"Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward
towards a summit where you will find your chiefest
pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will
be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbour and the
community."
MARK TWAIN: 'What is Man?'

"The humorous writer," says Thackeray, "professes to awaken and direct
your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension,
and imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed,
the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all
the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself
to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and
speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him.--sometimes
love him." This definition is apt enough to have been made with Mark
Twain in mind. In an earlier chapter, is displayed the comic phase of
Mark Twain's humour. Beneath that humour, underlying it and informing
it, is a fund of human concern, a wealth of seriousness and pathos, and
a universality of interests which argue real power and greatness. These
qualities, now to be discussed, reveal Mark Twain as serious enough to
be regarded as a real moralist and philosopher, humane enough to be
regarded as, in spirit, a true sociologist and reformer.

It must be recognised that the history of literature furnishes forth no
great international figure, whose fame rests solely upon the basis of
humour, however human, however sympathetic, however universal that
humour may be. Behind that humour must lurk some deeper and more
serious implication which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product.
Genuine humour, as Landor has pointed out, requires a "sound and
capacious mind, which is always a grave one." There is always a breadth
of philosophy, a depth of sadness, or a profundity of pathos in the very
greatest humorists. Both Rabelais and La Fontaine were reflective
dreamers; Cervantes fought for the progressive and the real in pricking
the bubble of Spanish chivalry; and Moliere declared that, for a man in
his position, he could do no better than attack the vices of his time
with ridiculous likenesses. Though exhibiting little of the melancholy
of Lincoln, Mark Twain revelled in the same directness of thought and
expression, showed the same zest for broad humour reeking with the
strong but pungen