ence it is, I
believe, that Mark Twain stands out as, in essence and in fundamentals,
a remarkable sociologist. Certain passages in his books on the subject
of slavery, as the historian Lecky has declared, are the truest things
that have ever been expressed on the subject which vexed a continent and
plunged a nation in bloody, fratricidal strife.

Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi always call up to my mind
the most vivid pictures--pictures that are eternally unforgettable. The
memorable scene in which Colonel Sherburne quells the mob and his
scathing remarks upon lynching; the reality and the pathos of the feuds
of those Kentucky families, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords,
shooting each other down at sight in vindication of honour and pride of
race; the lordly life of the pilot on the Mississippi, his violent and
unchallenged sway over his subordinates, his mastery of the river; the
variegated colours of that lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of
the river--all these sweep by us in a series of panoramic pictures as
Huck's raft swings lazily down the tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides
his boat through the dangers of the channel. Mark Twain is primarily a
great artist, only unconsciously a true sociologist. But his power as a
sociologist is no less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely
more real and human and verisimilar that it is not polemical. There is
a "sort of contemporaneous posterity" which has registered its verdict
that Mark Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era. But there
is yet to come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare
say, class Mark Twain as America's greatest, most human sociologist in
letters. He is the historian, the historian in art, of a varied and
unique phase of civilization on the American continent that has passed
forever. And it is inconceivable that any future investigator into the
sociological phases of that civilization can fail to find priceless and
unparalleled documents in the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane,
boisterous yet universally human writings of Mark Twain.

Mark Twain's genius of social comprehension and sociologic
interpretation went even deeper than this. His mastery lay not alone in
penetrative reflection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase
of our civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an "institution"
blotted from the American escutcheon and a collective racial passion
that pe