hat he
cared to know was that a man was a human being--that was bad enough for
him! It is a matter not of argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has
made more damaging admissions concerning America than concerning any
other nation. Lafcadio Hearn best succeeded in interpreting poetry to
his Japanese students by freeing it from all artificial and local
restraints, and using as examples the simplest lyrics which go straight
to the heart and soul of man. His remarkable lecture on 'Naked Poetry'
is the most signal illustration of his profoundly suggestive mode of
interpretation. In the same way, Mark Twain as humorist has sought the
highest common factor of all nations. "My secret--if there is any
secret--," Mr. Clemens once said to me, "is to create humour independent
of local conditions. In studying humanity as exhibited in the people
and localities I best knew and understood, I have sought to winnow out
the encumbrance of the local." And he significantly added--musingly--"
Humour, like morality, has its eternal verities."

To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has
contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the
Mississippi, 'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank
with the very best examples of picaresque fiction;

'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might
well be regarded as the supreme American morality--play of youth,
'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of
such originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory
parallel in literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and
all of 'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases
of a civilization now vanished forever. It is gratifying to Americans
to recognize in Mark Twain the incarnation of democratic America. It is
gratifying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and recapture the
pleasure and delight his works have given them for decades. It is more
gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain,
America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of
Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe--a man who will be
remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, "with the great humorists of all
time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company;
none of them was his equal in humanity."

V. PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST