ABSTRACT
The Americans are perhaps the gravest people in the world: therefore their notion of Humour-generally, as we have indicated, a superficial one-is of something contrary to real life. Their conception of wit is, like that of the pseudo-metaphysical poets, justly decried by Dr. Johnson. They laugh of malice prepense; and in, as well as out of the pulpit are apt to flaunt their eccentricities, and confound the genial glow of genuine comedy with the 'flat, stale, and unprofitable' mountebankeries of the farce. The master of this degenerate style is a writer to whom it is hard to do neither more nor less than justice: his success is, relatively, so far in advance of his deserts, that we have to resist the temptation to depreciate his really great, though, as seems to me, often misused ability. He has aimed at and attained an enormous popularity. It is probable that, to the lower class of British Philistines, American prose is, at this day, represented not so much by Irving, Emerson, or Hawthorne, as by 'Mark Twain,' who has done perhaps more than any other living writer to lower the literary tone of English speaking people. The most conspicuous intellectual trait of Mr. CLEMENS seems to me an almost preternatural shrewdness, thinly veiled under an assumption of simplicity. He knows perfectly what he is about, and is
able to turn every incident or circumstance to his advantage. He prefixes a recent paper, 'The Idle Excursion', with the remark, 'All the journcyings I have done had been purely in the way of business. The pleasant May weather suggested a novelty, a trip for pure recreation, the bread and butter element left out:' but he writes seventy pages about the trip; and so provides for the element ostentatiously neglected. Of the alarming tribe of recent American cynics he is the most genuine. He hates humbug and cant, and nothing delights him more than to run a tilt at copy-book texts. It goes without saying that his 'bad little boy,' will prosper, and his 'good little boy' come to grief; or that he will give an absurd turn to the story of Washington and the cherrytree. Romance and sentiment, in either continent, fare equally at his hands: 'Old masters' at Milan, Florence, and Rome are served in the same manner as the journalists in Tennessee; he writes his text to the sketch of a weazened hag perched on the summit of the Loreley Rock; makes a grimace at the Pyramids; puts his finger to his nose among the Alps; and, as it were, turning the statues in the Louvre, the Uffizi, and the Vatican, upside down, inspects their legs. But, if his scepticism is intense, his morality is truculent: he visits the tomb of Abelard, and pronounces a blessing on his semi-assassins; and his blushes arc blcnt with curses over Regent Street. Mark Twain's attraction is due in great measure to his freshness: he is not an imitator; he does not rely on books-though his writings evince a more than average culture: he is a parodist of his own experience, to which he holds up a mirror, like one of the rOtmd balls in German gardens.
