Though expressing distaste for
Franklin's somewhat cold and almost mercenary injunctions, Mark Twain
nevertheless has much of his Yankee thrift, shrewdness, and bed-rock
common sense. Beneath and commingled with all his boyish and exuberant
fun is a note of pathos subdued but unmistakable, which rings true
beside the forced and extravagant pathos of Dickens. His Southern
hereditament of chivalry, his compassion for the oppressed and his
defence of the down-trodden, were never in abeyance from the beginning
of his career to the very end. Like Joel Chandler Harris, that genial
master of African folk-lore, Mark Twain found no theme of such absorbing
interest as human nature. Like Fielding, he wrote immortal narratives
in which the prime concern is not the "story," but the almost scientific
revelation of the natural history of the characters. The corrosive and
mordant irony of many a passage in Mark Twain, wherein he holds up to
scorn the fraudulent and the artificial, the humbug, the hypocrite, the
sensualist, are not unworthy of the colossal Swift.
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