Mark Twain is primarily a
great artist, only unconsciously a true sociologist. But his power as a
sociologist is no less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely
more real and human and verisimilar that it is not polemical. There is
a "sort of contemporaneous posterity" which has registered its verdict
that Mark Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era. But there
is yet to come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare
say, class Mark Twain as America's greatest, most human sociologist in
letters. He is the historian, the historian in art, of a varied and
unique phase of civilization on the American continent that has passed
forever. And it is inconceivable that any future investigator into the
sociological phases of that civilization can fail to find priceless and
unparalleled documents in the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane,
boisterous yet universally human writings of Mark Twain.
Mark Twain's genius of social comprehension and sociologic
interpretation went even deeper than this.
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