Aristophanes, a pious conservative, was always laughing consumedly at the
Greek gods, and the Greek gods were supposed to be in the joke. The
theatrical season was sacred to the deity of wine and fun, and he, with
the other Olympians, was not scandalized by the merriment. In the ages
of faith it is also notorious that saints, and even more sacred persons,
were habitually buffooned in the Mystery Plays, and the Church saw no
harm. The old leaven of American Puritanism has the same kind of
familiarity with ideas and words which we approach more delicately,
conscious that the place where we tread is holy ground. This
consciousness appears to be less present in the States, which are peopled
by descendants of the Puritans, and scores of good things are told in
"family" American journals and magazines which are received without a
grin in this country. "We are not amused," a great person is reported to
have once observed when some wit had ventured on a hazardous anecdote.
And we, meaning the people of England, are often not amused, but rather
vexed, by gaieties which appear absolutely harmless on the other side of
the ocean. These two kinds of humour, the middle-class jokes about
courting between lovers seated on a snake fence, or about Sunday schools
and quaint answers there given to Biblical questions, leave us cold.

But surely we appreciate as well as the Americans themselves the
extraordinarily intellectual high spirits of Mark Twain, a writer whose
genius goes on mellowing, ripening, widening, and improving at an age
when another man would have written himself out. His gravity in
narrating the most preposterous tale, his sympathy with every one of his
absurdest characters, his microscopic imagination, his vein of
seriousness, his contrasts of pathos, his bursts of indignant plain
speaking about certain national errors, make Mark Twain an author of the
highest merit, and far remote from the mere buffoon. Say the "Jumping
Frog" is buffoonery; perhaps it is, but Louis Quinze could not have