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.
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