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his new country seat in Connecticut in 1910. Mr. Paine has written his life in three great volumes, and there is a twenty-five volume edition of his Works.
All the evidence seems to be in. Yet the verdict of the public seems not quite made up. It is clear that Mark Twain the writer of romance is gaining upon Mark Twain the humorist.
The inexhaustible American appetite for frontier types of humor seizes upon each new variety, crunches it with huge satisfaction, and then tosses it away.
John Phoenix, Josh Billings, Jack Downing, Bill Arp, Petroleum V. Nasby, Artemus Ward, Bill Nye-these are already obsolescent names.
If Clemens lacked something of Artemus Ward's whimsical delicacy and of Josh Billings's tested human wisdom, he surpassed all of his competitors in a certain rude, healthy masculinity, the humor of river and mining-camp and printing-office, where men speak without censorship.
His country-men liked exaggeration, and he exaggerated; they liked irreverence, and he had turned iconoclast in Innocents abroad.
As a professional humorist, he has paid the obligatory tax for his extravagance, over-emphasis, and undisciplined taste, but such faults are swiftly forgotten when one turns
New Haven. Yale University. Press. 1921.
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