I felt a strange sort of camaraderie, of personal attachment, for Mark Twain during all the years before I came into personal contact with him. It was the dictum of a distinguished English critic, to the effect that Huckleberry Finn was a literary masterpiece, which first awoke in me, then a mere boy, a genuine respect for literary criticism; for here was expressed an opinion which I had long secretly cherished, but somehow never dared to utter!
My personal association with Mr. Clemens, comparatively brief though it was—an ocean voyage, meetings here and there, a brief stay as a guest in his home—gave me at last the justification for paying the debt which, with the years, had grown greater and more insistently obligatory. I felt both relief and pleasure when he authorized me to pay that debt by writing an interpretation of his life and work.
It is an appreciation originating in the heart of one who loved Mark Twain's works for a generation before he ever met Samuel L. Clemens. It is an interpretation springing from the conviction that Mark Twain was a great American who comprehensively incorporated and realized his own country and his own age as no American has so completely done before him; a supreme humorist who ever wore the panache of youth, gaiety, and bonhomie; a brilliant wit who never dipped his darts in the poison of cynicism, misanthropy, or despair; constitutionally a reformer who, heedless of self, boldly struck for the right as he saw it; a philosopher and sociologist who intuitively understood the secret springs of human motive and impulse, and empirically demonstrated that intuition in works which crossed frontiers, survived translation, and went straight to the human, beneath the disguise of the racial; a genius who lived to know and enjoy the happy rewards of his own fame; a great man who saw life steadily and saw it whole.
ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.
LONDON, August 5, 1910.
NOTE.—The author esteems himself in the highest degree fortunate in having the co-operation of Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn. All the illustrations, both autochrome and monochrome, are the work of Mr. Coburn.
CONTENTS
| I. |
[INTRODUCTORY] |
| II. |
[THE MAN] |
| III. |
[THE HUMORIST] |
| IV. |
[WORLD-FAMED GENIUS] |
| V. | [PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST] |
“I've a theory that every author, while living, has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant places, and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never knew him in the flesh. When the author dies, this phantom fades away, not caring to continue business at the old stand. Then the dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature; this impression may grow sharper or fainter according to the fashions and new conditions of the time.”
Letter of THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH to WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS of date December 23, 1901.
