vivial life of a community of pioneers, found easy outlet in the robust humour and slashing satire of frontier journalism. In 1863 Artemus Ward' spent three glorious weeks revelling with the newspaper men in Virginia City, recognized the talent of Mark Twain, and encouraged him to send his name eastward with a contribution to the New York Sunday Mercury. A duel occasioned by some journalistic vivacities resulted in his migration in 1864 to San Francisco, where in 1864 and 1865 he wrote for The Morning Call, The Golden Era, and The Californian; and fraternized with the brilliant young coterie of which Bret Harte' was recognized as the most conspicuous light. In a pocket-hunting excursion in January, 1865, he picked up a very few nuggets and the nucleus for the story of Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog, which appeared in the New York Saturday Press in November and swiftly attained wide celebrity. In the following spring he visited the Sandwich Islands on a commission from the Sacramento Union, called upon his first king, explored the crater of Kilauea, struck up a friendship with the American ministers to China and Japan, and made a great "scoop" by interviewing a group of shipwrecked sailors in the hospital at Honolulu. Later he wrote up the story for Harper's Magazine; his appearance there in 1866 he calls his début as a literary person.

Returning to San Francisco, he made his first appearance as a humorous lecturer in a discourse on the Sandwich Islands, delivered with his sober, inimitable, irresistible drawl to a crowded and applausive house on the evening of 2 October, 1866. From this point his main course was determined. Realizing that he had a substantial literary capital, he set out to invest it so that it would in every sense of the word yield the largest returns obtainable. To the enterprise of purveying literary entertainment he, first in America, applied the wideranging vision and versatile talents of our modern men of action and captains of industry: collecting his "raw material," distributing it around the world from the lecture platform, sending it to the daily press, reworking it into book form, inventing his own type-setting machinery, and controlling his own printing, publishing, and selling agencies. He did not foresee this all in 1866; but it must have begun to dawn.

I See Book II, Chap. XIX.

2 See Book III, Chap. VI.

By repeating his Sandwich Islands lecture widely in California and Nevada he provided himself with means to travel, and revisited his home, returning by way of Panama and New York. In May, 1867, he published his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, and lectured in Cooper Institute. Then on 8 June he sailed on the Quaker City for a five months' excursion through the Mediterranean to the Holy Land, first reported in letters to The Alta-California and the New York Tribune, and immortalized by his book Innocents Abroad. On 2 February, 1870, he married his most sympathetic reader and severest censor, Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, a sister of one of the Quaker City pilgrims who had shown him her photograph in the Bay of Smyrna. After a brief unprofitable attempt to edit a newspaper in Buffalo, he moved in 1871 to Hartford, Connecticut, and in 1874 built there the home in which he lived for the next seventeen years.

3

He formed a close association with his neighbour Charles Dudley Warner'; was taken under the editorial wing of William Dean Howells' and into his intimate friendship; contributed to The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, and The North American Review; and ultimately made some progress with such festive New Englanders as O. W. Holmes, 3 F. J. Child, 4 and T. B. Aldrich 5; but his head was white before he became as much of a lion in Boston and New York as he had been in Carson City and San Francisco. At various times he made extended sojourns in England, Italy, France, Germany, and Austria, particularly in his later years in seasons of pecuniary retrenchment. He reaped a fortune by contracting for the publication of Grant's Memoirs and his royalties were steadily large; but bad ventures in his publishing business, his somewhat lavish style of living, and his unperfected type-setting machine, in which he sank $200,000, pushed him finally into bankruptcy. He had extended his reputation in 1873 by lecturing for two months in London; he made a big reading tour with G. W. Cable' in 1884-5; and in 1895, at the age of sixty,

'See Book III, Chap. XIII.

3 See Book II, Chap. XXIII.

$ See Book III, Chaps. VI, VII, and x.

* See Book III, Chap. XI. See Book III, Chap. XXIII.

• See Book III, Chap. vi.

disdaining the advantages of bankruptcy, he set out on a lecturing tour of the world which took on something of the aspect of a royal progress and ended in the triumphant discharge of all his obligations. Then he collected another fortune and built himself his mansion Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut.

In his last years he spent a good deal of time in New York and Washington, and a variety of causes kept him pretty steadily in the public eye as a figure of national interest: his valiant assumption of his debts, his great tour, his growing habit of commenting on public affairs, the publication of sections of his autobiography, his domestic bereavements, and the foreign tributes and honours which gradually assured his somewhat incredulous countrymen that he was a great man of letters. His first academic recognition had come from Yale University, which created him Master of Arts in 1888; in 1901 Yale and in 1902 the University of Missouri conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Letters; but the crowning academic glory fell in 1907 when the University of Oxford called him across the sea and robed him in scarlet and made him Doctor of Literature, amid, as he noted, "a very satisfactory hurrah" from the audience. On his return from a trip to the Bermudas he died 21 April, 1910.

Mark Twain's literary independence is generally conceded. Except for a certain flavour of Dickens in The Gilded Age there is hardly an indication of any important relationship between him and modern writers. He was a lover of the elemental in the midst of the refinements of an English and an American Victorian Age. "I can't stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and those people," he said. "And as for 'The Bostonians,' I would rather be damned to John Bunyan's heaven than read that." Modern fiction generally impressed him as namby-pamby and artificial. Jane Austen was his pet abhorrence, but he also detested Scott, primarily for his Toryism, and he poked fun at Cooper for his inaccuracies. His taste for books was eminently masculine. The literary nourishment of his style he appears to have found chiefly in history, travel, biography, and such works of imagination as one puts on a "five-foot shelf" -Shakespeare and the Bible, Suetonius's Lives of The Casars, Malory, Cellini, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, the Memoirs of Casanova, Lecky's History of Civilization, and Carlyle's French Revolution.

In his prose as in the verse of Whitman there is an appearance of free improvisation concealing a more or less novel and deliberate art. "So far as I know," wrote W. D. Howells in 1901, "Mr. Clemens is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favour of the thing that went before, or the thing that may be about to follow." Beside this assertion of a spontaneity approaching artlessness let us put Professor Matthews's caution: "His colloquial ease should not hide from us his mastery of all the devices of rhetoric." In a letter to Aldrich he acknowledges great indebtedness to Bret Harte, "who trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favour in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." Finally, let the reader who doubts whether he was conscious of his own art read carefully his little article, How to Tell a Story, beginning: "I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily in the company of the most expert story-tellers for many years. The art which he had learned of such American masters of oral rhetoric as Artemus Ward, John Phoenix, 1 and J. H. Riley he tested and developed in print and by word of mouth with constant reference to its immediate effect upon a large audience. Those principles the observance of which he found essential to holding and entertaining his public he adopted and followed; but literary "laws" which proved irrelevant to his business as entertainer of the masses he disregarded at pleasure as negligible or out of place in a democratic Esthetic. Howells calls him "the Lincoln of our literature"; and with that hint we may add that his power and limitations are alike related to his magnanimous ambition to beguile all the people all the time.

I

Let us begin our illustration of his literary character with a review of his five great books of travel. Against every one of them the charge might be brought that it is ill-composed: the chapters follow a certain chronological and geographical order; but the paragraphs frequently seem to owe their juxtaposition to the most casual association of ideas. This license, 1 See Book II, Chap. XIX.

M

however, is the law and studied practice of his humour. "To bring incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis," he declares, "of the American art." He is speaking here specifically of the humorous story; but obviously he applies the same principle to the book of travel, which, as he conceives it, is a joyous miscellany. It is a miscellany but with ingredients preconsidered and formulable. He is as inflexible as Aristotle on the importance of choosing a great subject. He holds with the classicists that the proper study of mankind is man. He traverses in each book territory of world-wide interest. He describes what meets his eye with rapid, vivid, unconventional eloquence. He sketches the historical background in a highly personal fashion and gives to his interlarded legends an individual twist. While he imparts a good quantity of information, useful and diverting, he keeps the thread of his personal adventures spinning, rhapsodizes for a page, then clowns it for another, or introduces an elaborate burlesque on the enthusiasm of previous travellers. It is a prepared concoction.

The Innocents Abroad justified the formula on which it was constructed by selling nearly a hundred thousand copies at three dollars and a half apiece within the first three years. Its initial success was due partly to its novelty and partly to the wide interest which the excursion itself had excited. Both these advantages it has now relinquished, yet, as his biographer tells us, it remains the most popular of all Mark Twain's travel books, and still "outsells every other book in its particular field." Time has not reduced the rich variety of its famous topics, though time has somewhat altered the nature of curiosity with regard to the conduct of the pilgrims; but even though their type of tourist were now quite extinct one might still gratify the historical sense by acquaintance with a representative group of Americans on a tremendous picnic with spirits high in rebound from the long depression of the Civil War. One hears in the book the rollicking voice of the expilot, ex-miner, the joyously insolent Western American, emancipated from all terror of the minor or Sunday-school vices, fortified by certain tolerant democratic standards of his own, well acquainted with the great American cities, equipped with