ached heaven. They were
given the harps and halos--indeed nothing harmless and reasonable was
refused them. But they found these things the merest accessories. Mark
Twain's heaven was just the busiest place imaginable. There weren't any
idle people there after the first day. The old sea captain pointed out
that singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity was all
very pretty when you heard about it from the pulpit, but that it was a
mighty poor way to put in valuable time. He took no stock in a heaven of
warbling ignoramuses. He found that Eternal Rest, reduced to hard pan,
was not as comforting as it sounds in the pulpit. Heaven is the merited
reward of service; and the opportunities for service were infinite. As
he said, you've got to earn a thing square and honest before you can
enjoy it. To Mark, this was "about the sensiblest heaven" he had ever
heard of. He mourned a little over the discovery that what a man mostly
missed in heaven was company. But he rejoiced in the information
vouchsafed by his friend the Captain--a valuable piece of information
that leaves him, and all who are so fortunate as to hear it, the better
for the knowledge--that happiness isn't a thing in itself, but only a
contrast with something that isn't pleasant! This view of heaven, seen
through the temperament of a humorist and a philosopher, is provocative
and thought-compelling more than it is amusing or ludicrous. I think it
inspired Bernard Shaw's Aerial Foot-ball which won Collier's thousand
dollar prize--a prize which Mr Shaw hurled back with indignation and
scorn!

Mark Twain was a great humorist--more genial than grim, more
good-humoured than ironic, more given to imaginative exaggeration than to
intellectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than to melancholy.
He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the
literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their
likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and
picaresque romance. He was a remarkable observer and faithful reporter,
never allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be "frightened by the
venerableness of the institution"; and his sublimated journalism reveals
a mastery of the naively comic thoroughly human and democratic. He is
the most eminent product of our American democracy, and, in profoundly
shocking Great Britain by preferring Connecticut to Camelot, he exhibited
that robustness o