The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a
lawless, untrammelled life. Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but
one remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of
argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature.
In the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic
and sanguinary. The refinements of art and civilization seemed
effeminate, artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously
at one another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of each other's
plans, and gloried in their defiance of both man and God. Deep in their
hearts they cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and
the afflicted, and generosity indescribable. And yet they prided
themselves upon their barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning
bred of their wild life and sharpened in the struggle for existence.
What, after all, is 'The Jumping Frog' but the elaborate narrative, in
native vernacular, of a shrewd practical joke? As Mark Twain first
heard it, this story was a solemn recital of an interesting incident in
the life of Angel's Camp. It was Mark Twain who "created" the story: he
endowed with the comic note of whimsicality that imaginative realization
of _une chose vue_, which went round the world. The humour of rustic
shrewdness in criticism of art, so elaborately exploited in 'The
Innocents Abroad', was displayed, perhaps invented, by Mark Twain in the
early journalistic days in San Francisco. In 'The Golden Era' an
excellent example is found in the following observations upon a
celebrated painting of Samson and Delilah, then on exhibition in San
Francisco:

"Now what is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at
the Bank Exchange? Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or
the muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it
the rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot? No,