classics. From ethical sophistication
and moral truantry Mark Twain evolves an inexhaustible supply of humour.
The revolt of mischievous and Bohemian boyhood against the stern
limitations of formal Puritanism is, in a sense, a principle that he
carried with him to the grave. "There are no more vital passages in his
fiction," says Mr. Howells, "than those which embody character as it is
affected for good as well as for evil by the severity of the local
Sunday-schooling and church-going." Out of the pangs of conscience, the
ingenious sedatives of sophistry, the numerous variations of the lie, he
won a wholesome humour that left you thinking, by inversion, upon the
moral involved. Knowledge of human nature finds expression in forms
made permanently effective through the arresting permeation of humour.
The incident of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashing of the fence is the sort
of thing over which boy and man alike can chuckle with satisfaction--for
Tom Sawyer had discovered a great law of human action without knowing
it, namely, that in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only
necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. Huck's reasoning about
chicken stealing--the exquisitely comic shifting of ground from morality
to expediency--is a striking example of the best type of Mark Twain's
humour. Following his father's example, Huck would occasionally "lift"
a chicken that wasn't roosting comfortable; for had his father not told
him that even if he didn't want the chicken himself, he could always
find somebody that did want it, and a good deed ain't never forgot?
Huck confesses that he had never seen his Pap when he didn't want the
chicken himself!

The germ of Mark Twain's humour, wherever it is found, from 'The
Innocents Abroad' to 'The Connecticut Yankee' and 'Captain Stormfield's
Visit to Heaven', is found in the mental reactions resulting from
stupendous and glaring contrasts. First it is the Wild Western
humorist, primitive and untamed, running amuck through the petrified
formulas and encrusted traditions of Europe. Then comes the fantastic
juxtaposition of the shrewd Connecticut Yankee, with his comic
irreverence and raucous sense of humour, his bourgeois limitations and
provincial prejudices, to the Court of King Arthur, with its
mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social narrowness. How many
have delighted in the Yankee's inimitable description of his feelings
toward that classic damsel of th