, 1910.

Any attempt to designate Mark Twain's place in the world's literary
history would be presumptuous now. Yet I cannot help thinking that he
will maintain his supremacy in the century that produced him. I think so
because, of all the writers of that hundred years, his work was the most
human his utterances went most surely to the mark. In the long analysis
of the ages it is the truth that counts, and he never approximated,
never compromised, but pronounced those absolute verities to which every
human being of whatever rank must instantly respond.

His understanding of subjective human nature--the vast, unwritten
life within--was simply amazing. Such knowledge he acquired at the
fountainhead--that is, from himself. He recognized in himself an extreme
example of the human being with all the attributes of power and of
weakness, and he made his exposition complete.

The world will long miss Mark Twain; his example and his teaching will
be neither ignored nor forgotten. Genius defies the laws of perspective
and looms larger as it recedes. The memory of Mark Twain remains to us
a living and intimate presence that today, even more than in life,
constitutes a stately moral bulwark reared against hypocrisy and
superstition--a mighty national menace to sham.

MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS

I. EARLY LETTERS, 1853. NEW YORK AND PHILADELPHIA

We have no record of Mark Twain's earliest letters. Very likely
they were soiled pencil notes, written to some school sweetheart
--to "Becky Thatcher," perhaps--and tossed across at lucky moments,
or otherwise, with happy or disastrous results. One of those
smudgy, much-folded school notes of the Tom Sawyer period would be
priceless to-day, and somewhere among forgotten keepsakes it may
exist, but we shall not be likely to find it. No letter of his
boyhood, no scrap of his earlier writing, has come to light except
his penciled name, SAM CLEMENS, laboriously inscribed on the inside
of a small worn purse that once held his meager, almost non-existent
wealth. He became a printer's apprentice at twelve, but as he
received no salary, the need of a purse could not have been urgent.
He must have carried it pretty steadily, however, from its
appearance--as a kind of symbol of hope, maybe--a token of that
Sellers-optimism which dominated his early life, and was never
entirely subdued.

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