Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Samuel L. Clemens (1836–1902). Jim Smily and His Jumping Frog.
The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1917.

Criticisms and Interpretations. III. By Archibald Henderson

MARK TWAIN was a great humorist—more genial than grim, more good-humored 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 institutions”; and his sublimated journalism reveals a mastery of the naïvely 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.—From “Mark Twain” (1900).