the strong
tide of earnestness in him. But it would be limiting him unjustly
to describe him as a satirist, and it is hardly practicable to
establish him in people's minds as a moralist; he has made them
laugh too long; they will not believe him serious; they think some
joke is always intended. This is the penalty, as Dr. Holmes has
pointed out, of making one's first success as a humorist. There was
a paper of Mark Twain's printed in the Atlantic Monthly some years
ago and called, "The Facts Concerning the Late Carnival of Crime in
Connecticut," which ought to have won popular recognition of the
ethical intelligence underlying his humor. It was, of course,
funny; but under the fun it was an impassioned study of the human
conscience. Hawthorne or Bunyan might have been proud to imagine
that powerful allegory, which had a grotesque force far beyond
either of them.... Yet it quite failed of the response I had hoped
for it, and I shall not insist here upon Mark Twain as a moralist;
though I warn the reader that if he leaves out of the account an
indignant sense of right and wrong, a scorn of all affectations and
pretense, an ardent hate of meanness and injustice, he will come
infinitely short of knowing Mark Twain.

Howells realized the unwisdom and weakness of dogmatic insistence, and
the strength of understatement. To him Mark Twain was already the
moralist, the philosopher, and the statesman; he was willing that the
reader should take his time to realize these things. The article, with
his subject's portrait as a frontispiece, appeared in the Century for
September, 1882. If it carried no new message to many of its readers, it
at least set the stamp of official approval upon what they had already
established in their hearts.

CXL

DOWN THE RIVER

Osgood was doing no great things with The Prince and the Pauper, but
Clemens gave him another book presently, a collection of sketches--The
Stolen White Elephant. It was not an especially important volume, though
some of the features, such as "Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning" and the
"Carnival of Crime," are among the best of their sort, while the
"Elephant" story is an amazingly good take-off on what might be called
the spectacular detective. The interview between Inspector Blunt and the
owner of the elephant is typical. The inspector asks:

"Now what does this elephant eat, and how mu