evoke, to
create even, characters and types of eternal verity. They profess for
Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration that we have in France
for Balzac."

Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that humour is a subject which
has never had much interest for him, it is nothing more than a
commonplace to say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist only,
that the world seems to persist in regarding him. The philosophy of his
early life was what George Meredith has aptly termed the "philosophy of
the Broad Grin." Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once said that "American
humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the French, nor sharp and
sensible and full of the realities of life like the Scotch, is simply
the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and
mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending
it to the end of the world." This partial and somewhat conventional
foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the
cumulative and "sky-breaking" humour of the early Mark Twain. Then no
exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm too unreal, no climax
too extreme.

The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a
lawless, untrammelled life. Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but
one remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of
argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature.
In the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic
and sanguinary. The refinements of art and civilization seemed
effeminate, artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously
at one another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of each other's
plans, and gloried in their defiance of both man and God. Deep in their
hearts they cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and
the afflicted, and generosity indescribable. And yet they prided
themselves upon their barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning
bred of their wild life and sharpened in the struggle for existence.
What, after all, is 'The Jumping Frog' but the elaborate narrative, in
native vernacular, of a shrewd practical joke? As Mark Twain first
heard it, this story was a solemn recital of an interesting incident in
the life of Angel's Camp. It was Mark Twain who "created" the story: he
endowed with the comic note of whimsicality that imaginative realization
of _une chose vue_, which went round the