e deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal,
it is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour.
That eidolon of which Aldrich speaks--a compact of good humour, robust
sanity, and large-minded humanity--has diligently "gone about in near
and distant places," everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk
of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh. The
French have a way of speaking of an author's public as if it were a
select and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a
country like France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects,
there is some reason for the phraseology. In reality, the author
appeals to many different "publics" or classes of readers--in proportion
to the many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the
catholicity of his tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a
boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of
experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he
points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to
whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real
psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid
irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid
Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that
innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the
omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs
of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill
condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the
equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the
growing body of reformers in all countries who would remedy the ills of
democratic government with the knife of publicity. The wisdom of human
experience and of sagacious tolerance informing his books for the young,
provokes the question whether these books are not more apposite to the
tastes of experienced age than to the fancies of callow youth. The
navvy may rejoice in 'Life on the Mississippi'. Youth and age may share
without jealousy the abounding fun and primitive naturalness of
'Huckleberry Finn'. True lovers of adventure may revel in the masterly
narrative of 'Tom Sawyer'. The artist may bestow his critical meed of
approval upon the beauty of 'Joan of Arc'. The moralist may heartily
validate the ethical lesson of 'The Man that