en two and three
hundred maxims during his life. Many of them, especially those from the
old and new calendars of Pudd'nhead Wilson, bear the individual and
peculiar stamp of Mark Twain's phraseology and outlook upon life
--quaint, genial, and shrewd. In pursuance of his deep-rooted belief in
the omnipotent power of training, he remarked that the peach was once a
bitter almond, the cauliflower nothing but cabbage with a college
education. He himself was not guiltless of that irreverence which he
defined as disrespect for another man's god. Women took an almost
unholy delight in describing some of their undesirable acquaintances, in
Mark Twain's phrase, as neither quite refined, nor quite unrefined, but
just the kind of person that keeps a parrot!

At times, Mark Twain realized the sanctifying power of illusions in a
world of harsh realities; for he asserted that when illusions are gone
you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. A depressing sense of
world-weariness sometimes overbore the native joyousness of his
temperament; and he expressed his sense of deep gratitude to Adam, the
first great benefactor of the race--because he had brought death into
the world. A funeral always gave Mark Twain a sense of spiritual
uplift, a sense of thankfulness because the dead friend had been set
free. He thought it was far harder to live than to die.

In one of his early sketches, there was admirable wit in the suggestion
to the organist for a hymn appropriate to a sermon on the Prodigal Son:

"Oh! we'll all get blind drunk
When Johnny comes marching home!"

And in The Innocents Abroad there is the same sort of brilliant wit in
the mad logic of his innocent query, on learning that St. Philip Neri's
heart was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs: "I was
curious to know what Philip had for dinner." Mark Twain was capable of
epigrams worthy, in their dark levity, of Swift himself. In speaking of
Pudd'nhead Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said "Humour there is in almost
every scene and every page; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam
on the greatest Shakespearian tragedies--on the deep melancholy of
Hamlet, the heartbreak of Lear." The greatest ironic achievements of
Mark Twain, in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that
Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the
power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist--or shall we