A second sojourn in Europe produced 'A Tramp Abroad,' full of stories and adventures, much in the spirit of his original effort. But with more reading, reflection, and search into his own experiences, came 'Old Times on the Mississippi,' 'Tom Sawyer,' and 'Huckleberry Finn,' in which the author wrote out of his own heart. To interest in social problems must be attributed the beautiful idyl of 'The Prince and the Pauper,' and 'The Yankee at the Court of King Arthur,' which latter the English thought lacked reverence for the traditions of chivalry.
During all this period Mr. Clemens was in great demand as a lecturer and an after-dinner speaker. His remarks about New England weather, at a New England dinner in New York, are a favorite example of his humor and his power of poetic description. As a lecturer, a teller of stories, and delineator of character, he had scarcely a rival in his ability to draw and entertain vast audiences. He made a large income from his lectures in America and in England, and from his books, which always had a phenomenally large sale. Very remunerative also was the play of 'Colonel Sellers,' constructed out of a novel called 'The Gilded Age.'
Since 1890 Mr. Clemens and his family have lived most of the time in Europe. For some time before he had written little, but since that his pen has again become active. He has produced many magazine papers, a story called 'Pudd'nhead Wilson,' and the most serious and imaginative work of his life in 'The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc,' feigned to be translated from a contemporary memoir left by her private secretary. In it the writer strikes the universal chords of sympathy and pathos and heroic elevation. In 1895-6 he made a lecturing tour of the globe, speaking in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India, and everywhere received an ovation due to his commanding reputation. He is understood to be making this journey the subject of another book.
Mr. Clemens is universally recognized as the first of living humorists; but if the fashion of humor changes, as change it may, he will remain for other qualities—certain primordial qualities such as are exhibited in his work on the Mississippi—a force to be reckoned with in the literature of this century. Mr. Clemens's humor has the stamp of universality, which is the one indispensable thing in all enduring literary productions, and his books have been translated and very widely diffused and read in German, French, and other languages. This is a prophecy of his lasting place in the world of letters.
THE CHILD OF CALAMITY
From 'Life on the Mississippi': copyright 1883, by James R. Osgood and Company
By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that now departed and hardly remembered raft life, I will throw in, in this place, a chapter from a book which I have been working at by fits and starts during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more. The book is a story which details some passages in the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town drunkard of my time out West there. He has run away from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who wishes to make a nice truth-telling respectable boy of him; and with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped. They have found a fragment of a lumber raft (it is high water and dead summer-time), and are floating down the river by night and hiding in the willows by day,—bound for Cairo,—whence the negro will seek freedom in the heart of the free States. But in a fog, they pass Cairo without knowing it. By-and-by they begin to suspect the truth, and Huck Finn is persuaded to end the dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge raft which they have seen in the distance ahead of them, creeping aboard under cover of the darkness, and gathering the needed information by eavesdropping:—