The
stage coach and the river steamboat furnished the means for
disseminating far and wide the gross, the ghastly, the extravagant
stories, the oddities of speech, the fantastic jests which emerged from
the clash of diverse and oddly-assorted types. The jarring contrasts,
the incongruities and surprises daily furnished by the picturesque river
life unquestionably stimulated and fertilized the latent germs of humour
in the young cub-pilot, Sam Clemens. Through Mark Twain's greatest
works flows the stately Mississippi, magically imparting to them some
indefinable share of its beauty, its variety, its majesty, its
immensity; and there is no exaggeration in the conclusion that it is the
greatest natural influence which his works betray. Reared in a
slave-holding community of narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people
of the lower middle class; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to
cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and
bob-tail of the town, in his passion for bohemianism and truantry--young
Clemens never learned to know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and
the humanity, of that aristocratic patriarchal South which produced such
beautiful figures as Lee and Lanier.
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