ABSTRACT
This newest work of Mark Twain increases the difficulty of assigning that author a literary habitat. 'American humorist' has for some time been recognised as too vague a label to attach to a writer whose 'Jumping Frog' and other early sketches have been reduced to mere fragments and ventures by such productions as Tlze Imzoce11ts Abroad and The New Pilgrim's Progress, in which, while the humour is still fresh, there is present an equal art in graphic description of natural scenery, and a fine sense of what is genuinely impressive in the grandeurs of the past. Those who have travelled with Mark Twain with some curiosity to observe the effect of the ancient world interpreted by a very shrewd eye, fresh from the newest outcome of civilisation, may have expected to find antiquity turned into a solemn joke, but they can hardly have failed to discover a fine discrimination present at each step in the path of the 'new pilgrim;' while he sheds tears of a kind hardly relished by the superstitious or sentimental over the supposed grave of his deceased parent Adam, he can 'listen deep' when any true theme from the buried world reaches his ear. Without being pathetic he is sympathetic, and there is also an innate refinement in his genius felt in every subject it selects and in his treatment of it. Tom
Sawyer carries us to an altogether novel region, and along with these characteristics displays a somewhat puzzling variety of abilities. There is something almost stately in the simplicity with which.he invites us to tum our attention to the affairs of some boys and girls growing up on the far frontiers of American civilisation. With the Eastern Question upon us, and crowned heads arrayed on the political stage, it may be with some surprise that we find our interest demmded in sundry Western questions that are solving themselves through a dramatis personce of humble folk whose complications occur in a St. Petersburg situated on the Missouri river. Our manager, we feel quite sure, would not for a moment allow us to collSider that my other St. Petersburg is of equal importance to that for which he claims our attention. What is the deposition, death, or enthronement of a Sultan compared with the tragical death of'InjunJoe,' the murderer, accidentally buried and entombed in the cavern where his stolen treasures are hid? There he was found. [quotes ch. 3 3 'The poor unfortunate' to 'rival it'.]
In such writing as this we seem to be reading some classic fable, such as the Persian Sadi might point with his moral, 'Set not your heart on things that are transitory; the Tigris will run through Bagdat after the race of Caliphs is extinct.' Nor is this feeling of the dignity of his subject absent when the author is describing the most amusing incidents. Indeed, a great deal of Mark Twain's humour consists in the serious-or even at times severe-style in which he narrates his stories and pourtrays his scenes, as one who feels that the universal laws are playing through the very slightest of them. The following is a scene in which the principal actors arc a dog, a boy, and a beetle, the place being the chapel:- [quotes ch. 5 'The minister gave' to 'carry it off'.)
The scene we have selected is not so laughable, perhaps, as some others in the volume, but it indicates very well the kind of art in which Mark Twain is pre-eminent in our time. Every movement of boy, beetle, and poodle, is described not merely with precision, but with a subtle sense of meaning in every movement. Everything is alive, and every face physiognomical. From a novel so replete with good things, and one so full of significance, as it brings before us what we can feel is the real spirit of home life in the far West, there is no possibility of obtaining extracts which will convey to the reader any idea of the purport of the book. The scenes and characters cannot be really seen
