but cumulative and extensive. Each scene is a unit and must appear as
such. Andrew Lang not inaptly catches the note of Mark Twain's earlier
manner, when he speaks of his "almost Mephistophelean coolness, an
unwearying search after the comic sides of serious subjects, after the
mean possibilities of the sublime--these with a native sense of
incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration."

Mark Twain began his career as a wag; he rejoiced in being a fun-maker.
He discarded the weird spellings and crude punning of his American
forerunners; his object was not play upon words, but play upon ideas.
He offered his public, as Frank R. Stockton pointed out, the pure ore of
fun. "If he puts his private mark on it, it will pass current; it does
not require the mint stamp of the schools of humour. He is never
afraid of being laughed at." Indeed, that is a large part of his
stock-in-trade; for throughout his entire career, nothing seemed to give
him so much pleasure--though it is one of the lowest forms of humour--as
making fun of himself. In describing two monkeys that got into his room
at Delhi, he said that when he awoke, one of them was before the glass
brushing his hair, and the other one had his notebook, and was reading a
page of humorous notes and crying. He didn't mind the one with the
hair-brush; but the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart. He
never forgave that monkey. His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of
Adam--only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric
indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who "never bored,
but he struck water"--is an admirable example of the mechanical fooling
of self-ridicule.

In his penetrating study, 'Mark Twain a Century Hence', published at the
time of Mr. Clemens' death, Professor H. T. Peck makes this observation:
"We must judge Mark Twain as a humorist by the very best of all he wrote