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.
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