As an American, I can say nothing more significantly characteristic of the man than that he was a good citizen. He possessed in the consciousness of personal responsibility for the standards, government, and ideals of his town, his city, and his country. Civic conscientiousness burned strong within him; and he fought to develop and to maintain breadth of public view and sanity of popular ideals. Blind patriotism was impossible for this great American: he exposed the shallowness of popular enthusiasms and the narrowness of rampant spread-eagleism, without regard for consequence to himself or his popularity. What a tribute to his personality that, instead of suffering, he gained in popularity by his honest and downright outspokenness! He wielded the lash of his bitter scorn and fearful irony upon the wrong-doer, the hypocrite, the fraud; and aroused public opinion to impatience with public abuse, open offence, and official discourtesy.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens impressed me as the most complete and human individual I have ever known. He was not a great thinker; his views were not “advanced”.

The glory of his temperament was its splendid sanity, balance, and normality. The homeliest virtues of life were his: the republican virtue of simplicity; the domestic virtue of, personal purity and passionately simple regard for the sanctity of the marriage bond; the civic virtue of public honesty; the business virtue of stainless private honour. Mark Twain was one of the supreme literary geniuses of his time. But he was something even more than this. He was not simply a great genius: he was a great man.

[THE HUMORIST]

“Exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow; a joke can be so big that it breaks the roof of the stars. By simply going on being absurd, a thing can become godlike; there is but one step from the ridiculous to the sublime.”
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON: Charles Dickens.