s sluggish in
beginning the necessary readjustment, and not only sluggish, but
somewhat grudging. Naturally it cannot help seeing the later works of a
popular writer from the point of view it had to take to enjoy his
earlier writings. And thus the author of 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Joan of
Arc' was forced to pay a high price for the early and abundant
popularity of the 'Innocents Abroad.'

No doubt, a few of his earlier sketches were inexpensive in their
elements; made of materials worn threadbare by generations of earlier
funny men, they were sometimes cut in the pattern of his predecessors.
No doubt, some of the earliest of all were crude and highly colored, and
may even be called forced, not to say violent. No doubt, also, they did
not suggest the seriousness and the melancholy which always must
underlie the deepest humor, as we find it in Cervantes and Moliere, in
Swift and in Lowell. But even a careless reader, skipping thru the book
in idle amusement, ought to have been able to see in the 'Innocents
Abroad,' that the writer of this liveliest of books of travel was no
mere merry-andrew, grinning thru a horse-collar to make sport for the
groundlings; but a sincere observer of life, seeing thru his own eyes
and setting down what he saw with abundant humor, of course, but also
with profound respect for the eternal verities.

George Eliot in one of her essays calls those who parody lofty themes
"debasers of the moral currency." Mark Twain is always an advocate of
the sterling ethical standard. He is ready to overwhelm an affectation
with irresistible laughter, but he never lacks reverence for the things
that really deserve reverence. It is not at the Old Masters that he
scoffs in Italy, but rather at those who pay lip-service to things which
they neither enjoy nor understand. For a ruin or a painting or a legend
that does not seem to him to deserve the appreciation in which it is
held he refuses to affect an admiration he does not feel; he cannot help
being honest--he was born so. For meanness of all kinds he has a burning
contempt; and on Abelard he pours out the vials of his wrath. He has a
quick eye for all humbugs and a scorching scorn for them; but there is
no attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he
stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx. He is not taken in by the
glamor of Palestine; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his feet;
but he knows that he is standing on holy grou