. Child, and most notable of all, Mr. Howells himself; but in
+general it is true that “in proportion as people thought themselves
+refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but
+which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude.”
+ The professors of literature regarded Mark Twain as an author whose
+works were essentially ephemeral; and stood in the breach for Culture
+against the barbaric invasion of primitive Western Barbarism.  Professor
+W. P. Trent was, I believe, the first to cite Professor Richardson's
+American Literature (published in 1886) as a typical instance of the
+position of literary culture in regard to Mark Twain.  “But there is a
+class of writers,” we read in that work, “authors ranking below Irving
+or Lowell, and lacking the higher artistic or moral purpose of the
+greater humorists, who amuse a generation and then pass from sight.
+Every period demands a new manner of jest, after the current fashion
+.  .  .  .  The reigning favourites of the day are Frank R. Stockton,
+Joel Chandler Harris, the various newspaper jokers, and 'Mark Twain.'
+[Note the damning position!]  But the creators of `Pomona' and 'Rudder
+Grange,' of `Uncle Remus and his Folk-lore Stories,' and `Innocents
+Abroad,' clever as they are, must make hay while the sun shines.  Twenty
+years hence, unless they chance to enshrine their wit in some higher
+literary achievement, their unknown successors will be the privileged
+comedians of the republic.  Humour alone never gives its masters a place
+in literature; it must coexist with literary qualities, and must usually
+be joined with such pathos as one finds in Lamb, Hood, Irving, or
+Holmes.”  This passage stands in the 1892 edition of that work, though
+'Tom Sawyer' had appeared in 1876, 'The Prince and the Pauper' in 1882,
+'Life on the Mississippi' in 1883, 'Huckleberry Finn' in 1884, and 'A
+Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in 1889.  Opinions analogous
+to those expressed in the passage just cited have found frequent
+expression among leaders of critical opinion in America; and only
+yesterday 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The Innocents Abroad' were seriously
+put forward, by a clever and popular American critic, as Mark Twain's
+most enduring claims upon posterity!  A bare half-dozen men in the ranks
+of American literary criticism have recognized and eloquently spoken
+forth in vindication of Mark Twain's title as a classic author, not
+simply of American literature, but of the literature of the world.
+
+It is, even now, perhaps not too early to attempt some sort of inquiry
+into the causes contributory to Mark Twain's recognition as the prime
+representative of contemporary American literature.  One of the cheap
+catchwords of Mark Twain criticism is the statement that he is “American
+to the core,” and that his popular appreciation in his own country was
+due to the fact that he most completely embodied the national genius.
+How many of those who confidently advance this vastly significant
+statement, one curiously wonders, have seriously endeavoured to make
+plain to others--or even to themselves--the reasons therefor?  Perhaps
+in seeking the causes for Mark Twain's renown in his own country one may
+discover the causes for his world-wide fame.
+
+A map of the United States, upon which were marked the localities and
+regions made famous by the writings of Mark Twain, would show that,
+geographically, he has known and studied this vast country in all the
+grand divisions of its composition.  Bred from old Southern stock, born
+in the Southwest, he passed his youth upon the bosom of that great
+natural division between East and West, the Mississippi River, which
+cleaves in twain the very body of the nation.  In the twenties he lost
+the feeling of local attachment in the vast democracy of the West, and
+looked life--a strangely barbaric and primitive life--straight in the
+face.  This is the first great transformation in his life--behold the
+Westerner!  After enriching his mind through contact with civilizations
+so diverse as Europe and the Sandwich Islands, he settled down in
+Connecticut, boldly foreswore the creeds and principles of his native
+section, and underwent a new transformation--behold the Yankee!  Once
+again, travel in foreign lands, association with the most intellectual
+and cultured circles of the world, broadened his vision; yet this
+cosmopolitan experience, far from diminishing his racial consciousness,
+tended still further to accentuate the national characteristics.  In
+this new transformation, we behold the typical American!  The later
+years, of cosmopolitan renown, of world-wide fame, throw into high
+relief the last transformation--behold the universally human spirit!
+Under this crude catalogue, the main lines of Mark Twain's development
+stand out in sharp definition.  The catalogue, however, is only too
+crude--it is impossible to say with precision just when such and such
+a transformation actually took place.  It is only intended to be
+suggestive; for we must bear in mind that Mark Twain never changed
+character.  His spirit underwent an evolutionary process--broadening,
+deepening, enlarging its vision with the passage of the years.
+
+The part which the South played in the formation of the character and
+genius of Mark Twain has been little noted heretofore.  It was in the
+South and Southwest that the creator of the humour of local eccentrics
+first appeared in full flower; and “Ned Brace,” “Major Jones,” and “Sut
+Lovengood” have in them the germs of that later Western humour that was
+to come to full fruition in the works of Bret Harte and Mark Twain.  The
+stage coach and the river steamboat furnished the means for
+disseminating far and wide the gross, the ghastly, the extravagant
+stories, the oddities of speech, the fantastic jests which emerged from
+the clash of diverse and oddly-assorted types.  The jarring contrasts,
+the incongruities and surprises daily furnished by the picturesque river
+life unquestionably stimulated and fertilized the latent germs of humour
+in the young cub-pilot, Sam Clemens.  Through Mark Twain's greatest
+works flows the stately Mississippi, magically imparting to them some
+indefinable share of its beauty, its variety, its majesty, its
+immensity; and there is no exaggeration in the conclusion that it is the
+greatest natural influence which his works betray.  Reared in a
+slave-holding community of narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people
+of the lower middle class; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to
+cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and
+bob-tail of the town, in his passion for bohemianism and truantry--young
+Clemens never learned to know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and
+the humanity, of that aristocratic patriarchal South which produced such
+beautiful figures as Lee and Lanier.  Not even his most enthusiastic
+biographers have attempted to palliate, save with half-hearted
+facetiousness, his inglorious desertion of the cause which he had
+espoused.  Mark Twain is the most speedily “reconstructed rebel” on
+record.  Is it broad-minded--or even accurate!--for Mr. Howells to say of
+Mark Twain: “No one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand,
+Walter-Scotticised, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal?”  Mark Twain
+never, I firmly believe, held up to ridicule the Southern “ideal.”  But
+in a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he
+properly pokes fun at the “wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,'
+romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter Scott,” of the
+Southern literary journal of the thirties and forties.  In later years
+Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc', voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which
+bespoke the “Southern ideal” of his Virginia forbears; and that delicacy
+of instinct in matters of right and wrong which is so conspicuous a trait
+of Mark Twain's is a symptom of that “moral elegance” which Mr. Owen
+Wister has pronounced to be one of the defining characteristics of the
+Southern American.  “No American of Northern birth or breeding,” Mr.
+Howells pertinently observes, “could have imagined the spiritual struggle
+of Huck Finn in deciding to help the negro Jim to his freedom, even
+though he should be for ever despised as a negro thief in his native
+town, and perhaps eternally lost through the blackness of his sin.  No
+Northerner could have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky feud, and
+revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing through its
+carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the sardonic
+comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the store-keeping
+magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's
+daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that comes to lynch
+him.”
+
+The influence of the West upon the character and genius of Mark Twain is
+momentous and unmistakable.  Mark Twain found room for development and
+expansion in the primitive freedom of the West.  It was here, I think,
+that there were bred in him that breezy democracy of sentiment and that
+hatred of sham and pretence which fill his writings from beginning to
+end.  In the West, virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood--or fell--by
+force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled
+for fortune, for competence--or for existence.  It was a case of the
+survival of the fittest.  In face of bleak Nature--the burning alkali
+desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,--all men were free
+and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort.  In this primitive
+democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting.
+The pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug soon went to the
+wall, exposed in the nakedness of his own impotency.  Humour is a
+salutary aid in the struggle of the individual with the contrasts of
+life; indeed it may be said to be born of the perception of those
+contrasts.  In a degree no whit inferior to the variegated river life,
+the life of the West furnished contrasts and incongruities innumerable
+--vaster perhaps, and more significant.  There was the incessant contrast
+of civilization with barbarism, of the East with the West; and there was
+infinite play for the comic _expose_ of the credulous “tenderfoot” at
+the hands of the pitiless cowboy.  Roars of Gargantuan laughter shook
+the skies as each new initiate unwittingly succumbed to the demoniac
+wiles of his tormentors.  The West was one vast theatre for the practice
+of the “practical joke.”  Behind everything, menacing, foreboding,
+tragic, lay the stupendous contrast between Man and Nature; and though
+the miner, the granger, the cowboy laughed defiantly at civilization and
+at Nature, there crept into the consciousness of each the conviction
+that, in the long run, civilization must triumph, and that, in order to
+win success, Nature must be conquered and subdued.  In such an
+environment, with its spirit of primitive democracy, its atmosphere of
+wild and ribald jest, its contempt for the impostor, its perpetually
+recurring incongruities, and behind all the solemn, perhaps tragic,
+presence of inexorable Nature--in such an environment were sharpened and
+whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour, the spirit of real democracy
+bred of competitive effort, and the hatred for pretence, sham, and
+imposture.
+
+It was not, I think, until Mark Twain went to live in Connecticut and,
+as he expressed it, became a scribbler of books, and an immovable
+fixture among the other rocks of New England, that he developed complete
+confidence in himself and his powers.  That passion for successful
+self-expression, which Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler has defined as the main
+ambition of the American, became the dominant motive of Mark Twain's
+life.  Of his experience as a steamboat pilot, Mark Twain has said that
+in that brief, sharp schooling he got personally and familiarly
+acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are
+to be found in fiction, biography or history.  In the West he had still
+further enriched his mind with an inexhaustible store of first-hand
+knowledge of human nature.  In rotation he had been tramping jour
+printer, river pilot, private secretary, miner, reporter, lecturer.
+He now turns to literature in real earnest, and begins to display that
+vast store of knowledge derived from actual contact with the infinitely
+diversified realities of American life.  Mark Twain takes on more and
+more of the characteristics of the Yankee--those characteristics which
+constitute the basis of his success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the
+practical efficiency, the shrewdness and the hard common--sense.  It is
+the last phase in the formation of the national type.
+
+It was, I venture to say, in some such way as this that Mark Twain came
+to assume in the eyes of his countrymen an embodiment of the national
+spirit.  He was the self--made man in the self--made democracy.  He was
+at once his own creation and the creation of a democracy.  There were
+humorists in America before Mark Twain; there are humorists in America
+still.  But Mark Twain succeeded not merely in captivating the great
+mass of the people; he achieved the far more difficult and unique
+distinction of convincing his countrymen of his essential fellowship,
+his temperamental affinity, with them.  This miracle he wrought by the
+frankest and most straightforward revelation of the actual experiences
+in his own life and the lives of those he had known with perfect
+intimacy.  It is true that he wrote a few books dealing with other
+times, other scenes, than our own in the present and in America.  But I
+daresay that his popularity with the mass of his countrymen would not
+have been in any degree lessened had he never written these few books.
+Indeed, it is hardly to be doubted that his books were successful in the
+ratio of their autobiographic nature.  For the character he revealed in
+those books of his which are essentially autobiographic, is the
+character dear to the American heart; and the experiences, vicissitudes,
+and hardships, shot through and irradiated with a high boisterousness of
+humour, found a joyous sympathy in the minds and hearts of men who had
+all “been there” themselves.  In Mark Twain the American people
+recognized at last the sturdy democrat, independent of foreign
+criticism; confident in the validity and value of his own ideas and
+judgments; believing loyally in his country's institutions, and
+upholding them fearlessly before the world; fundamentally serious and
+self-reliant, yet with a practicality tempered by humane kindliness,
+warmth of heart, and a strain of persistent idealism; rude, boisterous,
+even uncouth, yet withal softened by sympathy for the under-dog, a
+boundless love for the weak, the friendless, the oppressed; lacking in
+profound intellectuality, yet supreme in the possession of the simple
+and homely virtues--an upright and honourable character, a good citizen,
+a man tenacious of the sanctity of the domestic virtues.  America has
+produced finer and more exalted types--giants in intellectuality,
+princes in refinement and delicacy of spirit, savants in culture,
+classics in authorship.  An American type combining culture
+with picturesqueness, refinement with patriotism, suavity with
+self-reliance, desire it as we may, still awaits the imprimatur
+of international recognition.  America has sufficient cause for
+gratification in the memory of that quaint and sturdy figure so
+conspicuously bearing the national stamp and superscription.  Perhaps no
+American has equalled Mark Twain in the quality of subsuming and
+embodying in his own character so many elements of the national spirit
+and genius.  In letters, in life, Mark Twain is the American _par
+excellence_.
+
+Underneath those qualities which combined to produce in Mark Twain a
+composite American type, lay something deeper still--that indefinable
+_je ne sais quoi_ which procured him international fame.  Humour alone
+is utterly inadequate for achieving so momentous a result--though humour
+ostensibly constituted the burden of the appeal.  As a matter of fact,
+vehemently as the professors may deny it, Mark Twain was an artist of
+remarkable force and power.  From the days when he came under the
+tutelage of Mr. Howells, and humbly learned to prune away his stylistic
+superfluities of the grosser sort, Mark Twain indubitably began to
+subject himself to the discipline of stern self-criticism.  While it is
+true that he never learned to realize in full measure, to use Pater's
+phrase, “the responsibility of the artist to his materials,” he
+assuredly disciplined himself to make the most, in his own way, of the
+rude and volcanic power which he possessed.  It is fortunate that Mark
+Twain never subjected himself to the refinements of academic culture; a
+Harvard might well have spoiled a great author.  For Mark Twain had a
+memorable tale to tell of rude, primitive men and barbaric, remote
+scenes and circumstances; of truant and resourceful boyhood exercising
+all its cunning in circumventing circumstance and mastering a calling.
+And he had that tale to tell in the unlettered, yet vastly expressive,
+phraseology of the actors in those wild events.  The secret of his style
+is directness of thought, a sort of shattering clarity of utterance, and
+a mastery of vital, vigorous, audacious individual expression.  He had a
+remarkable feeling for words and their uses; and his language is the
+unspoiled, expressive language of the people.  At times he is primitive
+and coarse; but it is a Falstaffian note, the mark of universality
+rather than of limitation.  His art was, in Tolstoy's phrase, “the art
+of a people--universal art”; and his style was rich in the locutions of
+the common people, rich and racy of the soil.  A signal merit of his
+style is its admirable adaptation to the theme.  The personages of his
+novels always speak “in character”--with perfect reproduction, not only
+of their natural speech, but also of their natural thoughts.  Though Mr.
+Henry James may have said that one must be a very rudimentary person to
+enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue in a rudimentary style
+in treatment of rudimentary or,--as I should prefer to phrase it,
+--fundamental things.  Mr. James, I feel sure, could never have put into
+the mouth of a “rudimentary” person like Huck, so vivid and graphic a
+description of a storm with its perfect reproduction of the impression
+caught by the “rudimentary” mind.  “Writers of fiction,” says Sir Walter
+Besant in speaking of this book, “will understand the difficulty of
+getting inside the brain of that boy, seeing things as he saw them,
+writing as he would have written, and acting as he would have acted; and
+presenting to the world true, faithful, and living effigies of that boy.
+The feat has been accomplished; there is no character in fiction more
+fully, more faithfully, presented than the character of Huckleberry
+Finn.  .  .  .  It may be objected that the characters are extravagant.
+Not so.  They are all exactly and literally true; they are quite
+possible in a country so remote and so primitive.  Every figure in the
+book is a type; Huckleberry Finn has exaggerated none.  We see the life
+--the dull and vacuous life--of a small township upon the Mississippi
+River forty years ago.  So far as I know, it is the only place where we
+can find that phase of life portrayed.”
+
+Mark Twain impressed one always as writing with utter individuality
+--untrammelled by the limitations of any particular sect of art.  In his
+books of travel, he reveals not only the instinct of the trained
+journalist for the novel and the effective, but also the feeling of the
+artist for the beautiful, the impressive, and the sublime.  His
+descriptions, of striking natural objects, such as the volcano of Mount
+Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, of memorable architecture, such as the
+cathedral at Milan, show that he possessed the “stereoscopic
+imagination” in rare degree.  The picture he evokes of Athens by
+moonlight, in the language of simplicity and restraint, ineffaceably
+fixes itself in the fancy.
+
+Mark Twain was regarded in France as a remarkable “impressionist” and
+praised by the critics for the realistic accuracy and minuteness of his
+delineation.  Kipling frankly acknowledged the great debt that he owed
+him.  Tennyson spoke in high praise of his finesse in the choice of
+words, his feeling for the just word to catch and, as it were, visualize
+the precise shade of meaning desired.  In truth, Mark Twain was an
+impressionist, rather than an imaginative artist.  That passage in
+'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in which he describes an early morning
+ride through the forest, pictorially evocative as it is, stands
+self-revealed--a confusedly imaginative effort to create an image he has
+never experienced.
+
+If we set over beside this the remarkable descriptions of things seen,
+as minutely evocative as instantaneous photographs--such, for example,
+as the picture of a summer storm, or preferably, the picture of dawn on
+the Mississippi, both from Huckleberry Finn--pictures Mark Twain had
+seen and lived hundreds of times, we see at once the striking
+superiority of the realistic impressionist over the imaginative artist.
+
+I have always felt that the most lasting influence of his life--the
+influence which has left the most pervasive impression upon his art and
+thought--is portrayed in that classic and memorable passage in which he
+portrays the marvellous spell laid upon him by that mistress of his
+youth, the great river.
+
+To the young pilot, the face of the water in time became a wonderful
+book.  For the uninitiated traveller it was a dead language, but to the
+young pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets.  He came to feel that
+there had never been so wonderful a book written by man.  To its
+haunting beauty, its enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly
+--drinking it in like one bewitched.  But a day came when he began to
+cease from noting its marvels.  Another day came when he ceased
+altogether to note them.
+
+In time, he came to realize that, for him, the romance and the beauty
+were gone forever from the river.  If the early rapture was gone, in its
+place was the deeper sense of knowledge and intimacy.  He had learned
+the ultimate secrets of the river--learned them with a knowledge, so
+searching and so profound, that he was enabled to give them the enduring
+investiture of art.
+
+Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence.  He was a master of
+the art of moving, touching, swaying an audience.  At times, his insight
+into the mysterious springs of humour, of passion, and of pathos seemed
+almost like divination.  All these qualities appeared in full flower in
+the written expression of his art.  It would be doing a disservice to
+his memory to deny that his style did not possess literary distinction
+or elegance.  At times his judgment was at fault; his constitutional
+humour came near playing havoc with his artistic sense.  Not seldom he
+was long--winded and laborious in his striving after comic effect.  To
+offset these manifest lapses and defects there are the many fine
+qualities--descriptive passages aglow with serene and cloud less beauty,
+dramatic scenes depicted with virile and rugged eloquence, pathetic
+incidents touched with gentle and caressing tenderness.
+
+Style bears translation ill; in fact, translation is not infrequently
+impossible.  But Mr. Clemens once pointed out to me that humour has
+nothing to do with style.  Mark Twain's humour--for humour is his
+prevalent mood--has international range since, constructed out of a
+deep comprehension of human nature and a profound sympathy for human
+relationship and human failing, it successfully surmounts the
+difficulties of translation into alien tongues.
+
+Mark Twain became a great international figure, not because he was an
+American, paradoxical and unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he
+was America's greatest cosmopolitan.  He was a true cosmopolitan in the
+Higginsonian sense, in that, unlike Mr. Henry James, he was “at home
+even in his own country.”  He was a true cosmopolitan in the Tolstoyan
+sense; for his was “art transmitting the simplest feelings of common
+life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world
+--the art of common life--the art of a people--universal art.”  His
+spirit grasped the true ideal of our time and reflected it.
+
+Mr. Clemens attributed his international success not to qualities of
+style, not to allegiance to any distinctive school, not to any
+overtopping eminence of intellect.  “Many so-called American humorists,”
+ he once remarked to me, “have been betrayed by their preoccupation with
+the local.  Their work never crossed frontiers because they failed to
+impart to their humour that universal element which appeals to all races
+of men.  Realism is nothing more than close observation.  But
+observation will never give you the inside of the thing.  The life,
+the genius, the soul of a people are realized only through years of
+absorption.”  Mr. Clemens asseverated that the only way to be a great
+American humorist was to be a great human humorist--to discover in
+Americans those permanent and universal traits common to all
+nationalities.  In his commentary upon Bourget's 'Outre Mer', he
+declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic that could
+safely be labelled “American”--not a single human detail, inside or
+outside.  Through years of automatic observation, Mark Twain learned to
+discover for America, to adapt his own phrase, those few human
+peculiarities that can be generalized and located here and there
+in the world and named by the name of the nation where they are found.
+
+Above all, I think, Mark Twain sympathized with and found something to
+admire in the citizens of every nation, seeking beneath the surface
+veneer the universal traits of that nation's humanity.  He expressly
+disclaimed in my presence any “attitude” toward the world, for the very
+simple reason that his relation toward all peoples had been one of
+effort at comprehension of their ideals, and identification with them in
+feeling.  He disavowed any colour prejudices, caste prejudices, or creed
+prejudices--maintaining that he could stand any society.  All that he
+cared to know was that a man was a human being--that was bad enough for
+him!  It is a matter not of argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has
+made more damaging admissions concerning America than concerning any
+other nation.  Lafcadio Hearn best succeeded in interpreting poetry to
+his Japanese students by freeing it from all artificial and local
+restraints, and using as examples the simplest lyrics which go straight
+to the heart and soul of man.  His remarkable lecture on 'Naked Poetry'
+is the most signal illustration of his profoundly suggestive mode of
+interpretation.  In the same way, Mark Twain as humorist has sought the
+highest common factor of all nations.  “My secret--if there is any
+secret--,” Mr. Clemens once said to me, “is to create humour independent
+of local conditions.  In studying humanity as exhibited in the people
+and localities I best knew and understood, I have sought to winnow out
+the encumbrance of the local.”  And he significantly added--musingly--
+“Humour, like morality, has its eternal verities.”
+
+To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has
+contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the
+Mississippi, 'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank
+with the very best examples of picaresque fiction;
+
+'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might
+well be regarded as the supreme American morality--play of youth,
+'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of
+such originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory
+parallel in literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and
+all of 'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases
+of a civilization now vanished forever.  It is gratifying to Americans
+to recognize in Mark Twain the incarnation of democratic America.  It is
+gratifying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and recapture the
+pleasure and delight his works have given them for decades.  It is more
+gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain,
+America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of
+Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe--a man who will be
+remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, “with the great humorists of all
+time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company;
+none of them was his equal in humanity.”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                 V.  PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST
+
+          “Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward
+          towards a summit where you will find your chiefest
+          pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will
+          be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbour and the
+          community.”
+                                    MARK TWAIN: 'What is Man?'
+
+
+“The humorous writer,” says Thackeray, “professes to awaken and direct
+your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension,
+and imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed,
+the unhappy.  To the best of his means and ability he comments on all
+the ordinary actions and passions of life almost.  He takes upon himself
+to be the week-day preacher, so to speak.  Accordingly, as he finds, and
+speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him--sometimes
+love him.”  This definition is apt enough to have been made with Mark
+Twain in mind.  In an earlier chapter, is displayed the comic phase of
+Mark Twain's humour.  Beneath that humour, underlying it and informing
+it, is a fund of human concern, a wealth of seriousness and pathos, and
+a universality of interests which argue real power and greatness.  These
+qualities, now to be discussed, reveal Mark Twain as serious enough to
+be regarded as a real moralist and philosopher, humane enough to be
+regarded as, in spirit, a true sociologist and reformer.
+
+It must be recognised that the history of literature furnishes forth no
+great international figure, whose fame rests solely upon the basis of
+humour, however human, however sympathetic, however universal that
+humour may be.  Behind that humour must lurk some deeper and more
+serious implication which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product.
+Genuine humour, as Landor has pointed out, requires a “sound and
+capacious mind, which is always a grave one.”  There is always a breadth
+of philosophy, a depth of sadness, or a profundity of pathos in the very
+greatest humorists.  Both Rabelais and La Fontaine were reflective
+dreamers; Cervantes fought for the progressive and the real in pricking
+the bubble of Spanish chivalry; and Moliere declared that, for a man in
+his position, he could do no better than attack the vices of his time
+with ridiculous likenesses.  Though exhibiting little of the melancholy
+of Lincoln, Mark Twain revelled in the same directness of thought and
+expression, showed the same zest for broad humour reeking with the
+strong but pungent flavour of the soil.  Though expressing distaste for
+Franklin's somewhat cold and almost mercenary injunctions, Mark Twain
+nevertheless has much of his Yankee thrift, shrewdness, and bed-rock
+common sense.  Beneath and commingled with all his boyish and exuberant
+fun is a note of pathos subdued but unmistakable, which rings true
+beside the forced and extravagant pathos of Dickens.  His Southern
+hereditament of chivalry, his compassion for the oppressed and his
+defence of the down-trodden, were never in abeyance from the beginning
+of his career to the very end.  Like Joel Chandler Harris, that genial
+master of African folk-lore, Mark Twain found no theme of such absorbing
+interest as human nature.  Like Fielding, he wrote immortal narratives
+in which the prime concern is not the “story,” but the almost scientific
+revelation of the natural history of the characters.  The corrosive and
+mordant irony of many a passage in Mark Twain, wherein he holds up to
+scorn the fraudulent and the artificial, the humbug, the hypocrite, the
+sensualist, are not unworthy of the colossal Swift.  That “disposition
+for hard hitting with a moral purpose to sanction it,” which George
+Meredith pronounces the national disposition of British humour, is Mark
+Twain's unmistakable hereditament.  It is, perhaps, because he relates
+us to our origins, as Mr. Brander Matthews has suggested, that Mark
+Twain is the foremost of American humorists.
+
+In the preface to the Jumping Frog, published as far back as 1867, Mark
+Twain was dubbed, not only “the wild humorist of the Pacific slope,” but
+also “the moralist of the Main.”  The first book which brought him great
+popularity, 'The Innocents Abroad', exhibited qualities of serious
+ethical import which, while escaping the attention of the readers of
+that day, emerge for the moderns from the welter of hilarious humour.
+How unforgettable is his righteous indignation over that “benefit”
+ performance he witnessed in Italy!
+
+The ingrained quality in Mark Twain, which perhaps more than any other
+won the enthusiastic admiration of his fellow Americans, was this: he
+always had the courage of his convictions.  He writes of things, classic
+and hallowed by centuries, with a freshness of viewpoint, a total
+indifference to crystallized opinion, that inspire tremendous respect
+for his courage, even when one's own convictions are not engaged.  The
+“beautiful love story of Abelard and Heloise” will never, I venture to
+say, recover its pristine glory--now that Mark Twain has poured over
+Abelard the vials of his wrath.
+
+Those who know only the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep,
+underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and
+truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker
+and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence.  In answer to a query of
+mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave
+carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: “I never
+wrote a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens.  She is solely
+responsible--to her should go the credit--for any deeply serious or
+moral influence my subsequent work may exert.  After my marriage, she
+edited everything I wrote.  And what is more--she not only edited my
+works, she edited ME!  After I had written some side-splitting story,
+something beginning seriously and ending in preposterous anti-climax,
+she would say to me: 'You have a true lesson, a serious meaning to
+impart here.  Don't give way to your invincible temptation to destroy
+the good effect of your story by some extravagantly comic absurdity.
+Be yourself!  Speak out your real thoughts as humorously as you please,
+but--without farcical commentary.  Don't destroy your purpose with an
+ill-timed joke.'  I learned from her that the only right thing was to
+get in my serious meaning always, to treat my audience fairly, to let
+them really feel the underlying moral that gave body and essence to my
+jest.”
+
+The quality with which Mark Twain invests his disquisitions upon morals,
+upon conscience, upon human foibles and failings, is the charm of the
+humorist always--never the grimness of the moralist or the coldness of
+the philosopher.  He observes all human traits, whether of moral
+sophistry or ethical casuistry, with the genial sympathy of a lover of
+his kind irradiated with the riant comprehension of the humorist.  And
+yet at times there creeps into his tone a note of sincere and manly
+pathos, unmistakable, irresistible.  One has only to read the beautiful,
+tender tale of the blue jay in 'A Tramp Abroad' to know the beauty and
+the depth of his feeling for nature and her creatures, his sense of
+kinship with his brothers of the animal kingdom.
+
+In our first joyous and headlong interest in the narrative of
+'Huckleberry Finn', its rapid succession of continuously arresting
+incidents, its omnipresent yet never intrusive humour, the deeper
+significance of many a passage in that contemporary classic is likely to
+escape notice.  Sir Walter Besant, who revelled in it as one of the most
+completely satisfying and delightful of books, speaks of it deliberately
+as a book without a moral.  Perhaps he was deceived by the foreword:
+“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be
+prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
+persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”  There never was
+a more easy-going, care-free, unpuritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the
+two farcical “hoboes,” Tom Sawyer, and the rest.  And yet in the light
+of Mark Twain's later writings one cannot but see in that picaresque
+romance, with its pleasingly loose moral atmosphere, an underlying
+seriousness and conviction.  Jim is a simple, harmless negro, childlike
+and primitive; yet, so marvellous, so restrained is the art of the
+narrator, that imperceptibly, unconsciously, one comes to feel not only
+a deep interest in, but a genuine respect for, this innocent fugitive
+from slavery.  Mr. Booker Washington, a distinguished representative of
+his race, said he could not help feeling that, in the character of Jim,
+Mark Twain had, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited his sympathy for and
+interest in the masses of the negro people.
+
+Indeed, to the reflective mind--and it is to be presumed that by that
+standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged--there is no more
+significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck
+struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral
+responsibility for compassing Jim's emancipation.  Nothing else is
+needed to show at once Mark Twain's preoccupation with the workings of
+human conscience in the unsophisticated mind and his conviction that,
+with the “lights that he had,” Huck was justified in his courageous
+decision.
+
+Huck felt deeply repentant for allowing Jim to escape from the innocent,
+inoffending Miss Watson.  He became consumed with horror and remorse to
+hear Jim making plans for stealing his wife and children, if their
+masters wouldn't sell them.  His conscience kept stirring him up hotter
+than ever when he heard Jim talking to himself about the joys of
+freedom.  After awhile, Huck decided to write a letter to Miss Watson,
+informing her of the whereabouts of her “runaway nigger.”  After writing
+that letter, he felt washed clean of sin, uplifted, exalted.  But he
+could not forget all the goodness and tenderness of poor Jim, who had
+shown himself so profoundly grateful.  Though he faced the torments of
+Puritanical damnation as a consequence, he resolved to let Jim go free.
+Humanity triumphed over conscience--and with an “All right, then, I'll
+go to hell,” he tore up the letter.
+
+One of Mark Twain's favourite themes for the display of his humour was
+the subject of prevarication.  He seemed never to tire of ringing the
+changes upon the theme of the lie, its utility, its convenience, and its
+consequences.  Doubtless he chose to dabble in falsehood because it is
+generally winked at as the most venial of all moral obliquities--a fault
+which is the most thoroughly universal of all that flesh is heir to.
+The incident of George Washington and the cherry tree furnished the
+basis for countless of his anecdotes; he wrung from it variations
+innumerable, from the epigram to the anecdote.  His distinction between
+George Washington and himself, redounding immeasurably to his own glory,
+and demonstrating his complete superiority to Washington as a moral
+character, is classic: “George Washington couldn't tell a lie.  I can;
+but I won't.”  Perhaps his most humorous anecdote, based upon the same
+story, is in connection with the exceedingly old “darky” he once met in
+the South, who claimed to have crossed the Delaware with Washington.
+“Were you with Washington,” asked Mark Twain mischievously, “when he
+took that hack at the cherry tree?”  This was a poser for the old
+darkey; his pride was appealed to, his very character was at stake.
+After an awkward hesitation, the old darkey spoke up, a gleam of
+simulated recollection (and real gratification for his convenient
+memory) overspreading his countenance: “Lord, boss, I was dar.  In
+cose I was.  I was with Marse George at dat very time.  In fac--I done
+druv dat hack myself”!
+
+Mark Twain's most delightful trick as a popular humorist was to strike
+out some comic epigram, that passed currency with the masses whose fancy
+it tickled, and also had upon it the minted stamp of the classic
+aphorism.  These epigrams were frequently pseudo-moral in their nature;
+and their humour usually lay in the assumption that everybody is
+habitually addicted to prevarication--which is just precisely true
+enough and reprehensible enough to validate the epigram.  His method was
+humorous inversion; and he told a story whose morals are so ludicrously
+twisted that the right moral, by contrast, spontaneously springs to
+light.  “Never tell a lie--except for practice,” is less successful than
+the more popularly known “When in doubt, tell the truth.”  Out of the
+latter maxim he succeeded in extracting a further essence of humour.  He
+admitted inventing the maxim, but never expected it to be applied to
+himself.  His advice, he said, was intended for other people; when he
+was in doubt himself, he used more sagacity!  Mark Twain has made no
+more delightful epigram than that one in which he recognizes that a lie,
+morally reprehensible as it may be, is undoubtedly an ever present help
+in time of need: “Never waste a lie.  You never know when you may need
+it.”
+
+Sometimes in a humorous, sometimes in a grimly serious way, Mark Twain
+was fond of drawing the distinction between theoretical and practical
+morals.  Theoretical morals, he would point out, are the sort you get on
+your mother's knee, in good books, and from the pulpit.  You get them
+into your head, not into your heart.  Only by the commission of crime
+can anyone acquire real morals.  Commit all the crimes in the decalogue,
+take them in rotation, persevere in this stern determination--and after
+awhile you will thereby attain to moral perfection!  It is not enough to
+commit just one crime or two--though every little bit helps.  Only by
+committing them all can you achieve real morality!  It is interesting to
+note this distinction between Mark Twain, the humorous moralist, and
+Bernard Shaw, the ethical thinker.  Each teaches precisely the same
+thing--the one not even half seriously, the other with all the sharp
+sincerity of conviction.  Shaw unhesitatingly declares that trying to be
+wicked is precisely the same experiment as trying to be good, viz., the
+discovery of character.
+
+The range of Mark Twain's humour, from the ludicrous anecdote with
+comically mixed morals to the profound parable with grimly ironic
+conclusion, takes the measure of the ethical nature of the man.  It can
+best be illustrated, I think, by a comparison of his anecdote of the
+theft of the green water-melon and the classic fable of 'The Man that
+Corrupted Hadleyburg'.  Mark stole a water-melon out of a farmer's
+wagon, while he wasn't looking.  Of course stole was too harsh a term
+--he withdrew, he retired that water-melon.  After getting safely away to
+a secluded spot, he broke the water-melon open--only to find that it was
+green, the greenest water-melon of the year.
+
+The moment he saw that the water-melon was green, he felt sorry.  He
+began to reflect--for reflection is the beginning of reform.  It is only
+by reflecting on some crime you have committed, that you are
+“vaccinated” against committing it again.
+
+So Mark began to reflect.  And his reflections were of this nature: What
+ought a boy to do who has stolen a green water-melon?  What would George
+Washington, who never told a lie, have done?  He decided that the only
+real, right thing for any boy to do, who has stolen a water-melon of
+that class, is to make restitution.  It is his duty to restore it to its
+rightful owner.  So rising up, spiritually strengthened and refreshed by
+his noble resolution, Mark restored the water--melon--what there was
+left of it--to the farmer and--made the farmer give him a ripe one in
+its place!  Thus he clinched the “moral” of this story, so quaint and so
+ingenious; and concluded that only in some such way as this could one be
+fortified against further commission of crime.  Only thus could one
+become morally perfect!
+
+Here, as in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical
+suggestion--a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his
+literal words--the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity,
+fantasy, light irony.  Yet beneath this outer covering of art there is
+a serious meaning that, like murder, will out.  If demonstration were
+needed that Mark Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is
+amply supplied by that masterpiece, that triumph of invention,
+construction, and originality, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'.
+Here is a pure morality, daring in the extreme and incredibly original
+in a world perpetually reiterating a saying already thousands of years
+old, to the effect that there is nothing new under the sun.  It is a
+deliberate emendation of that invocation in the Lord's Prayer “Lead us
+(not) into temptation.”  The shrieking irony of this trenchant parable,
+its cynicism and heartlessness, would make of it an unendurable
+criticism of human life--were it accepted literally as a representation
+of society.  In essence it is a morality pure and simple, animated not
+only by its brilliantly original ethical suggestion, but also by its
+illuminating reflection of human nature and its graciously relieving
+humour.  In that exultant letter which the _Diabolus ex machina_ wrote
+to the betrayed villagers, he sneers at their old and lofty reputation
+for honesty--that reputation of which they were so inordinately proud
+and vain.  The weak point in their armour was disclosed so soon as he
+discovered how carefully and vigilantly they kept themselves and their
+children out of temptation.  For he well knew that the weakest of all
+weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire.  The
+familiar distinction between innocence and virtue springs to mind.  And
+it is worthy of consideration that Nietzsche, and Shaw after him, both
+point out that virtue consists, not in resisting evil, but in not
+desiring it!  'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' is a masterpiece,
+eminently worthy of the genius of a Swift.  It proclaims Mark Twain not
+only as a supreme artist, but also as eminently and distinctively a
+moralist.
+
+It is impossible to think of Mark Twain in his maturer development as
+other than a moralist.  My personal acquaintance with Mr. Clemens
+convinced me--had I needed to be convinced--that in his later years he
+had striven to grapple nobly with many of the deeper issues of life,
+character and morality, public, religious and social, as well as
+personal and private.  I never knew anyone who thought so “straight,”
+ or who expressed himself with such simple directness upon questions
+affecting religion and conduct.  He was absolutely fearless in his
+condemnation of those subsidized “ministers” of the Gospel in
+cosmopolitan centres, who, through self-interest, cut their moral
+disquisitions to fit the predilections of their wealthy parishioners,
+many of whom were under national condemnation as “malefactors of great
+wealth.”  Animated by love for all creatures, the defenceless wild
+animal as well as the domestic pet, he was unsparing in his indictment
+of those big-game hunters who shamelessly described their feelings of
+savage exultation when some poor animal served as the target for their
+skill, and staggered off wounded unto death.  His sympathy for the
+natives of the Congo was profound and intense; and his philippic against
+King Leopold for the atrocities he sanctioned called the attention of
+the whole world to conditions that constituted a disgrace to modern
+civilization.  His diatribe against the Czar of Russia for his
+inhumanity to the serfs was an equally convincing proof of his noble
+determination to throw the whole weight of his influence in behalf of
+suffering and oppressed humanity.  Some years before his death, he told
+me that he never intended to speak in public again save in behalf of
+movements, humanitarian and uplifting, which gave promise of effecting
+civic betterment and social improvement.
+
+I have always felt a peculiar and personal debt of gratitude to Mark
+Twain for three events--for the publication of such works can be
+dignified with no less eminent characterization.  When Mr. Edward Dowden
+tried to make out the best case for Shelley that he could, it was at the
+sacrifice of the reputation of the defenceless Harriet Westbrook.  That
+ingrained chivalry which is the defining characteristic of the
+Southerner, the sympathy for the oppressed, the compassion for the weak
+and the defenceless, animated Mark Twain to one of the noblest actions
+of his career.  For his defence of Harriet Westbrook is something more
+than a work, it is an act--an act of high courage and nobility.  With
+words icily cold in their logic, Mark Twain tabulated the six pitifully
+insignificant charges against Harriet, such as her love for dress and
+her waning interest in Latin lessons, and set over against them the six
+times repeated name of Cornelia Turner, that fascinating young married
+woman who read Petrarch with Shelley and sat up all hours of the night
+with him--because he saw visions when he was alone!  Again, in his 'Joan
+of Arc', Mark Twain erected a monument of enduring beauty to that simple
+maid of Orleans, to whom the Roman Catholic Church has just now paid the
+merited yet tardy tribute of canonization.  It is a sad commentary upon
+the popular attitude of frivolity towards the professional humorist that
+Mark Twain felt compelled to publish this book anonymously, in order
+that the truth and beauty of that magic story might receive its just
+meed of respectful and sympathetic attention.
+
+The third act for which I have always felt deeply grateful to Mark Twain
+is the apparently little known, yet beautiful and significant story
+entitled 'Was it Heaven or Hell?'  It contains, I believe, the moral
+that had most meaning for Mark Twain throughout his entire life--the
+bankruptcy of rigidly formal Puritanism in the face of erring human
+nature, the tragic result of heedlessly holding to the letter, instead
+of wisely conforming to the spirit, of moral law.  No one doubts that
+Mark Twain--as who would not?--believed, aye, knew, that this sweet,
+human child went to a heaven of forgiveness and mercy, not to a hell of
+fire and brimstone, for her innocently trivial transgression.  The essay
+on Harriet Shelley, the novel of 'Joan of Arc', and the story 'Was it
+Heaven or Hell?' are all, as decisively as the philippic against King
+Leopold, the diatribe against the Czar of Russia, essential vindications
+of the moral principle.  'Was it Heaven or Hell?'  in its simple pathos,
+'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' in its morally salutary irony,
+present vital evidence of that same transvaluation of current moral
+values which marks the age of Nietzsche and Ibsen, of Tolstoy and Shaw.
+In that amusing, naive biography of her father, little Susy admits that
+he could make exceedingly bright jokes and could be extremely amusing;
+but she maintains that he was more interested in earnest books and
+earnest conversation than in humorous ones.  She pronounced him to be as
+much of a Pholosopher (sic) as anything.  And she hazards the opinion
+that he might have done a great deal in this direction if only he had
+studied when he was a boy!
+
+Years ago, Mark Twain wrote a book which he called 'An Extract from
+Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'.  For long he desisted from
+publishing it because of his fear that its outspoken frankness would
+appear irreverent and shock the sensibilities of the public.  While his
+villa of “Stormfield” was in course of erection several years ago, he
+discovered that half of it was going to cost what he had expected to
+pay for the whole house.  His heart was set on having a loggia or
+sun-parlour; and when it seemed that he would have to sacrifice this
+apple of his eye through lack of funds, he threw discretion to the winds,
+hauled out Captain Stormfield and made the old tar pay the piper.  His
+fears as to its reception were wholly unwarranted; for it was generously
+enjoyed for its shrewd and vastly suggestive ideas on religion and heaven
+as popularly taught nowadays from the pulpits.  This book is full of a
+keen and bluff common sense, cannily expressed in the words of an old
+sea-captain whom Mark Twain had known intimately.  It is only another
+link in the chain of evidence which goes to prove that Mark Twain had
+thought long and deeply upon the problematical nature of a future life.
+It is, in essence, a _reductio ad absurdum_ of those professors of
+religion who still preach a heaven of golden streets and pearly gates, of
+idleness and everlasting psalm-singing, of restful and innocuous bliss.
+Mark Twain wanted to point out the absurdity of taking the allegories and
+the figurative language of the Bible literally.  Of course everybody
+called for a harp and a halo as soon as they reached heaven.  They were
+given the harps and halos--indeed nothing harmless and reasonable was
+refused them.  But they found these things the merest accessories.  Mark
+Twain's heaven was just the busiest place imaginable. There weren't any
+idle people there after the first day.  The old sea captain pointed out
+that singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity was all
+very pretty when you heard about it from the pulpit, but that it was a
+mighty poor way to put in valuable time. He took no stock in a heaven of
+warbling ignoramuses.  He found that Eternal Rest, reduced to hard pan,
+was not as comforting as it sounds in the pulpit.  Heaven is the merited
+reward of service; and the opportunities for service were infinite.  As
+he said, you've got to earn a thing square and honest before you can
+enjoy it.  To Mark, this was “about the sensiblest heaven” he had ever
+heard of.  He mourned a little over the discovery that what a man mostly
+missed in heaven was company. But he rejoiced in the information
+vouchsafed by his friend the Captain--a valuable piece of information
+that leaves him, and all who are so fortunate as to hear it, the better
+for the knowledge--that happiness isn't a thing in itself, but only a
+contrast with something that isn't pleasant!  This view of heaven, seen
+through the temperament of a humorist and a philosopher, is provocative
+and thought-compelling more than it is amusing or ludicrous.  I think it
+inspired Bernard Shaw's Aerial Foot-ball which won Collier's thousand
+dollar prize--a prize which Mr Shaw hurled back with indignation and
+scorn!
+
+Mark Twain was a great humorist--more genial than grim, more
+good-humoured than ironic, more given to imaginative exaggeration than to
+intellectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than to melancholy.
+He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the
+literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their
+likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and
+picaresque romance.  He was a remarkable observer and faithful reporter,
+never allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be “frightened by the
+venerableness of the institution”; and his sublimated journalism reveals
+a mastery of the naively comic thoroughly human and democratic.  He is
+the most eminent product of our American democracy, and, in profoundly
+shocking Great Britain by preferring Connecticut to Camelot, he exhibited
+that robustness of outlook, that buoyancy of spirit, and that faith in
+the contemporary which stamps America in perennial and inexhaustible
+youth.  Throughout his long life, he has been a factor of high ethical
+influence in our civilization, and the philosopher and the humanitarian
+look out through the twinkling eyes of the humorist.
+
+And yet, after all, Mark Twain's supreme title to distinction as a great
+writer inheres in his natural, if not wholly conscious, mastery in that
+highest sphere of thought, embracing religion, philosophy, morality and
+even humour, which we call sociology.  When I first advanced this view,
+it was taken up on all sides.  Here, we were told, was Mark Twain “from
+a new angle”; the essay was reviewed at length on the continent of
+Europe; and the author of the essay was invited “to explain Mark Twain
+to the German public”!  There are still many people, however, who resent
+any demonstration that Mark Twain was anything more than a mirthful and
+humorous entertainer.  Mr. Bernard Shaw once remarked to me, in support
+of the view here outlined, that he regarded Poe and Mark Twain as
+America's greatest achievements in literature, and that he thought of
+Mark Twain primarily, not as humorist, but as sociologist.  “Of course,”
+ he added, “Mark Twain is in much the same position as myself: he has to
+put matters in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang
+him, believe he is joking.”
+
+Mark Twain once said that whenever he had diverged from custom and
+principle to utter a truth, the rule had been that the hearer hadn't
+strength of mind enough to believe it.  “Custom is a petrifaction,” he
+asserted; “nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.”  Mr. W.
+D. Howells has advanced the somewhat fanciful theory that “the ludicrous
+incongruity of a slave-holding democracy nurtured upon the Declaration
+of Independence, and the comical spectacle of white labour owning black
+labour, had something to do in quickening (in Mark Twain) the sense of
+contrast which is the mountain of humour or is said to be so.”  However
+that may be, Mark Twain was irresistibly driven to the conclusion,
+Southern born though he was, that slavery was unjust, inhuman, and
+indefensible.  The advanced thinkers in the South had reached this
+conclusion long before the beginning of the Civil War, and many Southern
+men had actually devised freedom to their slaves in their wills.  The
+slaves were treated humanely, their material wants were cared for by
+their owners with a care that can only be called loving, and their
+spiritual welfare was the frequent concern in particular of the mistress
+of the house.
+
+In his schoolboy days, Mark Twain had no aversion to slavery.  He wasn't
+even aware that there was anything wrong about it.  He never heard it
+condemned by acquaintances or in the local papers.  And as for the
+preachers, they taught that God approved slavery, and cited Biblical
+passages in support of that view.  If the slaves themselves were averse
+to it, at least they kept discreetly silent on the subject.  He seldom
+saw a slave misused--on the farm, never.  But when he was brought face
+to face with Sandy, the little slave forcibly separated from his family,
+it made a deep impression upon his consciousness.  It was this
+deplorable evil of the system, this unnatural and inhuman forcible
+separation of the members of the same family, the one from the other,
+that convinced him of the injustice of slavery; though this vision, as
+has been pointed out by Mr. Howells, did not come to him “till after his
+liberation from neighbourhood in the vaster far West.”  Yet it found its
+way into his books--into Huckleberry Finn, with its recital of Jim's
+pathetic longing to buy back his wife and children; and in Pudd'nhead
+Wilson with its moving picture of the poor slave's agony when she
+suddenly realizes in the way the water is flowing around the snag that
+she is being “sold down the river.”  In Uncle Tom's Cabin, as Professor
+Phelps has pointed out, “the red--hot indignation of the author largely
+nullified her evident desire to tell the truth. . . .  Mrs. Stowe's
+astonishing work is not really the history of slavery; it is the history
+of abolition sentiment.  .  .  .  Mark Twain shows us the beautiful side
+of slavery--for it had a wonderfully beautiful, patriarchal side--and he
+also shows us the horror of it.”  Mark Twain has declared that the only
+way to write a great novel is to learn the scenes and people with which
+the story is concerned, through years of “unconscious absorption” of the
+facts of the life to be portrayed.  When his stories were written,
+slavery was a thing of the past--he was competent to judge of the
+situation impartially, through direct personal contact throughout his
+boyhood with the realities of slavery.  His object was not the object of
+the reformer, warped with prejudice and fired by animosity.  He saw
+clearly; for his aim was not polemic, but artistic.  Hence it is, I
+believe, that Mark Twain stands out as, in essence and in fundamentals,
+a remarkable sociologist.  Certain passages in his books on the subject
+of slavery, as the historian Lecky has declared, are the truest things
+that have ever been expressed on the subject which vexed a continent and
+plunged a nation in bloody, fratricidal strife.
+
+Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi always call up to my mind
+the most vivid pictures--pictures that are eternally unforgettable.  The
+memorable scene in which Colonel Sherburne quells the mob and his
+scathing remarks upon lynching; the reality and the pathos of the feuds
+of those Kentucky families, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords,
+shooting each other down at sight in vindication of honour and pride of
+race; the lordly life of the pilot on the Mississippi, his violent and
+unchallenged sway over his subordinates, his mastery of the river; the
+variegated colours of that lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of
+the river--all these sweep by us in a series of panoramic pictures as
+Huck's raft swings lazily down the tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides
+his boat through the dangers of the channel.  Mark Twain is primarily a
+great artist, only unconsciously a true sociologist.  But his power as a
+sociologist is no less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely
+more real and human and verisimilar that it is not polemical.  There is
+a “sort of contemporaneous posterity” which has registered its verdict
+that Mark Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era.  But there
+is yet to come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare
+say, class Mark Twain as America's greatest, most human sociologist in
+letters.  He is the historian, the historian in art, of a varied and
+unique phase of civilization on the American continent that has passed
+forever.  And it is inconceivable that any future investigator into the
+sociological phases of that civilization can fail to find priceless and
+unparalleled documents in the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane,
+boisterous yet universally human writings of Mark Twain.
+
+Mark Twain's genius of social comprehension and sociologic
+interpretation went even deeper than this.  His mastery lay not alone in
+penetrative reflection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase
+of our civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an “institution”
+ blotted from the American escutcheon and a collective racial passion
+that periodically breaks forth from time to time in mad “carnivals of
+crime.”  The defining quality of the true sociologist, that quality
+which gives his profession its power and validity as an effective
+instrumentality in the advancement of civilization, is the faculty of
+penetrating national and racial disguises, and going directly to the
+heart of the human problem.  Mark Twain possessed this faculty in
+supreme degree.  As a literary critic he was banal and futile; but as
+a social and racial critic he was remarkable and profound. His essay
+'Concerning the Jews' is a masterpiece of impartial interpretation; his
+comprehension of French and German racial traits, as revealed in his
+works, is keen and pervasively pertinent; and his magnificent analysis
+of the situation in South Africa, in the concluding chapters of
+'Following the Equator', rings clear with the accents of truth and
+mounts almost to the dignity of public prophecy.  Deeper far, more
+comprehensive, and voiced with splendid courage, are Mark Twain's
+interpretations of American democracy and his mirroring of the national
+ideals.  His “defence” of General Funston is a scorching and devastating
+blast, red with the fires of patriotism.  Whatever be one's convictions,
+one cannot but respect the profound sincerity of Mark Twain's
+berserker-like rage over the attitude of Europe in China, the barbarities
+of Russian autocracy, and the horrors of America's methods in the
+Philippines, copied after Weyler's _reconcentrado_ policy in Cuba. His
+study of Christian Science, despite its hyperbole, its gross
+exaggerations and unfulfilled prophecies, is the expression of glorified
+common-sense, a sociological study of religious fanaticism comprehensive
+in psychological analysis of national and racial traits.
+
+In his own works, Mark Twain brought to realization the dim and inchoate
+fancies of Whitman; in his own person he realized that “divine average”
+ of common life which is the dream of American democracy.  'The Prince
+and the Pauper' is a beautiful child's tale, vivid in narrative and rich
+in human interest.  It is something deeper far than this; for the very
+crucial motive of the story, the successful substitution of the commoner
+for the king, transforms it into a symbolic legend of democracy and the
+equality of man.  Mark Twain vehemently approved the French revolution,
+and frankly expressed his regret over Napoleon's failure to invade
+England and thus destroy the last vestiges of the semi-feudal
+paraphernalia of the British monarchy.  Despite its note of Yankee
+blatancy, 'A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur' is a remarkable brief
+for democracy and the brotherhood of man.  So eminent a publicist as Mr.
+William T. Stead pronounced it, at the time of its first appearance, one
+of the most significant books of our time; and classed it (with Henry
+George's 'Progress and Poverty' and Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward')
+as the third great book from America to give tremendous impetus to the
+social democratic movement of the age.  Mark Twain abandoned all hope of
+a future life; found more of sorrow than of joy in life's balances; and
+even, in his latter years, lost faith in humanity itself.  But amid the
+wreck of faiths and creeds, he achieved the strange paradox of American
+optimism: he never lost faith in democracy, and fought valiantly to the
+end in behalf of equality and the welfare of the average man.
+
+Several years ago, when we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship,
+Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early
+eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club
+to which he belonged.  This club was composed chiefly of men whose
+deepest interests were concerned with the theological and the
+religiously orthodox.  One of his friends, to whom he read this paper
+in advance, solemnly warned him not to read it before the club.  For he
+felt confident that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt as to
+the existence of free will, and declaring without hesitation that every
+man was under the immitigable compulsion of his temperament, his
+training, and his environment, would appear unspeakably shocking,
+heretical and blasphemous to the orthodox members of that club.  “I did
+not read that paper,” Mr. Clemens said to me, “but I put it away,
+resolved to let it stand the corrosive test of time.  Every now and
+then, when it occurred to me, I used to take that paper out and read it,
+to compare its views with my own later views.  From time to time I added
+something to it.  But I never found, during that quarter of a century,
+that my views had altered in the slightest degree.  I had a few copies
+published not long ago; but there is not the slightest evidence in the
+book to indicate its authorship.”  A few days later he gave me a copy,
+and when I read that book, I found these words, among others, in the
+prefatory note:
+
+“Every thought in them (these papers) has been thought (and accepted as
+unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed,
+kept private.  Why did they not speak out?  Because they dreaded (and
+could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them.  Why have I
+not published?  The same reason has restrained me, I think.  I can find
+no other.”
+
+'What is Man?'  propounds at length, through the medium of a dialogue
+between a Young Man and an Old Man, the doctrine that “Beliefs are
+acquirements; temperaments are born.  Beliefs are subject to change;
+nothing whatever can change temperament.”  He enunciates the theory,
+which seems to me both brilliant and original, that there can be no such
+person as a permanent seeker after truth.
+
+“When he found the truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth,
+with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he
+tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors.”  “All training,” he
+avers, “is one form or another of outside influences, and association is
+the largest part of it.  A man is never anything but what his outside
+influences have made him.  They train him downward or they train him
+upward--but they train him; they are at work upon him all the time.”
+ Once asked by Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to write another
+story about Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain replied that he had a notion of
+writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him to
+high honour, and in the other bringing him to the gallows.  When Kipling
+protested vigorously against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer
+was real, Mark Twain replied with the fatalistic doctrine of 'What is
+Man?': “Oh, he is real.  He's all the boy that I have known or
+recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book--because,
+when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education
+avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man.
+Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer's life, and
+gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him.  He
+would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an
+angel.”  It was what he called Kismet.
+
+It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the
+days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all
+faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal
+God.  And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or
+theology, atheism or agnosticism, the individual or the nation embraced,
+the human race remained “indestructibly content, happy, thankful,
+proud.”  He never had a tinge of pessimism in his make-up, his beliefs
+never tended to warp his nature, he accepted his fatalism gladly because
+he saw in it supreme truth.  His ultimate philosophy of life, which he
+sums up in 'What is Man?', is healthy and right-minded.  It is best
+embodied in the lofty injunction: “Diligently train your ideals upward
+and still upward towards a summit where you will find your chiefest
+pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer
+benefits upon your neighbour and the community.”  Lassalle once said:
+“History forgives mistakes and failures, but not want of conviction.”
+ In Mark Twain, posterity will never be called upon to forgive any want
+of conviction.
+
+
+
+
+
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diff --git a/6873-0.zip b/6873-0.zip
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      MARK TWAIN, by Archibald Henderson
+    </title>
+    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+    <style type="text/css">
+    <!--
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .indent5   { margin-left: 5%;}
+    .indent10  { margin-left: 10%;}
+    .indent15  { margin-left: 15%;}
+    .indent20  { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .indent30  { margin-left: 30%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 100%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    .side      { float: left; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
+               border-left: dashed thin; text-align: left;
+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
+    p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
+    span.dropcap         { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 1 }
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+    -->
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+    <h2>
+      MARK TWAIN, by Archibald Henderson
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, by Archibald Henderson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Mark Twain
+
+Author: Archibald Henderson
+
+Release Date: July 14, 2004 [EBook #6873]
+Last Updated: February 24, 2018
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+ <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+
+
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="titlepage.jpg (62K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="frontpiece.jpg (54K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      MARK TWAIN
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      By Archibald Henderson<br /><br /> With Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <i> &ldquo;Haply&mdash;who knows?&mdash;somewhere<br /> In Avalon, Isle of
+          Dreams,<br /> In vast contentment at last,<br /> With every grief done
+          away,<br /> While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait,<br /> And Moliere hangs
+          on his words,<br /> And Cervantes not far off<br /> Listens and smiles
+          apart,<br /> With that incomparable drawl<br /> He is jesting with
+          Dagonet now.&rdquo;</i>
+          <p>
+            BLISS CARMAN.
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are to-day, all over the world, men and women and children who owe a
+      debt of almost personal gratitude to Mark Twain for the joy of his humour
+      and the charm of his personality. In the future they will, I doubt not,
+      seek and welcome opportunities to acknowledge that debt. My own experience
+      with the works of Mark Twain is in no sense exceptional. From the days of
+      early childhood, my feeling for Mark Twain, derived first solely from
+      acquaintance with his works, was a feeling of warm and, as it were,
+      personal affection. With limitless interest and curiosity, I used to hear
+      the Uncle Remus stories from the lips of one of our old family servants, a
+      negro to whom I was devotedly attached. These stories were narrated to me
+      in the negro dialect with such perfect naturalness and racial gusto that I
+      often secretly wondered if the narrator were not Uncle Remus himself in
+      disguise. I was thus cunningly prepared, &ldquo;coached&rdquo; shall I say, for the
+      maturer charms of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. With Uncle Remus and
+      Mark Twain as my preceptors, I spent the days of my youth&mdash;excitedly
+      alternating, spell-bound, between the inexhaustible attractions of Tom,
+      Huck, Jim, Indian Joe, the Duke and the Dauphin, and their compeers on the
+      one hand; and Brer Rabbit, Sis Cow, and a thousand other fantastic, but
+      very real creatures of the animal kingdom on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt a strange sort of camaraderie, of personal attachment, for Mark
+      Twain during all the years before I came into personal contact with him.
+      It was the dictum of a distinguished English critic, to the effect that
+      Huckleberry Finn was a literary masterpiece, which first awoke in me, then
+      a mere boy, a genuine respect for literary criticism; for here was
+      expressed an opinion which I had long secretly cherished, but somehow
+      never dared to utter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My personal association with Mr. Clemens, comparatively brief though it
+      was&mdash;an ocean voyage, meetings here and there, a brief stay as a
+      guest in his home&mdash;gave me at last the justification for paying the
+      debt which, with the years, had grown greater and more insistently
+      obligatory. I felt both relief and pleasure when he authorized me to pay
+      that debt by writing an interpretation of his life and work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is an appreciation originating in the heart of one who loved Mark
+      Twain's works for a generation before he ever met Samuel L. Clemens. It is
+      an interpretation springing from the conviction that Mark Twain was a
+      great American who comprehensively incorporated and realized his own
+      country and his own age as no American has so completely done before him;
+      a supreme humorist who ever wore the panache of youth, gaiety, and
+      bonhomie; a brilliant wit who never dipped his darts in the poison of
+      cynicism, misanthropy, or despair; constitutionally a reformer who,
+      heedless of self, boldly struck for the right as he saw it; a philosopher
+      and sociologist who intuitively understood the secret springs of human
+      motive and impulse, and empirically demonstrated that intuition in works
+      which crossed frontiers, survived translation, and went straight to the
+      human, beneath the disguise of the racial; a genius who lived to know and
+      enjoy the happy rewards of his own fame; a great man who saw life steadily
+      and saw it whole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      LONDON, August 5, 1910.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      NOTE.&mdash;The author esteems himself in the highest degree fortunate in
+      having the co-operation of Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn. All the
+      illustrations, both autochrome and monochrome, are the work of Mr. Coburn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      CONTENTS
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          I.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#introductory">INTRODUCTORY</a><br />
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          II.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#man">THE MAN</a><br />
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          III.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#humorist">THE HUMORIST</a><br />
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          IV.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#genius">WORLD-FAMED GENIUS</a><br />
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          V.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#philosopher">PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST</a>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          <i> &ldquo;I've a theory that every author, while living, has a projection
+          of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant
+          places, and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never
+          knew him in the flesh. When the author dies, this phantom fades away,
+          not caring to continue business at the old stand. Then the dead writer
+          lives only in the impression made by his literature; this impression
+          may grow sharper or fainter according to the fashions and new
+          conditions of the time.&rdquo;</i>
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Letter of THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH to WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS of date
+          December 23, 1901.
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="pp003.jpg (29K)" src="images/pp003.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="introductory" id="introductory">INTRODUCTORY</a>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the past, the attitude of the average American toward Mark Twain has
+      been most characteristically expressed in a sort of complacent and
+      chuckling satisfaction. There was pride in the thought that America, the
+      colossal, had produced a superman of humour. The national vanity was
+      touched when the nations of the world rocked and roared with laughter over
+      the comically primitive barbarisms of the funny man from the &ldquo;Wild and
+      Woolly West.&rdquo; Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an international comedian
+      magically evoking the laughter of a world. It would be a mis-statement to
+      affirm that the works of Mark Twain were reckoned as falling within the
+      charmed circle of &ldquo;Literature.&rdquo; They were not reckoned in connexion with
+      literature at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fingers of one hand number those who realized in Mark Twain one of the
+      supreme geniuses of our age. Even in the event of his death, when the
+      flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown emptily wide, there is
+      room for grave doubt whether a realization of the unique and incomparable
+      position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters has fully dawned upon
+      the American consciousness. The literatures of England and Europe do not
+      posit an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive crudity and
+      apparently unstudied frankness as the work of Mark Twain. It is for
+      American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic, and to
+      demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great artist. It
+      would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain's appeal to posterity depends
+      upon the dicta of literary criticism. It would be absurd to deny that upon
+      America rests the task of demonstrating, to a world willing enough to be
+      convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the supreme and imperishable glories
+      of American literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can
+      be attributed what a Frenchman would call <i>mondial ecla</i> is
+      surprisingly few. It was not so many years ago that Rudyard Kipling, with
+      vigorous, imperialistic note, won for himself the unquestioned title of
+      militant spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon race. That fame has suffered
+      eclipse in the passage of time. To-day, Bernard Shaw has a fame more
+      world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the British Isles.
+      His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from Buda-Pesth to
+      Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to Buenos Ayres.
+      Recently Zola, Ibsen and, Tolstoy constituted the literary hierarchy of
+      the world&mdash;according to popular verdict. Since Zola and Ibsen have
+      passed from the scene, Tolstoy experts unchallenged the profoundest
+      influence upon the thought and consciousness of the world. This is an
+      influence streaming less from his works than from his life, less from his
+      intellect than from his conscience. The <i>literati</i> bemoan the artist
+      of an epoch prior to 'What is Art?' The whole world pays tribute to the
+      passionate integrity of Tolstoy's moral aspiration.
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          [While this book was going through the press, news has come of the
+          death of Tolstoy.]
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most widely
+      read and most genuinely popular author in the world. In a sense not easily
+      misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the minds and hearts of the great
+      mass of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if measured in
+      terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is without a
+      parallel. The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the defiant
+      opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends many an
+      inviolable canon of European taste. With all his incandescent wit and
+      comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon the upper
+      strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is perpetually
+      standing in the light of the serious reformer. Tolstoy's works are
+      Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet his literary
+      fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the magnificent futility
+      of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal mysticism of his
+      unrealizable hopes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal, it
+      is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour. That
+      eidolon of which Aldrich speaks&mdash;a compact of good humour, robust
+      sanity, and large-minded humanity&mdash;has diligently &ldquo;gone about in near
+      and distant places,&rdquo; everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk
+      of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh. The
+      French have a way of speaking of an author's public as if it were a select
+      and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a country like
+      France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects, there is some
+      reason for the phraseology. In reality, the author appeals to many
+      different &ldquo;publics&rdquo; or classes of readers&mdash;in proportion to the
+      many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the catholicity of his
+      tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a boy to the power of the
+      great human book, warm with the actuality of experience and the life-blood
+      of the heart. By humorous inversion, he points the sound moral and
+      vivifies the right principle for the youth to whom the dawning
+      consciousness of morality is the first real psychological discovery of
+      life. With hearty laughter at the stupid irritations of self-conscious
+      virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid Puritanism of mechanical
+      morality, Mark Twain enraptures that innumerable company of the
+      sophisticated who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a &ldquo;good
+      example&rdquo; and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With
+      splendid satire for the base, with shrill condemnation for tyranny and
+      oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the equivocal, the fraudulent, and
+      the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the growing body of reformers in all
+      countries who would remedy the ills of democratic government with the
+      knife of publicity. The wisdom of human experience and of sagacious
+      tolerance informing his books for the young, provokes the question whether
+      these books are not more apposite to the tastes of experienced age than to
+      the fancies of callow youth. The navvy may rejoice in 'Life on the
+      Mississippi'. Youth and age may share without jealousy the abounding fun
+      and primitive naturalness of 'Huckleberry Finn'. True lovers of adventure
+      may revel in the masterly narrative of 'Tom Sawyer'. The artist may bestow
+      his critical meed of approval upon the beauty of 'Joan of Arc'. The
+      moralist may heartily validate the ethical lesson of 'The Man that
+      Corrupted Hadleyburg'. Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible
+      explosions of laughter to the horse-play of 'Roughing It', the colossal
+      extravagance of 'The Innocents Abroad', the irreverence and iconoclasm of
+      that Yankee intruder into the hallowed confines of Camelot. All may
+      rejoice in the spontaneity and refreshment of truth; spiritually
+      co-operate in forthright condemnation of fraud, peculation, and sham; and
+      breathe gladly the fresh and bracing air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom.
+      The stevedore on the dock, the motor-man on the street car, the newsboy on
+      the street, the riverman on the Mississippi&mdash;all speak with exuberant
+      affection in memory of that quaint figure in his white suit, his ruddy
+      face shining through wreaths of tobacco smoke and surmounted by a great
+      halo of silvery hair. In one day, as Mark Twain was fond of relating, an
+      emperor and a <i>portie</i> vied with each other in tributes of admiration
+      and esteem for this man and his works. It is Mark Twain's imperishable
+      glory, not simply that his name is the most familiar of that of any author
+      who has lived in our own times, but that it is remembered with infinite
+      irrepressible zest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We think of Mark Twain not as other celebrities, but as the man whom we
+      knew and loved,&rdquo; said Dr. Van Dyke in his Memorial Address. &ldquo;We remember
+      the realities which made his life worth while, the strong and natural
+      manhood that was in him, the depth and tenderness of his affections, his
+      laughing enmity to all shams and pretences, his long and faithful witness
+      to honesty and fair-dealing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those who know the story of Mark Twain's career know how bravely he faced
+      hardships and misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet a debt
+      of conscience, following the injunction of the New Testament, to provide
+      not only things honest, but things 'honourable in the sight of all men.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those who know the story of his friendships and his family life know that
+      he was one who loved much and faithfully, even unto the end. Those who
+      know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and irrepressible
+      humour which was his gift, there was a foundation of serious thoughts and
+      noble affections and desires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour
+      means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the
+      unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world
+      which must seem humorous even to the highest mind. Of these the Bible
+      says: 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall hold
+      them in derision.' But the mark of this higher humour is that it does not
+      laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only at the
+      false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his
+      humour was infallible; but we say without doubt that he used his gift, not
+      for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work is clean and wholesome.
+      He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world's false claimants
+      out of court, and entangled many of the world's false witnesses in the net
+      of ridicule. In his best books and stories, coloured with his own
+      experiences, he touched the absurdities of life with penetrating, but not
+      unkindly, mockery, and made us feel somehow the infinite pathos of life's
+      realities. No one can say that he ever failed to reverence the purity, the
+      frank, joyful, genuine nature of the little children, of whom Christ said,
+      'Of such is the kingdom of heaven.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud. We
+      are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of the
+      great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left such
+      an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own sake
+      that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust, happy in
+      the fuller light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Rest after toil, port after stormy seas,<br /> Death after life doth
+      greatly please.&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          <i> &ldquo;'We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime&mdash;the
+          thin air stifles'&mdash;I have forgotten who said it. We cannot flush
+          always with the high ardour of the signers of the Declaration, nor
+          remain at the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry continually,
+          'O Beautiful! My country!' Yet, in the long dull interspans between
+          these sacred moments we need some one to remind us that we are a
+          nation. For in the dead vast and middle of the years insidious foes
+          are lurking&mdash;anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan decadencies, the
+          egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the cold sickening of
+          the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant fraud and corruption.
+          When our countrymen migrate because we have no kings or castles, we
+          are thankful to any one who will tell us what we can count on. When
+          they complain that our soil lacks the humanity essential to great
+          literature, we are grateful even for the firing of a national joke
+          heard round the world. And when Mark Twain, robust, big-hearted,
+          gifted with the divine power to use words, makes us all laugh
+          together, builds true romances with prairie fire and Western clay, and
+          shows us that we are at one on all the main points, we feel that he
+          has been appointed by Providence to see to it that the precious
+          ordinary self of the Republic shall suffer no harm.&rdquo;</i>
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          STUART P. SHERMAN: &ldquo;MARK TWAIN.&rdquo; The Nation, May 12, 1910.
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="pp015.jpg (53K)" src="images/pp015.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      <a name="man" id="man">THE MAN</a>
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      American literature, indeed I might say American life, can exhibit no
+      example of supreme success from the humblest beginnings, so signal as the
+      example of Mark Twain. Lincoln became President of the United States, as
+      did Grant and Johnson. But assassination began for Lincoln an apotheosis
+      which has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and adulation. Grant
+      was one of the great failures in American public life; and Johnson,
+      brilliant but unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment. Mark Twain enjoys
+      the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a
+      deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and
+      spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his career. From the
+      standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of Mark Twain from a
+      journeyman printer to a great author, from a merry-andrew to a
+      world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy navigator on the vast
+      and uncharted seas of human experience, may be taken as symbolic of the
+      romance of American life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sort of mock&mdash;pride, Clemens referred at times to the
+      ancestral glories of his house&mdash;the judge who condemned Charles I.,
+      and all those other notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed lustre
+      upon the name of Clemens. Yet he claimed that he had not examined into
+      these traditions, chiefly because &ldquo;I was so busy polishing up this end of
+      the line and trying to make it showy.&rdquo; His mother, a &ldquo;Lambton with a p,&rdquo;
+       of Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, a man of
+      determination and force, in Lexington, in 1823; but neither was endowed
+      with means, and their life was of the simplest. From Jamestown, in the
+      mountain solitudes of East Tennessee, they removed in 1829, much as Judge
+      Hawkins is said to have done in 'The Gilded Age', settling at Florida,
+      Missouri. Here was born, on November 30, 1835, a few months after their
+      arrival, Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Long afterwards he stated that he had
+      increased by one per cent. the population of this village of one hundred
+      inhabitants, thereby doing more than the best man in history had ever done
+      for any other town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although weak and sickly, the child did not suffer from the hard life, and
+      survived two other children, Margaret and Benjamin. At different times his
+      life was in danger, the local doctor always coming to the rescue. He once
+      asked his mother, after she had reached old age, if she hadn't been uneasy
+      about him. She admitted she had been uneasy about him the whole time. But
+      when he inquired further if she was afraid he would not live, she answered
+      after a reflective pause&mdash;as if thinking out the facts&mdash;that she
+      had been afraid he would!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother of Samuel E. Moffett, the
+      writer; and his brother Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was
+      intimately associated with him in life and found a place in his writings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the unpromising life of Florida
+      and removed to Hannibal, Missouri. He was a stern, unbending man, a lawyer
+      by profession, a merchant by vocation; after his removal to Hannibal he
+      became a Justice of the Peace, an office he filled with all the dignity of
+      a local autocrat. His forum was a &ldquo;dingy&rdquo; office, furnished with &ldquo;a
+      dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a puncheon bench.&rdquo; The
+      solemnity of his manner in administering the law won for him, among his
+      neighbours, the title of Judge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One need but recall the scenes in which Tom Sawyer was born and bred to
+      realize in its actuality the model from which these scenes were drawn.
+      &ldquo;Sam was always a good-hearted boy,&rdquo; his mother once remarked, &ldquo;but he was
+      a very wild and mischievous one, and, do what we would, we could never
+      make him go to school. This used to trouble his father and me dreadfully,
+      and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much in the world
+      as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and sober-minded as
+      they were.&rdquo; At school, he &ldquo;excelled only in spelling&rdquo;; outside of school
+      he was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn, mischievous and
+      prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity afforded. &ldquo;Often his
+      father would start him off to school,&rdquo; his mother once said, &ldquo;and in a
+      little while would follow him to ascertain his whereabouts. There was a
+      large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and Sam would take his position
+      behind that, and as his father went past would gradually circle around it
+      in such a way as to keep out of sight. Finally, his father and the teacher
+      both said it was of no use to try to teach Sam anything, because he was
+      determined not to learn. But I never gave up. He was always a great boy
+      for history, and could never get tired of that kind of reading; but he
+      hadn't any use for schoolhouses and text books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a &ldquo;loafing, out-at-elbows,
+      down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi river town.&rdquo; Young Clemens
+      accepted the institution of slavery as a matter of course, for his father
+      was a slave-owner; and his mother's wedding dowry consisted in part of two
+      or three slaves. Judge Clemens was a very austere man; like so many other
+      slave-holders, he silently abhorred slavery. To his children, especially
+      to Sam, as well as to his slaves, he was, however, a stern taskmaster.
+      Mark Twain has described the terms on which he and his father lived as a
+      sort of armed neutrality. If at times this neutrality was broken and
+      suffering ensued, the breaking and the suffering were always divided up
+      with strict impartiality between them&mdash;his father doing the breaking
+      and he the suffering! Sam claimed to be a very backward, cautious,
+      unadventurous boy. But this modest estimate is subject to modification
+      when we learn that once he jumped off a two-story stable; another time he
+      gave an elephant a plug of tobacco, and retired without waiting for an
+      answer; and still another time he pretended to be talking in his sleep,
+      and got off a portion of every original conundrum in hearing of his
+      father. He begs the curious not to pry into the result&mdash;as it was of
+      no consequence to any one but himself!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cave, so graphically described in Tom Sawyer, was one of Sam's
+      favourite haunts; and his first sweetheart was Laura Hawkins, the Becky
+      Thatcher of Tom's admiration. &ldquo;Sam was always up to some mischief,&rdquo; this
+      lady once remarked in later life, when in reminiscential mood. &ldquo;We
+      attended Sunday-school together, and they had a system of rewards for
+      saying verses after committing them to memory. A blue ticket was given for
+      ten verses, a red ticket for ten blue, a yellow for ten red, and a Bible
+      for ten yellow tickets. If you will count up, you will see it makes a
+      Bible for ten thousand verses. Sam came up one day with his ten yellow
+      tickets, and everybody knew he had not said a verse, but had just got them
+      by trading with the boys. But he received his Bible with all the serious
+      air of a diligent student!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain, save when in humorous vein, has never pretended that his
+      success was due to any marvellous qualities of mind, any indefatigable
+      industry, any innate energy and perseverance. I have good reason to recall
+      his favourite theory, which he was fond of expounding, to the effect that
+      circumstance is man's master. He likened circumstance to the attraction of
+      gravity; and declared that while it is man's privilege to argue with
+      circumstance, as it is the honourable privilege of the falling body to
+      argue with the attraction of gravity, it does no good: man has to obey.
+      Circumstance has as its working partner man's temperament, his natural
+      disposition. Temperament is not the creation of man, but an innate
+      quality; over it he has no authority; for its acts he cannot be held
+      responsible. It cannot be permanently changed or even modified. No power
+      can keep it modified. For it is inherent and enduring, as unchanging as
+      the lines upon the thumb or the conformation of the skull. Throughout his
+      life, circumstance seemed like a watchful spirit, switching his
+      temperament into those channels of experience and development leading
+      unerringly to the career of the author.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The death of Judge Clemens was the first link in the long chain of
+      circumstance&mdash;for his son was at once taken from school and
+      apprenticed to the editor and proprietor of the Hannibal Courier. He was
+      allowed the usual emolument of the office apprentice, &ldquo;board and clothes,
+      but no money&rdquo;; and even at that, though the board was paid, the clothes
+      rarely materialized. Several weeks later his brother Orion returned to
+      Hannibal, and in 1850 brought out a little paper called the 'Hannibal
+      Journal.' He took Sam out of the Courier office and engaged him for the
+      Journal at $3.50 a week&mdash;though he was never able to pay a cent of
+      the wages. One of Mark's fellow-townsmen once confessed: &ldquo;Yes, I knew him
+      when he was a boy. He was a printer's devil&mdash;I think that's what they
+      called him&mdash;and they didn't miss it.&rdquo; At a banquet some years ago,
+      Mark Twain aptly described at length his experiences as a printer's
+      apprentice. There were a thousand and one menial services he was called
+      upon to perform. If the subscribers paid at all, it was only sometimes&mdash;and
+      then the town subscribers paid in groceries, the country subscribers in
+      cabbages and cordwood. If they paid, they were puffed in the paper; and if
+      the editor forgot to insert the puff, the subscriber stopped the paper!
+      Every subscriber regarded himself as assistant editor, ex officio; gave
+      orders as to how the paper was to be edited, supplied it with opinions,
+      and directed its policy. Of course, every time the editor failed to follow
+      his suggestions, he revenged himself by stopping the paper!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After some financial stress, the paper was moved into the Clemens home, a
+      &ldquo;two-story brick&rdquo;; and here for several years it managed to worry along,
+      spasmodically hovering between life and death. Life was easy with the
+      editors of that paper; for if they pied a form, they suspended until the
+      next week. They always suspended anyhow, every now and then, when the
+      fishing was good; and always fell back upon the illness of the editor as a
+      convenient excuse, Mark admitted that this was a paltry excuse, for the
+      all-sufficing reason that a paper of that sort was just as well off with a
+      sick editor as a well one, and better off with a dead one than with either
+      of them. At the age of fifteen he considered himself a skilled journeyman
+      printer; and his faculty for comedic portrayal had already betrayed itself
+      in occasional clumsy efforts. In 'My First Literary Venture', he narrates
+      his experiences, amongst others how greatly he increased the circulation
+      of the paper, and incensed the &ldquo;inveterate woman-killer,&rdquo; whose poetry for
+      that week's paper read, &ldquo;To Mary in H&mdash;l&rdquo; (Hannibal). Mark added a
+      &ldquo;snappy foot&mdash;note&rdquo; at the bottom, in which he agreed to let the
+      thing pass, for just that once; but distinctly warning Mr. J. Gordon
+      Runnels that the paper had a character to sustain, and that in future,
+      when Mr. Runnels wanted to commune with his friends in h&mdash;l, he must
+      select some other medium for that communication! Many were the humorous
+      skits, crudely illustrated with cuts made from wooden blocks hacked out
+      with his jack-knife, which the mischievous young &ldquo;devil&rdquo; inserted in his
+      brother's paper. Here we may discern the first spontaneous outcroppings of
+      the genuine humorist. &ldquo;It was on this paper, the 'Hannibal Journal',&rdquo; says
+      his biographer, Mr. Albert B. Paine, &ldquo;that young Sam Clemens began his
+      writings&mdash;burlesques, as a rule, of local characters and conditions&mdash;usually
+      published in his brother's absence, generally resulting in trouble on his
+      return. Yet they made the paper sell, and if Orion had but realized his
+      possession he might have turned his brother's talent into capital even
+      then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening in 1858, the boy, consumed with wanderlust, asked his mother
+      for five dollars&mdash;to start on his travels. He failed to receive the
+      money, but he defiantly announced that he would go &ldquo;anyhow.&rdquo; He had
+      managed to save a tiny sum, and that night he disappeared and fled to St
+      Louis. There he worked in the composing-room of the Evening News for a
+      time, and then started out &ldquo;to see the world&rdquo;&mdash;New York, where a
+      little World's Fair was in progress. He was somewhat better off than was
+      Benjamin Franklin when he entered Philadelphia&mdash;for he had two or
+      three dollars in pocket-change, and a ten-dollar bank-bill concealed in
+      the lining of his coat. For a time he sweltered in a villainous mechanics'
+      boarding-house in Duane Street, and worked at starvation wages in the
+      printing-office of Gray &amp; Green. Being recognized one day by a man
+      from Hannibal, he fled to Philadelphia where he worked for some months as
+      a &ldquo;sub&rdquo; on the 'Inquirer' and the 'Public Ledger'. Next came a flying trip
+      to Washington &ldquo;to see the sights there,&rdquo; and then back he went to the
+      Mississippi Valley. This journey to the &ldquo;vague and fabled East&rdquo; really
+      opened his eyes to the great possibilities that the world has in store for
+      the traveller.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, Orion had gone to Muscatine, Ohio, and acquired a small interest
+      there; and, after his marriage, he and his wife went to Keokuk and started
+      a little job printing-office. Here Sam worked with his brother until the
+      winter of 1856-7, when circumstance once again played the part of good
+      fairy. As he was walking along the street one snowy evening, his attention
+      was attracted by a piece of paper which the wind had blown against the
+      wall. It proved to be a fifty-dollar bill; and after advertising for the
+      owner for four days, he stealthily moved to Cincinnati in order &ldquo;to take
+      that money out of danger.&rdquo; Now comes the second crucial event in his life!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For long the ambition for river life had remained with him&mdash;and now
+      there seemed some possibility of realizing these ambitions. He first
+      wanted to be a cabin boy; then his ideal was to be a deck hand, because of
+      his splendid conspicuousness as he stood on the end of the stage plank
+      with a coil of rope in his hand. But these were only day-dreams&mdash;he
+      didn't admit, even to himself, that they were anything more than heavenly
+      impossibilities. But as he worked during the winter in the printing-office
+      of Wrightson &amp; Company of Cincinnati, he whiled away his leisure hours
+      reading Lieutenant Herndon's account of his explorations of the Amazon,
+      and became greatly interested in his description of the cocoa industry.
+      Now he set to work to map out a new and thrilling career. The expedition
+      sent out by the government to explore the Amazon had encountered
+      difficulties and left unfinished the exploration of the country about the
+      head-waters, thousands of miles from the mouth of the river. It mattered
+      not to him that New Orleans was fifteen hundred miles away from
+      Cincinnati, and that he had only thirty dollars left. His mind was made up
+      he would go on and complete the work of exploration. So in April, 1857, he
+      set sail for New Orleans on an ancient tub, called the Paul Jones. For the
+      paltry sum of sixteen dollars, he was enabled to revel in the unimagined
+      glories of the main saloon. At last he was under way&mdash;realizing his
+      boyhood dream, unable to contain himself for joy. At last he saw himself
+      as that hero of his boyish fancy&mdash;a traveller.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he reached New Orleans, after the prolonged ecstasy of two weeks on a
+      tiny Mississippi steamer, he discovered that no ship was leaving for Para,
+      that there never had been one leaving for Para and that there probably
+      would not be one leaving for Para that century. A policeman made him,
+      move, on, threatening to run him in if he ever caught him reflecting in
+      the public street again. Just as his money failed him, his old friend
+      circumstance arrived, with another turning-point in his life&mdash;a new
+      link. On his way down the river he had met Horace Bixby; he turned to him
+      in this hour of need. It has been charged against Mark Twain that he was
+      deplorably lazy&mdash;apocryphal anecdotes are still narrated with much
+      gusto to prove it. Think of a lazy boy undertaking the stupendous task of
+      learning to know the intricate and treacherous secrets of the great river,
+      to know every foot of the route in the dark as well as he knew his own
+      face in the glass! And yet he confesses that he was unaware of the
+      immensity of the undertaking upon which he had embarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In 1852,&rdquo; says Bixby, &ldquo;I was chief pilot on the 'Paul Jones', a boat that
+      made occasional trips from Pittsburg to New Orleans. One day a tall,
+      angular, hoosier-like young fellow, whose limbs appeared to be fastened
+      with leather hinges, entered the pilot-house, and in a peculiar, drawling
+      voice, said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Good mawnin, sir. Don't you want to take er piert young fellow and teach
+      'im how to be er pilot?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'No sir; there is more bother about it than it's worth.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I wish you would, mister. I'm er printer by trade, but it don't 'pear to
+      'gree with me, and I'm on my way to Central America for my health. I
+      believe I'll make a tolerable good pilot, 'cause I like the river.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'What makes you pull your words that way?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I don't know, mister; you'll have to ask my Ma. She pulls hern too.
+      Ain't there some way that we can fix it, so that you'll teach me how to be
+      er pilot?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'The only way is for money.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'How much are you going to charge?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Well, I'll teach you the river for $500.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Gee whillikens! he! he! I ain't got $500, but I've got five lots in
+      Keokuk, Iowa, and 2000 acres of land in Tennessee that is worth two bits
+      an acre any time. You can have that if you want it.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told him I did not care for his land, and after a while he agreed to
+      pay $100 in cash (borrowed from his brother-in-law, William A. Moffett, of
+      Virginia), $150 in twelve months, and the balance when he became a pilot.
+      He was with me for a long time, but sometimes took occasional trips with
+      other pilots.&rdquo; And he significantly adds &ldquo;He was always drawling out dry
+      jokes, but then we did not pay any attention to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It cannot be thought accidental that Sam Clemens became a pilot. Bixby
+      became his mentor, the pilot-house his recitation-room, the steamboat his
+      university, the great river the field of knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that stupendous course in nature's own college, he &ldquo;learned the river&rdquo;
+       as schoolboy seldom masters his Greek or his mathematics. With the naive
+      assurance of youth, he gaily enters upon the task of &ldquo;learning&rdquo; some
+      twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi. Long
+      afterwards, he confessed that had he really known what he was about to
+      require of his faculties, he would never have had the courage to begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His comic sketches, published in the 'Hannibal Weekly Courier' in his
+      brother's absence, furnish the first link, his apprenticeship to Bixby the
+      second link in the chain of circumstance. For two years and a half he
+      sailed the river as a master pilot; his trustworthiness secured for him
+      the command of some of the best boats on the river, and he was so skilful
+      that he never met disaster on any of his trips. He narrowly escaped it in
+      1861, for when Louisiana seceded, his boat was drafted into the
+      Confederate service. As he reached St. Louis, having taken passage for
+      home, a shell came whizzing by and carried off part of the pilot-house. It
+      was the end of an era: the Civil War had begun. The occupation of the
+      pilot was gone; but the river had given up to him all of its secrets. He
+      was to show them to a world, in 'Life on the Mississippi' and 'Huckleberry
+      Finn'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of the derivation of the famous <i>nom de guerr</i> has often
+      been narrated-and as often erroneously. As the steamboat approaches a
+      sandbank, snag, or other obstruction, the man at the bow heaves the lead
+      and sings out, &ldquo;By the mark, three,&rdquo; &ldquo;Mark twain,&rdquo; etc.-meaning three
+      fathoms deep, two fathoms, and so on. The thought of adopting Mark Twain
+      as a <i>nom de guerr</i> was not original with Clemens; but the world owes
+      him a debt of gratitude for making forever famous a name that, but for
+      him, would have been forever lost. &ldquo;There was a man, Captain Isaiah
+      Sellers, who furnished river news for the New Orleans Picayune, still one
+      of the best papers in the South,&rdquo; Mr. Clemens once confessed to Professor
+      Wm. L. Phelps. &ldquo;He used to sign his articles Mark Twain. He died in 1863.
+      I liked the name, and stole it. I think I have done him no wrong, for I
+      seem to have made this name somewhat generally known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The inglorious escapade of his military career, at which he himself has
+      poked unspeakable fun, and for which not even his most enthusiastic
+      biographers have any excuse, was soon ended. Had his heart really been
+      enlisted on the side of the South, he would doubtless have stayed at his
+      post. In reality, he was at that time lacking in conviction; and in after
+      life he became a thorough Unionist and Abolitionist. In the summer of
+      1861, Governor Jackson of Missouri called for fifty thousand volunteers to
+      drive out the Union forces. While visiting in the small town where his
+      boyhood had been spent, Hannibal, Marion County, young Clemens and some of
+      his friends met together in a secret place one night, and formed
+      themselves into a military company. The spirited but untrained Tom Lyman
+      was made captain; and in lieu of a first lieutenant&mdash;strange
+      omission!&mdash;young Clemens was made second lieutenant. These fifteen
+      hardy souls proudly dubbed themselves the Marion Rangers. No one thought
+      of finding fault with such a name&mdash;it sounded too well. All were full
+      of notions as high-flown as the name of their company. One of their
+      number, named Dunlap, was ashamed of his name, because it had a plebeian
+      sound to his ear. So he solved the difficulty and gratified his
+      aristocratic ambitions by writing it d'Unlap. This may serve as a sample
+      of the stuff of which the company was made. Dunlap was by no means
+      useless; for he invented hifalutin names for the camps, and generally
+      succeeded in proposing a name that was, as his companions agreed, &ldquo;no
+      slouch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no real organization, nobody obeyed orders, there was never a
+      battle. They retreated, according to the tale of the humorist, at every
+      sign of the enemy. In truth, this little band had plenty of stomach for
+      fighting, despite its loose organization; and quite a number fought all
+      through the war. Mark Twain is doubtless correct in the main, in his
+      assertion that he has not given an unfair picture of the conditions
+      prevailing in many of the militia camps in the first months of the war
+      between the states. The men were raw and unseasoned, and even the leaders
+      were lacking in the rudiments of military training and discipline. The
+      situation was strange and unprecedented, the terrors were none the less
+      real that they were imaginary. As Mark says, it took an actual collision
+      with the enemy on the field of battle to change them from rabbits into
+      soldiers. Young Clemens, according to his nephew's account, was first
+      detailed to special duty on the river because of his knowledge acquired as
+      a pilot; it was not long before he was captured and paroled. Again he was
+      captured, this time sent to St. Louis, and imprisoned there in a tobacco
+      warehouse. Fearing recognition and tragic consequences, perhaps
+      courtmartial and death, should he, during the formalities of exchange, be
+      recognized by the command in Grant's army which first captured him, he
+      made his escape, abandoned the cause which he afterwards spoke of as &ldquo;the
+      rebellion,&rdquo; and went west as secretary to his brother Orion, lately
+      appointed Territorial Secretary of Nevada by the President.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very credible and interesting biography of Mark Twain might be compiled
+      from his own works; and Roughing it is full of autobiography of a coloured
+      sort, though in the main correct. His joy in the prospect of that trip,
+      the exciting details of the long journey, are all narrated with gusto and
+      fine effect. In the &ldquo;unique sinecure&rdquo; of the office of private secretary,
+      he found he had nothing to do and no salary; so after a short time&mdash;the
+      fear of being recognized by Union soldiers and shot for breaking his
+      parole still haunting him&mdash;he, and a companion, went off together on
+      a fishing jaunt to Lake Tahoe. Everywhere he saw fortunes made in a
+      moment. He fell a prey to the prevailing excitement and went mad like all
+      the rest. Little wonder over the wild talk, when cartloads of solid silver
+      bricks as large as pigs of lead were passing by every day before their
+      very eyes. The wild talk grew more frenzied from day to day. And young
+      Clemens yielded to no one in enthusiasm and excitement. For vividness or
+      picturesqueness of expression none could vie with him. With three
+      companions, he began &ldquo;prospecting,&rdquo; with the most indifferent success; and
+      soon tiring of their situation, they moved on down to Esmeralda (now
+      Aurora), on the other side of Carson City. Here new life seemed to inspire
+      the party. What mattered it if they were in debt to the butcher&mdash;for
+      did they not own thirty thousand feet apiece in the &ldquo;richest mines on
+      earth&rdquo;! Who cared if their credit was not good with the grocer, so long as
+      they revelled in mountains of fictitious wealth and raved in the frenzied
+      cant of the hour over their immediate prospect of fabulous riches! But at
+      last the practical necessities of living put a sudden damper on their
+      enthusiasm. Clemens was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to work
+      as a common labourer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board&mdash;after
+      flour had soared to a dollar a pound and the rate on borrowed money had
+      gone to eight per cent. a month. This work was very exhausting, and after
+      a week Clemens asked his employer for an advance of wages. The employer
+      replied that he was paying Clemens ten dollars a week, and thought that
+      all he was worth. How much did he want? When Clemens replied that four
+      hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was all he could reasonably
+      ask, considering the hard times, he was ordered off the premises! In after
+      days, Mark only regretted that, in view of the arduous labours he had
+      performed in that mill, he had not asked seven hundred thousand for his
+      services!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time, Mark and his friend Higbie established their claim to a
+      mine, became mad with excitement, and indulged in the wildest dreams for
+      the future. Under the laws of the district, work of a certain character
+      must be done upon the claim within ten days after location in order to
+      establish the right of possession. Mark was called away to the bedside of
+      a sick friend, Higbie failed to receive Mark's note, and the work was
+      never done&mdash;each thinking it was being properly attended to by the
+      other. On their return, they discovered that their claim was &ldquo;re-located,&rdquo;
+       and that millions had slipped from their grasp! The very stars in their
+      courses seemed to fight to force young Clemens into literature. Had Samuel
+      Clemens become a millionaire at this time, it is virtually certain that
+      there would have been no Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After one day more of heartless prospecting, Clemens &ldquo;dropped in&rdquo; at the
+      wayside post-office. It was the hour of fate! A letter awaited him there.
+      We cannot call it accident&mdash;it was the result of forces and events
+      which had long been converging toward this end. Samuel Clemens began his
+      career as an itinerant, tramping &ldquo;jour&rdquo; printer. He wrote for the papers
+      on which he served as printer; and he actually read the matter he set up
+      in type. By observation on his travels, by study of the writing of others,
+      Clemens acquired information, knowledge of life, and ingenuity of
+      expression. He hadn't served his ten&mdash;years' apprenticeship as a
+      printer for nothing. In the process of setting up tons of good and bad
+      literature, he had learned&mdash;half unconsciously&mdash;to appraise and
+      to discriminate. In the same half-unconscious way, he was actually gaining
+      some inkling of the niceties of style. After he began &ldquo;learning the
+      river,&rdquo; Clemens once wrote a funny sketch about Captain Sellers which made
+      a genuine &ldquo;hit&rdquo; with the officers on the boat. The sketch fell into the
+      hands of the &ldquo;river-editor&rdquo; of the 'St. Louis Republican', found a place
+      in that journal, and was widely copied throughout the West. On the
+      strength of it, Clemens became a sort of river reporter, and from time to
+      time published memoranda and comic squibs in the 'Republican'. That
+      passion which a French critic has characterized as distinctively American,
+      the passion for &ldquo;seeing yourself in print,&rdquo; still burned in Clemens, even
+      during all the hardships of prospecting and milling. At intervals he sent
+      from the mining regions of &ldquo;Washoe,&rdquo; as all that part of Nevada was then
+      called, humorous letters signed &ldquo;Josh&rdquo; to the 'Daily Territorial
+      Enterprise' of Virginia City, at that time one of the most progressive and
+      wide&mdash;awake newspapers in the West.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fateful letter which I have mentioned, contained an offer to Clemens
+      from the proprietor of the 'Enterprise', of the position of city editor,
+      at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. To Clemens at this time, this
+      offer came as a perfect godsend. Twenty-five dollars a week was nothing
+      short of wealth, luxury. His enthusiasm oozed away when he reflected over
+      his ignorance and incompetence; and he gloomily recalled his repeated
+      failures. But necessity faced him; and opportunity knocks but once at
+      every door. His doubts were speedily resolved; and he afterwards confessed
+      that, had he been offered at that time a salary to translate the Talmud
+      from the original Hebrew, he would unhesitatingly have accepted, despite
+      some natural misgivings, and have tried to throw as much variety into it
+      as he could for the money. It was to fill a vacancy, caused by the absence
+      of Dan De Quille, the regular reporter, on a visit to &ldquo;the States,&rdquo; that
+      Clemens was offered this position; but he retained it after De Quille
+      returned. &ldquo;Mark and I had our hands full,&rdquo; relates De Quille, &ldquo;and no
+      grass grew under our feet. There was a constant rush of startling events;
+      they came tumbling over one another as though playing at leap-frog. While
+      a stage robbery was being written up, a shooting affray started; and
+      perhaps before the pistol shots had ceased to echo among the surrounding
+      hills, the firebells were banging out an alarm.&rdquo; A record of the
+      variegated duties of these two, found in an old copy of the Territorial
+      Enterprise of 1863, bears the unmistakable hallmarks of Mark Twain. &ldquo;Our
+      duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning murders and
+      street fights, and balls and theatres, and pack-trains, and churches, and
+      lectures, and school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway
+      robberies, and Bible societies, and hay wagons, and the thousand other
+      things which it is within the province of local reporters to keep track of
+      and magnify into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a
+      great daily newspaper. Beyond this revelation everything connected with
+      these two experiments of Providence must for ever remain an impenetrable
+      mystery.&rdquo; An admirable picture of Mark Twain on his native heath, in the
+      latter part of 1863, is given by Edward Peron Hingston, author of The
+      Genial Showman, in the introduction to the English edition of The
+      Innocents Abroad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fame of the Western humorist had already reached the ears of Hingston;
+      and as soon as he reached Virginia City, he went to the office of the
+      'Territorial Enterprise' and asked to be presented to Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he heard his name called by some one, Clemens called out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pass the gentleman into my den. The noble animal is here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The noble animal proved to be &ldquo;a young man, strongly built, ruddy in
+      complexion, his hair of a sunny hue, his eyes light and twinkling, in
+      manner hearty, and nothing of the student about him&mdash;one who looked
+      as if he could take his own part in a quarrel, strike a smart blow as
+      readily as he could say a telling thing, bluffly jolly, brusquely cordial,
+      off-handedly good-natured.&rdquo; The picture is detailed and vivid:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;Let it be borne in mind that from the windows of the newspaper office
+          the American desert was visible; that within a radius of ten miles
+          Indians were encamping amongst the sage&mdash;brush; that the whole
+          city was populated with miners, adventurers, Jew traders, gamblers,
+          and all the rough-and-tumble class which a mining town in a new
+          territory collects together, and it will be readily understood that a
+          reporter for a daily paper in such a place must neither go about his
+          duties wearing light kid gloves, nor be fastidious about having gilt
+          edges to his note-books. In Mark Twain I found the very man I had
+          expected to see&mdash;a flower of the wilderness, tinged with the
+          colour of the soil, the man of thought and the man of action rolled
+          into one, humorist and hard-worker, Momus in a felt hat and
+          jack-boots. In the reporter of the 'Territorial Enterprise' I became
+          introduced to a Californian celebrity, rich in eccentricities of
+          thought, lively in fancy, quaint in remark, whose residence upon the
+          fringe of civilization had allowed his humour to develop without
+          restraint, and his speech to be rarely idiomatic.&rdquo;
+         </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Under the influence of the example of the proprietors of the 'Enterprise',
+      strict stylistic disciplinarians of the Dana school of journalism, Clemens
+      learned the advantages of the crisp, direct style which characterizes his
+      writing. As a reporter, he was really industrious in matters that met his
+      fancy; but &ldquo;cast-iron items&rdquo;&mdash;for he hated facts and figures
+      requiring absolute accuracy&mdash;got from him only &ldquo;a lick and a
+      promise.&rdquo; He was much interested in Tom Fitch's effort to establish a
+      literary journal, 'The Weekly Occidental'. Daggett's opening chapters of a
+      wonderful story, of which Fitch, Mrs Fitch, J. T. Goodman, Dan De Quille,
+      and Clemens were to write successive instalments, gave that paper the <i>coup
+      de grace</i> in its very first issue. Of this wonderful novel, at the close
+      of each instalment of which the &ldquo;hero was left in a position of such peril
+      that it seemed impossible he could be rescued, except through means and
+      wisdom more than human&rdquo;; of the Bohemian days of the &ldquo;Visigoths,&rdquo;&mdash;Clemens,
+      De Quille, Frank May, Louis Aldrich, and their confreres; of the practical
+      jokes played on each other, particularly the incident of the imitation
+      meerschaum (&ldquo;mere sham&rdquo;) pipe, solemnly presented to Clemens by Steve
+      Gillis, C. A. V. Putnam, D. E. M'Carthy, De Quille and others&mdash;all
+      these belong to the fascinating domain of the biographer. When Clemens was
+      sent down to Carson City to report the meetings of the first Nevada
+      Legislature, he began for the first time to sign his letters &ldquo;Mark Twain.&rdquo;
+       In his Autobiography he has explained that his function as a legislative
+      correspondent was to dispense compliment and censure with impartial
+      justice. As his disquisitions covered about half a page each morning in
+      the Enterprise, it is easy to understand that he was an &ldquo;influence.&rdquo;
+       Questioned by Carlyle Smith in regard to his choice of &ldquo;Mark Twain,&rdquo; Mr.
+      Clemens replied: &ldquo;I chose my pseudonym because to nine hundred and
+      ninety-nine persons out of a thousand it had no meaning, and also because
+      it was short. I was a reporter in the Legislature at the time, and I
+      wished to save the Legislature time. It was much shorter to say in their
+      debates&mdash;for I was certain to be the occasion of some questions of
+      privilege&mdash;'Mark Twain' than 'the unprincipled and lying
+      Parliamentary Reporter of the 'Territorial Enterprise'.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Already his name was known the whole length of the Pacific Coast; the
+      Enterprise published many things from his pen which gave him local, and
+      afterwards national, fame; such sketches as 'The Undertaker's Chat', 'The
+      Petrified Man' and 'The Marvellous Bloody Massacre' had attracted
+      favourable and wide notice east of the Rocky Mountains. But his career in
+      Carson City came to a sudden close when he challenged the editor of the
+      Virginia Union to a duel, the bloodless conclusion of which is narrated in
+      the Autobiography. But even a challenge to a duel was against the new law
+      of Nevada; and obeying the warning of Governor North, the duellists
+      crossed the border without ceremony, and stood not upon the order of their
+      going.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While Mark Twain was still with the Enterprise, he was in the habit of
+      reserving all his &ldquo;sketches&rdquo; for the San Francisco newspapers, the 'Golden
+      Era' and the 'Morning Call'. He now turns his steps to that storied city
+      of &ldquo;Frisco,&rdquo; and was not long in extending his fame on that coast. He was
+      incorrigibly lazy, as George Barnes, the editor of the Call, soon
+      discovered; and Kipling was told when he was in San Francisco that Mark
+      was in the habit of coiling himself into a heap and meditating until the
+      last minute, when he would produce copy having no relationship to the
+      subject of his assignment&mdash;&ldquo;which made the editor swear horribly, and
+      the readers of 'The Call' ask for more.&rdquo; His love for practical joking
+      during the California days brought him unpopularity; and one reads in a
+      San Francisco paper of the early days: &ldquo;There have been moments in the
+      lives of various kind-hearted and respectable citizens of California and
+      Nevada, when, if Mark Twain were before them as members of a vigilance
+      committee for any mild crime, such as mule-stealing or arson, it is to be
+      feared his shrift would have been short. What a dramatic picture the idea
+      conjures up, to be sure! Mark, before these honest men, infuriated by his
+      practical jokes, trying to show them what an innocent creature he was when
+      it came to mules, or how the only policy of fire insurance he held had
+      lapsed, how void of guile he was in any direction, and all with that
+      inimitable drawl, that perplexed countenance and peculiar scraping of the
+      left foot, like a boy speaking his first piece at school.&rdquo; If he just
+      escaped disaster, he likewise just escaped millions; on one occasion, for
+      the space of a few moments, he owned the famous Comstock Lode, which was,
+      though he never suspected it, worth millions. His trunkful of securities,
+      which were eminently saleable at one time, proved to be of fictitious
+      value when &ldquo;the bottom dropped out&rdquo; of the Nevada boom; and that silver
+      mine, which he was commissioned to sell in New York, was finally sold for
+      three million dollars! It was, as Mark says, the blind lead over again.
+      Mark Twain had the true Midas touch; but the mine of riches he was
+      destined to discover was a mine, not of gold or silver, but the mine of
+      intellect and rich human experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To The 'Golden Era', Mark Twain, like Prentice Mulford and Joaquin Miller,
+      contributed freely; and after a time he became associated with Bret Harte
+      on 'The Californian', Harte as editor at twenty dollars a week, and Mark
+      receiving twelve dollars for an article. Here forgathered that group of
+      brilliant writers of the Pacific Slope, numbering Bret Harte, Mark Twain,
+      Charles Warren Stoddard, Charles Henry Webb, and Prentice Mulford among
+      its celebrities; two of that remarkable coterie were soon destined to
+      achieve world-wide fame. &ldquo;These ingenuous young men, with the fatuity of
+      gifted people,&rdquo; says Mr. Howells, &ldquo;had established a literary newspaper in
+      San Francisco, and they brilliantly co-operated in its early extinction.&rdquo;
+       Of his first meeting with Mark Twain, Bret Harte has left a memorable
+      picture:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and
+          even the aquiline eye&mdash;an eye so eagle-like that a second lid
+          would not have surprised me&mdash;of an unusual and dominant nature.
+          His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, and
+          his general manner was one of supreme indifference to surroundings and
+          circumstances. Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam Clemens, and remarked
+          that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number of newspaper
+          articles contributed over the signature of 'Mark Twain.'&rdquo;
+         </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Mark tired of the life of literary drudgery in San Francisco&mdash;on one
+      occasion he was reduced to a solitary ten&mdash;cent piece; and General
+      John McComb wooed him back to journalism just as he was on the point of
+      returning to his old work on the Mississippi River, this time as a
+      Government pilot. During the earlier years in San Francisco, he was in the
+      habit of writing weekly letters to the 'Territorial Enterprise'&mdash;personals,
+      market-chat, and the like. But when he criticized the police department of
+      San Francisco in the most scathing terms, the officials &ldquo;found means for
+      bringing charges that made the author's presence there difficult and
+      comfortless.&rdquo; So he welcomed the opportunity to join Steve Gillis in a
+      pilgrimage to the mountain home of Jim Gillis, his brother&mdash;a &ldquo;sort
+      of Bohemian infirmary.&rdquo; Mark Twain revelled in the delightful company of
+      the original of Bret Harte's &ldquo;Truthful James,&rdquo; and he enjoyed the mining
+      methods of Jackass Hill, like the true Bohemian that he was. Soon after
+      his arrival, Mark and Jim Gillis started out in search of golden pockets.
+      As De Quille says:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;They soon found and spent some days in working up the undisturbed
+          trail of an undiscovered deposit, They were on the 'golden bee-line'
+          and stuck to it faithfully, though it was necessary to carry each
+          sample of dirt a considerable distance to a small stream in the bed of
+          a canon in order to wash it. However, Mark hungered and thirsted to
+          find a big rich pocket, and he pitched in after the manner of Joe
+          Bowers of old&mdash;just like a thousand of brick.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;Each step made sure by the finding of golden grains, they at last
+          came upon the pocket whence these grains had trailed out down the
+          slope of the mountain. It was a cold, dreary drizzling day when the
+          'home deposit' was found. The first sample of dirt carried to the
+          stream and washed out yielded only a few cents. Although the right
+          vein had been discovered, they had as yet found only the tail end of
+          the pocket.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;Returning to the vein, they dug a sample of the decomposed ore from a
+          new place, and were about to carry it down to the ravine and test it,
+          when the rain increased to a lively downpour.&rdquo;
+         </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Mark was chilled to the bone, and refused to carry another pail of water.
+      In slow, drawling tones he protested decisively:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable. Let's
+      go to the house and wait till it clears up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gillis was eager to test the sample he had just taken out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bring just one more pail, Sam,&rdquo; he urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won't do it, Jim!&rdquo; replied the now thoroughly disgusted Clemens. &ldquo;Not a
+      drop! Not if I knew there were a million dollars in that pan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Moved by Sam's dejected appearance&mdash;blue nose and humped back&mdash;and
+      realizing doubtless that it was futile to reason with him further, Jim
+      yielded and emptied the sacks of dirt just dug upon the ground. They now
+      started out for the nearest shelter, the hotel in Angel's Camp, kept by
+      Coon Drayton, formerly a Mississippi River pilot. Imagine the jests and
+      shouts that went around as Mark and Coon vied with each other in narrating
+      interesting experiences. For three days the rain and the stories held out;
+      and among those told by Drayton was a story of a frog. He narrated this
+      story with the utmost solemnity as a thing that had happened in Angel's
+      Camp in the spring of '49&mdash;the story of a frog trained by its owner
+      to become a wonderful jumper, but which failed to &ldquo;make good&rdquo; in a contest
+      because the owner of a rival frog, in order to secure the winning of the
+      wager, filled the trained frog full of shot during its owner's absence.
+      This story appealed irresistibly to Mark as a first-rate story told in a
+      first-rate way; he divined in it the magic quality unsuspected by the
+      narrator&mdash;universal humour. He made notes in order to remember the
+      story, and on his return to the Gillis' cabin, &ldquo;wrote it up.&rdquo; He wrote a
+      number of other things besides, all of which he valued above the frog
+      story; but Gillis thought it the best thing he had ever written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime the rain had washed off the surface soil from their last pan,
+      which they had left in their hurry. Some passing miners were astonished to
+      behold the ground glittering with gold; they appropriated it, but dared
+      not molest the deposit until the expiration of the thirty-day claim-notice
+      posted by Jim Gillis. They sat down to wait, hoping that the claimants
+      would not return. At the expiration of the thirty days, the claim-jumpers
+      took possession, and soon cleared out the pocket, which yielded twenty
+      thousand dollars. It was one of the most fortunate accidents in Mark
+      Twain's career. He came within one pail of water of comparative wealth;
+      but had he discovered that pocket, he would probably have settled down as
+      a pocketminer, and might have pounded quartz for the rest of his life. Had
+      his nerve held out a moment longer, he would never have gone to Angel's
+      Camp, would never have heard The Story of the Jumping Frog, and would have
+      escaped that sudden fame which this little story soon brought him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On his return to San Francisco, he dropped in one morning to see Bret
+      Harte, and told him this story. As Harte records:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself
+          irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and
+          half-unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the
+          original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came
+          in, and they asked him to write it for 'The Californian'. He did so,
+          and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work
+          of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the
+          Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was 'The Jumping Frog of
+          Calaveras.' It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever the
+          English language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to anyone in
+          print as it was to me, told for the first time, by the unknown Twain
+          himself, on that morning in the San Francisco Mint.&rdquo;
+         </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      When Artemus Ward passed through California on a literary tour in 1864,
+      Mark Twain regaled him&mdash;as he regaled all worthy acquaintances&mdash;with
+      his favourite story, 'The Jumping Frog'. Ward was delighted with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Write it out,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;give it all the necessary touches, and let me
+      use it in a volume of sketches I am preparing for the press. Just send it
+      to Carleton, my publisher, in New York.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It arrived too late for Ward's book, and Carleton presented it to Henry
+      Clapp, who published it in his paper, The Saturday Press of November 18,
+      1864. In his Autobiography, Mr. Clemens has narrated how 'The Jumping
+      Frog' put a quietus on 'The Saturday Press', and was immediately copied in
+      numerous newspapers in England and America. He was always proud of the
+      celebrity that story achieved; but he never sought to claim the credit for
+      himself. He freely admits that it was not Mark Twain, but the frog, that
+      became celebrated. The author, alas, remained in obscurity!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Carleton afterwards confessed that he had lost the chance of a life&mdash;time
+      by giving The Jumping Frog away; but Mark Twain's old friend, Charles
+      Henry Webb, came to the rescue and published it. About four thousand
+      copies were sold in three years; but the real fame of the story was in its
+      newspaper and magazine notoriety. In 1872 it was translated into the
+      'Revue des Deux Mondes'; and it was almost as widely read in England,
+      India, and Australia as it was in America.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime Mark Twain was still awaiting the rewards of journalism, and
+      doing literary hack work of one sort or another. In 1866 the proprietors
+      of the 'Sacramento Union' employed him to write a series of letters from
+      the Sandwich Islands. The purpose of these letters was to give an account
+      of the sugar industry. Mark told the story of sugar, but, as was his wont,
+      threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had nothing to do with sugar. It
+      was the extraneous matter, and not the sugar, that won him a wide audience
+      on the Pacific Coast. During these months of &ldquo;luxurious vagrancy&rdquo; he
+      described in the most vivid way many of the most notable features of the
+      Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such letters would at once have been embodied
+      in a volume. In his 'My Debut as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has
+      described in admirably graphic style his great &ldquo;scoop&rdquo; of the news of the
+      Hornet disaster; how Anson Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried
+      on a cot to the hospital, so that he could interview the half-dead
+      sailors. His bill&mdash;twenty dollars a week for general correspondence,
+      and one hundred dollars a column for the Hornet story&mdash;was paid with
+      all good will. On the strength of this story, he hoped to become a
+      &ldquo;Literary Person,&rdquo; and sent his account of the Hornet disaster to Harper's
+      Magazine, where it appeared in December, 1866. But alas! he could not give
+      the banquet he was going to give to celebrate his debut as a &ldquo;Literary
+      Person.&rdquo; He had not written the &ldquo;Mark Twain&rdquo; distinctly, and when it
+      appeared it had been transformed into &ldquo;Mike Swain&rdquo;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Mark returned to San Francisco, he resolved to follow the example of
+      Stoddard and Mulford, and &ldquo;enter the lecture field.&rdquo; The &ldquo;extraneous
+      matter&rdquo; in his letters to the Sacramento Union had made him &ldquo;notorious&rdquo;;
+      and, as he put it, &ldquo;San Francisco invited me to lecture.&rdquo; The historic
+      account of that lecture, in 'Roughing It', is found elsewhere in this
+      book. Noah Brooks, editor of the Alta California, who was present at this
+      lecture, has written the following graphic piece of description: &ldquo;Mark
+      Twain's method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel. His slow,
+      deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the
+      apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences, and, above
+      all, the surprise that spread over his face when the audience roared with
+      delight or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word-painting,
+      were unlike anything of the kind they had ever known. All this was
+      original; it was Mark Twain.&rdquo; Employing D. E. McCarthy as his agent, Mark
+      gave a number of lectures at various places on the Pacific Coast. From
+      this time forward we recognize in Mark Twain one of the supreme masters of
+      the art of lecturing in our time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In December, 1866, he set out for New York, preparatory to the grand tour
+      around the world. His own account of the circular describing the projected
+      trip is famous. He had proposed, for twelve hundred dollars in gold,&mdash;at
+      the rate of twenty dollars apiece, to write a series of letters for the
+      'Alta California'. Brooks, the editor, fortified the grave misgivings of
+      the proprietors over this proposition; but Colonel John McComb (then on
+      the editorial staff) argued vehemently for Mark, and turned the scale in
+      his favour. While Mark was in New York, he was urged by Frank Fuller, whom
+      he had known as Territorial Governor of Utah, to deliver a lecture&mdash;in
+      order to establish his reputation on the Atlantic coast. Fuller, an
+      enthusiastic admirer of Mark Twain, overcame all objections, and engaged
+      Cooper Union for the occasion. Though few tickets were sold, Fuller
+      cleverly succeeded in packing the hall by sending out a multitude of
+      complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of New York City and the
+      adjacent territory. That lecture proved to be a supreme success&mdash;Mark's
+      reputation as a lecturer on the Atlantic coast was assured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On June 10, 1867, the Quaker City set sail for its Oriental tour. It bore
+      on board a comparatively unknown person of the name of Clemens, who, in
+      applying for passage, represented himself to be a Baptist minister in
+      ill-health from San Francisco!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It brought back a celebrity, destined to become famous throughout the
+      world. Prior to sailing he arranged to contribute letters to the 'New York
+      Tribune' and the 'New York Herald', as well as to the 'Alta California'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His letters to the 'Alta California',&rdquo; says Noah Brooks, &ldquo;made him
+      famous. It was my business to prepare one of these letters for the Sunday
+      morning paper, taking the topmost letter from a goodly pile that was
+      stacked in a pigeon-hole of my desk. Clemens was an indefatigable
+      correspondent, and his last letter was slipped in at the bottom of a tall
+      stack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would not be quite accurate to say that Mark Twain's letters were the
+      talk of the town; but it was very rarely that readers of the paper did not
+      come into the office on Mondays to confide to the editors their admiration
+      of the writer, and their enjoyment of his weekly contributions. The
+      California newspapers copied these letters, with unanimous approval and
+      disregard of the copyrights of author and publisher.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the Western humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American
+      intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, which
+      caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public. It was a virgin field for
+      the humorous observer; Europe had not yet become the playground of
+      America. It was rather a <i>terra incognita</i>, regarded with a sort of
+      reverential ignorance by the average American tourist. By the range of his
+      humour, the pertinency of his observation, and the vigour of his
+      expression he awoke immediate attention. And he aroused a deeply
+      sympathetic response in the hearts of Americans by his manly and outspoken
+      expression&mdash;his respect for the worthy, the admirable, the
+      praiseworthy, his scorn and detestation for the spurious, the specious and
+      the fraudulent. In this book, for the first time, he strikes the key-note
+      of his life and thought, which sounds so clearly throughout all his later
+      works. It is the true beginning of his career.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On his return to the United States in November, he resumed his newspaper
+      work, this time at the National Capital. On his arrival there he found a
+      letter from Elisha Bliss, of the 'American Publishing Company', proposing
+      a volume recounting the adventures of the &ldquo;Excursion,&rdquo; to be elaborately
+      illustrated, and sold by subscription on a five per cent. royalty. He
+      eagerly accepted the offer and set to work on his notes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew Mark Twain in Washington,&rdquo; says Senator William M. Stewart of
+      Nevada, in his reminiscences 'A Senator of the Sixties', &ldquo;at a time when
+      he was without money. He told me his condition, and said he was very
+      anxious to get out his book. He showed me his notes, and I saw that they
+      would make a great book, and probably bring him in a fortune. I promised
+      that I would 'stake' him until he had the book written. I made him a clerk
+      to my committee in the senate, which paid him six dollars per day; then I
+      hired a man for one hundred dollars per month to do the work!&rdquo; His
+      mischievously extravagant description of Mark Twain at this time is
+      eminently worthy of record: &ldquo;He was arrayed in a seedy suit which hung upon
+      his lean frame in bunches, with no style worth mentioning. A sheaf of
+      scraggly, black hair leaked out of a battered, old, slouch hat, like
+      stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt,
+      very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He had a very
+      sinister appearance. He was a man I had known around the Nevada mining
+      camps several years before, and his name was Samuel L. Clemens.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was during this winter that Mark wrote a number of humorous articles
+      and sketches&mdash;'The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract', the
+      account of his resignation as clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology,
+      and 'Riley&mdash;Newspaper Correspondent'. His time was chiefly devoted to
+      preparing the material for his book; but finding Washington too
+      distracting, he returned to San Francisco and completed the manuscript
+      therein July, 1868. For a year the publication of the book was delayed, as
+      recorded in the Autobiography; but it finally appeared in print following
+      Mark's indignant telegram to Bliss that, if the book was not on sale in
+      twenty-four hours, he would bring suit for damages. Mark Twain records
+      that in nine months the book had taken the publishing house out of debt,
+      advanced its stock from twenty-five to two hundred, and left seventy
+      thousand dollars clear profit. Eighty-five thousand copies were sold
+      within sixteen months, the largest sale of a four dollar book ever
+      achieved in America in so short a time up to that date. It is, miraculous
+      to relate, still the leader in its own special field&mdash;a &ldquo;bestseller&rdquo;
+       for forty years!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The proprietors of the 'Alta California' were exceeding wroth when they
+      heard that Clemens was preparing for publication the very letters which
+      they had commissioned him to write and had printed in their own paper.
+      They prepared to publish a cheap paper-covered edition of the letters, and
+      sent the American Publishing Co. a challenge in the shape of an advance
+      notice of their publication. Clemens hurried back to San Francisco from
+      the East, and soon convinced the proprietors of the 'Alta California' of
+      the authenticity of his copyright. The paper-covered edition was then and
+      there abandoned forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before leaving the West to settle permanently in the East, Mark Twain was
+      associated for a short time with the 'Overland Monthly', edited by Bret
+      Harte. In his review of 'The Innocents Abroad', Harte asserted that
+      Clemens deserved &ldquo;to rank foremost among Western humorists&rdquo;; but he was
+      grievously disappointed in the first few contributions from Clemens to the
+      Overland Monthly&mdash;notably 'By Rail through France' (later
+      incorporated in The Innocents Abroad)&mdash;because of their perfect
+      gravity. At last, 'A Mediaeval Romance'&mdash;a story which has been said
+      to contain the germ of 'A Connecticut Yankee', because of its burlesque of
+      mediaevalism&mdash;won the enthusiastic approval of Bret Harte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this time forward, Samuel L. Clemens is seen in a new environment, in
+      association with new ideas and a new civilization. The history of this
+      second period does not fall within the scope of the present work. It has
+      just been narrated with brilliancy and charm by his close associate and
+      most intimate friend, Mr. William Dean Howells, in his admirable book 'My
+      Mark Twain'. In the subsequent portion of the present work attention will
+      be directed solely to those features of Mark Twain's life which have a
+      direct bearing upon his career as a man of letters, and which throw into
+      relief the progressive development of his genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The South and the West contributed to Mark Twain's development, and added
+      to his store of vital experience, in greater measure than all the other
+      influences of his life combined. From the inexhaustible well of those
+      experiences he drew ever fresh contributions for the satisfaction of the
+      world. His mind was stocked with the rich, crude ore of early experience&mdash;the
+      romance and the reality of a life full of prismatic variations of colour.
+      The civilization of the East, its culture and refinement, tempered the
+      genius of Mark Twain in conformity with the indispensable criteria of
+      classic art. Under the broadening influence of its persistent nationalism,
+      he became more deeply, more profoundly, imbued with the comprehensive
+      ideals of American democracy. He never lost the first fine virginal
+      spontaneity of his native style, never weakened in the vigour of his
+      thought or in the primitiveness of his expression. His contact with the
+      East compassed the liberation of that vast fund of stored&mdash;up early
+      experiences, acquired through grappling with life in many a rude
+      encounter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of its own life, the East never contributed to Mark Twain's works, in
+      any appreciably momentous way, either volume or immensity of fertile,
+      suggestive human experience. If we eliminate from the list of Mark Twain's
+      works those books which have their roots deep set in the soil of South and
+      West, we eliminate the most priceless assets of his art. Indeed, it may be
+      doubted whether, were those works struck from the catalogue of his
+      contributions, Mark Twain could justly rank as a great genius. To his
+      association with the South and the Southwest are due 'Tom Sawyer',
+      'Huckleberry Finn', 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', and 'Life on the Mississippi'.
+      'The Jumping Frog' and 'Roughing It' belong peculiarly to the West, and
+      even 'The Innocents Abroad' falls wholly within the period of Mark Twain's
+      influence by the West, its standards, outlook, and localized viewpoint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Colonel Mulberry Sellers is a veritably human type, the embodiment,
+      laughably lovable, of a temperamental phase of American character in the
+      course of the national development. But 'The Gilded Age' has long since
+      disappeared from that small but tremendously significant group of works
+      which are tentatively destined to rank as classics. Much as I enjoy the
+      satiric comedy of 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court', I have always felt
+      that it set before Europe an American type which is neither elevating nor
+      inspiring&mdash;nor national. It tends to the gratification of England and
+      Europe, even in the face of its democratic demolition of feudalistic
+      survival, by sealing a certain cheap type of vulgarity with the national
+      stamp. One must, nevertheless, confess with regret that this type is the
+      embodiment of an &ldquo;ideal&rdquo; still only too commonly cherished in America. The
+      national type, I take it, is found in such characters as Lincoln and
+      Phillips Brooks, in Lee and Henry W. Grady, in Charles W. Eliot and Edwin
+      A. Alderman, and not in a provincial 'Connecticut Yankee', jovial and
+      whole&mdash;hearted though he be. I say this without forgetting or
+      minimizing for a moment the art displayed in effecting the devastating and
+      illimitably humorous contrast of a present with a remotely past
+      civilization. 'Joan of Arc' has no local association, being a pure work of
+      the heart, the chivalric impulse of a noble spirit. 'The Man that
+      Corrupted Hadleyburg', viewed from any standpoint, is a masterpiece; but
+      its significance lies, not in the locality of its setting, but in the
+      universality of its moral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a word, it was the East which broadened and universalized the spirit of
+      Mark Twain. We shall see, later on, that it steadily fostered in him a
+      spirit of true nationalism and hardy democracy. But it was the South and
+      the West which lavishly gave him of their most priceless riches, and
+      thereby created in Mark Twain an unique and incomparable genius, the
+      veritable type and embodiment of their inalienably individual life and
+      civilization. This first phase of the life of Mark Twain has been so
+      strongly stressed here, because the first half of his life has always
+      seemed to me to have been a period of&mdash;shall I say?&mdash;God-appointed
+      preparation for the most significant and lastingly permanent work of the
+      latter half, namely, the narration of the incidents of early experience,
+      and the imaginative reminting of the gold of that experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One has only to read Mark Twain's works to learn the real history of his
+      life. There were momentous episodes in the latter half of his career; but
+      they were concerned with his life rather than with his art. We cannot,
+      indeed, say what or how profound is the effect of life and experience on
+      art. There was the happy marriage, the tragic losses of wife and children.
+      There were the associations with the culture and art circles of
+      America and Europe&mdash;New England, New York, Berlin, Vienna, London,
+      Glasgow; the academic degrees&mdash;Missouri, Yale; finally ancient Oxford
+      for the first time conferring the coveted honour of its degree upon a
+      humorist; the honours his own country delighted to bestow upon him. And
+      there too was that gallant struggle to pay off a tremendous debt, begun at
+      sixty&mdash;and accomplished one year sooner than he expected&mdash;after
+      the most spectacular and remarkable lecture tour in history. The beautiful
+      chivalric spirit of this great soul shone brightest in disaster. He
+      insisted that it was his wife who refused to compromise his debts for
+      forty cents on the dollar&mdash;that it was she who declared it must be
+      dollar for dollar; and when a fund was raised by his admirers to assist in
+      lightening his burden, that it was his wife who refused to accept it,
+      though he was willing enough to accept it as a welcome relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="pp065.jpg (82K)" src="images/pp065.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As an American, I can say nothing more significantly characteristic of the
+      man than that he was a good citizen. He possessed in the consciousness of
+      personal responsibility for the standards, government, and ideals of his
+      town, his city, and his country. Civic conscientiousness burned strong
+      within him; and he fought to develop and to maintain breadth of public
+      view and sanity of popular ideals. Blind patriotism was impossible for
+      this great American: he exposed the shallowness of popular enthusiasms and
+      the narrowness of rampant spread-eagleism, without regard for consequence
+      to himself or his popularity. What a tribute to his personality that,
+      instead of suffering, he gained in popularity by his honest and downright
+      outspokenness! He wielded the lash of his bitter scorn and fearful irony
+      upon the wrong-doer, the hypocrite, the fraud; and aroused public opinion
+      to impatience with public abuse, open offence, and official discourtesy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Samuel Langhorne Clemens impressed me as the most complete and human
+      individual I have ever known. He was not a great thinker; his views were
+      not &ldquo;advanced&rdquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glory of his temperament was its splendid sanity, balance, and
+      normality. The homeliest virtues of life were his: the republican virtue of
+      simplicity; the domestic virtue of, personal purity and passionately
+      simple regard for the sanctity of the marriage bond; the civic virtue of
+      public honesty; the business virtue of stainless private honour. Mark
+      Twain was one of the supreme literary geniuses of his time. But he was
+      something even more than this. He was not simply a great genius: he was a
+      great man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="pp069.jpg (50K)" src="images/pp069.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      <a name="humorist" id="humorist">THE HUMORIST</a>
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <blockquote>
+          <blockquote>
+            <p>
+              <i> &ldquo;Exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow; a joke can be so
+              big that it breaks the roof of the stars. By simply going on being
+              absurd, a thing can become godlike; there is but one step from the
+              ridiculous to the sublime.&rdquo;</i><br /> GILBERT K. CHESTERTON:
+              Charles Dickens.
+            </p>
+          </blockquote>
+        </blockquote>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not without wide significance in its bearing upon the general outlines of
+      contemporary literature is the circumstance that Mark Twain served his
+      apprenticeship to letters in the high school of journalism. Like his
+      contemporaries, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free play for
+      his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal for the
+      masses. Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective only when
+      he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece of his own
+      invention. Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native flavour of
+      his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more sophisticated
+      refinements of the purely literary. Mark Twain never lost the ruddy glow
+      of his first inspiration, and his style, to the very end, remained as it
+      began&mdash;journalistic, untamed, primitive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw, who like Mark Twain have achieved
+      comprehensive international reputations, have succeeded in preserving the
+      early vigour and telling directness acquired in journalistic
+      apprenticeship. It was by the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his
+      journalese that Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start. That
+      trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened
+      verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the new
+      journalism. &ldquo;The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are
+      'not for an age, but for all time,'&rdquo; says Bernard Shaw, &ldquo;has his reward in
+      being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes trying to
+      knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare peopling that
+      same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire hunts, Ibsen
+      photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a Norwegian parish,
+      Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as if she were a lady
+      living in the next street to him, are still alive and at home everywhere
+      among the dust and ashes of many thousands of academic, punctilious, most
+      archaeologically correct men of letters and art who spent their lives
+      haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar obsession with the ephemeral.&rdquo;
+       Mark Twain began his career by studying the people and period he knew in
+      relation to his own life. Jamestown, Hannibal, and Virginia City, the
+      stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic, uproarious life of Western
+      prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life and live again in the pages of
+      his books. Colonel Sellers, in the main correct but &ldquo;stretched a little&rdquo;
+       here and there; Tom Sawyer, the &ldquo;magerful&rdquo; hero of boyhood; the shrewd and
+      kindly Aunt Polly, drawn from his own mother; Huck Finn, with the tender
+      conscience and the gentle heart&mdash;these and many another were drawn
+      from the very life. In writing of his time <i>a propo</i> of himself, Mark
+      Twain succeeded in telling the truth about humanity in general and for any
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the main&mdash;though there are noteworthy exceptions&mdash;Mark
+      Twain's works originated fundamentally in the facts of his own life. He is
+      a master humorist&mdash;which is only another way of saying that he is a
+      master psychologist with the added gift of humour&mdash;because he looked
+      upon himself always as a complete and well-rounded repository of
+      universally human characteristics. <i>Humanus sum; et nil humanum mihi
+      alienum est</i>&mdash;this might well have served for his motto. It was
+      his conviction that the American possessed no unique and peculiar human
+      characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the world. In the
+      same way, he regarded himself as possessing no unique or peculiar human
+      characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the human race. Like
+      Omar he might have said &ldquo;I myself am Heaven and Hell&rdquo;&mdash;&mdash;for
+      within himself he recognized, in some form, at higher or lower power,
+      every feature, trait, instinct, characteristic of which a human being is
+      capable. The last half century of his life, as he himself said in his
+      Autobiography, had been constantly and faithfully devoted to the study of
+      the human race. His knowledge came from minute self-examination&mdash;for
+      he regarded himself as the entire human race compacted together. It was by
+      concentrating his attention upon himself, by recognizing in himself the
+      quintessential type of the race, that he succeeded in producing works of
+      such pure naturalness and utter verity. A humour which is at bottom good
+      humour is always contagious; but there is a deeper and more universal
+      appeal which springs from genial and unaffected representation of the
+      human species, of the universal 'Genus Homo'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been said, by foreign critics, that the intellectual life of
+      America in general takes its cue from the day, whilst the intellectual
+      life of Europe derives from history. If American literature be really
+      &ldquo;Journalism under exceptionally favourable conditions,&rdquo; as defined by the
+      Danish critic, Johannes V. Jensen, then must Mark Twain be a typical
+      product of American literature. A certain modicum of truth may rest in
+      this startling and seemingly uncomplimentary definition. Interpreted
+      liberally, it may be taken to mean that America finds her key to the
+      future in the immediate vital present, rather than in a remote and hazy
+      past. Mark Twain was a great creative genius because he saw himself, and
+      so saw human nature, in the strong, searching light of the living present.
+      He is the greatest genius evolved by natural selection out of the ranks of
+      American journalism. Crude, rudimentary and boisterous as his early
+      writing was, at times provincial and coarse, it bore upon its face the
+      fresh stamp of contemporary actuality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the American of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be placidly
+      assured by our British critics that America is sublimely unconscious that
+      her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less arresting than the
+      asseveration that America is lacking in humour because she is lacking in
+      self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly comic irony in this
+      commiseration with us, on the part of our British critics, for our failure
+      joyously to realize our old age, which they would have us believe is a
+      sort of premature senescence and decay. The New World is pitied for her
+      failure to know without illusion the futility of the hurried pursuit of
+      wealth, of the passion for extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of
+      all the hostages youth in America eternally gives to old age. &ldquo;America has
+      produced great artists,&rdquo; admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. Yet he maintains
+      that &ldquo;that fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility
+      and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they
+      are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave,
+      barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the
+      spirit of a schoolboy? . . . Out of America has come a sweet and startling
+      cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.&rdquo; This sweet and startling
+      cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr. Chesterton has
+      chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two American geniuses who
+      have lived outside their own country, absorbed the art ideals of the
+      older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost touch with the youthful
+      spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the ongoing rush and progress
+      of America. It is worthy of remark that Mr. James has always maintained
+      that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only very primitive persons; and
+      Whistler, with his acid <i>diablerie</i>, was wholly alien in spirit to
+      the boisterous humour of Mark Twain. That other brilliant but incoherent
+      interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles Whibley, bound to the
+      presupposed paradox of America's pathetic senescence and total deficiency
+      in humour, blithely gives away his case in the vehement assertion that
+      America's greatest national interpreter is&mdash;Mark Twain!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the
+      humorist&mdash;with his shrieking Philistinism, his dominant sense for the
+      colossally incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering, ludicrous
+      contrast. To the reflective, Mark Twain subsumed within himself a &ldquo;certain
+      surcharge and overplus of power, a buoyancy, and a sense of conquest&rdquo;
+       which typified the youth of America. It is memorable that he breathed in
+      his youth the bracing air of the prairie, shared the collective ardour of
+      the Argonauts, felt the rising thrill of Western adventure, and expressed
+      the crude and manly energy of navigation, exploration, and the daring
+      hazard for new fortune. To those who knew him in personal intimacy, the
+      quality that was outstanding, omnipresent and eternally ineradicable from
+      his nature was&mdash;paradoxical as it may sound&mdash;not humour, not
+      wit, not irony, not a thousand other terms that might be associated with
+      his name, but&mdash;the spirit of eternal youth. It is comprehensively
+      significant and conclusive that, to the day of her death, Mrs. Clemens
+      never called her husband anything but the bright nickname&mdash;&ldquo;Youth.&rdquo;
+       Mark Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller of tales, pungent as
+      stylist. But he has achieved another sort of eminence that is peculiarly
+      gratifying to Americans. &ldquo;They distinguish in his writings,&rdquo; says an acute
+      French critic, &ldquo;exalted and sublimated by his genius, their national
+      qualities of youth and of gaiety, of force and of faith; they love his
+      philosophy, at once practical and high&mdash;minded. They are fond of his
+      simple style, animated with verve and spice, thanks to which his work is
+      accessible to every class of readers. They think he describes his
+      contemporaries with such an art of distinguishing their essential traits,
+      that he manages to evoke, to create even, characters and types of eternal
+      verity. They profess for Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration
+      that we have in France for Balzac.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that humour is a subject which has
+      never had much interest for him, it is nothing more than a commonplace to
+      say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist only, that the world seems
+      to persist in regarding him. The philosophy of his early life was what
+      George Meredith has aptly termed the &ldquo;philosophy of the Broad Grin.&rdquo; Mr.
+      Gilbert Chesterton once said that &ldquo;American humour, neither unfathomably
+      absurd like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of the realities
+      of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination. It consists
+      in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke
+      up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.&rdquo; This partial
+      and somewhat conventional foreign conception of American humour is
+      admirably descriptive of the cumulative and &ldquo;sky-breaking&rdquo; humour of the
+      early Mark Twain. Then no exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm
+      too unreal, no climax too extreme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a
+      lawless, untrammelled life. Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but one
+      remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of
+      argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature. In
+      the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic and
+      sanguinary. The refinements of art and civilization seemed effeminate,
+      artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously at one
+      another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of each other's plans, and
+      gloried in their defiance of both man and God. Deep in their hearts they
+      cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and the afflicted,
+      and generosity indescribable. And yet they prided themselves upon their
+      barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning bred of their wild life
+      and sharpened in the struggle for existence. What, after all, is 'The
+      Jumping Frog' but the elaborate narrative, in native vernacular, of a
+      shrewd practical joke? As Mark Twain first heard it, this story was a
+      solemn recital of an interesting incident in the life of Angel's Camp. It
+      was Mark Twain who &ldquo;created&rdquo; the story: he endowed with the comic note of
+      whimsicality that imaginative realization of <i>une chose vue</i>, which
+      went round the world. The humour of rustic shrewdness in criticism of art,
+      so elaborately exploited in 'The Innocents Abroad', was displayed, perhaps
+      invented, by Mark Twain in the early journalistic days in San Francisco.
+      In 'The Golden Era' an excellent example is found in the following
+      observations upon a celebrated painting of Samson and Delilah, then on
+      exhibition in San Francisco:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now what is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at
+      the Bank Exchange? Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or the
+      muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it the
+      rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot? No, sir.
+      The first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her feet. Them
+      scissors is too modern; thar warn't no scissors like them in them days&mdash;by
+      a d&mdash;-d sight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a brilliant and audacious conception, having the just proportion
+      of sanguinary humour, embodied in Mark Twain's offer, during his lecture
+      on the Sandwich Islands, to show his audience how the cannibals consume
+      their food&mdash;if only some lady would lend him a live baby. There is
+      the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious anecdote of
+      Higgins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Higgins was a simple creature, who used to haul rock; and on the day Judge
+      Bagley fell down the court-house steps and broke his neck, Higgins was
+      commissioned to carry the body in his wagon to the house of Mrs. Bagley
+      and break the news to her as gently as possible. When he arrived, he
+      shouted until Mrs. Bagley came to the door, and then tactfully inquired if
+      the Widder Bagley lived there! When she indignantly replied in the
+      negative, he gently humoured her whim; and inquired next if Judge Bagley
+      lived there. When she replied that he did, Higgins offered to bet that he
+      didn't; and delicately inquired if the Judge were in. On being assured
+      that he was not in at present, Higgins triumphantly exclaimed that he
+      expected as much. Because he had the old Judge curled up out there in the
+      wagon; and when Mrs. Bagley saw him, she would doubtless admit that about
+      all that could comfort the Judge now would be an inquest!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was so fond of this bloody and ghastly humour that, on one
+      occasion, he utterly overreached himself and suffered serious
+      consequences. In the words of his fellow-journalist, Dan De Quille:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          Mark Twain was fond of manufacturing items of the horrible style, but
+          on one occasion he overdid this business, and the disease worked its
+          own cure. He wrote an account of a terrible murder, supposed to have
+          occurred at &ldquo;Dutch Nick's,&rdquo; a station on the Carson River, where
+          Empire City now stands. He made a man cut his wife's throat and those
+          of his nine children, after which diabolical deed the murderer mounted
+          his horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, rode to Carson City (a
+          distance of three and a half miles) and fell dead in front of Peter
+          Hopkins' saloon.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          All the California papers copied the item, and several made editorial
+          comment upon it as being the most shocking occurrence of the kind ever
+          known on the Pacific Coast. Of course rival Virginia City papers at
+          once denounced the item as a &ldquo;cruel and idiotic hoax.&rdquo; They showed how
+          the publication of such &ldquo;shocking and reckless falsehoods&rdquo; disgraced
+          and injured the State, and they made it as &ldquo;sultry&rdquo; as possible for
+          the 'Enterprise' and its &ldquo;fool reporter.&rdquo;
+         </p>
+        <p>
+          When the California papers saw all this and found they had been sold,
+          there was a howl from Siskiyou to San Diego. Some papers demanded the
+          immediate discharge of the author of the item by the 'Enterprise'
+          proprietors. They said they would never quote another line from that
+          paper while the reporter who wrote the shocking item remained on its
+          force. All this worried Mark as I had never before seen him worried.
+          Said he: &ldquo;I am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains.&rdquo; We
+          roomed together, and one night, when the persecution was hottest, he
+          was so distressed that he could not sleep. He tossed, tumbled, and
+          groaned aloud. So I set to work to comfort him. &ldquo;Mark,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;never
+          mind this bit of a gale, it will soon blow itself out. This item of
+          yours will be remembered and talked about when all your other work is
+          forgotten. The murder at Dutch Nick's will be quoted years from now as
+          the big sell of these times.&rdquo;
+         </p>
+        <p>
+          Said Mark: &ldquo;I believe you are right; I remember I once did a thing at
+          home in Missouri, was caught at it, and worried almost to death. I was
+          a mere lad, and was going to school in a little town where I had an
+          uncle living. I at once left the town and did not return to it for
+          three years. When I finally came back I found I was only remembered as
+          'the boy that played the trick on the schoolmaster.'&rdquo;
+         </p>
+        <p>
+          Mark then told me the story, began to laugh over it, and from that
+          moment &ldquo;ceased to groan.&rdquo; He was not discharged, and in less than a
+          month people everywhere were laughing and joking about the &ldquo;murder at
+          Dutch Nick's.&rdquo;
+         </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Out of that full, free Western life, with its tremendous hazards of
+      fortune, its extravagant alternations from fabulous wealth to wretched
+      poverty, its tremendous exaggerations and incredible contrasts, was
+      evolved a humour as rugged, as mountainous, and as altitudinous as the
+      conditions which gave it birth. Mark Twain may be said to have created,
+      and made himself master of, this new and fantastic humour which, in its
+      exaggeration and elaboration, was without a parallel in the history of
+      humorous narration. At times it seemed little more than a sort of
+      infectious and hilarious nonsense; but in reality it had behind it all the
+      calculation of detail and elaboration. There was something in it of the
+      volcanic, as if at the bursting forth of some pentup force of primitive
+      nature. It consisted in piling Pelion on Ossa, until the structure toppled
+      over of its own weight and fell with a stentorian crash of laughter which
+      echoed among the stars. Whenever Mark Twain conceived a humorous idea, he
+      seemed capable of extracting from it infinite complications of successive
+      and cumulative comedy. This humour seemed like the mental functionings of
+      some mad, yet inevitably logical jester; it grew from more to more, from
+      extravagance to extravagance, until reason itself tired and gave over.
+      Such explosive stories as 'How I Edited an Agricultural Paper', 'A Genuine
+      Mexican Plug', the deciphering of the Horace Greeley correspondence, 'The
+      Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract, and many another, as Mr.
+      Chesterton has pointed out, have one tremendous essential of great art.
+      &ldquo;The excitement mounts up perpetually; they grow more and more comic, as a
+      tragedy should grow more and more tragic. The rack, tragic or comic, goes
+      round until something breaks inside a man. In tragedy it is his heart, or
+      perhaps his stiff neck. In farce I do not quite know what it is&mdash;perhaps
+      his funny-bone is dislocated; perhaps his skull is slightly cracked.&rdquo; Mark
+      Twain's mountainous humour, of this early type, never contains the element
+      of final surprise, of the sudden, the unexpected, the <i>imprevu</i>. We
+      know what is coming, we surrender ourselves more and more to the mood of
+      the narrator, holding ourselves in reserve until laughter, no longer to be
+      restrained, bursts forth in a torrent of undignified and explosive mirth.
+      Perhaps no better example can be given than the description of the sad
+      fate of the camel in 'A Tramp Abroad'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Syria, at the head-waters of the Jordan, this camel had got hold of his
+      overcoat; and after he finished contemplating it as an article of apparel,
+      he began to inspect it as an article of diet. In his inimitable manner,
+      Mark describes the almost religious ecstasy of that camel as it devoured
+      his overcoat piecemeal&mdash;first one sleeve, then the other, velvet
+      collar, and finally the tails. All went well until the camel struck a
+      batch of manuscript&mdash;containing some of Mark's humorous letters for
+      the home papers. Their solid wisdom soon began to lie heavy on the camel's
+      stomach: the jokes shook him until he began to gag and gasp, and finally
+      he struck statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. He
+      died in horrible agony; and Mark found on examination that the camel had
+      choked to death on one of the mildest statements of fact that he had ever
+      offered to a trusting public! Here Mark gradually works up to an
+      anticipated climax by piling on effect after effect. Our risibility is
+      excited almost as much by the anticipation of the climax as by the
+      recital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Admirable instances of the ludicrous incident, of the nonsensical recital,
+      are found in the scene in 'Huckleberry Finn' dealing with the performance
+      of the King's Cameleopard or Royal Nonesuch, the address on the occasion
+      of the dinner in honour of the seventieth anniversary of John Greenleaf
+      Whittier (an historic failure), and the Turkish bath in 'The Innocents
+      Abroad'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this prison filled with hot air, an attendant sat him down by a tank of
+      hot water and began to polish him all over with a coarse mitten. Soon Mark
+      noticed a disagreeable smell, and realized that the more he was polished
+      the worse he smelt. He urged the attendant to bury him without unnecessary
+      delay, as it was obvious that he couldn't possibly &ldquo;keep&rdquo; long in such
+      warm weather. But the phlegmatic attendant paid no attention to Mark's
+      commands and continued to scrub with renewed vigour. Mark's consternation
+      changed to alarm when he discovered that little cylinders, like macaroni,
+      began to roll from under the mitten. They were too white to be dirt. He
+      felt that he was gradually being pared down to a convenient size.
+      Realizing that it would take hours for the attendant to trim him down to
+      the proper size, Mark indignantly ordered him to bring a jackplane at once
+      and get the matter over. To all his protests the attendant paid no
+      attention at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of the earliest critical articles about Mark Twain, which appeared
+      in 'Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science and Art' for July 4,1874,
+      Mr. G. T. Ferris gives an excellent appreciation of his humour. &ldquo;Of humour
+      in its highest phase,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;perhaps Bret Harte may be accounted the
+      most puissant master among our contemporary American writers. Of wit, we
+      see next to none. Mark Twain, while lacking the subtilty and pathos of the
+      other, has more breadth, variety, and ease. His sketches of life are
+      arabesque in their strange combinations. Bits of bright, serious
+      description, both of landscape and society, carry us along till suddenly
+      we stumble on some master-stroke of grotesque and irresistible fun. He
+      understands the value of repose in art. One tires of a page where every
+      sentence sparkles with points, and the author is constantly attitudinizing
+      for our amusement. We like to be betrayed into laughter as much in books
+      as in real life. It is the unconscious, easy, careless gait of Mark Twain
+      that makes his most potent charm. He seems always to be catering as much
+      to his own enjoyment as to that of the public. He strolls along like a
+      great rollicking schoolboy, bent on having a good time, and determined
+      that his readers shall have it with him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain is the most daring of humorists. He takes his courage in his
+      hands for the wildest flights of fancy. His humour is the caricature of
+      situations, rather than of individuals; and he is not afraid to risk his
+      characters in colossally ludicrous situations. His art reveals itself in
+      choosing ludicrous situations which contain such a strong colouring of
+      naturalness that one's sense of reality is not outraged, but titillated.
+      Hence it is that his humour, in its earlier form, does not lend itself
+      readily to quotation. His early humour is not epigrammatic, but cumulative
+      and extensive. Each scene is a unit and must appear as such. Andrew Lang
+      not inaptly catches the note of Mark Twain's earlier manner, when he
+      speaks of his &ldquo;almost Mephistophelean coolness, an unwearying search after
+      the comic sides of serious subjects, after the mean possibilities of the
+      sublime&mdash;these with a native sense of incongruities and a glorious
+      vein of exaggeration.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain began his career as a wag; he rejoiced in being a fun-maker. He
+      discarded the weird spellings and crude punning of his American
+      forerunners; his object was not play upon words, but play upon ideas. He
+      offered his public, as Frank R. Stockton pointed out, the pure ore of fun.
+      &ldquo;If he puts his private mark on it, it will pass current; it does not
+      require the mint stamp of the schools of humour. He is never afraid of
+      being laughed at.&rdquo; Indeed, that is a large part of his stock-in-trade; for
+      throughout his entire career, nothing seemed to give him so much pleasure&mdash;though
+      it is one of the lowest forms of humour&mdash;as making fun of himself. In
+      describing two monkeys that got into his room at Delhi, he said that when
+      he awoke, one of them was before the glass brushing his hair, and the
+      other one had his notebook, and was reading a page of humorous notes and
+      crying. He didn't mind the one with the hair-brush; but the conduct of the
+      other one cut him to the heart. He never forgave that monkey. His
+      apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of Adam&mdash;only to be fully
+      appreciated in connexion with his satiric indignation over the drivel of
+      the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who &ldquo;never bored, but he struck water&rdquo;&mdash;is an
+      admirable example of the mechanical fooling of self-ridicule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his penetrating study, 'Mark Twain a Century Hence', published at the
+      time of Mr. Clemens' death, Professor H. T. Peck makes this observation:
+      &ldquo;We must judge Mark Twain as a humorist by the very best of all he wrote
+      rather than by the more dubious productions, in which we fail to see at
+      every moment the winning qualities and the characteristic form of this
+      very interesting American. As one would not judge of Tennyson by his
+      dramas, nor Thackeray by his journalistic chit-chat, nor Sir Walter Scott
+      by those romances which he wrote after his fecundity had been exhausted,
+      so we must not judge Mark Twain by the dozen or more specimens which
+      belong to the later period, when he was ill at ease and growing old. Let
+      us rather go back with a sort of joy to what he wrote when he did so with
+      spontaneity, when his fun was as natural to him as breathing, and when his
+      humour was all American humour&mdash;not like that of Juvenal or Hierocles&mdash;acrid,
+      or devoid of anything individual&mdash;but brimming over with exactly the
+      same rich irresponsibility which belonged to Steele and Lamb and Irving.
+      It may seem odd to group a son of the New World and of the great West with
+      those earlier classic figures who have been mentioned here; yet upon
+      analysis it will be discovered that the humour of Mark Twain is at least
+      first cousin to that which produced Sir Roger de Coverley and Rip Van
+      Winkle and The Stout Gentleman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The details of the Gambetta-Fourtou duel, in which Mark played a somewhat
+      frightened second, have furnished untold amusement to thousands. And his
+      description of the inadvertent <i>faux pa</i> he committed at his first
+      public lecture is humorous for any age and society. The sign announcing
+      the lecture read&mdash;&ldquo;Doors open at 7. The Trouble will begin at 8.&rdquo; For
+      three days, Mark had been in a state of frightful suspense. Once his
+      lecture had seemed humorous; but as the day approached, it seemed to him
+      to be but the dreariest of fooling, without a vestige of real fun. He was
+      so panic-stricken that he persuaded three of his friends, who were giants
+      in stature, genial and stormy voiced, to act as claquers and pound loudly
+      at the faintest suspicion of a joke. He bribed Sawyer, a half-drunk man,
+      who had a laugh hung on a hair-trigger, to get off, naturally and easily
+      during the course of the evening, as many laughs as he could. He begged a
+      popular citizen and his wife to take a conspicuous seat in a box, so that
+      everybody could see them. He explained that when he needed help, he would
+      turn toward her and smile, as a signal, that he had given birth to an
+      obscure joke. Then, if ever, was her time&mdash;not to investigate, but to
+      respond!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fateful night found him in the depths of dejection. But heartened up
+      by a crowded house, full even to the aisles, he bravely set in and
+      proceeded to capture the house. His claquers hammered madly whenever the
+      very feeblest joke showed its head. Sawyer supported their herculean
+      efforts with bursts of stentorian laughter. As Mark explained, not without
+      a touch of pride, inferior jokes never fared so royally before. But his
+      hour of humiliation was at hand. On delivering a bit of serious matter
+      with impressive unction, to which the audience listened with rapt
+      interest, he glanced involuntarily, as if for her approval, at his friend
+      in the box. He remembered the compact, but it was too late&mdash;he smiled
+      in spite of himself. Forth came her ringing laugh, peal after peal, which
+      touched off the whole audience: the explosion was immense! Sawyer choked
+      with laughter, and the bludgeons performed like pile-drivers. The little
+      morsel of pathos was ruined; but what matter, so long as the audience took
+      it as an intentional joke, and applauded it with unparalleled enthusiasm.
+      Mark wisely let it go at that!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reading through 'The Innocents Abroad' after many years, I find that it
+      has not lost its power to provoke the most side-splitting laughter; and
+      the same may be said of 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'Following the Equator',
+      which, whilst not so boisterously comical, exhibit greater mastery and
+      restraint. His own luck, as Mark Twain observed on one occasion, had been
+      curious all his literary life. He never could tell a lie that anybody
+      would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. Could there be a more
+      accurate or more concise definition of the effect of his writings, in
+      especial of his travel notes? Like his mother, he too never used large
+      words, but he had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work.
+      How delightfully human is his comment on the vagaries of woman's shopping!
+      Human nature he found very much the same all over the world; and he felt
+      that it was so much like his dear native home to see a Venetian lady go
+      into a store, buy ten cents' worth of blue ribbon, and then have it sent
+      home in a scow. It was such little touches of nature as this which, as he
+      said, moved him to tears in those far-off lands. In speaking of Palestine,
+      he says that its holy places are not as deliriously beautiful as the books
+      paint them. Indeed, he asserts that if one be calm and resolute, he can
+      look on their beauty and live! He bequeathed his rheumatism to
+      Baden-Baden. It was little, but it was all he had to give. His only regret
+      was that he could not leave something more catching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is nothing better in all of 'The Innocents Abroad' than his analysis
+      of the theological hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Disclaiming all
+      intention to be frivolous, irreverent or blasphemous, he solemnly declared
+      that his observations had taught him the real way the Holy Personages were
+      ranked in Rome. &ldquo;The Mother of God,&rdquo; otherwise the Virgin Mary, comes
+      first, followed in order by the Deity, Peter, and some twelve or fifteen
+      canonized Popes and Martyrs. Last of all came Jesus Christ the Saviour&mdash;but
+      even then, always as an infant in arms!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who can ever forget the Mark Twain who kissed the Hawaiian stranger for
+      his mother's sake, the while robbing him of his small change; who was so
+      struck by the fine points of his Honolulan horse that he hung his hat on
+      one of them; who rode glaciers as gaily as he rode Mexican plugs, and
+      found diverting programmes of the Roman Coliseum, in the dust and rubbish
+      of two thousand years ago!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Samuel L. Clemens achieved instantaneous and world-wide popularity at a
+      single bound by the creation of a fantastic and delightfully naive
+      character known as &ldquo;Mark Twain.&rdquo; At a somewhat later day, Bernard Shaw
+      achieved world-wide fame by the creation of a legendary and fantastic wit
+      known as &ldquo;G. B. S.&rdquo; To the composition of &ldquo;Mark Twain&rdquo; went all the wild
+      humour of ignorance&mdash;the boisterously comic admixture of the
+      sanguinary and the stoical. The humour of 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The
+      Innocents Abroad' is the savage and naive humour of the mining camp, not
+      the sophisticated humour of civilization. It is significant that Mme.
+      Blanc, a polished and refined intelligence, found the <i>nil admirari</i>
+      attitude of &ldquo;Mark Twain&rdquo; no more enlightening nor suggestive than the
+      stoicism of the North American Indian. This mirthful and mock-innocent
+      naivete, so alien to the delicate and subtle spirit of the French, found
+      instant response in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples. The
+      English and the Germans, no less than the Americans, rejoiced in this gay
+      fellow with his combination of appealing ignorance and but half-concealed
+      shrewdness. They laughed at this unsophisticated <i>naif</i>, gazing in
+      wide-eyed wonderment at all he saw; and they delighted in the
+      consciousness that, behind this thin mask, lay an acute and searching
+      intelligence revelling in the humorous havoc wrought by his keen
+      perception of the contrasts and incongruities of life. The note of this
+      early humour is perfectly caught in the incident of the Egyptian mummy.
+      Deliberately assumed ignorance of the grossest sort, by Mark Twain and his
+      companions, had the most devastating effect upon the foreign guide&mdash;one
+      of that countless tribe to all of whom Mark applied the generic name of
+      Ferguson. After driving Ferguson nearly mad with pretended ignorance, they
+      finally asked him if the mummy was dead. When Ferguson glibly replied that
+      he had been dead three thousand years, he was dumbfounded at the fury of
+      the &ldquo;doctor&rdquo; for being imposed upon with vile second-hand carcases. The
+      poor Frenchman was warned that if he didn't bring out a nice, fresh corpse
+      at once, they would brain him! No wonder that, later, when he was asked
+      for a description of the party, Ferguson laconically remarked that they
+      were lunatics!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In speaking of contemporary society, Ibsen once remarked: &ldquo;We have made a
+      fiasco both in the heroic and the lover roles. The only parts in which we
+      have shown a little talent, are the naively comic; but with our more
+      highly developed self-consciousness we shall no longer be fitted even for
+      that.&rdquo; With time and &ldquo;our more highly developed self-consciousness&rdquo; have
+      largely passed the novelty and the charm of this early naively comic
+      humour of Mark Twain. But it is as valid still, as it was in 1867, to
+      record honestly the impressions directly communicated to one by the
+      novelties, peculiarities, individual standards and ideals of other peoples
+      and races. Mark Twain spoke his mind with utter disregard for other
+      people's opinions, the dicta of criticism or the authoritative judgment of
+      the schools. 'The Innocents Abroad' is eminently readable, not alone for
+      its humour, its clever journalism, its remarkably accurate and detailed
+      information, and its fine descriptions. The rare quality, which made it
+      &ldquo;sell right along&mdash;like the Bible,&rdquo; is that it is the vital record of
+      a keen and searching intelligence. Mark Twain found so many of the
+      &ldquo;masterpieces of the world&rdquo; utterly unimpressive and meaningless to him,
+      that he actually began to distrust the validity of his own impressions.
+      Every time he gloried to think that for once he had discovered an ancient
+      painting that was beautiful and worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gave
+      him was an infallible proof that it was not a beautiful picture, nor in
+      any sense worthy of commendation! He pours out the torrents of his
+      ridicule, not indiscriminately upon the works of the old masters
+      themselves&mdash;though he regarded Nature as the grandest of all the old
+      masters&mdash;but upon those half-baked sycophants who bend the knee to an
+      art they do not understand, an art of which they feign comprehension by
+      mouthings full of cheap and meaningless tags. As potent and effective as
+      ever, in its fine comic irony, is that passage in which he expresses his
+      &ldquo;envy&rdquo; of those people who pay lavish lip-service to scenes and works of
+      art which their expressionless language shows they neither realize nor
+      understand. He reserves his most biting condemnation for those second-hand
+      critics who accept other people's opinions for their criteria, and rave
+      over &ldquo;beauty,&rdquo; &ldquo;soul,&rdquo; &ldquo;character,&rdquo; &ldquo;expression&rdquo; and &ldquo;tone&rdquo; in wretched,
+      dingy, moth-eaten pictures. He hated with the heartiest detestation such
+      people&mdash;whose sole ambition seemed to be to make a fine show of
+      knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of inexpressive
+      technical terms of art criticism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is much, I fear, of misguided honesty in Mark Twain's records of
+      foreign travel. To the things which he personally reverenced, he was
+      always reverential; and his expression of likes and dislikes, of
+      prejudices and predilections, was honest and fearless. Grant as we may the
+      humorist's right to exaggerate and even to distort, for the purposes of
+      his fun-making, it does not therefore follow that his judgments, however
+      forthright or sincere, are valid, reputable criticisms. One's enjoyment of
+      his fresh and hilarious humour, his persistent fun-making is no whit
+      impaired by the recognition that he was lacking in the faculty of historic
+      imagination and in the finer artistic sense. It is, in a measure, because
+      of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of real knowledge, that he
+      was enabled to evoke the laughter of the multitude. &ldquo;The Mississippi
+      pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid,&rdquo; says Mr. S. P. Sherman, &ldquo;refuses
+      to sink his identity in the object contemplated&mdash;that, as Corporal
+      Nym would have said, is the humour of it. He is the kind of travelling
+      companion that makes you wonder why you went abroad. He turns the Old
+      World into a laughing stock by shearing it of its storied humanity&mdash;simply
+      because there is nothing in him to respond to the glory that was Greece,
+      to the grandeur that was Rome&mdash;simpler because nothing is holier to
+      him than a joke. He does not throw the comic light upon counterfeit
+      enthusiasm; he laughs at art, history, and antiquity from the point of
+      view of one who is ignorant of them and mightily well satisfied with his
+      ignorance.&rdquo; This picture reminds us of the foreign critics of 'The
+      Innocents Abroad' and 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court': it is
+      too partial and restricted. The whole point of Mark Twain's humour, as
+      exhibited in these travel notes, is missed in the statement that &ldquo;he does
+      not throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm&rdquo;&mdash;for this
+      might almost be taken as the &ldquo;philosophy&rdquo; of his books of foreign travel.
+      And yet Mr. Sherman's dictum, in its entirety, quite clearly provokes the
+      question whether, as he intimates, the &ldquo;overwhelming majority&rdquo; of his
+      fellow-citizens also were not mightily pleased with Mark Twain's point of
+      view, and whether they did not enjoy themselves hugely in laughing, not at
+      him, but with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In commenting on the reasons for the broadening and deepening of his
+      humour with the passage of time, Mr. Clemens once remarked to me: &ldquo;I
+      succeeded in the long run, where Shillaber, Doesticks, and Billings
+      failed, because they never had an ideal higher than that of merely being
+      funny. The first great lesson of my life was the discovery that I had to
+      live down my past. When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier
+      writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw
+      and heard. My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people laugh.
+      I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else&mdash;eager
+      to betray them at the end with some monstrous absurdity or some
+      extravagant anti-climax. One night, after a lecture in the early days, Tom
+      Fitch, the 'silver-tongued orator of Nevada,' said to me: 'Clemens, your
+      lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never in my
+      entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of descriptive
+      narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin&mdash;the unpardonable
+      sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed a most eloquent
+      description, by which you had keyed your audience up to a pitch of the
+      intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax which nullified
+      all the really fine effect you had produced. My dear Clemens, whatever you
+      do, never sell your audience.' And that,&rdquo; continued Mr. Clemens, &ldquo;was my
+      first really profitable lesson.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the toning down of his youthful extravagance&mdash;Fitch's precept
+      not to &ldquo;sell&rdquo; his audience, Mrs. Fairbanks' warning not to try their
+      endurance of the irreverent too far&mdash;that had a markedly salutary
+      effect upon Mark Twain's humorous writings. There can be no doubt that the
+      deep and lifelong friendship of Mr. Howells, expressing itself as occasion
+      demanded in the friendliest criticism, had a subduing influence upon Mark
+      Twain's tendency, as a humorist, to extravagance and headlong
+      exaggeration. In time he left the field of carpet-bag observation&mdash;the
+      humorous depicting of things seen from the rear of an observation car, so
+      to speak&mdash;and turned to fiction. Now at last the long pent-up flood
+      of observation upon human character and human characteristics found full
+      vent. 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn' are the romances of eternal
+      youth, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. They are freighted,
+      however, with a wealth of pungent and humorous characterization that have
+      made of them contemporary classics. From ethical sophistication and moral
+      truantry Mark Twain evolves an inexhaustible supply of humour. The revolt
+      of mischievous and Bohemian boyhood against the stern limitations of
+      formal Puritanism is, in a sense, a principle that he carried with him to
+      the grave. &ldquo;There are no more vital passages in his fiction,&rdquo; says Mr.
+      Howells, &ldquo;than those which embody character as it is affected for good as
+      well as for evil by the severity of the local Sunday-schooling and
+      church-going.&rdquo; Out of the pangs of conscience, the ingenious sedatives of
+      sophistry, the numerous variations of the lie, he won a wholesome humour
+      that left you thinking, by inversion, upon the moral involved. Knowledge
+      of human nature finds expression in forms made permanently effective
+      through the arresting permeation of humour. The incident of Tom Sawyer and
+      the whitewashing of the fence is the sort of thing over which boy and man
+      alike can chuckle with satisfaction&mdash;for Tom Sawyer had discovered a
+      great law of human action without knowing it, namely, that in order to
+      make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing
+      difficult to attain. Huck's reasoning about chicken stealing&mdash;the
+      exquisitely comic shifting of ground from morality to expediency&mdash;is
+      a striking example of the best type of Mark Twain's humour. Following his
+      father's example, Huck would occasionally &ldquo;lift&rdquo; a chicken that wasn't
+      roosting comfortable; for had his father not told him that even if he
+      didn't want the chicken himself, he could always find somebody that did
+      want it, and a good deed ain't never forgot? Huck confesses that he had
+      never seen his Pap when he didn't want the chicken himself!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The germ of Mark Twain's humour, wherever it is found, from 'The Innocents
+      Abroad' to 'The Connecticut Yankee' and 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to
+      Heaven', is found in the mental reactions resulting from stupendous and
+      glaring contrasts. First it is the Wild Western humorist, primitive and
+      untamed, running amuck through the petrified formulas and encrusted
+      traditions of Europe. Then comes the fantastic juxtaposition of the shrewd
+      Connecticut Yankee, with his comic irreverence and raucous sense of
+      humour, his bourgeois limitations and provincial prejudices, to the Court
+      of King Arthur, with its mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social
+      narrowness. How many have delighted in the Yankee's inimitable description
+      of his feelings toward that classic damsel of the sixth century? At first
+      he got along easily with the girl; but after a while he began to feel for
+      her a sort of mysterious and shuddery reverence. Whenever she began to
+      unwind one of those long sentences of hers, and got it well under way, he
+      could never suppress the feeling that he was standing in the awful
+      presence of the Mother of the German Language!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain ransacked the whole world of his own day, all countries, savage
+      and civilized, for the display of effective and ludicrous contrast; and he
+      opened up an illimitable field for humanizing satire, as Mr. Howells has
+      said, in his juxtaposition of sociologic types thirteen centuries apart.
+      Not even heaven was safe from the comprehensive survey of his satire; and
+      'Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven' is a remarkable document,&mdash;a
+      forthright lay sermon,&mdash;the conventional idea of heaven, the
+      theologic conception of eternity, as heedlessly taught from the pulpit,
+      thrown into comic, yet profoundly significant, relief against the
+      background of the common-sense of a deeply human, thoroughly modern
+      intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Humour, as Thackeray has defined it, is a combination of wit and love.
+      Certain it is that, in the case of Mark Twain, wit was a later development
+      of his humour; the love was there all the time. Mark Twain has not been
+      recognized as a wit; for he was primarily a humorist, and only secondarily
+      a wit. But the passion for brief and pungent formulation of an idea grew
+      upon him; and Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar is a mine of homely and
+      memorable aphorism, epigram, injunction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="pp105.jpg (59K)" src="images/pp105.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to Mark Twain's classification, the comic story is English, the
+      witty story French, the humorous story American. While the other two
+      depend upon matter, the humorous story depends for its effect upon the
+      manner of telling. The witty story and the comic story must be concise and
+      end with a &ldquo;point&rdquo;; but the humorous story may be as leisurely as you
+      please and have no particular destination. Mark Twain always maintained
+      that, while anyone could tell effectively a comic or a witty story, it
+      required a person skilled in an art of a rare and distinctive character to
+      tell a humorous story successfully. Mark Twain was himself the supreme
+      exemplar of the art of telling a humorous story. Take this little passage,
+      for example, which convulsed one of his London audiences. He was speaking
+      of a high mountain that he had come across in his travels. &ldquo;It is so cold
+      that people who have been there find it impossible to speak the truth; I
+      know that's a fact (here a pause, a blank stare, a shake of the head, a
+      little stroll across the platform, a sigh, a puff, a smothered groan),
+      because&mdash;I've&mdash;(another pause)&mdash;been&mdash;(a longer pause)&mdash;there
+      myself.&rdquo; Who could equal Mark Twain as a humorous narrator, in his recital
+      of the alarums and excursions, criminations and recriminations, over the
+      story of somebody else's dog he sold to General Miles for three dollars?
+      He delighted numerous audiences with his story of inveighing Mrs. Grover
+      Cleveland at a White House reception into writing blindly on the back of a
+      card &ldquo;He didn't.&rdquo; When she turned it over she discovered that it bore on
+      the other side, in Mrs. Clemens' handwriting, the startling words: &ldquo;Don't
+      wear your arctics in the White House.&rdquo; I shall never forget his recital of
+      the story of how his enthusiasm oozed away at a meeting in behalf of
+      foreign missions. So moving was the fervid eloquence of the exhorter that,
+      after fifteen minutes, if Mark Twain had had a blank cheque with him, he
+      would gladly have turned it over, signed, to the minister, to fill out for
+      any amount. But it was a very warm evening, the eloquence of the minister
+      was inexhaustible&mdash;and Mark Twain's enthusiasm for foreign missions
+      slowly oozed away&mdash;one hundred dollars, fifty dollars, and even lower
+      still&mdash;so that when the plate was actually passed around, Mark put in
+      ten cents and took out a quarter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was a witness in London, and at Oxford, in 1907, of the vast,
+      spontaneous, national reception which Mark Twain received from the English
+      people. One incident of that memorable visit is a perfect example of that
+      masterly power over an audience, that deep humanity, with which Mark Twain
+      was endowed. At the banquet presided over by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool,
+      which was the signal of Mark Twain's farewell to the English people, his
+      peroration was as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Many and many a year ago I read an anecdote in Dana's Two Years Before
+      the Mast. A frivolous little self-important captain of a coasting-sloop in
+      the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade was always hailing every
+      vessel that came in sight, just to hear himself talk and air his small
+      grandeurs. One day a majestic Indiaman came ploughing by, with course on
+      course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with
+      sailors, with macaws and monkeys and all manner of strange and romantic
+      creatures populating her rigging, and thereto her freightage of precious
+      spices lading the breeze with gracious and mysterious odours of the
+      Orient. Of course, the little coaster-captain hopped into the shrouds and
+      squeaked a hail: 'Ship ahoy! What ship is that, and whence and whither?'
+      In a deep and thunderous bass came the answer back, through a speaking
+      trumpet: 'The Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days out from
+      Canton homeward bound! What ship is that?' The little captain's vanity was
+      all crushed out of him, and most humbly he squeaked back: 'Only the Mary
+      Ann&mdash;fourteen hours from Boston, bound for Kittery Point with&mdash;with
+      nothing to speak of!' That eloquent word 'only' expressed the deeps of his
+      stricken humbleness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what is my case? During perhaps one hour in the twenty-four&mdash;not
+      more than that&mdash;I stop and reflect. Then I am humble, then I am
+      properly meek, and for that little time I am 'only the Mary Ann'&mdash;fourteen
+      hours out, and cargoed with vegetables and tin-ware; but all the other
+      twenty-three my self-satisfaction rides high, and I am the stately
+      Indiaman, ploughing the great seas under a cloud of sail, and laden with a
+      rich freightage of the kindest words that were ever spoken to a wandering
+      alien, I think; my twenty-six crowded and fortunate days multiplied by
+      five; and I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days out
+      from Canton&mdash;homeward bound!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Says &ldquo;Charles Vale,&rdquo; in describing the scene &ldquo;The audience sat spellbound
+      in almost painful silence, till it could restrain itself no longer; and
+      when in rich, resonant, uplifted voice Mark Twain sang out the words: 'I
+      am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days out from Canton,'
+      there burst forth a great cheer from one end of the room to the other. It
+      seemed an inopportune cheer, and for a moment it upset the orator: yet it
+      was felicitous in opportuneness. Slowly, after a long pause, came the last
+      two words&mdash;like that curious, detached and high note in which a great
+      piece of music suddenly ends&mdash;'Homeward bound.' Again there was a
+      cheer: but this time it was lower; it was subdued; it was the fitting echo
+      to the beautiful words&mdash;with their double significance&mdash;the
+      parting from a hospitable land, the return to the native land. . . . Only
+      a great litterateur could have conceived such a passage: only a great
+      orator could have so delivered it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was the greatest master of the anecdote this generation has
+      known. He claimed the humorous story as an American invention, and one
+      that has remained at home. His public speeches were little mosaics in the
+      finesse of their art; and the intricacies of inflection, insinuation,
+      jovial innuendo which Mark Twain threw into his gestures, his implicative
+      pauses, his suggestive shrugs and deprecative nods&mdash;all these are
+      hopelessly volatilized and disappear entirely from the printed copy of his
+      speeches. He gave the most minute and elaborate study to the preparation
+      of his speeches&mdash;polishing them dexterously and rehearsing every
+      word, every gesture, with infinite care. Yet his readiness and fertility
+      of resource in taking advantage, and making telling use, of things in the
+      speeches of those immediately preceding him, were striking evidences of
+      the rapidity of his thought-processes. In Boston, when asked what he
+      thought about the existence of a heaven or a hell, he looked grave for a
+      moment, and then replied: &ldquo;I don't want to express an opinion. It's policy
+      for me to keep silent. You see, I have friends in both places.&rdquo; His speech
+      introducing General Hawley of Connecticut to a Republican meeting at
+      Elmira, New York, is an admirable example of his laconic art: &ldquo;General
+      Hawley is a member of my church at Hartford, and the author of 'Beautiful
+      Snow.' Maybe he will deny that. But I am only here to give him a character
+      from his last place. As a pure citizen, I respect him; as a personal
+      friend of years, I have the warmest regard for him; as a neighbour, whose
+      vegetable garden adjoins mine, why&mdash;why, I watch him. As the author
+      of 'Beautiful Snow,' he has added a new pang to winter. He is a square,
+      true man in honest politics, and I must say he occupies a mighty lonesome
+      position. So broad, so bountiful is his character that he never turned a
+      tramp empty-handed from his door, but always gave him a letter of
+      introduction to me. Pure, honest, incorruptible, that is Joe Hawley. Such
+      a man in politics is like a bottle of perfumery in a glue factory&mdash;it
+      may modify the stench, but it doesn't destroy it. I haven't said any more
+      of him than I would say of myself. Ladies and gentlemen, this is General
+      Hawley.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Chesterton maintains that Mark Twain was a wit rather than a humorist&mdash;perhaps
+      something more than a humorist. &ldquo;Wit,&rdquo; he explains, &ldquo;requires an
+      intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic. A wit must have
+      something of the same running, working, and staying power as a
+      mathematician or a metaphysician. Moreover, wit is a fighting thing and a
+      working thing. A man may enjoy humour all by himself; he may see a joke
+      when no one else sees it; he may see the point and avoid it. But wit is a
+      sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it. All
+      honest people saw the point of Mark Twain's wit. Not a few dishonest
+      people felt it.&rdquo; The epigram, &ldquo;Be virtuous, and you will be eccentric,&rdquo;
+       has become a catchword; and everyone has heard Mark Twain's reply to the
+      reporter asking for advice as to what to cable his paper, which had
+      printed the statement that Mark Twain was dead &ldquo;Say that the statement is
+      greatly exaggerated.&rdquo; He has admirably taken off humanity's enduring
+      self-conceit in the statement that there isn't a Parallel of Latitude but
+      thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights. There is
+      something peculiarly American in his warning to young girls not to marry&mdash;that
+      is, not to excess! His remarks on compliments have a delightful and naive
+      freshness. He points out how embarrassing compliments always are. It is so
+      difficult to take them naturally. You never know what to say. He had
+      received many compliments in his lifetime, and they had always embarrassed
+      him&mdash;he always felt that they hadn't said enough!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident of Mark Twain's first meeting with Whistler is quaintly
+      illustrative of one phase of his broader humour. Mark Twain was taken by a
+      friend to Whistler's studio, just as he was putting the finishing touches
+      to one of his fantastic studies. Confident of the usual commendation,
+      Whistler inquired his guest's opinion of the picture. Mark Twain assumed
+      the air of a connoisseur, and approaching the picture remarked that it did
+      very well, but &ldquo;he didn't care much for that cloud&mdash;&rdquo;; and suiting
+      the action to the word, appeared to be on the point of rubbing the cloud
+      with his gloved finger. In genuine horror, Whistler exclaimed: &ldquo;Don't
+      touch it, the paint's wet!&rdquo; &ldquo;Oh, that's all right,&rdquo; replied Mark with his
+      characteristic drawl: &ldquo;these aren't my best gloves, anyhow!&rdquo; Whereat
+      Whistler recognized a congenial spirit, and their first hearty laugh
+      together was the beginning of a friendly and congenial relationship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I recall an incident in connection with the writing of his Autobiography.
+      On more than one occasion, he declared that the Autobiography was going to
+      be something awful&mdash;as caustic, fiendish, and devilish as he could
+      make it. Actually, he was in the habit of jotting on the margin of the
+      page, opposite to some startling characterization or diabolic joke: &ldquo;Not
+      to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty) years after my death.&rdquo;
+       One day I heard him vent his pent-up rage, in bitter and caustic words,
+      upon a certain strenuous, limelight American politician. I could not
+      resist the temptation to ask him if this, too, were going into the
+      Autobiography. &ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; he replied, decisively. &ldquo;Everything goes in. I
+      make no exceptions. But,&rdquo; he added reflectively, with the suspicion of a
+      twinkle in his eye, &ldquo;I shall make a note beside this passage: 'Not to be
+      published until one hundred and fifty years after my death'!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain had numerous &ldquo;doubles&rdquo; scattered about the world. The number
+      continually increased; once a month on an average, he would receive a
+      letter from a new &ldquo;double,&rdquo; enclosing a photograph in proof of the
+      resemblance. Mark once wrote to one of these doubles as follows:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          MY DEAR SIR&mdash;
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Many thanks for your letter, with enclosed photograph. Your
+          resemblance to me is remarkable. In fact, to be perfectly honest, you
+          look more like me than I look like myself. I was so much impressed by
+          the resemblance that I have had your picture framed, and am now using
+          it regularly, in place of a mirror, to shave by.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Yours gratefully,<br /> S. L. CLEMENS.
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Although not generally recognized, it is undoubtedly true that Mark Twain
+      was a wit as well as a humorist. He was the author of many epigrams and
+      curt aphorisms which have become stock phrases in conversation, quoted in
+      all classes of society wherever the English language is spoken. His
+      phrasing is unpretentious, even homely, wearing none of the polished
+      brilliancy of La Rochefoucauld or Bernard Shaw; but Mark Twain's sayings
+      &ldquo;stick&rdquo; because they are rooted in shrewdness and hard commonsense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's warning to the two burglars who stole his silverware from
+      &ldquo;Stormfield&rdquo; and were afterwards caught and sent to the penitentiary, is
+      very amusing, though not highly complimentary to American political life:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you two young men have been up to my house, stealing my tinware, and
+      got pulled in by these Yankees up here. You had much better have stayed in
+      New York, where you have the pull. Don't you see where you're drifting.
+      They'll send you from here down to Bridgeport jail, and the next thing you
+      know you'll be in the United States Senate. There's no other future left
+      open to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sign he posted after the visitation of these same burglars was a
+      prominent ornament of the billiard room at &ldquo;Stormfield &ldquo;:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+            <p>
+              NOTICE
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              To the next Burglar
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              There is nothing but plated-ware in this house, now<br /> and
+              henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing<br /> in the
+              dining-room over in the corner by the basket of<br /> kittens. If
+              you want the basket, put the kittens in<br /> the brass thing.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              Do not make a noise, it disturbs the family.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that thing<br /> which
+              has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think<br /> they call it,
+              or pergola, or something like that.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              Please close the door when you go away!
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              Very truly yours,
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              S. L. CLEMENS.
+            </p>
+          </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Now these are examples of Mark Twain's humour, American humour, such as we
+      are accustomed to expect from Mark Twain&mdash;humour not unmixed with a
+      strong spice of wit. But Mark Twain was capable of wit, pure and
+      unadulterated, curt and concise. I once saw him write in a young girl's
+      birthday book an aphorism which he said was one of his favourites &ldquo;Truth
+      is our most valuable possession. Let us economize it.&rdquo; The advice he once
+      gave me as to the proper frame of mind for undergoing a surgical operation
+      has always remained in my memory: &ldquo;Console yourself with the reflection
+      that you are giving the doctor pleasure, and that he is getting paid for
+      it.&rdquo; Peculiarly memorable is his forthright dictum that the statue which
+      advertises its modesty with a fig-leaf brings its modesty under suspicion.
+      His business motto&mdash;unfortunately, a motto that he never followed&mdash;has
+      often been attributed, because of its canny shrewdness, to Mr. Andrew
+      Carnegie. The idea was to put all your eggs in one basket&mdash;and then&mdash;watch
+      that basket! His anti-Puritanical convictions find concrete expression in
+      his assertion that few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance
+      of a good example. Truly classic, in usage if not in form, is his happy
+      saying that faith is believing what you know ain't so. His definition of a
+      classic as a book which people praise but don't read, is as frequently
+      heard as are Biblical and Shakespearian tags.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Clemens once told me that he had composed between two and three
+      hundred maxims during his life. Many of them, especially those from the
+      old and new calendars of Pudd'nhead Wilson, bear the individual and
+      peculiar stamp of Mark Twain's phraseology and outlook upon life&mdash;quaint,
+      genial, and shrewd. In pursuance of his deep-rooted belief in the
+      omnipotent power of training, he remarked that the peach was once a bitter
+      almond, the cauliflower nothing but cabbage with a college education. He
+      himself was not guiltless of that irreverence which he defined as
+      disrespect for another man's god. Women took an almost unholy delight in
+      describing some of their undesirable acquaintances, in Mark Twain's
+      phrase, as neither quite refined, nor quite unrefined, but just the kind
+      of person that keeps a parrot!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At times, Mark Twain realized the sanctifying power of illusions in a
+      world of harsh realities; for he asserted that when illusions are gone you
+      may still exist, but you have ceased to live. A depressing sense of
+      world-weariness sometimes overbore the native joyousness of his
+      temperament; and he expressed his sense of deep gratitude to Adam, the
+      first great benefactor of the race&mdash;because he had brought death into
+      the world. A funeral always gave Mark Twain a sense of spiritual uplift, a
+      sense of thankfulness because the dead friend had been set free. He
+      thought it was far harder to live than to die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of his early sketches, there was admirable wit in the suggestion to
+      the organist for a hymn appropriate to a sermon on the Prodigal Son:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! we'll all get blind drunk<br /> When Johnny comes marching home!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And in The Innocents Abroad there is the same sort of brilliant wit in the
+      mad logic of his innocent query, on learning that St. Philip Neri's heart
+      was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs: &ldquo;I was curious to
+      know what Philip had for dinner.&rdquo; Mark Twain was capable of epigrams
+      worthy, in their dark levity, of Swift himself. In speaking of Pudd'nhead
+      Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said &ldquo;Humour there is in almost every scene
+      and every page; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam on the
+      greatest Shakespearian tragedies&mdash;on the deep melancholy of Hamlet,
+      the heartbreak of Lear.&rdquo; The greatest ironic achievements of Mark Twain,
+      in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'
+      and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the power and subtlety of his art
+      as an ironic humorist&mdash;or shall we rather say, ironic wit? For they
+      range all the way from the most mordant to the most pathetic irony&mdash;from
+      Mephistophelean laughter to warm, human tears:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Sunt lachrymae rerum.</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make a reputation first by your more solid achievements,&rdquo; counselled
+      Oliver Wendell Holmes. &ldquo;You can't expect to do anything great with
+      Macbeth, if you first come on flourishing Paul Pry's umbrella.&rdquo; Mark Twain
+      has had to pay in full the penalty of comic greatness. The world is loth
+      to accept a popular character at any rating other than its own. Whosoever
+      sets himself the task of amusing the world must realize the almost
+      insuperable difficulty of inducing the world to regard him as a serious
+      thinker. Says Moliere&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>C'est une etrange entreprise que celle<br /> de faire rire les honnetes
+      gens.</i>&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The strangeness of the undertaking is no less pronounced than the rigour
+      of its obligations. Mark Twain began his career as a professional humorist
+      and fun-maker; he frankly donned the motley, the cap and bells. The
+      man-in-the-street is not easily persuaded that the basis of the comic is,
+      not uncommon nonsense, but glorified common-sense. The French have a
+      fine-flavoured distinction in <i>ce qui remu</i> from <i>ce qui emeut</i>;
+      and if <i>remuag</i> is the defining characteristic of 'A Tramp Abroad',
+      'Roughing It', and 'The Innocents Abroad', there is much of deep
+      seriousness and genuine emotion in 'Life on the Mississippi', 'Tom
+      Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'. In the course of his
+      lifetime, Mark Twain evolved from a fun-maker into a masterly humorist,
+      from a sensational journalist into a literary artist. In explanation of
+      this, let us recall the steps in that evolution. In his youth, this boy
+      had no schooling worth speaking of; he lived in an environment that
+      promised only stagnation and decay. As the young boy, barefooted and
+      dirty, watched the steamboats pass and repass upon the surface of that
+      great inland deep, the Mississippi, he conceived the ambition and the
+      ideal of learning to know and to master that mysterious water. His dream,
+      in time, was realized; he not only became a pilot, but&mdash;which is
+      infinitely more significant&mdash;he changed from a callow, indolent,
+      unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a man, a master of the
+      river, with a knowledge which, in its accuracy and minuteness, was, for
+      its purpose, all-sufficient and complete.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have always felt that, had it not been for this training in the great
+      university of the Mississippi, Mark Twain might never have acquired that
+      trained faculty for minute detail and descriptive elaboration without
+      which his works, full of flaws as they are, might never have revealed the
+      very real art which they betray. For the art of Mark Twain is the art of
+      taking infinite pains&mdash;the art of exactitude, precision and detail.
+      Humour per se is as ephemeral as the laugh&mdash;dying in the very moment
+      of its birth. Art alone can give it enduring vitality. Mark Twain's native
+      temperament, rich with humour and racy of the soil, drank in the wonder of
+      the river and unfolded through communication with all its rude human
+      devotees; the quick mind, the eager susceptibility, developed and matured
+      through rigorous education in particularity and detail; and before his
+      spirit the very beauties of Nature herself disappeared in face of a
+      consuming sense of the work of the world that must be done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain never wholly escaped the penalty that his reputation as a
+      humorist compelled him to pay. He became more than popular novelist, more
+      than a jovial entertainer: he became a public institution, as unmistakable
+      and as national as the Library of Congress or the Democratic Party. Even
+      in the latest years of his life, though long since dissociated in fact
+      from the category of Artemus Ward, John Phoenix, Josh Billings, and
+      Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain could never be sure that his most solemn
+      utterance might not be drowned in roars of thoughtless laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has been a very serious and a very difficult matter,&rdquo; Mr. Clemens once
+      said to me, &ldquo;to doff the mask of humour with which the public is
+      accustomed, in thought, to see me adorned. It is the incorrigible practice
+      of the public, in this or in any country, to see only humour in the
+      humorist, however serious his vein. Not long ago I wrote a poem, which I
+      never dreamed of giving to the public, on account of its seriousness; but
+      on being invited to address the women students of a certain great
+      university, I was persuaded by a near friend to read this poem. At the
+      close of my lecture I said 'Now, ladies, I am going to read you a poem of
+      mine'&mdash;which was greeted with bursts of uproarious laughter. 'But
+      this is a truly serious poem,' I asseverated&mdash;only to be greeted with
+      renewed and, this time, more uproarious laughter. Nettled by this
+      misunderstanding, I put the poem in my pocket, saying, 'Well, young
+      ladies, since you do not believe me to be serious, I shall not read the
+      poem'&mdash;at which the audience almost went into convulsions of
+      laughter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Humour is a function of nationality. The same joke, as related by an
+      American, a Scotchman, an Irishman, a Frenchman, carries with it a
+      distinctive racial flavour and individuality of approach. Indeed, it is
+      open to question whether most humour is not essentially local in its
+      nature, requiring some specialized knowledge of some particular locality.
+      It would be quite impossible for an Italian on his native heath to
+      understand that great political satirist, &ldquo;Mr. Dooley,&rdquo; on the Negro
+      Problem, for example. After reading George Ade's Fables in Slang, Mr.
+      Andrew Lang was driven to the desperate conclusion that humour varies with
+      the parallels of latitude, a joke in Chicago being a riddle in London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If one would lay his finger upon the secret of Mark Twain's world-wide
+      popularity as a humorist, he would find that secret, primarily, in the
+      universality and humanity of his humour. Mark Twain is a master in the art
+      of broad contrast; incongruity lurks on the surface of his humour; and
+      there is about it a staggering and cyclopean surprise. But these are mere
+      surface qualities, more or less common, though at lower power, to all
+      forms of humour. Nor is his international vogue as a humorist to be
+      attributed to any tricks of style, to any breadth of knowledge, or even to
+      any depth of intellectuality. His hold upon the world is due to qualities,
+      not of the head, but of the heart. I once heard Mr. Clemens say that
+      humour is the key to the hearts of men, for it springs from the heart; and
+      worthy of record is his dictum that there is far more of feeling than of
+      thought in genuine humour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain succeeded in &ldquo;tickling the midriff of the English-speaking
+      races&rdquo; with a single story; and in time he showed himself to be, not only
+      a man of letters, but also a man of action. His humour has been defined as
+      the sunny break of his serious purpose. Horace Walpole has said that the
+      world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy to the man of feeling.
+      To the great humorist&mdash;to Mark Twain&mdash;the world was a
+      tragi-comedy. Like Smile Faguet, he seemed at times to feel that grief is
+      the most real and important thing in the world&mdash;because it separates
+      us from happiness. He was an exemplar of the highest, truest, sincerest
+      humour, perfectly fulfilling George Meredith's definition: &ldquo;If you laugh
+      all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a
+      tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour, spare
+      him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is the
+      spirit of Humour that is moving you.&rdquo; Mark Twain's fun was light-hearted
+      and insouciant, his pathos genuine and profound. &ldquo;He is, above all,&rdquo; said
+      that oldest of English journals, 'The Spectator', &ldquo;the fearless upholder
+      of all that is clean, noble, straightforward, innocent, and manly. . . .
+      If he is a jester, he jests with the mirth of the happiest of the
+      Puritans; he has read much of English knighthood, and translated the best
+      of it into his living pages; and he has assuredly already won a high
+      degree in letters in having added more than any writer since Dickens to
+      the gaiety of the Empire of the English language.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's humour flowed warm from the heart. He enjoyed to the utmost
+      those two inalienable blessings: &ldquo;laughter and the love of friends.&rdquo; He
+      woke the laughter of an epoch and numbered a world for his friends. &ldquo;He is
+      the true consolidator of nations,&rdquo; said Mr. Augustine Birrell. &ldquo;His
+      delightful humour is of the kind which dissipates and destroys national
+      prejudices. His truth and his honour, his love of truth and his love of
+      honour, overflow all boundaries. He has made the world better by his
+      presence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="pp129.jpg (46K)" src="images/pp129.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      <a name="genius" id="genius">THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS</a>
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <blockquote>
+          <blockquote>
+            <p>
+              <i> &ldquo;Art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life,<br />
+              but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the<br /> whole
+              world the art of common life&mdash;the art of a people&mdash;<br />
+              universal art."<br /></i>
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              TOLSTOY: What is Art?
+            </p>
+          </blockquote>
+        </blockquote>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some years ago a group of Mark Twain's friends, in a spirit of fun,
+      addressed a letter to:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MARK TWAIN<br /> GOD KNOWS WHERE.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though taking a somewhat circuitous route, the letter went unerringly to
+      its goal; and it was not long before the senders of that letter received
+      the laconic, but triumphant reply: &ldquo;He did.&rdquo; They now turned the tables on
+      the jubilant author, who equally as quickly received a letter addressed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MARK TWAIN<br /> THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed that &ldquo;he&rdquo; did, too!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his lifetime Mark Twain won a fame that was literally world-wide&mdash;a
+      fame, indeed, which seemed to extend to realms peopled by noted
+      theological characters. From very humble beginnings&mdash;he used
+      facetiously to speak of coming up from the &ldquo;very dregs of society&rdquo;!&mdash;Mark
+      Twain achieved international eminence and repute. This accomplishment was
+      due to the power of brain and personality alone. In this sense, his career
+      is unprecedented and unparalleled in the history of American literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a mark of the democratic independence of America that she has
+      betrayed a singular indifference to the appraisal of her literature at the
+      hands of foreign criticism. Upon her writers who have exhibited derivative
+      genius&mdash;Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow&mdash;American
+      criticism has lavished the most extravagant eulogiums. The three geniuses
+      who have made permanent contributions to world-literature, who have either
+      embodied in the completest degree the spirit of American democracy, or who
+      have had the widest following of imitators and admirers in foreign
+      countries, still await their final and just deserts at the hands of
+      critical opinion in their own land. The genius of Edgar Allan Poe gave
+      rise to schools of literature on the continent of Europe; yet in America
+      his name must remain for years debarred from inclusion in a so-called Hall
+      of Fame! Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great interpreters and
+      embodiments of America, represent the supreme contribution of democracy to
+      universal literature. In so far as it is legitimate for anyone to be
+      denominated a &ldquo;self-made man&rdquo; in literature, these men are justly entitled
+      to such characterization. They owe nothing to European literature&mdash;their
+      genius is supremely original, native, democratic. The case of Mark Twain,
+      which is our present concern, is a literary phenomenon which imposes upon
+      criticism, peculiarly upon American criticism, the distinct obligation of
+      tracing the steps in his unhalting climb to an eminence that was
+      international in its character, and of defining those signal qualities,
+      traits, characteristics&mdash;individual, literary, social, racial,
+      national&mdash;which compassed his world-wide fame. For if it be true that
+      the judgment of foreign nations is virtually the judgment of posterity,
+      then is Mark Twain already a classic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the continent of Europe, Mark Twain first received notable
+      recognition in France at the hands of that brilliant woman, Mme. Blanc
+      (Th. Bentzon), who devoted so much of her energies to the popularization
+      of American literature in Europe. That one of her series of essays upon
+      the American humorists which dealt with Mark Twain appeared in the 'Revue
+      des Deux Mondes' in 1872; in it appeared her admirable translation of 'The
+      Jumping Frog'. There is no cause for surprise that a scholarly
+      Frenchwoman, reared on classic models and confined by rigid canons of art,
+      should stand aghast at this boisterous, barbaric, irreverent jester from
+      the wilds of America. When it is remembered that Mark Twain began his
+      career as one of the sage-brush writers and gave free play to his passion
+      for horseplay, his desire to &ldquo;lay a mine&rdquo; for the other fellow, and his
+      defiance of the traditional and the classic, it is not to be wondered at
+      that Mme. Blanc, while honouring him with recognition in the most
+      authoritative literary journal in the world, could not conceal an
+      expression of amazement over his enthusiastic acceptance in
+      English-speaking countries.
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;Mark Twain's 'Jumping Frog' should be mentioned in the first place as
+          one of his most popular little stories&mdash;almost a type of the
+          rest. It is, nevertheless, rather difficult for us to understand,
+          while reading this story, the 'roars of laughter' that it excited in
+          Australia and in India, in New York and in London; the numerous
+          editions of it which appeared; the epithet of 'inimitable' that the
+          critics of the English press have unanimously awarded to it.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;We may remark that a Persian of Montesquieu, a Huron of Voltaire,
+          even a simple Peruvian woman of Madame de Graffigny, reasons much more
+          wisely about European civilization than an American of San Francisco.
+          The fact is, that it is not sufficient to have wit, or even natural
+          taste, in order to appreciate works of art.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;It is the right of humorists to be extravagant; but still common
+          sense, although carefully hidden, ought sometimes to make itself
+          apparent. . . . In Mark Twain the Protestant is enraged against the
+          pagan worship of broken marble statues&mdash;the democrat denies that
+          there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages. The sublime ruins of
+          the Coliseum only impressed him with the superiority of America, which
+          punishes its criminals by forcing them to work for the benefit of the
+          State, over ancient Rome, which could only draw from the punishments
+          which it inflicted the passing pleasure of a spectacle.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;In the course of this voyage in company with Mark Twain, we at length
+          discover, under his good-fellowship and apparent ingenuousness, faults
+          which we should never have expected. He has in the highest degree that
+          fault of appearing astonished at nothing&mdash;common, we may say, to
+          all savages. He confesses himself that one of his great pleasures is
+          to horrify the guides by his indifference and stupidity. He is, too,
+          decidedly envious. . . . We could willingly pardon him his patriotic
+          self-love, often wounded by the ignorance of Europeans, above all in
+          what concerns the New World, if only that national pride were without
+          mixture of personal vanity; but how comes it that Mark Twain, so
+          severe upon those poor Turks, finds scarcely anything to criticize in
+          Russia, where absolutism has nevertheless not ceased to flourish? We
+          need not seek far for the cause of this indulgence: the Czar received
+          our ferocious republicans; the Empress, and the Grand Duchess Mary,
+          spoke to them in English.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          &ldquo;Taking the Pleasure Trip on the Continent altogether, does it merit
+          the success it enjoys? In spite of the indulgence that we cannot but
+          show to the judgments of a foreigner; while recollecting that those
+          amongst us who have visited America have fallen, doubtless, under the
+          influence of prejudices almost as dangerous as ignorance, into errors
+          quite as bad&mdash;in spite of the wit with which certain pages
+          sparkle&mdash;we must say that this voyage is very far below the less
+          celebrated excursions of the same author in his own country.&rdquo;
+         </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Three years later, Mme. Blanc returns to the discussion of Mark Twain, in
+      an essay in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes', entitled 'L'age Dore en Amerique'&mdash;an
+      elaborate review and analysis of The Gilded Age. The savage charm and real
+      simplicity of Mark Twain are not lacking in appeal, even to her
+      sophisticated intelligence; and she is inclined to infer that jovial irony
+      and animal spirits are qualities sufficient to amuse a young nation of
+      people like the Americans who do not, like the French, pique themselves
+      upon being blase. According to her judgment, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley
+      Warner are lacking in the requisite mental grasp for the &ldquo;stupendous task
+      of interpreting the great tableau of the American scene.&rdquo; Nor does she
+      regard their effort at collaboration as a success from the standpoint of
+      art. The charm of Colonel Sellers wholly escapes her; she cannot
+      understand the almost loving appreciation with which this cheaply gross
+      forerunner of the later American industrial brigand was greeted by the
+      American public. The book repels her by &ldquo;that mixture of good sense with
+      mad folly&mdash;disorder&rdquo;; but she praises Mark Twain's accuracy as a
+      reporter. The things which offend her sensibilities are the wilful
+      exaggeration of the characters, and the jests which are so elaborately
+      constructed that &ldquo;the very theme itself disappears under the mass of
+      embroidery which overlays it.&rdquo; &ldquo;The audacities of a Bret Harte, the
+      grosser temerities of a Mark Twain, still astonish us,&rdquo; she concludes;
+      &ldquo;but soon we shall become accustomed to an American language whose savoury
+      freshness is not to be disdained, awaiting still more delicate and refined
+      qualities that time will doubtless bring.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In translating 'The Jumping Frog' into faultless French (giving Mark Twain
+      the opportunity for that delightful retranslation into English which
+      furnished delight for thousands), in reviewing with elaboration and long
+      citations 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'The Gilded Age', Mme. Blanc
+      introduced Mark Twain to the literary public of France; and Emile Blemont,
+      in his 'Esquisses Americaines de Mark Twain' (1881), still further
+      enhanced the fame of Mark Twain in France by translating a number of his
+      slighter sketches. In 1886, Eugene Forgues published in the 'Revue des
+      Deux Mondes' an exhaustive review (with long citations) of 'Life on the
+      Mississippi', under the title 'Les Caravans d'un humoriste'; and his
+      prefatory remarks in regard to Mark Twain's fame in France at that time
+      may be accepted as authoritative. He pointed out the praiseworthy efforts
+      that had been made to popularize these &ldquo;transatlantic gaieties,&rdquo; to import
+      into France a new mode of comic entertainment. Yet he felt that the
+      peculiar twist of national character, the type of wit peculiar to a people
+      and a country, the specialized conception of the <i>vis comic</i> revealed
+      in Mark Twain's works, confined them to a restricted milieu. The result of
+      all the efforts to popularize Mark Twain in France, he makes plain, was an
+      almost complete check; for to the French taste Mark Twain's pleasantry
+      appeared macabre, his wit brutal, his temperament dry to excess. By some,
+      indeed, his exaggerations were regarded as symptoms of mental alienation;
+      and the originality of his verve did not succeed in giving a passport to
+      the incoherence of his conceptions. &ldquo;It has been said,&rdquo; remarked M.
+      Forgues, with keen perception, &ldquo;that an academician slumbers in the depths
+      of every Frenchman; and it was this which prevented the success of Mark
+      Twain in France. Humour, in France, has its laws and its restrictions. So
+      the French public saw in Mark Twain a gross jester, incessantly beating
+      upon a tom-tom to attract the attention of the crowd. They were tenacious
+      in resisting all such blandishments . . . . As a humorist, Mark Twain was
+      never appreciated in France. The appreciation he ultimately secured&mdash;an
+      appreciation by no means inconsiderable, though in no sense comparable to
+      that won in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic countries&mdash;was due to his
+      sagacity and penetration as an observer, and to his marvellous faculty for
+      calling up scenes and situations by the clever use of the novel and the <i>imprevu</i>.
+      There was, even to the Frenchman, a certain lively appeal in an
+      intelligence absolutely free of convention, sophistication, or reverence
+      for traditionary views <i>qua</i> traditionary.&rdquo; Though at first the salt
+      of Mark Twain's humour seemed to the French to be lacking in the Attic
+      flavour, this new mode of comic entertainment, the leisurely exposition of
+      the genially naive American, in time won its way with the <i>blase</i>
+      Parisians. Travellers who could find no copy of the Bible in the street
+      bookstalls of Paris, were confronted everywhere with copies of 'Roughing
+      It'. When the authoritative edition of Mark Twain's works appeared in
+      English, that authoritative French journal, the 'Mercure de France', paid
+      him this distinguished tribute: &ldquo;His public is as varied as possible,
+      because of the versatility and suppleness of his talent which addresses
+      itself successively to all classes of readers. He has been called the
+      greatest humorist in the world, and that is probably the truth; but he is
+      also a charming and attractive story-teller, an alert romancer, a clever
+      and penetrating observer, a philosopher without pretensions, and therefore
+      all the more profound, and finally, a brilliant essayist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, the observation of M. Forgues is just and authentic&mdash;the
+      Attic flavour of <i>l'esprit Gauloi</i> is alien to the loosely
+      articulated structure of American humour. The noteworthy criticism which
+      Mark Twain directed at Paul Bourget's 'Outre Mer', and the subsequent
+      controversy incident thereto, forced into light the racial and
+      temperamental dissimilarities between the Gallic and the American <i>Ausschauung</i>.
+      Mr. Clemens once remarked to me that, of all continental peoples, the
+      French were most alien to the spirit of his humour. In 'Le Figaro', at the
+      time of Mark Twain's death, this fundamental difference in taste once more
+      comes to light: &ldquo;It is as difficult for a Frenchman to understand Mark
+      Twain as for a North American to admire La Fontaine. At first sight, there
+      is nothing in common between that highly specialized faculty which the
+      Anglo-Saxons of the old and the new world designate under the name of
+      humour, and that quality with us which we call wit (esprit). And yet, at
+      bottom, these two manifestations of the human genius, so different in
+      appearance, have a common origin and reach the same result: they are, both
+      of them, the glorification of good sense presented in pleasing and
+      unexpected form. Only, this form must necessarily vary with peoples who do
+      not speak the same language and whose skulls are not fashioned in the same
+      way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In Italy, as in France, the peculiar <i>timbr</i> of Mark Twain's humour
+      found an audience not wholly sympathetic, not thoroughly <i>au courant</i>
+      with his spirit. &ldquo;Translation, however accurate and conscientious,&rdquo; as the
+      Italian critic, Raffaele Simboli, has pointed out, &ldquo;fails to render the
+      special flavour of his work. And then in Italy, where humorous writing
+      generally either rests on a political basis or depends on risky phrases,
+      Mark Twain's sketches are not appreciated because the spirit which
+      breathes in them is not always understood. The story of 'The Jumping
+      Frog', for instance, famous as it is in America and England, has made
+      little impression in France or Italy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was rather among the Germanic peoples and those most closely allied to
+      them, the Scandinavians, that Mark Twain found most complete and ready
+      response. At first blush, it seems almost incredible that the writings of
+      Mark Twain, with their occasional slang, their colloquialisms and their
+      local peculiarities of dialect, should have borne translation so well into
+      other languages, especially into German. It must, however, be borne in
+      mind that, despite these peculiar features of his writings, they are
+      couched in a style of most marked directness, simplicity and native
+      English purity. The ease with which his works were translated into
+      foreign, especially the Germanic and allied tongues, and the eager delight
+      with which they were read and comprehended by all classes, high and low,
+      constitute perhaps the most signal conceivable tribute, not only to the
+      humanity of his spirit, but to the genuine art of his marvellously
+      forthright and natural style. It need be no cause for surprise that as
+      early as 1872 he had secured Tauchnitz, of Leipzig, for his Continental
+      agent. German translations soon appeared of 'The Jumping Frog and Other
+      Stories' (1874), 'The Gilded Age' (1874), 'The Innocents Abroad and The
+      New Pilgrim's Progress' (1875), 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876). A
+      few years later his sketches, many of them, were translated into virtually
+      all printed languages, notably into Russian and modern Greek; and his more
+      extended works gradually came to be translated into German, French,
+      Italian, and the languages of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The elements of the colossally grotesque, the wildly primitive, in Mark
+      Twain's works, the underlying note of melancholy not less than the lawless
+      Bohemianism, found sympathetic appreciation among the Germanic races.
+      George Meredith has likened the functionings of Germanic humour to the
+      heavy-footed antics of a dancing bear. Mark Twain's stories of the
+      Argonauts, the miners and desperadoes, with their primitive, orgiastic
+      existence; his narratives of the wild freedom of the life on the
+      Mississippi, the lawless feuds and barbaric encounters&mdash;all appealed
+      to the passion for the fantastic and the grotesque innate in the Germanic
+      consciousness. To the Europeans, this wild genius of the Pacific Slope
+      seemed to function in a sort of unexplored fourth dimension of humour&mdash;vast
+      and novel&mdash;of which they had never dreamed. It is noteworthy that
+      Schleich, in his 'Psychopathik des Humors', reserved for American humour,
+      with Mark Twain as its leading exponent, a distinct and unique category
+      which he denominated <i>phantastischen, grossdimensionalen</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the biographer belongs the task of describing, in detail, the lavish
+      entertainment and open-hearted homage which were bestowed upon Mark Twain
+      in German Europe. In writing of Mark Twain and his popularity in Germanic
+      countries, Carl von Thaler unhesitatingly asserts that Mark Twain was
+      feted, wined and dined in Vienna, the Austrian metropolis, in an
+      unprecedented manner, and awarded unique honours hitherto paid to no
+      German writer. In Berlin, the young Kaiser bestowed upon him the most
+      distinguished marks of his esteem; and praised his works, in especial
+      'Life on the Mississippi', with the intensest enthusiasm. When Mark Twain
+      received a command from the Kaiser to dine with him, his young daughter
+      exclaimed that if it kept on like this, there soon wouldn't be anybody
+      left for him to become acquainted with but God! Mark said that it seemed
+      uncomplimentary to regard him as unacquainted in that quarter; but of
+      course his daughter was young, and the young always jump to conclusions
+      without reflection. After hearing the Kaiser's eulogy on 'Life on the
+      Mississippi', he was astounded and touched to receive a similar tribute,
+      the same evening, from the portier of his lodging-house. He loved to dwell
+      upon this, in later years&mdash;declaring it the most extraordinary
+      coincidence of his life that a crowned head and a portier, the very top of
+      an empire and the very bottom of it, should have expressed the very same
+      criticism, and delivered the very same verdict, upon one of his books,
+      almost in the same hour and the same breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The German edition of his works, in six volumes, published by Lutz of
+      Stuttgart, in 1898, I believe, contained an introduction in which he was
+      hailed as the greatest humorist in the world. Among German critics he was
+      regarded as second only to Dickens in drastic comic situation and depth of
+      feeling. Robinson Crusoe was held to exhibit a limited power of
+      imagination in comparison with the ingenuity and inventiveness of Tom
+      Sawyer. At times the German critics confessed their inability to discover
+      the dividing line between astounding actuality and fantastic exaggeration.
+      The descriptions of the barbaric state of Western America possessed an
+      indescribable fascination for the sedate Europeans. At times Mark Twain's
+      bloody jests froze the laughter on their lips; and his &ldquo;revolver-humour&rdquo;
+       made their hair stand on end. Though realizing that the scenes and events
+      described in 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', 'Roughing It', and 'Life on
+      the Mississippi' could not have been duplicated in Europe, the German
+      critics revelled in them none the less that &ldquo;such adventures were possible
+      only in America&mdash;perhaps only in the fancy of an American!&rdquo; &ldquo;Mark
+      Twain's greatest strength,&rdquo; says Von Thaler, &ldquo;lies in the little sketches,
+      the literary snap-shots. The shorter his work, the more striking it is. He
+      draws directly from life. No other writer has learned to know so many
+      different varieties of men and of circumstances, so many strange examples
+      of the Genus Homo, as he; no other has taken so strange a course of
+      development.&rdquo; The deeper elements of Mark Twain's humour did not escape
+      the attention of the Germans, nor fail of appreciation at their hands. In
+      his aphorisms, embodying at once genuine wit and experience of life, they
+      discovered not merely the American author, but the universal human being;
+      these aphorisms they found worthy of profound and lasting admiration.
+      Sintenis found in Mark Twain a &ldquo;living symptom of the youthful joy in
+      existence&rdquo;&mdash;a genius capable at will, despite his &ldquo;boyish
+      extravagance,&rdquo; of the virile formulation of fertile and suggestive ideas.
+      His latest critic in Germany wrote at the time of his death, with a
+      genuine insight into the significance of his work: &ldquo;Although Mark Twain's
+      humour moves us to irresistible laughter, this is not the main point in
+      his books; like all true humorists, <i>ist der Witz mit dem Weltschmerz
+      verbunden</i>, he is a witness to higher thoughts and higher emotions, and
+      his purpose is to expose bad morals and evil circumstances, in order to
+      improve and ennoble mankind.&rdquo; The critic of the 'Berliner Zeitung'
+      asserted that Mark Twain is loved in Germany more than all other
+      humorists, English or French, because his humour &ldquo;turns fundamentally upon
+      serious and earnest conceptions of life.&rdquo; It is a tremendously significant
+      fact that the works of American literature most widely read in Germany
+      are the works of&mdash;striking conjunction!&mdash;Ralph Waldo Emerson and
+      Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The 'Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' fired the laugh heard round the
+      world. Like Byron, Mark Twain woke one morning to find himself famous. A
+      classic fable, which had once evoked inextinguishable laughter in Athens,
+      was unconsciously re-told in the language of Angel's Camp, Calaveras
+      County, where history repeated itself with a precision of detail startling
+      in its miraculous coincidence. Despite the international fame thus
+      suddenly won by this little fable, Mark Twain had yet to overcome the
+      ingrained opposition of insular prejudice before his position in England
+      and the colonies was established upon a sure and enduring footing. In a
+      review of 'The Innocents Abroad' in 'The Saturday Review' (1870), the
+      comparison is made between the Americans who &ldquo;do Europe in six weeks&rdquo; and
+      the most nearly analogous class of British travellers, with the following
+      interesting conclusions: &ldquo;The American is generally the noisier and more
+      actively disagreeable, but, on the other hand, he often partially redeems
+      his absurdity by a certain naivete and half-conscious humour. He is often
+      laughing in his sleeve at his own preposterous brags, and does not take
+      himself quite so seriously as his British rival. He is vulgar, and even
+      ostentatiously and atrociously vulgar; but the vulgarity is mixed with a
+      real shrewdness which rescues it from simple insipidity. We laugh at him,
+      and we would rather not have too much of his company; but we do not feel
+      altogether safe in despising him.&rdquo; The lordly condescension and gross
+      self-satisfaction here betrayed are but preliminaries to the ludicrous
+      density of the subsequent reflections upon Mark Twain himself: &ldquo;He parades
+      his utter ignorance of Continental languages and manners, and expresses
+      his very original judgments on various wonders of art and nature with a
+      praiseworthy frankness. We are sometimes left in doubt whether he is
+      speaking in all sincerity or whether he is having a sly laugh at himself
+      and his readers&rdquo;! It is quite evident that the large mass of English
+      readers, represented by The Saturday Review, had not caught Mark Twain's
+      tone; but even the reviewer is more than half won over by the
+      infectiousness of this new American humour. &ldquo;Perhaps we have persuaded our
+      readers by this time that Mr. Twain (sic) is a very offensive specimen of
+      the vulgarest kind of Yankee. And yet, to say the truth, we have a kind of
+      liking for him. There is a frankness and originality about his remarks
+      which is (sic) pleasanter than the mere repetition of stale raptures; and
+      his fun, if not very refined, is often tolerable in its way. In short, his
+      pages may be turned over with amusement, as exhibiting more or less
+      consciously a very lively portrait of the uncultivated American tourist,
+      who may be more obtrusive and misjudging, but is not quite so stupidly
+      unobservant as our native product. We should not choose either of them for
+      our companions on a visit to a church or a picture&mdash;gallery, but we
+      should expect most amusement from the Yankee as long as we could stand
+      him.&rdquo; It was this review which gave Mark Twain the opening for his
+      celebrated parody&mdash;a parody which, I have always thought, went far to
+      opening the eyes of the British public to the true spirit of his humour.
+      Such irresistible fun could not fail of appreciation at the hands of a
+      nation which regarded Dickens as their representative national author.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two years later, Mark Twain received in England an appreciative reception
+      of well-nigh national character. Whilst the literary and academic circles
+      of America withheld their unstinted recognition of an author so primitive
+      and unlettered, Great Britain received him with open arms. He was a
+      welcome guest at the houses of the exclusive; the highest dignitaries of
+      public life, the authoritative journals, the leaders of fashion, of
+      thought, and of opinion openly rejoiced in the breezy unconventionality,
+      the fascinating daring, and the genial personality of this new variety of
+      American genius. His English publisher, John Camden Hotten, wrote in 1873:
+      &ldquo;How he dined with the Sheriff of London and Middlesex; how he spent
+      glorious evenings with the wits and literati who gather around the festive
+      boards of the Whitefriars and the Savage Clubs; how he moved in the gay
+      throng at the Guildhall conversazione; how he feasted with the Lord Mayor
+      of London; and was the guest of that ancient and most honourable body&mdash;the
+      City of London Artillery&mdash;all these matters we should like to dwell
+      upon.&rdquo; His public lectures, though not so popular as those of Artemus
+      Ward, won him recognition as a master in all the arts of the platform. Mr.
+      H. R. Haweis, who heard him once at the old Hanover Square Rooms, thus
+      describes the occasion: &ldquo;The audience was not large nor very enthusiastic.
+      I believe he would have been an increasing success had he stayed longer.
+      We had not time to get accustomed to his peculiar way, and there was
+      nothing to take us by storm, as in Artemus Ward. . . . . He came on and
+      stood quite alone. A little table, with the traditional water-bottle and
+      tumbler, was by his side. His appearance was not impressive, not very
+      unlike the representation of him in the various pictures in his 'Tramp
+      Abroad'. He spoke more slowly than any other man I ever heard, and did not
+      look at his audience quite enough. I do not think that he felt altogether
+      at home with us, nor we with him. We never laughed loud or long; no one
+      went into those irrepressible convulsions which used to make Artemus pause
+      and look so hurt and surprised. We sat throughout expectant and on the <i>qui
+      vive</i>, very well interested, and gently simmering with amusement. With
+      the exception of one exquisite description of the old Magdalen ivy&mdash;covered
+      collegiate buildings at Oxford University, I do not think there was one
+      thing worth setting down in print. I got no information out of the
+      lecture, and hardly a joke that would wear, or a story that would bear
+      repeating. There was a deal about the dismal, lone silver&mdash;land, the
+      story of the Mexican plug that bucked, and a duel which never came off,
+      and another duel in which no one was injured; and we sat patiently enough
+      through it, fancying that by and by the introduction would be over, and
+      the lecture would begin, when Twain suddenly made his bow and went off! It
+      was over. I looked at my watch; I was never more taken aback. I had been
+      sitting there exactly an hour and twenty minutes. It seemed ten minutes at
+      the outside. If you have ever tried to address a public meeting, you will
+      know what this means. It means that Mark Twain is a consummate public
+      speaker. If ever he chose to say anything, he would say it marvellously
+      well; but in the art of saying nothing in an hour, he surpasses our most
+      accomplished parliamentary speakers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The nation which had been reared upon the wit of Sidney Smith, the irony
+      of Swift, the <i>gros se</i> of Fielding, the extravagance of Dickens, was
+      ripe for the colossal incongruities and daring contrasts of Mark Twain.
+      They recognized in him not only &ldquo;the most successful and original wag of
+      his day,&rdquo; but also a rare genius who shared with Walt Whitman &ldquo;the honour
+      of being the most strictly American writer of what is called American
+      literature.&rdquo; We read in a review of 'A Tramp Abroad', published in The
+      Athenaeum in 1880: &ldquo;Mark Twain is American pure and simple. To the eastern
+      motherland he owes but the rudiments, the groundwork, already archaic and
+      obsolete to him, of the speech he has to write; in his turn of art, his
+      literary method and aims, his intellectual habit and temper, he is as
+      distinctly national as the Fourth of July.&rdquo; Mark Twain was admired because
+      he was &ldquo;a literary artist of exceptional skill&rdquo;; and it was ungrudgingly
+      acknowledged that &ldquo;he has a keen sense of character and uncommon skill in
+      presenting it dramatically; and he is also an admirable story-teller, with
+      the anecdotic instinct and habit in perfection, and with a power of
+      episodic narrative that is scarcely equalled, if at all, by Mr. Charles
+      Reade himself.&rdquo; Indeed, from the early days of 'The Innocents Abroad', the
+      &ldquo;first transatlantic democratic utterance which found its way into the
+      hearing of the mass of English people&rdquo;; during the period of 'Tom Sawyer',
+      &ldquo;the completest boy in fiction,&rdquo; the immortal 'Huckleberry Finn', &ldquo;the
+      standard picaresque novel of America&mdash;the least trammelled piece of
+      literature in the language,&rdquo; and 'Life on the Mississippi', vastly
+      appreciated in England as in Germany for its <i>cultur-historisch</i>
+      value; down to the day when Oxford University bestowed the coveted honour
+      of its degree upon Mark Twain, and all England took him to their hearts
+      with fervour and abandon&mdash;during this long period of almost four
+      decades, Mark Twain progressively strengthened his hold upon the
+      imagination of the English people and, like Charles Dickens before him,
+      may be said to have become the representative author of the Anglo-Saxon
+      race. &ldquo;The vast majority of readers here regard him,&rdquo; said Mr. Sydney
+      Brooks in 1907, &ldquo;to a degree in which they regard no other living writer,
+      as their personal friend, and love him for his tenderness, his
+      masculinity, his unfailing wholesomeness even more than for his humour.&rdquo;
+       To all who love and admire Mark Twain, these words in which he was
+      welcomed to England in 1907 should stand as a symbol of that racial bond,
+      that <i>entente cordial</i> of blood and heart, which he did so much to
+      strengthen and secure. &ldquo;A compliment paid to Mark Twain is something more
+      than a compliment to a great man, a great writer, and a great citizen. It
+      is a compliment to the American people, and one that will come home to
+      them with peculiar gratification. . . . The feeling for Mark Twain among
+      his own people is like that of the Scotch for Sir Walter eighty odd years
+      ago, or like that of our fathers for Charles Dickens. There is admiration
+      in it, gratitude, pride, and, above all, an immense and intimate
+      tenderness of affection. To writers alone it is given to win a sentiment
+      of this quality&mdash;to writers and occasionally, by the oddness of the
+      human mind, to generals. Perhaps one would best take the measure of the
+      American devotion to Mark Twain by describing it as a compound of what
+      Dickens enjoyed in England forty years ago, and of what Lord Roberts
+      enjoys to-day, and by adding something thereto for the intensity of all
+      transatlantic emotions. The 'popularity' of statesmen, even of such a
+      statesman as President Roosevelt, is a poor and flickering light by the
+      side of this full flame of personal affection. It has gone out to Mark
+      Twain not only for what he has written, for the clean, irresistible
+      extravagance of his humour and his unfailing command of the primal
+      feelings, for his tenderness, his jollity and his power to read the heart
+      of boy and man and woman; not only for the tragedies and afflictions of
+      his life so unconquerably borne; not only for his brave and fiery dashes
+      against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home and abroad; but also
+      because his countrymen feel him to be, beyond all other men, the
+      incarnation of the American spirit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain achieved a position of supreme eminence as a representative
+      national author which is without a parallel in the history of American
+      literature. This position he achieved directly by his appeal to the great
+      mass of the people, despite the <i>dict</i> of the <i>literati</i>. At a
+      time when England and Europe were throwing wide the doors to Mark Twain,
+      the culture of his own land was regarding him with slighting
+      condescension, or with mildly quizzical unconcern. Boston regarded him
+      with fastidious and frigid disapproval, Longfellow and Lowell found little
+      in him to admire or approve. There were notable exceptions, as Mr. Howells
+      has recently pointed out&mdash;Charles Eliot Norton, Professor Francis J.
+      Child, and most notable of all, Mr. Howells himself; but in general it is
+      true that &ldquo;in proportion as people thought themselves refined they
+      questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then
+      the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude.&rdquo; The professors of
+      literature regarded Mark Twain as an author whose works were essentially
+      ephemeral; and stood in the breach for Culture against the barbaric
+      invasion of primitive Western Barbarism. Professor W. P. Trent was, I
+      believe, the first to cite Professor Richardson's American Literature
+      (published in 1886) as a typical instance of the position of literary
+      culture in regard to Mark Twain. &ldquo;But there is a class of writers,&rdquo; we
+      read in that work, &ldquo;authors ranking below Irving or Lowell, and lacking
+      the higher artistic or moral purpose of the greater humorists, who amuse a
+      generation and then pass from sight. Every period demands a new manner of
+      jest, after the current fashion . . . . The reigning favourites of the day
+      are Frank R. Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, the various newspaper jokers,
+      and 'Mark Twain.' [Note the damning position!] But the creators of
+      `Pomona' and 'Rudder Grange,' of `Uncle Remus and his Folk-lore Stories,'
+      and `Innocents Abroad,' clever as they are, must make hay while the sun
+      shines. Twenty years hence, unless they chance to enshrine their wit in
+      some higher literary achievement, their unknown successors will be the
+      privileged comedians of the republic. Humour alone never gives its masters
+      a place in literature; it must coexist with literary qualities, and must
+      usually be joined with such pathos as one finds in Lamb, Hood, Irving, or
+      Holmes.&rdquo; This passage stands in the 1892 edition of that work, though 'Tom
+      Sawyer' had appeared in 1876, 'The Prince and the Pauper' in 1882, 'Life
+      on the Mississippi' in 1883, 'Huckleberry Finn' in 1884, and 'A
+      Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in 1889. Opinions analogous to
+      those expressed in the passage just cited have found frequent expression
+      among leaders of critical opinion in America; and only yesterday 'The
+      Jumping Frog' and 'The Innocents Abroad' were seriously put forward, by a
+      clever and popular American critic, as Mark Twain's most enduring claims
+      upon posterity! A bare half-dozen men in the ranks of American literary
+      criticism have recognized and eloquently spoken forth in vindication of
+      Mark Twain's title as a classic author, not simply of American literature,
+      but of the literature of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, even now, perhaps not too early to attempt some sort of inquiry
+      into the causes contributory to Mark Twain's recognition as the prime
+      representative of contemporary American literature. One of the cheap
+      catchwords of Mark Twain criticism is the statement that he is &ldquo;American
+      to the core,&rdquo; and that his popular appreciation in his own country was due
+      to the fact that he most completely embodied the national genius. How many
+      of those who confidently advance this vastly significant statement, one
+      curiously wonders, have seriously endeavoured to make plain to others&mdash;or
+      even to themselves&mdash;the reasons therefor? Perhaps in seeking the
+      causes for Mark Twain's renown in his own country one may discover the
+      causes for his world-wide fame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A map of the United States, upon which were marked the localities and
+      regions made famous by the writings of Mark Twain, would show that,
+      geographically, he has known and studied this vast country in all the
+      grand divisions of its composition. Bred from old Southern stock, born in
+      the Southwest, he passed his youth upon the bosom of that great natural
+      division between East and West, the Mississippi River, which cleaves in
+      twain the very body of the nation. In the twenties he lost the feeling of
+      local attachment in the vast democracy of the West, and looked life&mdash;a
+      strangely barbaric and primitive life&mdash;straight in the face. This is
+      the first great transformation in his life&mdash;behold the Westerner!
+      After enriching his mind through contact with civilizations so diverse as
+      Europe and the Sandwich Islands, he settled down in Connecticut, boldly
+      foreswore the creeds and principles of his native section, and underwent a
+      new transformation&mdash;behold the Yankee! Once again, travel in foreign
+      lands, association with the most intellectual and cultured circles of the
+      world, broadened his vision; yet this cosmopolitan experience, far from
+      diminishing his racial consciousness, tended still further to accentuate
+      the national characteristics. In this new transformation, we behold the
+      typical American! The later years, of cosmopolitan renown, of world-wide
+      fame, throw into high relief the last transformation&mdash;behold the
+      universally human spirit! Under this crude catalogue, the main lines of
+      Mark Twain's development stand out in sharp definition. The catalogue,
+      however, is only too crude&mdash;it is impossible to say with precision
+      just when such and such a transformation actually took place. It is only
+      intended to be suggestive; for we must bear in mind that Mark Twain never
+      changed character. His spirit underwent an evolutionary process&mdash;broadening,
+      deepening, enlarging its vision with the passage of the years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="pp157.jpg (78K)" src="images/pp157.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The part which the South played in the formation of the character and
+      genius of Mark Twain has been little noted heretofore. It was in the South
+      and Southwest that the creator of the humour of local eccentrics first
+      appeared in full flower; and &ldquo;Ned Brace,&rdquo; &ldquo;Major Jones,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Sut
+      Lovengood&rdquo; have in them the germs of that later Western humour that was to
+      come to full fruition in the works of Bret Harte and Mark Twain. The stage
+      coach and the river steamboat furnished the means for disseminating far
+      and wide the gross, the ghastly, the extravagant stories, the oddities of
+      speech, the fantastic jests which emerged from the clash of diverse and
+      oddly-assorted types. The jarring contrasts, the incongruities and
+      surprises daily furnished by the picturesque river life unquestionably
+      stimulated and fertilized the latent germs of humour in the young
+      cub-pilot, Sam Clemens. Through Mark Twain's greatest works flows the
+      stately Mississippi, magically imparting to them some indefinable share of
+      its beauty, its variety, its majesty, its immensity; and there is no
+      exaggeration in the conclusion that it is the greatest natural influence
+      which his works betray. Reared in a slave-holding community of
+      narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people of the lower middle class;
+      seeing his own father so degrade himself as to cuff his negro house-boy;
+      consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and bob-tail of the town, in his
+      passion for bohemianism and truantry&mdash;young Clemens never learned to
+      know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and the humanity, of that
+      aristocratic patriarchal South which produced such beautiful figures as
+      Lee and Lanier. Not even his most enthusiastic biographers have attempted
+      to palliate, save with half-hearted facetiousness, his inglorious
+      desertion of the cause which he had espoused. Mark Twain is the most
+      speedily &ldquo;reconstructed rebel&rdquo; on record. Is it broad-minded&mdash;or even
+      accurate!&mdash;for Mr. Howells to say of Mark Twain: &ldquo;No one has ever
+      poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticised,
+      pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal?&rdquo; Mark Twain never, I firmly
+      believe, held up to ridicule the Southern &ldquo;ideal.&rdquo; But in a well-known and
+      excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he properly pokes fun at the
+      &ldquo;wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality&mdash;all
+      imitated from Sir Walter Scott,&rdquo; of the Southern literary journal of the
+      thirties and forties. In later years Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc',
+      voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which bespoke the &ldquo;Southern ideal&rdquo; of
+      his Virginia forbears; and that delicacy of instinct in matters of right
+      and wrong which is so conspicuous a trait of Mark Twain's is a symptom of
+      that &ldquo;moral elegance&rdquo; which Mr. Owen Wister has pronounced to be one of
+      the defining characteristics of the Southern American. &ldquo;No American of
+      Northern birth or breeding,&rdquo; Mr. Howells pertinently observes, &ldquo;could have
+      imagined the spiritual struggle of Huck Finn in deciding to help the negro
+      Jim to his freedom, even though he should be for ever despised as a negro
+      thief in his native town, and perhaps eternally lost through the blackness
+      of his sin. No Northerner could have come so close to the heart of a
+      Kentucky feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing
+      through its carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the
+      sardonic comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the
+      store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the
+      drunkard's daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that comes
+      to lynch him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The influence of the West upon the character and genius of Mark Twain is
+      momentous and unmistakable. Mark Twain found room for development and
+      expansion in the primitive freedom of the West. It was here, I think, that
+      there were bred in him that breezy democracy of sentiment and that hatred
+      of sham and pretence which fill his writings from beginning to end. In the
+      West, virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood&mdash;or fell&mdash;by
+      force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled
+      for fortune, for competence&mdash;or for existence. It was a case of the
+      survival of the fittest. In face of bleak Nature&mdash;the burning alkali
+      desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,&mdash;all men were
+      free and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort. In this primitive
+      democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting. The
+      pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug soon went to the wall,
+      exposed in the nakedness of his own impotency. Humour is a salutary aid in
+      the struggle of the individual with the contrasts of life; indeed it may
+      be said to be born of the perception of those contrasts. In a degree no
+      whit inferior to the variegated river life, the life of the West furnished
+      contrasts and incongruities innumerable&mdash;vaster perhaps, and more
+      significant. There was the incessant contrast of civilization with
+      barbarism, of the East with the West; and there was infinite play for the
+      comic <i>expos</i> of the credulous &ldquo;tenderfoot&rdquo; at the hands of the
+      pitiless cowboy. Roars of Gargantuan laughter shook the skies as each new
+      initiate unwittingly succumbed to the demoniac wiles of his tormentors.
+      The West was one vast theatre for the practice of the &ldquo;practical joke.&rdquo;
+       Behind everything, menacing, foreboding, tragic, lay the stupendous
+      contrast between Man and Nature; and though the miner, the granger, the
+      cowboy laughed defiantly at civilization and at Nature, there crept into
+      the consciousness of each the conviction that, in the long run,
+      civilization must triumph, and that, in order to win success, Nature must
+      be conquered and subdued. In such an environment, with its spirit of
+      primitive democracy, its atmosphere of wild and ribald jest, its contempt
+      for the impostor, its perpetually recurring incongruities, and behind all
+      the solemn, perhaps tragic, presence of inexorable Nature&mdash;in such an
+      environment were sharpened and whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour,
+      the spirit of real democracy bred of competitive effort, and the hatred
+      for pretence, sham, and imposture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="pp163.jpg (69K)" src="images/pp163.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not, I think, until Mark Twain went to live in Connecticut and, as
+      he expressed it, became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture
+      among the other rocks of New England, that he developed complete
+      confidence in himself and his powers. That passion for successful
+      self-expression, which Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler has defined as the main
+      ambition of the American, became the dominant motive of Mark Twain's life.
+      Of his experience as a steamboat pilot, Mark Twain has said that in that
+      brief, sharp schooling he got personally and familiarly acquainted with
+      about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in
+      fiction, biography or history. In the West he had still further enriched
+      his mind with an inexhaustible store of first-hand knowledge of human
+      nature. In rotation he had been tramping jour printer, river pilot,
+      private secretary, miner, reporter, lecturer. He now turns to literature
+      in real earnest, and begins to display that vast store of knowledge
+      derived from actual contact with the infinitely diversified realities of
+      American life. Mark Twain takes on more and more of the characteristics of
+      the Yankee&mdash;those characteristics which constitute the basis of his
+      success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the practical efficiency, the
+      shrewdness and the hard common&mdash;sense. It is the last phase in the
+      formation of the national type.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was, I venture to say, in some such way as this that Mark Twain came to
+      assume in the eyes of his countrymen an embodiment of the national spirit.
+      He was the self&mdash;made man in the self&mdash;made democracy. He was at
+      once his own creation and the creation of a democracy. There were
+      humorists in America before Mark Twain; there are humorists in America
+      still. But Mark Twain succeeded not merely in captivating the great mass
+      of the people; he achieved the far more difficult and unique distinction
+      of convincing his countrymen of his essential fellowship, his
+      temperamental affinity, with them. This miracle he wrought by the frankest
+      and most straightforward revelation of the actual experiences in his own
+      life and the lives of those he had known with perfect intimacy. It is true
+      that he wrote a few books dealing with other times, other scenes, than our
+      own in the present and in America. But I daresay that his popularity with
+      the mass of his countrymen would not have been in any degree lessened had
+      he never written these few books. Indeed, it is hardly to be doubted that
+      his books were successful in the ratio of their autobiographic nature. For
+      the character he revealed in those books of his which are essentially
+      autobiographic, is the character dear to the American heart; and the
+      experiences, vicissitudes, and hardships, shot through and irradiated with
+      a high boisterousness of humour, found a joyous sympathy in the minds and
+      hearts of men who had all &ldquo;been there&rdquo; themselves. In Mark Twain the
+      American people recognized at last the sturdy democrat, independent of
+      foreign criticism; confident in the validity and value of his own ideas
+      and judgments; believing loyally in his country's institutions, and
+      upholding them fearlessly before the world; fundamentally serious and
+      self-reliant, yet with a practicality tempered by humane kindliness,
+      warmth of heart, and a strain of persistent idealism; rude, boisterous,
+      even uncouth, yet withal softened by sympathy for the under-dog, a
+      boundless love for the weak, the friendless, the oppressed; lacking in
+      profound intellectuality, yet supreme in the possession of the simple and
+      homely virtues&mdash;an upright and honourable character, a good citizen,
+      a man tenacious of the sanctity of the domestic virtues. America has
+      produced finer and more exalted types&mdash;giants in intellectuality,
+      princes in refinement and delicacy of spirit, savants in culture, classics
+      in authorship. An American type combining culture with picturesqueness,
+      refinement with patriotism, suavity with self-reliance, desire it as we
+      may, still awaits the imprimatur of international recognition. America has
+      sufficient cause for gratification in the memory of that quaint and sturdy
+      figure so conspicuously bearing the national stamp and superscription.
+      Perhaps no American has equalled Mark Twain in the quality of subsuming
+      and embodying in his own character so many elements of the national spirit
+      and genius. In letters, in life, Mark Twain is the American <i>par
+      excellence</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Underneath those qualities which combined to produce in Mark Twain a
+      composite American type, lay something deeper still&mdash;that indefinable
+      <i>je ne sais quoi</i> which procured him international fame. Humour alone
+      is utterly inadequate for achieving so momentous a result&mdash;though
+      humour ostensibly constituted the burden of the appeal. As a matter of
+      fact, vehemently as the professors may deny it, Mark Twain was an artist
+      of remarkable force and power. From the days when he came under the
+      tutelage of Mr. Howells, and humbly learned to prune away his stylistic
+      superfluities of the grosser sort, Mark Twain indubitably began to subject
+      himself to the discipline of stern self-criticism. While it is true that
+      he never learned to realize in full measure, to use Pater's phrase, &ldquo;the
+      responsibility of the artist to his materials,&rdquo; he assuredly disciplined
+      himself to make the most, in his own way, of the rude and volcanic power
+      which he possessed. It is fortunate that Mark Twain never subjected
+      himself to the refinements of academic culture; a Harvard might well have
+      spoiled a great author. For Mark Twain had a memorable tale to tell of
+      rude, primitive men and barbaric, remote scenes and circumstances; of
+      truant and resourceful boyhood exercising all its cunning in circumventing
+      circumstance and mastering a calling. And he had that tale to tell in the
+      unlettered, yet vastly expressive, phraseology of the actors in those wild
+      events. The secret of his style is directness of thought, a sort of
+      shattering clarity of utterance, and a mastery of vital, vigorous,
+      audacious individual expression. He had a remarkable feeling for words and
+      their uses; and his language is the unspoiled, expressive language of the
+      people. At times he is primitive and coarse; but it is a Falstaffian note,
+      the mark of universality rather than of limitation. His art was, in
+      Tolstoy's phrase, &ldquo;the art of a people&mdash;universal art&rdquo;; and his style
+      was rich in the locutions of the common people, rich and racy of the soil.
+      A signal merit of his style is its admirable adaptation to the theme. The
+      personages of his novels always speak &ldquo;in character&rdquo;&mdash;with perfect
+      reproduction, not only of their natural speech, but also of their natural
+      thoughts. Though Mr. Henry James may have said that one must be a very
+      rudimentary person to enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue in a
+      rudimentary style in treatment of rudimentary or,&mdash;as I should prefer
+      to phrase it,&mdash;fundamental things. Mr. James, I feel sure, could
+      never have put into the mouth of a &ldquo;rudimentary&rdquo; person like Huck, so
+      vivid and graphic a description of a storm with its perfect reproduction
+      of the impression caught by the &ldquo;rudimentary&rdquo; mind. &ldquo;Writers of fiction,&rdquo;
+       says Sir Walter Besant in speaking of this book, &ldquo;will understand the
+      difficulty of getting inside the brain of that boy, seeing things as he
+      saw them, writing as he would have written, and acting as he would have
+      acted; and presenting to the world true, faithful, and living effigies of
+      that boy. The feat has been accomplished; there is no character in fiction
+      more fully, more faithfully, presented than the character of Huckleberry
+      Finn. . . . It may be objected that the characters are extravagant. Not
+      so. They are all exactly and literally true; they are quite possible in a
+      country so remote and so primitive. Every figure in the book is a type;
+      Huckleberry Finn has exaggerated none. We see the life&mdash;the dull and
+      vacuous life&mdash;of a small township upon the Mississippi River forty
+      years ago. So far as I know, it is the only place where we can find that
+      phase of life portrayed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain impressed one always as writing with utter individuality&mdash;untrammelled
+      by the limitations of any particular sect of art. In his books of travel,
+      he reveals not only the instinct of the trained journalist for the novel
+      and the effective, but also the feeling of the artist for the beautiful,
+      the impressive, and the sublime. His descriptions, of striking natural
+      objects, such as the volcano of Mount Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, of
+      memorable architecture, such as the cathedral at Milan, show that he
+      possessed the &ldquo;stereoscopic imagination&rdquo; in rare degree. The picture he
+      evokes of Athens by moonlight, in the language of simplicity and
+      restraint, ineffaceably fixes itself in the fancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was regarded in France as a remarkable &ldquo;impressionist&rdquo; and
+      praised by the critics for the realistic accuracy and minuteness of his
+      delineation. Kipling frankly acknowledged the great debt that he owed him.
+      Tennyson spoke in high praise of his finesse in the choice of words, his
+      feeling for the just word to catch and, as it were, visualize the precise
+      shade of meaning desired. In truth, Mark Twain was an impressionist,
+      rather than an imaginative artist. That passage in 'A Yankee in King
+      Arthur's Court' in which he describes an early morning ride through the
+      forest, pictorially evocative as it is, stands self-revealed&mdash;a
+      confusedly imaginative effort to create an image he has never experienced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we set over beside this the remarkable descriptions of things seen, as
+      minutely evocative as instantaneous photographs&mdash;such, for example,
+      as the picture of a summer storm, or preferably, the picture of dawn on
+      the Mississippi, both from Huckleberry Finn&mdash;pictures Mark Twain had
+      seen and lived hundreds of times, we see at once the striking superiority
+      of the realistic impressionist over the imaginative artist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have always felt that the most lasting influence of his life&mdash;the
+      influence which has left the most pervasive impression upon his art and
+      thought&mdash;is portrayed in that classic and memorable passage in which
+      he portrays the marvellous spell laid upon him by that mistress of his
+      youth, the great river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the young pilot, the face of the water in time became a wonderful book.
+      For the uninitiated traveller it was a dead language, but to the young
+      pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets. He came to feel that there
+      had never been so wonderful a book written by man. To its haunting beauty,
+      its enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly&mdash;drinking it
+      in like one bewitched. But a day came when he began to cease from noting
+      its marvels. Another day came when he ceased altogether to note them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In time, he came to realize that, for him, the romance and the beauty were
+      gone forever from the river. If the early rapture was gone, in its place
+      was the deeper sense of knowledge and intimacy. He had learned the
+      ultimate secrets of the river&mdash;learned them with a knowledge, so
+      searching and so profound, that he was enabled to give them the enduring
+      investiture of art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence. He was a master of the
+      art of moving, touching, swaying an audience. At times, his insight into
+      the mysterious springs of humour, of passion, and of pathos seemed almost
+      like divination. All these qualities appeared in full flower in the
+      written expression of his art. It would be doing a disservice to his
+      memory to deny that his style did not possess literary distinction or
+      elegance. At times his judgment was at fault; his constitutional humour
+      came near playing havoc with his artistic sense. Not seldom he was long&mdash;winded
+      and laborious in his striving after comic effect. To offset these manifest
+      lapses and defects there are the many fine qualities&mdash;descriptive
+      passages aglow with serene and cloud less beauty, dramatic scenes depicted
+      with virile and rugged eloquence, pathetic incidents touched with gentle
+      and caressing tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Style bears translation ill; in fact, translation is not infrequently
+      impossible. But Mr. Clemens once pointed out to me that humour has nothing
+      to do with style. Mark Twain's humour&mdash;for humour is his prevalent
+      mood&mdash;has international range since, constructed out of a deep
+      comprehension of human nature and a profound sympathy for human
+      relationship and human failing, it successfully surmounts the difficulties
+      of translation into alien tongues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain became a great international figure, not because he was an
+      American, paradoxical and unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he
+      was America's greatest cosmopolitan. He was a true cosmopolitan in the
+      Higginsonian sense, in that, unlike Mr. Henry James, he was &ldquo;at home even
+      in his own country.&rdquo; He was a true cosmopolitan in the Tolstoyan sense;
+      for his was &ldquo;art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, but
+      such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world&mdash;the
+      art of common life&mdash;the art of a people&mdash;universal art.&rdquo; His
+      spirit grasped the true ideal of our time and reflected it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Clemens attributed his international success not to qualities of
+      style, not to allegiance to any distinctive school, not to any overtopping
+      eminence of intellect. &ldquo;Many so-called American humorists,&rdquo; he once
+      remarked to me, &ldquo;have been betrayed by their preoccupation with the local.
+      Their work never crossed frontiers because they failed to impart to their
+      humour that universal element which appeals to all races of men. Realism
+      is nothing more than close observation. But observation will never give
+      you the inside of the thing. The life, the genius, the soul of a people
+      are realized only through years of absorption.&rdquo; Mr. Clemens asseverated
+      that the only way to be a great American humorist was to be a great human
+      humorist&mdash;to discover in Americans those permanent and universal
+      traits common to all nationalities. In his commentary upon Bourget's
+      'Outre Mer', he declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic
+      that could safely be labelled &ldquo;American&rdquo;&mdash;not a single human detail,
+      inside or outside. Through years of automatic observation, Mark Twain
+      learned to discover for America, to adapt his own phrase, those few human
+      peculiarities that can be generalized and located here and there in the
+      world and named by the name of the nation where they are found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Above all, I think, Mark Twain sympathized with and found something to
+      admire in the citizens of every nation, seeking beneath the surface veneer
+      the universal traits of that nation's humanity. He expressly disclaimed in
+      my presence any &ldquo;attitude&rdquo; toward the world, for the very simple reason
+      that his relation toward all peoples had been one of effort at
+      comprehension of their ideals, and identification with them in feeling. He
+      disavowed any colour prejudices, caste prejudices, or creed prejudices&mdash;maintaining
+      that he could stand any society. All that he cared to know was that a man
+      was a human being&mdash;that was bad enough for him! It is a matter not of
+      argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has made more damaging admissions
+      concerning America than concerning any other nation. Lafcadio Hearn best
+      succeeded in interpreting poetry to his Japanese students by freeing it
+      from all artificial and local restraints, and using as examples the
+      simplest lyrics which go straight to the heart and soul of man. His
+      remarkable lecture on 'Naked Poetry' is the most signal illustration of
+      his profoundly suggestive mode of interpretation. In the same way, Mark
+      Twain as humorist has sought the highest common factor of all nations. &ldquo;My
+      secret&mdash;if there is any secret&mdash;,&rdquo; Mr. Clemens once said to me,
+      &ldquo;is to create humour independent of local conditions. In studying humanity
+      as exhibited in the people and localities I best knew and understood, I
+      have sought to winnow out the encumbrance of the local.&rdquo; And he
+      significantly added&mdash;musingly&mdash;&ldquo;Humour, like morality, has its
+      eternal verities.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has
+      contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the Mississippi,
+      'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank with the very best
+      examples of picaresque fiction;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might well
+      be regarded as the supreme American morality&mdash;play of youth,
+      'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of such
+      originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory parallel in
+      literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and all of
+      'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases of a
+      civilization now vanished forever. It is gratifying to Americans to
+      recognize in Mark Twain the incarnation of democratic America. It is
+      gratifying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and recapture the
+      pleasure and delight his works have given them for decades. It is more
+      gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain,
+      America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of
+      Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe&mdash;a man who will
+      be remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, &ldquo;with the great humorists of all
+      time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company;
+      none of them was his equal in humanity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig">
+      <img alt="pp179.jpg (33K)" src="images/pp179.jpg" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      <a name="philosopher" id="philosopher">PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST</a>
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p>
+            &ldquo;Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward<br /> towards a
+            summit where you will find your chiefest<br /> pleasure in conduct
+            which, while contenting you, will<br /> be sure to confer benefits
+            upon your neighbour and the<br /> community."<br /> MARK TWAIN: 'What
+            is Man?'
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The humorous writer,&rdquo; says Thackeray, &ldquo;professes to awaken and direct
+      your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension,
+      and imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the
+      unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the
+      ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be
+      the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks,
+      and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him&mdash;sometimes love
+      him.&rdquo; This definition is apt enough to have been made with Mark Twain in
+      mind. In an earlier chapter, is displayed the comic phase of Mark Twain's
+      humour. Beneath that humour, underlying it and informing it, is a fund of
+      human concern, a wealth of seriousness and pathos, and a universality of
+      interests which argue real power and greatness. These qualities, now to be
+      discussed, reveal Mark Twain as serious enough to be regarded as a real
+      moralist and philosopher, humane enough to be regarded as, in spirit, a
+      true sociologist and reformer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be recognised that the history of literature furnishes forth no
+      great international figure, whose fame rests solely upon the basis of
+      humour, however human, however sympathetic, however universal that humour
+      may be. Behind that humour must lurk some deeper and more serious
+      implication which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product. Genuine
+      humour, as Landor has pointed out, requires a &ldquo;sound and capacious mind,
+      which is always a grave one.&rdquo; There is always a breadth of philosophy, a
+      depth of sadness, or a profundity of pathos in the very greatest
+      humorists. Both Rabelais and La Fontaine were reflective dreamers;
+      Cervantes fought for the progressive and the real in pricking the bubble
+      of Spanish chivalry; and Moliere declared that, for a man in his position,
+      he could do no better than attack the vices of his time with ridiculous
+      likenesses. Though exhibiting little of the melancholy of Lincoln, Mark
+      Twain revelled in the same directness of thought and expression, showed
+      the same zest for broad humour reeking with the strong but pungent flavour
+      of the soil. Though expressing distaste for Franklin's somewhat cold and
+      almost mercenary injunctions, Mark Twain nevertheless has much of his
+      Yankee thrift, shrewdness, and bed-rock common sense. Beneath and
+      commingled with all his boyish and exuberant fun is a note of pathos
+      subdued but unmistakable, which rings true beside the forced and
+      extravagant pathos of Dickens. His Southern hereditament of chivalry, his
+      compassion for the oppressed and his defence of the down-trodden, were
+      never in abeyance from the beginning of his career to the very end. Like
+      Joel Chandler Harris, that genial master of African folk-lore, Mark Twain
+      found no theme of such absorbing interest as human nature. Like Fielding,
+      he wrote immortal narratives in which the prime concern is not the
+      &ldquo;story,&rdquo; but the almost scientific revelation of the natural history of
+      the characters. The corrosive and mordant irony of many a passage in Mark
+      Twain, wherein he holds up to scorn the fraudulent and the artificial, the
+      humbug, the hypocrite, the sensualist, are not unworthy of the colossal
+      Swift. That &ldquo;disposition for hard hitting with a moral purpose to sanction
+      it,&rdquo; which George Meredith pronounces the national disposition of British
+      humour, is Mark Twain's unmistakable hereditament. It is, perhaps, because
+      he relates us to our origins, as Mr. Brander Matthews has suggested, that
+      Mark Twain is the foremost of American humorists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the preface to the Jumping Frog, published as far back as 1867, Mark
+      Twain was dubbed, not only &ldquo;the wild humorist of the Pacific slope,&rdquo; but
+      also &ldquo;the moralist of the Main.&rdquo; The first book which brought him great
+      popularity, 'The Innocents Abroad', exhibited qualities of serious ethical
+      import which, while escaping the attention of the readers of that day,
+      emerge for the moderns from the welter of hilarious humour. How
+      unforgettable is his righteous indignation over that &ldquo;benefit&rdquo; performance
+      he witnessed in Italy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ingrained quality in Mark Twain, which perhaps more than any other won
+      the enthusiastic admiration of his fellow Americans, was this: he always
+      had the courage of his convictions. He writes of things, classic and
+      hallowed by centuries, with a freshness of viewpoint, a total indifference
+      to crystallized opinion, that inspire tremendous respect for his courage,
+      even when one's own convictions are not engaged. The &ldquo;beautiful love story
+      of Abelard and Heloise&rdquo; will never, I venture to say, recover its pristine
+      glory&mdash;now that Mark Twain has poured over Abelard the vials of his
+      wrath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those who know only the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep,
+      underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and
+      truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker
+      and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence. In answer to a query of
+      mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave
+      carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: &ldquo;I never wrote
+      a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens. She is solely
+      responsible&mdash;to her should go the credit&mdash;for any deeply serious
+      or moral influence my subsequent work may exert. After my marriage, she
+      edited everything I wrote. And what is more&mdash;she not only edited my
+      works, she edited ME! After I had written some side-splitting story,
+      something beginning seriously and ending in preposterous anti-climax, she
+      would say to me: 'You have a true lesson, a serious meaning to impart
+      here. Don't give way to your invincible temptation to destroy the good
+      effect of your story by some extravagantly comic absurdity. Be yourself!
+      Speak out your real thoughts as humorously as you please, but&mdash;without
+      farcical commentary. Don't destroy your purpose with an ill-timed joke.' I
+      learned from her that the only right thing was to get in my serious
+      meaning always, to treat my audience fairly, to let them really feel the
+      underlying moral that gave body and essence to my jest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The quality with which Mark Twain invests his disquisitions upon morals,
+      upon conscience, upon human foibles and failings, is the charm of the
+      humorist always&mdash;never the grimness of the moralist or the coldness
+      of the philosopher. He observes all human traits, whether of moral
+      sophistry or ethical casuistry, with the genial sympathy of a lover of his
+      kind irradiated with the riant comprehension of the humorist. And yet at
+      times there creeps into his tone a note of sincere and manly pathos,
+      unmistakable, irresistible. One has only to read the beautiful, tender
+      tale of the blue jay in 'A Tramp Abroad' to know the beauty and the depth
+      of his feeling for nature and her creatures, his sense of kinship with his
+      brothers of the animal kingdom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In our first joyous and headlong interest in the narrative of 'Huckleberry
+      Finn', its rapid succession of continuously arresting incidents, its
+      omnipresent yet never intrusive humour, the deeper significance of many a
+      passage in that contemporary classic is likely to escape notice. Sir
+      Walter Besant, who revelled in it as one of the most completely satisfying
+      and delightful of books, speaks of it deliberately as a book without a
+      moral. Perhaps he was deceived by the foreword: &ldquo;Persons attempting to
+      find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to
+      find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in
+      it will be shot.&rdquo; There never was a more easy-going, care-free,
+      unpuritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the two farcical &ldquo;hoboes,&rdquo; Tom
+      Sawyer, and the rest. And yet in the light of Mark Twain's later writings
+      one cannot but see in that picaresque romance, with its pleasingly loose
+      moral atmosphere, an underlying seriousness and conviction. Jim is a
+      simple, harmless negro, childlike and primitive; yet, so marvellous, so
+      restrained is the art of the narrator, that imperceptibly, unconsciously,
+      one comes to feel not only a deep interest in, but a genuine respect for,
+      this innocent fugitive from slavery. Mr. Booker Washington, a
+      distinguished representative of his race, said he could not help feeling
+      that, in the character of Jim, Mark Twain had, perhaps unconsciously,
+      exhibited his sympathy for and interest in the masses of the negro people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, to the reflective mind&mdash;and it is to be presumed that by that
+      standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged&mdash;there is no
+      more significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck
+      struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral
+      responsibility for compassing Jim's emancipation. Nothing else is needed
+      to show at once Mark Twain's preoccupation with the workings of human
+      conscience in the unsophisticated mind and his conviction that, with the
+      &ldquo;lights that he had,&rdquo; Huck was justified in his courageous decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Huck felt deeply repentant for allowing Jim to escape from the innocent,
+      inoffending Miss Watson. He became consumed with horror and remorse to
+      hear Jim making plans for stealing his wife and children, if their masters
+      wouldn't sell them. His conscience kept stirring him up hotter than ever
+      when he heard Jim talking to himself about the joys of freedom. After
+      awhile, Huck decided to write a letter to Miss Watson, informing her of
+      the whereabouts of her &ldquo;runaway nigger.&rdquo; After writing that letter, he
+      felt washed clean of sin, uplifted, exalted. But he could not forget all
+      the goodness and tenderness of poor Jim, who had shown himself so
+      profoundly grateful. Though he faced the torments of Puritanical damnation
+      as a consequence, he resolved to let Jim go free. Humanity triumphed over
+      conscience&mdash;and with an &ldquo;All right, then, I'll go to hell,&rdquo; he tore
+      up the letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of Mark Twain's favourite themes for the display of his humour was the
+      subject of prevarication. He seemed never to tire of ringing the changes
+      upon the theme of the lie, its utility, its convenience, and its
+      consequences. Doubtless he chose to dabble in falsehood because it is
+      generally winked at as the most venial of all moral obliquities&mdash;a
+      fault which is the most thoroughly universal of all that flesh is heir to.
+      The incident of George Washington and the cherry tree furnished the basis
+      for countless of his anecdotes; he wrung from it variations innumerable,
+      from the epigram to the anecdote. His distinction between George
+      Washington and himself, redounding immeasurably to his own glory, and
+      demonstrating his complete superiority to Washington as a moral character,
+      is classic: &ldquo;George Washington couldn't tell a lie. I can; but I won't.&rdquo;
+       Perhaps his most humorous anecdote, based upon the same story, is in
+      connection with the exceedingly old &ldquo;darky&rdquo; he once met in the South, who
+      claimed to have crossed the Delaware with Washington. &ldquo;Were you with
+      Washington,&rdquo; asked Mark Twain mischievously, &ldquo;when he took that hack at
+      the cherry tree?&rdquo; This was a poser for the old darkey; his pride was
+      appealed to, his very character was at stake. After an awkward hesitation,
+      the old darkey spoke up, a gleam of simulated recollection (and real
+      gratification for his convenient memory) overspreading his countenance:
+      &ldquo;Lord, boss, I was dar. In cose I was. I was with Marse George at dat very
+      time. In fac&mdash;I done druv dat hack myself&rdquo;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's most delightful trick as a popular humorist was to strike out
+      some comic epigram, that passed currency with the masses whose fancy it
+      tickled, and also had upon it the minted stamp of the classic aphorism.
+      These epigrams were frequently pseudo-moral in their nature; and their
+      humour usually lay in the assumption that everybody is habitually addicted
+      to prevarication&mdash;which is just precisely true enough and
+      reprehensible enough to validate the epigram. His method was humorous
+      inversion; and he told a story whose morals are so ludicrously twisted
+      that the right moral, by contrast, spontaneously springs to light. &ldquo;Never
+      tell a lie&mdash;except for practice,&rdquo; is less successful than the more
+      popularly known &ldquo;When in doubt, tell the truth.&rdquo; Out of the latter maxim
+      he succeeded in extracting a further essence of humour. He admitted
+      inventing the maxim, but never expected it to be applied to himself. His
+      advice, he said, was intended for other people; when he was in doubt
+      himself, he used more sagacity! Mark Twain has made no more delightful
+      epigram than that one in which he recognizes that a lie, morally
+      reprehensible as it may be, is undoubtedly an ever present help in time of
+      need: &ldquo;Never waste a lie. You never know when you may need it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes in a humorous, sometimes in a grimly serious way, Mark Twain was
+      fond of drawing the distinction between theoretical and practical morals.
+      Theoretical morals, he would point out, are the sort you get on your
+      mother's knee, in good books, and from the pulpit. You get them into your
+      head, not into your heart. Only by the commission of crime can anyone
+      acquire real morals. Commit all the crimes in the decalogue, take them in
+      rotation, persevere in this stern determination&mdash;and after awhile you
+      will thereby attain to moral perfection! It is not enough to commit just
+      one crime or two&mdash;though every little bit helps. Only by committing
+      them all can you achieve real morality! It is interesting to note this
+      distinction between Mark Twain, the humorous moralist, and Bernard Shaw,
+      the ethical thinker. Each teaches precisely the same thing&mdash;the one
+      not even half seriously, the other with all the sharp sincerity of
+      conviction. Shaw unhesitatingly declares that trying to be wicked is
+      precisely the same experiment as trying to be good, viz., the discovery of
+      character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The range of Mark Twain's humour, from the ludicrous anecdote with
+      comically mixed morals to the profound parable with grimly ironic
+      conclusion, takes the measure of the ethical nature of the man. It can
+      best be illustrated, I think, by a comparison of his anecdote of the theft
+      of the green water-melon and the classic fable of 'The Man that Corrupted
+      Hadleyburg'. Mark stole a water-melon out of a farmer's wagon, while he
+      wasn't looking. Of course stole was too harsh a term&mdash;he withdrew, he
+      retired that water-melon. After getting safely away to a secluded spot, he
+      broke the water-melon open&mdash;only to find that it was green, the
+      greenest water-melon of the year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The moment he saw that the water-melon was green, he felt sorry. He began
+      to reflect&mdash;for reflection is the beginning of reform. It is only by
+      reflecting on some crime you have committed, that you are &ldquo;vaccinated&rdquo;
+       against committing it again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Mark began to reflect. And his reflections were of this nature: What
+      ought a boy to do who has stolen a green water-melon? What would George
+      Washington, who never told a lie, have done? He decided that the only
+      real, right thing for any boy to do, who has stolen a water-melon of that
+      class, is to make restitution. It is his duty to restore it to its
+      rightful owner. So rising up, spiritually strengthened and refreshed by
+      his noble resolution, Mark restored the water&mdash;melon&mdash;what there
+      was left of it&mdash;to the farmer and&mdash;made the farmer give him a
+      ripe one in its place! Thus he clinched the &ldquo;moral&rdquo; of this story, so
+      quaint and so ingenious; and concluded that only in some such way as this
+      could one be fortified against further commission of crime. Only thus
+      could one become morally perfect!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, as in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical
+      suggestion&mdash;a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his
+      literal words&mdash;the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity,
+      fantasy, light irony. Yet beneath this outer covering of art there is a
+      serious meaning that, like murder, will out. If demonstration were needed
+      that Mark Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is amply
+      supplied by that masterpiece, that triumph of invention, construction, and
+      originality, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'. Here is a pure morality,
+      daring in the extreme and incredibly original in a world perpetually
+      reiterating a saying already thousands of years old, to the effect that
+      there is nothing new under the sun. It is a deliberate emendation of that
+      invocation in the Lord's Prayer &ldquo;Lead us (not) into temptation.&rdquo; The
+      shrieking irony of this trenchant parable, its cynicism and heartlessness,
+      would make of it an unendurable criticism of human life&mdash;were it
+      accepted literally as a representation of society. In essence it is a
+      morality pure and simple, animated not only by its brilliantly original
+      ethical suggestion, but also by its illuminating reflection of human
+      nature and its graciously relieving humour. In that exultant letter which
+      the <i>Diabolus ex machina</i> wrote to the betrayed villagers, he sneers
+      at their old and lofty reputation for honesty&mdash;that reputation of
+      which they were so inordinately proud and vain. The weak point in their
+      armour was disclosed so soon as he discovered how carefully and vigilantly
+      they kept themselves and their children out of temptation. For he well
+      knew that the weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been
+      tested in the fire. The familiar distinction between innocence and virtue
+      springs to mind. And it is worthy of consideration that Nietzsche, and
+      Shaw after him, both point out that virtue consists, not in resisting
+      evil, but in not desiring it! 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' is a
+      masterpiece, eminently worthy of the genius of a Swift. It proclaims Mark
+      Twain not only as a supreme artist, but also as eminently and
+      distinctively a moralist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is impossible to think of Mark Twain in his maturer development as
+      other than a moralist. My personal acquaintance with Mr. Clemens convinced
+      me&mdash;had I needed to be convinced&mdash;that in his later years he had
+      striven to grapple nobly with many of the deeper issues of life, character
+      and morality, public, religious and social, as well as personal and
+      private. I never knew anyone who thought so &ldquo;straight,&rdquo; or who expressed
+      himself with such simple directness upon questions affecting religion and
+      conduct. He was absolutely fearless in his condemnation of those
+      subsidized &ldquo;ministers&rdquo; of the Gospel in cosmopolitan centres, who, through
+      self-interest, cut their moral disquisitions to fit the predilections of
+      their wealthy parishioners, many of whom were under national condemnation
+      as &ldquo;malefactors of great wealth.&rdquo; Animated by love for all creatures, the
+      defenceless wild animal as well as the domestic pet, he was unsparing in
+      his indictment of those big-game hunters who shamelessly described their
+      feelings of savage exultation when some poor animal served as the target
+      for their skill, and staggered off wounded unto death. His sympathy for
+      the natives of the Congo was profound and intense; and his philippic
+      against King Leopold for the atrocities he sanctioned called the attention
+      of the whole world to conditions that constituted a disgrace to modern
+      civilization. His diatribe against the Czar of Russia for his inhumanity
+      to the serfs was an equally convincing proof of his noble determination to
+      throw the whole weight of his influence in behalf of suffering and
+      oppressed humanity. Some years before his death, he told me that he never
+      intended to speak in public again save in behalf of movements,
+      humanitarian and uplifting, which gave promise of effecting civic
+      betterment and social improvement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have always felt a peculiar and personal debt of gratitude to Mark Twain
+      for three events&mdash;for the publication of such works can be dignified
+      with no less eminent characterization. When Mr. Edward Dowden tried to
+      make out the best case for Shelley that he could, it was at the sacrifice
+      of the reputation of the defenceless Harriet Westbrook. That ingrained
+      chivalry which is the defining characteristic of the Southerner, the
+      sympathy for the oppressed, the compassion for the weak and the
+      defenceless, animated Mark Twain to one of the noblest actions of his
+      career. For his defence of Harriet Westbrook is something more than a
+      work, it is an act&mdash;an act of high courage and nobility. With words
+      icily cold in their logic, Mark Twain tabulated the six pitifully
+      insignificant charges against Harriet, such as her love for dress and her
+      waning interest in Latin lessons, and set over against them the six times
+      repeated name of Cornelia Turner, that fascinating young married woman who
+      read Petrarch with Shelley and sat up all hours of the night with him&mdash;because
+      he saw visions when he was alone! Again, in his 'Joan of Arc', Mark Twain
+      erected a monument of enduring beauty to that simple maid of Orleans, to
+      whom the Roman Catholic Church has just now paid the merited yet tardy
+      tribute of canonization. It is a sad commentary upon the popular attitude
+      of frivolity towards the professional humorist that Mark Twain felt
+      compelled to publish this book anonymously, in order that the truth and
+      beauty of that magic story might receive its just meed of respectful and
+      sympathetic attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third act for which I have always felt deeply grateful to Mark Twain
+      is the apparently little known, yet beautiful and significant story
+      entitled 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' It contains, I believe, the moral that
+      had most meaning for Mark Twain throughout his entire life&mdash;the
+      bankruptcy of rigidly formal Puritanism in the face of erring human
+      nature, the tragic result of heedlessly holding to the letter, instead of
+      wisely conforming to the spirit, of moral law. No one doubts that Mark
+      Twain&mdash;as who would not?&mdash;believed, aye, knew, that this sweet,
+      human child went to a heaven of forgiveness and mercy, not to a hell of
+      fire and brimstone, for her innocently trivial transgression. The essay on
+      Harriet Shelley, the novel of 'Joan of Arc', and the story 'Was it Heaven
+      or Hell?' are all, as decisively as the philippic against King Leopold,
+      the diatribe against the Czar of Russia, essential vindications of the
+      moral principle. 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' in its simple pathos, 'The Man
+      that Corrupted Hadleyburg' in its morally salutary irony, present vital
+      evidence of that same transvaluation of current moral values which marks
+      the age of Nietzsche and Ibsen, of Tolstoy and Shaw. In that amusing,
+      naive biography of her father, little Susy admits that he could make
+      exceedingly bright jokes and could be extremely amusing; but she maintains
+      that he was more interested in earnest books and earnest conversation than
+      in humorous ones. She pronounced him to be as much of a Pholosopher (sic)
+      as anything. And she hazards the opinion that he might have done a great
+      deal in this direction if only he had studied when he was a boy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Years ago, Mark Twain wrote a book which he called 'An Extract from
+      Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'. For long he desisted from
+      publishing it because of his fear that its outspoken frankness would
+      appear irreverent and shock the sensibilities of the public. While his
+      villa of &ldquo;Stormfield&rdquo; was in course of erection several years ago, he
+      discovered that half of it was going to cost what he had expected to pay
+      for the whole house. His heart was set on having a loggia or sun-parlour;
+      and when it seemed that he would have to sacrifice this apple of his eye
+      through lack of funds, he threw discretion to the winds, hauled out
+      Captain Stormfield and made the old tar pay the piper. His fears as to its
+      reception were wholly unwarranted; for it was generously enjoyed for its
+      shrewd and vastly suggestive ideas on religion and heaven as popularly
+      taught nowadays from the pulpits. This book is full of a keen and bluff
+      common sense, cannily expressed in the words of an old sea-captain whom
+      Mark Twain had known intimately. It is only another link in the chain of
+      evidence which goes to prove that Mark Twain had thought long and deeply
+      upon the problematical nature of a future life. It is, in essence, a <i>reductio
+      ad absurdu</i> of those professors of religion who still preach a heaven
+      of golden streets and pearly gates, of idleness and everlasting
+      psalm-singing, of restful and innocuous bliss. Mark Twain wanted to point
+      out the absurdity of taking the allegories and the figurative language of
+      the Bible literally. Of course everybody called for a harp and a halo as
+      soon as they reached heaven. They were given the harps and halos&mdash;indeed
+      nothing harmless and reasonable was refused them. But they found these
+      things the merest accessories. Mark Twain's heaven was just the busiest
+      place imaginable. There weren't any idle people there after the first day.
+      The old sea captain pointed out that singing hymns and waving palm
+      branches through all eternity was all very pretty when you heard about it
+      from the pulpit, but that it was a mighty poor way to put in valuable
+      time. He took no stock in a heaven of warbling ignoramuses. He found that
+      Eternal Rest, reduced to hard pan, was not as comforting as it sounds in
+      the pulpit. Heaven is the merited reward of service; and the opportunities
+      for service were infinite. As he said, you've got to earn a thing square
+      and honest before you can enjoy it. To Mark, this was &ldquo;about the
+      sensiblest heaven&rdquo; he had ever heard of. He mourned a little over the
+      discovery that what a man mostly missed in heaven was company. But he
+      rejoiced in the information vouchsafed by his friend the Captain&mdash;a
+      valuable piece of information that leaves him, and all who are so
+      fortunate as to hear it, the better for the knowledge&mdash;that happiness
+      isn't a thing in itself, but only a contrast with something that isn't
+      pleasant! This view of heaven, seen through the temperament of a humorist
+      and a philosopher, is provocative and thought-compelling more than it is
+      amusing or ludicrous. I think it inspired Bernard Shaw's Aerial Foot-ball
+      which won Collier's thousand dollar prize&mdash;a prize which Mr Shaw
+      hurled back with indignation and scorn!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was a great humorist&mdash;more genial than grim, more
+      good-humoured than ironic, more given to imaginative exaggeration than to
+      intellectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than to melancholy.
+      He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the
+      literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their
+      likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and
+      picaresque romance. He was a remarkable observer and faithful reporter,
+      never allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be &ldquo;frightened by the
+      venerableness of the institution&rdquo;; and his sublimated journalism reveals a
+      mastery of the naively comic thoroughly human and democratic. He is the
+      most eminent product of our American democracy, and, in profoundly
+      shocking Great Britain by preferring Connecticut to Camelot, he exhibited
+      that robustness of outlook, that buoyancy of spirit, and that faith in the
+      contemporary which stamps America in perennial and inexhaustible youth.
+      Throughout his long life, he has been a factor of high ethical influence
+      in our civilization, and the philosopher and the humanitarian look out
+      through the twinkling eyes of the humorist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, after all, Mark Twain's supreme title to distinction as a great
+      writer inheres in his natural, if not wholly conscious, mastery in that
+      highest sphere of thought, embracing religion, philosophy, morality and
+      even humour, which we call sociology. When I first advanced this view, it
+      was taken up on all sides. Here, we were told, was Mark Twain &ldquo;from a new
+      angle&rdquo;; the essay was reviewed at length on the continent of Europe; and
+      the author of the essay was invited &ldquo;to explain Mark Twain to the German
+      public&rdquo;! There are still many people, however, who resent any
+      demonstration that Mark Twain was anything more than a mirthful and
+      humorous entertainer. Mr. Bernard Shaw once remarked to me, in support of
+      the view here outlined, that he regarded Poe and Mark Twain as America's
+      greatest achievements in literature, and that he thought of Mark Twain
+      primarily, not as humorist, but as sociologist. &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he added,
+      &ldquo;Mark Twain is in much the same position as myself: he has to put matters
+      in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him, believe he
+      is joking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain once said that whenever he had diverged from custom and
+      principle to utter a truth, the rule had been that the hearer hadn't
+      strength of mind enough to believe it. &ldquo;Custom is a petrifaction,&rdquo; he
+      asserted; &ldquo;nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.&rdquo; Mr. W. D.
+      Howells has advanced the somewhat fanciful theory that &ldquo;the ludicrous
+      incongruity of a slave-holding democracy nurtured upon the Declaration of
+      Independence, and the comical spectacle of white labour owning black
+      labour, had something to do in quickening (in Mark Twain) the sense of
+      contrast which is the mountain of humour or is said to be so.&rdquo; However
+      that may be, Mark Twain was irresistibly driven to the conclusion,
+      Southern born though he was, that slavery was unjust, inhuman, and
+      indefensible. The advanced thinkers in the South had reached this
+      conclusion long before the beginning of the Civil War, and many Southern
+      men had actually devised freedom to their slaves in their wills. The
+      slaves were treated humanely, their material wants were cared for by their
+      owners with a care that can only be called loving, and their spiritual
+      welfare was the frequent concern in particular of the mistress of the
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his schoolboy days, Mark Twain had no aversion to slavery. He wasn't
+      even aware that there was anything wrong about it. He never heard it
+      condemned by acquaintances or in the local papers. And as for the
+      preachers, they taught that God approved slavery, and cited Biblical
+      passages in support of that view. If the slaves themselves were averse to
+      it, at least they kept discreetly silent on the subject. He seldom saw a
+      slave misused&mdash;on the farm, never. But when he was brought face to
+      face with Sandy, the little slave forcibly separated from his family, it
+      made a deep impression upon his consciousness. It was this deplorable evil
+      of the system, this unnatural and inhuman forcible separation of the
+      members of the same family, the one from the other, that convinced him of
+      the injustice of slavery; though this vision, as has been pointed out by
+      Mr. Howells, did not come to him &ldquo;till after his liberation from
+      neighbourhood in the vaster far West.&rdquo; Yet it found its way into his books&mdash;into
+      Huckleberry Finn, with its recital of Jim's pathetic longing to buy back
+      his wife and children; and in Pudd'nhead Wilson with its moving picture of
+      the poor slave's agony when she suddenly realizes in the way the water is
+      flowing around the snag that she is being &ldquo;sold down the river.&rdquo; In Uncle
+      Tom's Cabin, as Professor Phelps has pointed out, &ldquo;the red&mdash;hot
+      indignation of the author largely nullified her evident desire to tell the
+      truth. . . . Mrs. Stowe's astonishing work is not really the history of
+      slavery; it is the history of abolition sentiment. . . . Mark Twain shows
+      us the beautiful side of slavery&mdash;for it had a wonderfully beautiful,
+      patriarchal side&mdash;and he also shows us the horror of it.&rdquo; Mark Twain
+      has declared that the only way to write a great novel is to learn the
+      scenes and people with which the story is concerned, through years of
+      &ldquo;unconscious absorption&rdquo; of the facts of the life to be portrayed. When
+      his stories were written, slavery was a thing of the past&mdash;he was
+      competent to judge of the situation impartially, through direct personal
+      contact throughout his boyhood with the realities of slavery. His object
+      was not the object of the reformer, warped with prejudice and fired by
+      animosity. He saw clearly; for his aim was not polemic, but artistic.
+      Hence it is, I believe, that Mark Twain stands out as, in essence and in
+      fundamentals, a remarkable sociologist. Certain passages in his books on
+      the subject of slavery, as the historian Lecky has declared, are the
+      truest things that have ever been expressed on the subject which vexed a
+      continent and plunged a nation in bloody, fratricidal strife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi always call up to my mind the
+      most vivid pictures&mdash;pictures that are eternally unforgettable. The
+      memorable scene in which Colonel Sherburne quells the mob and his scathing
+      remarks upon lynching; the reality and the pathos of the feuds of those
+      Kentucky families, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, shooting each
+      other down at sight in vindication of honour and pride of race; the lordly
+      life of the pilot on the Mississippi, his violent and unchallenged sway
+      over his subordinates, his mastery of the river; the variegated colours of
+      that lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of the river&mdash;all
+      these sweep by us in a series of panoramic pictures as Huck's raft swings
+      lazily down the tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides his boat through the
+      dangers of the channel. Mark Twain is primarily a great artist, only
+      unconsciously a true sociologist. But his power as a sociologist is no
+      less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely more real and human
+      and verisimilar that it is not polemical. There is a &ldquo;sort of
+      contemporaneous posterity&rdquo; which has registered its verdict that Mark
+      Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era. But there is yet to
+      come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare say, class
+      Mark Twain as America's greatest, most human sociologist in letters. He is
+      the historian, the historian in art, of a varied and unique phase of
+      civilization on the American continent that has passed forever. And it is
+      inconceivable that any future investigator into the sociological phases of
+      that civilization can fail to find priceless and unparalleled documents in
+      the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane, boisterous yet universally
+      human writings of Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's genius of social comprehension and sociologic interpretation
+      went even deeper than this. His mastery lay not alone in penetrative
+      reflection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase of our
+      civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an &ldquo;institution&rdquo; blotted
+      from the American escutcheon and a collective racial passion that
+      periodically breaks forth from time to time in mad &ldquo;carnivals of crime.&rdquo;
+       The defining quality of the true sociologist, that quality which gives his
+      profession its power and validity as an effective instrumentality in the
+      advancement of civilization, is the faculty of penetrating national and
+      racial disguises, and going directly to the heart of the human problem.
+      Mark Twain possessed this faculty in supreme degree. As a literary critic
+      he was banal and futile; but as a social and racial critic he was
+      remarkable and profound. His essay 'Concerning the Jews' is a masterpiece
+      of impartial interpretation; his comprehension of French and German racial
+      traits, as revealed in his works, is keen and pervasively pertinent; and
+      his magnificent analysis of the situation in South Africa, in the
+      concluding chapters of 'Following the Equator', rings clear with the
+      accents of truth and mounts almost to the dignity of public prophecy.
+      Deeper far, more comprehensive, and voiced with splendid courage, are Mark
+      Twain's interpretations of American democracy and his mirroring of the
+      national ideals. His &ldquo;defence&rdquo; of General Funston is a scorching and
+      devastating blast, red with the fires of patriotism. Whatever be one's
+      convictions, one cannot but respect the profound sincerity of Mark Twain's
+      berserker-like rage over the attitude of Europe in China, the barbarities
+      of Russian autocracy, and the horrors of America's methods in the
+      Philippines, copied after Weyler's <i>reconcentrad</i> policy in Cuba. His
+      study of Christian Science, despite its hyperbole, its gross exaggerations
+      and unfulfilled prophecies, is the expression of glorified common-sense, a
+      sociological study of religious fanaticism comprehensive in psychological
+      analysis of national and racial traits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his own works, Mark Twain brought to realization the dim and inchoate
+      fancies of Whitman; in his own person he realized that &ldquo;divine average&rdquo; of
+      common life which is the dream of American democracy. 'The Prince and the
+      Pauper' is a beautiful child's tale, vivid in narrative and rich in human
+      interest. It is something deeper far than this; for the very crucial
+      motive of the story, the successful substitution of the commoner for the
+      king, transforms it into a symbolic legend of democracy and the equality
+      of man. Mark Twain vehemently approved the French revolution, and frankly
+      expressed his regret over Napoleon's failure to invade England and thus
+      destroy the last vestiges of the semi-feudal paraphernalia of the British
+      monarchy. Despite its note of Yankee blatancy, 'A Yankee at the Court of
+      King Arthur' is a remarkable brief for democracy and the brotherhood of
+      man. So eminent a publicist as Mr. William T. Stead pronounced it, at the
+      time of its first appearance, one of the most significant books of our
+      time; and classed it (with Henry George's 'Progress and Poverty' and
+      Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward') as the third great book from America
+      to give tremendous impetus to the social democratic movement of the age.
+      Mark Twain abandoned all hope of a future life; found more of sorrow than
+      of joy in life's balances; and even, in his latter years, lost faith in
+      humanity itself. But amid the wreck of faiths and creeds, he achieved the
+      strange paradox of American optimism: he never lost faith in democracy,
+      and fought valiantly to the end in behalf of equality and the welfare of
+      the average man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several years ago, when we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship,
+      Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early
+      eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club to
+      which he belonged. This club was composed chiefly of men whose deepest
+      interests were concerned with the theological and the religiously
+      orthodox. One of his friends, to whom he read this paper in advance,
+      solemnly warned him not to read it before the club. For he felt confident
+      that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt as to the existence of
+      free will, and declaring without hesitation that every man was under the
+      immitigable compulsion of his temperament, his training, and his
+      environment, would appear unspeakably shocking, heretical and blasphemous
+      to the orthodox members of that club. &ldquo;I did not read that paper,&rdquo; Mr.
+      Clemens said to me, &ldquo;but I put it away, resolved to let it stand the
+      corrosive test of time. Every now and then, when it occurred to me, I used
+      to take that paper out and read it, to compare its views with my own later
+      views. From time to time I added something to it. But I never found,
+      during that quarter of a century, that my views had altered in the
+      slightest degree. I had a few copies published not long ago; but there is
+      not the slightest evidence in the book to indicate its authorship.&rdquo; A few
+      days later he gave me a copy, and when I read that book, I found these
+      words, among others, in the prefatory note:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every thought in them (these papers) has been thought (and accepted as
+      unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men&mdash;and concealed,
+      kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and could
+      not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I not
+      published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no
+      other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      'What is Man?' propounds at length, through the medium of a dialogue
+      between a Young Man and an Old Man, the doctrine that &ldquo;Beliefs are
+      acquirements; temperaments are born. Beliefs are subject to change;
+      nothing whatever can change temperament.&rdquo; He enunciates the theory, which
+      seems to me both brilliant and original, that there can be no such person
+      as a permanent seeker after truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When he found the truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth,
+      with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he
+      tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors.&rdquo; &ldquo;All training,&rdquo; he avers,
+      &ldquo;is one form or another of outside influences, and association is the
+      largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside
+      influences have made him. They train him downward or they train him upward&mdash;but
+      they train him; they are at work upon him all the time.&rdquo; Once asked by
+      Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to write another story about Tom
+      Sawyer, Mark Twain replied that he had a notion of writing the sequel to
+      Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him to high honour, and in the
+      other bringing him to the gallows. When Kipling protested vigorously
+      against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer was real, Mark Twain
+      replied with the fatalistic doctrine of 'What is Man?': &ldquo;Oh, he is real.
+      He's all the boy that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good
+      way of ending the book&mdash;because, when you come to think of it,
+      neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the
+      force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and
+      twenty years of Tom Sawyer's life, and gave a little joggle to the
+      circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to
+      the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel.&rdquo; It was what he called Kismet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the
+      days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all
+      faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal
+      God. And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or theology,
+      atheism or agnosticism, the individual or the nation embraced, the human
+      race remained &ldquo;indestructibly content, happy, thankful, proud.&rdquo; He never
+      had a tinge of pessimism in his make-up, his beliefs never tended to warp
+      his nature, he accepted his fatalism gladly because he saw in it supreme
+      truth. His ultimate philosophy of life, which he sums up in 'What is
+      Man?', is healthy and right-minded. It is best embodied in the lofty
+      injunction: &ldquo;Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward towards
+      a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct which,
+      while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbour
+      and the community.&rdquo; Lassalle once said: &ldquo;History forgives mistakes and
+      failures, but not want of conviction.&rdquo; In Mark Twain, posterity will never
+      be called upon to forgive any want of conviction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      MARK TWAIN, by Archibald Henderson
+    </title>
+    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd7; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+    <h2>
+      MARK TWAIN, by Archibald Henderson
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, by Archibald Henderson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Mark Twain
+
+Author: Archibald Henderson
+
+Release Date: July 14, 2004 [EBook #6873]
+Last Updated: October 31, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="titlepage.jpg (62K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="frontpiece.jpg (54K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      MARK TWAIN
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      By Archibald Henderson<br /><br /> With Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <i> "Haply&mdash;who knows?&mdash;somewhere<br /> In Avalon, Isle of
+          Dreams,<br /> In vast contentment at last,<br /> With every grief done
+          away,<br /> While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait,<br /> And Moliere hangs
+          on his words,<br /> And Cervantes not far off<br /> Listens and smiles
+          apart,<br /> With that incomparable drawl<br /> He is jesting with
+          Dagonet now."</i>
+          <p>
+            BLISS CARMAN.
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are to-day, all over the world, men and women and children who owe a
+      debt of almost personal gratitude to Mark Twain for the joy of his humour
+      and the charm of his personality. In the future they will, I doubt not,
+      seek and welcome opportunities to acknowledge that debt. My own experience
+      with the works of Mark Twain is in no sense exceptional. From the days of
+      early childhood, my feeling for Mark Twain, derived first solely from
+      acquaintance with his works, was a feeling of warm and, as it were,
+      personal affection. With limitless interest and curiosity, I used to hear
+      the Uncle Remus stories from the lips of one of our old family servants, a
+      negro to whom I was devotedly attached. These stories were narrated to me
+      in the negro dialect with such perfect naturalness and racial gusto that I
+      often secretly wondered if the narrator were not Uncle Remus himself in
+      disguise. I was thus cunningly prepared, "coached" shall I say, for the
+      maturer charms of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. With Uncle Remus and
+      Mark Twain as my preceptors, I spent the days of my youth&mdash;excitedly
+      alternating, spell-bound, between the inexhaustible attractions of Tom,
+      Huck, Jim, Indian Joe, the Duke and the Dauphin, and their compeers on the
+      one hand; and Brer Rabbit, Sis Cow, and a thousand other fantastic, but
+      very real creatures of the animal kingdom on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt a strange sort of camaraderie, of personal attachment, for Mark
+      Twain during all the years before I came into personal contact with him.
+      It was the dictum of a distinguished English critic, to the effect that
+      Huckleberry Finn was a literary masterpiece, which first awoke in me, then
+      a mere boy, a genuine respect for literary criticism; for here was
+      expressed an opinion which I had long secretly cherished, but somehow
+      never dared to utter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My personal association with Mr. Clemens, comparatively brief though it
+      was&mdash;an ocean voyage, meetings here and there, a brief stay as a
+      guest in his home&mdash;gave me at last the justification for paying the
+      debt which, with the years, had grown greater and more insistently
+      obligatory. I felt both relief and pleasure when he authorized me to pay
+      that debt by writing an interpretation of his life and work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is an appreciation originating in the heart of one who loved Mark
+      Twain's works for a generation before he ever met Samuel L. Clemens. It is
+      an interpretation springing from the conviction that Mark Twain was a
+      great American who comprehensively incorporated and realized his own
+      country and his own age as no American has so completely done before him;
+      a supreme humorist who ever wore the panache of youth, gaiety, and
+      bonhomie; a brilliant wit who never dipped his darts in the poison of
+      cynicism, misanthropy, or despair; constitutionally a reformer who,
+      heedless of self, boldly struck for the right as he saw it; a philosopher
+      and sociologist who intuitively understood the secret springs of human
+      motive and impulse, and empirically demonstrated that intuition in works
+      which crossed frontiers, survived translation, and went straight to the
+      human, beneath the disguise of the racial; a genius who lived to know and
+      enjoy the happy rewards of his own fame; a great man who saw life steadily
+      and saw it whole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      LONDON, August 5, 1910.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      NOTE.&mdash;The author esteems himself in the highest degree fortunate in
+      having the co-operation of Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn. All the
+      illustrations, both autochrome and monochrome, are the work of Mr. Coburn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      CONTENTS
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          I.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#introductory">INTRODUCTORY</a><br />
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          II.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#man">THE MAN</a><br />
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          III.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#humorist">THE HUMORIST</a><br />
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          IV.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#genius">WORLD-FAMED GENIUS</a><br />
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          V.
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#philosopher">PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST</a>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          <i> "I've a theory that every author, while living, has a projection
+          of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant
+          places, and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never
+          knew him in the flesh. When the author dies, this phantom fades away,
+          not caring to continue business at the old stand. Then the dead writer
+          lives only in the impression made by his literature; this impression
+          may grow sharper or fainter according to the fashions and new
+          conditions of the time."</i>
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Letter of THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH to WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS of date
+          December 23, 1901.
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="pp003.jpg (29K)" src="images/pp003.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      <a name="introductory" id="introductory">INTRODUCTORY</a>
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the past, the attitude of the average American toward Mark Twain has
+      been most characteristically expressed in a sort of complacent and
+      chuckling satisfaction. There was pride in the thought that America, the
+      colossal, had produced a superman of humour. The national vanity was
+      touched when the nations of the world rocked and roared with laughter over
+      the comically primitive barbarisms of the funny man from the "Wild and
+      Woolly West." Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an international comedian
+      magically evoking the laughter of a world. It would be a mis-statement to
+      affirm that the works of Mark Twain were reckoned as falling within the
+      charmed circle of "Literature." They were not reckoned in connexion with
+      literature at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fingers of one hand number those who realized in Mark Twain one of the
+      supreme geniuses of our age. Even in the event of his death, when the
+      flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown emptily wide, there is
+      room for grave doubt whether a realization of the unique and incomparable
+      position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters has fully dawned upon
+      the American consciousness. The literatures of England and Europe do not
+      posit an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive crudity and
+      apparently unstudied frankness as the work of Mark Twain. It is for
+      American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic, and to
+      demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great artist. It
+      would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain's appeal to posterity depends
+      upon the dicta of literary criticism. It would be absurd to deny that upon
+      America rests the task of demonstrating, to a world willing enough to be
+      convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the supreme and imperishable glories
+      of American literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can
+      be attributed what a Frenchman would call <i>mondial ecla</i> is
+      surprisingly few. It was not so many years ago that Rudyard Kipling, with
+      vigorous, imperialistic note, won for himself the unquestioned title of
+      militant spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon race. That fame has suffered
+      eclipse in the passage of time. To-day, Bernard Shaw has a fame more
+      world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the British Isles.
+      His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from Buda-Pesth to
+      Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to Buenos Ayres.
+      Recently Zola, Ibsen and, Tolstoy constituted the literary hierarchy of
+      the world&mdash;according to popular verdict. Since Zola and Ibsen have
+      passed from the scene, Tolstoy experts unchallenged the profoundest
+      influence upon the thought and consciousness of the world. This is an
+      influence streaming less from his works than from his life, less from his
+      intellect than from his conscience. The <i>literati</i> bemoan the artist
+      of an epoch prior to 'What is Art?' The whole world pays tribute to the
+      passionate integrity of Tolstoy's moral aspiration.
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          [While this book was going through the press, news has come of the
+          death of Tolstoy.]
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most widely
+      read and most genuinely popular author in the world. In a sense not easily
+      misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the minds and hearts of the great
+      mass of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if measured in
+      terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is without a
+      parallel. The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the defiant
+      opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends many an
+      inviolable canon of European taste. With all his incandescent wit and
+      comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon the upper
+      strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is perpetually
+      standing in the light of the serious reformer. Tolstoy's works are
+      Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet his literary
+      fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the magnificent futility
+      of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal mysticism of his
+      unrealizable hopes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal, it
+      is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour. That
+      eidolon of which Aldrich speaks&mdash;a compact of good humour, robust
+      sanity, and large-minded humanity&mdash;has diligently "gone about in near
+      and distant places," everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk
+      of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh. The
+      French have a way of speaking of an author's public as if it were a select
+      and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a country like
+      France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects, there is some
+      reason for the phraseology. In reality, the author appeals to many
+      different "publics" or classes of readers&mdash;in proportion to the
+      many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the catholicity of his
+      tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a boy to the power of the
+      great human book, warm with the actuality of experience and the life-blood
+      of the heart. By humorous inversion, he points the sound moral and
+      vivifies the right principle for the youth to whom the dawning
+      consciousness of morality is the first real psychological discovery of
+      life. With hearty laughter at the stupid irritations of self-conscious
+      virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid Puritanism of mechanical
+      morality, Mark Twain enraptures that innumerable company of the
+      sophisticated who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a "good
+      example" and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With
+      splendid satire for the base, with shrill condemnation for tyranny and
+      oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the equivocal, the fraudulent, and
+      the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the growing body of reformers in all
+      countries who would remedy the ills of democratic government with the
+      knife of publicity. The wisdom of human experience and of sagacious
+      tolerance informing his books for the young, provokes the question whether
+      these books are not more apposite to the tastes of experienced age than to
+      the fancies of callow youth. The navvy may rejoice in 'Life on the
+      Mississippi'. Youth and age may share without jealousy the abounding fun
+      and primitive naturalness of 'Huckleberry Finn'. True lovers of adventure
+      may revel in the masterly narrative of 'Tom Sawyer'. The artist may bestow
+      his critical meed of approval upon the beauty of 'Joan of Arc'. The
+      moralist may heartily validate the ethical lesson of 'The Man that
+      Corrupted Hadleyburg'. Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible
+      explosions of laughter to the horse-play of 'Roughing It', the colossal
+      extravagance of 'The Innocents Abroad', the irreverence and iconoclasm of
+      that Yankee intruder into the hallowed confines of Camelot. All may
+      rejoice in the spontaneity and refreshment of truth; spiritually
+      co-operate in forthright condemnation of fraud, peculation, and sham; and
+      breathe gladly the fresh and bracing air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom.
+      The stevedore on the dock, the motor-man on the street car, the newsboy on
+      the street, the riverman on the Mississippi&mdash;all speak with exuberant
+      affection in memory of that quaint figure in his white suit, his ruddy
+      face shining through wreaths of tobacco smoke and surmounted by a great
+      halo of silvery hair. In one day, as Mark Twain was fond of relating, an
+      emperor and a <i>portie</i> vied with each other in tributes of admiration
+      and esteem for this man and his works. It is Mark Twain's imperishable
+      glory, not simply that his name is the most familiar of that of any author
+      who has lived in our own times, but that it is remembered with infinite
+      irrepressible zest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We think of Mark Twain not as other celebrities, but as the man whom we
+      knew and loved," said Dr. Van Dyke in his Memorial Address. "We remember
+      the realities which made his life worth while, the strong and natural
+      manhood that was in him, the depth and tenderness of his affections, his
+      laughing enmity to all shams and pretences, his long and faithful witness
+      to honesty and fair-dealing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Those who know the story of Mark Twain's career know how bravely he faced
+      hardships and misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet a debt
+      of conscience, following the injunction of the New Testament, to provide
+      not only things honest, but things 'honourable in the sight of all men.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Those who know the story of his friendships and his family life know that
+      he was one who loved much and faithfully, even unto the end. Those who
+      know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and irrepressible
+      humour which was his gift, there was a foundation of serious thoughts and
+      noble affections and desires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour
+      means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the
+      unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world
+      which must seem humorous even to the highest mind. Of these the Bible
+      says: 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall hold
+      them in derision.' But the mark of this higher humour is that it does not
+      laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only at the
+      false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his
+      humour was infallible; but we say without doubt that he used his gift, not
+      for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work is clean and wholesome.
+      He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world's false claimants
+      out of court, and entangled many of the world's false witnesses in the net
+      of ridicule. In his best books and stories, coloured with his own
+      experiences, he touched the absurdities of life with penetrating, but not
+      unkindly, mockery, and made us feel somehow the infinite pathos of life's
+      realities. No one can say that he ever failed to reverence the purity, the
+      frank, joyful, genuine nature of the little children, of whom Christ said,
+      'Of such is the kingdom of heaven.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud. We
+      are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of the
+      great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left such
+      an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own sake
+      that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust, happy in
+      the fuller light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Rest after toil, port after stormy seas,<br /> Death after life doth
+      greatly please."'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          <i> "'We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime&mdash;the
+          thin air stifles'&mdash;I have forgotten who said it. We cannot flush
+          always with the high ardour of the signers of the Declaration, nor
+          remain at the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry continually,
+          'O Beautiful! My country!' Yet, in the long dull interspans between
+          these sacred moments we need some one to remind us that we are a
+          nation. For in the dead vast and middle of the years insidious foes
+          are lurking&mdash;anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan decadencies, the
+          egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the cold sickening of
+          the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant fraud and corruption.
+          When our countrymen migrate because we have no kings or castles, we
+          are thankful to any one who will tell us what we can count on. When
+          they complain that our soil lacks the humanity essential to great
+          literature, we are grateful even for the firing of a national joke
+          heard round the world. And when Mark Twain, robust, big-hearted,
+          gifted with the divine power to use words, makes us all laugh
+          together, builds true romances with prairie fire and Western clay, and
+          shows us that we are at one on all the main points, we feel that he
+          has been appointed by Providence to see to it that the precious
+          ordinary self of the Republic shall suffer no harm."</i>
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          STUART P. SHERMAN: "MARK TWAIN." The Nation, May 12, 1910.
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="pp015.jpg (53K)" src="images/pp015.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      <a name="man" id="man">THE MAN</a>
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      American literature, indeed I might say American life, can exhibit no
+      example of supreme success from the humblest beginnings, so signal as the
+      example of Mark Twain. Lincoln became President of the United States, as
+      did Grant and Johnson. But assassination began for Lincoln an apotheosis
+      which has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and adulation. Grant
+      was one of the great failures in American public life; and Johnson,
+      brilliant but unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment. Mark Twain enjoys
+      the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a
+      deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and
+      spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his career. From the
+      standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of Mark Twain from a
+      journeyman printer to a great author, from a merry-andrew to a
+      world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy navigator on the vast
+      and uncharted seas of human experience, may be taken as symbolic of the
+      romance of American life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sort of mock&mdash;pride, Clemens referred at times to the
+      ancestral glories of his house&mdash;the judge who condemned Charles I.,
+      and all those other notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed lustre
+      upon the name of Clemens. Yet he claimed that he had not examined into
+      these traditions, chiefly because "I was so busy polishing up this end of
+      the line and trying to make it showy." His mother, a "Lambton with a p,"
+      of Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, a man of
+      determination and force, in Lexington, in 1823; but neither was endowed
+      with means, and their life was of the simplest. From Jamestown, in the
+      mountain solitudes of East Tennessee, they removed in 1829, much as Judge
+      Hawkins is said to have done in 'The Gilded Age', settling at Florida,
+      Missouri. Here was born, on November 30, 1835, a few months after their
+      arrival, Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Long afterwards he stated that he had
+      increased by one per cent. the population of this village of one hundred
+      inhabitants, thereby doing more than the best man in history had ever done
+      for any other town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although weak and sickly, the child did not suffer from the hard life, and
+      survived two other children, Margaret and Benjamin. At different times his
+      life was in danger, the local doctor always coming to the rescue. He once
+      asked his mother, after she had reached old age, if she hadn't been uneasy
+      about him. She admitted she had been uneasy about him the whole time. But
+      when he inquired further if she was afraid he would not live, she answered
+      after a reflective pause&mdash;as if thinking out the facts&mdash;that she
+      had been afraid he would!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother of Samuel E. Moffett, the
+      writer; and his brother Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was
+      intimately associated with him in life and found a place in his writings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the unpromising life of Florida
+      and removed to Hannibal, Missouri. He was a stern, unbending man, a lawyer
+      by profession, a merchant by vocation; after his removal to Hannibal he
+      became a Justice of the Peace, an office he filled with all the dignity of
+      a local autocrat. His forum was a "dingy" office, furnished with "a
+      dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a puncheon bench." The
+      solemnity of his manner in administering the law won for him, among his
+      neighbours, the title of Judge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One need but recall the scenes in which Tom Sawyer was born and bred to
+      realize in its actuality the model from which these scenes were drawn.
+      "Sam was always a good-hearted boy," his mother once remarked, "but he was
+      a very wild and mischievous one, and, do what we would, we could never
+      make him go to school. This used to trouble his father and me dreadfully,
+      and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much in the world
+      as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and sober-minded as
+      they were." At school, he "excelled only in spelling"; outside of school
+      he was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn, mischievous and
+      prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity afforded. "Often his
+      father would start him off to school," his mother once said, "and in a
+      little while would follow him to ascertain his whereabouts. There was a
+      large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and Sam would take his position
+      behind that, and as his father went past would gradually circle around it
+      in such a way as to keep out of sight. Finally, his father and the teacher
+      both said it was of no use to try to teach Sam anything, because he was
+      determined not to learn. But I never gave up. He was always a great boy
+      for history, and could never get tired of that kind of reading; but he
+      hadn't any use for schoolhouses and text books."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a "loafing, out-at-elbows,
+      down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi river town." Young Clemens
+      accepted the institution of slavery as a matter of course, for his father
+      was a slave-owner; and his mother's wedding dowry consisted in part of two
+      or three slaves. Judge Clemens was a very austere man; like so many other
+      slave-holders, he silently abhorred slavery. To his children, especially
+      to Sam, as well as to his slaves, he was, however, a stern taskmaster.
+      Mark Twain has described the terms on which he and his father lived as a
+      sort of armed neutrality. If at times this neutrality was broken and
+      suffering ensued, the breaking and the suffering were always divided up
+      with strict impartiality between them&mdash;his father doing the breaking
+      and he the suffering! Sam claimed to be a very backward, cautious,
+      unadventurous boy. But this modest estimate is subject to modification
+      when we learn that once he jumped off a two-story stable; another time he
+      gave an elephant a plug of tobacco, and retired without waiting for an
+      answer; and still another time he pretended to be talking in his sleep,
+      and got off a portion of every original conundrum in hearing of his
+      father. He begs the curious not to pry into the result&mdash;as it was of
+      no consequence to any one but himself!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cave, so graphically described in Tom Sawyer, was one of Sam's
+      favourite haunts; and his first sweetheart was Laura Hawkins, the Becky
+      Thatcher of Tom's admiration. "Sam was always up to some mischief," this
+      lady once remarked in later life, when in reminiscential mood. "We
+      attended Sunday-school together, and they had a system of rewards for
+      saying verses after committing them to memory. A blue ticket was given for
+      ten verses, a red ticket for ten blue, a yellow for ten red, and a Bible
+      for ten yellow tickets. If you will count up, you will see it makes a
+      Bible for ten thousand verses. Sam came up one day with his ten yellow
+      tickets, and everybody knew he had not said a verse, but had just got them
+      by trading with the boys. But he received his Bible with all the serious
+      air of a diligent student!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain, save when in humorous vein, has never pretended that his
+      success was due to any marvellous qualities of mind, any indefatigable
+      industry, any innate energy and perseverance. I have good reason to recall
+      his favourite theory, which he was fond of expounding, to the effect that
+      circumstance is man's master. He likened circumstance to the attraction of
+      gravity; and declared that while it is man's privilege to argue with
+      circumstance, as it is the honourable privilege of the falling body to
+      argue with the attraction of gravity, it does no good: man has to obey.
+      Circumstance has as its working partner man's temperament, his natural
+      disposition. Temperament is not the creation of man, but an innate
+      quality; over it he has no authority; for its acts he cannot be held
+      responsible. It cannot be permanently changed or even modified. No power
+      can keep it modified. For it is inherent and enduring, as unchanging as
+      the lines upon the thumb or the conformation of the skull. Throughout his
+      life, circumstance seemed like a watchful spirit, switching his
+      temperament into those channels of experience and development leading
+      unerringly to the career of the author.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The death of Judge Clemens was the first link in the long chain of
+      circumstance&mdash;for his son was at once taken from school and
+      apprenticed to the editor and proprietor of the Hannibal Courier. He was
+      allowed the usual emolument of the office apprentice, "board and clothes,
+      but no money"; and even at that, though the board was paid, the clothes
+      rarely materialized. Several weeks later his brother Orion returned to
+      Hannibal, and in 1850 brought out a little paper called the 'Hannibal
+      Journal.' He took Sam out of the Courier office and engaged him for the
+      Journal at $3.50 a week&mdash;though he was never able to pay a cent of
+      the wages. One of Mark's fellow-townsmen once confessed: "Yes, I knew him
+      when he was a boy. He was a printer's devil&mdash;I think that's what they
+      called him&mdash;and they didn't miss it." At a banquet some years ago,
+      Mark Twain aptly described at length his experiences as a printer's
+      apprentice. There were a thousand and one menial services he was called
+      upon to perform. If the subscribers paid at all, it was only sometimes&mdash;and
+      then the town subscribers paid in groceries, the country subscribers in
+      cabbages and cordwood. If they paid, they were puffed in the paper; and if
+      the editor forgot to insert the puff, the subscriber stopped the paper!
+      Every subscriber regarded himself as assistant editor, ex officio; gave
+      orders as to how the paper was to be edited, supplied it with opinions,
+      and directed its policy. Of course, every time the editor failed to follow
+      his suggestions, he revenged himself by stopping the paper!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After some financial stress, the paper was moved into the Clemens home, a
+      "two-story brick"; and here for several years it managed to worry along,
+      spasmodically hovering between life and death. Life was easy with the
+      editors of that paper; for if they pied a form, they suspended until the
+      next week. They always suspended anyhow, every now and then, when the
+      fishing was good; and always fell back upon the illness of the editor as a
+      convenient excuse, Mark admitted that this was a paltry excuse, for the
+      all-sufficing reason that a paper of that sort was just as well off with a
+      sick editor as a well one, and better off with a dead one than with either
+      of them. At the age of fifteen he considered himself a skilled journeyman
+      printer; and his faculty for comedic portrayal had already betrayed itself
+      in occasional clumsy efforts. In 'My First Literary Venture', he narrates
+      his experiences, amongst others how greatly he increased the circulation
+      of the paper, and incensed the "inveterate woman-killer," whose poetry for
+      that week's paper read, "To Mary in H&mdash;l" (Hannibal). Mark added a
+      "snappy foot&mdash;note" at the bottom, in which he agreed to let the
+      thing pass, for just that once; but distinctly warning Mr. J. Gordon
+      Runnels that the paper had a character to sustain, and that in future,
+      when Mr. Runnels wanted to commune with his friends in h&mdash;l, he must
+      select some other medium for that communication! Many were the humorous
+      skits, crudely illustrated with cuts made from wooden blocks hacked out
+      with his jack-knife, which the mischievous young "devil" inserted in his
+      brother's paper. Here we may discern the first spontaneous outcroppings of
+      the genuine humorist. "It was on this paper, the 'Hannibal Journal'," says
+      his biographer, Mr. Albert B. Paine, "that young Sam Clemens began his
+      writings&mdash;burlesques, as a rule, of local characters and conditions&mdash;usually
+      published in his brother's absence, generally resulting in trouble on his
+      return. Yet they made the paper sell, and if Orion had but realized his
+      possession he might have turned his brother's talent into capital even
+      then."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening in 1858, the boy, consumed with wanderlust, asked his mother
+      for five dollars&mdash;to start on his travels. He failed to receive the
+      money, but he defiantly announced that he would go "anyhow." He had
+      managed to save a tiny sum, and that night he disappeared and fled to St
+      Louis. There he worked in the composing-room of the Evening News for a
+      time, and then started out "to see the world"&mdash;New York, where a
+      little World's Fair was in progress. He was somewhat better off than was
+      Benjamin Franklin when he entered Philadelphia&mdash;for he had two or
+      three dollars in pocket-change, and a ten-dollar bank-bill concealed in
+      the lining of his coat. For a time he sweltered in a villainous mechanics'
+      boarding-house in Duane Street, and worked at starvation wages in the
+      printing-office of Gray &amp; Green. Being recognized one day by a man
+      from Hannibal, he fled to Philadelphia where he worked for some months as
+      a "sub" on the 'Inquirer' and the 'Public Ledger'. Next came a flying trip
+      to Washington "to see the sights there," and then back he went to the
+      Mississippi Valley. This journey to the "vague and fabled East" really
+      opened his eyes to the great possibilities that the world has in store for
+      the traveller.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, Orion had gone to Muscatine, Ohio, and acquired a small interest
+      there; and, after his marriage, he and his wife went to Keokuk and started
+      a little job printing-office. Here Sam worked with his brother until the
+      winter of 1856-7, when circumstance once again played the part of good
+      fairy. As he was walking along the street one snowy evening, his attention
+      was attracted by a piece of paper which the wind had blown against the
+      wall. It proved to be a fifty-dollar bill; and after advertising for the
+      owner for four days, he stealthily moved to Cincinnati in order "to take
+      that money out of danger." Now comes the second crucial event in his life!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For long the ambition for river life had remained with him&mdash;and now
+      there seemed some possibility of realizing these ambitions. He first
+      wanted to be a cabin boy; then his ideal was to be a deck hand, because of
+      his splendid conspicuousness as he stood on the end of the stage plank
+      with a coil of rope in his hand. But these were only day-dreams&mdash;he
+      didn't admit, even to himself, that they were anything more than heavenly
+      impossibilities. But as he worked during the winter in the printing-office
+      of Wrightson &amp; Company of Cincinnati, he whiled away his leisure hours
+      reading Lieutenant Herndon's account of his explorations of the Amazon,
+      and became greatly interested in his description of the cocoa industry.
+      Now he set to work to map out a new and thrilling career. The expedition
+      sent out by the government to explore the Amazon had encountered
+      difficulties and left unfinished the exploration of the country about the
+      head-waters, thousands of miles from the mouth of the river. It mattered
+      not to him that New Orleans was fifteen hundred miles away from
+      Cincinnati, and that he had only thirty dollars left. His mind was made up
+      he would go on and complete the work of exploration. So in April, 1857, he
+      set sail for New Orleans on an ancient tub, called the Paul Jones. For the
+      paltry sum of sixteen dollars, he was enabled to revel in the unimagined
+      glories of the main saloon. At last he was under way&mdash;realizing his
+      boyhood dream, unable to contain himself for joy. At last he saw himself
+      as that hero of his boyish fancy&mdash;a traveller.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he reached New Orleans, after the prolonged ecstasy of two weeks on a
+      tiny Mississippi steamer, he discovered that no ship was leaving for Para,
+      that there never had been one leaving for Para and that there probably
+      would not be one leaving for Para that century. A policeman made him,
+      move, on, threatening to run him in if he ever caught him reflecting in
+      the public street again. Just as his money failed him, his old friend
+      circumstance arrived, with another turning-point in his life&mdash;a new
+      link. On his way down the river he had met Horace Bixby; he turned to him
+      in this hour of need. It has been charged against Mark Twain that he was
+      deplorably lazy&mdash;apocryphal anecdotes are still narrated with much
+      gusto to prove it. Think of a lazy boy undertaking the stupendous task of
+      learning to know the intricate and treacherous secrets of the great river,
+      to know every foot of the route in the dark as well as he knew his own
+      face in the glass! And yet he confesses that he was unaware of the
+      immensity of the undertaking upon which he had embarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "In 1852," says Bixby, "I was chief pilot on the 'Paul Jones', a boat that
+      made occasional trips from Pittsburg to New Orleans. One day a tall,
+      angular, hoosier-like young fellow, whose limbs appeared to be fastened
+      with leather hinges, entered the pilot-house, and in a peculiar, drawling
+      voice, said&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Good mawnin, sir. Don't you want to take er piert young fellow and teach
+      'im how to be er pilot?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'No sir; there is more bother about it than it's worth.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'I wish you would, mister. I'm er printer by trade, but it don't 'pear to
+      'gree with me, and I'm on my way to Central America for my health. I
+      believe I'll make a tolerable good pilot, 'cause I like the river.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'What makes you pull your words that way?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'I don't know, mister; you'll have to ask my Ma. She pulls hern too.
+      Ain't there some way that we can fix it, so that you'll teach me how to be
+      er pilot?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'The only way is for money.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'How much are you going to charge?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Well, I'll teach you the river for $500.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "'Gee whillikens! he! he! I ain't got $500, but I've got five lots in
+      Keokuk, Iowa, and 2000 acres of land in Tennessee that is worth two bits
+      an acre any time. You can have that if you want it.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I told him I did not care for his land, and after a while he agreed to
+      pay $100 in cash (borrowed from his brother-in-law, William A. Moffett, of
+      Virginia), $150 in twelve months, and the balance when he became a pilot.
+      He was with me for a long time, but sometimes took occasional trips with
+      other pilots." And he significantly adds "He was always drawling out dry
+      jokes, but then we did not pay any attention to him."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It cannot be thought accidental that Sam Clemens became a pilot. Bixby
+      became his mentor, the pilot-house his recitation-room, the steamboat his
+      university, the great river the field of knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that stupendous course in nature's own college, he "learned the river"
+      as schoolboy seldom masters his Greek or his mathematics. With the naive
+      assurance of youth, he gaily enters upon the task of "learning" some
+      twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi. Long
+      afterwards, he confessed that had he really known what he was about to
+      require of his faculties, he would never have had the courage to begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His comic sketches, published in the 'Hannibal Weekly Courier' in his
+      brother's absence, furnish the first link, his apprenticeship to Bixby the
+      second link in the chain of circumstance. For two years and a half he
+      sailed the river as a master pilot; his trustworthiness secured for him
+      the command of some of the best boats on the river, and he was so skilful
+      that he never met disaster on any of his trips. He narrowly escaped it in
+      1861, for when Louisiana seceded, his boat was drafted into the
+      Confederate service. As he reached St. Louis, having taken passage for
+      home, a shell came whizzing by and carried off part of the pilot-house. It
+      was the end of an era: the Civil War had begun. The occupation of the
+      pilot was gone; but the river had given up to him all of its secrets. He
+      was to show them to a world, in 'Life on the Mississippi' and 'Huckleberry
+      Finn'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of the derivation of the famous <i>nom de guerr</i> has often
+      been narrated-and as often erroneously. As the steamboat approaches a
+      sandbank, snag, or other obstruction, the man at the bow heaves the lead
+      and sings out, "By the mark, three," "Mark twain," etc.-meaning three
+      fathoms deep, two fathoms, and so on. The thought of adopting Mark Twain
+      as a <i>nom de guerr</i> was not original with Clemens; but the world owes
+      him a debt of gratitude for making forever famous a name that, but for
+      him, would have been forever lost. "There was a man, Captain Isaiah
+      Sellers, who furnished river news for the New Orleans Picayune, still one
+      of the best papers in the South," Mr. Clemens once confessed to Professor
+      Wm. L. Phelps. "He used to sign his articles Mark Twain. He died in 1863.
+      I liked the name, and stole it. I think I have done him no wrong, for I
+      seem to have made this name somewhat generally known."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The inglorious escapade of his military career, at which he himself has
+      poked unspeakable fun, and for which not even his most enthusiastic
+      biographers have any excuse, was soon ended. Had his heart really been
+      enlisted on the side of the South, he would doubtless have stayed at his
+      post. In reality, he was at that time lacking in conviction; and in after
+      life he became a thorough Unionist and Abolitionist. In the summer of
+      1861, Governor Jackson of Missouri called for fifty thousand volunteers to
+      drive out the Union forces. While visiting in the small town where his
+      boyhood had been spent, Hannibal, Marion County, young Clemens and some of
+      his friends met together in a secret place one night, and formed
+      themselves into a military company. The spirited but untrained Tom Lyman
+      was made captain; and in lieu of a first lieutenant&mdash;strange
+      omission!&mdash;young Clemens was made second lieutenant. These fifteen
+      hardy souls proudly dubbed themselves the Marion Rangers. No one thought
+      of finding fault with such a name&mdash;it sounded too well. All were full
+      of notions as high-flown as the name of their company. One of their
+      number, named Dunlap, was ashamed of his name, because it had a plebeian
+      sound to his ear. So he solved the difficulty and gratified his
+      aristocratic ambitions by writing it d'Unlap. This may serve as a sample
+      of the stuff of which the company was made. Dunlap was by no means
+      useless; for he invented hifalutin names for the camps, and generally
+      succeeded in proposing a name that was, as his companions agreed, "no
+      slouch."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no real organization, nobody obeyed orders, there was never a
+      battle. They retreated, according to the tale of the humorist, at every
+      sign of the enemy. In truth, this little band had plenty of stomach for
+      fighting, despite its loose organization; and quite a number fought all
+      through the war. Mark Twain is doubtless correct in the main, in his
+      assertion that he has not given an unfair picture of the conditions
+      prevailing in many of the militia camps in the first months of the war
+      between the states. The men were raw and unseasoned, and even the leaders
+      were lacking in the rudiments of military training and discipline. The
+      situation was strange and unprecedented, the terrors were none the less
+      real that they were imaginary. As Mark says, it took an actual collision
+      with the enemy on the field of battle to change them from rabbits into
+      soldiers. Young Clemens, according to his nephew's account, was first
+      detailed to special duty on the river because of his knowledge acquired as
+      a pilot; it was not long before he was captured and paroled. Again he was
+      captured, this time sent to St. Louis, and imprisoned there in a tobacco
+      warehouse. Fearing recognition and tragic consequences, perhaps
+      courtmartial and death, should he, during the formalities of exchange, be
+      recognized by the command in Grant's army which first captured him, he
+      made his escape, abandoned the cause which he afterwards spoke of as "the
+      rebellion," and went west as secretary to his brother Orion, lately
+      appointed Territorial Secretary of Nevada by the President.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very credible and interesting biography of Mark Twain might be compiled
+      from his own works; and Roughing it is full of autobiography of a coloured
+      sort, though in the main correct. His joy in the prospect of that trip,
+      the exciting details of the long journey, are all narrated with gusto and
+      fine effect. In the "unique sinecure" of the office of private secretary,
+      he found he had nothing to do and no salary; so after a short time&mdash;the
+      fear of being recognized by Union soldiers and shot for breaking his
+      parole still haunting him&mdash;he, and a companion, went off together on
+      a fishing jaunt to Lake Tahoe. Everywhere he saw fortunes made in a
+      moment. He fell a prey to the prevailing excitement and went mad like all
+      the rest. Little wonder over the wild talk, when cartloads of solid silver
+      bricks as large as pigs of lead were passing by every day before their
+      very eyes. The wild talk grew more frenzied from day to day. And young
+      Clemens yielded to no one in enthusiasm and excitement. For vividness or
+      picturesqueness of expression none could vie with him. With three
+      companions, he began "prospecting," with the most indifferent success; and
+      soon tiring of their situation, they moved on down to Esmeralda (now
+      Aurora), on the other side of Carson City. Here new life seemed to inspire
+      the party. What mattered it if they were in debt to the butcher&mdash;for
+      did they not own thirty thousand feet apiece in the "richest mines on
+      earth"! Who cared if their credit was not good with the grocer, so long as
+      they revelled in mountains of fictitious wealth and raved in the frenzied
+      cant of the hour over their immediate prospect of fabulous riches! But at
+      last the practical necessities of living put a sudden damper on their
+      enthusiasm. Clemens was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to work
+      as a common labourer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board&mdash;after
+      flour had soared to a dollar a pound and the rate on borrowed money had
+      gone to eight per cent. a month. This work was very exhausting, and after
+      a week Clemens asked his employer for an advance of wages. The employer
+      replied that he was paying Clemens ten dollars a week, and thought that
+      all he was worth. How much did he want? When Clemens replied that four
+      hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was all he could reasonably
+      ask, considering the hard times, he was ordered off the premises! In after
+      days, Mark only regretted that, in view of the arduous labours he had
+      performed in that mill, he had not asked seven hundred thousand for his
+      services!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time, Mark and his friend Higbie established their claim to a
+      mine, became mad with excitement, and indulged in the wildest dreams for
+      the future. Under the laws of the district, work of a certain character
+      must be done upon the claim within ten days after location in order to
+      establish the right of possession. Mark was called away to the bedside of
+      a sick friend, Higbie failed to receive Mark's note, and the work was
+      never done&mdash;each thinking it was being properly attended to by the
+      other. On their return, they discovered that their claim was "re-located,"
+      and that millions had slipped from their grasp! The very stars in their
+      courses seemed to fight to force young Clemens into literature. Had Samuel
+      Clemens become a millionaire at this time, it is virtually certain that
+      there would have been no Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After one day more of heartless prospecting, Clemens "dropped in" at the
+      wayside post-office. It was the hour of fate! A letter awaited him there.
+      We cannot call it accident&mdash;it was the result of forces and events
+      which had long been converging toward this end. Samuel Clemens began his
+      career as an itinerant, tramping "jour" printer. He wrote for the papers
+      on which he served as printer; and he actually read the matter he set up
+      in type. By observation on his travels, by study of the writing of others,
+      Clemens acquired information, knowledge of life, and ingenuity of
+      expression. He hadn't served his ten&mdash;years' apprenticeship as a
+      printer for nothing. In the process of setting up tons of good and bad
+      literature, he had learned&mdash;half unconsciously&mdash;to appraise and
+      to discriminate. In the same half-unconscious way, he was actually gaining
+      some inkling of the niceties of style. After he began "learning the
+      river," Clemens once wrote a funny sketch about Captain Sellers which made
+      a genuine "hit" with the officers on the boat. The sketch fell into the
+      hands of the "river-editor" of the 'St. Louis Republican', found a place
+      in that journal, and was widely copied throughout the West. On the
+      strength of it, Clemens became a sort of river reporter, and from time to
+      time published memoranda and comic squibs in the 'Republican'. That
+      passion which a French critic has characterized as distinctively American,
+      the passion for "seeing yourself in print," still burned in Clemens, even
+      during all the hardships of prospecting and milling. At intervals he sent
+      from the mining regions of "Washoe," as all that part of Nevada was then
+      called, humorous letters signed "Josh" to the 'Daily Territorial
+      Enterprise' of Virginia City, at that time one of the most progressive and
+      wide&mdash;awake newspapers in the West.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fateful letter which I have mentioned, contained an offer to Clemens
+      from the proprietor of the 'Enterprise', of the position of city editor,
+      at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. To Clemens at this time, this
+      offer came as a perfect godsend. Twenty-five dollars a week was nothing
+      short of wealth, luxury. His enthusiasm oozed away when he reflected over
+      his ignorance and incompetence; and he gloomily recalled his repeated
+      failures. But necessity faced him; and opportunity knocks but once at
+      every door. His doubts were speedily resolved; and he afterwards confessed
+      that, had he been offered at that time a salary to translate the Talmud
+      from the original Hebrew, he would unhesitatingly have accepted, despite
+      some natural misgivings, and have tried to throw as much variety into it
+      as he could for the money. It was to fill a vacancy, caused by the absence
+      of Dan De Quille, the regular reporter, on a visit to "the States," that
+      Clemens was offered this position; but he retained it after De Quille
+      returned. "Mark and I had our hands full," relates De Quille, "and no
+      grass grew under our feet. There was a constant rush of startling events;
+      they came tumbling over one another as though playing at leap-frog. While
+      a stage robbery was being written up, a shooting affray started; and
+      perhaps before the pistol shots had ceased to echo among the surrounding
+      hills, the firebells were banging out an alarm." A record of the
+      variegated duties of these two, found in an old copy of the Territorial
+      Enterprise of 1863, bears the unmistakable hallmarks of Mark Twain. "Our
+      duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning murders and
+      street fights, and balls and theatres, and pack-trains, and churches, and
+      lectures, and school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway
+      robberies, and Bible societies, and hay wagons, and the thousand other
+      things which it is within the province of local reporters to keep track of
+      and magnify into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a
+      great daily newspaper. Beyond this revelation everything connected with
+      these two experiments of Providence must for ever remain an impenetrable
+      mystery." An admirable picture of Mark Twain on his native heath, in the
+      latter part of 1863, is given by Edward Peron Hingston, author of The
+      Genial Showman, in the introduction to the English edition of The
+      Innocents Abroad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fame of the Western humorist had already reached the ears of Hingston;
+      and as soon as he reached Virginia City, he went to the office of the
+      'Territorial Enterprise' and asked to be presented to Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he heard his name called by some one, Clemens called out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Pass the gentleman into my den. The noble animal is here."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The noble animal proved to be "a young man, strongly built, ruddy in
+      complexion, his hair of a sunny hue, his eyes light and twinkling, in
+      manner hearty, and nothing of the student about him&mdash;one who looked
+      as if he could take his own part in a quarrel, strike a smart blow as
+      readily as he could say a telling thing, bluffly jolly, brusquely cordial,
+      off-handedly good-natured." The picture is detailed and vivid:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          "Let it be borne in mind that from the windows of the newspaper office
+          the American desert was visible; that within a radius of ten miles
+          Indians were encamping amongst the sage&mdash;brush; that the whole
+          city was populated with miners, adventurers, Jew traders, gamblers,
+          and all the rough-and-tumble class which a mining town in a new
+          territory collects together, and it will be readily understood that a
+          reporter for a daily paper in such a place must neither go about his
+          duties wearing light kid gloves, nor be fastidious about having gilt
+          edges to his note-books. In Mark Twain I found the very man I had
+          expected to see&mdash;a flower of the wilderness, tinged with the
+          colour of the soil, the man of thought and the man of action rolled
+          into one, humorist and hard-worker, Momus in a felt hat and
+          jack-boots. In the reporter of the 'Territorial Enterprise' I became
+          introduced to a Californian celebrity, rich in eccentricities of
+          thought, lively in fancy, quaint in remark, whose residence upon the
+          fringe of civilization had allowed his humour to develop without
+          restraint, and his speech to be rarely idiomatic."
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Under the influence of the example of the proprietors of the 'Enterprise',
+      strict stylistic disciplinarians of the Dana school of journalism, Clemens
+      learned the advantages of the crisp, direct style which characterizes his
+      writing. As a reporter, he was really industrious in matters that met his
+      fancy; but "cast-iron items"&mdash;for he hated facts and figures
+      requiring absolute accuracy&mdash;got from him only "a lick and a
+      promise." He was much interested in Tom Fitch's effort to establish a
+      literary journal, 'The Weekly Occidental'. Daggett's opening chapters of a
+      wonderful story, of which Fitch, Mrs Fitch, J. T. Goodman, Dan De Quille,
+      and Clemens were to write successive instalments, gave that paper the <i>coup
+      de grac</i> in its very first issue. Of this wonderful novel, at the close
+      of each instalment of which the "hero was left in a position of such peril
+      that it seemed impossible he could be rescued, except through means and
+      wisdom more than human"; of the Bohemian days of the "Visigoths,"&mdash;Clemens,
+      De Quille, Frank May, Louis Aldrich, and their confreres; of the practical
+      jokes played on each other, particularly the incident of the imitation
+      meerschaum ("mere sham") pipe, solemnly presented to Clemens by Steve
+      Gillis, C. A. V. Putnam, D. E. M'Carthy, De Quille and others&mdash;all
+      these belong to the fascinating domain of the biographer. When Clemens was
+      sent down to Carson City to report the meetings of the first Nevada
+      Legislature, he began for the first time to sign his letters "Mark Twain."
+      In his Autobiography he has explained that his function as a legislative
+      correspondent was to dispense compliment and censure with impartial
+      justice. As his disquisitions covered about half a page each morning in
+      the Enterprise, it is easy to understand that he was an "influence."
+      Questioned by Carlyle Smith in regard to his choice of "Mark Twain," Mr.
+      Clemens replied: "I chose my pseudonym because to nine hundred and
+      ninety-nine persons out of a thousand it had no meaning, and also because
+      it was short. I was a reporter in the Legislature at the time, and I
+      wished to save the Legislature time. It was much shorter to say in their
+      debates&mdash;for I was certain to be the occasion of some questions of
+      privilege&mdash;'Mark Twain' than 'the unprincipled and lying
+      Parliamentary Reporter of the 'Territorial Enterprise'.'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already his name was known the whole length of the Pacific Coast; the
+      Enterprise published many things from his pen which gave him local, and
+      afterwards national, fame; such sketches as 'The Undertaker's Chat', 'The
+      Petrified Man' and 'The Marvellous 'Bloody Massacre'' had attracted
+      favourable and wide notice east of the Rocky Mountains. But his career in
+      Carson City came to a sudden close when he challenged the editor of the
+      Virginia Union to a duel, the bloodless conclusion of which is narrated in
+      the Autobiography. But even a challenge to a duel was against the new law
+      of Nevada; and obeying the warning of Governor North, the duellists
+      crossed the border without ceremony, and stood not upon the order of their
+      going.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While Mark Twain was still with the Enterprise, he was in the habit of
+      reserving all his "sketches" for the San Francisco newspapers, the 'Golden
+      Era' and the 'Morning Call'. He now turns his steps to that storied city
+      of "Frisco," and was not long in extending his fame on that coast. He was
+      incorrigibly lazy, as George Barnes, the editor of the Call, soon
+      discovered; and Kipling was told when he was in San Francisco that Mark
+      was in the habit of coiling himself into a heap and meditating until the
+      last minute, when he would produce copy having no relationship to the
+      subject of his assignment&mdash;"which made the editor swear horribly, and
+      the readers of 'The Call' ask for more." His love for practical joking
+      during the California days brought him unpopularity; and one reads in a
+      San Francisco paper of the early days: "There have been moments in the
+      lives of various kind-hearted and respectable citizens of California and
+      Nevada, when, if Mark Twain were before them as members of a vigilance
+      committee for any mild crime, such as mule-stealing or arson, it is to be
+      feared his shrift would have been short. What a dramatic picture the idea
+      conjures up, to be sure! Mark, before these honest men, infuriated by his
+      practical jokes, trying to show them what an innocent creature he was when
+      it came to mules, or how the only policy of fire insurance he held had
+      lapsed, how void of guile he was in any direction, and all with that
+      inimitable drawl, that perplexed countenance and peculiar scraping of the
+      left foot, like a boy speaking his first piece at school." If he just
+      escaped disaster, he likewise just escaped millions; on one occasion, for
+      the space of a few moments, he owned the famous Comstock Lode, which was,
+      though he never suspected it, worth millions. His trunkful of securities,
+      which were eminently saleable at one time, proved to be of fictitious
+      value when "the bottom dropped out" of the Nevada boom; and that silver
+      mine, which he was commissioned to sell in New York, was finally sold for
+      three million dollars! It was, as Mark says, the blind lead over again.
+      Mark Twain had the true Midas touch; but the mine of riches he was
+      destined to discover was a mine, not of gold or silver, but the mine of
+      intellect and rich human experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To The 'Golden Era', Mark Twain, like Prentice Mulford and Joaquin Miller,
+      contributed freely; and after a time he became associated with Bret Harte
+      on 'The Californian', Harte as editor at twenty dollars a week, and Mark
+      receiving twelve dollars for an article. Here forgathered that group of
+      brilliant writers of the Pacific Slope, numbering Bret Harte, Mark Twain,
+      Charles Warren Stoddard, Charles Henry Webb, and Prentice Mulford among
+      its celebrities; two of that remarkable coterie were soon destined to
+      achieve world-wide fame. "These ingenuous young men, with the fatuity of
+      gifted people," says Mr. Howells, "had established a literary newspaper in
+      San Francisco, and they brilliantly co-operated in its early extinction."
+      Of his first meeting with Mark Twain, Bret Harte has left a memorable
+      picture:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          "His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and
+          even the aquiline eye&mdash;an eye so eagle-like that a second lid
+          would not have surprised me&mdash;of an unusual and dominant nature.
+          His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, and
+          his general manner was one of supreme indifference to surroundings and
+          circumstances. Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam Clemens, and remarked
+          that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number of newspaper
+          articles contributed over the signature of 'Mark Twain.'"
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Mark tired of the life of literary drudgery in San Francisco&mdash;on one
+      occasion he was reduced to a solitary ten&mdash;cent piece; and General
+      John McComb wooed him back to journalism just as he was on the point of
+      returning to his old work on the Mississippi River, this time as a
+      Government pilot. During the earlier years in San Francisco, he was in the
+      habit of writing weekly letters to the 'Territorial Enterprise'&mdash;personals,
+      market-chat, and the like. But when he criticized the police department of
+      San Francisco in the most scathing terms, the officials "found means for
+      bringing charges that made the author's presence there difficult and
+      comfortless." So he welcomed the opportunity to join Steve Gillis in a
+      pilgrimage to the mountain home of Jim Gillis, his brother&mdash;a "sort
+      of Bohemian infirmary." Mark Twain revelled in the delightful company of
+      the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," and he enjoyed the mining
+      methods of Jackass Hill, like the true Bohemian that he was. Soon after
+      his arrival, Mark and Jim Gillis started out in search of golden pockets.
+      As De Quille says:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          "They soon found and spent some days in working up the undisturbed
+          trail of an undiscovered deposit, They were on the 'golden bee-line'
+          and stuck to it faithfully, though it was necessary to carry each
+          sample of dirt a considerable distance to a small stream in the bed of
+          a canon in order to wash it. However, Mark hungered and thirsted to
+          find a big rich pocket, and he pitched in after the manner of Joe
+          Bowers of old&mdash;just like a thousand of brick.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "Each step made sure by the finding of golden grains, they at last
+          came upon the pocket whence these grains had trailed out down the
+          slope of the mountain. It was a cold, dreary drizzling day when the
+          'home deposit' was found. The first sample of dirt carried to the
+          stream and washed out yielded only a few cents. Although the right
+          vein had been discovered, they had as yet found only the tail end of
+          the pocket.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "Returning to the vein, they dug a sample of the decomposed ore from a
+          new place, and were about to carry it down to the ravine and test it,
+          when the rain increased to a lively downpour."
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Mark was chilled to the bone, and refused to carry another pail of water.
+      In slow, drawling tones he protested decisively:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable. Let's
+      go to the house and wait till it clears up."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gillis was eager to test the sample he had just taken out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Bring just one more pail, Sam," he urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I won't do it, Jim!" replied the now thoroughly disgusted Clemens. "Not a
+      drop! Not if I knew there were a million dollars in that pan!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moved by Sam's dejected appearance&mdash;blue nose and humped back&mdash;and
+      realizing doubtless that it was futile to reason with him further, Jim
+      yielded and emptied the sacks of dirt just dug upon the ground. They now
+      started out for the nearest shelter, the hotel in Angel's Camp, kept by
+      Coon Drayton, formerly a Mississippi River pilot. Imagine the jests and
+      shouts that went around as Mark and Coon vied with each other in narrating
+      interesting experiences. For three days the rain and the stories held out;
+      and among those told by Drayton was a story of a frog. He narrated this
+      story with the utmost solemnity as a thing that had happened in Angel's
+      Camp in the spring of '49&mdash;the story of a frog trained by its owner
+      to become a wonderful jumper, but which failed to "make good" in a contest
+      because the owner of a rival frog, in order to secure the winning of the
+      wager, filled the trained frog full of shot during its owner's absence.
+      This story appealed irresistibly to Mark as a first-rate story told in a
+      first-rate way; he divined in it the magic quality unsuspected by the
+      narrator&mdash;universal humour. He made notes in order to remember the
+      story, and on his return to the Gillis' cabin, "wrote it up." He wrote a
+      number of other things besides, all of which he valued above the frog
+      story; but Gillis thought it the best thing he had ever written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime the rain had washed off the surface soil from their last pan,
+      which they had left in their hurry. Some passing miners were astonished to
+      behold the ground glittering with gold; they appropriated it, but dared
+      not molest the deposit until the expiration of the thirty-day claim-notice
+      posted by Jim Gillis. They sat down to wait, hoping that the claimants
+      would not return. At the expiration of the thirty days, the claim-jumpers
+      took possession, and soon cleared out the pocket, which yielded twenty
+      thousand dollars. It was one of the most fortunate accidents in Mark
+      Twain's career. He came within one pail of water of comparative wealth;
+      but had he discovered that pocket, he would probably have settled down as
+      a pocketminer, and might have pounded quartz for the rest of his life. Had
+      his nerve held out a moment longer, he would never have gone to Angel's
+      Camp, would never have heard The Story of the Jumping Frog, and would have
+      escaped that sudden fame which this little story soon brought him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On his return to San Francisco, he dropped in one morning to see Bret
+      Harte, and told him this story. As Harte records:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          "He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself
+          irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and
+          half-unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the
+          original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came
+          in, and they asked him to write it for 'The Californian'. He did so,
+          and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work
+          of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the
+          Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was 'The Jumping Frog of
+          Calaveras.' It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever the
+          English language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to anyone in
+          print as it was to me, told for the first time, by the unknown Twain
+          himself, on that morning in the San Francisco Mint."
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      When Artemus Ward passed through California on a literary tour in 1864,
+      Mark Twain regaled him&mdash;as he regaled all worthy acquaintances&mdash;with
+      his favourite story, 'The Jumping Frog'. Ward was delighted with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Write it out," he said, "give it all the necessary touches, and let me
+      use it in a volume of sketches I am preparing for the press. Just send it
+      to Carleton, my publisher, in New York."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It arrived too late for Ward's book, and Carleton presented it to Henry
+      Clapp, who published it in his paper, The Saturday Press of November 18,
+      1864. In his Autobiography, Mr. Clemens has narrated how 'The Jumping
+      Frog' put a quietus on 'The Saturday Press', and was immediately copied in
+      numerous newspapers in England and America. He was always proud of the
+      celebrity that story achieved; but he never sought to claim the credit for
+      himself. He freely admits that it was not Mark Twain, but the frog, that
+      became celebrated. The author, alas, remained in obscurity!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Carleton afterwards confessed that he had lost the chance of a life&mdash;time
+      by giving The Jumping Frog away; but Mark Twain's old friend, Charles
+      Henry Webb, came to the rescue and published it. About four thousand
+      copies were sold in three years; but the real fame of the story was in its
+      newspaper and magazine notoriety. In 1872 it was translated into the
+      'Revue des Deux Mondes'; and it was almost as widely read in England,
+      India, and Australia as it was in America.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime Mark Twain was still awaiting the rewards of journalism, and
+      doing literary hack work of one sort or another. In 1866 the proprietors
+      of the 'Sacramento Union' employed him to write a series of letters from
+      the Sandwich Islands. The purpose of these letters was to give an account
+      of the sugar industry. Mark told the story of sugar, but, as was his wont,
+      threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had nothing to do with sugar. It
+      was the extraneous matter, and not the sugar, that won him a wide audience
+      on the Pacific Coast. During these months of "luxurious vagrancy" he
+      described in the most vivid way many of the most notable features of the
+      Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such letters would at once have been embodied
+      in a volume. In his 'My Debut as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has
+      described in admirably graphic style his great "scoop" of the news of the
+      Hornet disaster; how Anson Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried
+      on a cot to the hospital, so that he could interview the half-dead
+      sailors. His bill&mdash;twenty dollars a week for general correspondence,
+      and one hundred dollars a column for the Hornet story&mdash;was paid with
+      all good will. On the strength of this story, he hoped to become a
+      "Literary Person," and sent his account of the Hornet disaster to Harper's
+      Magazine, where it appeared in December, 1866. But alas! he could not give
+      the banquet he was going to give to celebrate his debut as a "Literary
+      Person." He had not written the "Mark Twain" distinctly, and when it
+      appeared it had been transformed into "Mike Swain"!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Mark returned to San Francisco, he resolved to follow the example of
+      Stoddard and Mulford, and "enter the lecture field." The "extraneous
+      matter" in his letters to the Sacramento Union had made him "notorious";
+      and, as he put it, "San Francisco invited me to lecture." The historic
+      account of that lecture, in 'Roughing It', is found elsewhere in this
+      book. Noah Brooks, editor of the Alta California, who was present at this
+      lecture, has written the following graphic piece of description "Mark
+      Twain's method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel. His slow,
+      deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the
+      apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences, and, above
+      all, the surprise that spread over his face when the audience roared with
+      delight or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word-painting,
+      were unlike anything of the kind they had ever known. All this was
+      original; it was Mark Twain." Employing D. E. McCarthy as his agent, Mark
+      gave a number of lectures at various places on the Pacific Coast. From
+      this time forward we recognize in Mark Twain one of the supreme masters of
+      the art of lecturing in our time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In December, 1866, he set out for New York, preparatory to the grand tour
+      around the world. His own account of the circular describing the projected
+      trip is famous. He had proposed, for twelve hundred dollars in gold,&mdash;at
+      the rate of twenty dollars apiece, to write a series of letters for the
+      'Alta California'. Brooks, the editor, fortified the grave misgivings of
+      the proprietors over this proposition; but Colonel John McComb (then on
+      the editorial staff) argued vehemently for Mark, and turned the scale in
+      his favour. While Mark was in New York, he was urged by Frank Fuller, whom
+      he had known as Territorial Governor of Utah, to deliver a lecture&mdash;in
+      order to establish his reputation on the Atlantic coast. Fuller, an
+      enthusiastic admirer of Mark Twain, overcame all objections, and engaged
+      Cooper Union for the occasion. Though few tickets were sold, Fuller
+      cleverly succeeded in packing the hall by sending out a multitude of
+      complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of New York City and the
+      adjacent territory. That lecture proved to be a supreme success&mdash;Mark's
+      reputation as a lecturer on the Atlantic coast was assured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On June 10, 1867, the Quaker City set sail for its Oriental tour. It bore
+      on board a comparatively unknown person of the name of Clemens, who, in
+      applying for passage, represented himself to be a Baptist minister in
+      ill-health from San Francisco!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It brought back a celebrity, destined to become famous throughout the
+      world. Prior to sailing he arranged to contribute letters to the 'New York
+      Tribune' and the 'New York Herald', as well as to the 'Alta California'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "His letters to the 'Alta California'," says Noah Brooks, "made him
+      famous. It was my business to prepare one of these letters for the Sunday
+      morning paper, taking the topmost letter from a goodly pile that was
+      stacked in a pigeon-hole of my desk. Clemens was an indefatigable
+      correspondent, and his last letter was slipped in at the bottom of a tall
+      stack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It would not be quite accurate to say that Mark Twain's letters were the
+      talk of the town; but it was very rarely that readers of the paper did not
+      come into the office on Mondays to confide to the editors their admiration
+      of the writer, and their enjoyment of his weekly contributions. The
+      California newspapers copied these letters, with unanimous approval and
+      disregard of the copyrights of author and publisher."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the Western humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American
+      intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, which
+      caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public. It was a virgin field for
+      the humorous observer; Europe had not yet become the playground of
+      America. It was rather a <i>terra incognita</i>, regarded with a sort of
+      reverential ignorance by the average American tourist. By the range of his
+      humour, the pertinency of his observation, and the vigour of his
+      expression he awoke immediate attention. And he aroused a deeply
+      sympathetic response in the hearts of Americans by his manly and outspoken
+      expression&mdash;his respect for the worthy, the admirable, the
+      praiseworthy, his scorn and detestation for the spurious, the specious and
+      the fraudulent. In this book, for the first time, he strikes the key-note
+      of his life and thought, which sounds so clearly throughout all his later
+      works. It is the true beginning of his career.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On his return to the United States in November, he resumed his newspaper
+      work, this time at the National Capital. On his arrival there he found a
+      letter from Elisha Bliss, of the 'American Publishing Company', proposing
+      a volume recounting the adventures of the "Excursion," to be elaborately
+      illustrated, and sold by subscription on a five per cent. royalty. He
+      eagerly accepted the offer and set to work on his notes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I knew Mark Twain in Washington," says Senator William M. Stewart of
+      Nevada, in his reminiscences 'A Senator of the Sixties', "at a time when
+      he was without money. He told me his condition, and said he was very
+      anxious to get out his book. He showed me his notes, and I saw that they
+      would make a great book, and probably bring him in a fortune. I promised
+      that I would 'stake' him until he had the book written. I made him a clerk
+      to my committee in the senate, which paid him six dollars per day; then I
+      hired a man for one hundred dollars per month to do the work!" His
+      mischievously extravagant description of Mark Twain at this time is
+      eminently worthy of record "He was arrayed in a seedy suit which hung upon
+      his lean frame in bunches, with no style worth mentioning. A sheaf of
+      scraggly, black hair leaked out of a battered, old, slouch hat, like
+      stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt,
+      very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He had a very
+      sinister appearance. He was a man I had known around the Nevada mining
+      camps several years before, and his name was Samuel L. Clemens."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was during this winter that Mark wrote a number of humorous articles
+      and sketches&mdash;'The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract', the
+      account of his resignation as clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology,
+      and 'Riley&mdash;Newspaper Correspondent'. His time was chiefly devoted to
+      preparing the material for his book; but finding Washington too
+      distracting, he returned to San Francisco and completed the manuscript
+      therein July, 1868. For a year the publication of the book was delayed, as
+      recorded in the Autobiography; but it finally appeared in print following
+      Mark's indignant telegram to Bliss that, if the book was not on sale in
+      twenty-four hours, he would bring suit for damages. Mark Twain records
+      that in nine months the book had taken the publishing house out of debt,
+      advanced its stock from twenty-five to two hundred, and left seventy
+      thousand dollars clear profit. Eighty-five thousand copies were sold
+      within sixteen months, the largest sale of a four dollar book ever
+      achieved in America in so short a time up to that date. It is, miraculous
+      to relate, still the leader in its own special field&mdash;a "bestseller"
+      for forty years!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The proprietors of the 'Alta California' were exceeding wroth when they
+      heard that Clemens was preparing for publication the very letters which
+      they had commissioned him to write and had printed in their own paper.
+      They prepared to publish a cheap paper-covered edition of the letters, and
+      sent the American Publishing Co. a challenge in the shape of an advance
+      notice of their publication. Clemens hurried back to San Francisco from
+      the East, and soon convinced the proprietors of the 'Alta California' of
+      the authenticity of his copyright. The paper-covered edition was then and
+      there abandoned forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before leaving the West to settle permanently in the East, Mark Twain was
+      associated for a short time with the 'Overland Monthly', edited by Bret
+      Harte. In his review of 'The Innocents Abroad', Harte asserted that
+      Clemens deserved "to rank foremost among Western humorists"; but he was
+      grievously disappointed in the first few contributions from Clemens to the
+      Overland Monthly&mdash;notably 'By Rail through France' (later
+      incorporated in The Innocents Abroad)&mdash;because of their perfect
+      gravity. At last, 'A Mediaeval Romance'&mdash;a story which has been said
+      to contain the germ of 'A Connecticut Yankee', because of its burlesque of
+      mediaevalism&mdash;won the enthusiastic approval of Bret Harte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this time forward, Samuel L. Clemens is seen in a new environment, in
+      association with new ideas and a new civilization. The history of this
+      second period does not fall within the scope of the present work. It has
+      just been narrated with brilliancy and charm by his close associate and
+      most intimate friend, Mr. William Dean Howells, in his admirable book 'My
+      Mark Twain'. In the subsequent portion of the present work attention will
+      be directed solely to those features of Mark Twain's life which have a
+      direct bearing upon his career as a man of letters, and which throw into
+      relief the progressive development of his genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The South and the West contributed to Mark Twain's development, and added
+      to his store of vital experience, in greater measure than all the other
+      influences of his life combined. From the inexhaustible well of those
+      experiences he drew ever fresh contributions for the satisfaction of the
+      world. His mind was stocked with the rich, crude ore of early experience&mdash;the
+      romance and the reality of a life full of prismatic variations of colour.
+      The civilization of the East, its culture and refinement, tempered the
+      genius of Mark Twain in conformity with the indispensable criteria of
+      classic art. Under the broadening influence of its persistent nationalism,
+      he became more deeply, more profoundly, imbued with the comprehensive
+      ideals of American democracy. He never lost the first fine virginal
+      spontaneity of his native style, never weakened in the vigour of his
+      thought or in the primitiveness of his expression. His contact with the
+      East compassed the liberation of that vast fund of stored&mdash;up early
+      experiences, acquired through grappling with life in many a rude
+      encounter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of its own life, the East never contributed to Mark Twain's works, in
+      any appreciably momentous way, either volume or immensity of fertile,
+      suggestive human experience. If we eliminate from the list of Mark Twain's
+      works those books which have their roots deep set in the soil of South and
+      West, we eliminate the most priceless assets of his art. Indeed, it may be
+      doubted whether, were those works struck from the catalogue of his
+      contributions, Mark Twain could justly rank as a great genius. To his
+      association with the South and the Southwest are due 'Tom Sawyer',
+      'Huckleberry Finn', 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', and 'Life on the Mississippi'.
+      'The Jumping Frog' and 'Roughing It' belong peculiarly to the West, and
+      even 'The Innocents Abroad' falls wholly within the period of Mark Twain's
+      influence by the West, its standards, outlook, and localized viewpoint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Colonel Mulberry Sellers is a veritably human type, the embodiment,
+      laughably lovable, of a temperamental phase of American character in the
+      course of the national development. But 'The Gilded Age' has long since
+      disappeared from that small but tremendously significant group of works
+      which are tentatively destined to rank as classics. Much as I enjoy the
+      satiric comedy of 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court', I have always felt
+      that it set before Europe an American type which is neither elevating nor
+      inspiring&mdash;nor national. It tends to the gratification of England and
+      Europe, even in the face of its democratic demolition of feudalistic
+      survival, by sealing a certain cheap type of vulgarity with the national
+      stamp. One must, nevertheless, confess with regret that this type is the
+      embodiment of an "ideal" still only too commonly cherished in America. The
+      national type, I take it, is found in such characters as Lincoln and
+      Phillips Brooks, in Lee and Henry W. Grady, in Charles W. Eliot and Edwin
+      A. Alderman, and not in a provincial 'Connecticut Yankee', jovial and
+      whole&mdash;hearted though he be. I say this without forgetting or
+      minimizing for a moment the art displayed in effecting the devastating and
+      illimitably humorous contrast of a present with a remotely past
+      civilization. 'Joan of Arc' has no local association, being a pure work of
+      the heart, the chivalric impulse of a noble spirit. 'The Man that
+      Corrupted Hadleyburg', viewed from any standpoint, is a masterpiece; but
+      its significance lies, not in the locality of its setting, but in the
+      universality of its moral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a word, it was the East which broadened and universalized the spirit of
+      Mark Twain. We shall see, later on, that it steadily fostered in him a
+      spirit of true nationalism and hardy democracy. But it was the South and
+      the West which lavishly gave him of their most priceless riches, and
+      thereby created in Mark Twain an unique and incomparable genius, the
+      veritable type and embodiment of their inalienably individual life and
+      civilization. This first phase of the life of Mark Twain has been so
+      strongly stressed here, because the first half of his life has always
+      seemed to me to have been a period of&mdash;shall I say?&mdash;God-appointed
+      preparation for the most significant and lastingly permanent work of the
+      latter half, namely, the narration of the incidents of early experience,
+      and the imaginative reminting of the gold of that experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One has only to read Mark Twain's works to learn the real history of his
+      life. There were momentous episodes in the latter half of his career; but
+      they were concerned with his life rather than with his art. We cannot,
+      indeed, say what or how profound is the effect of life and experience on
+      art. There was the happy marriage, the tragic losses of wife and children.
+      There were the associations with the culture and art&mdash;circles of
+      America and Europe&mdash;New England, New York, Berlin, Vienna, London,
+      Glasgow; the academic degrees&mdash;Missouri, Yale; finally ancient Oxford
+      for the first time conferring the coveted honour of its degree upon a
+      humorist; the honours his own country delighted to bestow upon him. And
+      there too was that gallant struggle to pay off a tremendous debt, begun at
+      sixty&mdash;and accomplished one year sooner than he expected&mdash;after
+      the most spectacular and remarkable lecture tour in history. The beautiful
+      chivalric spirit of this great soul shone brightest in disaster. He
+      insisted that it was his wife who refused to compromise his debts for
+      forty cents on the dollar&mdash;that it was she who declared it must be
+      dollar for dollar; and when a fund was raised by his admirers to assist in
+      lightening his burden, that it was his wife who refused to accept it,
+      though he was willing enough to accept it as a welcome relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="pp065.jpg (82K)" src="images/pp065.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As an American, I can say nothing more significantly characteristic of the
+      man than that he was a good citizen. He possessed in the consciousness of
+      personal responsibility for the standards, government, and ideals of his
+      town, his city, and his country. Civic conscientiousness burned strong
+      within him; and he fought to develop and to maintain breadth of public
+      view and sanity of popular ideals. Blind patriotism was impossible for
+      this great American: he exposed the shallowness of popular enthusiasms and
+      the narrowness of rampant spread-eagleism, without regard for consequence
+      to himself or his popularity. What a tribute to his personality that,
+      instead of suffering, he gained in popularity by his honest and downright
+      outspokenness! He wielded the lash of his bitter scorn and fearful irony
+      upon the wrong-doer, the hypocrite, the fraud; and aroused public opinion
+      to impatience with public abuse, open offence, and official discourtesy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Samuel Langhorne Clemens impressed me as the most complete and human
+      individual I have ever known. He was not a great thinker; his views were
+      not "advanced".
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glory of his temperament was its splendid sanity, balance, and
+      normality. The homeliest virtues of life were his the republican virtue of
+      simplicity; the domestic virtue of, personal purity and passionately
+      simple regard for the sanctity of the marriage bond; the civic virtue of
+      public honesty; the business virtue of stainless private honour. Mark
+      Twain was one of the supreme literary geniuses of his time. But he was
+      something even more than this. He was not simply a great genius: he was a
+      great man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="pp069.jpg (50K)" src="images/pp069.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      <a name="humorist" id="humorist">THE HUMORIST</a>
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <blockquote>
+          <blockquote>
+            <p>
+              <i> "Exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow; a joke can be so
+              big that it breaks the roof of the stars. By simply going on being
+              absurd, a thing can become godlike; there is but one step from the
+              ridiculous to the sublime."</i><br /> GILBERT K. CHESTERTON:
+              Charles Dickens.
+            </p>
+          </blockquote>
+        </blockquote>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not without wide significance in its bearing upon the general outlines of
+      contemporary literature is the circumstance that Mark Twain served his
+      apprenticeship to letters in the high school of journalism. Like his
+      contemporaries, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free play for
+      his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal for the
+      masses. Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective only when
+      he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece of his own
+      invention. Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native flavour of
+      his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more sophisticated
+      refinements of the purely literary. Mark Twain never lost the ruddy glow
+      of his first inspiration, and his style, to the very end, remained as it
+      began&mdash;journalistic, untamed, primitive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw, who like Mark Twain have achieved
+      comprehensive international reputations, have succeeded in preserving the
+      early vigour and telling directness acquired in journalistic
+      apprenticeship. It was by the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his
+      journalese that Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start. That
+      trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened
+      verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the new
+      journalism. "The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are
+      'not for an age, but for all time,'" says Bernard Shaw, "has his reward in
+      being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes trying to
+      knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare peopling that
+      same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire hunts, Ibsen
+      photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a Norwegian parish,
+      Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as if she were a lady
+      living in the next street to him, are still alive and at home everywhere
+      among the dust and ashes of many thousands of academic, punctilious, most
+      archaeologically correct men of letters and art who spent their lives
+      haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar obsession with the ephemeral."
+      Mark Twain began his career by studying the people and period he knew in
+      relation to his own life. Jamestown, Hannibal, and Virginia City, the
+      stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic, uproarious life of Western
+      prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life and live again in the pages of
+      his books. Colonel Sellers, in the main correct but "stretched a little"
+      here and there; Tom Sawyer, the "magerful" hero of boyhood; the shrewd and
+      kindly Aunt Polly, drawn from his own mother; Huck Finn, with the tender
+      conscience and the gentle heart&mdash;these and many another were drawn
+      from the very life. In writing of his time <i>a propo</i> of himself, Mark
+      Twain succeeded in telling the truth about humanity in general and for any
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the main&mdash;though there are noteworthy exceptions&mdash;Mark
+      Twain's works originated fundamentally in the facts of his own life. He is
+      a master humorist&mdash;which is only another way of saying that he is a
+      master psychologist with the added gift of humour&mdash;because he looked
+      upon himself always as a complete and well-rounded repository of
+      universally human characteristics. <i>Humanus sum; et nil humanum mihi
+      alienum est</i>&mdash;this might well have served for his motto. It was
+      his conviction that the American possessed no unique and peculiar human
+      characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the world. In the
+      same way, he regarded himself as possessing no unique or peculiar human
+      characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the human race. Like
+      Omar he might have said "I myself am Heaven and Hell"&mdash;&mdash;for
+      within himself he recognized, in some form, at higher or lower power,
+      every feature, trait, instinct, characteristic of which a human being is
+      capable. The last half century of his life, as he himself said in his
+      Autobiography, had been constantly and faithfully devoted to the study of
+      the human race. His knowledge came from minute self-examination&mdash;for
+      he regarded himself as the entire human race compacted together. It was by
+      concentrating his attention upon himself, by recognizing in himself the
+      quintessential type of the race, that he succeeded in producing works of
+      such pure naturalness and utter verity. A humour which is at bottom good
+      humour is always contagious; but there is a deeper and more universal
+      appeal which springs from genial and unaffected representation of the
+      human species, of the universal 'Genus Homo'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been said, by foreign critics, that the intellectual life of
+      America in general takes its cue from the day, whilst the intellectual
+      life of Europe derives from history. If American literature be really
+      "Journalism under exceptionally favourable conditions," as defined by the
+      Danish critic, Johannes V. Jensen, then must Mark Twain be a typical
+      product of American literature. A certain modicum of truth may rest in
+      this startling and seemingly uncomplimentary definition. Interpreted
+      liberally, it may be taken to mean that America finds her key to the
+      future in the immediate vital present, rather than in a remote and hazy
+      past. Mark Twain was a great creative genius because he saw himself, and
+      so saw human nature, in the strong, searching light of the living present.
+      He is the greatest genius evolved by natural selection out of the ranks of
+      American journalism. Crude, rudimentary and boisterous as his early
+      writing was, at times provincial and coarse, it bore upon its face the
+      fresh stamp of contemporary actuality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the American of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be placidly
+      assured by our British critics that America is sublimely unconscious that
+      her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less arresting than the
+      asseveration that America is lacking in humour because she is lacking in
+      self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly comic irony in this
+      commiseration with us, on the part of our British critics, for our failure
+      joyously to realize our old age, which they would have us believe is a
+      sort of premature senescence and decay. The New World is pitied for her
+      failure to know without illusion the futility of the hurried pursuit of
+      wealth, of the passion for extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of
+      all the hostages youth in America eternally gives to old age. "America has
+      produced great artists," admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. Yet he maintains
+      that "that fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility
+      and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they
+      are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave,
+      barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the
+      spirit of a schoolboy? . . . Out of America has come a sweet and startling
+      cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man." This sweet and startling
+      cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr. Chesterton has
+      chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two American geniuses who
+      have lived outside their own country, absorbed the art ideals of the
+      older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost touch with the youthful
+      spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the ongoing rush and progress
+      of America. It is worthy of remark that Mr. James has always maintained
+      that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only very primitive persons; and
+      Whistler, with his acid <i>diablerie</i>, was wholly alien in spirit to
+      the boisterous humour of Mark Twain. That other brilliant but incoherent
+      interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles Whibley, bound to the
+      presupposed paradox of America's pathetic senescence and total deficiency
+      in humour, blithely gives away his case in the vehement assertion that
+      America's greatest national interpreter is&mdash;Mark Twain!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the
+      humorist&mdash;with his shrieking Philistinism, his dominant sense for the
+      colossally incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering, ludicrous
+      contrast. To the reflective, Mark Twain subsumed within himself a "certain
+      surcharge and overplus of power, a buoyancy, and a sense of conquest"
+      which typified the youth of America. It is memorable that he breathed in
+      his youth the bracing air of the prairie, shared the collective ardour of
+      the Argonauts, felt the rising thrill of Western adventure, and expressed
+      the crude and manly energy of navigation, exploration, and the daring
+      hazard for new fortune. To those who knew him in personal intimacy, the
+      quality that was outstanding, omnipresent and eternally ineradicable from
+      his nature was&mdash;paradoxical as it may sound&mdash;not humour, not
+      wit, not irony, not a thousand other terms that might be associated with
+      his name, but&mdash;the spirit of eternal youth. It is comprehensively
+      significant and conclusive that, to the day of her death, Mrs. Clemens
+      never called her husband anything but the bright nickname&mdash;"Youth."
+      Mark Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller of tales, pungent as
+      stylist. But he has achieved another sort of eminence that is peculiarly
+      gratifying to Americans. "They distinguish in his writings," says an acute
+      French critic, "exalted and sublimated by his genius, their national
+      qualities of youth and of gaiety, of force and of faith; they love his
+      philosophy, at once practical and high&mdash;minded. They are fond of his
+      simple style, animated with verve and spice, thanks to which his work is
+      accessible to every class of readers. They think he describes his
+      contemporaries with such an art of distinguishing their essential traits,
+      that he manages to evoke, to create even, characters and types of eternal
+      verity. They profess for Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration
+      that we have in France for Balzac."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that humour is a subject which has
+      never had much interest for him, it is nothing more than a commonplace to
+      say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist only, that the world seems
+      to persist in regarding him. The philosophy of his early life was what
+      George Meredith has aptly termed the "philosophy of the Broad Grin." Mr.
+      Gilbert Chesterton once said that "American humour, neither unfathomably
+      absurd like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of the realities
+      of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination. It consists
+      in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke
+      up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world." This partial
+      and somewhat conventional foreign conception of American humour is
+      admirably descriptive of the cumulative and "sky-breaking" humour of the
+      early Mark Twain. Then no exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm
+      too unreal, no climax too extreme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a
+      lawless, untrammelled life. Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but one
+      remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of
+      argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature. In
+      the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic and
+      sanguinary. The refinements of art and civilization seemed effeminate,
+      artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously at one
+      another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of each other's plans, and
+      gloried in their defiance of both man and God. Deep in their hearts they
+      cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and the afflicted,
+      and generosity indescribable. And yet they prided themselves upon their
+      barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning bred of their wild life
+      and sharpened in the struggle for existence. What, after all, is 'The
+      Jumping Frog' but the elaborate narrative, in native vernacular, of a
+      shrewd practical joke? As Mark Twain first heard it, this story was a
+      solemn recital of an interesting incident in the life of Angel's Camp. It
+      was Mark Twain who "created" the story: he endowed with the comic note of
+      whimsicality that imaginative realization of <i>une chose vue</i>, which
+      went round the world. The humour of rustic shrewdness in criticism of art,
+      so elaborately exploited in 'The Innocents Abroad', was displayed, perhaps
+      invented, by Mark Twain in the early journalistic days in San Francisco.
+      In 'The Golden Era' an excellent example is found in the following
+      observations upon a celebrated painting of Samson and Delilah, then on
+      exhibition in San Francisco:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now what is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at
+      the Bank Exchange? Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or the
+      muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it the
+      rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot? No, sir.
+      The first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her feet. Them
+      scissors is too modern; thar warn't no scissors like them in them days&mdash;by
+      a d&mdash;-d sight."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a brilliant and audacious conception, having the just proportion
+      of sanguinary humour, embodied in Mark Twain's offer, during his lecture
+      on the Sandwich Islands, to show his audience how the cannibals consume
+      their food&mdash;if only some lady would lend him a live baby. There is
+      the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious anecdote of
+      Higgins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Higgins was a simple creature, who used to haul rock; and on the day Judge
+      Bagley fell down the court-house steps and broke his neck, Higgins was
+      commissioned to carry the body in his wagon to the house of Mrs. Bagley
+      and break the news to her as gently as possible. When he arrived, he
+      shouted until Mrs. Bagley came to the door, and then tactfully inquired if
+      the Widder Bagley lived there! When she indignantly replied in the
+      negative, he gently humoured her whim; and inquired next if Judge Bagley
+      lived there. When she replied that he did, Higgins offered to bet that he
+      didn't; and delicately inquired if the Judge were in. On being assured
+      that he was not in at present, Higgins triumphantly exclaimed that he
+      expected as much. Because he had the old Judge curled up out there in the
+      wagon; and when Mrs. Bagley saw him, she would doubtless admit that about
+      all that could comfort the Judge now would be an inquest!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was so fond of this bloody and ghastly humour that, on one
+      occasion, he utterly overreached himself and suffered serious
+      consequences. In the words of his fellow-journalist, Dan De Quille:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          Mark Twain was fond of manufacturing items of the horrible style, but
+          on one occasion he overdid this business, and the disease worked its
+          own cure. He wrote an account of a terrible murder, supposed to have
+          occurred at "Dutch Nick's," a station on the Carson River, where
+          Empire City now stands. He made a man cut his wife's throat and those
+          of his nine children, after which diabolical deed the murderer mounted
+          his horse, cut his own throat from ear to ear, rode to Carson City (a
+          distance of three and a half miles) and fell dead in front of Peter
+          Hopkins' saloon.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          All the California papers copied the item, and several made editorial
+          comment upon it as being the most shocking occurrence of the kind ever
+          known on the Pacific Coast. Of course rival Virginia City papers at
+          once denounced the item as a "cruel and idiotic hoax." They showed how
+          the publication of such "shocking and reckless falsehoods" disgraced
+          and injured the State, and they made it as "sultry" as possible for
+          the 'Enterprise' and its "fool reporter."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          When the California papers saw all this and found they had been sold,
+          there was a howl from Siskiyou to San Diego. Some papers demanded the
+          immediate discharge of the author of the item by the 'Enterprise'
+          proprietors. They said they would never quote another line from that
+          paper while the reporter who wrote the shocking item remained on its
+          force. All this worried Mark as I had never before seen him worried.
+          Said he: "I am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains." We
+          roomed together, and one night, when the persecution was hottest, he
+          was so distressed that he could not sleep. He tossed, tumbled, and
+          groaned aloud. So I set to work to comfort him. "Mark," said I, "never
+          mind this bit of a gale, it will soon blow itself out. This item of
+          yours will be remembered and talked about when all your other work is
+          forgotten. The murder at Dutch Nick's will be quoted years from now as
+          the big sell of these times."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Said Mark: "I believe you are right; I remember I once did a thing at
+          home in Missouri, was caught at it, and worried almost to death. I was
+          a mere lad, and was going to school in a little town where I had an
+          uncle living. I at once left the town and did not return to it for
+          three years. When I finally came back I found I was only remembered as
+          'the boy that played the trick on the schoolmaster.'"
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Mark then told me the story, began to laugh over it, and from that
+          moment "ceased to groan." He was not discharged, and in less than a
+          month people everywhere were laughing and joking about the "murder at
+          Dutch Nick's."
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Out of that full, free Western life, with its tremendous hazards of
+      fortune, its extravagant alternations from fabulous wealth to wretched
+      poverty, its tremendous exaggerations and incredible contrasts, was
+      evolved a humour as rugged, as mountainous, and as altitudinous as the
+      conditions which gave it birth. Mark Twain may be said to have created,
+      and made himself master of, this new and fantastic humour which, in its
+      exaggeration and elaboration, was without a parallel in the history of
+      humorous narration. At times it seemed little more than a sort of
+      infectious and hilarious nonsense; but in reality it had behind it all the
+      calculation of detail and elaboration. There was something in it of the
+      volcanic, as if at the bursting forth of some pentup force of primitive
+      nature. It consisted in piling Pelion on Ossa, until the structure toppled
+      over of its own weight and fell with a stentorian crash of laughter which
+      echoed among the stars. Whenever Mark Twain conceived a humorous idea, he
+      seemed capable of extracting from it infinite complications of successive
+      and cumulative comedy. This humour seemed like the mental functionings of
+      some mad, yet inevitably logical jester; it grew from more to more, from
+      extravagance to extravagance, until reason itself tired and gave over.
+      Such explosive stories as 'How I Edited an Agricultural Paper', 'A Genuine
+      Mexican Plug', the deciphering of the Horace Greeley correspondence, 'The
+      Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract, and many another, as Mr.
+      Chesterton has pointed out, have one tremendous essential of great art.
+      "The excitement mounts up perpetually; they grow more and more comic, as a
+      tragedy should grow more and more tragic. The rack, tragic or comic, goes
+      round until something breaks inside a man. In tragedy it is his heart, or
+      perhaps his stiff neck. In farce I do not quite know what it is&mdash;perhaps
+      his funny-bone is dislocated; perhaps his skull is slightly cracked." Mark
+      Twain's mountainous humour, of this early type, never contains the element
+      of final surprise, of the sudden, the unexpected, the <i>imprevu</i>. We
+      know what is coming, we surrender ourselves more and more to the mood of
+      the narrator, holding ourselves in reserve until laughter, no longer to be
+      restrained, bursts forth in a torrent of undignified and explosive mirth.
+      Perhaps no better example can be given than the description of the sad
+      fate of the camel in 'A Tramp Abroad'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Syria, at the head-waters of the Jordan, this camel had got hold of his
+      overcoat; and after he finished contemplating it as an article of apparel,
+      he began to inspect it as an article of diet. In his inimitable manner,
+      Mark describes the almost religious ecstasy of that camel as it devoured
+      his overcoat piecemeal&mdash;first one sleeve, then the other, velvet
+      collar, and finally the tails. All went well until the camel struck a
+      batch of manuscript&mdash;containing some of Mark's humorous letters for
+      the home papers. Their solid wisdom soon began to lie heavy on the camel's
+      stomach: the jokes shook him until he began to gag and gasp, and finally
+      he struck statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. He
+      died in horrible agony; and Mark found on examination that the camel had
+      choked to death on one of the mildest statements of fact that he had ever
+      offered to a trusting public! Here Mark gradually works up to an
+      anticipated climax by piling on effect after effect. Our risibility is
+      excited almost as much by the anticipation of the climax as by the
+      recital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Admirable instances of the ludicrous incident, of the nonsensical recital,
+      are found in the scene in 'Huckleberry Finn' dealing with the performance
+      of the King's Cameleopard or Royal Nonesuch, the address on the occasion
+      of the dinner in honour of the seventieth anniversary of John Greenleaf
+      Whittier (an historic failure), and the Turkish bath in 'The Innocents
+      Abroad'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this prison filled with hot air, an attendant sat him down by a tank of
+      hot water and began to polish him all over with a coarse mitten. Soon Mark
+      noticed a disagreeable smell, and realized that the more he was polished
+      the worse he smelt. He urged the attendant to bury him without unnecessary
+      delay, as it was obvious that he couldn't possibly "keep" long in such
+      warm weather. But the phlegmatic attendant paid no attention to Mark's
+      commands and continued to scrub with renewed vigour. Mark's consternation
+      changed to alarm when he discovered that little cylinders, like macaroni,
+      began to roll from under the mitten. They were too white to be dirt. He
+      felt that he was gradually being pared down to a convenient size.
+      Realizing that it would take hours for the attendant to trim him down to
+      the proper size, Mark indignantly ordered him to bring a jackplane at once
+      and get the matter over. To all his protests the attendant paid no
+      attention at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of the earliest critical articles about Mark Twain, which appeared
+      in 'Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science and Art' for July 4,1874,
+      Mr. G. T. Ferris gives an excellent appreciation of his humour. "Of humour
+      in its highest phase," he says, "perhaps Bret Harte may be accounted the
+      most puissant master among our contemporary American writers. Of wit, we
+      see next to none. Mark Twain, while lacking the subtilty and pathos of the
+      other, has more breadth, variety, and ease. His sketches of life are
+      arabesque in their strange combinations. Bits of bright, serious
+      description, both of landscape and society, carry us along till suddenly
+      we stumble on some master-stroke of grotesque and irresistible fun. He
+      understands the value of repose in art. One tires of a page where every
+      sentence sparkles with points, and the author is constantly attitudinizing
+      for our amusement. We like to be betrayed into laughter as much in books
+      as in real life. It is the unconscious, easy, careless gait of Mark Twain
+      that makes his most potent charm. He seems always to be catering as much
+      to his own enjoyment as to that of the public. He strolls along like a
+      great rollicking schoolboy, bent on having a good time, and determined
+      that his readers shall have it with him."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain is the most daring of humorists. He takes his courage in his
+      hands for the wildest flights of fancy. His humour is the caricature of
+      situations, rather than of individuals; and he is not afraid to risk his
+      characters in colossally ludicrous situations. His art reveals itself in
+      choosing ludicrous situations which contain such a strong colouring of
+      naturalness that one's sense of reality is not outraged, but titillated.
+      Hence it is that his humour, in its earlier form, does not lend itself
+      readily to quotation. His early humour is not epigrammatic, but cumulative
+      and extensive. Each scene is a unit and must appear as such. Andrew Lang
+      not inaptly catches the note of Mark Twain's earlier manner, when he
+      speaks of his "almost Mephistophelean coolness, an unwearying search after
+      the comic sides of serious subjects, after the mean possibilities of the
+      sublime&mdash;these with a native sense of incongruities and a glorious
+      vein of exaggeration."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain began his career as a wag; he rejoiced in being a fun-maker. He
+      discarded the weird spellings and crude punning of his American
+      forerunners; his object was not play upon words, but play upon ideas. He
+      offered his public, as Frank R. Stockton pointed out, the pure ore of fun.
+      "If he puts his private mark on it, it will pass current; it does not
+      require the mint stamp of the schools of humour. He is never afraid of
+      being laughed at." Indeed, that is a large part of his stock-in-trade; for
+      throughout his entire career, nothing seemed to give him so much pleasure&mdash;though
+      it is one of the lowest forms of humour&mdash;as making fun of himself. In
+      describing two monkeys that got into his room at Delhi, he said that when
+      he awoke, one of them was before the glass brushing his hair, and the
+      other one had his notebook, and was reading a page of humorous notes and
+      crying. He didn't mind the one with the hair-brush; but the conduct of the
+      other one cut him to the heart. He never forgave that monkey. His
+      apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of Adam&mdash;only to be fully
+      appreciated in connexion with his satiric indignation over the drivel of
+      the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who "never bored, but he struck water"&mdash;is an
+      admirable example of the mechanical fooling of self-ridicule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his penetrating study, 'Mark Twain a Century Hence', published at the
+      time of Mr. Clemens' death, Professor H. T. Peck makes this observation:
+      "We must judge Mark Twain as a humorist by the very best of all he wrote
+      rather than by the more dubious productions, in which we fail to see at
+      every moment the winning qualities and the characteristic form of this
+      very interesting American. As one would not judge of Tennyson by his
+      dramas, nor Thackeray by his journalistic chit-chat, nor Sir Walter Scott
+      by those romances which he wrote after his fecundity had been exhausted,
+      so we must not judge Mark Twain by the dozen or more specimens which
+      belong to the later period, when he was ill at ease and growing old. Let
+      us rather go back with a sort of joy to what he wrote when he did so with
+      spontaneity, when his fun was as natural to him as breathing, and when his
+      humour was all American humour&mdash;not like that of Juvenal or Hierocles&mdash;acrid,
+      or devoid of anything individual&mdash;but brimming over with exactly the
+      same rich irresponsibility which belonged to Steele and Lamb and Irving.
+      It may seem odd to group a son of the New World and of the great West with
+      those earlier classic figures who have been mentioned here; yet upon
+      analysis it will be discovered that the humour of Mark Twain is at least
+      first cousin to that which produced Sir Roger de Coverley and Rip Van
+      Winkle and The Stout Gentleman."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The details of the Gambetta-Fourtou duel, in which Mark played a somewhat
+      frightened second, have furnished untold amusement to thousands. And his
+      description of the inadvertent <i>faux pa</i> he committed at his first
+      public lecture is humorous for any age and society. The sign announcing
+      the lecture read&mdash;"Doors open at 7. The Trouble will begin at 8." For
+      three days, Mark had been in a state of frightful suspense. Once his
+      lecture had seemed humorous; but as the day approached, it seemed to him
+      to be but the dreariest of fooling, without a vestige of real fun. He was
+      so panic-stricken that he persuaded three of his friends, who were giants
+      in stature, genial and stormy voiced, to act as claquers and pound loudly
+      at the faintest suspicion of a joke. He bribed Sawyer, a half-drunk man,
+      who had a laugh hung on a hair-trigger, to get off, naturally and easily
+      during the course of the evening, as many laughs as he could. He begged a
+      popular citizen and his wife to take a conspicuous seat in a box, so that
+      everybody could see them. He explained that when he needed help, he would
+      turn toward her and smile, as a signal, that he had given birth to an
+      obscure joke. Then, if ever, was her time&mdash;not to investigate, but to
+      respond!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fateful night found him in the depths of dejection. But heartened up
+      by a crowded house, full even to the aisles, he bravely set in and
+      proceeded to capture the house. His claquers hammered madly whenever the
+      very feeblest joke showed its head. Sawyer supported their herculean
+      efforts with bursts of stentorian laughter. As Mark explained, not without
+      a touch of pride, inferior jokes never fared so royally before. But his
+      hour of humiliation was at hand. On delivering a bit of serious matter
+      with impressive unction, to which the audience listened with rapt
+      interest, he glanced involuntarily, as if for her approval, at his friend
+      in the box. He remembered the compact, but it was too late&mdash;he smiled
+      in spite of himself. Forth came her ringing laugh, peal after peal, which
+      touched off the whole audience: the explosion was immense! Sawyer choked
+      with laughter, and the bludgeons performed like pile-drivers. The little
+      morsel of pathos was ruined; but what matter, so long as the audience took
+      it as an intentional joke, and applauded it with unparalleled enthusiasm.
+      Mark wisely let it go at that!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reading through 'The Innocents Abroad' after many years, I find that it
+      has not lost its power to provoke the most side-splitting laughter; and
+      the same may be said of 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'Following the Equator',
+      which, whilst not so boisterously comical, exhibit greater mastery and
+      restraint. His own luck, as Mark Twain observed on one occasion, had been
+      curious all his literary life. He never could tell a lie that anybody
+      would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. Could there be a more
+      accurate or more concise definition of the effect of his writings, in
+      especial of his travel notes? Like his mother, he too never used large
+      words, but he had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work.
+      How delightfully human is his comment on the vagaries of woman's shopping!
+      Human nature he found very much the same all over the world; and he felt
+      that it was so much like his dear native home to see a Venetian lady go
+      into a store, buy ten cents' worth of blue ribbon, and then have it sent
+      home in a scow. It was such little touches of nature as this which, as he
+      said, moved him to tears in those far-off lands. In speaking of Palestine,
+      he says that its holy places are not as deliriously beautiful as the books
+      paint them. Indeed, he asserts that if one be calm and resolute, he can
+      look on their beauty and live! He bequeathed his rheumatism to
+      Baden-Baden. It was little, but it was all he had to give. His only regret
+      was that he could not leave something more catching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is nothing better in all of 'The Innocents Abroad' than his analysis
+      of the theological hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Disclaiming all
+      intention to be frivolous, irreverent or blasphemous, he solemnly declared
+      that his observations had taught him the real way the Holy Personages were
+      ranked in Rome. "The Mother of God," otherwise the Virgin Mary, comes
+      first, followed in order by the Deity, Peter, and some twelve or fifteen
+      canonized Popes and Martyrs. Last of all came Jesus Christ the Saviour&mdash;but
+      even then, always as an infant in arms!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who can ever forget the Mark Twain who kissed the Hawaiian stranger for
+      his mother's sake, the while robbing him of his small change; who was so
+      struck by the fine points of his Honolulan horse that he hung his hat on
+      one of them; who rode glaciers as gaily as he rode Mexican plugs, and
+      found diverting programmes of the Roman Coliseum, in the dust and rubbish
+      of two thousand years ago!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Samuel L. Clemens achieved instantaneous and world-wide popularity at a
+      single bound by the creation of a fantastic and delightfully naive
+      character known as "Mark Twain." At a somewhat later day, Bernard Shaw
+      achieved world-wide fame by the creation of a legendary and fantastic wit
+      known as "G. B. S." To the composition of "Mark Twain" went all the wild
+      humour of ignorance&mdash;the boisterously comic admixture of the
+      sanguinary and the stoical. The humour of 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The
+      Innocents Abroad' is the savage and naive humour of the mining camp, not
+      the sophisticated humour of civilization. It is significant that Mme.
+      Blanc, a polished and refined intelligence, found the <i>nil admirari</i>
+      attitude of "Mark Twain" no more enlightening nor suggestive than the
+      stoicism of the North American Indian. This mirthful and mock-innocent
+      naivete, so alien to the delicate and subtle spirit of the French, found
+      instant response in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples. The
+      English and the Germans, no less than the Americans, rejoiced in this gay
+      fellow with his combination of appealing ignorance and but half-concealed
+      shrewdness. They laughed at this unsophisticated <i>naif</i>, gazing in
+      wide-eyed wonderment at all he saw; and they delighted in the
+      consciousness that, behind this thin mask, lay an acute and searching
+      intelligence revelling in the humorous havoc wrought by his keen
+      perception of the contrasts and incongruities of life. The note of this
+      early humour is perfectly caught in the incident of the Egyptian mummy.
+      Deliberately assumed ignorance of the grossest sort, by Mark Twain and his
+      companions, had the most devastating effect upon the foreign guide&mdash;one
+      of that countless tribe to all of whom Mark applied the generic name of
+      Ferguson. After driving Ferguson nearly mad with pretended ignorance, they
+      finally asked him if the mummy was dead. When Ferguson glibly replied that
+      he had been dead three thousand years, he was dumbfounded at the fury of
+      the "doctor" for being imposed upon with vile second-hand carcases. The
+      poor Frenchman was warned that if he didn't bring out a nice, fresh corpse
+      at once, they would brain him! No wonder that, later, when he was asked
+      for a description of the party, Ferguson laconically remarked that they
+      were lunatics!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In speaking of contemporary society, Ibsen once remarked: "We have made a
+      fiasco both in the heroic and the lover roles. The only parts in which we
+      have shown a little talent, are the naively comic; but with our more
+      highly developed self-consciousness we shall no longer be fitted even for
+      that." With time and "our more highly developed self-consciousness" have
+      largely passed the novelty and the charm of this early naively comic
+      humour of Mark Twain. But it is as valid still, as it was in 1867, to
+      record honestly the impressions directly communicated to one by the
+      novelties, peculiarities, individual standards and ideals of other peoples
+      and races. Mark Twain spoke his mind with utter disregard for other
+      people's opinions, the dicta of criticism or the authoritative judgment of
+      the schools. 'The Innocents Abroad' is eminently readable, not alone for
+      its humour, its clever journalism, its remarkably accurate and detailed
+      information, and its fine descriptions. The rare quality, which made it
+      "sell right along&mdash;like the Bible," is that it is the vital record of
+      a keen and searching intelligence. Mark Twain found so many of the
+      "masterpieces of the world" utterly unimpressive and meaningless to him,
+      that he actually began to distrust the validity of his own impressions.
+      Every time he gloried to think that for once he had discovered an ancient
+      painting that was beautiful and worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gave
+      him was an infallible proof that it was not a beautiful picture, nor in
+      any sense worthy of commendation! He pours out the torrents of his
+      ridicule, not indiscriminately upon the works of the old masters
+      themselves&mdash;though he regarded Nature as the grandest of all the old
+      masters&mdash;but upon those half-baked sycophants who bend the knee to an
+      art they do not understand, an art of which they feign comprehension by
+      mouthings full of cheap and meaningless tags. As potent and effective as
+      ever, in its fine comic irony, is that passage in which he expresses his
+      "envy" of those people who pay lavish lip-service to scenes and works of
+      art which their expressionless language shows they neither realize nor
+      understand. He reserves his most biting condemnation for those second-hand
+      critics who accept other people's opinions for their criteria, and rave
+      over "beauty," "soul," "character," "expression" and "tone" in wretched,
+      dingy, moth-eaten pictures. He hated with the heartiest detestation such
+      people&mdash;whose sole ambition seemed to be to make a fine show of
+      knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of inexpressive
+      technical terms of art criticism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is much, I fear, of misguided honesty in Mark Twain's records of
+      foreign travel. To the things which he personally reverenced, he was
+      always reverential; and his expression of likes and dislikes, of
+      prejudices and predilections, was honest and fearless. Grant as we may the
+      humorist's right to exaggerate and even to distort, for the purposes of
+      his fun-making, it does not therefore follow that his judgments, however
+      forthright or sincere, are valid, reputable criticisms. One's enjoyment of
+      his fresh and hilarious humour, his persistent fun-making is no whit
+      impaired by the recognition that he was lacking in the faculty of historic
+      imagination and in the finer artistic sense. It is, in a measure, because
+      of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of real knowledge, that he
+      was enabled to evoke the laughter of the multitude. "The Mississippi
+      pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid," says Mr. S. P. Sherman, "refuses
+      to sink his identity in the object contemplated&mdash;that, as Corporal
+      Nym would have said, is the humour of it. He is the kind of travelling
+      companion that makes you wonder why you went abroad. He turns the Old
+      World into a laughing stock by shearing it of its storied humanity&mdash;simply
+      because there is nothing in him to respond to the glory that was Greece,
+      to the grandeur that was Rome&mdash;simpler because nothing is holier to
+      him than a joke. He does not throw the comic light upon counterfeit
+      enthusiasm; he laughs at art, history, and antiquity from the point of
+      view of one who is ignorant of them and mightily well satisfied with his
+      ignorance." This picture reminds us of the foreign critics of 'The
+      Innocents Abroad' and 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court': it is
+      too partial and restricted. The whole point of Mark Twain's humour, as
+      exhibited in these travel notes, is missed in the statement that "he does
+      not throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm "&mdash;for this
+      might almost be taken as the "philosophy" of his books of foreign travel.
+      And yet Mr. Sherman's dictum, in its entirety, quite clearly provokes the
+      question whether, as he intimates, the "overwhelming majority" of his
+      fellow-citizens also were not mightily pleased with Mark Twain's point of
+      view, and whether they did not enjoy themselves hugely in laughing, not at
+      him, but with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In commenting on the reasons for the broadening and deepening of his
+      humour with the passage of time, Mr. Clemens once remarked to me: "I
+      succeeded in the long run, where Shillaber, Doesticks, and Billings
+      failed, because they never had an ideal higher than that of merely being
+      funny. The first great lesson of my life was the discovery that I had to
+      live down my past. When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier
+      writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw
+      and heard. My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people laugh.
+      I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else&mdash;eager
+      to betray them at the end with some monstrous absurdity or some
+      extravagant anti-climax. One night, after a lecture in the early days, Tom
+      Fitch, the 'silver-tongued orator of Nevada,' said to me: 'Clemens, your
+      lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never in my
+      entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of descriptive
+      narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin&mdash;the unpardonable
+      sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed a most eloquent
+      description, by which you had keyed your audience up to a pitch of the
+      intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax which nullified
+      all the really fine effect you had produced. My dear Clemens, whatever you
+      do, never sell your audience.' And that," continued Mr. Clemens, "was my
+      first really profitable lesson."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the toning down of his youthful extravagance&mdash;Fitch's precept
+      not to "sell" his audience, Mrs. Fairbanks' warning not to try their
+      endurance of the irreverent too far&mdash;that had a markedly salutary
+      effect upon Mark Twain's humorous writings. There can be no doubt that the
+      deep and lifelong friendship of Mr. Howells, expressing itself as occasion
+      demanded in the friendliest criticism, had a subduing influence upon Mark
+      Twain's tendency, as a humorist, to extravagance and headlong
+      exaggeration. In time he left the field of carpet-bag observation&mdash;the
+      humorous depicting of things seen from the rear of an observation car, so
+      to speak&mdash;and turned to fiction. Now at last the long pent-up flood
+      of observation upon human character and human characteristics found full
+      vent. 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn' are the romances of eternal
+      youth, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. They are freighted,
+      however, with a wealth of pungent and humorous characterization that have
+      made of them contemporary classics. From ethical sophistication and moral
+      truantry Mark Twain evolves an inexhaustible supply of humour. The revolt
+      of mischievous and Bohemian boyhood against the stern limitations of
+      formal Puritanism is, in a sense, a principle that he carried with him to
+      the grave. "There are no more vital passages in his fiction," says Mr.
+      Howells, "than those which embody character as it is affected for good as
+      well as for evil by the severity of the local Sunday-schooling and
+      church-going." Out of the pangs of conscience, the ingenious sedatives of
+      sophistry, the numerous variations of the lie, he won a wholesome humour
+      that left you thinking, by inversion, upon the moral involved. Knowledge
+      of human nature finds expression in forms made permanently effective
+      through the arresting permeation of humour. The incident of Tom Sawyer and
+      the whitewashing of the fence is the sort of thing over which boy and man
+      alike can chuckle with satisfaction&mdash;for Tom Sawyer had discovered a
+      great law of human action without knowing it, namely, that in order to
+      make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing
+      difficult to attain. Huck's reasoning about chicken stealing&mdash;the
+      exquisitely comic shifting of ground from morality to expediency&mdash;is
+      a striking example of the best type of Mark Twain's humour. Following his
+      father's example, Huck would occasionally "lift" a chicken that wasn't
+      roosting comfortable; for had his father not told him that even if he
+      didn't want the chicken himself, he could always find somebody that did
+      want it, and a good deed ain't never forgot? Huck confesses that he had
+      never seen his Pap when he didn't want the chicken himself!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The germ of Mark Twain's humour, wherever it is found, from 'The Innocents
+      Abroad' to 'The Connecticut Yankee' and 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to
+      Heaven', is found in the mental reactions resulting from stupendous and
+      glaring contrasts. First it is the Wild Western humorist, primitive and
+      untamed, running amuck through the petrified formulas and encrusted
+      traditions of Europe. Then comes the fantastic juxtaposition of the shrewd
+      Connecticut Yankee, with his comic irreverence and raucous sense of
+      humour, his bourgeois limitations and provincial prejudices, to the Court
+      of King Arthur, with its mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social
+      narrowness. How many have delighted in the Yankee's inimitable description
+      of his feelings toward that classic damsel of the sixth century? At first
+      he got along easily with the girl; but after a while he began to feel for
+      her a sort of mysterious and shuddery reverence. Whenever she began to
+      unwind one of those long sentences of hers, and got it well under way, he
+      could never suppress the feeling that he was standing in the awful
+      presence of the Mother of the German Language!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain ransacked the whole world of his own day, all countries, savage
+      and civilized, for the display of effective and ludicrous contrast; and he
+      opened up an illimitable field for humanizing satire, as Mr. Howells has
+      said, in his juxtaposition of sociologic types thirteen centuries apart.
+      Not even heaven was safe from the comprehensive survey of his satire; and
+      'Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven' is a remarkable document,&mdash;a
+      forthright lay sermon,&mdash;the conventional idea of heaven, the
+      theologic conception of eternity, as heedlessly taught from the pulpit,
+      thrown into comic, yet profoundly significant, relief against the
+      background of the common-sense of a deeply human, thoroughly modern
+      intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Humour, as Thackeray has defined it, is a combination of wit and love.
+      Certain it is that, in the case of Mark Twain, wit was a later development
+      of his humour; the love was there all the time. Mark Twain has not been
+      recognized as a wit; for he was primarily a humorist, and only secondarily
+      a wit. But the passion for brief and pungent formulation of an idea grew
+      upon him; and Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar is a mine of homely and
+      memorable aphorism, epigram, injunction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="pp105.jpg (59K)" src="images/pp105.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to Mark Twain's classification, the comic story is English, the
+      witty story French, the humorous story American. While the other two
+      depend upon matter, the humorous story depends for its effect upon the
+      manner of telling. The witty story and the comic story must be concise and
+      end with a "point"; but the humorous story may be as leisurely as you
+      please and have no particular destination. Mark Twain always maintained
+      that, while anyone could tell effectively a comic or a witty story, it
+      required a person skilled in an art of a rare and distinctive character to
+      tell a humorous story successfully. Mark Twain was himself the supreme
+      exemplar of the art of telling a humorous story. Take this little passage,
+      for example, which convulsed one of his London audiences. He was speaking
+      of a high mountain that he had come across in his travels. "It is so cold
+      that people who have been there find it impossible to speak the truth; I
+      know that's a fact (here a pause, a blank stare, a shake of the head, a
+      little stroll across the platform, a sigh, a puff, a smothered groan),
+      because&mdash;I've&mdash;(another pause)&mdash;been&mdash;(a longer pause)&mdash;there
+      myself." Who could equal Mark Twain as a humorous narrator, in his recital
+      of the alarums and excursions, criminations and recriminations, over the
+      story of somebody else's dog he sold to General Miles for three dollars?
+      He delighted numerous audiences with his story of inveighing Mrs. Grover
+      Cleveland at a White House reception into writing blindly on the back of a
+      card "He didn't." When she turned it over she discovered that it bore on
+      the other side, in Mrs. Clemens' handwriting, the startling words: "Don't
+      wear your arctics in the White House." I shall never forget his recital of
+      the story of how his enthusiasm oozed away at a meeting in behalf of
+      foreign missions. So moving was the fervid eloquence of the exhorter that,
+      after fifteen minutes, if Mark Twain had had a blank cheque with him, he
+      would gladly have turned it over, signed, to the minister, to fill out for
+      any amount. But it was a very warm evening, the eloquence of the minister
+      was inexhaustible&mdash;and Mark Twain's enthusiasm for foreign missions
+      slowly oozed away&mdash;one hundred dollars, fifty dollars, and even lower
+      still&mdash;so that when the plate was actually passed around, Mark put in
+      ten cents and took out a quarter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was a witness in London, and at Oxford, in 1907, of the vast,
+      spontaneous, national reception which Mark Twain received from the English
+      people. One incident of that memorable visit is a perfect example of that
+      masterly power over an audience, that deep humanity, with which Mark Twain
+      was endowed. At the banquet presided over by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool,
+      which was the signal of Mark Twain's farewell to the English people, his
+      peroration was as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Many and many a year ago I read an anecdote in Dana's Two Years Before
+      the Mast. A frivolous little self-important captain of a coasting-sloop in
+      the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade was always hailing every
+      vessel that came in sight, just to hear himself talk and air his small
+      grandeurs. One day a majestic Indiaman came ploughing by, with course on
+      course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with
+      sailors, with macaws and monkeys and all manner of strange and romantic
+      creatures populating her rigging, and thereto her freightage of precious
+      spices lading the breeze with gracious and mysterious odours of the
+      Orient. Of course, the little coaster-captain hopped into the shrouds and
+      squeaked a hail: 'Ship ahoy! What ship is that, and whence and whither?'
+      In a deep and thunderous bass came the answer back, through a speaking
+      trumpet: The Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days out from
+      Canton homeward bound! What ship is that?' The little captain's vanity was
+      all crushed out of him, and most humbly he squeaked back: 'Only the Mary
+      Ann&mdash;fourteen hours from Boston, bound for Kittery Point with&mdash;with
+      nothing to speak of!' That eloquent word 'only' expressed the deeps of his
+      stricken humbleness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And what is my case? During perhaps one hour in the twenty-four&mdash;not
+      more than that&mdash;I stop and reflect. Then I am humble, then I am
+      properly meek, and for that little time I am 'only the Mary Ann'&mdash;fourteen
+      hours out, and cargoed with vegetables and tin-ware; but all the other
+      twenty-three my self-satisfaction rides high, and I am the stately
+      Indiaman, ploughing the great seas under a cloud of sail, and laden with a
+      rich freightage of the kindest words that were ever spoken to a wandering
+      alien, I think; my twenty-six crowded and fortunate days multiplied by
+      five; and I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days out
+      from Canton&mdash;homeward bound!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Says "Charles Vale," in describing the scene "The audience sat spellbound
+      in almost painful silence, till it could restrain itself no longer; and
+      when in rich, resonant, uplifted voice Mark Twain sang out the words: 'I
+      am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days out from Canton,'
+      there burst forth a great cheer from one end of the room to the other. It
+      seemed an inopportune cheer, and for a moment it upset the orator: yet it
+      was felicitous in opportuneness. Slowly, after a long pause, came the last
+      two words&mdash;like that curious, detached and high note in which a great
+      piece of music suddenly ends&mdash;'Homeward bound.' Again there was a
+      cheer: but this time it was lower; it was subdued; it was the fitting echo
+      to the beautiful words&mdash;with their double significance&mdash;the
+      parting from a hospitable land, the return to the native land. . . . Only
+      a great litterateur could have conceived such a passage: only a great
+      orator could have so delivered it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was the greatest master of the anecdote this generation has
+      known. He claimed the humorous story as an American invention, and one
+      that has remained at home. His public speeches were little mosaics in the
+      finesse of their art; and the intricacies of inflection, insinuation,
+      jovial innuendo which Mark Twain threw into his gestures, his implicative
+      pauses, his suggestive shrugs and deprecative nods&mdash;all these are
+      hopelessly volatilized and disappear entirely from the printed copy of his
+      speeches. He gave the most minute and elaborate study to the preparation
+      of his speeches&mdash;polishing them dexterously and rehearsing every
+      word, every gesture, with infinite care. Yet his readiness and fertility
+      of resource in taking advantage, and making telling use, of things in the
+      speeches of those immediately preceding him, were striking evidences of
+      the rapidity of his thought-processes. In Boston, when asked what he
+      thought about the existence of a heaven or a hell, he looked grave for a
+      moment, and then replied: "I don't want to express an opinion. It's policy
+      for me to keep silent. You see, I have friends in both places." His speech
+      introducing General Hawley of Connecticut to a Republican meeting at
+      Elmira, New York, is an admirable example of his laconic art: "General
+      Hawley is a member of my church at Hartford, and the author of 'Beautiful
+      Snow.' Maybe he will deny that. But I am only here to give him a character
+      from his last place. As a pure citizen, I respect him; as a personal
+      friend of years, I have the warmest regard for him; as a neighbour, whose
+      vegetable garden adjoins mine, why&mdash;why, I watch him. As the author
+      of 'Beautiful Snow,' he has added a new pang to winter. He is a square,
+      true man in honest politics, and I must say he occupies a mighty lonesome
+      position. So broad, so bountiful is his character that he never turned a
+      tramp empty-handed from his door, but always gave him a letter of
+      introduction to me. Pure, honest, incorruptible, that is Joe Hawley. Such
+      a man in politics is like a bottle of perfumery in a glue factory&mdash;it
+      may modify the stench, but it doesn't destroy it. I haven't said any more
+      of him than I would say of myself. Ladies and gentlemen, this is General
+      Hawley."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Chesterton maintains that Mark Twain was a wit rather than a humorist&mdash;perhaps
+      something more than a humorist. "Wit," he explains, "requires an
+      intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic. A wit must have
+      something of the same running, working, and staying power as a
+      mathematician or a metaphysician. Moreover, wit is a fighting thing and a
+      working thing. A man may enjoy humour all by himself; he may see a joke
+      when no one else sees it; he may see the point and avoid it. But wit is a
+      sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it. All
+      honest people saw the point of Mark Twain's wit. Not a few dishonest
+      people felt it." The epigram, "Be virtuous, and you will be eccentric,"
+      has become a catchword; and everyone has heard Mark Twain's reply to the
+      reporter asking for advice as to what to cable his paper, which had
+      printed the statement that Mark Twain was dead "Say that the statement is
+      greatly exaggerated." He has admirably taken off humanity's enduring
+      self-conceit in the statement that there isn't a Parallel of Latitude but
+      thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights. There is
+      something peculiarly American in his warning to young girls not to marry&mdash;that
+      is, not to excess! His remarks on compliments have a delightful and naive
+      freshness. He points out how embarrassing compliments always are. It is so
+      difficult to take them naturally. You never know what to say. He had
+      received many compliments in his lifetime, and they had always embarrassed
+      him&mdash;he always felt that they hadn't said enough!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident of Mark Twain's first meeting with Whistler is quaintly
+      illustrative of one phase of his broader humour. Mark Twain was taken by a
+      friend to Whistler's studio, just as he was putting the finishing touches
+      to one of his fantastic studies. Confident of the usual commendation,
+      Whistler inquired his guest's opinion of the picture. Mark Twain assumed
+      the air of a connoisseur, and approaching the picture remarked that it did
+      very well, but "he didn't care much for that cloud&mdash;"; and suiting
+      the action to the word, appeared to be on the point of rubbing the cloud
+      with his gloved finger. In genuine horror, Whistler exclaimed: "Don't
+      touch it, the paint's wet!" "Oh, that's all right," replied Mark with his
+      characteristic drawl: "these aren't my best gloves, anyhow!" Whereat
+      Whistler recognized a congenial spirit, and their first hearty laugh
+      together was the beginning of a friendly and congenial relationship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I recall an incident in connection with the writing of his Autobiography.
+      On more than one occasion, he declared that the Autobiography was going to
+      be something awful&mdash;as caustic, fiendish, and devilish as he could
+      make it. Actually, he was in the habit of jotting on the margin of the
+      page, opposite to some startling characterization or diabolic joke: "Not
+      to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty) years after my death."
+      One day I heard him vent his pent-up rage, in bitter and caustic words,
+      upon a certain strenuous, limelight American politician. I could not
+      resist the temptation to ask him if this, too, were going into the
+      Autobiography. "Oh yes," he replied, decisively. "Everything goes in. I
+      make no exceptions. But," he added reflectively, with the suspicion of a
+      twinkle in his eye, "I shall make a note beside this passage: 'Not to be
+      published until one hundred and fifty years after my death'!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain had numerous "doubles" scattered about the world. The number
+      continually increased; once a month on an average, he would receive a
+      letter from a new "double," enclosing a photograph in proof of the
+      resemblance. Mark once wrote to one of these doubles as follows:
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          MY DEAR SIR&mdash;
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Many thanks for your letter, with enclosed photograph. Your
+          resemblance to me is remarkable. In fact, to be perfectly honest, you
+          look more like me than I look like myself. I was so much impressed by
+          the resemblance that I have had your picture framed, and am now using
+          it regularly, in place of a mirror, to shave by.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Yours gratefully,<br /> S. L. CLEMENS.
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Although not generally recognized, it is undoubtedly true that Mark Twain
+      was a wit as well as a humorist. He was the author of many epigrams and
+      curt aphorisms which have become stock phrases in conversation, quoted in
+      all classes of society wherever the English language is spoken. His
+      phrasing is unpretentious, even homely, wearing none of the polished
+      brilliancy of La Rochefoucauld or Bernard Shaw; but Mark Twain's sayings
+      "stick" because they are rooted in shrewdness and hard commonsense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's warning to the two burglars who stole his silverware from
+      "Stormfield" and were afterwards caught and sent to the penitentiary, is
+      very amusing, though not highly complimentary to American political life:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now you two young men have been up to my house, stealing my tinware, and
+      got pulled in by these Yankees up here. You had much better have stayed in
+      New York, where you have the pull. Don't you see where you're drifting.
+      They'll send you from here down to Bridgeport jail, and the next thing you
+      know you'll be in the United States Senate. There's no other future left
+      open to you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sign he posted after the visitation of these same burglars was a
+      prominent ornament of the billiard room at "Stormfield ":
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+            <p>
+              NOTICE
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              To the next Burglar
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              There is nothing but plated-ware in this house, now<br /> and
+              henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing<br /> in the
+              dining-room over in the corner by the basket of<br /> kittens. If
+              you want the basket, put the kittens in<br /> the brass thing.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              Do not make a noise, it disturbs the family.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that thing<br /> which
+              has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think<br /> they call it,
+              or pergola, or something like that.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              Please close the door when you go away!
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              Very truly yours,
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              S. L. CLEMENS.
+            </p>
+          </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Now these are examples of Mark Twain's humour, American humour, such as we
+      are accustomed to expect from Mark Twain&mdash;humour not unmixed with a
+      strong spice of wit. But Mark Twain was capable of wit, pure and
+      unadulterated, curt and concise. I once saw him write in a young girl's
+      birthday book an aphorism which he said was one of his favourites "Truth
+      is our most valuable possession. Let us economize it." The advice he once
+      gave me as to the proper frame of mind for undergoing a surgical operation
+      has always remained in my memory: "Console yourself with the reflection
+      that you are giving the doctor pleasure, and that he is getting paid for
+      it." Peculiarly memorable is his forthright dictum that the statue which
+      advertises its modesty with a fig-leaf brings its modesty under suspicion.
+      His business motto&mdash;unfortunately, a motto that he never followed&mdash;has
+      often been attributed, because of its canny shrewdness, to Mr. Andrew
+      Carnegie. The idea was to put all your eggs in one basket&mdash;and then&mdash;watch
+      that basket! His anti-Puritanical convictions find concrete expression in
+      his assertion that few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance
+      of a good example. Truly classic, in usage if not in form, is his happy
+      saying that faith is believing what you know ain't so. His definition of a
+      classic as a book which people praise but don't read, is as frequently
+      heard as are Biblical and Shakespearian tags.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Clemens once told me that he had composed between two and three
+      hundred maxims during his life. Many of them, especially those from the
+      old and new calendars of Pudd'nhead Wilson, bear the individual and
+      peculiar stamp of Mark Twain's phraseology and outlook upon life&mdash;quaint,
+      genial, and shrewd. In pursuance of his deep-rooted belief in the
+      omnipotent power of training, he remarked that the peach was once a bitter
+      almond, the cauliflower nothing but cabbage with a college education. He
+      himself was not guiltless of that irreverence which he defined as
+      disrespect for another man's god. Women took an almost unholy delight in
+      describing some of their undesirable acquaintances, in Mark Twain's
+      phrase, as neither quite refined, nor quite unrefined, but just the kind
+      of person that keeps a parrot!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At times, Mark Twain realized the sanctifying power of illusions in a
+      world of harsh realities; for he asserted that when illusions are gone you
+      may still exist, but you have ceased to live. A depressing sense of
+      world-weariness sometimes overbore the native joyousness of his
+      temperament; and he expressed his sense of deep gratitude to Adam, the
+      first great benefactor of the race&mdash;because he had brought death into
+      the world. A funeral always gave Mark Twain a sense of spiritual uplift, a
+      sense of thankfulness because the dead friend had been set free. He
+      thought it was far harder to live than to die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of his early sketches, there was admirable wit in the suggestion to
+      the organist for a hymn appropriate to a sermon on the Prodigal Son:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! we'll all get blind drunk<br /> When Johnny comes marching home!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in The Innocents Abroad there is the same sort of brilliant wit in the
+      mad logic of his innocent query, on learning that St. Philip Neri's heart
+      was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs: "I was curious to
+      know what Philip had for dinner." Mark Twain was capable of epigrams
+      worthy, in their dark levity, of Swift himself. In speaking of Pudd'nhead
+      Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said "Humour there is in almost every scene
+      and every page; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam on the
+      greatest Shakespearian tragedies&mdash;on the deep melancholy of Hamlet,
+      the heartbreak of Lear." The greatest ironic achievements of Mark Twain,
+      in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'
+      and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the power and subtlety of his art
+      as an ironic humorist&mdash;or shall we rather say, ironic wit? For they
+      range all the way from the most mordant to the most pathetic irony&mdash;from
+      Mephistophelean laughter to warm, human tears:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "<i>Sunt lachrymae rerum.</i>"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Make a reputation first by your more solid achievements," counselled
+      Oliver Wendell Holmes. "You can't expect to do anything great with
+      Macbeth, if you first come on flourishing Paul Pry's umbrella." Mark Twain
+      has had to pay in full the penalty of comic greatness. The world is loth
+      to accept a popular character at any rating other than its own. Whosoever
+      sets himself the task of amusing the world must realize the almost
+      insuperable difficulty of inducing the world to regard him as a serious
+      thinker. Says Moliere&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "<i>C'est une etrange entreprise que celle<br /> de faire rire les honnetes
+      gens.</i>"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The strangeness of the undertaking is no less pronounced than the rigour
+      of its obligations. Mark Twain began his career as a professional humorist
+      and fun-maker; he frankly donned the motley, the cap and bells. The
+      man-in-the-street is not easily persuaded that the basis of the comic is,
+      not uncommon nonsense, but glorified common-sense. The French have a
+      fine-flavoured distinction in <i>ce qui remu</i> from <i>ce qui emeut</i>;
+      and if <i>remuag</i> is the defining characteristic of 'A Tramp Abroad',
+      'Roughing It', and 'The Innocents Abroad', there is much of deep
+      seriousness and genuine emotion in 'Life on the Mississippi', 'Tom
+      Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'. In the course of his
+      lifetime, Mark Twain evolved from a fun-maker into a masterly humorist,
+      from a sensational journalist into a literary artist. In explanation of
+      this, let us recall the steps in that evolution. In his youth, this boy
+      had no schooling worth speaking of; he lived in an environment that
+      promised only stagnation and decay. As the young boy, barefooted and
+      dirty, watched the steamboats pass and repass upon the surface of that
+      great inland deep, the Mississippi, he conceived the ambition and the
+      ideal of learning to know and to master that mysterious water. His dream,
+      in time, was realized; he not only became a pilot, but&mdash;which is
+      infinitely more significant&mdash;he changed from a callow, indolent,
+      unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a man, a master of the
+      river, with a knowledge which, in its accuracy and minuteness, was, for
+      its purpose, all-sufficient and complete.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have always felt that, had it not been for this training in the great
+      university of the Mississippi, Mark Twain might never have acquired that
+      trained faculty for minute detail and descriptive elaboration without
+      which his works, full of flaws as they are, might never have revealed the
+      very real art which they betray. For the art of Mark Twain is the art of
+      taking infinite pains&mdash;the art of exactitude, precision and detail.
+      Humour per se is as ephemeral as the laugh&mdash;dying in the very moment
+      of its birth. Art alone can give it enduring vitality. Mark Twain's native
+      temperament, rich with humour and racy of the soil, drank in the wonder of
+      the river and unfolded through communication with all its rude human
+      devotees; the quick mind, the eager susceptibility, developed and matured
+      through rigorous education in particularity and detail; and before his
+      spirit the very beauties of Nature herself disappeared in face of a
+      consuming sense of the work of the world that must be done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain never wholly escaped the penalty that his reputation as a
+      humorist compelled him to pay. He became more than popular novelist, more
+      than a jovial entertainer: he became a public institution, as unmistakable
+      and as national as the Library of Congress or the Democratic Party. Even
+      in the latest years of his life, though long since dissociated in fact
+      from the category of Artemus Ward, John Phoenix, Josh Billings, and
+      Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain could never be sure that his most solemn
+      utterance might not be drowned in roars of thoughtless laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It has been a very serious and a very difficult matter," Mr. Clemens once
+      said to me, "to doff the mask of humour with which the public is
+      accustomed, in thought, to see me adorned. It is the incorrigible practice
+      of the public, in this or in any country, to see only humour in the
+      humorist, however serious his vein. Not long ago I wrote a poem, which I
+      never dreamed of giving to the public, on account of its seriousness; but
+      on being invited to address the women students of a certain great
+      university, I was persuaded by a near friend to read this poem. At the
+      close of my lecture I said 'Now, ladies, I am going to read you a poem of
+      mine'&mdash;which was greeted with bursts of uproarious laughter. 'But
+      this is a truly serious poem,' I asseverated&mdash;only to be greeted with
+      renewed and, this time, more uproarious laughter. Nettled by this
+      misunderstanding, I put the poem in my pocket, saying, 'Well, young
+      ladies, since you do not believe me to be serious, I shall not read the
+      poem'&mdash;at which the audience almost went into convulsions of
+      laughter."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Humour is a function of nationality. The same joke, as related by an
+      American, a Scotchman, an Irishman, a Frenchman, carries with it a
+      distinctive racial flavour and individuality of approach. Indeed, it is
+      open to question whether most humour is not essentially local in its
+      nature, requiring some specialized knowledge of some particular locality.
+      It would be quite impossible for an Italian on his native heath to
+      understand that great political satirist, "Mr. Dooley," on the Negro
+      Problem, for example. After reading George Ade's Fables in Slang, Mr.
+      Andrew Lang was driven to the desperate conclusion that humour varies with
+      the parallels of latitude, a joke in Chicago being a riddle in London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If one would lay his finger upon the secret of Mark Twain's world-wide
+      popularity as a humorist, he would find that secret, primarily, in the
+      universality and humanity of his humour. Mark Twain is a master in the art
+      of broad contrast; incongruity lurks on the surface of his humour; and
+      there is about it a staggering and cyclopean surprise. But these are mere
+      surface qualities, more or less common, though at lower power, to all
+      forms of humour. Nor is his international vogue as a humorist to be
+      attributed to any tricks of style, to any breadth of knowledge, or even to
+      any depth of intellectuality. His hold upon the world is due to qualities,
+      not of the head, but of the heart. I once heard Mr. Clemens say that
+      humour is the key to the hearts of men, for it springs from the heart; and
+      worthy of record is his dictum that there is far more of feeling than of
+      thought in genuine humour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain succeeded in "tickling the midriff of the English-speaking
+      races" with a single story; and in time he showed himself to be, not only
+      a man of letters, but also a man of action. His humour has been defined as
+      the sunny break of his serious purpose. Horace Walpole has said that the
+      world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy to the man of feeling.
+      To the great humorist&mdash;to Mark Twain&mdash;the world was a
+      tragi-comedy. Like Smile Faguet, he seemed at times to feel that grief is
+      the most real and important thing in the world&mdash;because it separates
+      us from happiness. He was an exemplar of the highest, truest, sincerest
+      humour, perfectly fulfilling George Meredith's definition: "If you laugh
+      all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a
+      tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour, spare
+      him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is the
+      spirit of Humour that is moving you." Mark Twain's fun was light-hearted
+      and insouciant, his pathos genuine and profound. "He is, above all," said
+      that oldest of English journals, 'The Spectator', "the fearless upholder
+      of all that is clean, noble, straightforward, innocent, and manly. . . .
+      If he is a jester, he jests with the mirth of the happiest of the
+      Puritans; he has read much of English knighthood, and translated the best
+      of it into his living pages; and he has assuredly already won a high
+      degree in letters in having added more than any writer since Dickens to
+      the gaiety of the Empire of the English language."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's humour flowed warm from the heart. He enjoyed to the utmost
+      those two inalienable blessings: "laughter and the love of friends." He
+      woke the laughter of an epoch and numbered a world for his friends. "He is
+      the true consolidator of nations," said Mr. Augustine Birrell. "His
+      delightful humour is of the kind which dissipates and destroys national
+      prejudices. His truth and his honour, his love of truth and his love of
+      honour, overflow all boundaries. He has made the world better by his
+      presence."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="pp129.jpg (46K)" src="images/pp129.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      <a name="genius" id="genius">THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS</a>
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <blockquote>
+          <blockquote>
+            <p>
+              <i> "Art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life,<br />
+              but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the<br /> whole
+              world the art of common life&mdash;the art of a people&mdash;<br />
+              universal art."<br /></i>
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              TOLSTOY: What is Art?
+            </p>
+          </blockquote>
+        </blockquote>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some years ago a group of Mark Twain's friends, in a spirit of fun,
+      addressed a letter to:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MARK TWAIN<br /> GOD KNOWS WHERE.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though taking a somewhat circuitous route, the letter went unerringly to
+      its goal; and it was not long before the senders of that letter received
+      the laconic, but triumphant reply: "He did." They now turned the tables on
+      the jubilant author, who equally as quickly received a letter addressed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MARK TWAIN<br /> THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed that "he" did, too!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his lifetime Mark Twain won a fame that was literally world-wide&mdash;a
+      fame, indeed, which seemed to extend to realms peopled by noted
+      theological characters. From very humble beginnings&mdash;he used
+      facetiously to speak of coming up from the "very dregs of society"!&mdash;Mark
+      Twain achieved international eminence and repute. This accomplishment was
+      due to the power of brain and personality alone. In this sense, his career
+      is unprecedented and unparalleled in the history of American literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a mark of the democratic independence of America that she has
+      betrayed a singular indifference to the appraisal of her literature at the
+      hands of foreign criticism. Upon her writers who have exhibited derivative
+      genius&mdash;Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow&mdash;American
+      criticism has lavished the most extravagant eulogiums. The three geniuses
+      who have made permanent contributions to world-literature, who have either
+      embodied in the completest degree the spirit of American democracy, or who
+      have had the widest following of imitators and admirers in foreign
+      countries, still await their final and just deserts at the hands of
+      critical opinion in their own land. The genius of Edgar Allan Poe gave
+      rise to schools of literature on the continent of Europe; yet in America
+      his name must remain for years debarred from inclusion in a so-called Hall
+      of Fame! Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great interpreters and
+      embodiments of America, represent the supreme contribution of democracy to
+      universal literature. In so far as it is legitimate for anyone to be
+      denominated a "self-made man" in literature, these men are justly entitled
+      to such characterization. They owe nothing to European literature&mdash;their
+      genius is supremely original, native, democratic. The case of Mark Twain,
+      which is our present concern, is a literary phenomenon which imposes upon
+      criticism, peculiarly upon American criticism, the distinct obligation of
+      tracing the steps in his unhalting climb to an eminence that was
+      international in its character, and of defining those signal qualities,
+      traits, characteristics&mdash;individual, literary, social, racial,
+      national&mdash;which compassed his world-wide fame. For if it be true that
+      the judgment of foreign nations is virtually the judgment of posterity,
+      then is Mark Twain already a classic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the continent of Europe, Mark Twain first received notable
+      recognition in France at the hands of that brilliant woman, Mme. Blanc
+      (Th. Bentzon), who devoted so much of her energies to the popularization
+      of American literature in Europe. That one of her series of essays upon
+      the American humorists which dealt with Mark Twain appeared in the 'Revue
+      des Deux Mondes' in 1872; in it appeared her admirable translation of 'The
+      Jumping Frog'. There is no cause for surprise that a scholarly
+      Frenchwoman, reared on classic models and confined by rigid canons of art,
+      should stand aghast at this boisterous, barbaric, irreverent jester from
+      the wilds of America. When it is remembered that Mark Twain began his
+      career as one of the sage-brush writers and gave free play to his passion
+      for horseplay, his desire to "lay a mine" for the other fellow, and his
+      defiance of the traditional and the classic, it is not to be wondered at
+      that Mme. Blanc, while honouring him with recognition in the most
+      authoritative literary journal in the world, could not conceal an
+      expression of amazement over his enthusiastic acceptance in
+      English-speaking countries.
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+        <p>
+          "Mark Twain's 'Jumping Frog' should be mentioned in the first place as
+          one of his most popular little stories&mdash;almost a type of the
+          rest. It is, nevertheless, rather difficult for us to understand,
+          while reading this story, the 'roars of laughter' that it excited in
+          Australia and in India, in New York and in London; the numerous
+          editions of it which appeared; the epithet of 'inimitable' that the
+          critics of the English press have unanimously awarded to it.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "We may remark that a Persian of Montesquieu, a Huron of Voltaire,
+          even a simple Peruvian woman of Madame de Graffigny, reasons much more
+          wisely about European civilization than an American of San Francisco.
+          The fact is, that it is not sufficient to have wit, or even natural
+          taste, in order to appreciate works of art.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "It is the right of humorists to be extravagant; but still common
+          sense, although carefully hidden, ought sometimes to make itself
+          apparent. . . . In Mark Twain the Protestant is enraged against the
+          pagan worship of broken marble statues&mdash;the democrat denies that
+          there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages. The sublime ruins of
+          the Coliseum only impressed him with the superiority of America, which
+          punishes its criminals by forcing them to work for the benefit of the
+          State, over ancient Rome, which could only draw from the punishments
+          which it inflicted the passing pleasure of a spectacle.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "In the course of this voyage in company with Mark Twain, we at length
+          discover, under his good-fellowship and apparent ingenuousness, faults
+          which we should never have expected. He has in the highest degree that
+          fault of appearing astonished at nothing&mdash;common, we may say, to
+          all savages. He confesses himself that one of his great pleasures is
+          to horrify the guides by his indifference and stupidity. He is, too,
+          decidedly envious. . . . We could willingly pardon him his patriotic
+          self-love, often wounded by the ignorance of Europeans, above all in
+          what concerns the New World, if only that national pride were without
+          mixture of personal vanity; but how comes it that Mark Twain, so
+          severe upon those poor Turks, finds scarcely anything to criticize in
+          Russia, where absolutism has nevertheless not ceased to flourish? We
+          need not seek far for the cause of this indulgence: the Czar received
+          our ferocious republicans; the Empress, and the Grand Duchess Mary,
+          spoke to them in English.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "Taking the Pleasure Trip on the Continent altogether, does it merit
+          the success it enjoys? In spite of the indulgence that we cannot but
+          show to the judgments of a foreigner; while recollecting that those
+          amongst us who have visited America have fallen, doubtless, under the
+          influence of prejudices almost as dangerous as ignorance, into errors
+          quite as bad&mdash;in spite of the wit with which certain pages
+          sparkle&mdash;we must say that this voyage is very far below the less
+          celebrated excursions of the same author in his own country."
+        </p>
+      </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      Three years later, Mme. Blanc returns to the discussion of Mark Twain, in
+      an essay in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes', entitled 'L'age Dore en Amerique'&mdash;an
+      elaborate review and analysis of The Gilded Age. The savage charm and real
+      simplicity of Mark Twain are not lacking in appeal, even to her
+      sophisticated intelligence; and she is inclined to infer that jovial irony
+      and animal spirits are qualities sufficient to amuse a young nation of
+      people like the Americans who do not, like the French, pique themselves
+      upon being blase. According to her judgment, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley
+      Warner are lacking in the requisite mental grasp for the "stupendous task
+      of interpreting the great tableau of the American scene." Nor does she
+      regard their effort at collaboration as a success from the standpoint of
+      art. The charm of Colonel Sellers wholly escapes her; she cannot
+      understand the almost loving appreciation with which this cheaply gross
+      forerunner of the later American industrial brigand was greeted by the
+      American public. The book repels her by "that mixture of good sense with
+      mad folly&mdash;disorder"; but she praises Mark Twain's accuracy as a
+      reporter. The things which offend her sensibilities are the wilful
+      exaggeration of the characters, and the jests which are so elaborately
+      constructed that "the very theme itself disappears under the mass of
+      embroidery which overlays it." "The audacities of a Bret Harte, the
+      grosser temerities of a Mark Twain, still astonish us," she concludes;
+      "but soon we shall become accustomed to an American language whose savoury
+      freshness is not to be disdained, awaiting still more delicate and refined
+      qualities that time will doubtless bring."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In translating 'The Jumping Frog' into faultless French (giving Mark Twain
+      the opportunity for that delightful retranslation into English which
+      furnished delight for thousands), in reviewing with elaboration and long
+      citations 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'The Gilded Age', Mme. Blanc
+      introduced Mark Twain to the literary public of France; and Emile Blemont,
+      in his 'Esquisses Americaines de Mark Twain' (1881), still further
+      enhanced the fame of Mark Twain in France by translating a number of his
+      slighter sketches. In 1886, Eugene Forgues published in the 'Revue des
+      Deux Mondes' an exhaustive review (with long citations) of 'Life on the
+      Mississippi', under the title 'Les Caravans d'un humoriste'; and his
+      prefatory remarks in regard to Mark Twain's fame in France at that time
+      may be accepted as authoritative. He pointed out the praiseworthy efforts
+      that had been made to popularize these "transatlantic gaieties," to import
+      into France a new mode of comic entertainment. Yet he felt that the
+      peculiar twist of national character, the type of wit peculiar to a people
+      and a country, the specialized conception of the <i>vis comic</i> revealed
+      in Mark Twain's works, confined them to a restricted milieu. The result of
+      all the efforts to popularize Mark Twain in France, he makes plain, was an
+      almost complete check; for to the French taste Mark Twain's pleasantry
+      appeared macabre, his wit brutal, his temperament dry to excess. By some,
+      indeed, his exaggerations were regarded as symptoms of mental alienation;
+      and the originality of his verve did not succeed in giving a passport to
+      the incoherence of his conceptions. "It has been said," remarked M.
+      Forgues, with keen perception, "that an academician slumbers in the depths
+      of every Frenchman; and it was this which prevented the success of Mark
+      Twain in France. Humour, in France, has its laws and its restrictions. So
+      the French public saw in Mark Twain a gross jester, incessantly beating
+      upon a tom-tom to attract the attention of the crowd. They were tenacious
+      in resisting all such blandishments . . . . As a humorist, Mark Twain was
+      never appreciated in France. The appreciation he ultimately secured&mdash;an
+      appreciation by no means inconsiderable, though in no sense comparable to
+      that won in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic countries&mdash;was due to his
+      sagacity and penetration as an observer, and to his marvellous faculty for
+      calling up scenes and situations by the clever use of the novel and the <i>imprevu</i>.
+      There was, even to the Frenchman, a certain lively appeal in an
+      intelligence absolutely free of convention, sophistication, or reverence
+      for traditionary views <i>qu</i> traditionary." Though at first the salt
+      of Mark Twain's humour seemed to the French to be lacking in the Attic
+      flavour, this new mode of comic entertainment, the leisurely exposition of
+      the genially naive American, in time won its way with the <i>blase</i>
+      Parisians. Travellers who could find no copy of the Bible in the street
+      bookstalls of Paris, were confronted everywhere with copies of 'Roughing
+      It'. When the authoritative edition of Mark Twain's works appeared in
+      English, that authoritative French journal, the 'Mercure de France', paid
+      him this distinguished tribute: "His public is as varied as possible,
+      because of the versatility and suppleness of his talent which addresses
+      itself successively to all classes of readers. He has been called the
+      greatest humorist in the world, and that is probably the truth; but he is
+      also a charming and attractive story-teller, an alert romancer, a clever
+      and penetrating observer, a philosopher without pretensions, and therefore
+      all the more profound, and finally, a brilliant essayist."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, the observation of M. Forgues is just and authentic&mdash;the
+      Attic flavour of <i>l'esprit Gauloi</i> is alien to the loosely
+      articulated structure of American humour. The noteworthy criticism which
+      Mark Twain directed at Paul Bourget's 'Outre Mer', and the subsequent
+      controversy incident thereto, forced into light the racial and
+      temperamental dissimilarities between the Gallic and the American <i>Ausschauung</i>.
+      Mr. Clemens once remarked to me that, of all continental peoples, the
+      French were most alien to the spirit of his humour. In 'Le Figaro', at the
+      time of Mark Twain's death, this fundamental difference in taste once more
+      comes to light: "It is as difficult for a Frenchman to understand Mark
+      Twain as for a North American to admire La Fontaine. At first sight, there
+      is nothing in common between that highly specialized faculty which the
+      Anglo-Saxons of the old and the new world designate under the name of
+      humour, and that quality with us which we call wit (esprit). And yet, at
+      bottom, these two manifestations of the human genius, so different in
+      appearance, have a common origin and reach the same result: they are, both
+      of them, the glorification of good sense presented in pleasing and
+      unexpected form. Only, this form must necessarily vary with peoples who do
+      not speak the same language and whose skulls are not fashioned in the same
+      way."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Italy, as in France, the peculiar <i>timbr</i> of Mark Twain's humour
+      found an audience not wholly sympathetic, not thoroughly <i>au courant</i>
+      with his spirit. "Translation, however accurate and conscientious," as the
+      Italian critic, Raffaele Simboli, has pointed out, "fails to render the
+      special flavour of his work. And then in Italy, where humorous writing
+      generally either rests on a political basis or depends on risky phrases,
+      Mark Twain's sketches are not appreciated because the spirit which
+      breathes in them is not always understood. The story of 'The Jumping
+      Frog', for instance, famous as it is in America and England, has made
+      little impression in France or Italy."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was rather among the Germanic peoples and those most closely allied to
+      them, the Scandinavians, that Mark Twain found most complete and ready
+      response. At first blush, it seems almost incredible that the writings of
+      Mark Twain, with their occasional slang, their colloquialisms and their
+      local peculiarities of dialect, should have borne translation so well into
+      other languages, especially into German. It must, however, be borne in
+      mind that, despite these peculiar features of his writings, they are
+      couched in a style of most marked directness, simplicity and native
+      English purity. The ease with which his works were translated into
+      foreign, especially the Germanic and allied tongues, and the eager delight
+      with which they were read and comprehended by all classes, high and low,
+      constitute perhaps the most signal conceivable tribute, not only to the
+      humanity of his spirit, but to the genuine art of his marvellously
+      forthright and natural style. It need be no cause for surprise that as
+      early as 1872 he had secured Tauchnitz, of Leipzig, for his Continental
+      agent. German translations soon appeared of 'The Jumping Frog and Other
+      Stories' (1874), 'The Gilded Age' (1874), 'The Innocents Abroad and The
+      New Pilgrim's Progress' (1875), 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876). A
+      few years later his sketches, many of them, were translated into virtually
+      all printed languages, notably into Russian and modern Greek; and his more
+      extended works gradually came to be translated into German, French,
+      Italian, and the languages of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The elements of the colossally grotesque, the wildly primitive, in Mark
+      Twain's works, the underlying note of melancholy not less than the lawless
+      Bohemianism, found sympathetic appreciation among the Germanic races.
+      George Meredith has likened the functionings of Germanic humour to the
+      heavy-footed antics of a dancing bear. Mark Twain's stories of the
+      Argonauts, the miners and desperadoes, with their primitive, orgiastic
+      existence; his narratives of the wild freedom of the life on the
+      Mississippi, the lawless feuds and barbaric encounters&mdash;all appealed
+      to the passion for the fantastic and the grotesque innate in the Germanic
+      consciousness. To the Europeans, this wild genius of the Pacific Slope
+      seemed to function in a sort of unexplored fourth dimension of humour&mdash;vast
+      and novel&mdash;of which they had never dreamed. It is noteworthy that
+      Schleich, in his 'Psychopathik des Humors', reserved for American humour,
+      with Mark Twain as its leading exponent, a distinct and unique category
+      which he denominated <i>phantastischen, grossdimensionalen</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the biographer belongs the task of describing, in detail, the lavish
+      entertainment and open-hearted homage which were bestowed upon Mark Twain
+      in German Europe. In writing of Mark Twain and his popularity in Germanic
+      countries, Carl von Thaler unhesitatingly asserts that Mark Twain was
+      feted, wined and dined in Vienna, the Austrian metropolis, in an
+      unprecedented manner, and awarded unique honours hitherto paid to no
+      German writer. In Berlin, the young Kaiser bestowed upon him the most
+      distinguished marks of his esteem; and praised his works, in especial
+      'Life on the Mississippi', with the intensest enthusiasm. When Mark Twain
+      received a command from the Kaiser to dine with him, his young daughter
+      exclaimed that if it kept on like this, there soon wouldn't be anybody
+      left for him to become acquainted with but God! Mark said that it seemed
+      uncomplimentary to regard him as unacquainted in that quarter; but of
+      course his daughter was young, and the young always jump to conclusions
+      without reflection. After hearing the Kaiser's eulogy on 'Life on the
+      Mississippi', he was astounded and touched to receive a similar tribute,
+      the same evening, from the portier of his lodging-house. He loved to dwell
+      upon this, in later years&mdash;declaring it the most extraordinary
+      coincidence of his life that a crowned head and a portier, the very top of
+      an empire and the very bottom of it, should have expressed the very same
+      criticism, and delivered the very same verdict, upon one of his books,
+      almost in the same hour and the same breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The German edition of his works, in six volumes, published by Lutz of
+      Stuttgart, in 1898, I believe, contained an introduction in which he was
+      hailed as the greatest humorist in the world. Among German critics he was
+      regarded as second only to Dickens in drastic comic situation and depth of
+      feeling. Robinson Crusoe was held to exhibit a limited power of
+      imagination in comparison with the ingenuity and inventiveness of Tom
+      Sawyer. At times the German critics confessed their inability to discover
+      the dividing line between astounding actuality and fantastic exaggeration.
+      The descriptions of the barbaric state of Western America possessed an
+      indescribable fascination for the sedate Europeans. At times Mark Twain's
+      bloody jests froze the laughter on their lips; and his "revolver-humour"
+      made their hair stand on end. Though realizing that the scenes and events
+      described in 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', 'Roughing It', and 'Life on
+      the Mississippi' could not have been duplicated in Europe, the German
+      critics revelled in them none the less that "such adventures were possible
+      only in America&mdash;perhaps only in the fancy of an American!" "Mark
+      Twain's greatest strength," says Von Thaler, "lies in the little sketches,
+      the literary snap-shots. The shorter his work, the more striking it is. He
+      draws directly from life. No other writer has learned to know so many
+      different varieties of men and of circumstances, so many strange examples
+      of the Genus Homo, as he; no other has taken so strange a course of
+      development." The deeper elements of Mark Twain's humour did not escape
+      the attention of the Germans, nor fail of appreciation at their hands. In
+      his aphorisms, embodying at once genuine wit and experience of life, they
+      discovered not merely the American author, but the universal human being;
+      these aphorisms they found worthy of profound and lasting admiration.
+      Sintenis found in Mark Twain a "living symptom of the youthful joy in
+      existence"&mdash;a genius capable at will, despite his "boyish
+      extravagance," of the virile formulation of fertile and suggestive ideas.
+      His latest critic in Germany wrote at the time of his death, with a
+      genuine insight into the significance of his work: "Although Mark Twain's
+      humour moves us to irresistible laughter, this is not the main point in
+      his books; like all true humorists, <i>ist der Witz mit dem Weltschmerz
+      verbunden</i>, he is a witness to higher thoughts and higher emotions, and
+      his purpose is to expose bad morals and evil circumstances, in order to
+      improve and ennoble mankind." The critic of the 'Berliner Zeitung'
+      asserted that Mark Twain is loved in Germany more than all other
+      humorists, English or French, because his humour "turns fundamentally upon
+      serious and earnest conceptions of life." It is a tremendously significant
+      fact that the, works of American literature most widely read in Germany
+      are the works of&mdash;striking conjunction!&mdash;Ralph Waldo Emerson and
+      Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The 'Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' fired the laugh heard round the
+      world. Like Byron, Mark Twain woke one morning to find himself famous. A
+      classic fable, which had once evoked inextinguishable laughter in Athens,
+      was unconsciously re-told in the language of Angel's Camp, Calaveras
+      County, where history repeated itself with a precision of detail startling
+      in its miraculous coincidence. Despite the international fame thus
+      suddenly won by this little fable, Mark Twain had yet to overcome the
+      ingrained opposition of insular prejudice before his position in England
+      and the colonies was established upon a sure and enduring footing. In a
+      review of 'The Innocents Abroad' in 'The Saturday Review' (1870), the
+      comparison is made between the Americans who "do Europe in six weeks" and
+      the most nearly analogous class of British travellers, with the following
+      interesting conclusions: "The American is generally the noisier and more
+      actively disagreeable, but, on the other hand, he often partially redeems
+      his absurdity by a certain naivete and half-conscious humour. He is often
+      laughing in his sleeve at his own preposterous brags, and does not take
+      himself quite so seriously as his British rival. He is vulgar, and even
+      ostentatiously and atrociously vulgar; but the vulgarity is mixed with a
+      real shrewdness which rescues it from simple insipidity. We laugh at him,
+      and we would rather not have too much of his company; but we do not feel
+      altogether safe in despising him." The lordly condescension and gross
+      self-satisfaction here betrayed are but preliminaries to the ludicrous
+      density of the subsequent reflections upon Mark Twain himself: "He parades
+      his utter ignorance of Continental languages and manners, and expresses
+      his very original judgments on various wonders of art and nature with a
+      praiseworthy frankness. We are sometimes left in doubt whether he is
+      speaking in all sincerity or whether he is having a sly laugh at himself
+      and his readers"! It is quite evident that the large mass of English
+      readers, represented by The Saturday Review, had not caught Mark Twain's
+      tone; but even the reviewer is more than half won over by the
+      infectiousness of this new American humour. "Perhaps we have persuaded our
+      readers by this time that Mr. Twain (sic) is a very offensive specimen of
+      the vulgarest kind of Yankee. And yet, to say the truth, we have a kind of
+      liking for him. There is a frankness and originality about his remarks
+      which is (sic) pleasanter than the mere repetition of stale raptures; and
+      his fun, if not very refined, is often tolerable in its way. In short, his
+      pages may be turned over with amusement, as exhibiting more or less
+      consciously a very lively portrait of the uncultivated American tourist,
+      who may be more obtrusive and misjudging, but is not quite so stupidly
+      unobservant as our native product. We should not choose either of them for
+      our companions on a visit to a church or a picture&mdash;gallery, but we
+      should expect most amusement from the Yankee as long as we could stand
+      him." It was this review which gave Mark Twain the opening for his
+      celebrated parody&mdash;a parody which, I have always thought, went far to
+      opening the eyes of the British public to the true spirit of his humour.
+      Such irresistible fun could not fail of appreciation at the hands of a
+      nation which regarded Dickens as their representative national author.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two years later, Mark Twain received in England an appreciative reception
+      of well-nigh national character. Whilst the literary and academic circles
+      of America withheld their unstinted recognition of an author so primitive
+      and unlettered, Great Britain received him with open arms. He was a
+      welcome guest at the houses of the exclusive; the highest dignitaries of
+      public life, the authoritative journals, the leaders of fashion, of
+      thought, and of opinion openly rejoiced in the breezy unconventionality,
+      the fascinating daring, and the genial personality of this new variety of
+      American genius. His English publisher, John Camden Hotten, wrote in 1873:
+      "How he dined with the Sheriff of London and Middlesex; how he spent
+      glorious evenings with the wits and literati who gather around the festive
+      boards of the Whitefriars and the Savage Clubs; how he moved in the gay
+      throng at the Guildhall conversazione; how he feasted with the Lord Mayor
+      of London; and was the guest of that ancient and most honourable body&mdash;the
+      City of London Artillery&mdash;all these matters we should like to dwell
+      upon." His public lectures, though not so popular as those of Artemus
+      Ward, won him recognition as a master in all the arts of the platform. Mr.
+      H. R. Haweis, who heard him once at the old Hanover Square Rooms, thus
+      describes the occasion: "The audience was not large nor very enthusiastic.
+      I believe he would have been an increasing success had he stayed longer.
+      We had not time to get accustomed to his peculiar way, and there was
+      nothing to take us by storm, as in Artemus Ward. . . . . He came on and
+      stood quite alone. A little table, with the traditional water-bottle and
+      tumbler, was by his side. His appearance was not impressive, not very
+      unlike the representation of him in the various pictures in his 'Tramp
+      Abroad'. He spoke more slowly than any other man I ever heard, and did not
+      look at his audience quite enough. I do not think that he felt altogether
+      at home with us, nor we with him. We never laughed loud or long; no one
+      went into those irrepressible convulsions which used to make Artemus pause
+      and look so hurt and surprised. We sat throughout expectant and on the <i>qui
+      vive</i>, very well interested, and gently simmering with amusement. With
+      the exception of one exquisite description of the old Magdalen ivy&mdash;covered
+      collegiate buildings at Oxford University, I do not think there was one
+      thing worth setting down in print. I got no information out of the
+      lecture, and hardly a joke that would wear, or a story that would bear
+      repeating. There was a deal about the dismal, lone silver&mdash;land, the
+      story of the Mexican plug that bucked, and a duel which never came off,
+      and another duel in which no one was injured; and we sat patiently enough
+      through it, fancying that by and by the introduction would be over, and
+      the lecture would begin, when Twain suddenly made his bow and went off! It
+      was over. I looked at my watch; I was never more taken aback. I had been
+      sitting there exactly an hour and twenty minutes. It seemed ten minutes at
+      the outside. If you have ever tried to address a public meeting, you will
+      know what this means. It means that Mark Twain is a consummate public
+      speaker. If ever he chose to say anything, he would say it marvellously
+      well; but in the art of saying nothing in an hour, he surpasses our most
+      accomplished parliamentary speakers."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nation which had been reared upon the wit of Sidney Smith, the irony
+      of Swift, the <i>gros se</i> of Fielding, the extravagance of Dickens, was
+      ripe for the colossal incongruities and daring contrasts of Mark Twain.
+      They recognized in him not only "the most successful and original wag of
+      his day," but also a rare genius who shared with Walt Whitman "the honour
+      of being the most strictly American writer of what is called American
+      literature." We read in a review of 'A Tramp Abroad', published in The
+      Athenaeum in 1880: "Mark Twain is American pure and simple. To the eastern
+      motherland he owes but the rudiments, the groundwork, already archaic and
+      obsolete to him, of the speech he has to write; in his turn of art, his
+      literary method and aims, his intellectual habit and temper, he is as
+      distinctly national as the Fourth of July." Mark Twain was admired because
+      he was "a literary artist of exceptional skill"; and it was ungrudgingly
+      acknowledged that "he has a keen sense of character and uncommon skill in
+      presenting it dramatically; and he is also an admirable story-teller, with
+      the anecdotic instinct and habit in perfection, and with a power of
+      episodic narrative that is scarcely equalled, if at all, by Mr. Charles
+      Reade himself." Indeed, from the early days of 'The Innocents Abroad', the
+      "first transatlantic democratic utterance which found its way into the
+      hearing of the mass of English people"; during the period of 'Tom Sawyer',
+      "the completest boy in fiction," the immortal 'Huckleberry Finn', "the
+      standard picaresque novel of America&mdash;the least trammelled piece of
+      literature in the language," and 'Life on the Mississippi', vastly
+      appreciated in England as in Germany for its <i>cultur-historisch</i>
+      value; down to the day when Oxford University bestowed the coveted honour
+      of its degree upon Mark Twain, and all England took him to their hearts
+      with fervour and abandon&mdash;during this long period of almost four
+      decades, Mark Twain progressively strengthened his hold upon the
+      imagination of the English people and, like Charles Dickens before him,
+      may be said to have become the representative author of the Anglo-Saxon
+      race. "The vast majority of readers here regard him," said Mr. Sydney
+      Brooks in 1907, "to a degree in which they regard no other living writer,
+      as their personal friend, and love him for his tenderness, his
+      masculinity, his unfailing wholesomeness even more than for his humour."
+      To all who love and admire Mark Twain, these words in which he was
+      welcomed to England in 1907 should stand as a symbol of that racial bond,
+      that <i>entente cordial</i> of blood and heart, which he did so much to
+      strengthen and secure. "A compliment paid to Mark Twain is something more
+      than a compliment to a great man, a great writer, and a great citizen. It
+      is a compliment to the American people, and one that will come home to
+      them with peculiar gratification. . . . The feeling for Mark Twain among
+      his own people is like that of the Scotch for Sir Walter eighty odd years
+      ago, or like that of our fathers for Charles Dickens. There is admiration
+      in it, gratitude, pride, and, above all, an immense and intimate
+      tenderness of affection. To writers alone it is given to win a sentiment
+      of this quality&mdash;to writers and occasionally, by the oddness of the
+      human mind, to generals. Perhaps one would best take the measure of the
+      American devotion to Mark Twain by describing it as a compound of what
+      Dickens enjoyed in England forty years ago, and of what Lord Roberts
+      enjoys to-day, and by adding something thereto for the intensity of all
+      transatlantic emotions. The 'popularity' of statesmen, even of such a
+      statesman as President Roosevelt, is a poor and flickering light by the
+      side of this full flame of personal affection. It has gone out to Mark
+      Twain not only for what he has written, for the clean, irresistible
+      extravagance of his humour and his unfailing command of the primal
+      feelings, for his tenderness, his jollity and his power to read the heart
+      of boy and man and woman; not only for the tragedies and afflictions of
+      his life so unconquerably borne; not only for his brave and fiery dashes
+      against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home and abroad; but also
+      because his countrymen feel him to be, beyond all other men, the
+      incarnation of the American spirit."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain achieved a position of supreme eminence as a representative
+      national author which is without a parallel in the history of American
+      literature. This position he achieved directly by his appeal to the great
+      mass of the people, despite the <i>dict</i> of the <i>literati</i>. At a
+      time when England and Europe were throwing wide the doors to Mark Twain,
+      the culture of his own land was regarding him with slighting
+      condescension, or with mildly quizzical unconcern. Boston regarded him
+      with fastidious and frigid disapproval, Longfellow and Lowell found little
+      in him to admire or approve. There were notable exceptions, as Mr. Howells
+      has recently pointed out&mdash;Charles Eliot Norton, Professor Francis J.
+      Child, and most notable of all, Mr. Howells himself; but in general it is
+      true that "in proportion as people thought themselves refined they
+      questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then
+      the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude." The professors of
+      literature regarded Mark Twain as an author whose works were essentially
+      ephemeral; and stood in the breach for Culture against the barbaric
+      invasion of primitive Western Barbarism. Professor W. P. Trent was, I
+      believe, the first to cite Professor Richardson's American Literature
+      (published in 1886) as a typical instance of the position of literary
+      culture in regard to Mark Twain. "But there is a class of writers," we
+      read in that work, "authors ranking below Irving or Lowell, and lacking
+      the higher artistic or moral purpose of the greater humorists, who amuse a
+      generation and then pass from sight. Every period demands a new manner of
+      jest, after the current fashion . . . . The reigning favourites of the day
+      are Frank R. Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, the various newspaper jokers,
+      and 'Mark Twain.' [Note the damning position!] But the creators of
+      `Pomona' and 'Rudder Grange,' of `Uncle Remus and his Folk-lore Stories,'
+      and `Innocents Abroad,' clever as they are, must make hay while the sun
+      shines. Twenty years hence, unless they chance to enshrine their wit in
+      some higher literary achievement, their unknown successors will be the
+      privileged comedians of the republic. Humour alone never gives its masters
+      a place in literature; it must coexist with literary qualities, and must
+      usually be joined with such pathos as one finds in Lamb, Hood, Irving, or
+      Holmes." This passage stands in the 1892 edition of that work, though 'Tom
+      Sawyer' had appeared in 1876, 'The Prince and the Pauper' in 1882, 'Life
+      on the Mississippi' in 1883, 'Huckleberry Finn' in 1884, and 'A
+      Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in 1889. Opinions analogous to
+      those expressed in the passage just cited have found frequent expression
+      among leaders of critical opinion in America; and only yesterday 'The
+      Jumping Frog' and 'The Innocents Abroad' were seriously put forward, by a
+      clever and popular American critic, as Mark Twain's most enduring claims
+      upon posterity! A bare half-dozen men in the ranks of American literary
+      criticism have recognized and eloquently spoken forth in vindication of
+      Mark Twain's title as a classic author, not simply of American literature,
+      but of the literature of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, even now, perhaps not too early to attempt some sort of inquiry
+      into the causes contributory to Mark Twain's recognition as the prime
+      representative of contemporary American literature. One of the cheap
+      catchwords of Mark Twain criticism is the statement that he is "American
+      to the core," and that his popular appreciation in his own country was due
+      to the fact that he most completely embodied the national genius. How many
+      of those who confidently advance this vastly significant statement, one
+      curiously wonders, have seriously endeavoured to make plain to others&mdash;or
+      even to themselves&mdash;the reasons therefor? Perhaps in seeking the
+      causes for Mark Twain's renown in his own country one may discover the
+      causes for his world-wide fame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A map of the United States, upon which were marked the localities and
+      regions made famous by the writings of Mark Twain, would show that,
+      geographically, he has known and studied this vast country in all the
+      grand divisions of its composition. Bred from old Southern stock, born in
+      the Southwest, he passed his youth upon the bosom of that great natural
+      division between East and West, the Mississippi River, which cleaves in
+      twain the very body of the nation. In the twenties he lost the feeling of
+      local attachment in the vast democracy of the West, and looked life&mdash;a
+      strangely barbaric and primitive life&mdash;straight in the face. This is
+      the first great transformation in his life&mdash;behold the Westerner!
+      After enriching his mind through contact with civilizations so diverse as
+      Europe and the Sandwich Islands, he settled down in Connecticut, boldly
+      foreswore the creeds and principles of his native section, and underwent a
+      new transformation&mdash;behold the Yankee! Once again, travel in foreign
+      lands, association with the most intellectual and cultured circles of the
+      world, broadened his vision; yet this cosmopolitan experience, far from
+      diminishing his racial consciousness, tended still further to accentuate
+      the national characteristics. In this new transformation, we behold the
+      typical American! The later years, of cosmopolitan renown, of world-wide
+      fame, throw into high relief the last transformation&mdash;behold the
+      universally human spirit! Under this crude catalogue, the main lines of
+      Mark Twain's development stand out in sharp definition. The catalogue,
+      however, is only too crude&mdash;it is impossible to say with precision
+      just when such and such a transformation actually took place. It is only
+      intended to be suggestive; for we must bear in mind that Mark Twain never
+      changed character. His spirit underwent an evolutionary process&mdash;broadening,
+      deepening, enlarging its vision with the passage of the years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="pp157.jpg (78K)" src="images/pp157.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The part which the South played in the formation of the character and
+      genius of Mark Twain has been little noted heretofore. It was in the South
+      and Southwest that the creator of the humour of local eccentrics first
+      appeared in full flower; and "Ned Brace," "Major Jones," and "Sut
+      Lovengood" have in them the germs of that later Western humour that was to
+      come to full fruition in the works of Bret Harte and Mark Twain. The stage
+      coach and the river steamboat furnished the means for disseminating far
+      and wide the gross, the ghastly, the extravagant stories, the oddities of
+      speech, the fantastic jests which emerged from the clash of diverse and
+      oddly-assorted types. The jarring contrasts, the incongruities and
+      surprises daily furnished by the picturesque river life unquestionably
+      stimulated and fertilized the latent germs of humour in the young
+      cub-pilot, Sam Clemens. Through Mark Twain's greatest works flows the
+      stately Mississippi, magically imparting to them some indefinable share of
+      its beauty, its variety, its majesty, its immensity; and there is no
+      exaggeration in the conclusion that it is the greatest natural influence
+      which his works betray. Reared in a slave-holding community of
+      narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people of the lower middle class;
+      seeing his own father so degrade himself as to cuff his negro house-boy;
+      consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and bob-tail of the town, in his
+      passion for bohemianism and truantry&mdash;young Clemens never learned to
+      know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and the humanity, of that
+      aristocratic patriarchal South which produced such beautiful figures as
+      Lee and Lanier. Not even his most enthusiastic biographers have attempted
+      to palliate, save with half-hearted facetiousness, his inglorious
+      desertion of the cause which he had espoused. Mark Twain is the most
+      speedily "reconstructed rebel" on record. Is it broad-minded&mdash;or even
+      accurate!&mdash;for Mr. Howells to say of Mark Twain: "No one has ever
+      poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticised,
+      pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal?" Mark Twain never, I firmly
+      believe, held up to ridicule the Southern "ideal." But in a well-known and
+      excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he properly pokes fun at the
+      "wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality&mdash;all
+      imitated from Sir Walter Scott," of the Southern literary journal of the
+      thirties and forties. In later years Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc',
+      voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which bespoke the "Southern ideal" of
+      his Virginia forbears; and that delicacy of instinct in matters of right
+      and wrong which is so conspicuous a trait of Mark Twain's is a symptom of
+      that "moral elegance" which Mr. Owen Wister has pronounced to be one of
+      the defining characteristics of the Southern American. "No American of
+      Northern birth or breeding," Mr. Howells pertinently observes, "could have
+      imagined the spiritual struggle of Huck Finn in deciding to help the negro
+      Jim to his freedom, even though he should be for ever despised as a negro
+      thief in his native town, and perhaps eternally lost through the blackness
+      of his sin. No Northerner could have come so close to the heart of a
+      Kentucky feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing
+      through its carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the
+      sardonic comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the
+      store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the
+      drunkard's daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that comes
+      to lynch him."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The influence of the West upon the character and genius of Mark Twain is
+      momentous and unmistakable. Mark Twain found room for development and
+      expansion in the primitive freedom of the West. It was here, I think, that
+      there were bred in him that breezy democracy of sentiment and that hatred
+      of sham and pretence which fill his writings from beginning to end. In the
+      West, virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood&mdash;or fell&mdash;by
+      force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled
+      for fortune, for competence&mdash;or for existence. It was a case of the
+      survival of the fittest. In face of bleak Nature&mdash;the burning alkali
+      desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,&mdash;all men were
+      free and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort. In this primitive
+      democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting. The
+      pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug soon went to the wall,
+      exposed in the nakedness of his own impotency. Humour is a salutary aid in
+      the struggle of the individual with the contrasts of life; indeed it may
+      be said to be born of the perception of those contrasts. In a degree no
+      whit inferior to the variegated river life, the life of the West furnished
+      contrasts and incongruities innumerable&mdash;vaster perhaps, and more
+      significant. There was the incessant contrast of civilization with
+      barbarism, of the East with the West; and there was infinite play for the
+      comic <i>expos</i> of the credulous "tenderfoot" at the hands of the
+      pitiless cowboy. Roars of Gargantuan laughter shook the skies as each new
+      initiate unwittingly succumbed to the demoniac wiles of his tormentors.
+      The West was one vast theatre for the practice of the "practical joke."
+      Behind everything, menacing, foreboding, tragic, lay the stupendous
+      contrast between Man and Nature; and though the miner, the granger, the
+      cowboy laughed defiantly at civilization and at Nature, there crept into
+      the consciousness of each the conviction that, in the long run,
+      civilization must triumph, and that, in order to win success, Nature must
+      be conquered and subdued. In such an environment, with its spirit of
+      primitive democracy, its atmosphere of wild and ribald jest, its contempt
+      for the impostor, its perpetually recurring incongruities, and behind all
+      the solemn, perhaps tragic, presence of inexorable Nature&mdash;in such an
+      environment were sharpened and whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour,
+      the spirit of real democracy bred of competitive effort, and the hatred
+      for pretence, sham, and imposture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="pp163.jpg (69K)" src="images/pp163.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not, I think, until Mark Twain went to live in Connecticut and, as
+      he expressed it, became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture
+      among the other rocks of New England, that he developed complete
+      confidence in himself and his powers. That passion for successful
+      self-expression, which Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler has defined as the main
+      ambition of the American, became the dominant motive of Mark Twain's life.
+      Of his experience as a steamboat pilot, Mark Twain has said that in that
+      brief, sharp schooling he got personally and familiarly acquainted with
+      about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in
+      fiction, biography or history. In the West he had still further enriched
+      his mind with an inexhaustible store of first-hand knowledge of human
+      nature. In rotation he had been tramping jour printer, river pilot,
+      private secretary, miner, reporter, lecturer. He now turns to literature
+      in real earnest, and begins to display that vast store of knowledge
+      derived from actual contact with the infinitely diversified realities of
+      American life. Mark Twain takes on more and more of the characteristics of
+      the Yankee&mdash;those characteristics which constitute the basis of his
+      success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the practical efficiency, the
+      shrewdness and the hard common&mdash;sense. It is the last phase in the
+      formation of the national type.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was, I venture to say, in some such way as this that Mark Twain came to
+      assume in the eyes of his countrymen an embodiment of the national spirit.
+      He was the self&mdash;made man in the self&mdash;made democracy. He was at
+      once his own creation and the creation of a democracy. There were
+      humorists in America before Mark Twain; there are humorists in America
+      still. But Mark Twain succeeded not merely in captivating the great mass
+      of the people; he achieved the far more difficult and unique distinction
+      of convincing his countrymen of his essential fellowship, his
+      temperamental affinity, with them. This miracle he wrought by the frankest
+      and most straightforward revelation of the actual experiences in his own
+      life and the lives of those he had known with perfect intimacy. It is true
+      that he wrote a few books dealing with other times, other scenes, than our
+      own in the present and in America. But I daresay that his popularity with
+      the mass of his countrymen would not have been in any degree lessened had
+      he never written these few books. Indeed, it is hardly to be doubted that
+      his books were successful in the ratio of their autobiographic nature. For
+      the character he revealed in those books of his which are essentially
+      autobiographic, is the character dear to the American heart; and the
+      experiences, vicissitudes, and hardships, shot through and irradiated with
+      a high boisterousness of humour, found a joyous sympathy in the minds and
+      hearts of men who had all "been there" themselves. In Mark Twain the
+      American people recognized at last the sturdy democrat, independent of
+      foreign criticism; confident in the validity and value of his own ideas
+      and judgments; believing loyally in his country's institutions, and
+      upholding them fearlessly before the world; fundamentally serious and
+      self-reliant, yet with a practicality tempered by humane kindliness,
+      warmth of heart, and a strain of persistent idealism; rude, boisterous,
+      even uncouth, yet withal softened by sympathy for the under-dog, a
+      boundless love for the weak, the friendless, the oppressed; lacking in
+      profound intellectuality, yet supreme in the possession of the simple and
+      homely virtues&mdash;an upright and honourable character, a good citizen,
+      a man tenacious of the sanctity of the domestic virtues. America has
+      produced finer and more exalted types&mdash;giants in intellectuality,
+      princes in refinement and delicacy of spirit, savants in culture, classics
+      in authorship. An American type combining culture with picturesqueness,
+      refinement with patriotism, suavity with self-reliance, desire it as we
+      may, still awaits the imprimatur of international recognition. America has
+      sufficient cause for gratification in the memory of that quaint and sturdy
+      figure so conspicuously bearing the national stamp and superscription.
+      Perhaps no American has equalled Mark Twain in the quality of subsuming
+      and embodying in his own character so many elements of the national spirit
+      and genius. In letters, in life, Mark Twain is the American <i>par
+      excellence</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Underneath those qualities which combined to produce in Mark Twain a
+      composite American type, lay something deeper still&mdash;that indefinable
+      <i>je ne sais quo</i> which procured him international fame. Humour alone
+      is utterly inadequate for achieving so momentous a result&mdash;though
+      humour ostensibly constituted the burden of the appeal. As a matter of
+      fact, vehemently as the professors may deny it, Mark Twain was an artist
+      of remarkable force and power. From the days when he came under the
+      tutelage of Mr. Howells, and humbly learned to prune away his stylistic
+      superfluities of the grosser sort, Mark Twain indubitably began to subject
+      himself to the discipline of stern self-criticism. While it is true that
+      he never learned to realize in full measure, to use Pater's phrase, "the
+      responsibility of the artist to his materials," he assuredly disciplined
+      himself to make the most, in his own way, of the rude and volcanic power
+      which he possessed. It is fortunate that Mark Twain never subjected
+      himself to the refinements of academic culture; a Harvard might well have
+      spoiled a great author. For Mark Twain had a memorable tale to tell of
+      rude, primitive men and barbaric, remote scenes and circumstances; of
+      truant and resourceful boyhood exercising all its cunning in circumventing
+      circumstance and mastering a calling. And he had that tale to tell in the
+      unlettered, yet vastly expressive, phraseology of the actors in those wild
+      events. The secret of his style is directness of thought, a sort of
+      shattering clarity of utterance, and a mastery of vital, vigorous,
+      audacious individual expression. He had a remarkable feeling for words and
+      their uses; and his language is the unspoiled, expressive language of the
+      people. At times he is primitive and coarse; but it is a Falstaffian note,
+      the mark of universality rather than of limitation. His art was, in
+      Tolstoy's phrase, "the art of a people&mdash;universal art"; and his style
+      was rich in the locutions of the common people, rich and racy of the soil.
+      A signal merit of his style is its admirable adaptation to the theme. The
+      personages of his novels always speak "in character"&mdash;with perfect
+      reproduction, not only of their natural speech, but also of their natural
+      thoughts. Though Mr. Henry James may have said that one must be a very
+      rudimentary person to enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue in a
+      rudimentary style in treatment of rudimentary or,&mdash;as I should prefer
+      to phrase it,&mdash;fundamental things. Mr. James, I feel sure, could
+      never have put into the mouth of a "rudimentary" person like Huck, so
+      vivid and graphic a description of a storm with its perfect reproduction
+      of the impression caught by the "rudimentary" mind. "Writers of fiction,"
+      says Sir Walter Besant in speaking of this book, "will understand the
+      difficulty of getting inside the brain of that boy, seeing things as he
+      saw them, writing as he would have written, and acting as he would have
+      acted; and presenting to the world true, faithful, and living effigies of
+      that boy. The feat has been accomplished; there is no character in fiction
+      more fully, more faithfully, presented than the character of Huckleberry
+      Finn. . . . It may be objected that the characters are extravagant. Not
+      so. They are all exactly and literally true; they are quite possible in a
+      country so remote and so primitive. Every figure in the book is a type;
+      Huckleberry Finn has exaggerated none. We see the life&mdash;the dull and
+      vacuous life&mdash;of a small township upon the Mississippi River forty
+      years ago. So far as I know, it is the only place where we can find that
+      phase of life portrayed."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain impressed one always as writing with utter individuality&mdash;untrammelled
+      by the limitations of any particular sect of art. In his books of travel,
+      he reveals not only the instinct of the trained journalist for the novel
+      and the effective, but also the feeling of the artist for the beautiful,
+      the impressive, and the sublime. His descriptions, of striking natural
+      objects, such as the volcano of Mount Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, of
+      memorable architecture, such as the cathedral at Milan, show that he
+      possessed the "stereoscopic imagination" in rare degree. The picture he
+      evokes of Athens by moonlight, in the language of simplicity and
+      restraint, ineffaceably fixes itself in the fancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was regarded in France as a remarkable "impressionist" and
+      praised by the critics for the realistic accuracy and minuteness of his
+      delineation. Kipling frankly acknowledged the great debt that he owed him.
+      Tennyson spoke in high praise of his finesse in the choice of words, his
+      feeling for the just word to catch and, as it were, visualize the precise
+      shade of meaning desired. In truth, Mark Twain was an impressionist,
+      rather than an imaginative artist. That passage in 'A Yankee in King
+      Arthur's Court' in which he describes an early morning ride through the
+      forest, pictorially evocative as it is, stands self-revealed&mdash;a
+      confusedly imaginative effort to create an image he has never experienced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we set over beside this the remarkable descriptions of things seen, as
+      minutely evocative as instantaneous photographs&mdash;such, for example,
+      as the picture of a summer storm, or preferably, the picture of dawn on
+      the Mississippi, both from Huckleberry Finn&mdash;pictures Mark Twain had
+      seen and lived hundreds of times, we see at once the striking superiority
+      of the realistic impressionist over the imaginative artist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have always felt that the most lasting influence of his life&mdash;the
+      influence which has left the most pervasive impression upon his art and
+      thought&mdash;is portrayed in that classic and memorable passage in which
+      he portrays the marvellous spell laid upon him by that mistress of his
+      youth, the great river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the young pilot, the face of the water in time became a wonderful book.
+      For the uninitiated traveller it was a dead language, but to the young
+      pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets. He came to feel that there
+      had never been so wonderful a book written by man. To its haunting beauty,
+      its enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly&mdash;drinking it
+      in like one bewitched. But a day came when he began to cease from noting
+      its marvels. Another day came when he ceased altogether to note them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In time, he came to realize that, for him, the romance and the beauty were
+      gone forever from the river. If the early rapture was gone, in its place
+      was the deeper sense of knowledge and intimacy. He had learned the
+      ultimate secrets of the river&mdash;learned them with a knowledge, so
+      searching and so profound, that he was enabled to give them the enduring
+      investiture of art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence. He was a master of the
+      art of moving, touching, swaying an audience. At times, his insight into
+      the mysterious springs of humour, of passion, and of pathos seemed almost
+      like divination. All these qualities appeared in full flower in the
+      written expression of his art. It would be doing a disservice to his
+      memory to deny that his style did not possess literary distinction or
+      elegance. At times his judgment was at fault; his constitutional humour
+      came near playing havoc with his artistic sense. Not seldom he was long&mdash;winded
+      and laborious in his striving after comic effect. To offset these manifest
+      lapses and defects there are the many fine qualities&mdash;descriptive
+      passages aglow with serene and cloud less beauty, dramatic scenes depicted
+      with virile and rugged eloquence, pathetic incidents touched with gentle
+      and caressing tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Style bears translation ill; in fact, translation is not infrequently
+      impossible. But Mr. Clemens once pointed out to me that humour has nothing
+      to do with style. Mark Twain's humour&mdash;for humour is his prevalent
+      mood&mdash;has international range since, constructed out of a deep
+      comprehension of human nature and a profound sympathy for human
+      relationship and human failing, it successfully surmounts the difficulties
+      of translation into alien tongues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain became a great international figure, not because he was an
+      American, paradoxical and unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he
+      was America's greatest cosmopolitan. He was a true cosmopolitan in the
+      Higginsonian sense, in that, unlike Mr. Henry James, he was "at home even
+      in his own country." He was a true cosmopolitan in the Tolstoyan sense;
+      for his was "art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, but
+      such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world&mdash;the
+      art of common life&mdash;the art of a people&mdash;universal art." His
+      spirit grasped the true ideal of our time and reflected it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Clemens attributed his international success not to qualities of
+      style, not to allegiance to any distinctive school, not to any overtopping
+      eminence of intellect. "Many so-called American humorists," he once
+      remarked to me, "have been betrayed by their preoccupation with the local.
+      Their work never crossed frontiers because they failed to impart to their
+      humour that universal element which appeals to all races of men. Realism
+      is nothing more than close observation. But observation will never give
+      you the inside of the thing. The life, the genius, the soul of a people
+      are realized only through years of absorption." Mr. Clemens asseverated
+      that the only way to be a great American humorist was to be a great human
+      humorist&mdash;to discover in Americans those permanent and universal
+      traits common to all nationalities. In his commentary upon Bourget's
+      'Outre Mer', he declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic
+      that could safely be labelled "American"&mdash;not a single human detail,
+      inside or outside. Through years of automatic observation, Mark Twain
+      learned to discover for America, to adapt his own phrase, those few human
+      peculiarities that can be generalized and located here and there in the
+      world and named by the name of the nation where they are found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Above all, I think, Mark Twain sympathized with and found something to
+      admire in the citizens of every nation, seeking beneath the surface veneer
+      the universal traits of that nation's humanity. He expressly disclaimed in
+      my presence any "attitude" toward the world, for the very simple reason
+      that his relation toward all peoples had been one of effort at
+      comprehension of their ideals, and identification with them in feeling. He
+      disavowed any colour prejudices, caste prejudices, or creed prejudices&mdash;maintaining
+      that he could stand any society. All that he cared to know was that a man
+      was a human being&mdash;that was bad enough for him! It is a matter not of
+      argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has made more damaging admissions
+      concerning America than concerning any other nation. Lafcadio Hearn best
+      succeeded in interpreting poetry to his Japanese students by freeing it
+      from all artificial and local restraints, and using as examples the
+      simplest lyrics which go straight to the heart and soul of man. His
+      remarkable lecture on 'Naked Poetry' is the most signal illustration of
+      his profoundly suggestive mode of interpretation. In the same way, Mark
+      Twain as humorist has sought the highest common factor of all nations. "My
+      secret&mdash;if there is any secret&mdash;," Mr. Clemens once said to me,
+      "is to create humour independent of local conditions. In studying humanity
+      as exhibited in the people and localities I best knew and understood, I
+      have sought to winnow out the encumbrance of the local." And he
+      significantly added&mdash;musingly&mdash;" Humour, like morality, has its
+      eternal verities."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has
+      contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the Mississippi,
+      'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank with the very best
+      examples of picaresque fiction;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might well
+      be regarded as the supreme American morality&mdash;play of youth,
+      'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of such
+      originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory parallel in
+      literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and all of
+      'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases of a
+      civilization now vanished forever. It is gratifying to Americans to
+      recognize in Mark Twain the incarnation of democratic America. It is
+      gratifying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and recapture the
+      pleasure and delight his works have given them for decades. It is more
+      gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain,
+      America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of
+      Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe&mdash;a man who will
+      be remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, "with the great humorists of all
+      time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company;
+      none of them was his equal in humanity."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
+      <img alt="pp179.jpg (33K)" src="images/pp179.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      <a name="philosopher" id="philosopher">PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST</a>
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p>
+            "Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward<br /> towards a
+            summit where you will find your chiefest<br /> pleasure in conduct
+            which, while contenting you, will<br /> be sure to confer benefits
+            upon your neighbour and the<br /> community."<br /> MARK TWAIN: 'What
+            is Man?'
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The humorous writer," says Thackeray, "professes to awaken and direct
+      your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension,
+      and imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the
+      unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the
+      ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be
+      the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks,
+      and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him.&mdash;sometimes love
+      him." This definition is apt enough to have been made with Mark Twain in
+      mind. In an earlier chapter, is displayed the comic phase of Mark Twain's
+      humour. Beneath that humour, underlying it and informing it, is a fund of
+      human concern, a wealth of seriousness and pathos, and a universality of
+      interests which argue real power and greatness. These qualities, now to be
+      discussed, reveal Mark Twain as serious enough to be regarded as a real
+      moralist and philosopher, humane enough to be regarded as, in spirit, a
+      true sociologist and reformer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be recognised that the history of literature furnishes forth no
+      great international figure, whose fame rests solely upon the basis of
+      humour, however human, however sympathetic, however universal that humour
+      may be. Behind that humour must lurk some deeper and more serious
+      implication which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product. Genuine
+      humour, as Landor has pointed out, requires a "sound and capacious mind,
+      which is always a grave one." There is always a breadth of philosophy, a
+      depth of sadness, or a profundity of pathos in the very greatest
+      humorists. Both Rabelais and La Fontaine were reflective dreamers;
+      Cervantes fought for the progressive and the real in pricking the bubble
+      of Spanish chivalry; and Moliere declared that, for a man in his position,
+      he could do no better than attack the vices of his time with ridiculous
+      likenesses. Though exhibiting little of the melancholy of Lincoln, Mark
+      Twain revelled in the same directness of thought and expression, showed
+      the same zest for broad humour reeking with the strong but pungent flavour
+      of the soil. Though expressing distaste for Franklin's somewhat cold and
+      almost mercenary injunctions, Mark Twain nevertheless has much of his
+      Yankee thrift, shrewdness, and bed-rock common sense. Beneath and
+      commingled with all his boyish and exuberant fun is a note of pathos
+      subdued but unmistakable, which rings true beside the forced and
+      extravagant pathos of Dickens. His Southern hereditament of chivalry, his
+      compassion for the oppressed and his defence of the down-trodden, were
+      never in abeyance from the beginning of his career to the very end. Like
+      Joel Chandler Harris, that genial master of African folk-lore, Mark Twain
+      found no theme of such absorbing interest as human nature. Like Fielding,
+      he wrote immortal narratives in which the prime concern is not the
+      "story," but the almost scientific revelation of the natural history of
+      the characters. The corrosive and mordant irony of many a passage in Mark
+      Twain, wherein he holds up to scorn the fraudulent and the artificial, the
+      humbug, the hypocrite, the sensualist, are not unworthy of the colossal
+      Swift. That "disposition for hard hitting with a moral purpose to sanction
+      it," which George Meredith pronounces the national disposition of British
+      humour, is Mark Twain's unmistakable hereditament. It is, perhaps, because
+      he relates us to our origins, as Mr. Brander Matthews has suggested, that
+      Mark Twain is the foremost of American humorists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the preface to the Jumping Frog, published as far back as 1867, Mark
+      Twain was dubbed, not only "the wild humorist of the Pacific slope," but
+      also "the moralist of the Main." The first book which brought him great
+      popularity, 'The Innocents Abroad', exhibited qualities of serious ethical
+      import which, while escaping the attention of the readers of that day,
+      emerge for the moderns from the welter of hilarious humour. How
+      unforgettable is his righteous indignation over that "benefit" performance
+      he witnessed in Italy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ingrained quality in Mark Twain, which perhaps more than any other won
+      the enthusiastic admiration of his fellow Americans, was this: he always
+      had the courage of his convictions. He writes of things, classic and
+      hallowed by centuries, with a freshness of viewpoint, a total indifference
+      to crystallized opinion, that inspire tremendous respect for his courage,
+      even when one's own convictions are not engaged. The "beautiful love story
+      of Abelard and Heloise" will never, I venture to say, recover its pristine
+      glory&mdash;now that Mark Twain has poured over Abelard the vials of his
+      wrath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those who know only the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep,
+      underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and
+      truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker
+      and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence. In answer to a query of
+      mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave
+      carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: "I never wrote
+      a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens. She is solely
+      responsible&mdash;to her should go the credit&mdash;for any deeply serious
+      or moral influence my subsequent work may exert. After my marriage, she
+      edited everything I wrote. And what is more&mdash;she not only edited my
+      works, she edited ME! After I had written some side-splitting story,
+      something beginning seriously and ending in preposterous anti-climax, she
+      would say to me: 'You have a true lesson, a serious meaning to impart
+      here. Don't give way to your invincible temptation to destroy the good
+      effect of your story by some extravagantly comic absurdity. Be yourself!
+      Speak out your real thoughts as humorously as you please, but&mdash;without
+      farcical commentary. Don't destroy your purpose with an ill-timed joke.' I
+      learned from her that the only right thing was to get in my serious
+      meaning always, to treat my audience fairly, to let them really feel the
+      underlying moral that gave body and essence to my jest."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The quality with which Mark Twain invests his disquisitions upon morals,
+      upon conscience, upon human foibles and failings, is the charm of the
+      humorist always&mdash;never the grimness of the moralist or the coldness
+      of the philosopher. He observes all human traits, whether of moral
+      sophistry or ethical casuistry, with the genial sympathy of a lover of his
+      kind irradiated with the riant comprehension of the humorist. And yet at
+      times there creeps into his tone a note of sincere and manly pathos,
+      unmistakable, irresistible. One has only to read the beautiful, tender
+      tale of the blue jay in 'A Tramp Abroad' to know the beauty and the depth
+      of his feeling for nature and her creatures, his sense of kinship with his
+      brothers of the animal kingdom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In our first joyous and headlong interest in the narrative of 'Huckleberry
+      Finn', its rapid succession of continuously arresting incidents, its
+      omnipresent yet never intrusive humour, the deeper significance of many a
+      passage in that contemporary classic is likely to escape notice. Sir
+      Walter Besant, who revelled in it as one of the most completely satisfying
+      and delightful of books, speaks of it deliberately as a book without a
+      moral. Perhaps he was deceived by the foreword: "Persons attempting to
+      find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to
+      find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in
+      it will be shot." There never was a more easy-going, care-free,
+      unpuritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the two farcical "hoboes," Tom
+      Sawyer, and the rest. And yet in the light of Mark Twain's later writings
+      one cannot but see in that picaresque romance, with its pleasingly loose
+      moral atmosphere, an underlying seriousness and conviction. Jim is a
+      simple, harmless negro, childlike and primitive; yet, so marvellous, so
+      restrained is the art of the narrator, that imperceptibly, unconsciously,
+      one comes to feel not only a deep interest in, but a genuine respect for,
+      this innocent fugitive from slavery. Mr. Booker Washington, a
+      distinguished representative of his race, said he could not help feeling
+      that, in the character of Jim, Mark Twain had, perhaps unconsciously,
+      exhibited his sympathy for and interest in the masses of the negro people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, to the reflective mind&mdash;and it is to be presumed that by that
+      standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged&mdash;there is no
+      more significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck
+      struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral
+      responsibility for compassing Jim's emancipation. Nothing else is needed
+      to show at once Mark Twain's preoccupation with the workings of human
+      conscience in the unsophisticated mind and his conviction that, with the
+      "lights that he had," Huck was justified in his courageous decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Huck felt deeply repentant for allowing Jim to escape from the innocent,
+      inoffending Miss Watson. He became consumed with horror and remorse to
+      hear Jim making plans for stealing his wife and children, if their masters
+      wouldn't sell them. His conscience kept stirring him up hotter than ever
+      when he heard Jim talking to himself about the joys of freedom. After
+      awhile, Huck decided to write a letter to Miss Watson, informing her of
+      the whereabouts of her "runaway nigger." After writing that letter, he
+      felt washed clean of sin, uplifted, exalted. But he could not forget all
+      the goodness and tenderness of poor Jim, who had shown himself so
+      profoundly grateful. Though he faced the torments of Puritanical damnation
+      as a consequence, he resolved to let Jim go free. Humanity triumphed over
+      conscience&mdash;and with an "All right, then, I'll go to hell," he tore
+      up the letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of Mark Twain's favourite themes for the display of his humour was the
+      subject of prevarication. He seemed never to tire of ringing the changes
+      upon the theme of the lie, its utility, its convenience, and its
+      consequences. Doubtless he chose to dabble in falsehood because it is
+      generally winked at as the most venial of all moral obliquities&mdash;a
+      fault which is the most thoroughly universal of all that flesh is heir to.
+      The incident of George Washington and the cherry tree furnished the basis
+      for countless of his anecdotes; he wrung from it variations innumerable,
+      from the epigram to the anecdote. His distinction between George
+      Washington and himself, redounding immeasurably to his own glory, and
+      demonstrating his complete superiority to Washington as a moral character,
+      is classic: "George Washington couldn't tell a lie. I can; but I won't."
+      Perhaps his most humorous anecdote, based upon the same story, is in
+      connection with the exceedingly old "darky" he once met in the South, who
+      claimed to have crossed the Delaware with Washington. "Were you with
+      Washington," asked Mark Twain mischievously, "when he took that hack at
+      the cherry tree?" This was a poser for the old darkey; his pride was
+      appealed to, his very character was at stake. After an awkward hesitation,
+      the old darkey spoke up, a gleam of simulated recollection (and real
+      gratification for his convenient memory) overspreading his countenance:
+      "Lord, boss, I was dar. In cose I was. I was with Marse George at dat very
+      time. In fac&mdash;I done druv dat hack myself"!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's most delightful trick as a popular humorist was to strike out
+      some comic epigram, that passed currency with the masses whose fancy it
+      tickled, and also had upon it the minted stamp of the classic aphorism.
+      These epigrams were frequently pseudo-moral in their nature; and their
+      humour usually lay in the assumption that everybody is habitually addicted
+      to prevarication&mdash;which is just precisely true enough and
+      reprehensible enough to validate the epigram. His method was humorous
+      inversion; and he told a story whose morals are so ludicrously twisted
+      that the right moral, by contrast, spontaneously springs to light. "Never
+      tell a lie&mdash;except for practice," is less successful than the more
+      popularly known "When in doubt, tell the truth." Out of the latter maxim
+      he succeeded in extracting a further essence of humour. He admitted
+      inventing the maxim, but never expected it to be applied to himself. His
+      advice, he said, was intended for other people; when he was in doubt
+      himself, he used more sagacity! Mark Twain has made no more delightful
+      epigram than that one in which he recognizes that a lie, morally
+      reprehensible as it may be, is undoubtedly an ever present help in time of
+      need: "Never waste a lie. You never know when you may need it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes in a humorous, sometimes in a grimly serious way, Mark Twain was
+      fond of drawing the distinction between theoretical and practical morals.
+      Theoretical morals, he would point out, are the sort you get on your
+      mother's knee, in good books, and from the pulpit. You get them into your
+      head, not into your heart. Only by the commission of crime can anyone
+      acquire real morals. Commit all the crimes in the decalogue, take them in
+      rotation, persevere in this stern determination&mdash;and after awhile you
+      will thereby attain to moral perfection! It is not enough to commit just
+      one crime or two&mdash;though every little bit helps. Only by committing
+      them all can you achieve real morality! It is interesting to note this
+      distinction between Mark Twain, the humorous moralist, and Bernard Shaw,
+      the ethical thinker. Each teaches precisely the same thing&mdash;the one
+      not even half seriously, the other with all the sharp sincerity of
+      conviction. Shaw unhesitatingly declares that trying to be wicked is
+      precisely the same experiment as trying to be good, viz., the discovery of
+      character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The range of Mark Twain's humour, from the ludicrous anecdote with
+      comically mixed morals to the profound parable with grimly ironic
+      conclusion, takes the measure of the ethical nature of the man. It can
+      best be illustrated, I think, by a comparison of his anecdote of the theft
+      of the green water-melon and the classic fable of 'The Man that Corrupted
+      Hadleyburg'. Mark stole a water-melon out of a farmer's wagon, while he
+      wasn't looking. Of course stole was too harsh a term&mdash;he withdrew, he
+      retired that water-melon. After getting safely away to a secluded spot, he
+      broke the water-melon open&mdash;only to find that it was green, the
+      greenest water-melon of the year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The moment he saw that the water-melon was green, he felt sorry. He began
+      to reflect&mdash;for reflection is the beginning of reform. It is only by
+      reflecting on some crime you have committed, that you are "vaccinated"
+      against committing it again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Mark began to reflect. And his reflections were of this nature: What
+      ought a boy to do who has stolen a green water-melon? What would George
+      Washington, who never told a lie, have done? He decided that the only
+      real, right thing for any boy to do, who has stolen a water-melon of that
+      class, is to make restitution. It is his duty to restore it to its
+      rightful owner. So rising up, spiritually strengthened and refreshed by
+      his noble resolution, Mark restored the water&mdash;melon&mdash;what there
+      was left of it&mdash;to the farmer and&mdash;made the farmer give him a
+      ripe one in its place! Thus he clinched the "moral" of this story, so
+      quaint and so ingenious; and concluded that only in some such way as this
+      could one be fortified against further commission of crime. Only thus
+      could one become morally perfect!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, as in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical
+      suggestion&mdash;a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his
+      literal words&mdash;the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity,
+      fantasy, light irony. Yet beneath this outer covering of art there is a
+      serious meaning that, like murder, will out. If demonstration were needed
+      that Mark Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is amply
+      supplied by that masterpiece, that triumph of invention, construction, and
+      originality, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'. Here is a pure morality,
+      daring in the extreme and incredibly original in a world perpetually
+      reiterating a saying already thousands of years old, to the effect that
+      there is nothing new under the sun. It is a deliberate emendation of that
+      invocation in the Lord's Prayer "Lead us (not) into temptation." The
+      shrieking irony of this trenchant parable, its cynicism and heartlessness,
+      would make of it an unendurable criticism of human life&mdash;were it
+      accepted literally as a representation of society. In essence it is a
+      morality pure and simple, animated not only by its brilliantly original
+      ethical suggestion, but also by its illuminating reflection of human
+      nature and its graciously relieving humour. In that exultant letter which
+      the <i>Diabolus ex machin</i> wrote to the betrayed villagers, he sneers
+      at their old and lofty reputation for honesty&mdash;that reputation of
+      which they were so inordinately proud and vain. The weak point in their
+      armour was disclosed so soon as he discovered how carefully and vigilantly
+      they kept themselves and their children out of temptation. For he well
+      knew that the weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been
+      tested in the fire. The familiar distinction between innocence and virtue
+      springs to mind. And it is worthy of consideration that Nietzsche, and
+      Shaw after him, both point out that virtue consists, not in resisting
+      evil, but in not desiring it! 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' is a
+      masterpiece, eminently worthy of the genius of a Swift. It proclaims Mark
+      Twain not only as a supreme artist, but also as eminently and
+      distinctively a moralist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is impossible to think of Mark Twain in his maturer development as
+      other than a moralist. My personal acquaintance with Mr. Clemens convinced
+      me&mdash;had I needed to be convinced&mdash;that in his later years he had
+      striven to grapple nobly with many of the deeper issues of life, character
+      and morality, public, religious and social, as well as personal and
+      private. I never knew anyone who thought so "straight," or who expressed
+      himself with such simple directness upon questions affecting religion and
+      conduct. He was absolutely fearless in his condemnation of those
+      subsidized "ministers" of the Gospel in cosmopolitan centres, who, through
+      self-interest, cut their moral disquisitions to fit the predilections of
+      their wealthy parishioners, many of whom were under national condemnation
+      as "malefactors of great wealth." Animated by love for all creatures, the
+      defenceless wild animal as well as the domestic pet, he was unsparing in
+      his indictment of those big-game hunters who shamelessly described their
+      feelings of savage exultation when some poor animal served as the target
+      for their skill, and staggered off wounded unto death. His sympathy for
+      the natives of the Congo was profound and intense; and his philippic
+      against King Leopold for the atrocities he sanctioned called the attention
+      of the whole world to conditions that constituted a disgrace to modern
+      civilization. His diatribe against the Czar of Russia for his inhumanity
+      to the serfs was an equally convincing proof of his noble determination to
+      throw the whole weight of his influence in behalf of suffering and
+      oppressed humanity. Some years before his death, he told me that he never
+      intended to speak in public again save in behalf of movements,
+      humanitarian and uplifting, which gave promise of effecting civic
+      betterment and social improvement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have always felt a peculiar and personal debt of gratitude to Mark Twain
+      for three events&mdash;for the publication of such works can be dignified
+      with no less eminent characterization. When Mr. Edward Dowden tried to
+      make out the best case for Shelley that he could, it was at the sacrifice
+      of the reputation of the defenceless Harriet Westbrook. That ingrained
+      chivalry which is the defining characteristic of the Southerner, the
+      sympathy for the oppressed, the compassion for the weak and the
+      defenceless, animated Mark Twain to one of the noblest actions of his
+      career. For his defence of Harriet Westbrook is something more than a
+      work, it is an act&mdash;an act of high courage and nobility. With words
+      icily cold in their logic, Mark Twain tabulated the six pitifully
+      insignificant charges against Harriet, such as her love for dress and her
+      waning interest in Latin lessons, and set over against them the six times
+      repeated name of Cornelia Turner, that fascinating young married woman who
+      read Petrarch with Shelley and sat up all hours of the night with him&mdash;because
+      he saw visions when he was alone! Again, in his 'Joan of Arc', Mark Twain
+      erected a monument of enduring beauty to that simple maid of Orleans, to
+      whom the Roman Catholic Church has just now paid the merited yet tardy
+      tribute of canonization. It is a sad commentary upon the popular attitude
+      of frivolity towards the professional humorist that Mark Twain felt
+      compelled to publish this book anonymously, in order that the truth and
+      beauty of that magic story might receive its just meed of respectful and
+      sympathetic attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third act for which I have always felt deeply grateful to Mark Twain
+      is the apparently little known, yet beautiful and significant story
+      entitled 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' It contains, I believe, the moral that
+      had most meaning for Mark Twain throughout his entire life&mdash;the
+      bankruptcy of rigidly formal Puritanism in the face of erring human
+      nature, the tragic result of heedlessly holding to the letter, instead of
+      wisely conforming to the spirit, of moral law. No one doubts that Mark
+      Twain&mdash;as who would not?&mdash;believed, aye, knew, that this sweet,
+      human child went to a heaven of forgiveness and mercy, not to a hell of
+      fire and brimstone, for her innocently trivial transgression. The essay on
+      Harriet Shelley, the novel of 'Joan of Arc', and the story 'Was it Heaven
+      or Hell?' are all, as decisively as the philippic against King Leopold,
+      the diatribe against the Czar of Russia, essential vindications of the
+      moral principle. 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' in its simple pathos, 'The Man
+      that Corrupted Hadleyburg' in its morally salutary irony, present vital
+      evidence of that same transvaluation of current moral values which marks
+      the age of Nietzsche and Ibsen, of Tolstoy and Shaw. In that amusing,
+      naive biography of her father, little Susy admits that he could make
+      exceedingly bright jokes and could be extremely amusing; but she maintains
+      that he was more interested in earnest books and earnest conversation than
+      in humorous ones. She pronounced him to be as much of a Pholosopher (sic)
+      as anything. And she hazards the opinion that he might have done a great
+      deal in this direction if only he had studied when he was a boy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Years ago, Mark Twain wrote a book which he called 'An Extract from
+      Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'. For long he desisted from
+      publishing it because of his fear that its outspoken frankness would
+      appear irreverent and shock the sensibilities of the public. While his
+      villa of "Stormfield" was in course of erection several years ago, he
+      discovered that half of it was going to cost what he had expected to pay
+      for the whole house. His heart was set on having a loggia or sun-parlour;
+      and when it seemed that he would have to sacrifice this apple of his eye
+      through lack of funds, he threw discretion to the winds, hauled out
+      Captain Stormfield and made the old tar pay the piper. His fears as to its
+      reception were wholly unwarranted; for it was generously enjoyed for its
+      shrewd and vastly suggestive ideas on religion and heaven as popularly
+      taught nowadays from the pulpits. This book is full of a keen and bluff
+      common sense, cannily expressed in the words of an old sea-captain whom
+      Mark Twain had known intimately. It is only another link in the chain of
+      evidence which goes to prove that Mark Twain had thought long and deeply
+      upon the problematical nature of a future life. It is, in essence, a <i>reductio
+      ad absurdu</i> of those professors of religion who still preach a heaven
+      of golden streets and pearly gates, of idleness and everlasting
+      psalm-singing, of restful and innocuous bliss. Mark Twain wanted to point
+      out the absurdity of taking the allegories and the figurative language of
+      the Bible literally. Of course everybody called for a harp and a halo as
+      soon as they reached heaven. They were given the harps and halos&mdash;indeed
+      nothing harmless and reasonable was refused them. But they found these
+      things the merest accessories. Mark Twain's heaven was just the busiest
+      place imaginable. There weren't any idle people there after the first day.
+      The old sea captain pointed out that singing hymns and waving palm
+      branches through all eternity was all very pretty when you heard about it
+      from the pulpit, but that it was a mighty poor way to put in valuable
+      time. He took no stock in a heaven of warbling ignoramuses. He found that
+      Eternal Rest, reduced to hard pan, was not as comforting as it sounds in
+      the pulpit. Heaven is the merited reward of service; and the opportunities
+      for service were infinite. As he said, you've got to earn a thing square
+      and honest before you can enjoy it. To Mark, this was "about the
+      sensiblest heaven" he had ever heard of. He mourned a little over the
+      discovery that what a man mostly missed in heaven was company. But he
+      rejoiced in the information vouchsafed by his friend the Captain&mdash;a
+      valuable piece of information that leaves him, and all who are so
+      fortunate as to hear it, the better for the knowledge&mdash;that happiness
+      isn't a thing in itself, but only a contrast with something that isn't
+      pleasant! This view of heaven, seen through the temperament of a humorist
+      and a philosopher, is provocative and thought-compelling more than it is
+      amusing or ludicrous. I think it inspired Bernard Shaw's Aerial Foot-ball
+      which won Collier's thousand dollar prize&mdash;a prize which Mr Shaw
+      hurled back with indignation and scorn!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain was a great humorist&mdash;more genial than grim, more
+      good-humoured than ironic, more given to imaginative exaggeration than to
+      intellectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than to melancholy.
+      He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the
+      literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their
+      likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and
+      picaresque romance. He was a remarkable observer and faithful reporter,
+      never allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be "frightened by the
+      venerableness of the institution"; and his sublimated journalism reveals a
+      mastery of the naively comic thoroughly human and democratic. He is the
+      most eminent product of our American democracy, and, in profoundly
+      shocking Great Britain by preferring Connecticut to Camelot, he exhibited
+      that robustness of outlook, that buoyancy of spirit, and that faith in the
+      contemporary which stamps America in perennial and inexhaustible youth.
+      Throughout his long life, he has been a factor of high ethical influence
+      in our civilization, and the philosopher and the humanitarian look out
+      through the twinkling eyes of the humorist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, after all, Mark Twain's supreme title to distinction as a great
+      writer inheres in his natural, if not wholly conscious, mastery in that
+      highest sphere of thought, embracing religion, philosophy, morality and
+      even humour, which we call sociology. When I first advanced this view, it
+      was taken up on all sides. Here, we were told, was Mark Twain "from a new
+      angle"; the essay was reviewed at length on the continent of Europe; and
+      the author of the essay was invited "to explain Mark Twain to the German
+      public"! There are still many people, however, who resent any
+      demonstration that Mark Twain was anything more than a mirthful and
+      humorous entertainer. Mr. Bernard Shaw once remarked to me, in support of
+      the view here outlined, that he regarded Poe and Mark Twain as America's
+      greatest achievements in literature, and that he thought of Mark Twain
+      primarily, not as humorist, but as sociologist. "Of course," he added,
+      "Mark Twain is in much the same position as myself: he has to put matters
+      in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him, believe he
+      is joking."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain once said that whenever he had diverged from custom and
+      principle to utter a truth, the rule had been that the hearer hadn't
+      strength of mind enough to believe it. "Custom is a petrifaction," he
+      asserted; "nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century." Mr. W. D.
+      Howells has advanced the somewhat fanciful theory that "the ludicrous
+      incongruity of a slave-holding democracy nurtured upon the Declaration of
+      Independence, and the comical spectacle of white labour owning black
+      labour, had something to do in quickening (in Mark Twain) the sense of
+      contrast which is the mountain of humour or is said to be so." However
+      that may be, Mark Twain was irresistibly driven to the conclusion,
+      Southern born though he was, that slavery was unjust, inhuman, and
+      indefensible. The advanced thinkers in the South had reached this
+      conclusion long before the beginning of the Civil War, and many Southern
+      men had actually devised freedom to their slaves in their wills. The
+      slaves were treated humanely, their material wants were cared for by their
+      owners with a care that can only be called loving, and their spiritual
+      welfare was the frequent concern in particular of the mistress of the
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his schoolboy days, Mark Twain had no aversion to slavery. He wasn't
+      even aware that there was anything wrong about it. He never heard it
+      condemned by acquaintances or in the local papers. And as for the
+      preachers, they taught that God approved slavery, and cited Biblical
+      passages in support of that view. If the slaves themselves were averse to
+      it, at least they kept discreetly silent on the subject. He seldom saw a
+      slave misused&mdash;on the farm, never. But when he was brought face to
+      face with Sandy, the little slave forcibly separated from his family, it
+      made a deep impression upon his consciousness. It was this deplorable evil
+      of the system, this unnatural and inhuman forcible separation of the
+      members of the same family, the one from the other, that convinced him of
+      the injustice of slavery; though this vision, as has been pointed out by
+      Mr. Howells, did not come to him "till after his liberation from
+      neighbourhood in the vaster far West." Yet it found its way into his books&mdash;into
+      Huckleberry Finn, with its recital of Jim's pathetic longing to buy back
+      his wife and children; and in Pudd'nhead Wilson with its moving picture of
+      the poor slave's agony when she suddenly realizes in the way the water is
+      flowing around the snag that she is being "sold down the river." In Uncle
+      Tom's Cabin, as Professor Phelps has pointed out, "the red&mdash;hot
+      indignation of the author largely nullified her evident desire to tell the
+      truth. . . . Mrs. Stowe's astonishing work is not really the history of
+      slavery; it is the history of abolition sentiment. . . . Mark Twain shows
+      us the beautiful side of slavery&mdash;for it had a wonderfully beautiful,
+      patriarchal side&mdash;and he also shows us the horror of it." Mark Twain
+      has declared that the only way to write a great novel is to learn the
+      scenes and people with which the story is concerned, through years of
+      "unconscious absorption" of the facts of the life to be portrayed. When
+      his stories were written, slavery was a thing of the past&mdash;he was
+      competent to judge of the situation impartially, through direct personal
+      contact throughout his boyhood with the realities of slavery. His object
+      was not the object of the reformer, warped with prejudice and fired by
+      animosity. He saw clearly; for his aim was not polemic, but artistic.
+      Hence it is, I believe, that Mark Twain stands out as, in essence and in
+      fundamentals, a remarkable sociologist. Certain passages in his books on
+      the subject of slavery, as the historian Lecky has declared, are the
+      truest things that have ever been expressed on the subject which vexed a
+      continent and plunged a nation in bloody, fratricidal strife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi always call up to my mind the
+      most vivid pictures&mdash;pictures that are eternally unforgettable. The
+      memorable scene in which Colonel Sherburne quells the mob and his scathing
+      remarks upon lynching; the reality and the pathos of the feuds of those
+      Kentucky families, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, shooting each
+      other down at sight in vindication of honour and pride of race; the lordly
+      life of the pilot on the Mississippi, his violent and unchallenged sway
+      over his subordinates, his mastery of the river; the variegated colours of
+      that lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of the river&mdash;all
+      these sweep by us in a series of panoramic pictures as Huck's raft swings
+      lazily down the tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides his boat through the
+      dangers of the channel. Mark Twain is primarily a great artist, only
+      unconsciously a true sociologist. But his power as a sociologist is no
+      less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely more real and human
+      and verisimilar that it is not polemical. There is a "sort of
+      contemporaneous posterity" which has registered its verdict that Mark
+      Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era. But there is yet to
+      come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare say, class
+      Mark Twain as America's greatest, most human sociologist in letters. He is
+      the historian, the historian in art, of a varied and unique phase of
+      civilization on the American continent that has passed forever. And it is
+      inconceivable that any future investigator into the sociological phases of
+      that civilization can fail to find priceless and unparalleled documents in
+      the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane, boisterous yet universally
+      human writings of Mark Twain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain's genius of social comprehension and sociologic interpretation
+      went even deeper than this. His mastery lay not alone in penetrative
+      reflection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase of our
+      civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an "institution" blotted
+      from the American escutcheon and a collective racial passion that
+      periodically breaks forth from time to time in mad "carnivals of crime."
+      The defining quality of the true sociologist, that quality which gives his
+      profession its power and validity as an effective instrumentality in the
+      advancement of civilization, is the faculty of penetrating national and
+      racial disguises, and going directly to the heart of the human problem.
+      Mark Twain possessed this faculty in supreme degree. As a literary critic
+      he was banal and futile; but as a social and racial critic he was
+      remarkable and profound. His essay 'Concerning the Jews' is a masterpiece
+      of impartial interpretation; his comprehension of French and German racial
+      traits, as revealed in his works, is keen and pervasively pertinent; and
+      his magnificent analysis of the situation in South Africa, in the
+      concluding chapters of 'Following the Equator', rings clear with the
+      accents of truth and mounts almost to the dignity of public prophecy.
+      Deeper far, more comprehensive, and voiced with splendid courage, are Mark
+      Twain's interpretations of American democracy and his mirroring of the
+      national ideals. His "defence" of General Funston is a scorching and
+      devastating blast, red with the fires of patriotism. Whatever be one's
+      convictions, one cannot but respect the profound sincerity of Mark Twain's
+      berserker-like rage over the attitude of Europe in China, the barbarities
+      of Russian autocracy, and the horrors of America's methods in the
+      Philippines, copied after Weyler's <i>reconcentrad</i> policy in Cuba. His
+      study of Christian Science, despite its hyperbole, its gross exaggerations
+      and unfulfilled prophecies, is the expression of glorified common-sense, a
+      sociological study of religious fanaticism comprehensive in psychological
+      analysis of national and racial traits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his own works, Mark Twain brought to realization the dim and inchoate
+      fancies of Whitman; in his own person he realized that "divine average" of
+      common life which is the dream of American democracy. 'The Prince and the
+      Pauper' is a beautiful child's tale, vivid in narrative and rich in human
+      interest. It is something deeper far than this; for the very crucial
+      motive of the story, the successful substitution of the commoner for the
+      king, transforms it into a symbolic legend of democracy and the equality
+      of man. Mark Twain vehemently approved the French revolution, and frankly
+      expressed his regret over Napoleon's failure to invade England and thus
+      destroy the last vestiges of the semi-feudal paraphernalia of the British
+      monarchy. Despite its note of Yankee blatancy, 'A Yankee at the Court of
+      King Arthur' is a remarkable brief for democracy and the brotherhood of
+      man. So eminent a publicist as Mr. William T. Stead pronounced it, at the
+      time of its first appearance, one of the most significant books of our
+      time; and classed it (with Henry George's 'Progress and Poverty' and
+      Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward') as the third great book from America
+      to give tremendous impetus to the social democratic movement of the age.
+      Mark Twain abandoned all hope of a future life; found more of sorrow than
+      of joy in life's balances; and even, in his latter years, lost faith in
+      humanity itself. But amid the wreck of faiths and creeds, he achieved the
+      strange paradox of American optimism: he never lost faith in democracy,
+      and fought valiantly to the end in behalf of equality and the welfare of
+      the average man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several years ago, when we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship,
+      Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early
+      eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club to
+      which he belonged. This club was composed chiefly of men whose deepest
+      interests were concerned with the theological and the religiously
+      orthodox. One of his friends, to whom he read this paper in advance,
+      solemnly warned him not to read it before the club. For he felt confident
+      that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt as to the existence of
+      free will, and declaring without hesitation that every man was under the
+      immitigable compulsion of his temperament, his training, and his
+      environment, would appear unspeakably shocking, heretical and blasphemous
+      to the orthodox members of that club. "I did not read that paper," Mr.
+      Clemens said to me, "but I put it away, resolved to let it stand the
+      corrosive test of time. Every now and then, when it occurred to me, I used
+      to take that paper out and read it, to compare its views with my own later
+      views. From time to time I added something to it. But I never found,
+      during that quarter of a century, that my views had altered in the
+      slightest degree. I had a few copies published not long ago; but there is
+      not the slightest evidence in the book to indicate its authorship." A few
+      days later he gave me a copy, and when I read that book, I found these
+      words, among others, in the prefatory note:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Every thought in them (these papers) has been thought (and accepted as
+      unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men&mdash;and concealed,
+      kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and could
+      not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I not
+      published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no
+      other."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'What is Man?' propounds at length, through the medium of a dialogue
+      between a Young Man and an Old Man, the doctrine that "Beliefs are
+      acquirements; temperaments are born. Beliefs are subject to change;
+      nothing whatever can change temperament." He enunciates the theory, which
+      seems to me both brilliant and original, that there can be no such person
+      as a permanent seeker after truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "When he found the truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth,
+      with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he
+      tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors." "All training," he avers,
+      "is one form or another of outside influences, and association is the
+      largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside
+      influences have made him. They train him downward or they train him upward&mdash;but
+      they train him; they are at work upon him all the time." Once asked by
+      Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to write another story about Tom
+      Sawyer, Mark Twain replied that he had a notion of writing the sequel to
+      Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him to high honour, and in the
+      other bringing him to the gallows. When Kipling protested vigorously
+      against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer was real, Mark Twain
+      replied with the fatalistic doctrine of 'What is Man?': "Oh, he is real.
+      He's all the boy that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good
+      way of ending the book&mdash;because, when you come to think of it,
+      neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the
+      force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and
+      twenty years of Tom Sawyer's life, and gave a little joggle to the
+      circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to
+      the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel." It was what he called Kismet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the
+      days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all
+      faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal
+      God. And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or theology,
+      atheism or agnosticism, the individual or the nation embraced, the human
+      race remained "indestructibly content, happy, thankful, proud." He never
+      had a tinge of pessimism in his make-up, his beliefs never tended to warp
+      his nature, he accepted his fatalism gladly because he saw in it supreme
+      truth. His ultimate philosophy of life, which he sums up in 'What is
+      Man?', is healthy and right-minded. It is best embodied in the lofty
+      injunction: "Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward towards
+      a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct which,
+      while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbour
+      and the community." Lassalle once said: "History forgives mistakes and
+      failures, but not want of conviction." In Mark Twain, posterity will never
+      be called upon to forgive any want of conviction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Mark Twain, by Archibald Henderson
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
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+
+
+Title: Mark Twain
+
+Author: Archibald Henderson
+
+Release Date: November, 2004  [EBook #6873]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 5, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
+
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+
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN BY HENDERSON ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger, widger@cecomet.net
+
+
+
+
+
+                               MARK TWAIN
+
+                         By Archibald Henderson
+
+                With Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn
+
+
+
+
+                    "Haply--who knows?--somewhere
+                    In Avalon, Isle of Dreams,
+                    In vast contentment at last,
+                    With every grief done away,
+                    While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait,
+                    And Moliere hangs on his words,
+                    And Cervantes not far off
+                    Listens and smiles apart,
+                    With that incomparable drawl
+                    He is jesting with Dagonet now."
+
+                                        BLISS CARMAN.
+
+
+
+
+                                 PREFACE
+
+There are to-day, all over the world, men and women and children who owe
+a debt of almost personal gratitude to Mark Twain for the joy of his
+humour and the charm of his personality.  In the future they will, I
+doubt not, seek and welcome opportunities to acknowledge that debt.  My
+own experience with the works of Mark Twain is in no sense exceptional.
+From the days of early childhood, my feeling for Mark Twain, derived
+first solely from acquaintance with his works, was a feeling of warm
+and, as it were, personal affection.  With limitless interest and
+curiosity, I used to hear the Uncle Remus stories from the lips of one
+of our old family servants, a negro to whom I was devotedly attached.
+These stories were narrated to me in the negro dialect with such perfect
+naturalness and racial gusto that I often secretly wondered if the
+narrator were not Uncle Remus himself in disguise.  I was thus cunningly
+prepared, "coached" shall I say, for the maturer charms of Tom Sawyer
+and Huckleberry Finn.  With Uncle Remus and Mark Twain as my preceptors,
+I spent the days of my youth--excitedly alternating, spell-bound,
+between the inexhaustible attractions of Tom, Huck, Jim, Indian Joe, the
+Duke and the Dauphin, and their compeers on the one hand; and Brer
+Rabbit, Sis Cow, and a thousand other fantastic, but very real creatures
+of the animal kingdom on the other.
+
+I felt a strange sort of camaraderie, of personal attachment, for Mark
+Twain during all the years before I came into personal contact with him.
+It was the dictum of a distinguished English critic, to the effect that
+Huckleberry Finn was a literary masterpiece, which first awoke in me,
+then a mere boy, a genuine respect for literary criticism; for here was
+expressed an opinion which I had long secretly cherished, but somehow
+never dared to utter!
+
+My personal association with Mr. Clemens, comparatively brief though it
+was--an ocean voyage, meetings here and there, a brief stay as a guest
+in his home--gave me at last the justification for paying the debt
+which, with the years, had grown greater and more insistently
+obligatory.  I felt both relief and pleasure when he authorized me to
+pay that debt by writing an interpretation of his life and work.
+
+It is an appreciation originating in the heart of one who loved Mark
+Twain's works for a generation before he ever met Samuel L. Clemens.  It
+is an interpretation springing from the conviction that Mark Twain was a
+great American who comprehensively incorporated and realized his own
+country and his own age as no American has so completely done before
+him; a supreme humorist who ever wore the panache of youth, gaiety, and
+bonhomie; a brilliant wit who never dipped his darts in the poison of
+cynicism, misanthropy, or despair; constitutionally a reformer who,
+heedless of self, boldly struck for the right as he saw it; a
+philosopher and sociologist who intuitively understood the secret
+springs of human motive and impulse, and empirically demonstrated that
+intuition in works which crossed frontiers, survived translation, and
+went straight to the human, beneath the disguise of the racial; a genius
+who lived to know and enjoy the happy rewards of his own fame; a great
+man who saw life steadily and saw it whole.
+
+                                        ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.
+
+LONDON,
+August 5, 1910.
+
+
+NOTE.--The author esteems himself in the highest degree fortunate in
+having the co-operation of Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn.  All the
+illustrations, both autochrome and monochrome, are the work of Mr.
+Coburn.
+
+
+
+
+                                 CONTENTS
+
+PREFACE
+
+I.   INTRODUCTORY
+II.  THE MAN
+III. THE HUMORIST
+IV.  WORLD-FAMED GENIUS
+V.   PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST
+
+
+
+
+     "I've a theory that every author, while living, has a projection of
+     himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant
+     places, and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never
+     knew him in the flesh.  When the author dies, this phantom fades
+     away, not caring to continue business at the old stand.  Then the
+     dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature;
+     this impression may grow sharper or fainter according to the
+     fashions and new conditions of the time."
+
+     Letter of THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH to WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+     of date December 23, 1901.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+In the past, the attitude of the average American toward Mark Twain has
+been most characteristically expressed in a sort of complacent and
+chuckling satisfaction.  There was pride in the thought that America,
+the colossal, had produced a superman of humour.  The national vanity
+was touched when the nations of the world rocked and roared with
+laughter over the comically primitive barbarisms of the funny man from
+the "Wild and Woolly West."  Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an
+international comedian magically evoking the laughter of a world.  It
+would be a mis-statement to affirm that the works of Mark Twain were
+reckoned as falling within the charmed circle of "Literature."  They
+were not reckoned in connexion with literature at all.
+
+The fingers of one hand number those who realized in Mark Twain one of
+the supreme geniuses of our age.  Even in the event of his death, when
+the flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown emptily wide, there
+is room for grave doubt whether a realization of the unique and
+incomparable position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters has fully
+dawned upon the American consciousness.  The literatures of England and
+Europe do not posit an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive
+crudity and apparently unstudied frankness as the work of Mark Twain.
+It is for American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic,
+and to demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great
+artist.  It would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain's appeal to
+posterity depends upon the dicta of literary criticism.  It would be
+absurd to deny that upon America rests the task of demonstrating, to a
+world willing enough to be convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the
+supreme and imperishable glories of American literature.
+
+At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can
+be attributed what a Frenchman would call /mondial eclat/ is
+surprisingly few.  It was not so many years ago that Rudyard Kipling,
+with vigorous, imperialistic note, won for himself the unquestioned
+title of militant spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon race.  That fame has
+suffered eclipse in the passage of time.  To-day, Bernard Shaw has a
+fame more world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the
+British Isles.  His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from
+Buda-Pesth to Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to
+Buenos Ayres.  Recently Zola, Ibsen and, Tolstoy constituted the
+literary hierarchy of the world--according to popular verdict.  Since
+Zola and Ibsen have passed from the scene, Tolstoy experts unchallenged
+the profoundest influence upon the thought and consciousness of the
+world.  This is an influence streaming less from his works than from his
+life, less from his intellect than from his conscience.  The /literati/
+bemoan the artist of an epoch prior to 'What is Art?'  The whole world
+pays tribute to the passionate integrity of Tolstoy's moral aspiration.
+
+     [While this book was going through the press, news has come of the
+     death of Tolstoy.]
+
+Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most
+widely read and most genuinely popular author in the world.  In a sense
+not easily misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the minds and hearts
+of the great mass of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if
+measured in terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is
+without a parallel.  The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the
+defiant opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends
+many an inviolable canon of European taste.  With all his incandescent
+wit and comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon
+the upper strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is
+perpetually standing in the light of the serious reformer.  Tolstoy's
+works are Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet
+his literary fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the
+magnificent futility of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal
+mysticism of his unrealizable hopes.
+
+If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal,
+it is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour.
+That eidolon of which Aldrich speaks--a compact of good humour, robust
+sanity, and large-minded humanity--has diligently "gone about in near
+and distant places," everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk
+of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh.  The
+French have a way of speaking of an author's public as if it were a
+select and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a
+country like France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects,
+there is some reason for the phraseology.  In reality, the author
+appeals to many different "publics" or classes of readers--in proportion
+to the many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the
+catholicity of his tastes.  Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a
+boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of
+experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he
+points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to
+whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real
+psychological discovery of life.  With hearty laughter at the stupid
+irritations of self-conscious  virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid
+Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that
+innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the
+omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs
+of an unruly conscience.  With splendid satire for the base, with shrill
+condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the
+equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the
+growing body of reformers in all countries who would remedy the ills of
+democratic government with the knife of publicity.  The wisdom of human
+experience and of sagacious tolerance informing his books for the young,
+provokes the question whether these books are not more apposite to the
+tastes of experienced age than to the fancies of callow youth.  The
+navvy may rejoice in 'Life on the Mississippi'.  Youth and age may share
+without jealousy the abounding fun and primitive naturalness of
+'Huckleberry Finn'.  True lovers of adventure may revel in the masterly
+narrative of 'Tom Sawyer'.  The artist may bestow his critical meed of
+approval upon the beauty of 'Joan of Arc'.  The moralist may heartily
+validate the ethical lesson of 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'.
+Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible explosions of laughter to the
+horse-play of 'Roughing It', the colossal extravagance of 'The Innocents
+Abroad', the irreverence and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the
+hallowed confines of Camelot.  All may rejoice in the spontaneity and
+refreshment of truth; spiritually co-operate in forthright condemnation
+of fraud, peculation, and sham; and breathe gladly the fresh and bracing
+air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom.  The stevedore on the dock, the
+motor-man on the street car, the newsboy on the street, the riverman on
+the Mississippi--all speak with exuberant affection in memory of that
+quaint figure in his white suit, his ruddy face shining through wreaths
+of tobacco smoke and surmounted by a great halo of silvery hair.  In one
+day, as Mark Twain was fond of relating, an emperor and a /portier/ vied
+with each other in tributes of admiration and esteem for this man and
+his works.  It is Mark Twain's imperishable glory, not simply that his
+name is the most familiar of that of any author who has lived in our own
+times, but that it is remembered with infinite irrepressible zest.
+
+"We think of Mark Twain not as other celebrities, but as the man whom we
+knew and loved," said Dr. Van Dyke in his Memorial Address.  "We
+remember the realities which made his life worth while, the strong and
+natural manhood that was in him, the depth and tenderness of his
+affections, his laughing enmity to all shams and pretences, his long and
+faithful witness to honesty and fair-dealing.
+
+"Those who know the story of Mark Twain's career know how bravely he
+faced hardships and misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet
+a debt of conscience, following the injunction of the New Testament, to
+provide not only things honest, but things 'honourable in the sight of
+all men.'
+
+"Those who know the story of his friendships and his family life know
+that he was one who loved much and faithfully, even unto the end.  Those
+who know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and
+irrepressible humour which was his gift, there was a foundation of
+serious thoughts and noble affections and desires.
+
+"Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour
+means the absence of depth and earnestness.  There are elements of the
+unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world
+which must seem humorous even to the highest mind.  Of these the Bible
+says: 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall
+hold them in derision.'  But the mark of this higher humour is that it
+does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only
+at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical.
+
+"Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his
+humour was infallible; but we say without doubt that he used his gift,
+not for evil, but for good.  The atmosphere of his work is clean and
+wholesome.  He made fun without hatred.  He laughed many of the world's
+false claimants out of court, and entangled many of the world's false
+witnesses in the net of ridicule.  In his best books and stories,
+coloured with his own experiences, he touched the absurdities of life
+with penetrating, but not unkindly, mockery, and made us feel somehow
+the infinite pathos of life's realities.  No one can say that he ever
+failed to reverence the purity, the frank, joyful, genuine nature of the
+little children, of whom Christ said, 'Of such is the kingdom of
+heaven.'
+
+"Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud.
+We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of
+the great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left
+such an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own
+sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust,
+happy in the fuller light.
+
+             "'Rest after toil, port after stormy seas,
+               Death after life doth greatly please."'
+
+
+
+     "'We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime--the
+     thin air stifles'--I have forgotten who said it.  We cannot flush
+     always with the high ardour of the signers of the Declaration, nor
+     remain at the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry
+     continually, 'O Beautiful!  My country!'  Yet, in the long dull
+     interspans between these sacred moments we need some one to remind
+     us that we are a nation.  For in the dead vast and middle of the
+     years insidious foes are lurking--anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan
+     decadencies, the egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the
+     cold sickening of the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant
+     fraud and corruption.  When our countrymen migrate because we have
+     no kings or castles, we are thankful to any one who will tell us
+     what we can count on.  When they complain that our soil lacks the
+     humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful even for
+     the firing of a national joke heard round the world.  And when Mark
+     Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use
+     words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with
+     prairie fire and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on
+     all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by
+     Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the
+     Republic shall suffer no harm."
+
+                                   STUART P. SHERMAN: "MARK TWAIN."
+                                        The Nation, May 12, 1910.
+
+
+
+
+                                 THE MAN
+
+
+American literature, indeed I might say American life, can exhibit no
+example of supreme success from the humblest beginnings, so signal as
+the example of Mark Twain.  Lincoln became President of the United
+States, as did Grant and Johnson.  But assassination began for Lincoln
+an apotheosis which has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and
+adulation.  Grant was one of the great failures in American public life;
+and Johnson, brilliant but unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment.  Mark
+Twain enjoys the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive
+development, a deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of
+intellectual and spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his
+career.  From the standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of
+Mark Twain from a journeyman printer to a great author, from a merry-
+andrew to a world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy
+navigator on the vast and uncharted seas of human experience, may be
+taken as symbolic of the romance of American life.
+
+With a sort of mock--pride, Clemens referred at times to the ancestral
+glories of his house--the judge who condemned Charles I., and all those
+other notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed lustre upon the
+name of Clemens.  Yet he claimed that he had not examined into these
+traditions, chiefly because "I was so busy polishing up this end of the
+line and trying to make it showy."  His mother, a "Lambton with a p," of
+Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, a man of
+determination and force, in Lexington, in 1823; but neither was endowed
+with means, and their life was of the simplest.  From Jamestown, in the
+mountain solitudes of East Tennessee, they removed in 1829, much as
+Judge Hawkins is said to have done in 'The Gilded Age', settling at
+Florida, Missouri.  Here was born, on November 30, 1835, a few months
+after their arrival, Samuel Langhorne Clemens.  Long afterwards he
+stated that he had increased by one per cent. the population of this
+village of one hundred inhabitants, thereby doing more than the best man
+in history had ever done for any other town.
+
+Although weak and sickly, the child did not suffer from the hard life,
+and survived two other children, Margaret and Benjamin.  At different
+times his life was in danger, the local doctor always coming to the
+rescue.  He once asked his mother, after she had reached old age, if she
+hadn't been uneasy about him.  She admitted she had been uneasy about
+him the whole time.  But when he inquired further if she was afraid he
+would not live, she answered after a reflective pause--as if thinking
+out the facts--that she had been afraid he would!
+
+His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother of Samuel E. Moffett, the
+writer; and his brother Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was
+intimately associated with him in life and found a place in his
+writings.
+
+In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the unpromising life of Florida
+and removed to Hannibal, Missouri.  He was a stern, unbending man, a
+lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation; after his removal to
+Hannibal he became a Justice of the Peace, an office he filled with all
+the dignity of a local autocrat.  His forum was a "dingy" office,
+furnished with "a dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a
+puncheon bench."  The solemnity of his manner in administering the law
+won for him, among his neighbours, the title of Judge.
+
+One need but recall the scenes in which Tom Sawyer was born and bred to
+realize in its actuality the model from which these scenes were drawn.
+"Sam was always a good-hearted boy," his mother once remarked, "but he
+was a very wild and mischievous one, and, do what we would, we could
+never make him go to school.  This used to trouble his father and me
+dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much
+in the world as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and
+sober-minded as they were."  At school, he "excelled only in spelling";
+outside of school he was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn,
+mischievous and prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity
+afforded.  "Often his father would start him off to school," his mother
+once said, "and in a little while would follow him to ascertain his
+whereabouts.  There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and
+Sam would take his position behind that, and as his father went past
+would gradually circle around it in such a way as to keep out of sight.
+Finally, his father and the teacher both said it was of no use to try to
+teach Sam anything, because he was determined not to learn.  But I never
+gave up.  He was always a great boy for history, and could never get
+tired of that kind of reading; but he hadn't any use for schoolhouses
+and text books."
+
+Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a "loafing, out-at-elbows,
+down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi river town."  Young Clemens
+accepted the institution of slavery as a matter of course, for his
+father was a slave-owner; and his mother's wedding dowry consisted in
+part of two or three slaves.  Judge Clemens was a very austere man; like
+so many other slave-holders, he silently abhorred slavery.  To his
+children, especially to Sam, as well as to his slaves, he was, however,
+a stern taskmaster.  Mark Twain has described the terms on which he and
+his father lived as a sort of armed neutrality.  If at times this
+neutrality was broken and suffering ensued, the breaking and the
+suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between them--
+his father doing the breaking and he the suffering!  Sam claimed to be a
+very backward, cautious, unadventurous boy.  But this modest estimate is
+subject to modification when we learn that once he jumped off a two-
+story stable; another time he gave an elephant a plug of tobacco, and
+retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time he
+pretended to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion of every
+original conundrum in hearing of his father.  He begs the curious not to
+pry into the result--as it was of no consequence to any one but himself!
+
+The cave, so graphically described in Tom Sawyer, was one of Sam's
+favourite haunts; and his first sweetheart was Laura Hawkins, the Becky
+Thatcher of Tom's admiration.  "Sam was always up to some mischief,"
+this lady once remarked in later life, when in reminiscential mood.
+"We attended Sunday-school together, and they had a system of rewards
+for saying verses after committing them to memory.  A blue ticket was
+given for ten verses, a red ticket for ten blue, a yellow for ten red,
+and a Bible for ten yellow tickets.  If you will count up, you will see
+it makes a Bible for ten thousand verses.  Sam came up one day with his
+ten yellow tickets, and everybody knew he had not said a verse, but had
+just got them by trading with the boys.  But he received his Bible with
+all the serious air of a diligent student!"
+
+Mark Twain, save when in humorous vein, has never pretended that his
+success was due to any marvellous qualities of mind, any indefatigable
+industry, any innate energy and perseverance.  I have good reason to
+recall his favourite theory, which he was fond of expounding, to the
+effect that circumstance is man's master.  He likened circumstance to
+the attraction of gravity; and declared that while it is man's privilege
+to argue with circumstance, as it is the honourable privilege of the
+falling body to argue with the attraction of gravity, it does no good:
+man has to obey.  Circumstance has as its working partner man's
+temperament, his natural disposition.  Temperament is not the creation
+of man, but an innate quality; over it he has no authority; for its acts
+he cannot be held responsible.  It cannot be permanently changed or even
+modified.  No power can keep it modified.  For it is inherent and
+enduring, as unchanging as the lines upon the thumb or the conformation
+of the skull.  Throughout his life, circumstance seemed like a watchful
+spirit, switching his temperament into those channels of experience and
+development leading unerringly to the career of the author.
+
+The death of Judge Clemens was the first link inthe long chain of
+circumstance--for his son was at once taken from school and apprenticed
+to the editor and proprietor of the Hannibal Courier.  He was allowed
+the usual emolument of the office apprentice, "board and clothes, but no
+money"; and even at that, though the board was paid, the clothes rarely
+materialized.  Several weeks later his brother Orion returned to
+Hannibal, and in 1850 brought out a little paper called the 'Hannibal
+Journal.'  He took Sam out of the Courier office and engaged him for the
+Journal at $3.50 a week--though he was never able to pay a cent of the
+wages.  One of Mark's fellow-townsmen once confessed: "Yes, I knew him
+when he was a boy.  He was a printer's devil--I think that's what they
+called him--and they didn't miss it."  At a banquet some years ago, Mark
+Twain aptly described at length his experiences as a printer's
+apprentice.  There were a thousand and one menial services he was called
+upon to perform.  If the subscribers paid at all, it was only sometimes
+--and then the town subscribers paid in groceries, the country
+subscribers in cabbages and cordwood.  If they paid, they were puffed in
+the paper; and if the editor forgot to insert the puff, the subscriber
+stopped the paper!  Every subscriber regarded himself as assistant
+editor, ex officio; gave orders as to how the paper was to be edited,
+supplied it with opinions, and directed its policy.  Of course, every
+time the editor failed to follow his suggestions, he revenged himself by
+stopping the paper!
+
+After some financial stress, the paper was moved into the Clemens home,
+a "two-story brick"; and here for several years it managed to worry
+along, spasmodically hovering between life and death.  Life was easy
+with the editors of that paper; for if they pied a form, they suspended
+until the next week.  They always suspended anyhow, every now and then,
+when the fishing was good; and always fell back upon the illness of the
+editor as a convenient excuse, Mark admitted that this was a paltry
+excuse, for the all-sufficing reason that a paper of that sort was just
+as well off with a sick editor as a well one, and better off with a dead
+one than with either of them.  At the age of fifteen he considered
+himself a skilled journeyman printer; and his faculty for comedic
+portrayal had already betrayed itself in occasional clumsy efforts.  In
+'My First Literary Venture', he narrates his experiences, amongst others
+how greatly he increased the circulation of the paper, and incensed the
+"inveterate woman-killer," whose poetry for that week's paper read, "To
+Mary in H--l" (Hannibal).  Mark added a "snappy foot--note" at the
+bottom, in which he agreed to let the thing pass, for just that once;
+but distinctly warning Mr. J. Gordon Runnels that the paper had a
+character to sustain, and that in future, when Mr. Runnels wanted to
+commune with his friends in h--l, he must select some other medium for
+that communication!  Many were the humorous skits, crudely illustrated
+with cuts made from wooden blocks hacked out with his jack-knife, which
+the mischievous young "devil" inserted in his brother's paper.  Here we
+may discern the first spontaneous outcroppings of the genuine humorist.
+"It was on this paper, the 'Hannibal Journal'," says his biographer, Mr.
+Albert B. Paine, "that young Sam Clemens began his writings--burlesques,
+as a rule, of local characters and conditions--usually published in his
+brother's absence, generally resulting in trouble on his return.  Yet
+they made the paper sell, and if Orion had but realized his possession
+he might have turned his brother's talent into capital even then."
+
+One evening in 1858, the boy, consumed with wanderlust, asked his mother
+for five dollars--to start on his travels.  He failed to receive the
+money, but he defiantly announced that he would go "anyhow."  He had
+managed to save a tiny sum, and that night he disappeared and fled to St
+Louis.  There he worked in the composing-room of the Evening News for a
+time, and then started out "to see the world"--New York, where a little
+World's Fair was in progress.  He was somewhat better off than was
+Benjamin Franklin when he entered Philadelphia--for he had two or three
+dollars in pocket-change, and a ten-dollar bank-bill concealed in the
+lining of his coat.  For a time he sweltered in a villainous mechanics'
+boarding-house in Duane Street, and worked at starvation wages in the
+printing-office of Gray & Green.  Being recognized one day by a man from
+Hannibal, he fled to Philadelphia where he worked for some months as a
+"sub" on the 'Inquirer' and the 'Public Ledger'.  Next came a flying
+trip to Washington "to see the sights there," and then back he went to
+the Mississippi Valley.  This journey to the "vague and fabled East"
+really opened his eyes to the great possibilities that the world has in
+store for the traveller.
+
+Meantime, Orion had gone to Muscatine, Ohio, and acquired a small
+interest there; and, after his marriage, he and his wife went to Keokuk
+and started a little job printing-office.  Here Sam worked with his
+brother until the winter of 1856-7, when circumstance once again played
+the part of good fairy.  As he was walking along the street one snowy
+evening, his attention was attracted by a piece of paper which the wind
+had blown against the wall.  It proved to be a fifty-dollar bill; and
+after advertising for the owner for four days, he stealthily moved to
+Cincinnati in order "to take that money out of danger."  Now comes the
+second crucial event in his life!
+
+For long the ambition for river life had remained with him--and now
+there seemed some possibility of realizing these ambitions.  He first
+wanted to be a cabin boy; then his ideal was to be a deck hand, because
+of his splendid conspicuousness as he stood on the end of the stage
+plank with a coil of rope in his hand.  But these were only day-dreams--
+he didn't admit, even to himself, that they were anything more than
+heavenly impossibilities.  But as he worked during the winter in the
+printing-office of Wrightson & Company of Cincinnati, he whiled away his
+leisure hours reading Lieutenant Herndon's account of his explorations
+of the Amazon, and became greatly interested in his description of the
+cocoa industry.  Now he set to work to map out a new and thrilling
+career.  The expedition sent out by the government to explore the Amazon
+had encountered difficulties and left unfinished the exploration of the
+country about the head-waters, thousands of miles from the mouth of the
+river.  It mattered not to him that New Orleans was fifteen hundred
+miles away from Cincinnati, and that he had only thirty dollars left.
+His mind was made up he would go on and complete the work of
+exploration.  So in April, 1857, he set sail for New Orleans on an
+ancient tub, called the Paul Jones.  For the paltry sum of sixteen
+dollars, he was enabled to revel in the unimagined glories of the main
+saloon.  At last he was under way--realizing his boyhood dream, unable
+to contain himself for joy.  At last he saw himself as that hero of his
+boyish fancy--a traveller.
+
+When he reached New Orleans, after the prolonged ecstasy of two weeks on
+a tiny Mississippi steamer, he discovered that no ship was leaving for
+Para, that there never had been one leaving for Para and that there
+probably would not be one leaving for Para that century.  A policeman
+made him, move, on, threatening to run him in if he ever caught him
+reflecting in the public street again.  Just as his money failed him,
+his old friend circumstance arrived, with another turning-point in his
+life--a new link.  On his way down the river he had met Horace Bixby; he
+turned to him in this hour of need.  It has been charged against Mark
+Twain that he was deplorably lazy--apocryphal anecdotes are still
+narrated with much gusto to prove it.  Think of a lazy boy undertaking
+the stupendous task of learning to know the intricate and treacherous
+secrets of the great river, to know every foot of the route in the dark
+as well as he knew his own face in the glass!  And yet he confesses that
+he was unaware of the immensity of the undertaking upon which he had
+embarked.
+
+"In 1852," says Bixby, "I was chief pilot on the 'Paul Jones', a boat
+that made occasional trips from Pittsburg to New Orleans.  One day a
+tall, angular, hoosier-like young fellow, whose limbs appeared to be
+fastened with leather hinges, entered the pilot-house, and in a
+peculiar, drawling voice, said--
+
+"'Good mawnin, sir.  Don't you want to take er piert young fellow and
+teach 'im how to be er pilot?'
+
+"'No sir; there is more bother about it than it's worth.'
+
+"'I wish you would, mister.  I'm er printer by trade, but it don't 'pear
+to 'gree with me, and I'm on my way to Central America for my health.  I
+believe I'll make a tolerable good pilot, 'cause I like the river.'
+
+"'What makes you pull your words that way?'
+
+"'I don't know, mister; you'll have to ask my Ma.  She pulls hern too.
+Ain't there some way that we can fix it, so that you'll teach me how to
+be er pilot?'
+
+"'The only way is for money.'
+
+"'How much are you going to charge?
+
+"'Well, I'll teach you the river for $500.'
+
+"'Gee whillikens! he! he!  I ain't got $500, but I've got five lots in
+Keokuk, Iowa, and 2000 acres of land in Tennessee that is worth two bits
+an acre any time.  You can have that if you want it.'
+
+"I told him I did not care for his land, and after a while he agreed to
+pay $100 in cash (borrowed from his brother-in-law, William A. Moffett,
+of Virginia), $150 in twelve months, and the balance when he became a
+pilot.  He was with me for a long time, but sometimes took occasional
+trips with other pilots."  And he significantly adds "He was always
+drawling out dry jokes, but then we did not pay any attention to him."
+
+It cannot be thought accidental that Sam Clemens became a pilot.  Bixby
+became his mentor, the pilot-house his recitation-room, the steamboat
+his university, the great river the field of knowledge.
+
+In that stupendous course in nature's own college, he "learned the
+river" as schoolboy seldom masters his Greek or his mathematics.  With
+the naive assurance of youth, he gaily enters upon the task of
+"learning" some twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great
+Mississippi.  Long afterwards, he confessed that had he really known
+what he was about to require of his faculties, he would never have had
+the courage to begin.
+
+His comic sketches, published in the 'Hannibal Weekly Courier' in his
+brother's absence, furnish the first link, his apprenticeship to Bixby
+the second link in the chain of circumstance.  For two years and a half
+he sailed the river as a master pilot; his trustworthiness secured for
+him the command of some of the best boats on the river, and he was so
+skilful that he never met disaster on any of his trips.  He narrowly
+escaped it in 1861, for when Louisiana seceded, his boat was drafted
+into the Confederate service.  As he reached St. Louis, having taken
+passage for home, a shell came whizzing by and carried off part of the
+pilot-house.  It was the end of an era: the Civil War had begun.  The
+occupation of the pilot was gone; but the river had given up to him all
+of its secrets.  He was to show them to a world, in 'Life on the
+Mississippi' and 'Huckleberry Finn'.
+
+The story of the derivation of the famous /nom de guerre/ has often been
+narrated-and as often erroneously.  As the steamboat approaches a
+sandbank, snag, or other obstruction, the man at the bow heaves the lead
+and sings out, "By the mark, three," "Mark twain," etc.-meaning three
+fathoms deep, two fathoms, and so on.  The thought of adopting Mark
+Twain as a /nom de guerre/ was not original with Clemens; but the world
+owes him a debt of gratitude for making forever famous a name that, but
+for him, would have been forever lost.  "There was a man, Captain Isaiah
+Sellers, who furnished river news for the New Orleans Picayune, still
+one of the best papers in the South," Mr. Clemens once confessed to
+Professor Wm. L. Phelps.  "He used to sign his articles Mark Twain.  He
+died in 1863.  I liked the name, and stole it.  I think I have done him
+no wrong, for I seem to have made this name somewhat generally known."
+
+The inglorious escapade of his military career, at which he himself has
+poked unspeakable fun, and for which not even his most enthusiastic
+biographers have any excuse, was soon ended.  Had his heart really been
+enlisted on the side of the South, he would doubtless have stayed at his
+post.  In reality, he was at that time lacking in conviction; and in
+after life he became a thorough Unionist and Abolitionist.  In the
+summer of 1861, Governor Jackson of Missouri called for fifty thousand
+volunteers to drive out the Union forces.  While visiting in the small
+town where his boyhood had been spent, Hannibal, Marion County, young
+Clemens and some of his friends met together in a secret place one
+night, and formed themselves into a military company.  The spirited but
+untrained Tom Lyman was made captain; and in lieu of a first lieutenant
+--strange omission!--young Clemens was made second lieutenant.  These
+fifteen hardy souls proudly dubbed themselves the Marion Rangers.  No
+one thought of finding fault with such a name--it sounded too well.  All
+were full of notions as high-flown as the name of their company.  One of
+their number, named Dunlap, was ashamed of his name, because it had a
+plebeian sound to his ear.  So he solved the difficulty and gratified
+his aristocratic ambitions by writing it d'Unlap.  This may serve as a
+sample of the stuff of which the company was made.  Dunlap was by no
+means useless; for he invented hifalutin names for the camps, and
+generally succeeded in proposing a name that was, as his companions
+agreed, "no slouch."
+
+There was no real organization, nobody obeyed orders, there was never a
+battle.  They retreated, according to the tale of the humorist, at every
+sign of the enemy.  In truth, this little band had plenty of stomach for
+fighting, despite its loose organization; and quite a number fought all
+through the war.  Mark Twain is doubtless correct in the main, in his
+assertion that he has not given an unfair picture of the conditions
+prevailing in many of the militia camps in the first months of the war
+between the states.  The men were raw and unseasoned, and even the
+leaders were lacking in the rudiments of military training and
+discipline.  The situation was strange and unprecedented, the terrors
+were none the less real that they were imaginary.  As Mark says, it took
+an actual collision with the enemy on the field of battle to change them
+from rabbits into soldiers.  Young Clemens, according to his nephew's
+account, was first detailed to special duty on the river because of his
+knowledge acquired as a pilot; it was not long before he was captured
+and paroled.  Again he was captured, this time sent to St. Louis, and
+imprisoned there in a tobacco warehouse.  Fearing recognition and tragic
+consequences, perhaps courtmartial and death, should he, during the
+formalities of exchange, be recognized by the command in Grant's army
+which first captured him, he made his escape, abandoned the cause which
+he afterwards spoke of as "the rebellion," and went west as secretary to
+his brother Orion, lately appointed Territorial Secretary of Nevada by
+the President.
+
+A very credible and interesting biography of Mark Twain might be
+compiled from his own works; and Roughing it is full of autobiography of
+a coloured sort, though in the main correct.  His joy in the prospect of
+that trip, the exciting details of the long journey, are all narrated
+with gusto and fine effect.  In the "unique sinecure" of the office of
+private secretary, he found he had nothing to do and no salary; so after
+a short time--the fear of being recognized by Union soldiers and shot
+for breaking his parole still haunting him--he, and a companion, went
+off together on a fishing jaunt to Lake Tahoe.  Everywhere he saw
+fortunes made in a moment.  He fell a prey to the prevailing excitement
+and went mad like all the rest.  Little wonder over the wild talk, when
+cartloads of solid silver bricks as large as pigs of lead were passing
+by every day before their very eyes.  The wild talk grew more frenzied
+from day to day.  And young Clemens yielded to no one in enthusiasm and
+excitement.  For vividness or picturesqueness of expression none could
+vie with him.  With three companions, he began "prospecting," with the
+most indifferent success; and soon tiring of their situation, they moved
+on down to Esmeralda (now Aurora), on the other side of Carson City.
+Here new life seemed to inspire the party.  What mattered it if they
+were in debt to the butcher--for did they not own thirty thousand feet
+apiece in the "richest mines on earth"!  Who cared if their credit was
+not good with the grocer, so long as they revelled in mountains of
+fictitious wealth and raved in the frenzied cant of the hour over their
+immediate prospect of fabulous riches!  But at last the practical
+necessities of living put a sudden damper on their enthusiasm.  Clemens
+was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to work as a common
+labourer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board--after flour
+had soared to a dollar a pound and the rate on borrowed money had gone
+to eight per cent. a month.  This work was very exhausting, and after a
+week Clemens asked his employer for an advance of wages.  The employer
+replied that he was paying Clemens ten dollars a week, and thought that
+all he was worth.  How much did he want?  When Clemens replied that four
+hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was all he could reasonably
+ask, considering the hard times, he was ordered off the premises!  In
+after days, Mark only regretted that, in view of the arduous labours he
+had performed in that mill, he had not asked seven hundred thousand for
+his services!
+
+After a time, Mark and his friend Higbie established their claim to a
+mine, became mad with excitement, and indulged in the wildest dreams for
+the future.  Under the laws of the district, work of a certain character
+must be done upon the claim within ten days after location in order to
+establish the right of possession.  Mark was called away to the bedside
+of a sick friend, Higbie failed to receive Mark's note, and the work was
+never done--each thinking it was being properly attended to by the
+other.  On their return, they discovered that their claim was
+"re-located," and that millions had slipped from their grasp!  The very
+stars in their courses seemed to fight to force young Clemens into
+literature.  Had Samuel Clemens become a millionaire at this time, it is
+virtually certain that there would have been no Mark Twain.
+
+After one day more of heartless prospecting, Clemens "dropped in" at the
+wayside post-office.  It was the hour of fate!  A letter awaited him
+there.  We cannot call it accident--it was the result of forces and
+events which had long been converging toward this end.  Samuel Clemens
+began his career as an itinerant, tramping "jour" printer.  He wrote for
+the papers on which he served as printer; and he actually read the
+matter he set up in type.  By observation on his travels, by study of
+the writing of others, Clemens acquired information, knowledge of life,
+and ingenuity of expression.  He hadn't served his ten--years'
+apprenticeship as a printer for nothing.  In the process of setting up
+tons of good and bad literature, he had learned--half unconsciously--to
+appraise and to discriminate.  In the same half-unconscious way, he was
+actually gaining some inkling of the niceties of style.  After he began
+"learning the river," Clemens once wrote a funny sketch about Captain
+Sellers which made a genuine "hit" with the officers on the boat.  The
+sketch fell into the hands of the "river-editor" of the 'St. Louis
+Republican', found a place in that journal, and was widely copied
+throughout the West.  On the strength of it, Clemens became a sort of
+river reporter, and from time to time published memoranda and comic
+squibs in the 'Republican'.  That passion which a French critic has
+characterized as distinctively American, the passion for "seeing
+yourself in print," still burned in Clemens, even during all the
+hardships of prospecting and milling.  At intervals he sent from the
+mining regions of "Washoe," as all that part of Nevada was then called,
+humorous letters signed "Josh" to the 'Daily Territorial Enterprise' of
+Virginia City, at that time one of the most progressive and wide--awake
+newspapers in the West.
+
+The fateful letter which I have mentioned, contained an offer to Clemens
+from the proprietor of the 'Enterprise', of the position of city editor,
+at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week.  To Clemens at this time,
+this offer came as a perfect godsend.  Twenty-five dollars a week was
+nothing short of wealth, luxury.  His enthusiasm oozed away when he
+reflected over his ignorance and incompetence; and he gloomily recalled
+his repeated failures.  But necessity faced him; and opportunity knocks
+but once at every door.  His doubts were speedily resolved; and he
+afterwards confessed that, had he been offered at that time a salary to
+translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, he would unhesitatingly
+have accepted, despite some natural misgivings, and have tried to throw
+as much variety into it as he could for the money.  It was to fill a
+vacancy, caused by the absence of Dan De Quille, the regular reporter,
+on a visit to "the States," that Clemens was offered this position; but
+he retained it after De Quille returned.  "Mark and I had our hands
+full," relates De Quille, "and no grass grew under our feet.  There was
+a constant rush of startling events; they came tumbling over one another
+as though playing at leap-frog.  While a stage robbery was being written
+up, a shooting affray started; and perhaps before the pistol shots had
+ceased to echo among the surrounding hills, the firebells were banging
+out an alarm."  A record of the variegated duties of these two, found in
+an old copy of the Territorial Enterprise of 1863, bears the
+unmistakable hallmarks of Mark Twain.  "Our duty is to keep the universe
+thoroughly posted concerning murders and street fights, and balls and
+theatres, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and school-
+houses, and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and Bible
+societies, and hay wagons, and the thousand other things which it is
+within the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify into
+undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a great daily
+newspaper.  Beyond this revelation everything connected with these two
+experiments of Providence must for ever remain an impenetrable mystery."
+An admirable picture of Mark Twain on his native heath, in the latter
+part of 1863, is given by Edward Peron Hingston, author of The Genial
+Showman, in the introduction to the English edition of The Innocents
+Abroad.
+
+The fame of the Western humorist had already reached the ears of
+Hingston; and as soon as he reached Virginia City, he went to the office
+of the 'Territorial Enterprise' and asked to be presented to Mark Twain.
+
+When he heard his name called by some one, Clemens called out:
+
+"Pass the gentleman into my den.  The noble animal is here."
+
+The noble animal proved to be "a young man, strongly built, ruddy in
+complexion, his hair of a sunny hue, his eyes light and twinkling, in
+manner hearty, and nothing of the student about him--one who looked as
+if he could take his own part in a quarrel, strike a smart blow as
+readily as he could say a telling thing, bluffly jolly, brusquely
+cordial, off-handedly good-natured."  The picture is detailed and vivid:
+
+     "Let it be borne in mind that from the windows of the newspaper
+     office the American desert was visible; that within a radius of ten
+     miles Indians were encamping amongst the sage--brush; that the
+     whole city was populated with miners, adventurers, Jew traders,
+     gamblers, and all the rough-and-tumble class which a mining town in
+     a new territory collects together, and it will be readily
+     understood that a reporter for a daily paper in such a place must
+     neither go about his duties wearing light kid gloves, nor be
+     fastidious about having gilt edges to his note-books.  In Mark
+     Twain I found the very man I had expected to see--a flower of the
+     wilderness, tinged with the colour of the soil, the man of thought
+     and the man of action rolled into one, humorist and hard-worker,
+     Momus in a felt hat and jack-boots.  In the reporter of the
+     'Territorial Enterprise' I became introduced to a Californian
+     celebrity, rich in eccentricities of thought, lively in fancy,
+     quaint in remark, whose residence upon the fringe of civilization
+     had allowed his humour to develop without restraint, and his speech
+     to be rarely idiomatic."
+
+Under the influence of the example of the proprietors of the
+'Enterprise', strict stylistic disciplinarians of the Dana school of
+journalism, Clemens learned the advantages of the crisp, direct style
+which characterizes his writing.  As a reporter, he was really
+industrious in matters that met his fancy; but "cast-iron items"--for he
+hated facts and figures requiring absolute accuracy--got from him only
+"a lick and a promise."  He was much interested in Tom Fitch's effort to
+establish a literary journal, 'The Weekly Occidental'.  Daggett's
+opening chapters of a wonderful story, of which Fitch, Mrs Fitch, J. T.
+Goodman, Dan De Quille, and Clemens were to write successive
+instalments, gave that paper the /coup de grace/ in its very first
+issue.  Of this wonderful novel, at the close of each instalment of
+which the "hero was left in a position of such peril that it seemed
+impossible he could be rescued, except through means and wisdom more
+than human"; of the Bohemian days of the "Visigoths,"--Clemens, De
+Quille, Frank May, Louis Aldrich, and their confreres; of the practical
+jokes played on each other, particularly the incident of the imitation
+meerschaum ("mere sham") pipe, solemnly presented to Clemens by Steve
+Gillis, C. A. V. Putnam, D. E. M'Carthy, De Quille and others--all these
+belong to the fascinating domain of the biographer.  When Clemens was
+sent down to Carson City to report the meetings of the first Nevada
+Legislature, he began for the first time to sign his letters "Mark
+Twain."  In his Autobiography he has explained that his function as a
+legislative correspondent was to dispense compliment and censure with
+impartial justice.  As his disquisitions covered about half a page each
+morning in the Enterprise, it is easy to understand that he was an
+"influence."  Questioned by Carlyle Smith in regard to his choice of
+"Mark Twain," Mr. Clemens replied: "I chose my pseudonym because to nine
+hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand it had no meaning, and
+also because it was short.  I was a reporter in the Legislature at the
+time, and I wished to save the Legislature time.  It was much shorter to
+say in their debates--for I was certain to be the occasion of some
+questions of privilege--'Mark Twain' than 'the unprincipled and lying
+Parliamentary Reporter of the 'Territorial Enterprise'.'"
+
+Already his name was known the whole length of the Pacific Coast; the
+Enterprise published many things from his pen which gave him local, and
+afterwards national, fame; such sketches as 'The Undertaker's Chat',
+'The Petrified Man' and 'The Marvellous 'Bloody Massacre'' had attracted
+favourable and wide notice east of the Rocky Mountains.  But his career
+in Carson City came to a sudden close when he challenged the editor of
+the Virginia Union to a duel, the bloodless conclusion of which is
+narrated in the Autobiography.  But even a challenge to a duel was
+against the new law of Nevada; and obeying the warning of Governor
+North, the duellists crossed the border without ceremony, and stood not
+upon the order of their going.
+
+While Mark Twain was still with the Enterprise, he was in the habit of
+reserving all his "sketches" for the San Francisco newspapers, the
+'Golden Era' and the 'Morning Call'.  He now turns his steps to that
+storied city of "Frisco," and was not long in extending his fame on that
+coast.  He was incorrigibly lazy, as George Barnes, the editor of the
+Call, soon discovered; and Kipling was told when he was in San Francisco
+that Mark was in the habit of coiling himself into a heap and meditating
+until the last minute, when he would produce copy having no relationship
+to the subject of his assignment--"which made the editor swear horribly,
+and the readers of 'The Call' ask for more."  His love for practical
+joking during the California days brought him unpopularity; and one
+reads in a San Francisco paper of the early days: "There have been
+moments in the lives of various kind-hearted and respectable citizens of
+California and Nevada, when, if Mark Twain were before them as members
+of a vigilance committee for any mild crime, such as mule-stealing or
+arson, it is to be feared his shrift would have been short.  What a
+dramatic picture the idea conjures up, to be sure!  Mark, before these
+honest men, infuriated by his practical jokes, trying to show them what
+an innocent creature he was when it came to mules, or how the only
+policy of fire insurance he held had lapsed, how void of guile he was in
+any direction, and all with that inimitable drawl, that perplexed
+countenance and peculiar scraping of the left foot, like a boy speaking
+his first piece at school."  If he just escaped disaster, he likewise
+just escaped millions; on one occasion, for the space of a few moments,
+he owned the famous Comstock Lode, which was, though he never suspected
+it, worth millions.  His trunkful of securities, which were eminently
+saleable at one time, proved to be of fictitious value when "the bottom
+dropped out" of the Nevada boom; and that silver mine, which he was
+commissioned to sell in New York, was finally sold for three million
+dollars!  It was, as Mark says, the blind lead over again.  Mark Twain
+had the true Midas touch; but the mine of riches he was destined to
+discover was a mine, not of gold or silver, but the mine of intellect
+and rich human experience.
+
+To The 'Golden Era', Mark Twain, like Prentice Mulford and Joaquin
+Miller, contributed freely; and after a time he became associated with
+Bret Harte on 'The Californian', Harte as editor at twenty dollars a
+week, and Mark receiving twelve dollars for an article.  Here
+forgathered that group of brilliant writers of the Pacific Slope,
+numbering Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, Charles Henry
+Webb, and Prentice Mulford among its celebrities; two of that remarkable
+coterie were soon destined to achieve world-wide fame.  "These ingenuous
+young men, with the fatuity of gifted people," says Mr. Howells, "had
+established a literary newspaper in San Francisco, and they brilliantly
+co-operated in its early extinction."  Of his first meeting with Mark
+Twain, Bret Harte has left a memorable picture:
+
+     "His head was striking.  He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose,
+     and even the aquiline eye--an eye so eagle-like that a second lid
+     would not have surprised me--of an unusual and dominant nature.
+     His eyebrows were very thick and bushy.  His dress was careless,
+     and his general manner was one of supreme indifference to
+     surroundings and circumstances.  Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam
+     Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a
+     number of newspaper articles contributed over the signature of
+     'Mark Twain.'"
+
+Mark tired of the life of literary drudgery in San Francisco--on one
+occasion he was reduced to a solitary ten--cent piece; and General John
+McComb wooed him back to journalism just as he was on the point of
+returning to his old work on the Mississippi River, this time as a
+Government pilot.  During the earlier years in San Francisco, he was in
+the habit of writing weekly letters to the 'Territorial Enterprise'--
+personals, market-chat, and the like.  But when he criticized the police
+department of San Francisco in the most scathing terms, the officials
+"found means for bringing charges that made the author's presence there
+difficult and comfortless."  So he welcomed the opportunity to join
+Steve Gillis in a pilgrimage to the mountain home of Jim Gillis, his
+brother--a "sort of Bohemian infirmary."  Mark Twain revelled in the
+delightful company of the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," and
+he enjoyed the mining methods of Jackass Hill, like the true Bohemian
+that he was.  Soon after his arrival, Mark and Jim Gillis started out in
+search of golden pockets.  As De Quille says:
+
+     "They soon found and spent some days in working up the undisturbed
+     trail of an undiscovered deposit, They were on the 'golden bee-
+     line' and stuck to it faithfully, though it was necessary to carry
+     each sample of dirt a considerable distance to a small stream in
+     the bed of a canon in order to wash it.  However, Mark hungered and
+     thirsted to find a big rich pocket, and he pitched in after the
+     manner of Joe Bowers of old--just like a thousand of brick.
+
+     "Each step made sure by the finding of golden grains, they at last
+     came upon the pocket whence these grains had trailed out down the
+     slope of the mountain.  It was a cold, dreary drizzling day when
+     the 'home deposit' was found.  The first sample of dirt carried to
+     the stream and washed out yielded only a few cents.  Although the
+     right vein had been discovered, they had as yet found only the tail
+     end of the pocket.
+
+     "Returning to the vein, they dug a sample of the decomposed ore
+     from a new place, and were about to carry it down to the ravine and
+     test it, when the rain increased to a lively downpour."
+
+Mark was chilled to the bone, and refused to carry another pail of
+water.  In slow, drawling tones he protested decisively:
+
+"Jim, I won't carry any more water.  This work is too disagreeable.
+Let's go to the house and wait till it clears up."
+
+Gillis was eager to test the sample he had just taken out.
+
+"Bring just one more pail, Sam," he urged.
+
+"I won't do it, Jim!" replied the now thoroughly disgusted Clemens.
+"Not a drop!  Not if I knew there were a million dollars in that pan!"
+
+Moved by Sam's dejected appearance--blue nose and humped back--and
+realizing doubtless that it was futile to reason with him further, Jim
+yielded and emptied the sacks of dirt just dug upon the ground.  They
+now started out for the nearest shelter, the hotel in Angel's Camp, kept
+by Coon Drayton, formerly a Mississippi River pilot.  Imagine the jests
+and shouts that went around as Mark and Coon vied with each other in
+narrating interesting experiences.  For three days the rain and the
+stories held out; and among those told by Drayton was a story of a frog.
+He narrated this story with the utmost solemnity as a thing that had
+happened in Angel's Camp in the spring of '49--the story of a frog
+trained by its owner to become a wonderful jumper, but which failed to
+"make good" in a contest because the owner of a rival frog, in order to
+secure the winning of the wager, filled the trained frog full of shot
+during its owner's absence.  This story appealed irresistibly to Mark as
+a first-rate story told in a first-rate way; he divined in it the magic
+quality unsuspected by the narrator--universal humour.  He made notes in
+order to remember the story, and on his return to the Gillis' cabin,
+"wrote it up."  He wrote a number of other things besides, all of which
+he valued above the frog story; but Gillis thought it the best thing he
+had ever written.
+
+Meantime the rain had washed off the surface soil from their last pan,
+which they had left in their hurry.  Some passing miners were astonished
+to behold the ground glittering with gold; they appropriated it, but
+dared not molest the deposit until the expiration of the thirty-day
+claim-notice posted by Jim Gillis.  They sat down to wait, hoping that
+the claimants would not return.  At the expiration of the thirty days,
+the claim-jumpers took possession, and soon cleared out the pocket,
+which yielded twenty thousand dollars.  It was one of the most fortunate
+accidents in Mark Twain's career.  He came within one pail of water of
+comparative wealth; but had he discovered that pocket, he would probably
+have settled down as a pocketminer, and might have pounded quartz for
+the rest of his life.  Had his nerve held out a moment longer, he would
+never have gone to Angel's Camp, would never have heard The Story of the
+Jumping Frog, and would have escaped that sudden fame which this little
+story soon brought him.
+
+On his return to San Francisco, he dropped in one morning to see Bret
+Harte, and told him this story.  As Harte records:
+
+     "He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself
+     irresistible.  He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories,
+     and half-unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the
+     original narrator.  I asked him to tell it again to a friend who
+     came in, and they asked him to write it for 'The Californian'.  He
+     did so, and when published it was an emphatic success.  It was the
+     first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it
+     crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading.  The story was 'The
+     Jumping Frog of Calaveras.'  It is now known and laughed over, I
+     suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never
+     be as funny to anyone in print as it was to me, told for the first
+     time, by the unknown Twain himself, on that morning in the San
+     Francisco Mint."
+
+When Artemus Ward passed through California on a literary tour in 1864,
+Mark Twain regaled him--as he regaled all worthy acquaintances--with his
+favourite story, 'The Jumping Frog'.  Ward was delighted with it.
+
+"Write it out," he said, "give it all the necessary touches, and let me
+use it in a volume of sketches I am preparing for the press.  Just send
+it to Carleton, my publisher, in New York."
+
+It arrived too late for Ward's book, and Carleton presented it to Henry
+Clapp, who published it in his paper, The Saturday Press of November 18,
+1864.  In his Autobiography, Mr. Clemens has narrated how 'The Jumping
+Frog' put a quietus on 'The Saturday Press', and was immediately copied
+in numerous newspapers in England and America.  He was always proud of
+the celebrity that story achieved; but he never sought to claim the
+credit for himself.  He freely admits that it was not Mark Twain, but
+the frog, that became celebrated.  The author, alas, remained in
+obscurity!
+
+Carleton afterwards confessed that he had lost the chance of a life--
+time by giving The Jumping Frog away; but Mark Twain's old friend,
+Charles Henry Webb, came to the rescue and published it.  About four
+thousand copies were sold in three years; but the real fame of the story
+was in its newspaper and magazine notoriety.  In 1872 it was translated
+into the 'Revue des Deux Mondes'; and it was almost as widely read in
+England, India, and Australia as it was in America.
+
+Meantime Mark Twain was still awaiting the rewards of journalism, and
+doing literary hack work of one sort or another.  In 1866 the
+proprietors of the 'Sacramento Union' employed him to write a series of
+letters from the Sandwich Islands.  The purpose of these letters was to
+give an account of the sugar industry.  Mark told the story of sugar,
+but, as was his wont, threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had
+nothing to do with sugar.  It was the extraneous matter, and not the
+sugar, that won him a wide audience on the Pacific Coast.  During these
+months of "luxurious vagrancy" he described in the most vivid way many
+of the most notable features of the Sandwich Islands.  Nowadays such
+letters would at once have been embodied in a volume.  In his 'My Debut
+as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has described in admirably graphic
+style his great "scoop" of the news of the Hornet disaster; how Anson
+Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried on a cot to the hospital,
+so that he could interview the half-dead sailors.  His bill--twenty
+dollars a week for general correspondence, and one hundred dollars a
+column for the Hornet story--was paid with all good will.  On the
+strength of this story, he hoped to become a "Literary Person," and sent
+his account of the Hornet disaster to Harper's Magazine, where it
+appeared in December, 1866.  But alas! he could not give the banquet he
+was going to give to celebrate his debut as a "Literary Person."  He had
+not written the "Mark Twain" distinctly, and when it appeared it had
+been transformed into "Mike Swain"!
+
+When Mark returned to San Francisco, he resolved to follow the example
+of Stoddard and Mulford, and "enter the lecture field."  The "extraneous
+matter" in his letters to the Sacramento Union had made him "notorious";
+and, as he put it, "San Francisco invited me to lecture."  The historic
+account of that lecture, in 'Roughing It', is found elsewhere in this
+book.  Noah Brooks, editor of the Alta California, who was present at
+this lecture, has written the following graphic piece of description
+"Mark Twain's method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel.  His
+slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his
+visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his
+sentences, and, above all, the surprise that spread over his face when
+the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the finer
+passages of his word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind they had
+ever known.  All this was original; it was Mark Twain."  Employing D. E.
+McCarthy as his agent, Mark gave a number of lectures at various places
+on the Pacific Coast.  From this time forward we recognize in Mark Twain
+one of the supreme masters of the art of lecturing in our time.
+
+In December, 1866, he set out for New York, preparatory to the grand
+tour around the world.  His own account of the circular describing the
+projected trip is famous.  He had proposed, for twelve hundred dollars
+in gold,--at the rate of twenty dollars apiece, to write a series of
+letters for the 'Alta California'.  Brooks, the editor, fortified the
+grave misgivings of the proprietors over this proposition; but Colonel
+John McComb (then on the editorial staff) argued vehemently for Mark,
+and turned the scale in his favour.  While Mark was in New York, he was
+urged by Frank Fuller, whom he had known as Territorial Governor of
+Utah, to deliver a lecture--in order to establish his reputation on the
+Atlantic coast.  Fuller, an enthusiastic admirer of Mark Twain, overcame
+all objections, and engaged Cooper Union for the occasion.  Though few
+tickets were sold, Fuller cleverly succeeded in packing the hall by
+sending out a multitude of complimentary tickets to the school-teachers
+of New York City and the adjacent territory.  That lecture proved to be
+a supreme success--Mark's reputation as a lecturer on the Atlantic coast
+was assured.
+
+On June 10, 1867, the Quaker City set sail for its Oriental tour.  It
+bore on board a comparatively unknown person of the name of Clemens,
+who, in applying for passage, represented himself to be a Baptist
+minister in ill-health from San Francisco!
+
+It brought back a celebrity, destined to become famous throughout the
+world.  Prior to sailing he arranged to contribute letters to the 'New
+York Tribune' and the 'New York Herald', as well as to the 'Alta
+California'.
+
+"His letters to the 'Alta California'," says Noah Brooks, "made him
+famous.  It was my business to prepare one of these letters for the
+Sunday morning paper, taking the topmost letter from a goodly pile that
+was stacked in a pigeon-hole of my desk.  Clemens was an indefatigable
+correspondent, and his last letter was slipped in at the bottom of a
+tall stack.
+
+"It would not be quite accurate to say that Mark Twain's letters were
+the talk of the town; but it was very rarely that readers of the paper
+did not come into the office on Mondays to confide to the editors their
+admiration of the writer, and their enjoyment of his weekly
+contributions.  The California newspapers copied these letters, with
+unanimous approval and disregard of the copyrights of author and
+publisher."
+
+It was the Western humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American
+intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations,
+which caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public.  It was a virgin
+field for the humorous observer; Europe had not yet become the
+playground of America.  It was rather a /terra incognita/, regarded with
+a sort of reverential ignorance by the average American tourist.  By the
+range of his humour, the pertinency of his observation, and the vigour
+of his expression he awoke immediate attention.  And he aroused a deeply
+sympathetic response in the hearts of Americans by his manly and
+outspoken expression--his respect for the worthy, the admirable, the
+praiseworthy, his scorn and detestation for the spurious, the specious
+and the fraudulent.  In this book, for the first time, he strikes the
+key-note of his life and thought, which sounds so clearly throughout all
+his later works.  It is the true beginning of his career.
+
+On his return to the United States in November, he resumed his newspaper
+work, this time at the National Capital.  On his arrival there he found
+a letter from Elisha Bliss, of the 'American Publishing Company',
+proposing a volume recounting the adventures of the "Excursion," to be
+elaborately illustrated, and sold by subscription on a five per cent.
+royalty.  He eagerly accepted the offer and set to work on his notes.
+
+"I knew Mark Twain in Washington," says Senator William M. Stewart of
+Nevada, in his reminiscences 'A Senator of the Sixties', "at a time when
+he was without money.  He told me his condition, and said he was very
+anxious to get out his book.  He showed me his notes, and I saw that
+they would make a great book, and probably bring him in a fortune.  I
+promised that I would 'stake' him until he had the book written.  I made
+him a clerk to my committee in the senate, which paid him six dollars
+per day; then I hired a man for one hundred dollars per month to do the
+work!"  His mischievously extravagant description of Mark Twain at this
+time is eminently worthy of record "He was arrayed in a seedy suit which
+hung upon his lean frame in bunches, with no style worth mentioning.  A
+sheaf of scraggly, black hair leaked out of a battered, old, slouch hat,
+like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar
+butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth.  He
+had a very sinister appearance.  He was a man I had known around the
+Nevada mining camps several years before, and his name was Samuel L.
+Clemens."
+
+It was during this winter that Mark wrote a number of humorous articles
+and sketches--'The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract', the
+account of his resignation as clerk of the Senate Committee on
+Conchology, and 'Riley--Newspaper Correspondent'.  His time was chiefly
+devoted to preparing the material for his book; but finding Washington
+too distracting, he returned to San Francisco and completed the
+manuscript therein July, 1868.  For a year the publication of the book
+was delayed, as recorded in the Autobiography; but it finally appeared
+in print following Mark's indignant telegram to Bliss that, if the book
+was not on sale in twenty-four hours, he would bring suit for damages.
+Mark Twain records that in nine months the book had taken the publishing
+house out of debt, advanced its stock from twentyfive to two hundred,
+and left seventy thousand dollars clear profit.  Eighty-five thousand
+copies were sold within sixteen months, the largest sale of a four
+dollar book ever achieved in America in so short a time up to that date.
+It is, miraculous to relate, still the leader in its own special field--
+a "bestseller" for forty years!
+
+The proprietors of the 'Alta California' were exceeding wroth when they
+heard that Clemens was preparing for publication the very letters which
+they had commissioned him to write and had printed in their own paper.
+They prepared to publish a cheap paper-covered edition of the letters,
+and sent the American Publishing Co. a challenge in the shape of an
+advance notice of their publication.  Clemens hurried back to San
+Francisco from the East, and soon convinced the proprietors of the 'Alta
+California' of the authenticity of his copyright.  The paper-covered
+edition was then and there abandoned forever.
+
+Before leaving the West to settle permanently in the East, Mark Twain
+was associated for a short time with the 'Overland Monthly', edited by
+Bret Harte.  In his review of 'The Innocents Abroad', Harte asserted
+that Clemens deserved "to rank foremost among Western humorists"; but he
+was grievously disappointed in the first few contributions from Clemens
+to the Overland Monthly--notably 'By Rail through France' (later
+incorporated in The Innocents Abroad)--because of their perfect gravity.
+At last, 'A Mediaeval Romance'--a story which has been said to contain
+the germ of 'A Connecticut Yankee', because of its burlesque of
+mediaevalism--won the enthusiastic approval of Bret Harte.
+
+From this time forward, Samuel L. Clemens is seen in a new environment,
+in association with new ideas and a new civilization.  The history of
+this second period does not fall within the scope of the present work.
+It has just been narrated with brilliancy and charm by his close
+associate and most intimate friend, Mr. William Dean Howells, in his
+admirable book 'My Mark Twain'.  In the subsequent portion of the
+present work attention will be directed solely to those features of Mark
+Twain's life which have a direct bearing upon his career as a man of
+letters, and which throw into relief the progressive development of his
+genius.
+
+The South and the West contributed to Mark Twain's development, and
+added to his store of vital experience, in greater measure than all the
+other influences of his life combined.  From the inexhaustible well of
+those experiences he drew ever fresh contributions for the satisfaction
+of the world.  His mind was stocked with the rich, crude ore of early
+experience--the romance and the reality of a life full of prismatic
+variations of colour.  The civilization of the East, its culture and
+refinement, tempered the genius of Mark Twain in conformity with the
+indispensable criteria of classic art.  Under the broadening influence
+of its persistent nationalism, he became more deeply, more profoundly,
+imbued with the comprehensive ideals of American democracy.  He never
+lost the first fine virginal spontaneity of his native style, never
+weakened in the vigour of his thought or in the primitiveness of his
+expression.  His contact with the East compassed the liberation of that
+vast fund of stored--up early experiences, acquired through grappling
+with life in many a rude encounter.
+
+Out of its own life, the East never contributed to Mark Twain's works,
+in any appreciably momentous way, either volume or immensity of fertile,
+suggestive human experience.  If we eliminate from the list of Mark
+Twain's works those books which have their roots deep set in the soil of
+South and West, we eliminate the most priceless assets of his art.
+Indeed, it may be doubted whether, were those works struck from the
+catalogue of his contributions, Mark Twain could justly rank as a great
+genius.  To his association with the South and the Southwest are due
+'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', and 'Life on the
+Mississippi'.  'The Jumping Frog' and 'Roughing It' belong peculiarly to
+the West, and even 'The Innocents Abroad' falls wholly within the period
+of Mark Twain's influence by the West, its standards, outlook, and
+localized viewpoint.
+
+Colonel Mulberry Sellers is a veritably human type, the embodiment,
+laughably lovable, of a temperamental phase of American character in the
+course of the national development.  But 'The Gilded Age' has long since
+disappeared from that small but tremendously significant group of works
+which are tentatively destined to rank as classics.  Much as I enjoy the
+satiric comedy of 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court', I have always felt
+that it set before Europe an American type which is neither elevating
+nor inspiring--nor national.  It tends to the gratification of England
+and Europe, even in the face of its democratic demolition of feudalistic
+survival, by sealing a certain cheap type of vulgarity with the national
+stamp.  One must, nevertheless, confess with regret that this type is
+the embodiment of an "ideal" still only too commonly cherished in
+America.  The national type, I take it, is found in such characters as
+Lincoln and Phillips Brooks, in Lee and Henry W. Grady, in Charles W.
+Eliot and Edwin A. Alderman, and not in a provincial 'Connecticut
+Yankee', jovial and whole--hearted though he be.  I say this without
+forgetting or minimizing for a moment the art displayed in effecting the
+devastating and illimitably humorous contrast of a present with a
+remotely past civilization.  'Joan of Arc' has no local association,
+being a pure work of the heart, the chivalric impulse of a noble spirit.
+'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', viewed from any standpoint, is a
+masterpiece; but its significance lies, not in the locality of its
+setting, but in the universality of its moral.
+
+In a word, it was the East which broadened and universalized the spirit
+of Mark Twain.  We shall see, later on, that it steadily fostered in him
+a spirit of true nationalism and hardy democracy.  But it was the South
+and the West which lavishly gave him of their most priceless riches, and
+thereby created in Mark Twain an unique and incomparable genius, the
+veritable type and embodiment of their inalienably individual life and
+civilization.  This first phase of the life of Mark Twain has been so
+strongly stressed here, because the first half of his life has always
+seemed to me to have been a period of--shall I say?--God-appointed
+preparation for the most significant and lastingly permanent work of the
+latter half, namely, the narration of the incidents of early experience,
+and the imaginative reminting of the gold of that experience.
+
+One has only to read Mark Twain's works to learn the real history of his
+life.  There were momentous episodes in the latter half of his career;
+but they were concerned with his life rather than with his art.  We
+cannot, indeed, say what or how profound is the effect of life and
+experience on art.  There was the happy marriage, the tragic losses of
+wife and children.  There were the associations with the culture and
+art--circles of America and Europe--New England, New York, Berlin,
+Vienna, London, Glasgow; the academic degrees--Missouri, Yale; finally
+ancient Oxford for the first time conferring the coveted honour of its
+degree upon a humorist; the honours his own country delighted to bestow
+upon him.  And there too was that gallant struggle to pay off a
+tremendous debt, begun at sixty--and accomplished one year sooner than
+he expected--after the most spectacular and remarkable lecture tour in
+history.  The beautiful chivalric spirit of this great soul shone
+brightest in disaster.  He insisted that it was his wife who refused to
+compromise his debts for forty cents on the dollar--that it was she who
+declared it must be dollar for dollar; and when a fund was raised by his
+admirers to assist in lightening his burden, that it was his wife who
+refused to accept it, though he was willing enough to accept it as a
+welcome relief.
+
+As an American, I can say nothing more significantly characteristic of
+the man than that he was a good citizen.  He possessed in rich measure
+the consciousness of personal responsibility for the standards,
+government, and ideals of his town, his city, and his country.  Civic
+conscientiousness burned strong within him; and he fought to develop and
+to maintain breadth of public view and sanity of popular ideals.  Blind
+patriotism was impossible for this great American: he exposed the
+shallowness of popular enthusiasms and the narrowness of rampant spread-
+-eagleism, without regard for consequence to himself or his popularity.
+What a tribute to his personality that, instead of suffering, he gained
+in popularity by his honest and downright outspokenness!  He wielded the
+lash of his bitter scorn and fearful irony upon the wrong-doer, the
+hypocrite, the fraud; and aroused public opinion to impatience with
+public abuse, open offence, and official discourtesy.
+
+Samuel Langhorne Clemens impressed me as the most complete and human
+individual I have ever known.  He was not a great thinker; his views
+were not "advanced".
+
+The glory of his temperament was its splendid sanity, balance, and
+normality.  The homeliest virtues of life were his the republican virtue
+of simplicity; the domestic virtue of, personal purity and passionately
+simple regard for the sanctity of the marriage bond; the civic virtue of
+public honesty; the business virtue of stainless private honour.  Mark
+Twain was one of the supreme literary geniuses of his time.  But he was
+something even more than this.  He was not simply a great genius: he was
+a great man.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+          "Exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow; a joke
+          can be so big that it breaks the roof of the stars.
+          By simply going on being absurd, a thing can become
+          godlike; there is but one step from the ridiculous
+          to the sublime."
+                      GILBERT K.  CHESTERTON: Charles Dickens.
+
+
+
+                               THE HUMORIST
+
+Not without wide significance in its bearing upon the general outlines
+of contemporary literature is the circumstance that Mark Twain served
+his apprenticeship to letters in the high school of journalism.  Like
+his contemporaries, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free
+play for his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal
+for the masses.  Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective
+only when he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece
+of his own invention.  Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native
+flavour of his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more
+sophisticated refinements of the purely literary.  Mark Twain never lost
+the ruddy glow of his first inspiration, and his style, to the very end,
+remained as it began--journalistic, untamed, primitive.
+
+Both Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw, who like Mark Twain have achieved
+comprehensive international reputations, have succeeded in preserving
+the early vigour and telling directness acquired in journalistic
+apprenticeship.  It was by the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his
+journalese that Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start.  That
+trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened
+verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the
+new journalism.  "The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which
+are 'not for an age, but for all time,'" says Bernard Shaw, "has his
+reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes
+trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare
+peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire
+hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a
+Norwegian parish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as
+if she were a lady living in the next street to him, are still alive and
+at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of
+academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and
+art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar
+obsession with the ephemeral."  Mark Twain began his career by studying
+the people and period he knew in relation to his own life.  Jamestown,
+Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic,
+uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life
+and live again in the pages of his books.  Colonel Sellers, in the main
+correct but "stretched a little" here and there; Tom Sawyer, the
+"magerful" hero of boyhood; the shrewd and kindly Aunt Polly, drawn from
+his own mother; Huck Finn, with the tender conscience and the gentle
+heart--these and many another were drawn from the very life.  In writing
+of his time /a propos/ of himself, Mark Twain succeeded in telling the
+truth about humanity in general and for any time.
+
+In the main--though there are noteworthy exceptions--Mark Twain's works
+originated fundamentally in the facts of his own life.  He is a master
+humorist--which is only another way of saying that he is a master
+psychologist with the added gift of humour--because he looked upon
+himself always as a complete and well-rounded repository of universally
+human characteristics. /Humanus sum; et nil humanum mihi alienum est/--
+this might well have served for his motto.  It was his conviction that
+the American possessed no unique and peculiar human characteristics
+differentiating him from the rest of the world.  In the same way, he
+regarded himself as possessing no unique or peculiar human
+characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the human race.
+Like Omar he might have said "I myself am Heaven and Hell"----for within
+himself he recognized, in some form, at higher or lower power, every
+feature, trait, instinct, characteristic of which a human being is
+capable.  The last half century of his life, as he himself said in his
+Autobiography, had been constantly and faithfully devoted to the study
+of the human race.  His knowledge came from minute self-examination--for
+he regarded himself as the entire human race compacted together.  It was
+by concentrating his attention upon himself, by recognizing in himself
+the quintessential type of the race, that he succeeded in producing
+works of such pure naturalness and utter verity.  A humour which is at
+bottom good humour is always contagious; but there is a deeper and more
+universal appeal which springs from genial and unaffected representation
+of the human species, of the universal 'Genus Homo'.
+
+It has been said, by foreign critics, that the intellectual life of
+America in general takes its cue from the day, whilst the intellectual
+life of Europe derives from history.  If American literature be really
+"Journalism under exceptionally favourable conditions," as defined by
+the Danish critic, Johannes V. Jensen, then must Mark Twain be a typical
+product of American literature.  A certain modicum of truth may rest in
+this startling and seemingly uncomplimentary definition.  Interpreted
+liberally, it may be taken to mean that America finds her key to the
+future in the immediate vital present, rather than in a remote and hazy
+past.  Mark Twain was a great creative genius because he saw himself,
+and so saw human nature, in the strong, searching light of the living
+present.  He is the greatest genius evolved by natural selection out of
+the ranks of American journalism.  Crude, rudimentary and boisterous as
+his early writing was, at times provincial and coarse, it bore upon its
+face the fresh stamp of contemporary actuality.
+
+To the American of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be
+placidly assured by our British critics that America is sublimely
+unconscious that her childhood is gone.  And this gay paradox is less
+arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour
+because she is lacking in self-knowledge.  There is a certain grimly
+comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British
+critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, which they
+would have us believe is a sort of premature senescence and decay.  The
+New World is pitied for her failure to know without illusion the
+futility of the hurried pursuit of wealth, of the passion for
+extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of all the hostages youth
+in America eternally gives to old age.  "America has produced great
+artists," admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton.  Yet he maintains that "that
+fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility and the
+end of all things.  Whatever the American men of genius are, they are
+not young gods making a young world.  Is the art of Whistler a brave,
+barbaric art, happy and headlong?  Does Mr. Henry James infect us with
+the spirit of a schoolboy?  .  .  .  Out of America has come a sweet and
+startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man."  This sweet
+and startling cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr.
+Chesterton has chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two
+American geniuses who have lived outside their own country, absorbed the
+art ideals of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost
+touch with the youthful spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the
+ongoing rush and progress of America.  It is worthy of remark that Mr.
+James has always maintained that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only
+very primitive persons; and Whistler, with his acid /diablerie/, was
+wholly alien in spirit to the boisterous humour of Mark Twain.  That
+other brilliant but incoherent interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles
+Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America's pathetic
+senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case
+in the vehement assertion that America's greatest national interpreter
+is--Mark Twain!
+
+To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the
+humorist--with his shrieking Philistinism, his dominant sense for the
+colossally incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering,
+ludicrous contrast.  To the reflective, Mark Twain subsumed within
+himself a "certain surcharge and overplus of power, a buoyancy, and a
+sense of conquest" which typified the youth of America.  It is memorable
+that he breathed in his youth the bracing air of the prairie, shared the
+collective ardour of the Argonauts, felt the rising thrill of Western
+adventure, and expressed the crude and manly energy of navigation,
+exploration, and the daring hazard for new fortune.  To those who knew
+him in personal intimacy, the quality that was outstanding, omnipresent
+and eternally ineradicable from his nature was--paradoxical as it may
+sound--not humour, not wit, not irony, not a thousand other terms that
+might be associated with his name, but--the spirit of eternal youth.  It
+is comprehensively significant and conclusive that, to the day of her
+death, Mrs. Clemens never called her husband anything but the bright
+nickname--"Youth."  Mark Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller
+of tales, pungent as stylist.  But he has achieved another sort of
+eminence that is peculiarly gratifying to Americans.  "They distinguish
+in his writings," says an acute French critic, "exalted and sublimated
+by his genius, their national qualities of youth and of gaiety, of force
+and of faith; they love his philosophy, at once practical and high--
+minded.  They are fond of his simple style, animated with verve and
+spice, thanks to which his work is accessible to every class of readers.
+They think he describes his contemporaries with such an art of
+distinguishing their essential traits, that he manages to evoke, to
+create even, characters and types of eternal verity.  They profess for
+Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration that we have in France
+for Balzac."
+
+Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that humour is a subject which
+has never had much interest for him, it is nothing more than a
+commonplace to say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist only,
+that the world seems to persist in regarding him.  The philosophy of his
+early life was what George Meredith has aptly termed the "philosophy of
+the Broad Grin."  Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once said that "American
+humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the French, nor sharp and
+sensible and full of the realities of life like the Scotch, is simply
+the humour of imagination.  It consists in piling towers on towers and
+mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending
+it to the end of the world."  This partial and somewhat conventional
+foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the
+cumulative and "sky-breaking" humour of the early Mark Twain.  Then no
+exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm too unreal, no climax
+too extreme.
+
+The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a
+lawless, untrammelled life.  Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but
+one remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of
+argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature.
+In the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic
+and sanguinary.  The refinements of art and civilization seemed
+effeminate, artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously
+at one another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of each other's
+plans, and gloried in their defiance of both man and God.  Deep in their
+hearts they cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and
+the afflicted, and generosity indescribable.  And yet they prided
+themselves upon their barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning
+bred of their wild life and sharpened in the struggle for existence.
+What, after all, is 'The Jumping Frog' but the elaborate narrative, in
+native vernacular, of a shrewd practical joke?  As Mark Twain first
+heard it, this story was a solemn recital of an interesting incident in
+the life of Angel's Camp.  It was Mark Twain who "created" the story: he
+endowed with the comic note of whimsicality that imaginative realization
+of /une chose vue/, which went round the world.  The humour of rustic
+shrewdness in criticism of art, so elaborately exploited in 'The
+Innocents Abroad', was displayed, perhaps invented, by Mark Twain in the
+early journalistic days in San Francisco.  In 'The Golden Era' an
+excellent example is found in the following observations upon a
+celebrated painting of Samson and Delilah, then on exhibition in San
+Francisco:
+
+"Now what is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at
+the Bank Exchange?  Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or
+the muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it
+the rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot?  No,
+sir.  The first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her feet.
+Them scissors is too modern; thar warn't no scissors like them in them
+days--by a d---d sight."
+
+That was a brilliant and audacious conception, having the just
+proportion of sanguinary humour, embodied in Mark Twain's offer, during
+his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, to show his audience how the
+cannibals consume their food--if only some lady would lend him a live
+baby.  There is the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious
+anecdote of Higgins.
+
+Higgins was a simple creature, who used to haul rock; and on the day
+Judge Bagley fell down the court-house steps and broke his neck, Higgins
+was commissioned to carry the body in his wagon to the house of Mrs.
+Bagley and break the news to her as gently as possible.  When he
+arrived, he shouted until Mrs. Bagley came to the door, and then
+tactfully inquired if the Widder Bagley lived there!  When she
+indignantly replied in the negative, he gently humoured her whim; and
+inquired next if Judge Bagley lived there.  When she replied that he
+did, Higgins offered to bet that he didn't; and delicately inquired if
+the Judge were in.  On being assured that he was not in at present,
+Higgins triumphantly exclaimed that he expected as much.  Because he had
+the old Judge curled up out there in the wagon; and when Mrs. Bagley saw
+him, she would doubtless admit that about all that could comfort the
+Judge now would be an inquest!
+
+Mark Twain was so fond of this bloody and ghastly humour that, on one
+occasion, he utterly overreached himself and suffered serious
+consequences.  In the words of his fellow-journalist, Dan De Quille:
+
+     Mark Twain was fond of manufacturing items of the horrible style,
+     but on one occasion he overdid this business, and the disease
+     worked its own cure.  He wrote an account of a terrible murder,
+     supposed to have occurred at "Dutch Nick's," a station on the
+     Carson River, where Empire City now stands.  He made a man cut his
+     wife's throat and those of his nine children, after which
+     diabolical deed the murderer mounted his horse, cut his own throat
+     from ear to ear, rode to Carson City (a distance of three and a
+     half miles) and fell dead in front of Peter Hopkins' saloon.
+
+     All the California papers copied the item, and several made
+     editorial comment upon it as being the most shocking occurrence of
+     the kind ever known on the Pacific Coast.  Of course rival Virginia
+     City papers at once denounced the item as a "cruel and idiotic
+     hoax."  They showed how the publication of such "shocking and
+     reckless falsehoods" disgraced and injured the State, and they made
+     it as "sultry" as possible for the 'Enterprise' and its "fool
+     reporter."
+
+     When the California papers saw all this and found they had been
+     sold, there was a howl from Siskiyou to San Diego.  Some papers
+     demanded the immediate discharge of the author of the item by the
+     'Enterprise' proprietors.  They said they would never quote another
+     line from that paper while the reporter who wrote the shocking item
+     remained on its force.  All this worried Mark as I had never before
+     seen him worried.  Said he: "I am being burned alive on both sides
+     of the mountains."  We roomed together, and one night, when the
+     persecution was hottest, he was so distressed that he could not
+     sleep.  He tossed, tumbled, and groaned aloud.  So I set to work to
+     comfort him.  "Mark," said I, "never mind this bit of a gale, it
+     will soon blow itself out.  This item of yours will be remembered
+     and talked about when all your other work is forgotten.  The murder
+     at Dutch Nick's will be quoted years from now as the big sell of
+     these times."
+
+     Said Mark: "I believe you are right; I remember I once did a thing
+     at home in Missouri, was caught at it, and worried almost to death.
+     I was a mere lad, and was going to school in a little town where I
+     had an uncle living.  I at once left the town and did not return to
+     it for three years.  When I finally came back I found I was only
+     remembered as 'the boy that played the trick on the schoolmaster.'"
+
+     Mark then told me the story, began to laugh over it, and from that
+     moment "ceased to groan."  He was not discharged, and in less than
+     a month people everywhere were laughing and joking about the
+     "murder at Dutch Nick's."
+
+Out of that full, free Western life, with its tremendous hazards of
+fortune, its extravagant alternations from fabulous wealth to wretched
+poverty, its tremendous exaggerations and incredible contrasts, was
+evolved a humour as rugged, as mountainous, and as altitudinous as the
+conditions which gave it birth.  Mark Twain may be said to have created,
+and made himself master of, this new and fantastic humour which, in its
+exaggeration and elaboration, was without a parallel in the history of
+humorous narration.  At times it seemed little more than a sort of
+infectious and hilarious nonsense; but in reality it had behind it all
+the calculation of detail and elaboration.  There was something in it
+of the volcanic, as if at the bursting forth of some pentup force of
+primitive nature.  It consisted in piling Pelion on Ossa, until the
+structure toppled over of its own weight and fell with a stentorian
+crash of laughter which echoed among the stars.  Whenever Mark Twain
+conceived a humorous idea, he seemed capable of extracting from it
+infinite complications of successive and cumulative comedy.  This humour
+seemed like the mental functionings of some mad, yet inevitably logical
+jester; it grew from more to more, from extravagance to extravagance,
+until reason itself tired and gave over.  Such explosive stories as 'How
+I Edited an Agricultural Paper', 'A Genuine Mexican Plug', the
+deciphering of the Horace Greeley correspondence, 'The Facts in the Case
+of the Great Beef Contract, and many another, as Mr. Chesterton has
+pointed out, have one tremendous essential of great art.  "The
+excitement mounts up perpetually; they grow more and more comic, as a
+tragedy should grow more and more tragic.  The rack, tragic or comic,
+goes round until something breaks inside a man.  In tragedy it is his
+heart, or perhaps his stiff neck.  In farce I do not quite know what it
+is--perhaps his funny-bone is dislocated; perhaps his skull is slightly
+cracked."  Mark Twain's mountainous humour, of this early type, never
+contains the element of final surprise, of the sudden, the unexpected,
+the /imprevu/.  We know what is coming, we surrender ourselves more and
+more to the mood of the narrator, holding ourselves in reserve until
+laughter, no longer to be restrained, bursts forth in a torrent of
+undignified and explosive mirth.  Perhaps no better example can be given
+than the description of the sad fate of the camel in 'A Tramp Abroad'.
+
+In Syria, at the head-waters of the Jordan, this camel had got hold of
+his overcoat; and after he finished contemplating it as an article of
+apparel, he began to inspect it as an article of diet.  In his
+inimitable manner, Mark describes the almost religious ecstasy of that
+camel as it devoured his overcoat piecemeal--first one sleeve, then the
+other, velvet collar, and finally the tails.  All went well until the
+camel struck a batch of manuscript--containing some of Mark's humorous
+letters for the home papers.  Their solid wisdom soon began to lie heavy
+on the camel's stomach: the jokes shook him until he began to gag and
+gasp, and finally he struck statements that not even a camel could
+swallow with impunity.  He died in horrible agony; and Mark found on
+examination that the camel had choked to death on one of the mildest
+statements of fact that he had ever offered to a trusting public!  Here
+Mark gradually works up to an anticipated climax by piling on effect
+after effect.  Our risibility is excited almost as much by the
+anticipation of the climax as by the recital.
+
+Admirable instances of the ludicrous incident, of the nonsensical
+recital, are found in the scene in 'Huckleberry Finn' dealing with the
+performance of the King's Cameleopard or Royal Nonesuch, the address on
+the occasion of the dinner in honour of the seventieth anniversary of
+John Greenleaf Whittier (an historic failure), and the Turkish bath in
+'The Innocents Abroad'.
+
+In this prison filled with hot air, an attendant sat him down by a tank
+of hot water and began to polish him all over with a coarse mitten.
+Soon Mark noticed a disagreeable smell, and realized that the more he
+was polished the worse he smelt.  He urged the attendant to bury him
+without unnecessary delay, as it was obvious that he couldn't possibly
+"keep" long in such warm weather.  But the phlegmatic attendant paid no
+attention to Mark's commands and continued to scrub with renewed vigour.
+Mark's consternation changed to alarm when he discovered that little
+cylinders, like macaroni, began to roll from under the mitten.  They
+were too white to be dirt.  He felt that he was gradually being pared
+down to a convenient size.  Realizing that it would take hours for the
+attendant to trim him down to the proper size, Mark indignantly ordered
+him to bring a jackplane at once and get the matter over.  To all his
+protests the attendant paid no attention at all.
+
+In one of the earliest critical articles about Mark Twain, which
+appeared in 'Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science and Art' for July
+4,1874, Mr. G. T. Ferris gives an excellent appreciation of his humour.
+"Of humour in its highest phase," he says, "perhaps Bret Harte may be
+accounted the most puissant master among our contemporary American
+writers.  Of wit, we see next to none.  Mark Twain, while lacking the
+subtilty and pathos of the other, has more breadth, variety, and ease.
+His sketches of life are arabesque in their strange combinations.  Bits
+of bright, serious description, both of landscape and society, carry us
+along till suddenly we stumble on some master-stroke of grotesque and
+irresistible fun.  He understands the value of repose in art.  One tires
+of a page where every sentence sparkles with points, and the author is
+constantly attitudinizing for our amusement.  We like to be betrayed
+into laughter as much in books as in real life.  It is the unconscious,
+easy, careless gait of Mark Twain that makes his most potent charm.  He
+seems always to be catering as much to his own enjoyment as to that of
+the public.  He strolls along like a great rollicking schoolboy, bent on
+having a good time, and determined that his readers shall have it with
+him."
+
+Mark Twain is the most daring of humorists.  He takes his courage in his
+hands for the wildest flights of fancy.  His humour is the caricature of
+situations, rather than of individuals; and he is not afraid to risk his
+characters in colossally ludicrous situations.  His art reveals itself
+in choosing ludicrous situations which contain such a strong colouring
+of naturalness that one's sense of reality is not outraged, but
+titillated.  Hence it is that his humour, in its earlier form, does not
+lend itself readily to quotation.  His early humour is not epigrammatic,
+but cumulative and extensive.  Each scene is a unit and must appear as
+such.  Andrew Lang not inaptly catches the note of Mark Twain's earlier
+manner, when he speaks of his "almost Mephistophelean coolness, an
+unwearying search after the comic sides of serious subjects, after the
+mean possibilities of the sublime--these with a native sense of
+incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration."
+
+Mark Twain began his career as a wag; he rejoiced in being a fun-maker.
+He discarded the weird spellings and crude punning of his American
+forerunners; his object was not play upon words, but play upon ideas.
+He offered his public, as Frank R. Stockton pointed out, the pure ore of
+fun.  "If he puts his private mark on it, it will pass current; it does
+not require the mint stamp of the schools of humour.  He is never afraid
+of being laughed at."  Indeed, that is a large part of his stock-in-
+trade; for throughout his entire career, nothing seemed to give him so
+much pleasure--though it is one of the lowest forms of humour--as making
+fun of himself.  In describing two monkeys that got into his room at
+Delhi, he said that when he awoke, one of them was before the glass
+brushing his hair, and the other one had his notebook, and was reading a
+page of humorous notes and crying.  He didn't mind the one with the
+hair-brush; but the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart.  He
+never forgave that monkey.  His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of
+Adam--only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric
+indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who "never bored,
+but he struck water"--is an admirable example of the mechanical fooling
+of self-ridicule.
+
+In his penetrating study, 'Mark Twain a Century Hence', published at the
+time of Mr. Clemens' death, Professor H. T. Peck makes this observation:
+"We must judge Mark Twain as a humorist by the very best of all he wrote
+rather than by the more dubious productions, in which we fail to see at
+every moment the winning qualities and the characteristic form of this
+very interesting American.  As one would not judge of Tennyson by his
+dramas, nor Thackeray by his journalistic chit-chat, nor Sir Walter
+Scott by those romances which he wrote after his fecundity had been
+exhausted, so we must not judge Mark Twain by the dozen or more
+specimens which belong to the later period, when he was ill at ease and
+growing old.  Let us rather go back with a sort of joy to what he wrote
+when he did so with spontaneity, when his fun was as natural to him as
+breathing, and when his humour was all American humour--not like that of
+Juvenal or Hierocles--acrid, or devoid of anything individual--but
+brimming over with exactly the same rich irresponsibility which belonged
+to Steele and Lamb and Irving.  It may seem odd to group a son of the
+New World and of the great West with those earlier classic figures who
+have been mentioned here; yet upon analysis it will be discovered that
+the humour of Mark Twain is at least first cousin to that which produced
+Sir Roger de Coverley and Rip Van Winkle and The Stout Gentleman."
+
+The details of the Gambetta-Fourtou duel, in which Mark played a
+somewhat frightened second, have furnished untold amusement to
+thousands.  And his description of the inadvertent /faux pas/ he
+committed at his first public lecture is humorous for any age and
+society.  The sign announcing the lecture read--"Doors open at 7 �.  The
+Trouble will begin at 8."  For three days, Mark had been in a state of
+frightful suspense.  Once his lecture had seemed humorous; but as the
+day approached, it seemed to him to be but the dreariest of fooling,
+without a vestige of real fun.  He was so panic-stricken that he
+persuaded three of his friends, who were giants in stature, genial and
+stormy voiced, to act as claquers and pound loudly at the faintest
+suspicion of a joke.  He bribed Sawyer, a half-drunk man, who had a
+laugh hung on a hair-trigger, to get off, naturally and easily during
+the course of the evening, as many laughs as he could.  He begged a
+popular citizen and his wife to take a conspicuous seat in a box, so
+that everybody could see them.  He explained that when he needed help,
+he would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, that he had given birth
+to an obscure joke.  Then, if ever, was her time--not to investigate,
+but to respond!
+
+The fateful night found him in the depths of dejection.  But heartened
+up by a crowded house, full even to the aisles, he bravely set in and
+proceeded to capture the house.  His claquers hammered madly whenever
+the very feeblest joke showed its head.  Sawyer supported their
+herculean efforts with bursts of stentorian laughter.  As Mark
+explained, not without a touch of pride, inferior jokes never fared so
+royally before.  But his hour of humiliation was at hand.  On delivering
+a bit of serious matter with impressive unction, to which the audience
+listened with rapt interest, he glanced involuntarily, as if for her
+approval, at his friend in the box.  He remembered the compact, but it
+was too late--he smiled in spite of himself.  Forth came her ringing
+laugh, peal after peal, which touched off the whole audience: the
+explosion was immense!  Sawyer choked with laughter, and the bludgeons
+performed like pile-drivers.  The little morsel of pathos was ruined;
+but what matter, so long as the audience took it as an intentional joke,
+and applauded it with unparalleled enthusiasm.  Mark wisely let it go at
+that!
+
+Reading through 'The Innocents Abroad' after many years, I find that it
+has not lost its power to provoke the most side-splitting laughter; and
+the same may be said of 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'Following the Equator',
+which, whilst not so boisterously comical, exhibit greater mastery and
+restraint.  His own luck, as Mark Twain observed on one occasion, had
+been curious all his literary life.  He never could tell a lie that
+anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.  Could
+there be a more accurate or more concise definition of the effect of his
+writings, in especial of his travel notes?  Like his mother, he too
+never used large words, but he had a natural gift for making small ones
+do effective work.  How delightfully human is his comment on the
+vagaries of woman's shopping!  Human nature he found very much the same
+all over the world; and he felt that it was so much like his dear native
+home to see a Venetian lady go into a store, buy ten cents' worth of
+blue ribbon, and then have it sent home in a scow.  It was such little
+touches of nature as this which, as he said, moved him to tears in those
+far-off lands.  In speaking of Palestine, he says that its holy places
+are not as deliriously beautiful as the books paint them.  Indeed, he
+asserts that if one be calm and resolute, he can look on their beauty
+and live!  He bequeathed his rheumatism to Baden-Baden.  It was little,
+but it was all he had to give.  His only regret was that he could not
+leave something more catching.
+
+There is nothing better in all of 'The Innocents Abroad' than his
+analysis of the theological hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.
+Disclaiming all intention to be frivolous, irreverent or blasphemous, he
+solemnly declared that his observations had taught him the real way the
+Holy Personages were ranked in Rome.  "The Mother of God," otherwise the
+Virgin Mary, comes first, followed in order by the Deity, Peter, and
+some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and Martyrs.  Last of all came
+Jesus Christ the Saviour--but even then, always as an infant in arms!
+
+Who can ever forget the Mark Twain who kissed the Hawaiian stranger for
+his mother's sake, the while robbing him of his small change; who was so
+struck by the fine points of his Honolulan horse that he hung his hat on
+one of them; who rode glaciers as gaily as he rode Mexican plugs, and
+found diverting programmes of the Roman Coliseum, in the dust and
+rubbish of two thousand years ago!
+
+Samuel L. Clemens achieved instantaneous and world-wide popularity at a
+single bound by the creation of a fantastic and delightfully naive
+character known as "Mark Twain."  At a somewhat later day, Bernard Shaw
+achieved world-wide fame by the creation of a legendary and fantastic
+wit known as "G. B. S."  To the composition of "Mark Twain" went all the
+wild humour of ignorance--the boisterously comic admixture of the
+sanguinary and the stoical.  The humour of 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The
+Innocents Abroad' is the savage and naive humour of the mining camp, not
+the sophisticated humour of civilization.  It is significant that Mme.
+Blanc, a polished and refined intelligence, found the /nil admirari/
+attitude of "Mark Twain" no more enlightening nor suggestive than the
+stoicism of the North American Indian.  This mirthful and mock-innocent
+naivete, so alien to the delicate and subtle spirit of the French, found
+instant response in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples.
+The English and the Germans, no less than the Americans, rejoiced in
+this gay fellow with his combination of appealing ignorance and but
+half-concealed shrewdness.  They laughed at this unsophisticated /naif/,
+gazing in wide-eyed wonderment at all he saw; and they delighted in the
+consciousness that, behind this thin mask, lay an acute and searching
+intelligence revelling in the humorous havoc wrought by his keen
+perception of the contrasts and incongruities of life.  The note of this
+early humour is perfectly caught in the incident of the Egyptian mummy.
+Deliberately assumed ignorance of the grossest sort, by Mark Twain and
+his companions, had the most devastating effect upon the foreign guide--
+one of that countless tribe to all of whom Mark applied the generic name
+of Ferguson.  After driving Ferguson nearly mad with pretended
+ignorance, they finally asked him if the mummy was dead.  When Ferguson
+glibly replied that he had been dead three thousand years, he was
+dumbfounded at the fury of the "doctor" for being imposed upon with vile
+second-hand carcases.  The poor Frenchman was warned that if he didn't
+bring out a nice, fresh corpse at once, they would brain him!  No wonder
+that, later, when he was asked for a description of the party, Ferguson
+laconically remarked that they were lunatics!
+
+In speaking of contemporary society, Ibsen once remarked: "We have made
+a fiasco both in the heroic and the lover roles.  The only parts in
+which we have shown a little talent, are the naively comic; but with our
+more highly developed selfconsciousness we shall no longer be fitted
+even for that."  With time and "our more highly developed self--
+consciousness" have largely passed the novelty and the charm of this
+early naively comic humour of Mark Twain.  But it is as valid still, as
+it was in 1867, to record honestly the impressions directly communicated
+to one by the novelties, peculiarities, individual standards and ideals
+of other peoples and races.  Mark Twain spoke his mind with utter
+disregard for other people's opinions, the dicta of criticism or the
+authoritative judgment of the schools.  'The Innocents Abroad' is
+eminently readable, not alone for its humour, its clever journalism, its
+remarkably accurate and detailed information, and its fine descriptions.
+The rare quality, which made it "sell right along--like the Bible," is
+that it is the vital record of a keen and searching intelligence.  Mark
+Twain found so many of the "masterpieces of the world" utterly
+unimpressive and meaningless to him, that he actually began to distrust
+the validity of his own impressions.  Every time he gloried to think
+that for once he had discovered an ancient painting that was beautiful
+and worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gave him was an infallible
+proof that it was not a beautiful picture, nor in any sense worthy of
+commendation!  He pours out the torrents of his ridicule, not
+indiscriminately upon the works of the old masters themselves--though he
+regarded Nature as the grandest of all the old masters--but upon those
+half-baked sycophants who bend the knee to an art they do not
+understand, an art of which they feign comprehension by mouthings full
+of cheap and meaningless tags.  As potent and effective as ever, in its
+fine comic irony, is that passage in which he expresses his "envy" of
+those people who pay lavish lip-service to scenes and works of art which
+their expressionless language shows they neither realize nor understand.
+He reserves his most biting condemnation for those second-hand critics
+who accept other people's opinions for their criteria, and rave over
+"beauty," "soul," "character," "expression" and "tone" in wretched,
+dingy, moth-eaten pictures.  He hated with the heartiest detestation
+such people--whose sole ambition seemed to be to make a fine show of
+knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of
+inexpressive technical terms of art criticism.
+
+There is much, I fear, of misguided honesty in Mark Twain's records of
+foreign travel.  To the things which he personally reverenced, he was
+always reverential; and his expression of likes and dislikes, of
+prejudices and predilections, was honest and fearless.  Grant as we may
+the humorist's right to exaggerate and even to distort, for the purposes
+of his fun-making, it does not therefore follow that his judgments,
+however forthright or sincere, are valid, reputable criticisms.  One's
+enjoyment of his fresh and hilarious humour, his persistent fun-making
+is no whit impaired by the recognition that he was lacking in the
+faculty of historic imagination and in the finer artistic sense.  It is,
+in a measure, because of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of
+real knowledge, that he was enabled to evoke the laughter of the
+multitude.  "The Mississippi pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid,"
+says Mr. S. P. Sherman, "refuses to sink his identity in the object
+contemplated--that, as Corporal Nym would have said, is the humour of
+it.  He is the kind of travelling companion that makes you wonder why
+you went abroad.  He turns the Old World into a laughing stock by
+shearing it of its storied humanity--simply because there is nothing in
+him to respond to the glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was
+Rome--simpler because nothing is holier to him than a joke.  He does not
+throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm; he laughs at art,
+history, and antiquity from the point of view of one who is ignorant of
+them and mightily well satisfied with his ignorance."  This picture
+reminds us of the foreign critics of 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'A
+Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court': it is too partial and
+restricted.  The whole point of Mark Twain's humour, as exhibited in
+these travel notes, is missed in the statement that "he does not throw
+the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm "--for this might almost be
+taken as the "philosophy" of his books of foreign travel.  And yet Mr.
+Sherman's dictum, in its entirety, quite clearly provokes the question
+whether, as he intimates, the "overwhelming majority" of his fellow-
+citizens also were not mightily pleased with Mark Twain's point of view,
+and whether they did not enjoy themselves hugely in laughing, not at
+him, but with him.
+
+In commenting on the reasons for the broadening and deepening of his
+humour with the passage of time, Mr. Clemens once remarked to me: "I
+succeeded in the long run, where Shillaber, Doesticks, and Billings
+failed, because they never had an ideal higher than that of merely being
+funny.  The first great lesson of my life was the discovery that I had
+to live down my past.  When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier
+writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw
+and heard.  My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people
+laugh.  I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else--
+eager to betray them at the end with some monstrous absurdity or some
+extravagant anti-climax.  One night, after a lecture in the early days,
+Tom Fitch, the 'silver-tongued orator of Nevada,' said to me: 'Clemens,
+your lecture was magnificent.  It was eloquent, moving, sincere.  Never
+in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of
+descriptive narration.  But you committed one unpardonable sin--the
+unpardonable sin.  It is a sin you must never commit again.  You closed
+a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to
+a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax
+which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced.  My dear
+Clemens, whatever you do, never sell your audience.'  And that,"
+continued Mr. Clemens, "was my first really profitable lesson."
+
+It was the toning down of his youthful extravagance--Fitch's precept not
+to "sell" his audience, Mrs. Fairbanks' warning not to try their
+endurance of the irreverent too far--that had a markedly salutary effect
+upon Mark Twain's humorous writings.  There can be no doubt that the
+deep and lifelong friendship of Mr. Howells, expressing itself as
+occasion demanded in the friendliest criticism, had a subduing influence
+upon Mark Twain's tendency, as a humorist, to extravagance and headlong
+exaggeration.  In time he left the field of carpet-bag observation--the
+humorous depicting of things seen from the rear of an observation car,
+so to speak--and turned to fiction.  Now at last the long pent-up flood
+of observation upon human character and human characteristics found full
+vent.  'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn' are the romances of eternal
+youth, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.  They are freighted,
+however, with a wealth of pungent and humorous characterization that
+have made of them contemporary classics.  From ethical sophistication
+and moral truantry Mark Twain evolves an inexhaustible supply of humour.
+The revolt of mischievous and Bohemian boyhood against the stern
+limitations of formal Puritanism is, in a sense, a principle that he
+carried with him to the grave.  "There are no more vital passages in his
+fiction," says Mr. Howells, "than those which embody character as it is
+affected for good as well as for evil by the severity of the local
+Sunday-schooling and church-going."  Out of the pangs of conscience, the
+ingenious sedatives of sophistry, the numerous variations of the lie, he
+won a wholesome humour that left you thinking, by inversion, upon the
+moral involved.  Knowledge of human nature finds expression in forms
+made permanently effective through the arresting permeation of humour.
+The incident of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashing of the fence is the sort
+of thing over which boy and man alike can chuckle with satisfaction--for
+Tom Sawyer had discovered a great law of human action without knowing
+it, namely, that in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only
+necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.  Huck's reasoning about
+chicken stealing--the exquisitely comic shifting of ground from morality
+to expediency--is a striking example of the best type of Mark Twain's
+humour.  Following his father's example, Huck would occasionally "lift"
+a chicken that wasn't roosting comfortable; for had his father not told
+him that even if he didn't want the chicken himself, he could always
+find somebody that did want it, and a good deed ain't never forgot?
+Huck confesses that he had never seen his Pap when he didn't want the
+chicken himself!
+
+The germ of Mark Twain's humour, wherever it is found, from 'The
+Innocents Abroad' to 'The Connecticut Yankee' and 'Captain Stormfield's
+Visit to Heaven', is found in the mental reactions resulting from
+stupendous and glaring contrasts.  First it is the Wild Western
+humorist, primitive and untamed, running amuck through the petrified
+formulas and encrusted traditions of Europe.  Then comes the fantastic
+juxtaposition of the shrewd Connecticut Yankee, with his comic
+irreverence and raucous sense of humour, his bourgeois limitations and
+provincial prejudices, to the Court of King Arthur, with its
+mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social narrowness.  How many
+have delighted in the Yankee's inimitable description of his feelings
+toward that classic damsel of the sixth century?  At first he got along
+easily with the girl; but after a while he began to feel for her a sort
+of mysterious and shuddery reverence.  Whenever she began to unwind one
+of those long sentences of hers, and got it well under way, he could
+never suppress the feeling that he was standing in the awful presence of
+the Mother of the German Language!
+
+Mark Twain ransacked the whole world of his own day, all countries,
+savage and civilized, for the display of effective and ludicrous
+contrast; and he opened up an illimitable field for humanizing satire,
+as Mr. Howells has said, in his juxtaposition of sociologic types
+thirteen centuries apart.  Not even heaven was safe from the
+comprehensive survey of his satire; and 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to
+Heaven' is a remarkable document,--a forthright lay sermon,--the
+conventional idea of heaven, the theologic conception of eternity, as
+heedlessly taught from the pulpit, thrown into comic, yet profoundly
+significant, relief against the background of the common-sense of a
+deeply human, thoroughly modern intelligence.
+
+Humour, as Thackeray has defined it, is a combination of wit and love.
+Certain it is that, in the case of Mark Twain, wit was a later
+development of his humour; the love was there all the time.  Mark Twain
+has not been recognized as a wit; for he was primarily a humorist, and
+only secondarily a wit.  But the passion for brief and pungent
+formulation of an idea grew upon him; and Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
+is a mine of homely and memorable aphorism, epigram, injunction.
+
+According to Mark Twain's classification, the comic story is English,
+the witty story French, the humorous story American.  While the other
+two depend upon matter, the humorous story depends for its effect upon
+the manner of telling.  The witty story and the comic story must be
+concise and end with a "point"; but the humorous story may be as
+leisurely as you please and have no particular destination.  Mark Twain
+always maintained that, while anyone could tell effectively a comic or a
+witty story, it required a person skilled in an art of a rare and
+distinctive character to tell a humorous story successfully.  Mark Twain
+was himself the supreme exemplar of the art of telling a humorous story.
+Take this little passage, for example, which convulsed one of his London
+audiences.  He was speaking of a high mountain that he had come across
+in his travels.  "It is so cold that people who have been there find it
+impossible to speak the truth; I know that's a fact (here a pause, a
+blank stare, a shake of the head, a little stroll across the platform, a
+sigh, a puff, a smothered groan), because--I've--(another pause)--been--
+(a longer pause)--there myself."  Who could equal Mark Twain as a
+humorous narrator, in his recital of the alarums and excursions,
+criminations and recriminations, over the story of somebody else's dog
+he sold to General Miles for three dollars?  He delighted numerous
+audiences with his story of inveighing Mrs. Grover Cleveland at a White
+House reception into writing blindly on the back of a card "He didn't."
+When she turned it over she discovered that it bore on the other side,
+in Mrs. Clemens' handwriting, the startling words: "Don't wear your
+arctics in the White House."  I shall never forget his recital of the
+story of how his enthusiasm oozed away at a meeting in behalf of foreign
+missions.  So moving was the fervid eloquence of the exhorter that,
+after fifteen minutes, if Mark Twain had had a blank cheque with him, he
+would gladly have turned it over, signed, to the minister, to fill out
+for any amount.  But it was a very warm evening, the eloquence of the
+minister was inexhaustible--and Mark Twain's enthusiasm for foreign
+missions slowly oozed away--one hundred dollars, fifty dollars, and even
+lower still--so that when the plate was actually passed around, Mark put
+in ten cents and took out a quarter!
+
+I was a witness in London, and at Oxford, in 1907, of the vast,
+spontaneous, national reception which Mark Twain received from the
+English people.  One incident of that memorable visit is a perfect
+example of that masterly power over an audience, that deep humanity,
+with which Mark Twain was endowed.  At the banquet presided over by the
+Lord Mayor of Liverpool, which was the signal of Mark Twain's farewell
+to the English people, his peroration was as follows:
+
+"Many and many a year ago I read an anecdote in Dana's Two Years Before
+the Mast.  A frivolous little self-important captain of a coasting-sloop
+in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade was always hailing every
+vessel that came in sight, just to hear himself talk and air his small
+grandeurs.  One day a majestic Indiaman came ploughing by, with course
+on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming
+with sailors, with macaws and monkeys and all manner of strange and
+romantic creatures populating her rigging, and thereto her freightage of
+precious spices lading the breeze with gracious and mysterious odours of
+the Orient.  Of course, the little coaster-captain hopped into the
+shrouds and squeaked a hail: 'Ship ahoy!  What ship is that, and whence
+and whither?' In a deep and thunderous bass came the answer back,
+through a speaking trumpet: The Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-
+three days out from Canton homeward bound!  What ship is that?'  The
+little captain's vanity was all crushed out of him, and most humbly he
+squeaked back: 'Only the Mary Ann--fourteen hours from Boston, bound for
+Kittery Point with--with nothing to speak of!'  That eloquent word
+'only' expressed the deeps of his stricken humbleness.
+
+"And what is my case?  During perhaps one hour in the twenty-four--not
+more than that--I stop and reflect.  Then I am humble, then I am
+properly meek, and for that little time I am 'only the Mary Ann'--
+fourteen hours out, and cargoed with vegetables and tin-ware; but all
+the other twenty-three my self-satisfaction rides high, and I am the
+stately Indiaman, ploughing the great seas under a cloud of sail, and
+laden with a rich freightage of the kindest words that were ever spoken
+to a wandering alien, I think; my twenty-six crowded and fortunate days
+multiplied by five; and I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-
+three days out from Canton--homeward bound!"
+
+Says "Charles Vale," in describing the scene "The audience sat
+spellbound in almost painful silence, till it could restrain itself no
+longer; and when in rich, resonant, uplifted voice Mark Twain sang out
+the words: 'I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days
+out from Canton,' there burst forth a great cheer from one end of the
+room to the other.  It seemed an inopportune cheer, and for a moment it
+upset the orator: yet it was felicitous in opportuneness.  Slowly, after
+a long pause, came the last two words--like that curious, detached and
+high note in which a great piece of music suddenly ends--'Homeward
+bound.'  Again there was a cheer: but this time it was lower; it was
+subdued; it was the fitting echo to the beautiful words--with their
+double significance--the parting from a hospitable land, the return to
+the native land.  .  .  .  Only a great litterateur could have conceived
+such a passage: only a great orator could have so delivered it."
+
+Mark Twain was the greatest master of the anecdote this generation has
+known.  He claimed the humorous story as an American invention, and one
+that has remained at home.  His public speeches were little mosaics in
+the finesse of their art; and the intricacies of inflection,
+insinuation, jovial innuendo which Mark Twain threw into his gestures,
+his implicative pauses, his suggestive shrugs and deprecative nods--all
+these are hopelessly volatilized and disappear entirely from the printed
+copy of his speeches.  He gave the most minute and elaborate study to
+the preparation of his speeches--polishing them dexterously and
+rehearsing every word, every gesture, with infinite care.  Yet his
+readiness and fertility of resource in taking advantage, and making
+telling use, of things in the speeches of those immediately preceding
+him, were striking evidences of the rapidity of his thought-processes.
+In Boston, when asked what he thought about the existence of a heaven or
+a hell, he looked grave for a moment, and then replied: "I don't want to
+express an opinion.  It's policy for me to keep silent.  You see, I have
+friends in both places."  His speech introducing General Hawley of
+Connecticut to a Republican meeting at Elmira, New York, is an admirable
+example of his laconic art: "General Hawley is a member of my church at
+Hartford, and the author of 'Beautiful Snow.'  Maybe he will deny that.
+But I am only here to give him a character from his last place.  As a
+pure citizen, I respect him; as a personal friend of years, I have the
+warmest regard for him; as a neighbour, whose vegetable garden adjoins
+mine, why--why, I watch him.  As the author of 'Beautiful Snow,' he has
+added a new pang to winter.  He is a square, true man in honest
+politics, and I must say he occupies a mighty lonesome position.  So
+broad, so bountiful is his character that he never turned a tramp empty-
+handed from his door, but always gave him a letter of introduction to
+me.  Pure, honest, incorruptible, that is Joe Hawley.  Such a man in
+politics is like a bottle of perfumery in a glue factory--it may modify
+the stench, but it doesn't destroy it.  I haven't said any more of him
+than I would say of myself.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is General
+Hawley."
+
+Mr. Chesterton maintains that Mark Twain was a wit rather than a
+humorist--perhaps something more than a humorist.  "Wit," he explains,
+"requires an intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic.  A
+wit must have something of the same running, working, and staying power
+as a mathematician or a metaphysician.  Moreover, wit is a fighting
+thing and a working thing.  A man may enjoy humour all by himself; he
+may see a joke when no one else sees it; he may see the point and avoid
+it.  But wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as
+well as see it.  All honest people saw the point of Mark Twain's wit.
+Not a few dishonest people felt it."  The epigram, "Be virtuous, and you
+will be eccentric," has become a catchword; and everyone has heard Mark
+Twain's reply to the reporter asking for advice as to what to cable his
+paper, which had printed the statement that Mark Twain was dead "Say
+that the statement is greatly exaggerated."  He has admirably taken off
+humanity's enduring self-conceit in the statement that there isn't a
+Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had
+had its rights.  There is something peculiarly American in his warning
+to young girls not to marry--that is, not to excess!  His remarks on
+compliments have a delightful and naive freshness.  He points out how
+embarrassing compliments always are.  It is so difficult to take them
+naturally.  You never know what to say.  He had received many
+compliments in his lifetime, and they had always embarrassed him--he
+always felt that they hadn't said enough!
+
+The incident of Mark Twain's first meeting with Whistler is quaintly
+illustrative of one phase of his broader humour.  Mark Twain was taken
+by a friend to Whistler's studio, just as he was putting the finishing
+touches to one of his fantastic studies.  Confident of the usual
+commendation, Whistler inquired his guest's opinion of the picture.
+Mark Twain assumed the air of a connoisseur, and approaching the picture
+remarked that it did very well, but "he didn't care much for that
+cloud--"; and suiting the action to the word, appeared to be on the
+point of rubbing the cloud with his gloved finger.  In genuine horror,
+Whistler exclaimed: "Don't touch it, the paint's wet!"  "Oh, that's all
+right," replied Mark with his characteristic drawl: "these aren't my
+best gloves, anyhow!"  Whereat Whistler recognized a congenial spirit,
+and their first hearty laugh together was the beginning of a friendly
+and congenial relationship.
+
+I recall an incident in connection with the writing of his
+Autobiography.  On more than one occasion, he declared that the
+Autobiography was going to be something awful--as caustic, fiendish, and
+devilish as he could make it.  Actually, he was in the habit of jotting
+on the margin of the page, opposite to some startling characterization
+or diabolic joke: "Not to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty)
+years after my death."  One day I heard him vent his pent-up rage, in
+bitter and caustic words, upon a certain strenuous, limelight American
+politician.  I could not resist the temptation to ask him if this, too,
+were going into the Autobiography.  "Oh yes," he replied, decisively.
+"Everything goes in.  I make no exceptions.  But," he added
+reflectively, with the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye, "I shall make
+a note beside this passage: 'Not to be published until one hundred and
+fifty years after my death'!"
+
+Mark Twain had numerous "doubles" scattered about the world.  The number
+continually increased; once a month on an average, he would receive a
+letter from a new "double," enclosing a photograph in proof of the
+resemblance.  Mark once wrote to one of these doubles as follows:
+
+MY DEAR SIR--
+
+Many thanks for your letter, with enclosed photograph.  Your resemblance
+to me is remarkable.  In fact, to be perfectly honest, you look more
+like me than I look like myself.  I was so much impressed by the
+resemblance that I have had your picture framed, and am now using it
+regularly, in place of a mirror, to shave by.
+
+                         Yours gratefully,
+                                        S. L. CLEMENS.
+
+Although not generally recognized, it is undoubtedly true that Mark
+Twain was a wit as well as a humorist.  He was the author of many
+epigrams and curt aphorisms which have become stock phrases in
+conversation, quoted in all classes of society wherever the English
+language is spoken.  His phrasing is unpretentious, even homely, wearing
+none of the polished brilliancy of La Rochefoucauld or Bernard Shaw; but
+Mark Twain's sayings "stick" because they are rooted in shrewdness and
+hard commonsense.
+
+Mark Twain's warning to the two burglars who stole his silverware from
+"Stormfield" and were afterwards caught and sent to the penitentiary, is
+very amusing, though not highly complimentary to American political
+life:
+
+"Now you two young men have been up to my house, stealing my tinware,
+and got pulled in by these Yankees up here.  You had much better have
+stayed in New York, where you have the pull.  Don't you see where you're
+drifting.  They'll send you from here down to Bridgeport jail, and the
+next thing you know you'll be in the United States Senate.  There's no
+other future left open to you."
+
+The sign he posted after the visitation of these same burglars was a
+prominent ornament of the billiard room at "Stormfield ":
+
+                                  NOTICE
+
+                           To the next Burglar
+
+          There is nothing but plated-ware in this house, now
+          and henceforth.  You will find it in that brass thing
+          in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of
+          kittens.  If you want the basket, put the kittens in
+          the brass thing.
+
+          Do not make a noise, it disturbs the family.
+
+          You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that thing
+          which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think
+          they call it, or pergola, or something like that.
+
+          Please close the door when you go away!
+
+                                        Very truly yours,
+
+                                                  S. L. CLEMENS.
+
+Now these are examples of Mark Twain's humour, American humour, such as
+we are accustomed to expect from Mark Twain--humour not unmixed with a
+strong spice of wit.  But Mark Twain was capable of wit, pure and
+unadulterated, curt and concise.  I once saw him write in a young girl's
+birthday book an aphorism which he said was one of his favourites "Truth
+is our most valuable possession.  Let us economize it."  The advice he
+once gave me as to the proper frame of mind for undergoing a surgical
+operation has always remained in my memory: "Console yourself with the
+reflection that you are giving the doctor pleasure, and that he is
+getting paid for it."  Peculiarly memorable is his forthright dictum
+that the statue which advertises its modesty with a fig-leaf brings its
+modesty under suspicion.  His business motto--unfortunately, a motto
+that he never followed--has often been attributed, because of its canny
+shrewdness, to Mr. Andrew Carnegie.  The idea was to put all your eggs
+in one basket--and then--watch that basket!  His anti-Puritanical
+convictions find concrete expression in his assertion that few things
+are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.  Truly
+classic, in usage if not in form, is his happy saying that faith is
+believing what you know ain't so.  His definition of a classic as a book
+which people praise but don't read, is as frequently heard as are
+Biblical and Shakespearian tags.
+
+Mr. Clemens once told me that he had composed between two and three
+hundred maxims during his life.  Many of them, especially those from the
+old and new calendars of Pudd'nhead Wilson, bear the individual and
+peculiar stamp of Mark Twain's phraseology and outlook upon life--
+quaint, genial, and shrewd.  In pursuance of his deep-rooted belief in
+the omnipotent power of training, he remarked that the peach was once a
+bitter almond, the cauliflower nothing but cabbage with a college
+education.  He himself was not guiltless of that irreverence which he
+defined as disrespect for another man's god.  Women took an almost
+unholy delight in describing some of their undesirable acquaintances, in
+Mark Twain's phrase, as neither quite refined, nor quite unrefined, but
+just the kind of person that keeps a parrot!
+
+At times, Mark Twain realized the sanctifying power of illusions in a
+world of harsh realities; for he asserted that when illusions are gone
+you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.  A depressing sense of
+world-weariness sometimes overbore the native joyousness of his
+temperament; and he expressed his sense of deep gratitude to Adam, the
+first great benefactor of the race--because he had brought death into
+the world.  A funeral always gave Mark Twain a sense of spiritual
+uplift, a sense of thankfulness because the dead friend had been set
+free.  He thought it was far harder to live than to die.
+
+In one of his early sketches, there was admirable wit in the suggestion
+to the organist for a hymn appropriate to a sermon on the Prodigal Son:
+
+                   "Oh!  we'll all get blind drunk
+                    When Johnny comes marching home!"
+
+And in The Innocents Abroad there is the same sort of brilliant wit in
+the mad logic of his innocent query, on learning that St. Philip Neri's
+heart was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs: "I was
+curious to know what Philip had for dinner."  Mark Twain was capable of
+epigrams worthy, in their dark levity, of Swift himself.  In speaking of
+Pudd'nhead Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said "Humour there is in almost
+every scene and every page; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam
+on the greatest Shakespearian tragedies--on the deep melancholy of
+Hamlet, the heartbreak of Lear."  The greatest ironic achievements of
+Mark Twain, in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that
+Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'?  They reveal the
+power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist--or shall we rather
+say, ironic wit?  For they range all the way from the most mordant to
+the most pathetic irony--from Mephistophelean laughter to warm, human
+tears:
+
+                         "Sunt lachrymae rerum."
+
+"Make a reputation first by your more solid achievements," counselled
+Oliver Wendell Holmes.  "You can't expect to do anything great with
+Macbeth, if you first come on flourishing Paul Pry's umbrella."  Mark
+Twain has had to pay in full the penalty of comic greatness.  The world
+is loth to accept a popular character at any rating other than its own.
+Whosoever sets himself the task of amusing the world must realize the
+almost insuperable difficulty of inducing the world to regard him as a
+serious thinker.  Says Moliere--
+
+              "C'est une etrange entreprise que celle
+               de faire rire les honnetes gens."
+
+The strangeness of the undertaking is no less pronounced than the rigour
+of its obligations.  Mark Twain began his career as a professional
+humorist and fun-maker; he frankly donned the motley, the cap and bells.
+The man-in-the-street is not easily persuaded that the basis of the
+comic is, not uncommon nonsense, but glorified common-sense.  The French
+have a fine-flavoured distinction in /ce qui remue/ from /ce qui emeut/;
+and if /remuage/ is the defining characteristic of 'A Tramp Abroad',
+'Roughing It', and 'The Innocents Abroad', there is much of deep
+seriousness and genuine emotion in 'Life on the Mississippi', 'Tom
+Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'.  In the course of
+his lifetime, Mark Twain evolved from a fun-maker into a masterly
+humorist, from a sensational journalist into a literary artist.  In
+explanation of this, let us recall the steps in that evolution.  In his
+youth, this boy had no schooling worth speaking of; he lived in an
+environment that promised only stagnation and decay.  As the young boy,
+barefooted and dirty, watched the steamboats pass and repass upon the
+surface of that great inland deep, the Mississippi, he conceived the
+ambition and the ideal of learning to know and to master that mysterious
+water.  His dream, in time, was realized; he not only became a pilot,
+but--which is infinitely more significant--he changed from a callow,
+indolent, unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a man, a
+master of the river, with a knowledge which, in its accuracy and
+minuteness, was, for its purpose, all-sufficient and complete.
+
+I have always felt that, had it not been for this training in the great
+university of the Mississippi, Mark Twain might never have acquired that
+trained faculty for minute detail and descriptive elaboration without
+which his works, full of flaws as they are, might never have revealed
+the very real art which they betray.  For the art of Mark Twain is the
+art of taking infinite pains--the art of exactitude, precision and
+detail.  Humour per se is as ephemeral as the laugh--dying in the very
+moment of its birth.  Art alone can give it enduring vitality.  Mark
+Twain's native temperament, rich with humour and racy of the soil, drank
+in the wonder of the river and unfolded through communication with all
+its rude human devotees; the quick mind, the eager susceptibility,
+developed and matured through rigorous education in particularity and
+detail; and before his spirit the very beauties of Nature herself
+disappeared in face of a consuming sense of the work of the world that
+must be done.
+
+Mark Twain never wholly escaped the penalty that his reputation as a
+humorist compelled him to pay.  He became more than popular novelist,
+more than a jovial entertainer: he became a public institution, as
+unmistakable and as national as the Library of Congress or the
+Democratic Party.  Even in the latest years of his life, though long
+since dissociated in fact from the category of Artemus Ward, John
+Phoenix, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain could never
+be sure that his most solemn utterance might not be drowned in roars of
+thoughtless laughter.
+
+"It has been a very serious and a very difficult matter," Mr. Clemens
+once said to me, "to doff the mask of humour with which the public is
+accustomed, in thought, to see me adorned.  It is the incorrigible
+practice of the public, in this or in any country, to see only humour in
+the humorist, however serious his vein.  Not long ago I wrote a poem,
+which I never dreamed of giving to the public, on account of its
+seriousness; but on being invited to address the women students of a
+certain great university, I was persuaded by a near friend to read this
+poem.  At the close of my lecture I said 'Now, ladies, I am going to
+read you a poem of mine'--which was greeted with bursts of uproarious
+laughter.  'But this is a truly serious poem,' I asseverated--only to be
+greeted with renewed and, this time, more uproarious laughter.  Nettled
+by this misunderstanding, I put the poem in my pocket, saying, 'Well,
+young ladies, since you do not believe me to be serious, I shall not
+read the poem'--at which the audience almost went into convulsions of
+laughter."
+
+Humour is a function of nationality.  The same joke, as related by an
+American, a Scotchman, an Irishman, a Frenchman, carries with it a
+distinctive racial flavour and individuality of approach.  Indeed, it is
+open to question whether most humour is not essentially local in its
+nature, requiring some specialized knowledge of some particular
+locality.  It would be quite impossible for an Italian on his native
+heath to understand that great political satirist, "Mr. Dooley," on the
+Negro Problem, for example.  After reading George Ade's Fables in Slang,
+Mr. Andrew Lang was driven to the desperate conclusion that humour
+varies with the parallels of latitude, a joke in Chicago being a riddle
+in London.
+
+If one would lay his finger upon the secret of Mark Twain's world-wide
+popularity as a humorist, he would find that secret, primarily, in the
+universality and humanity of his humour.  Mark Twain is a master in the
+art of broad contrast; incongruity lurks on the surface of his humour;
+and there is about it a staggering and cyclopean surprise.  But these
+are mere surface qualities, more or less common, though at lower power,
+to all forms of humour.  Nor is his international vogue as a humorist to
+be attributed to any tricks of style, to any breadth of knowledge, or
+even to any depth of intellectuality.  His hold upon the world is due to
+qualities, not of the head, but of the heart.  I once heard Mr. Clemens
+say that humour is the key to the hearts of men, for it springs from the
+heart; and worthy of record is his dictum that there is far more of
+feeling than of thought in genuine humour.
+
+Mark Twain succeeded in "tickling the midriff of the English-speaking
+races" with a single story; and in time he showed himself to be, not
+only a man of letters, but also a man of action.  His humour has been
+defined as the sunny break of his serious purpose.  Horace Walpole has
+said that the world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy to the
+man of feeling.  To the great humorist--to Mark Twain--the world was a
+tragi-comedy.  Like Smile Faguet, he seemed at times to feel that grief
+is the most real and important thing in the world--because it separates
+us from happiness.  He was an exemplar of the highest, truest, sincerest
+humour, perfectly fulfilling George Meredith's definition: "If you laugh
+all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a
+tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour, spare
+him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is the
+spirit of Humour that is moving you."  Mark Twain's fun was light-
+hearted and insouciant, his pathos genuine and profound.  "He is, above
+all," said that oldest of English journals, 'The Spectator', "the
+fearless upholder of all that is clean, noble, straightforward,
+innocent, and manly.  .  .  .  If he is a jester, he jests with the
+mirth of the happiest of the Puritans; he has read much of English
+knighthood, and translated the best of it into his living pages; and he
+has assuredly already won a high degree in letters in having added more
+than any writer since Dickens to the gaiety of the Empire of the English
+language."
+
+Mark Twain's humour flowed warm from the heart.  He enjoyed to the
+utmost those two inalienable blessings: "laughter and the love of
+friends."  He woke the laughter of an epoch and numbered a world for his
+friends.  "He is the true consolidator of nations," said Mr. Augustine
+Birrell.  "His delightful humour is of the kind which dissipates and
+destroys national prejudices.  His truth and his honour, his love of
+truth and his love of honour, overflow all boundaries.  He has made the
+world better by his presence."
+
+
+
+
+
+                       IV.  THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS
+
+
+          "Art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life,
+          but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the
+          whole world the art of common life--the art of a people--
+          universal art."
+                                   TOLSTOY: What is Art?
+
+
+
+Some years ago a group of Mark Twain's friends, in a spirit of fun,
+addressed a letter to:
+
+                               MARK TWAIN
+                            GOD KNOWS WHERE.
+
+Though taking a somewhat circuitous route, the letter went unerringly to
+its goal; and it was not long before the senders of that letter received
+the laconic, but triumphant reply: "He did."  They now turned the tables
+on the jubilant author, who equally as quickly received a letter
+addressed:
+
+                               MARK TWAIN
+                         THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE.
+
+It seemed that "he" did, too!
+
+In his lifetime Mark Twain won a fame that was literally world-wide
+--a fame, indeed, which seemed to extend to realms peopled by noted
+theological characters.  From very humble beginnings--he used
+facetiously to speak of coming up from the "very dregs of society"!--
+Mark Twain achieved international eminence and repute.  This
+accomplishment was due to the power of brain and personality alone.  In
+this sense, his career is unprecedented and unparalleled in the history
+of American literature.
+
+It is a mark of the democratic independence of America that she has
+betrayed a singular indifference to the appraisal of her literature at
+the hands of foreign criticism.  Upon her writers who have exhibited
+derivative genius--Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow--American
+criticism has lavished the most extravagant eulogiums.  The three
+geniuses who have made permanent contributions to world-literature, who
+have either embodied in the completest degree the spirit of American
+democracy, or who have had the widest following of imitators and
+admirers in foreign countries, still await their final and just deserts
+at the hands of critical opinion in their own land.  The genius of Edgar
+Allan Poe gave rise to schools of literature on the continent of Europe;
+yet in America his name must remain for years debarred from inclusion in
+a so-called Hall of Fame!  Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great
+interpreters and embodiments of America, represent the supreme
+contribution of democracy to universal literature.  In so far as it is
+legitimate for anyone to be denominated a "self-made man" in literature,
+these men are justly entitled to such characterization.  They owe
+nothing to European literature--their genius is supremely original,
+native, democratic.  The case of Mark Twain, which is our present
+concern, is a literary phenomenon which imposes upon criticism,
+peculiarly upon American criticism, the distinct obligation of tracing
+the steps in his unhalting climb to an eminence that was international
+in its character, and of defining those signal qualities, traits,
+characteristics--individual, literary, social, racial, national--which
+compassed his world-wide fame.  For if it be true that the judgment of
+foreign nations is virtually the judgment of posterity, then is Mark
+Twain already a classic.
+
+Upon the continent of Europe, Mark Twain first received notable
+recognition in France at the hands of that brilliant woman, Mme. Blanc
+(Th. Bentzon), who devoted so much of her energies to the popularization
+of American literature in Europe.  That one of her series of essays upon
+the American humorists which dealt with Mark Twain appeared in the
+'Revue des Deux Mondes' in 1872; in it appeared her admirable
+translation of 'The Jumping Frog'.  There is no cause for surprise that
+a scholarly Frenchwoman, reared on classic models and confined by rigid
+canons of art, should stand aghast at this boisterous, barbaric,
+irreverent jester from the wilds of America.  When it is remembered that
+Mark Twain began his career as one of the sage-brush writers and gave
+free play to his passion for horseplay, his desire to "lay a mine" for
+the other fellow, and his defiance of the traditional and the classic,
+it is not to be wondered at that Mme. Blanc, while honouring him with
+recognition in the most authoritative literary journal in the world,
+could not conceal an expression of amazement over his enthusiastic
+acceptance in English-speaking countries.
+
+     "Mark Twain's 'Jumping Frog' should be mentioned in the first place
+     as one of his most popular little stories--almost a type of the
+     rest.  It is, nevertheless, rather difficult for us to understand,
+     while reading this story, the 'roars of laughter' that it excited
+     in Australia and in India, in New York and in London; the numerous
+     editions of it which appeared; the epithet of 'inimitable' that the
+     critics of the English press have unanimously awarded to it.
+
+     "We may remark that a Persian of Montesquieu, a Huron of Voltaire,
+     even a simple Peruvian woman of Madame de Graffigny, reasons much
+     more wisely about European civilization than an American of San
+     Francisco.  The fact is, that it is not sufficient to have wit, or
+     even natural taste, in order to appreciate works of art.
+
+     "It is the right of humorists to be extravagant; but still common
+     sense, although carefully hidden, ought sometimes to make itself
+     apparent.  .  .  .  In Mark Twain the Protestant is enraged against
+     the pagan worship of broken marble statues--the democrat denies
+     that there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages.  The sublime
+     ruins of the Coliseum only impressed him with the superiority of
+     America, which punishes its criminals by forcing them to work for
+     the benefit of the State, over ancient Rome, which could only draw
+     from the punishments which it inflicted the passing pleasure of a
+     spectacle.
+
+     "In the course of this voyage in company with Mark Twain, we at
+     length discover, under his good-fellowship and apparent
+     ingenuousness, faults which we should never have expected.  He has
+     in the highest degree that fault of appearing astonished at
+     nothing--common, we may say, to all savages.  He confesses himself
+     that one of his great pleasures is to horrify the guides by his
+     indifference and stupidity.  He is, too, decidedly envious. . . .
+     We could willingly pardon him his patriotic self-love, often
+     wounded by the ignorance of Europeans, above all in what concerns
+     the New World, if only that national pride were without mixture of
+     personal vanity; but how comes it that Mark Twain, so severe upon
+     those poor Turks, finds scarcely anything to criticize in Russia,
+     where absolutism has nevertheless not ceased to flourish?  We need
+     not seek far for the cause of this indulgence: the Czar received
+     our ferocious republicans; the Empress, and the Grand Duchess Mary,
+     spoke to them in English.
+
+     "Taking the Pleasure Trip on the Continent altogether, does it
+     merit the success it enjoys?  In spite of the indulgence that we
+     cannot but show to the judgments of a foreigner; while recollecting
+     that those amongst us who have visited America have fallen,
+     doubtless, under the influence of prejudices almost as dangerous as
+     ignorance, into errors quite as bad--in spite of the wit with which
+     certain pages sparkle--we must say that this voyage is very far
+     below the less celebrated excursions of the same author in his own
+     country."
+
+Three years later, Mme. Blanc returns to the discussion of Mark Twain,
+in an essay in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes', entitled 'L'age Dore en
+Amerique'--an elaborate review and analysis of The Gilded Age.  The
+savage charm and real simplicity of Mark Twain are not lacking in
+appeal, even to her sophisticated intelligence; and she is inclined to
+infer that jovial irony and animal spirits are qualities sufficient to
+amuse a young nation of people like the Americans who do not, like the
+French, pique themselves upon being blase.  According to her judgment,
+Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner are lacking in the requisite mental
+grasp for the "stupendous task of interpreting the great tableau of the
+American scene."  Nor does she regard their effort at collaboration as a
+success from the standpoint of art.  The charm of Colonel Sellers wholly
+escapes her; she cannot understand the almost loving appreciation with
+which this cheaply gross forerunner of the later American industrial
+brigand was greeted by the American public.  The book repels her by
+"that mixture of good sense with mad folly--disorder"; but she praises
+Mark Twain's accuracy as a reporter.  The things which offend her
+sensibilities are the wilful exaggeration of the characters, and the
+jests which are so elaborately constructed that "the very theme itself
+disappears under the mass of embroidery which overlays it."  "The
+audacities of a Bret Harte, the grosser temerities of a Mark Twain,
+still astonish us," she concludes; "but soon we shall become accustomed
+to an American language whose savoury freshness is not to be disdained,
+awaiting still more delicate and refined qualities that time will
+doubtless bring."
+
+In translating 'The Jumping Frog' into faultless French (giving Mark
+Twain the opportunity for that delightful retranslation into English
+which furnished delight for thousands), in reviewing with elaboration
+and long citations 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'The Gilded Age', Mme.
+Blanc introduced Mark Twain to the literary public of France; and Emile
+Blemont, in his 'Esquisses Americaines de Mark Twain' (1881), still
+further enhanced the fame of Mark Twain in France by translating a
+number of his slighter sketches.  In 1886, Eugene Forgues published in
+the 'Revue des Deux Mondes' an exhaustive review (with long citations)
+of 'Life on the Mississippi', under the title 'Les Caravans d'un
+humoriste'; and his prefatory remarks in regard to Mark Twain's fame in
+France at that time may be accepted as authoritative.  He pointed out
+the praiseworthy efforts that had been made to popularize these
+"transatlantic gaieties," to import into France a new mode of comic
+entertainment.  Yet he felt that the peculiar twist of national
+character, the type of wit peculiar to a people and a country, the
+specialized conception of the /vis comica/ revealed in Mark Twain's
+works, confined them to a restricted milieu.  The result of all the
+efforts to popularize Mark Twain in France, he makes plain, was an
+almost complete check; for to the French taste Mark Twain's pleasantry
+appeared macabre, his wit brutal, his temperament dry to excess.  By
+some, indeed, his exaggerations were regarded as symptoms of mental
+alienation; and the originality of his verve did not succeed in giving a
+passport to the incoherence of his conceptions.  "It has been said,"
+remarked M. Forgues, with keen perception, "that an academician slumbers
+in the depths of every Frenchman; and it was this which prevented the
+success of Mark Twain in France.  Humour, in France, has its laws and
+its restrictions.  So the French public saw in Mark Twain a gross
+jester, incessantly beating upon a tom-tom to attract the attention of
+the crowd.  They were tenacious in resisting all such blandishments
+.  .  .  .  As a humorist, Mark Twain was never appreciated in France.
+The appreciation he ultimately secured--an appreciation by no means
+inconsiderable, though in no sense comparable to that won in Anglo-Saxon
+and Germanic countries--was due to his sagacity and penetration as an
+observer, and to his marvellous faculty for calling up scenes and
+situations by the clever use of the novel and the /imprevu/.  There was,
+even to the Frenchman, a certain lively appeal in an intelligence
+absolutely free of convention, sophistication, or reverence for
+traditionary views /qua/ traditionary."  Though at first the salt of
+Mark Twain's humour seemed to the French to be lacking in the Attic
+flavour, this new mode of comic entertainment, the leisurely exposition
+of the genially naive American, in time won its way with the /blase/
+Parisians.  Travellers who could find no copy of the Bible in the street
+bookstalls of Paris, were confronted everywhere with copies of 'Roughing
+It'.  When the authoritative edition of Mark Twain's works appeared in
+English, that authoritative French journal, the 'Mercure de France',
+paid him this distinguished tribute: "His public is as varied as
+possible, because of the versatility and suppleness of his talent which
+addresses itself successively to all classes of readers.  He has been
+called the greatest humorist in the world, and that is probably the
+truth; but he is also a charming and attractive story-teller, an alert
+romancer, a clever and penetrating observer, a philosopher without
+pretensions, and therefore all the more profound, and finally, a
+brilliant essayist."
+
+Nevertheless, the observation of M. Forgues is just and authentic--the
+Attic flavour of /l'esprit Gaulois/ is alien to the loosely articulated
+structure of American humour.  The noteworthy criticism which Mark Twain
+directed at Paul Bourget's 'Outre Mer', and the subsequent controversy
+incident thereto, forced into light the racial and temperamental
+dissimilarities between the Gallic and the American /Ausschauung/.  Mr.
+Clemens once remarked to me that, of all continental peoples, the French
+were most alien to the spirit of his humour.  In 'Le Figaro', at the
+time of Mark Twain's death, this fundamental difference in taste once
+more comes to light: "It is as difficult for a Frenchman to understand
+Mark Twain as for a North American to admire La Fontaine.  At first
+sight, there is nothing in common between that highly specialized
+faculty which the Anglo-Saxons of the old and the new world designate
+under the name of humour, and that quality with us which we call wit
+(esprit).  And yet, at bottom, these two manifestations of the human
+genius, so different in appearance, have a common origin and reach the
+same result: they are, both of them, the glorification of good sense
+presented in pleasing and unexpected form.  Only, this form must
+necessarily vary with peoples who do not speak the same language and
+whose skulls are not fashioned in the same way."
+
+In Italy, as in France, the peculiar /timbre/ of Mark Twain's humour
+found an audience not wholly sympathetic, not thoroughly /au courant/
+with his spirit.  "Translation, however accurate and conscientious," as
+the Italian critic, Raffaele Simboli, has pointed out, "fails to render
+the special flavour of his work.  And then in Italy, where humorous
+writing generally either rests on a political basis or depends on risky
+phrases, Mark Twain's sketches are not appreciated because the spirit
+which breathes in them is not always understood.  The story of 'The
+Jumping Frog', for instance, famous as it is in America and England, has
+made little impression in France or Italy."
+
+It was rather among the Germanic peoples and those most closely allied
+to them, the Scandinavians, that Mark Twain found most complete and
+ready response.  At first blush, it seems almost incredible that the
+writings of Mark Twain, with their occasional slang, their
+colloquialisms and their local peculiarities of dialect, should have
+borne translation so well into other languages, especially into German.
+It must, however, be borne in mind that, despite these peculiar features
+of his writings, they are couched in a style of most marked directness,
+simplicity and native English purity.  The ease with which his works
+were translated into foreign, especially the Germanic and allied
+tongues, and the eager delight with which they were read and
+comprehended by all classes, high and low, constitute perhaps the most
+signal conceivable tribute, not only to the humanity of his spirit, but
+to the genuine art of his marvellously forthright and natural style.
+It need be no cause for surprise that as early as 1872 he had secured
+Tauchnitz, of Leipzig, for his Continental agent.  German translations
+soon appeared of 'The Jumping Frog and Other Stories' (1874), 'The
+Gilded Age' (1874), 'The Innocents Abroad and The New Pilgrim's
+Progress' (1875), 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876).  A few years
+later his sketches, many of them, were translated into virtually all
+printed languages, notably into Russian and modern Greek; and his more
+extended works gradually came to be translated into German, French,
+Italian, and the languages of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula.
+
+The elements of the colossally grotesque, the wildly primitive, in Mark
+Twain's works, the underlying note of melancholy not less than the
+lawless Bohemianism, found sympathetic appreciation among the Germanic
+races.  George Meredith has likened the functionings of Germanic humour
+to the heavy-footed antics of a dancing bear.  Mark Twain's stories of
+the Argonauts, the miners and desperadoes, with their primitive,
+orgiastic existence; his narratives of the wild freedom of the life on
+the Mississippi, the lawless feuds and barbaric encounters--all appealed
+to the passion for the fantastic and the grotesque innate in the
+Germanic consciousness.  To the Europeans, this wild genius of the
+Pacific Slope seemed to function in a sort of unexplored fourth
+dimension of humour--vast and novel--of which they had never dreamed.
+It is noteworthy that Schleich, in his 'Psychopathik des Humors',
+reserved for American humour, with Mark Twain as its leading exponent,
+a distinct and unique category which he denominated /phantastischen,
+grossdimensionalen/.
+
+To the biographer belongs the task of describing, in detail, the lavish
+entertainment and open-hearted homage which were bestowed upon Mark
+Twain in German Europe.  In writing of Mark Twain and his popularity in
+Germanic countries, Carl von Thaler unhesitatingly asserts that Mark
+Twain was feted, wined and dined in Vienna, the Austrian metropolis, in
+an unprecedented manner, and awarded unique honours hitherto paid to no
+German writer.  In Berlin, the young Kaiser bestowed upon him the most
+distinguished marks of his esteem; and praised his works, in especial
+'Life on the Mississippi', with the intensest enthusiasm.  When Mark
+Twain received a command from the Kaiser to dine with him, his young
+daughter exclaimed that if it kept on like this, there soon wouldn't be
+anybody left for him to become acquainted with but God!  Mark said that
+it seemed uncomplimentary to regard him as unacquainted in that quarter;
+but of course his daughter was young, and the young always jump to
+conclusions without reflection.  After hearing the Kaiser's eulogy on
+'Life on the Mississippi', he was astounded and touched to receive a
+similar tribute, the same evening, from the portier of his lodging-
+house.  He loved to dwell upon this, in later years--declaring it the
+most extraordinary coincidence of his life that a crowned head and a
+portier, the very top of an empire and the very bottom of it, should
+have expressed the very same criticism, and delivered the very same
+verdict, upon one of his books, almost in the same hour and the same
+breath.
+
+The German edition of his works, in six volumes, published by Lutz of
+Stuttgart, in 1898, I believe, contained an introduction in which he was
+hailed as the greatest humorist in the world.  Among German critics he
+was regarded as second only to Dickens in drastic comic situation and
+depth of feeling.  Robinson Crusoe was held to exhibit a limited power
+of imagination in comparison with the ingenuity and inventiveness of Tom
+Sawyer.  At times the German critics confessed their inability to
+discover the dividing line between astounding actuality and fantastic
+exaggeration.  The descriptions of the barbaric state of Western America
+possessed an indescribable fascination for the sedate Europeans.  At
+times Mark Twain's bloody jests froze the laughter on their lips; and
+his "revolver-humour" made their hair stand on end.  Though realizing
+that the scenes and events described in 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry
+Finn', 'Roughing It', and 'Life on the Mississippi' could not have been
+duplicated in Europe, the German critics revelled in them none the less
+that "such adventures were possible only in America--perhaps only in the
+fancy of an American!"  "Mark Twain's greatest strength," says Von
+Thaler, "lies in the little sketches, the literary snap-shots.  The
+shorter his work, the more striking it is.  He draws directly from life.
+No other writer has learned to know so many different varieties of men
+and of circumstances, so many strange examples of the Genus Homo, as he;
+no other has taken so strange a course of development."  The deeper
+elements of Mark Twain's humour did not escape the attention of the
+Germans, nor fail of appreciation at their hands.  In his aphorisms,
+embodying at once genuine wit and experience of life, they discovered
+not merely the American author, but the universal human being; these
+aphorisms they found worthy of profound and lasting admiration.
+Sintenis found in Mark Twain a "living symptom of the youthful joy in
+existence"--a genius capable at will, despite his "boyish extravagance,"
+of the virile formulation of fertile and suggestive ideas.  His latest
+critic in Germany wrote at the time of his death, with a genuine insight
+into the significance of his work: "Although Mark Twain's humour moves
+us to irresistible laughter, this is not the main point in his books;
+like all true humorists, /ist der Witz mit dem Weltschmerz verbunden/,
+he is a witness to higher thoughts and higher emotions, and his purpose
+is to expose bad morals and evil circumstances, in order to improve and
+ennoble mankind."  The critic of the 'Berliner Zeitung' asserted that
+Mark Twain is loved in Germany more than all other humorists, English or
+French, because his humour "turns fundamentally upon serious and earnest
+conceptions of life."  It is a tremendously significant fact that the,
+works of American literature most widely read in Germany are the works
+of--striking conjunction!--Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain.
+
+The 'Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' fired the laugh heard round the
+world.  Like Byron, Mark Twain woke one morning to find himself famous.
+A classic fable, which had once evoked inextinguishable laughter in
+Athens, was unconsciously re-told in the language of Angel's Camp,
+Calaveras County, where history repeated itself with a precision of
+detail startling in its miraculous coincidence.  Despite the
+international fame thus suddenly won by this little fable, Mark Twain
+had yet to overcome the ingrained opposition of insular prejudice before
+his position in England and the colonies was established upon a sure and
+enduring footing.  In a review of 'The Innocents Abroad' in 'The
+Saturday Review' (1870), the comparison is made between the Americans
+who "do Europe in six weeks" and the most nearly analogous class of
+British travellers, with the following interesting conclusions: "The
+American is generally the noisier and more actively disagreeable, but,
+on the other hand, he often partially redeems his absurdity by a certain
+naivete and half-conscious humour.  He is often laughing in his sleeve
+at his own preposterous brags, and does not take himself quite so
+seriously as his British rival.  He is vulgar, and even ostentatiously
+and atrociously vulgar; but the vulgarity is mixed with a real
+shrewdness which rescues it from simple insipidity.  We laugh at him,
+and we would rather not have too much of his company; but we do not feel
+altogether safe in despising him."  The lordly condescension and gross
+self-satisfaction here betrayed are but preliminaries to the ludicrous
+density of the subsequent reflections upon Mark Twain himself: "He
+parades his utter ignorance of Continental languages and manners, and
+expresses his very original judgments on various wonders of art and
+nature with a praiseworthy frankness.  We are sometimes left in doubt
+whether he is speaking in all sincerity or whether he is having a sly
+laugh at himself and his readers"!  It is quite evident that the large
+mass of English readers, represented by The Saturday Review, had not
+caught Mark Twain's tone; but even the reviewer is more than half won
+over by the infectiousness of this new American humour.  "Perhaps we
+have persuaded our readers by this time that Mr. Twain (sic) is a very
+offensive specimen of the vulgarest kind of Yankee.  And yet, to say the
+truth, we have a kind of liking for him.  There is a frankness and
+originality about his remarks which is (sic) pleasanter than the mere
+repetition of stale raptures; and his fun, if not very refined, is often
+tolerable in its way.  In short, his pages may be turned over with
+amusement, as exhibiting more or less consciously a very lively portrait
+of the uncultivated American tourist, who may be more obtrusive and
+misjudging, but is not quite so stupidly unobservant as our native
+product.  We should not choose either of them for our companions on a
+visit to a church or a picture--gallery, but we should expect most
+amusement from the Yankee as long as we could stand him."  It was this
+review which gave Mark Twain the opening for his celebrated parody--a
+parody which, I have always thought, went far to opening the eyes of the
+British public to the true spirit of his humour.  Such irresistible fun
+could not fail of appreciation at the hands of a nation which regarded
+Dickens as their representative national author.
+
+Two years later, Mark Twain received in England an appreciative
+reception of well-nigh national character.  Whilst the literary and
+academic circles of America withheld their unstinted recognition of an
+author so primitive and unlettered, Great Britain received him with open
+arms.  He was a welcome guest at the houses of the exclusive; the
+highest dignitaries of public life, the authoritative journals, the
+leaders of fashion, of thought, and of opinion openly rejoiced in the
+breezy unconventionality, the fascinating daring, and the genial
+personality of this new variety of American genius.  His English
+publisher, John Camden Hotten, wrote in 1873: "How he dined with the
+Sheriff of London and Middlesex; how he spent glorious evenings with the
+wits and literati who gather around the festive boards of the
+Whitefriars and the Savage Clubs; how he moved in the gay throng at the
+Guildhall conversazione; how he feasted with the Lord Mayor of London;
+and was the guest of that ancient and most honourable body--the City of
+London Artillery--all these matters we should like to dwell upon."  His
+public lectures, though not so popular as those of Artemus Ward, won him
+recognition as a master in all the arts of the platform.  Mr. H.  R.
+Haweis, who heard him once at the old Hanover Square Rooms, thus
+describes the occasion: "The audience was not large nor very
+enthusiastic.  I believe he would have been an increasing success had he
+stayed longer.  We had not time to get accustomed to his peculiar way,
+and there was nothing to take us by storm, as in Artemus Ward. . . . .
+He came on and stood quite alone.  A little table, with the traditional
+water-bottle and tumbler, was by his side.  His appearance was not
+impressive, not very unlike the representation of him in the various
+pictures in his 'Tramp Abroad'.  He spoke more slowly than any other man
+I ever heard, and did not look at his audience quite enough.  I do not
+think that he felt altogether at home with us, nor we with him.  We
+never laughed loud or long; no one went into those irrepressible
+convulsions which used to make Artemus pause and look so hurt and
+surprised.  We sat throughout expectant and on the /qui vive/, very well
+interested, and gently simmering with amusement.  With the exception of
+one exquisite description of the old Magdalen ivy--covered collegiate
+buildings at Oxford University, I do not think there was one thing worth
+setting down in print.  I got no information out of the lecture, and
+hardly a joke that would wear, or a story that would bear repeating.
+There was a deal about the dismal, lone silver--land, the story of the
+Mexican plug that bucked, and a duel which never came off, and another
+duel in which no one was injured; and we sat patiently enough through
+it, fancying that by and by the introduction would be over, and the
+lecture would begin, when Twain suddenly made his bow and went off!  It
+was over.  I looked at my watch; I was never more taken aback.  I had
+been sitting there exactly an hour and twenty minutes.  It seemed ten
+minutes at the outside.  If you have ever tried to address a public
+meeting, you will know what this means.  It means that Mark Twain is a
+consummate public speaker.  If ever he chose to say anything, he would
+say it marvellously well; but in the art of saying nothing in an hour,
+he surpasses our most accomplished parliamentary speakers."
+
+The nation which had been reared upon the wit of Sidney Smith, the irony
+of Swift, the /gros sel/ of Fielding, the extravagance of Dickens, was
+ripe for the colossal incongruities and daring contrasts of Mark Twain.
+They recognized in him not only "the most successful and original wag of
+his day," but also a rare genius who shared with Walt Whitman "the
+honour of being the most strictly American writer of what is called
+American literature."  We read in a review of 'A Tramp Abroad',
+published in The Athenaeum in 1880: "Mark Twain is American pure and
+simple.  To the eastern motherland he owes but the rudiments, the
+groundwork, already archaic and obsolete to him, of the speech he has to
+write; in his turn of art, his literary method and aims, his
+intellectual habit and temper, he is as distinctly national as the
+Fourth of July."  Mark Twain was admired because he was "a literary
+artist of exceptional skill"; and it was ungrudgingly acknowledged that
+"he has a keen sense of character and uncommon skill in presenting it
+dramatically; and he is also an admirable story-teller, with the
+anecdotic instinct and habit in perfection, and with a power of episodic
+narrative that is scarcely equalled, if at all, by Mr. Charles Reade
+himself."  Indeed, from the early days of 'The Innocents Abroad', the
+"first transatlantic democratic utterance which found its way into the
+hearing of the mass of English people"; during the period of 'Tom
+Sawyer', "the completest boy in fiction," the immortal 'Huckleberry
+Finn', "the standard picaresque novel of America--the least trammelled
+piece of literature in the language," and 'Life on the Mississippi',
+vastly appreciated in England as in Germany for its /cultur-historisch/
+value; down to the day when Oxford University bestowed the coveted
+honour of its degree upon Mark Twain, and all England took him to their
+hearts with fervour and abandon--during this long period of almost four
+decades, Mark Twain progressively strengthened his hold upon the
+imagination of the English people and, like Charles Dickens before him,
+may be said to have become the representative author of the Anglo-Saxon
+race.  "The vast majority of readers here regard him," said Mr. Sydney
+Brooks in 1907, "to a degree in which they regard no other living
+writer, as their personal friend, and love him for his tenderness, his
+masculinity, his unfailing wholesomeness even more than for his humour."
+To all who love and admire Mark Twain, these words in which he was
+welcomed to England in 1907 should stand as a symbol of that racial
+bond, that /entente cordiale/ of blood and heart, which he did so much
+to strengthen and secure.  "A compliment paid to Mark Twain is something
+more than a compliment to a great man, a great writer, and a great
+citizen.  It is a compliment to the American people, and one that will
+come home to them with peculiar gratification.  .  .  .  The feeling for
+Mark Twain among his own people is like that of the Scotch for Sir
+Walter eighty odd years ago, or like that of our fathers for Charles
+Dickens.  There is admiration in it, gratitude, pride, and, above all,
+an immense and intimate tenderness of affection.  To writers alone it is
+given to win a sentiment of this quality--to writers and occasionally,
+by the oddness of the human mind, to generals.  Perhaps one would best
+take the measure of the American devotion to Mark Twain by describing it
+as a compound of what Dickens enjoyed in England forty years ago, and of
+what Lord Roberts enjoys to-day, and by adding something thereto for the
+intensity of all transatlantic emotions.  The 'popularity' of statesmen,
+even of such a statesman as President Roosevelt, is a poor and
+flickering light by the side of this full flame of personal affection.
+It has gone out to Mark Twain not only for what he has written, for the
+clean, irresistible extravagance of his humour and his unfailing command
+of the primal feelings, for his tenderness, his jollity and his power to
+read the heart of boy and man and woman; not only for the tragedies and
+afflictions of his life so unconquerably borne; not only for his brave
+and fiery dashes against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home and
+abroad; but also because his countrymen feel him to be, beyond all other
+men, the incarnation of the American spirit."
+
+Mark Twain achieved a position of supreme eminence as a representative
+national author which is without a parallel in the history of American
+literature.  This position he achieved directly by his appeal to the
+great mass of the people, despite the /dicta/ of the /literati/.  At a
+time when England and Europe were throwing wide the doors to Mark Twain,
+the culture of his own land was regarding him with slighting
+condescension, or with mildly quizzical unconcern.  Boston regarded him
+with fastidious and frigid disapproval, Longfellow and Lowell found
+little in him to admire or approve.  There were notable exceptions, as
+Mr. Howells has recently pointed out--Charles Eliot Norton, Professor
+Francis J. Child, and most notable of all, Mr. Howells himself; but in
+general it is true that "in proportion as people thought themselves
+refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but
+which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude."
+The professors of literature regarded Mark Twain as an author whose
+works were essentially ephemeral; and stood in the breach for Culture
+against the barbaric invasion of primitive Western Barbarism.  Professor
+W. P. Trent was, I believe, the first to cite Professor Richardson's
+American Literature (published in 1886) as a typical instance of the
+position of literary culture in regard to Mark Twain.  "But there is a
+class of writers," we read in that work, "authors ranking below Irving
+or Lowell, and lacking the higher artistic or moral purpose of the
+greater humorists, who amuse a generation and then pass from sight.
+Every period demands a new manner of jest, after the current fashion
+.  .  .  .  The reigning favourites of the day are Frank R. Stockton,
+Joel Chandler Harris, the various newspaper jokers, and 'Mark Twain.'
+[Note the damning position!]  But the creators of `Pomona' and 'Rudder
+Grange,' of `Uncle Remus and his Folk-lore Stories,' and `Innocents
+Abroad,' clever as they are, must make hay while the sun shines.  Twenty
+years hence, unless they chance to enshrine their wit in some higher
+literary achievement, their unknown successors will be the privileged
+comedians of the republic.  Humour alone never gives its masters a place
+in literature; it must coexist with literary qualities, and must usually
+be joined with such pathos as one finds in Lamb, Hood, Irving, or
+Holmes."  This passage stands in the 1892 edition of that work, though
+'Tom Sawyer' had appeared in 1876, 'The Prince and the Pauper' in 1882,
+'Life on the Mississippi' in 1883, 'Huckleberry Finn' in 1884, and 'A
+Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in 1889.  Opinions analogous
+to those expressed in the passage just cited have found frequent
+expression among leaders of critical opinion in America; and only
+yesterday 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The Innocents Abroad' were seriously
+put forward, by a clever and popular American critic, as Mark Twain's
+most enduring claims upon posterity!  A bare half-dozen men in the ranks
+of American literary criticism have recognized and eloquently spoken
+forth in vindication of Mark Twain's title as a classic author, not
+simply of American literature, but of the literature of the world.
+
+It is, even now, perhaps not too early to attempt some sort of inquiry
+into the causes contributory to Mark Twain's recognition as the prime
+representative of contemporary American literature.  One of the cheap
+catchwords of Mark Twain criticism is the statement that he is "American
+to the core," and that his popular appreciation in his own country was
+due to the fact that he most completely embodied the national genius.
+How many of those who confidently advance this vastly significant
+statement, one curiously wonders, have seriously endeavoured to make
+plain to others--or even to themselves--the reasons therefor?  Perhaps
+in seeking the causes for Mark Twain's renown in his own country one may
+discover the causes for his world-wide fame.
+
+A map of the United States, upon which were marked the localities and
+regions made famous by the writings of Mark Twain, would show that,
+geographically, he has known and studied this vast country in all the
+grand divisions of its composition.  Bred from old Southern stock, born
+in the Southwest, he passed his youth upon the bosom of that great
+natural division between East and West, the Mississippi River, which
+cleaves in twain the very body of the nation.  In the twenties he lost
+the feeling of local attachment in the vast democracy of the West, and
+looked life--a strangely barbaric and primitive life--straight in the
+face.  This is the first great transformation in his life--behold the
+Westerner!  After enriching his mind through contact with civilizations
+so diverse as Europe and the Sandwich Islands, he settled down in
+Connecticut, boldly foreswore the creeds and principles of his native
+section, and underwent a new transformation--behold the Yankee!  Once
+again, travel in foreign lands, association with the most intellectual
+and cultured circles of the world, broadened his vision; yet this
+cosmopolitan experience, far from diminishing his racial consciousness,
+tended still further to accentuate the national characteristics.  In
+this new transformation, we behold the typical American!  The later
+years, of cosmopolitan renown, of world-wide fame, throw into high
+relief the last transformation--behold the universally human spirit!
+Under this crude catalogue, the main lines of Mark Twain's development
+stand out in sharp definition.  The catalogue, however, is only too
+crude--it is impossible to say with precision just when such and such
+a transformation actually took place.  It is only intended to be
+suggestive; for we must bear in mind that Mark Twain never changed
+character.  His spirit underwent an evolutionary process--broadening,
+deepening, enlarging its vision with the passage of the years.
+
+The part which the South played in the formation of the character and
+genius of Mark Twain has been little noted heretofore.  It was in the
+South and Southwest that the creator of the humour of local eccentrics
+first appeared in full flower; and "Ned Brace," "Major Jones," and "Sut
+Lovengood" have in them the germs of that later Western humour that was
+to come to full fruition in the works of Bret Harte and Mark Twain.  The
+stage coach and the river steamboat furnished the means for
+disseminating far and wide the gross, the ghastly, the extravagant
+stories, the oddities of speech, the fantastic jests which emerged from
+the clash of diverse and oddly-assorted types.  The jarring contrasts,
+the incongruities and surprises daily furnished by the picturesque river
+life unquestionably stimulated and fertilized the latent germs of humour
+in the young cub-pilot, Sam Clemens.  Through Mark Twain's greatest
+works flows the stately Mississippi, magically imparting to them some
+indefinable share of its beauty, its variety, its majesty, its
+immensity; and there is no exaggeration in the conclusion that it is the
+greatest natural influence which his works betray.  Reared in a slave-
+holding community of narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people of
+the lower middle class; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to
+cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and
+bob-tail of the town, in his passion for bohemianism and truantry--young
+Clemens never learned to know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and
+the humanity, of that aristocratic patriarchal South which produced such
+beautiful figures as Lee and Lanier.  Not even his most enthusiastic
+biographers have attempted to palliate, save with half-hearted
+facetiousness, his inglorious desertion of the cause which he had
+espoused.  Mark Twain is the most speedily "reconstructed rebel" on
+record.  Is it broad-minded--or even accurate!--for Mr. Howells to say
+of Mark Twain: "No one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand,
+Walter-Scotticised, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal?"  Mark Twain
+never, I firmly believe, held up to ridicule the Southern "ideal."  But
+in a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he
+properly pokes fun at the "wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,'
+romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter Scott," of the
+Southern literary journal of the thirties and forties.  In later years
+Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc', voiced a spirit of noble chivalry
+which bespoke the "Southern ideal" of his Virginia forbears; and that
+delicacy of instinct in matters of right and wrong which is so
+conspicuous a trait of Mark Twain's is a symptom of that "moral
+elegance" which Mr. Owen Wister has pronounced to be one of the defining
+characteristics of the Southern American.  "No American of Northern
+birth or breeding," Mr. Howells pertinently observes, "could have
+imagined the spiritual struggle of Huck Finn in deciding to help the
+negro Jim to his freedom, even though he should be for ever despised as
+a negro thief in his native town, and perhaps eternally lost through the
+blackness of his sin.  No Northerner could have come so close to the
+heart of a Kentucky feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the
+whimsicality playing through its carnage, or could have so brought us
+into the presence of the sardonic comi-tragedy of the squalid little
+river town where the store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken
+tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's daughter, and then cows with
+bitter mockery the mob that comes to lynch him."
+
+The influence of the West upon the character and genius of Mark Twain is
+momentous and unmistakable.  Mark Twain found room for development and
+expansion in the primitive freedom of the West.  It was here, I think,
+that there were bred in him that breezy democracy of sentiment and that
+hatred of sham and pretence which fill his writings from beginning to
+end.  In the West, virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood--or fell--by
+force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled
+for fortune, for competence--or for existence.  It was a case of the
+survival of the fittest.  In face of bleak Nature--the burning alkali
+desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,--all men were free
+and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort.  In this primitive
+democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting.
+The pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug soon went to the
+wall, exposed in the nakedness of his own impotency.  Humour is a
+salutary aid in the struggle of the individual with the contrasts of
+life; indeed it may be said to be born of the perception of those
+contrasts.  In a degree no whit inferior to the variegated river life,
+the life of the West furnished contrasts and incongruities innumerable--
+vaster perhaps, and more significant.  There was the incessant contrast
+of civilization with barbarism, of the East with the West; and there was
+infinite play for the comic /expose/ of the credulous "tenderfoot" at
+the hands of the pitiless cowboy.  Roars of Gargantuan laughter shook
+the skies as each new initiate unwittingly succumbed to the demoniac
+wiles of his tormentors.  The West was one vast theatre for the practice
+of the "practical joke."  Behind everything, menacing, foreboding,
+tragic, lay the stupendous contrast between Man and Nature; and though
+the miner, the granger, the cowboy laughed defiantly at civilization and
+at Nature, there crept into the consciousness of each the conviction
+that, in the long run, civilization must triumph, and that, in order to
+win success, Nature must be conquered and subdued.  In such an
+environment, with its spirit of primitive democracy, its atmosphere of
+wild and ribald jest, its contempt for the impostor, its perpetually
+recurring incongruities, and behind all the solemn, perhaps tragic,
+presence of inexorable Nature--in such an environment were sharpened and
+whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour, the spirit of real democracy
+bred of competitive effort, and the hatred for pretence, sham, and
+imposture.
+
+It was not, I think, until Mark Twain went to live in Connecticut and,
+as he expressed it, became a scribbler of books, and an immovable
+fixture among the other rocks of New England, that he developed complete
+confidence in himself and his powers.  That passion for successful self-
+expression, which Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler has defined as the main
+ambition of the American, became the dominant motive of Mark Twain's
+life.  Of his experience as a steamboat pilot, Mark Twain has said that
+in that brief, sharp schooling he got personally and familiarly
+acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are
+to be found in fiction, biography or history.  In the West he had still
+further enriched his mind with an inexhaustible store of first-hand
+knowledge of human nature.  In rotation he had been tramping jour
+printer, river pilot, private secretary, miner, reporter, lecturer.
+He now turns to literature in real earnest, and begins to display that
+vast store of knowledge derived from actual contact with the infinitely
+diversified realities of American life.  Mark Twain takes on more and
+more of the characteristics of the Yankee--those characteristics which
+constitute the basis of his success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the
+practical efficiency, the shrewdness and the hard common--sense.  It is
+the last phase in the formation of the national type.
+
+It was, I venture to say, in some such way as this that Mark Twain came
+to assume in the eyes of his countrymen an embodiment of the national
+spirit.  He was the self--made man in the self--made democracy.  He was
+at once his own creation and the creation of a democracy.  There were
+humorists in America before Mark Twain; there are humorists in America
+still.  But Mark Twain succeeded not merely in captivating the great
+mass of the people; he achieved the far more difficult and unique
+distinction of convincing his countrymen of his essential fellowship,
+his temperamental affinity, with them.  This miracle he wrought by the
+frankest and most straightforward revelation of the actual experiences
+in his own life and the lives of those he had known with perfect
+intimacy.  It is true that he wrote a few books dealing with other
+times, other scenes, than our own in the present and in America.  But I
+daresay that his popularity with the mass of his countrymen would not
+have been in any degree lessened had he never written these few books.
+Indeed, it is hardly to be doubted that his books were successful in the
+ratio of their autobiographic nature.  For the character he revealed in
+those books of his which are essentially autobiographic, is the
+character dear to the American heart; and the experiences, vicissitudes,
+and hardships, shot through and irradiated with a high boisterousness of
+humour, found a joyous sympathy in the minds and hearts of men who had
+all "been there" themselves.  In Mark Twain the American people
+recognized at last the sturdy democrat, independent of foreign
+criticism; confident in the validity and value of his own ideas and
+judgments; believing loyally in his country's institutions, and
+upholding them fearlessly before the world; fundamentally serious and
+self-reliant, yet with a practicality tempered by humane kindliness,
+warmth of heart, and a strain of persistent idealism; rude, boisterous,
+even uncouth, yet withal softened by sympathy for the under-dog, a
+boundless love for the weak, the friendless, the oppressed; lacking in
+profound intellectuality, yet supreme in the possession of the simple
+and homely virtues--an upright and honourable character, a good citizen,
+a man tenacious of the sanctity of the domestic virtues.  America has
+produced finer and more exalted types--giants in intellectuality,
+princes in refinement and delicacy of spirit, savants in culture,
+classics in authorship.  An American type combining culture with
+picturesqueness, refinement with patriotism, suavity with self--
+reliance, desire it as we may, still awaits the imprimatur of
+international recognition.  America has sufficient cause for
+gratification in the memory of that quaint and sturdy figure so
+conspicuously bearing the national stamp and superscription.  Perhaps no
+American has equalled Mark Twain in the quality of subsuming and
+embodying in his own character so many elements of the national spirit
+and genius.  In letters, in life, Mark Twain is the American /par
+excellence/.
+
+Underneath those qualities which combined to produce in Mark Twain a
+composite American type, lay something deeper still--that indefinable
+/je ne sais quoi/ which procured him international fame.  Humour alone
+is utterly inadequate for achieving so momentous a result--though humour
+ostensibly constituted the burden of the appeal.  As a matter of fact,
+vehemently as the professors may deny it, Mark Twain was an artist of
+remarkable force and power.  From the days when he came under the
+tutelage of Mr. Howells, and humbly learned to prune away his stylistic
+superfluities of the grosser sort, Mark Twain indubitably began to
+subject himself to the discipline of stern self-criticism.  While it is
+true that he never learned to realize in full measure, to use Pater's
+phrase, "the responsibility of the artist to his materials," he
+assuredly disciplined himself to make the most, in his own way, of the
+rude and volcanic power which he possessed.  It is fortunate that Mark
+Twain never subjected himself to the refinements of academic culture; a
+Harvard might well have spoiled a great author.  For Mark Twain had a
+memorable tale to tell of rude, primitive men and barbaric, remote
+scenes and circumstances; of truant and resourceful boyhood exercising
+all its cunning in circumventing circumstance and mastering a calling.
+And he had that tale to tell in the unlettered, yet vastly expressive,
+phraseology of the actors in those wild events.  The secret of his style
+is directness of thought, a sort of shattering clarity of utterance, and
+a mastery of vital, vigorous, audacious individual expression.  He had a
+remarkable feeling for words and their uses; and his language is the
+unspoiled, expressive language of the people.  At times he is primitive
+and coarse; but it is a Falstaffian note, the mark of universality
+rather than of limitation.  His art was, in Tolstoy's phrase, "the art
+of a people--universal art"; and his style was rich in the locutions of
+the common people, rich and racy of the soil.  A signal merit of his
+style is its admirable adaptation to the theme.  The personages of his
+novels always speak "in character"--with perfect reproduction, not only
+of their natural speech, but also of their natural thoughts.  Though Mr.
+Henry James may have said that one must be a very rudimentary person to
+enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue in a rudimentary style
+in treatment of rudimentary or,--as I should prefer to phrase it,--
+fundamental things.  Mr. James, I feel sure, could never have put into
+the mouth of a "rudimentary" person like Huck, so vivid and graphic a
+description of a storm with its perfect reproduction of the impression
+caught by the "rudimentary" mind.  "Writers of fiction," says Sir Walter
+Besant in speaking of this book, "will understand the difficulty of
+getting inside the brain of that boy, seeing things as he saw them,
+writing as he would have written, and acting as he would have acted; and
+presenting to the world true, faithful, and living effigies of that boy.
+The feat has been accomplished; there is no character in fiction more
+fully, more faithfully, presented than the character of Huckleberry
+Finn.  .  .  .  It may be objected that the characters are extravagant.
+Not so.  They are all exactly and literally true; they are quite
+possible in a country so remote and so primitive.  Every figure in the
+book is a type; Huckleberry Finn has exaggerated none.  We see the life
+--the dull and vacuous life--of a small township upon the Mississippi
+River forty years ago.  So far as I know, it is the only place where we
+can find that phase of life portrayed."
+
+Mark Twain impressed one always as writing with utter individuality--
+untrammelled by the limitations of any particular sect of art.  In his
+books of travel, he reveals not only the instinct of the trained
+journalist for the novel and the effective, but also the feeling of the
+artist for the beautiful, the impressive, and the sublime.  His
+descriptions, of striking natural objects, such as the volcano of Mount
+Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, of memorable architecture, such as the
+cathedral at Milan, show that he possessed the "stereoscopic
+imagination" in rare degree.  The picture he evokes of Athens by
+moonlight, in the language of simplicity and restraint, ineffaceably
+fixes itself in the fancy.
+
+Mark Twain was regarded in France as a remarkable "impressionist" and
+praised by the critics for the realistic accuracy and minuteness of his
+delineation.  Kipling frankly acknowledged the great debt that he owed
+him.  Tennyson spoke in high praise of his finesse in the choice of
+words, his feeling for the just word to catch and, as it were, visualize
+the precise shade of meaning desired.  In truth, Mark Twain was an
+impressionist, rather than an imaginative artist.  That passage in
+'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in which he describes an early morning
+ride through the forest, pictorially evocative as it is, stands self-
+revealed--a confusedly imaginative effort to create an image he has
+never experienced.
+
+If we set over beside this the remarkable descriptions of things seen,
+as minutely evocative as instantaneous photographs--such, for example,
+as the picture of a summer storm, or preferably, the picture of dawn on
+the Mississippi, both from Huckleberry Finn--pictures Mark Twain had
+seen and lived hundreds of times, we see at once the striking
+superiority of the realistic impressionist over the imaginative artist.
+
+I have always felt that the most lasting influence of his life--the
+influence which has left the most pervasive impression upon his art and
+thought--is portrayed in that classic and memorable passage in which he
+portrays the marvellous spell laid upon him by that mistress of his
+youth, the great river.
+
+To the young pilot, the face of the water in time became a wonderful
+book.  For the uninitiated traveller it was a dead language, but to the
+young pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets.  He came to feel that
+there had never been so wonderful a book written by man.  To its
+haunting beauty, its enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly
+--drinking it in like one bewitched.  But a day came when he began to
+cease from noting its marvels.  Another day came when he ceased
+altogether to note them.
+
+In time, he came to realize that, for him, the romance and the beauty
+were gone forever from the river.  If the early rapture was gone, in its
+place was the deeper sense of knowledge and intimacy.  He had learned
+the ultimate secrets of the river--learned them with a knowledge, so
+searching and so profound, that he was enabled to give them the enduring
+investiture of art.
+
+Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence.  He was a master of
+the art of moving, touching, swaying an audience.  At times, his insight
+into the mysterious springs of humour, of passion, and of pathos seemed
+almost like divination.  All these qualities appeared in full flower in
+the written expression of his art.  It would be doing a disservice to
+his memory to deny that his style did not possess literary distinction
+or elegance.  At times his judgment was at fault; his constitutional
+humour came near playing havoc with his artistic sense.  Not seldom he
+was long--winded and laborious in his striving after comic effect.  To
+offset these manifest lapses and defects there are the many fine
+qualities--descriptive passages aglow with serene and cloud less beauty,
+dramatic scenes depicted with virile and rugged eloquence, pathetic
+incidents touched with gentle and caressing tenderness.
+
+Style bears translation ill; in fact, translation is not infrequently
+impossible.  But Mr. Clemens once pointed out to me that humour has
+nothing to do with style.  Mark Twain's humour--for humour is his
+prevalent mood--has international range since, constructed out of a
+deep comprehension of human nature and a profound sympathy for human
+relationship and human failing, it successfully surmounts the
+difficulties of translation into alien tongues.
+
+Mark Twain became a great international figure, not because he was an
+American, paradoxical and unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he
+was America's greatest cosmopolitan.  He was a true cosmopolitan in the
+Higginsonian sense, in that, unlike Mr. Henry James, he was "at home
+even in his own country."  He was a true cosmopolitan in the Tolstoyan
+sense; for his was "art transmitting the simplest feelings of common
+life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world
+--the art of common life--the art of a people--universal art."  His
+spirit grasped the true ideal of our time and reflected it.
+
+Mr. Clemens attributed his international success not to qualities of
+style, not to allegiance to any distinctive school, not to any
+overtopping eminence of intellect.  "Many so-called American humorists,"
+he once remarked to me, "have been betrayed by their preoccupation with
+the local.  Their work never crossed frontiers because they failed to
+impart to their humour that universal element which appeals to all races
+of men.  Realism is nothing more than close observation.  But
+observation will never give you the inside of the thing.  The life,
+the genius, the soul of a people are realized only through years of
+absorption."  Mr. Clemens asseverated that the only way to be a great
+American humorist was to be a great human humorist--to discover in
+Americans those permanent and universal traits common to all
+nationalities.  In his commentary upon Bourget's 'Outre Mer', he
+declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic that could
+safely be labelled "American"--not a single human detail, inside or
+outside.  Through years of automatic observation, Mark Twain learned to
+discover for America, to adapt his own phrase, those few human
+peculiarities that can be generalized and located here and there
+in the world and named by the name of the nation where they are found.
+
+Above all, I think, Mark Twain sympathized with and found something to
+admire in the citizens of every nation, seeking beneath the surface
+veneer the universal traits of that nation's humanity.  He expressly
+disclaimed in my presence any "attitude" toward the world, for the very
+simple reason that his relation toward all peoples had been one of
+effort at comprehension of their ideals, and identification with them in
+feeling.  He disavowed any colour prejudices, caste prejudices, or creed
+prejudices--maintaining that he could stand any society.  All that he
+cared to know was that a man was a human being--that was bad enough for
+him!  It is a matter not of argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has
+made more damaging admissions concerning America than concerning any
+other nation.  Lafcadio Hearn best succeeded in interpreting poetry to
+his Japanese students by freeing it from all artificial and local
+restraints, and using as examples the simplest lyrics which go straight
+to the heart and soul of man.  His remarkable lecture on 'Naked Poetry'
+is the most signal illustration of his profoundly suggestive mode of
+interpretation.  In the same way, Mark Twain as humorist has sought the
+highest common factor of all nations.  "My secret--if there is any
+secret--," Mr. Clemens once said to me, "is to create humour independent
+of local conditions.  In studying humanity as exhibited in the people
+and localities I best knew and understood, I have sought to winnow out
+the encumbrance of the local."  And he significantly added--musingly--"
+Humour, like morality, has its eternal verities."
+
+To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has
+contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the
+Mississippi, 'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank
+with the very best examples of picaresque fiction;
+
+'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might
+well be regarded as the supreme American morality--play of youth,
+'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of
+such originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory
+parallel in literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and
+all of 'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases
+of a civilization now vanished forever.  It is gratifying to Americans
+to recognize in Mark Twain the incarnation of democratic America.  It is
+gratifying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and recapture the
+pleasure and delight his works have given them for decades.  It is more
+gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain,
+America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of
+Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe--a man who will be
+remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, "with the great humorists of all
+time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company;
+none of them was his equal in humanity."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                 V.  PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST
+
+          "Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward
+          towards a summit where you will find your chiefest
+          pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will
+          be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbour and the
+          community."
+                                   MARK TWAIN: 'What is Man?'
+
+
+"The humorous writer," says Thackeray, "professes to awaken and direct
+your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension,
+and imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed,
+the unhappy.  To the best of his means and ability he comments on all
+the ordinary actions and passions of life almost.  He takes upon himself
+to be the week-day preacher, so to speak.  Accordingly, as he finds, and
+speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him.--sometimes
+love him."  This definition is apt enough to have been made with Mark
+Twain in mind.  In an earlier chapter, is displayed the comic phase of
+Mark Twain's humour.  Beneath that humour, underlying it and informing
+it, is a fund of human concern, a wealth of seriousness and pathos, and
+a universality of interests which argue real power and greatness.  These
+qualities, now to be discussed, reveal Mark Twain as serious enough to
+be regarded as a real moralist and philosopher, humane enough to be
+regarded as, in spirit, a true sociologist and reformer.
+
+It must be recognised that the history of literature furnishes forth no
+great international figure, whose fame rests solely upon the basis of
+humour, however human, however sympathetic, however universal that
+humour may be.  Behind that humour must lurk some deeper and more
+serious implication which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product.
+Genuine humour, as Landor has pointed out, requires a "sound and
+capacious mind, which is always a grave one."  There is always a breadth
+of philosophy, a depth of sadness, or a profundity of pathos in the very
+greatest humorists.  Both Rabelais and La Fontaine were reflective
+dreamers; Cervantes fought for the progressive and the real in pricking
+the bubble of Spanish chivalry; and Moliere declared that, for a man in
+his position, he could do no better than attack the vices of his time
+with ridiculous likenesses.  Though exhibiting little of the melancholy
+of Lincoln, Mark Twain revelled in the same directness of thought and
+expression, showed the same zest for broad humour reeking with the
+strong but pungent flavour of the soil.  Though expressing distaste for
+Franklin's somewhat cold and almost mercenary injunctions, Mark Twain
+nevertheless has much of his Yankee thrift, shrewdness, and bed-rock
+common sense.  Beneath and commingled with all his boyish and exuberant
+fun is a note of pathos subdued but unmistakable, which rings true
+beside the forced and extravagant pathos of Dickens.  His Southern
+hereditament of chivalry, his compassion for the oppressed and his
+defence of the down-trodden, were never in abeyance from the beginning
+of his career to the very end.  Like Joel Chandler Harris, that genial
+master of African folk-lore, Mark Twain found no theme of such absorbing
+interest as human nature.  Like Fielding, he wrote immortal narratives
+in which the prime concern is not the "story," but the almost scientific
+revelation of the natural history of the characters.  The corrosive and
+mordant irony of many a passage in Mark Twain, wherein he holds up to
+scorn the fraudulent and the artificial, the humbug, the hypocrite, the
+sensualist, are not unworthy of the colossal Swift.  That "disposition
+for hard hitting with a moral purpose to sanction it," which George
+Meredith pronounces the national disposition of British humour, is Mark
+Twain's unmistakable hereditament.  It is, perhaps, because he relates
+us to our origins, as Mr. Brander Matthews has suggested, that Mark
+Twain is the foremost of American humorists.
+
+In the preface to the Jumping Frog, published as far back as 1867, Mark
+Twain was dubbed, not only "the wild humorist of the Pacific slope," but
+also "the moralist of the Main."  The first book which brought him great
+popularity, 'The Innocents Abroad', exhibited qualities of serious
+ethical import which, while escaping the attention of the readers of
+that day, emerge for the moderns from the welter of hilarious humour.
+How unforgettable is his righteous indignation over that "benefit"
+performance he witnessed in Italy!
+
+The ingrained quality in Mark Twain, which perhaps more than any other
+won the enthusiastic admiration of his fellow Americans, was this: he
+always had the courage of his convictions.  He writes of things, classic
+and hallowed by centuries, with a freshness of viewpoint, a total
+indifference to crystallized opinion, that inspire tremendous respect
+for his courage, even when one's own convictions are not engaged.  The
+"beautiful love story of Abelard and Heloise" will never, I venture to
+say, recover its pristine glory--now that Mark Twain has poured over
+Abelard the vials of his wrath.
+
+Those who know only the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep,
+underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and
+truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker
+and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence.  In answer to a query of
+mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave
+carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: "I never
+wrote a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens.  She is solely
+responsible--to her should go the credit--for any deeply serious or
+moral influence my subsequent work may exert.  After my marriage, she
+edited everything I wrote.  And what is more--she not only edited my
+works, she edited ME!  After I had written some side-splitting story,
+something beginning seriously and ending in preposterous anti-climax,
+she would say to me: 'You have a true lesson, a serious meaning to
+impart here.  Don't give way to your invincible temptation to destroy
+the good effect of your story by some extravagantly comic absurdity.
+Be yourself!  Speak out your real thoughts as humorously as you please,
+but--without farcical commentary.  Don't destroy your purpose with an
+ill-timed joke.'  I learned from her that the only right thing was to
+get in my serious meaning always, to treat my audience fairly, to let
+them really feel the underlying moral that gave body and essence to my
+jest."
+
+The quality with which Mark Twain invests his disquisitions upon morals,
+upon conscience, upon human foibles and failings, is the charm of the
+humorist always--never the grimness of the moralist or the coldness of
+the philosopher.  He observes all human traits, whether of moral
+sophistry or ethical casuistry, with the genial sympathy of a lover of
+his kind irradiated with the riant comprehension of the humorist.  And
+yet at times there creeps into his tone a note of sincere and manly
+pathos, unmistakable, irresistible.  One has only to read the beautiful,
+tender tale of the blue jay in 'A Tramp Abroad' to know the beauty and
+the depth of his feeling for nature and her creatures, his sense of
+kinship with his brothers of the animal kingdom.
+
+In our first joyous and headlong interest in the narrative of
+'Huckleberry Finn', its rapid succession of continuously arresting
+incidents, its omnipresent yet never intrusive humour, the deeper
+significance of many a passage in that contemporary classic is likely to
+escape notice.  Sir Walter Besant, who revelled in it as one of the most
+completely satisfying and delightful of books, speaks of it deliberately
+as a book without a moral.  Perhaps he was deceived by the foreword:
+"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be
+prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
+persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."  There never was
+a more easy-going, care-free, unpuritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the
+two farcical "hoboes," Tom Sawyer, and the rest.  And yet in the light
+of Mark Twain's later writings one cannot but see in that picaresque
+romance, with its pleasingly loose moral atmosphere, an underlying
+seriousness and conviction.  Jim is a simple, harmless negro, childlike
+and primitive; yet, so marvellous, so restrained is the art of the
+narrator, that imperceptibly, unconsciously, one comes to feel not only
+a deep interest in, but a genuine respect for, this innocent fugitive
+from slavery.  Mr. Booker Washington, a distinguished representative of
+his race, said he could not help feeling that, in the character of Jim,
+Mark Twain had, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited his sympathy for and
+interest in the masses of the negro people.
+
+Indeed, to the reflective mind--and it is to be presumed that by that
+standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged--there is no more
+significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck
+struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral
+responsibility for compassing Jim's emancipation.  Nothing else is
+needed to show at once Mark Twain's preoccupation with the workings of
+human conscience in the unsophisticated mind and his conviction that,
+with the "lights that he had," Huck was justified in his courageous
+decision.
+
+Huck felt deeply repentant for allowing Jim to escape from the innocent,
+inoffending Miss Watson.  He became consumed with horror and remorse to
+hear Jim making plans for stealing his wife and children, if their
+masters wouldn't sell them.  His conscience kept stirring him up hotter
+than ever when he heard Jim talking to himself about the joys of
+freedom.  After awhile, Huck decided to write a letter to Miss Watson,
+informing her of the whereabouts of her "runaway nigger."  After writing
+that letter, he felt washed clean of sin, uplifted, exalted.  But he
+could not forget all the goodness and tenderness of poor Jim, who had
+shown himself so profoundly grateful.  Though he faced the torments of
+Puritanical damnation as a consequence, he resolved to let Jim go free.
+Humanity triumphed over conscience--and with an "All right, then, I'll
+go to hell," he tore up the letter.
+
+One of Mark Twain's favourite themes for the display of his humour was
+the subject of prevarication.  He seemed never to tire of ringing the
+changes upon the theme of the lie, its utility, its convenience, and its
+consequences.  Doubtless he chose to dabble in falsehood because it is
+generally winked at as the most venial of all moral obliquities--a fault
+which is the most thoroughly universal of all that flesh is heir to.
+The incident of George Washington and the cherry tree furnished the
+basis for countless of his anecdotes; he wrung from it variations
+innumerable, from the epigram to the anecdote.  His distinction between
+George Washington and himself, redounding immeasurably to his own glory,
+and demonstrating his complete superiority to Washington as a moral
+character, is classic: "George Washington couldn't tell a lie.  I can;
+but I won't."  Perhaps his most humorous anecdote, based upon the same
+story, is in connection with the exceedingly old "darky" he once met in
+the South, who claimed to have crossed the Delaware with Washington.
+"Were you with Washington," asked Mark Twain mischievously, "when he
+took that hack at the cherry tree?"  This was a poser for the old
+darkey; his pride was appealed to, his very character was at stake.
+After an awkward hesitation, the old darkey spoke up, a gleam of
+simulated recollection (and real gratification for his convenient
+memory) overspreading his countenance: "Lord, boss, I was dar.  In
+cose I was.  I was with Marse George at dat very time.  In fac--I done
+druv dat hack myself"!
+
+Mark Twain's most delightful trick as a popular humorist was to strike
+out some comic epigram, that passed currency with the masses whose fancy
+it tickled, and also had upon it the minted stamp of the classic
+aphorism.  These epigrams were frequently pseudo-moral in their nature;
+and their humour usually lay in the assumption that everybody is
+habitually addicted to prevarication--which is just precisely true
+enough and reprehensible enough to validate the epigram.  His method was
+humorous inversion; and he told a story whose morals are so ludicrously
+twisted that the right moral, by contrast, spontaneously springs to
+light.  "Never tell a lie--except for practice," is less successful than
+the more popularly known "When in doubt, tell the truth."  Out of the
+latter maxim he succeeded in extracting a further essence of humour.  He
+admitted inventing the maxim, but never expected it to be applied to
+himself.  His advice, he said, was intended for other people; when he
+was in doubt himself, he used more sagacity!  Mark Twain has made no
+more delightful epigram than that one in which he recognizes that a lie,
+morally reprehensible as it may be, is undoubtedly an ever present help
+in time of need: "Never waste a lie.  You never know when you may need
+it."
+
+Sometimes in a humorous, sometimes in a grimly serious way, Mark Twain
+was fond of drawing the distinction between theoretical and practical
+morals.  Theoretical morals, he would point out, are the sort you get on
+your mother's knee, in good books, and from the pulpit.  You get them
+into your head, not into your heart.  Only by the commission of crime
+can anyone acquire real morals.  Commit all the crimes in the decalogue,
+take them in rotation, persevere in this stern determination--and after
+awhile you will thereby attain to moral perfection!  It is not enough to
+commit just one crime or two--though every little bit helps.  Only by
+committing them all can you achieve real morality!  It is interesting to
+note this distinction between Mark Twain, the humorous moralist, and
+Bernard Shaw, the ethical thinker.  Each teaches precisely the same
+thing--the one not even half seriously, the other with all the sharp
+sincerity of conviction.  Shaw unhesitatingly declares that trying to be
+wicked is precisely the same experiment as trying to be good, viz., the
+discovery of character.
+
+The range of Mark Twain's humour, from the ludicrous anecdote with
+comically mixed morals to the profound parable with grimly ironic
+conclusion, takes the measure of the ethical nature of the man.  It can
+best be illustrated, I think, by a comparison of his anecdote of the
+theft of the green water-melon and the classic fable of 'The Man that
+Corrupted Hadleyburg'.  Mark stole a water-melon out of a farmer's
+wagon, while he wasn't looking.  Of course stole was too harsh a term--
+he withdrew, he retired that water-melon.  After getting safely away to
+a secluded spot, he broke the water-melon open--only to find that it was
+green, the greenest water-melon of the year.
+
+The moment he saw that the water-melon was green, he felt sorry.  He
+began to reflect--for reflection is the beginning of reform.  It is only
+by reflecting on some crime you have committed, that you are
+"vaccinated" against committing it again.
+
+So Mark began to reflect.  And his reflections were of this nature: What
+ought a boy to do who has stolen a green water-melon?  What would George
+Washington, who never told a lie, have done?  He decided that the only
+real, right thing for any boy to do, who has stolen a water-melon of
+that class, is to make restitution.  It is his duty to restore it to its
+rightful owner.  So rising up, spiritually strengthened and refreshed by
+his noble resolution, Mark restored the water--melon--what there was
+left of it--to the farmer and--made the farmer give him a ripe one in
+its place!  Thus he clinched the "moral" of this story, so quaint and so
+ingenious; and concluded that only in some such way as this could one be
+fortified against further commission of crime.  Only thus could one
+become morally perfect!
+
+Here, as in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical
+suggestion--a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his
+literal words--the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity,
+fantasy, light irony.  Yet beneath this outer covering of art there is
+a serious meaning that, like murder, will out.  If demonstration were
+needed that Mark Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is
+amply supplied by that masterpiece, that triumph of invention,
+construction, and originality, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'.
+Here is a pure morality, daring in the extreme and incredibly original
+in a world perpetually reiterating a saying already thousands of years
+old, to the effect that there is nothing new under the sun.  It is a
+deliberate emendation of that invocation in the Lord's Prayer "Lead us
+(not) into temptation."  The shrieking irony of this trenchant parable,
+its cynicism and heartlessness, would make of it an unendurable
+criticism of human life--were it accepted literally as a representation
+of society.  In essence it is a morality pure and simple, animated not
+only by its brilliantly original ethical suggestion, but also by its
+illuminating reflection of human nature and its graciously relieving
+humour.  In that exultant letter which the /Diabolus ex machina/ wrote
+to the betrayed villagers, he sneers at their old and lofty reputation
+for honesty--that reputation of which they were so inordinately proud
+and vain.  The weak point in their armour was disclosed so soon as he
+discovered how carefully and vigilantly they kept themselves and their
+children out of temptation.  For he well knew that the weakest of all
+weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire.  The
+familiar distinction between innocence and virtue springs to mind.  And
+it is worthy of consideration that Nietzsche, and Shaw after him, both
+point out that virtue consists, not in resisting evil, but in not
+desiring it!  'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' is a masterpiece,
+eminently worthy of the genius of a Swift.  It proclaims Mark Twain not
+only as a supreme artist, but also as eminently and distinctively a
+moralist.
+
+It is impossible to think of Mark Twain in his maturer development as
+other than a moralist.  My personal acquaintance with Mr. Clemens
+convinced me--had I needed to be convinced--that in his later years he
+had striven to grapple nobly with many of the deeper issues of life,
+character and morality, public, religious and social, as well as
+personal and private.  I never knew anyone who thought so "straight,"
+or who expressed himself with such simple directness upon questions
+affecting religion and conduct.  He was absolutely fearless in his
+condemnation of those subsidized "ministers" of the Gospel in
+cosmopolitan centres, who, through self-interest, cut their moral
+disquisitions to fit the predilections of their wealthy parishioners,
+many of whom were under national condemnation as "malefactors of great
+wealth."  Animated by love for all creatures, the defenceless wild
+animal as well as the domestic pet, he was unsparing in his indictment
+of those big-game hunters who shamelessly described their feelings of
+savage exultation when some poor animal served as the target for their
+skill, and staggered off wounded unto death.  His sympathy for the
+natives of the Congo was profound and intense; and his philippic against
+King Leopold for the atrocities he sanctioned called the attention of
+the whole world to conditions that constituted a disgrace to modern
+civilization.  His diatribe against the Czar of Russia for his
+inhumanity to the serfs was an equally convincing proof of his noble
+determination to throw the whole weight of his influence in behalf of
+suffering and oppressed humanity.  Some years before his death, he told
+me that he never intended to speak in public again save in behalf of
+movements, humanitarian and uplifting, which gave promise of effecting
+civic betterment and social improvement.
+
+I have always felt a peculiar and personal debt of gratitude to Mark
+Twain for three events--for the publication of such works can be
+dignified with no less eminent characterization.  When Mr. Edward Dowden
+tried to make out the best case for Shelley that he could, it was at the
+sacrifice of the reputation of the defenceless Harriet Westbrook.  That
+ingrained chivalry which is the defining characteristic of the
+Southerner, the sympathy for the oppressed, the compassion for the weak
+and the defenceless, animated Mark Twain to one of the noblest actions
+of his career.  For his defence of Harriet Westbrook is something more
+than a work, it is an act--an act of high courage and nobility.  With
+words icily cold in their logic, Mark Twain tabulated the six pitifully
+insignificant charges against Harriet, such as her love for dress and
+her waning interest in Latin lessons, and set over against them the six
+times repeated name of Cornelia Turner, that fascinating young married
+woman who read Petrarch with Shelley and sat up all hours of the night
+with him--because he saw visions when he was alone!  Again, in his 'Joan
+of Arc', Mark Twain erected a monument of enduring beauty to that simple
+maid of Orleans, to whom the Roman Catholic Church has just now paid the
+merited yet tardy tribute of canonization.  It is a sad commentary upon
+the popular attitude of frivolity towards the professional humorist that
+Mark Twain felt compelled to publish this book anonymously, in order
+that the truth and beauty of that magic story might receive its just
+meed of respectful and sympathetic attention.
+
+The third act for which I have always felt deeply grateful to Mark Twain
+is the apparently little known, yet beautiful and significant story
+entitled 'Was it Heaven or Hell?'  It contains, I believe, the moral
+that had most meaning for Mark Twain throughout his entire life--the
+bankruptcy of rigidly formal Puritanism in the face of erring human
+nature, the tragic result of heedlessly holding to the letter, instead
+of wisely conforming to the spirit, of moral law.  No one doubts that
+Mark Twain--as who would not?--believed, aye, knew, that this sweet,
+human child went to a heaven of forgiveness and mercy, not to a hell of
+fire and brimstone, for her innocently trivial transgression.  The essay
+on Harriet Shelley, the novel of 'Joan of Arc', and the story 'Was it
+Heaven or Hell?' are all, as decisively as the philippic against King
+Leopold, the diatribe against the Czar of Russia, essential vindications
+of the moral principle.  'Was it Heaven or Hell?'  in its simple pathos,
+'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' in its morally salutary irony,
+present vital evidence of that same transvaluation of current moral
+values which marks the age of Nietzsche and Ibsen, of Tolstoy and Shaw.
+In that amusing, naive biography of her father, little Susy admits that
+he could make exceedingly bright jokes and could be extremely amusing;
+but she maintains that he was more interested in earnest books and
+earnest conversation than in humorous ones.  She pronounced him to be as
+much of a Pholosopher (sic) as anything.  And she hazards the opinion
+that he might have done a great deal in this direction if only he had
+studied when he was a boy!
+
+Years ago, Mark Twain wrote a book which he called 'An Extract from
+Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'.  For long he desisted from
+publishing it because of his fear that its outspoken frankness would
+appear irreverent and shock the sensibilities of the public.  While his
+villa of "Stormfield" was in course of erection several years ago, he
+discovered that half of it was going to cost what he had expected to pay
+for the whole house.  His heart was set on having a loggia or sun-
+parlour; and when it seemed that he would have to sacrifice this apple
+of his eye through lack of funds, he threw discretion to the winds,
+hauled out Captain Stormfield and made the old tar pay the piper.  His
+fears as to its reception were wholly unwarranted; for it was generously
+enjoyed for its shrewd and vastly suggestive ideas on religion and
+heaven as popularly taught nowadays from the pulpits.  This book is full
+of a keen and bluff common sense, cannily expressed in the words of an
+old sea-captain whom Mark Twain had known intimately.  It is only
+another link in the chain of evidence which goes to prove that Mark
+Twain had thought long and deeply upon the problematical nature of a
+future life.  It is, in essence, a /reductio ad absurdum/ of those
+professors of religion who still preach a heaven of golden streets and
+pearly gates, of idleness and everlasting psalm-singing, of restful and
+innocuous bliss.  Mark Twain wanted to point out the absurdity of taking
+the allegories and the figurative language of the Bible literally.  Of
+course everybody called for a harp and a halo as soon as they reached
+heaven.  They were given the harps and halos--indeed nothing harmless
+and reasonable was refused them.  But they found these things the merest
+accessories.  Mark Twain's heaven was just the busiest place imaginable.
+There weren't any idle people there after the first day.  The old sea
+captain pointed out that singing hymns and waving palm branches through
+all eternity was all very pretty when you heard about it from the
+pulpit, but that it was a mighty poor way to put in valuable time.
+He took no stock in a heaven of warbling ignoramuses.  He found that
+Eternal Rest, reduced to hard pan, was not as comforting as it sounds in
+the pulpit.  Heaven is the merited reward of service; and the
+opportunities for service were infinite.  As he said, you've got to earn
+a thing square and honest before you can enjoy it.  To Mark, this was
+"about the sensiblest heaven" he had ever heard of.  He mourned a little
+over the discovery that what a man mostly missed in heaven was company.
+But he rejoiced in the information vouchsafed by his friend the Captain
+--a valuable piece of information that leaves him, and all who are so
+fortunate as to hear it, the better for the knowledge--that happiness
+isn't a thing in itself, but only a contrast with something that isn't
+pleasant!  This view of heaven, seen through the temperament of a
+humorist and a philosopher, is provocative and thought-compelling more
+than it is amusing or ludicrous.  I think it inspired Bernard Shaw's
+Aerial Foot-ball which won Collier's thousand dollar prize--a prize
+which Mr Shaw hurled back with indignation and scorn!
+
+Mark Twain was a great humorist--more genial than grim, more good-
+humoured than ironic, more given to imaginative exaggeration than to
+intellectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than to melancholy.
+He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the
+literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their
+likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and
+picaresque romance.  He was a remarkable observer and faithful reporter,
+never allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be "frightened by the
+venerableness of the institution"; and his sublimated journalism reveals
+a mastery of the naively comic thoroughly human and democratic.  He is
+the most eminent product of our American democracy, and, in profoundly
+shocking Great Britain by preferring Connecticut to Camelot, he
+exhibited that robustness of outlook, that buoyancy of spirit, and
+that faith in the contemporary which stamps America in perennial and
+inexhaustible youth.  Throughout his long life, he has been a factor of
+high ethical influence in our civilization, and the philosopher and the
+humanitarian look out through the twinkling eyes of the humorist.
+
+And yet, after all, Mark Twain's supreme title to distinction as a great
+writer inheres in his natural, if not wholly conscious, mastery in that
+highest sphere of thought, embracing religion, philosophy, morality and
+even humour, which we call sociology.  When I first advanced this view,
+it was taken up on all sides.  Here, we were told, was Mark Twain "from
+a new angle"; the essay was reviewed at length on the continent of
+Europe; and the author of the essay was invited "to explain Mark Twain
+to the German public"!  There are still many people, however, who resent
+any demonstration that Mark Twain was anything more than a mirthful and
+humorous entertainer.  Mr. Bernard Shaw once remarked to me, in support
+of the view here outlined, that he regarded Poe and Mark Twain as
+America's greatest achievements in literature, and that he thought of
+Mark Twain primarily, not as humorist, but as sociologist.  "Of course,"
+he added, "Mark Twain is in much the same position as myself: he has to
+put matters in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang
+him, believe he is joking."
+
+Mark Twain once said that whenever he had diverged from custom and
+principle to utter a truth, the rule had been that the hearer hadn't
+strength of mind enough to believe it.  "Custom is a petrifaction," he
+asserted; "nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century."  Mr. W.
+D. Howells has advanced the somewhat fanciful theory that "the ludicrous
+incongruity of a slave-holding democracy nurtured upon the Declaration
+of Independence, and the comical spectacle of white labour owning black
+labour, had something to do in quickening (in Mark Twain) the sense of
+contrast which is the mountain of humour or is said to be so."  However
+that may be, Mark Twain was irresistibly driven to the conclusion,
+Southern born though he was, that slavery was unjust, inhuman, and
+indefensible.  The advanced thinkers in the South had reached this
+conclusion long before the beginning of the Civil War, and many Southern
+men had actually devised freedom to their slaves in their wills.  The
+slaves were treated humanely, their material wants were cared for by
+their owners with a care that can only be called loving, and their
+spiritual welfare was the frequent concern in particular of the mistress
+of the house.
+
+In his schoolboy days, Mark Twain had no aversion to slavery.  He wasn't
+even aware that there was anything wrong about it.  He never heard it
+condemned by acquaintances or in the local papers.  And as for the
+preachers, they taught that God approved slavery, and cited Biblical
+passages in support of that view.  If the slaves themselves were averse
+to it, at least they kept discreetly silent on the subject.  He seldom
+saw a slave misused--on the farm, never.  But when he was brought face
+to face with Sandy, the little slave forcibly separated from his family,
+it made a deep impression upon his consciousness.  It was this
+deplorable evil of the system, this unnatural and inhuman forcible
+separation of the members of the same family, the one from the other,
+that convinced him of the injustice of slavery; though this vision, as
+has been pointed out by Mr. Howells, did not come to him "till after his
+liberation from neighbourhood in the vaster far West."  Yet it found its
+way into his books--into Huckleberry Finn, with its recital of Jim's
+pathetic longing to buy back his wife and children; and in Pudd'nhead
+Wilson with its moving picture of the poor slave's agony when she
+suddenly realizes in the way the water is flowing around the snag that
+she is being "sold down the river."  In Uncle Tom's Cabin, as Professor
+Phelps has pointed out, "the red--hot indignation of the author largely
+nullified her evident desire to tell the truth. . . .  Mrs. Stowe's
+astonishing work is not really the history of slavery; it is the history
+of abolition sentiment.  .  .  .  Mark Twain shows us the beautiful side
+of slavery--for it had a wonderfully beautiful, patriarchal side--and he
+also shows us the horror of it."  Mark Twain has declared that the only
+way to write a great novel is to learn the scenes and people with which
+the story is concerned, through years of "unconscious absorption" of the
+facts of the life to be portrayed.  When his stories were written,
+slavery was a thing of the past--he was competent to judge of the
+situation impartially, through direct personal contact throughout his
+boyhood with the realities of slavery.  His object was not the object of
+the reformer, warped with prejudice and fired by animosity.  He saw
+clearly; for his aim was not polemic, but artistic.  Hence it is, I
+believe, that Mark Twain stands out as, in essence and in fundamentals,
+a remarkable sociologist.  Certain passages in his books on the subject
+of slavery, as the historian Lecky has declared, are the truest things
+that have ever been expressed on the subject which vexed a continent and
+plunged a nation in bloody, fratricidal strife.
+
+Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi always call up to my mind
+the most vivid pictures--pictures that are eternally unforgettable.  The
+memorable scene in which Colonel Sherburne quells the mob and his
+scathing remarks upon lynching; the reality and the pathos of the feuds
+of those Kentucky families, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords,
+shooting each other down at sight in vindication of honour and pride of
+race; the lordly life of the pilot on the Mississippi, his violent and
+unchallenged sway over his subordinates, his mastery of the river; the
+variegated colours of that lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of
+the river--all these sweep by us in a series of panoramic pictures as
+Huck's raft swings lazily down the tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides
+his boat through the dangers of the channel.  Mark Twain is primarily a
+great artist, only unconsciously a true sociologist.  But his power as a
+sociologist is no less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely
+more real and human and verisimilar that it is not polemical.  There is
+a "sort of contemporaneous posterity" which has registered its verdict
+that Mark Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era.  But there
+is yet to come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare
+say, class Mark Twain as America's greatest, most human sociologist in
+letters.  He is the historian, the historian in art, of a varied and
+unique phase of civilization on the American continent that has passed
+forever.  And it is inconceivable that any future investigator into the
+sociological phases of that civilization can fail to find priceless and
+unparalleled documents in the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane,
+boisterous yet universally human writings of Mark Twain.
+
+Mark Twain's genius of social comprehension and sociologic
+interpretation went even deeper than this.  His mastery lay not alone in
+penetrative reflection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase
+of our civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an "institution"
+blotted from the American escutcheon and a collective racial passion
+that periodically breaks forth from time to time in mad "carnivals of
+crime."  The defining quality of the true sociologist, that quality
+which gives his profession its power and validity as an effective
+instrumentality in the advancement of civilization, is the faculty of
+penetrating national and racial disguises, and going directly to the
+heart of the human problem.  Mark Twain possessed this faculty in
+supreme degree.  As a literary critic he was banal and futile; but as
+a social and racial critic he was remarkable and profound. His essay
+'Concerning the Jews' is a masterpiece of impartial interpretation; his
+comprehension of French and German racial traits, as revealed in his
+works, is keen and pervasively pertinent; and his magnificent analysis
+of the situation in South Africa, in the concluding chapters of
+'Following the Equator', rings clear with the accents of truth and
+mounts almost to the dignity of public prophecy.  Deeper far, more
+comprehensive, and voiced with splendid courage, are Mark Twain's
+interpretations of American democracy and his mirroring of the national
+ideals.  His "defence" of General Funston is a scorching and devastating
+blast, red with the fires of patriotism.  Whatever be one's convictions,
+one cannot but respect the profound sincerity of Mark Twain's berserker-
+like rage over the attitude of Europe in China, the barbarities of
+Russian autocracy, and the horrors of America's methods in the
+Philippines, copied after Weyler's /reconcentrado/ policy in Cuba.
+His study of Christian Science, despite its hyperbole, its gross
+exaggerations and unfulfilled prophecies, is the expression of glorified
+common-sense, a sociological study of religious fanaticism comprehensive
+in psychological analysis of national and racial traits.
+
+In his own works, Mark Twain brought to realization the dim and inchoate
+fancies of Whitman; in his own person he realized that "divine average"
+of common life which is the dream of American democracy.  'The Prince
+and the Pauper' is a beautiful child's tale, vivid in narrative and rich
+in human interest.  It is something deeper far than this; for the very
+crucial motive of the story, the successful substitution of the commoner
+for the king, transforms it into a symbolic legend of democracy and the
+equality of man.  Mark Twain vehemently approved the French revolution,
+and frankly expressed his regret over Napoleon's failure to invade
+England and thus destroy the last vestiges of the semi-feudal
+paraphernalia of the British monarchy.  Despite its note of Yankee
+blatancy, 'A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur' is a remarkable brief
+for democracy and the brotherhood of man.  So eminent a publicist as Mr.
+William T. Stead pronounced it, at the time of its first appearance, one
+of the most significant books of our time; and classed it (with Henry
+George's 'Progress and Poverty' and Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward')
+as the third great book from America to give tremendous impetus to the
+social democratic movement of the age.  Mark Twain abandoned all hope of
+a future life; found more of sorrow than of joy in life's balances; and
+even, in his latter years, lost faith in humanity itself.  But amid the
+wreck of faiths and creeds, he achieved the strange paradox of American
+optimism: he never lost faith in democracy, and fought valiantly to the
+end in behalf of equality and the welfare of the average man.
+
+Several years ago, when we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship,
+Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early
+eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club
+to which he belonged.  This club was composed chiefly of men whose
+deepest interests were concerned with the theological and the
+religiously orthodox.  One of his friends, to whom he read this paper
+in advance, solemnly warned him not to read it before the club.  For he
+felt confident that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt as to
+the existence of free will, and declaring without hesitation that every
+man was under the immitigable compulsion of his temperament, his
+training, and his environment, would appear unspeakably shocking,
+heretical and blasphemous to the orthodox members of that club.  "I did
+not read that paper," Mr. Clemens said to me, "but I put it away,
+resolved to let it stand the corrosive test of time.  Every now and
+then, when it occurred to me, I used to take that paper out and read it,
+to compare its views with my own later views.  From time to time I added
+something to it.  But I never found, during that quarter of a century,
+that my views had altered in the slightest degree.  I had a few copies
+published not long ago; but there is not the slightest evidence in the
+book to indicate its authorship."  A few days later he gave me a copy,
+and when I read that book, I found these words, among others, in the
+prefatory note:
+
+"Every thought in them (these papers) has been thought (and accepted as
+unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed,
+kept private.  Why did they not speak out?  Because they dreaded (and
+could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them.  Why have I
+not published?  The same reason has restrained me, I think.  I can find
+no other."
+
+'What is Man?'  propounds at length, through the medium of a dialogue
+between a Young Man and an Old Man, the doctrine that "Beliefs are
+acquirements; temperaments are born.  Beliefs are subject to change;
+nothing whatever can change temperament."  He enunciates the theory,
+which seems to me both brilliant and original, that there can be no such
+person as a permanent seeker after truth.
+
+"When he found the truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth,
+with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he
+tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors."  "All training," he
+avers, "is one form or another of outside influences, and association is
+the largest part of it.  A man is never anything but what his outside
+influences have made him.  They train him downward or they train him
+upward--but they train him; they are at work upon him all the time."
+Once asked by Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to write another
+story about Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain replied that he had a notion of
+writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him to
+high honour, and in the other bringing him to the gallows.  When Kipling
+protested vigorously against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer
+was real, Mark Twain replied with the fatalistic doctrine of 'What is
+Man?': "Oh, he is real.  He's all the boy that I have known or
+recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book--because,
+when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education
+avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man.
+Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer's life, and
+gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him.  He
+would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an
+angel."  It was what he called Kismet.
+
+It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the
+days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all
+faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal
+God.  And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or
+theology, atheism or agnosticism, the individual or the nation embraced,
+the human race remained "indestructibly content, happy, thankful,
+proud."  He never had a tinge of pessimism in his make-up, his beliefs
+never tended to warp his nature, he accepted his fatalism gladly because
+he saw in it supreme truth.  His ultimate philosophy of life, which he
+sums up in 'What is Man?', is healthy and right-minded.  It is best
+embodied in the lofty injunction: "Diligently train your ideals upward
+and still upward towards a summit where you will find your chiefest
+pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer
+benefits upon your neighbour and the community."  Lassalle once said:
+"History forgives mistakes and failures, but not want of conviction."
+In Mark Twain, posterity will never be called upon to forgive any want
+of conviction.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN BY HENDERSON ***
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