nickname--"Youth." Mark Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller
of tales, pungent as stylist. But he has achieved another sort of
eminence that is peculiarly gratifying to Americans. "They distinguish
in his writings," says an acute French critic, "exalted and sublimated
by his genius, their national qualities of youth and of gaiety, of force
and of faith; they love his philosophy, at once practical and high
--minded. They are fond of his simple style, animated with verve and
spice, thanks to which his work is accessible to every class of readers.
They think he describes his contemporaries with such an art of
distinguishing their essential traits, that he manages to evoke, to
create even, characters and types of eternal verity. They profess for
Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration that we have in France
for Balzac."

Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that humour is a subject which
has never had much interest for him, it is nothing more than a
commonplace to say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist only,
that the world seems to persist in regarding him. The philosophy of his
early life was what George Meredith has aptly termed the "philosophy of
the Broad Grin." Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once said that "American
humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the French, nor sharp and
sensible and full of the realities of life like the Scotch, is simply
the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and
mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending
it to the end of the world." This partial and somewhat conventional
foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the
cumulative and "sky-breaking" humour of the early Mark Twain. Then no
exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm too unreal, no climax
too extreme.