seriousness and genuine emotion in 'Life on the Mississippi', 'Tom
Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'. In the course of
his lifetime, Mark Twain evolved from a fun-maker into a masterly
humorist, from a sensational journalist into a literary artist. In
explanation of this, let us recall the steps in that evolution. In his
youth, this boy had no schooling worth speaking of; he lived in an
environment that promised only stagnation and decay. As the young boy,
barefooted and dirty, watched the steamboats pass and repass upon the
surface of that great inland deep, the Mississippi, he conceived the
ambition and the ideal of learning to know and to master that mysterious
water. His dream, in time, was realized; he not only became a pilot,
but--which is infinitely more significant--he changed from a callow,
indolent, unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a man, a
master of the river, with a knowledge which, in its accuracy and
minuteness, was, for its purpose, all-sufficient and complete.

I have always felt that, had it not been for this training in the great
university of the Mississippi, Mark Twain might never have acquired that
trained faculty for minute detail and descriptive elaboration without
which his works, full of flaws as they are, might never have revealed
the very real art which they betray. For the art of Mark Twain is the
art of taking infinite pains--the art of exactitude, precision and
detail. Humour per se is as ephemeral as the laugh--dying in the very
moment of its birth. Art alone can give it enduring vitality. Mark
Twain's native temperament, rich with humour and racy of the soil, drank
in the wonder of the river and unfolded through communication with all
its rude human devotees; the quick mind, the eager susceptibility,
developed and matured through rigorous education in particularity and
detail; and before his spirit the very beauties of Nature herself
disappeared in face of a consuming sense of the work of the world that