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Mark Twain by Archibald Henderson
page 115 of 140 (82%)

Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence. He was a master of
the art of moving, touching, swaying an audience. At times, his insight
into the mysterious springs of humour, of passion, and of pathos seemed
almost like divination. All these qualities appeared in full flower in
the written expression of his art. It would be doing a disservice to
his memory to deny that his style did not possess literary distinction
or elegance. At times his judgment was at fault; his constitutional
humour came near playing havoc with his artistic sense. Not seldom he
was long--winded and laborious in his striving after comic effect. To
offset these manifest lapses and defects there are the many fine
qualities--descriptive passages aglow with serene and cloud less beauty,
dramatic scenes depicted with virile and rugged eloquence, pathetic
incidents touched with gentle and caressing tenderness.

Style bears translation ill; in fact, translation is not infrequently
impossible. But Mr. Clemens once pointed out to me that humour has
nothing to do with style. Mark Twain's humour--for humour is his
prevalent mood--has international range since, constructed out of a
deep comprehension of human nature and a profound sympathy for human
relationship and human failing, it successfully surmounts the
difficulties of translation into alien tongues.

Mark Twain became a great international figure, not because he was an
American, paradoxical and unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he
was America's greatest cosmopolitan. He was a true cosmopolitan in the
Higginsonian sense, in that, unlike Mr. Henry James, he was "at home
even in his own country." He was a true cosmopolitan in the Tolstoyan
sense; for his was "art transmitting the simplest feelings of common
life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world
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