and homely virtues--an upright and honourable character, a good citizen,
a man tenacious of the sanctity of the domestic virtues. America has
produced finer and more exalted types--giants in intellectuality,
princes in refinement and delicacy of spirit, savants in culture,
classics in authorship. An American type combining culture
with picturesqueness, refinement with patriotism, suavity with
self-reliance, desire it as we may, still awaits the imprimatur
of international recognition. America has sufficient cause for
gratification in the memory of that quaint and sturdy figure so
conspicuously bearing the national stamp and superscription. Perhaps no
American has equalled Mark Twain in the quality of subsuming and
embodying in his own character so many elements of the national spirit
and genius. In letters, in life, Mark Twain is the American _par
excellence_.

Underneath those qualities which combined to produce in Mark Twain a
composite American type, lay something deeper still--that indefinable
_je ne sais quoi_ which procured him international fame. Humour alone
is utterly inadequate for achieving so momentous a result--though humour
ostensibly constituted the burden of the appeal. As a matter of fact,
vehemently as the professors may deny it, Mark Twain was an artist of
remarkable force and power. From the days when he came under the
tutelage of Mr. Howells, and humbly learned to prune away his stylistic
superfluities of the grosser sort, Mark Twain indubitably began to
subject himself to the discipline of stern self-criticism. While it is
true that he never learned to realize in full measure, to use Pater's
phrase, "the responsibility of the artist to his materials," he
assuredly disciplined himself to make the most, in his own way, of the
rude and volcanic power which he possessed. It is fortunate that Mark
Twain never subjected himself to the refinements of academic culture; a