environment, with its spirit of primitive democracy, its atmosphere of
wild and ribald jest, its contempt for the impostor, its perpetually
recurring incongruities, and behind all the solemn, perhaps tragic,
presence of inexorable Nature--in such an environment were sharpened and
whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour, the spirit of real democracy
bred of competitive effort, and the hatred for pretence, sham, and
imposture.

It was not, I think, until Mark Twain went to live in Connecticut and,
as he expressed it, became a scribbler of books, and an immovable
fixture among the other rocks of New England, that he developed complete
confidence in himself and his powers. That passion for successful
self-expression, which Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler has defined as the main
ambition of the American, became the dominant motive of Mark Twain's
life. Of his experience as a steamboat pilot, Mark Twain has said that
in that brief, sharp schooling he got personally and familiarly
acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are
to be found in fiction, biography or history. In the West he had still
further enriched his mind with an inexhaustible store of first-hand
knowledge of human nature. In rotation he had been tramping jour
printer, river pilot, private secretary, miner, reporter, lecturer.
He now turns to literature in real earnest, and begins to display that
vast store of knowledge derived from actual contact with the infinitely
diversified realities of American life. Mark Twain takes on more and
more of the characteristics of the Yankee--those characteristics which
constitute the basis of his success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the
practical efficiency, the shrewdness and the hard common--sense. It is
the last phase in the formation of the national type.

It was, I venture to say, in some such way as this that Mark Twain came