ghing It." Who was this Argonaut of the new era, and
what makes him representative of his countrymen in the epoch of release?
Born in Missouri in 1835, the son of an impractical emigrant from
Virginia, the youth had lived from his fourth until his eighteenth year
on the banks of the Mississippi. He had learned the printer's trade, had
wandered east and back again, had served for four years as a river-pilot
on the Mississippi, and had tried to enter the Confederate army. Then
came the six crowded years, chiefly as newspaper reporter, in the boom
times of Nevada and California. His fame began with the publication in
New York in 1867 of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."
A newspaper now sent him to Europe to record "what he sees with his own
eyes." He did so in "Innocents Abroad," and his countrymen shouted with
laughter. This, then, was "Europe" after all--another "fake" until this
shrewd river pilot who signed himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings!
Then came a series of far greater books--"Roughing It," "Life on the
Mississippi," "The Gilded Age" (in collaboration ), and "Tom Sawyer" and
"Huckleberry Finn"--books that make our American "Odyssey", rich in the
spirit of romance and revealing the magic of the great river as no other
pages can ever do again. Gradually Mark Twain became a public character;
he retrieved on the lecture platform the loss of a fortune earned by his
books; he enjoyed his honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University. Every
reader of American periodicals came to recognize the photographs of that
thick shock of hair, those heavy eyebrows, the gallant drooping little
figure, the striking clothes, the inevitable cigar: all these things
seemed to go with the part of professional humorist, to be like the
caressing drawl of Mark's voice. The force of advertisement could
no further go. But at bottom he was far other than a mere maker of
boisterous jokes for people with frontier preferences in humor. He was a
passionate, chivalric lover of things fair and good, although too honest
to pretend to see beauty and goodness where he could not personally
detect them--and an equally passionate hater of evil. Read "The Man Who
Corrupted Hadleyburg" and "The Mysterious Stranger." In his last years,
torn by private sorrows, he turned as black a philosophical pessimist
as we have bred. He died at his new country seat in Connecticut in 1910.
Mr. Paine has written his life in three great volumes, and there is