"My secret--if there is any
secret--," Mr. Clemens once said to me, "is to create humour independent
of local conditions. In studying humanity as exhibited in the people
and localities I best knew and understood, I have sought to winnow out
the encumbrance of the local." And he significantly added--musingly--"
Humour, like morality, has its eternal verities."
To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has
contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the
Mississippi, 'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank
with the very best examples of picaresque fiction;
'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might
well be regarded as the supreme American morality--play of youth,
'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of
such originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory
parallel in literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and
all of 'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases
of a civilization now vanished forever.
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