wit and comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon
the upper strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is
perpetually standing in the light of the serious reformer. Tolstoy's
works are Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet
his literary fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the
magnificent futility of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal
mysticism of his unrealizable hopes.

If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal,
it is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour.
That eidolon of which Aldrich speaks--a compact of good humour, robust
sanity, and large-minded humanity--has diligently "gone about in near
and distant places," everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk
of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh. The
French have a way of speaking of an author's public as if it were a
select and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a
country like France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects,
there is some reason for the phraseology. In reality, the author
appeals to many different "publics" or classes of readers--in proportion
to the many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the
catholicity of his tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a
boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of
experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he
points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to
whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real
psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid
irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid
Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that
innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the
omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs