Of all the literary men I have known he was the most unliterary in his
make and manner. I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with
Latin, but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and
Italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in
all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it
had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style was
what we know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference
the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. I
have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in
writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote
as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to
what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside
what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made
it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him. Then, when
he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he
would go back to the company he was entertaining, and keep on with what
he had been talking about. He observed this manner in the construction
of his sentences, and the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering
or disordering of his compilations.--[Nowhere is this characteristic
better found than in Twain's 'Autobiography,' it was not a "style" it was
unselfconscious thought D.W.]--I helped him with a Library of Humor,
which he once edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition,
with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he
tore it all apart, and "chucked" the pieces in wherever the fancy, for
them took him at the moment. He was right: we were not making a
text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the
reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his
travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it;
and I do not now see, either, though at the time it confounded me. On