ABSTRACT
His humor springs from a certain intensity of common sense, a passionate love of justice, and a generous scorn of what is petty and mean; and it is these qualities which his 'school' have not been able to convey. They have never been more conspicuous than in this last book of his, to which they may be said to give its sole coherence. It may be claiming more than a humorist could wish to assert that he is always in earnest; but this strikes us as the paradoxical charm of Mr. Clemens's best humor. Its wildest extravagance is the break and fling from a deep feeling, a wrath with some folly which disquiets him worse than other men, a personal hatred for some humbug or pretension that embitters him beyond anything but laughter. It must be because he is intolerably weary of the twaddle of pedcstrianizing that he conceives the notion of a tramp through Europe, which he operates by means of express trains, steamboats, and private carriages, with the help of an agent and a courier; it is because he has a real loathing, otherwise inexpressible, for Alp-climbing, that he imagines an ascent of the Riffelberg, with 'half a mile of men and mules' tied together by rope. One sees that affectations do not first strike him as ludicrous, merely, but as detestable. He laughs, certainly, at an abuse, at ill manners, at conceit, at cruelty, and you must laugh with him; but if you enter into the very spirit ofhis humor, you feel that if he could set these things right there would be very little laughing. At the bottom of his heart he has often the grinmess of a reformer; his wit is turned by preference not upon human nature, not upon droll situations and things abstractly ludicrous, but upon matters that arc out of joint, that are unfair or unnecessarily ignoble, and cry out to his love of justice for discipline. Much of the fun is at his own cost where he boldly attempts to grapple with some hoary abuse, and gets worsted by it, as in his verbal contest with the girl at the medicinal springs in Baden, who returns 'that beggar's answer' of half Europe, 'What you please,' to his ten-times-repeated demand of 'How much?' and gets the last word. But it is plain that if he had his way there would be a fixed price for those waters very suddenly, and without regard to the public amusement, or regret for lost opportunities of humorous writing.
