fixture among the other rocks of New England, that he developed complete
confidence in himself and his powers. That passion for successful
self-expression, which Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler has defined as the main
ambition of the American, became the dominant motive of Mark Twain's
life. Of his experience as a steamboat pilot, Mark Twain has said that
in that brief, sharp schooling he got personally and familiarly
acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are
to be found in fiction, biography or history. In the West he had still
further enriched his mind with an inexhaustible store of first-hand
knowledge of human nature. In rotation he had been tramping jour
printer, river pilot, private secretary, miner, reporter, lecturer.
He now turns to literature in real earnest, and begins to display that
vast store of knowledge derived from actual contact with the infinitely
diversified realities of American life. Mark Twain takes on more and
more of the characteristics of the Yankee--those characteristics which
constitute the basis of his success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the
practical efficiency, the shrewdness and the hard common--sense. It is
the last phase in the formation of the national type.

It was, I venture to say, in some such way as this that Mark Twain came
to assume in the eyes of his countrymen an embodiment of the national
spirit. He was the self--made man in the self--made democracy. He was
at once his own creation and the creation of a democracy. There were
humorists in America before Mark Twain; there are humorists in America
still. But Mark Twain succeeded not merely in captivating the great
mass of the people; he achieved the far more difficult and unique
distinction of convincing his countrymen of his essential fellowship,
his temperamental affinity, with them. This miracle he wrought by the
frankest and most straightforward revelation of the actual experiences
in his own life and the lives of those he had known with perfect
intimacy. It is true that he wrote a few books dealing with other
times, other scenes, than our own in the present and in America. But I
daresay that his popularity with the mass of his countrymen would not
have been in any degree lessened had he never written these few books.
Indeed, it is hardly to be doubted that his books were successful in the
ratio of their autobiographic nature. For the character he revealed in
those books of his which a