ks the
humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful even for
the firing of a national joke heard round the world. And when Mark
Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use
words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with
prairie fire and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on
all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by
Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the
Republic shall suffer no harm."

STUART P. SHERMAN: "MARK TWAIN."
The Nation, May 12, 1910.

THE MAN

American literature, indeed I might say American life, can exhibit no
example of supreme success from the humblest beginnings, so signal as
the example of Mark Twain. Lincoln became President of the United
States, as did Grant and Johnson. But assassination began for Lincoln
an apotheosis which has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and
adulation. Grant was one of the great failures in American public life;
and Johnson, brilliant but unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment. Mark
Twain enjoys the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive
development, a deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of
intellectual and spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his
career. From the standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of
Mark Twain from a journeyman printer to a great author, from a
merry-andrew to a world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy
navigator on the vast and uncharted seas of human experience, may be
taken as symbolic of the romance of American life.

With a sort of mock--pride, Clemens referred at times to the ancestral
glories of his house--the judge who condemned Charles I., and all those
other notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed lustre upon the
name of Clemens. Yet he claimed that he had not examined into these
traditions, chiefly because "I was so busy polishing up this end of the
line and trying to make it showy." His mother, a "Lambton with a p," of
Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, a man of
determination and force, in Lexington, in 1823; but neither was endowed
with means, and their life was of the simplest. From Jamestown, in the
mountain solitudes of East Tennessee, they removed in 1829, much as
Judge Hawkins is said to ha