his experience of
life.

II

A humorist is often without honor in his own country. Perhaps
this is partly because humor is likely to be familiar, and familiarity
breeds contempt. Perhaps it is partly because (for some strange reason)
we tend to despise those who make us laugh, while we respect those who
make us weep--forgetting that there are formulas for forcing tears quite
as facile as the formulas for forcing smiles. Whatever the reason, the
fact is indisputable that the humorist must pay the penalty of his
humor, he must run the risk of being tolerated as a mere fun-maker, not
to be taken seriously, and not worthy of critical consideration. This
penalty has been paid by Mark Twain. In many of the discussions of
American literature he has been dismist as tho he were only a competitor
of his predecessors, Artemus Ward and John Phoenix, instead of being,
what he is really, a writer who is to be classed--at whatever interval
only time may decide--rather with Cervantes and Moliere.

Like the heroines of the problem-plays of the modern theater, Mark
Twain has had to live down his past. His earlier writing gave but little
promise of the enduring qualities obvious enough in his later works.
Noah Brooks has told us how he was advised if he wisht to "see genuine
specimens of American humor, frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious," to
look up the sketches which the then almost unknown Mark Twain was
printing in a Nevada newspaper. The humor of Mark Twain is still
American, still frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious; but it is riper
now and richer, and it has taken unto itself other qualities existing
only in germ in these firstlings of his muse. The sketches in the
'Jumping Frog' and the letters which made up the 'Innocents Abroad' are
"comic copy," as the phrase is in newspaper offices--comic copy not
altogether unlike what John Phoenix had written and Artemus
Ward,--better indeed than the work of these newspaper humorists (for
Mark Twain had it in him to develop as they did not), but not
essentially dissimilar.

And in the eyes of many who do not think for themselves, Mark Twain was
only the author of these genuine specimens of American humor. For when
the public has once made up its mind about any man's work, it does not
relish any attempt to force it to unmake this opinion and to remake it.
Like other juries, it does not like to be ordered to reconsider its
verdict as contrary to the facts of the case. It is alway