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.
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