II

A humorist is often without honor in his own country.  Perhaps this is partly because humor is likely to be familiar, and familiarity breeds contempt.  Perhaps it is partly because (for some strange reason) we tend to despise those who make us laugh, while we respect those who make us weep—­forgetting that there are formulas for forcing tears quite as facile as the formulas for forcing smiles.  Whatever the reason, the fact is indisputable that the humorist must pay the penalty of his humor, he must run the risk of being tolerated as a mere fun-maker, not to be taken seriously, and not worthy of critical consideration.  This penalty has been paid by Mark Twain.  In many of the discussions of American literature he has been dismist as tho he were only a competitor of his predecessors, Artemus Ward and John Phoenix, instead of being, what he is really, a writer who is to be classed—­at whatever interval only time may decide—­rather with Cervantes and Moliere.

Like the heroines of the problem-plays of the modern theater, Mark Twain has had to live down his past.  His earlier writing gave but little promise of the enduring qualities obvious enough in his later works.  Noah Brooks has told us how he was advised if he wisht to “see genuine specimens of American humor, frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious,” to look up the sketches which the then almost unknown Mark Twain was printing in a Nevada newspaper.  The humor of Mark Twain is still American, still frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious; but it is riper now and richer, and it has taken unto itself other qualities existing only in germ in these firstlings of his muse.  The sketches in the ‘Jumping Frog’ and the letters which made up the ‘Innocents Abroad’ are “comic copy,” as the phrase is in newspaper offices—­comic copy not altogether unlike what John Phoenix had written and Artemus Ward,—­better indeed than the work of these newspaper humorists (for Mark Twain had it in him to develop as they did not), but not essentially dissimilar.

And in the eyes of many who do not think for themselves, Mark Twain was only the author of these genuine specimens of American humor.  For when the public has once made up its mind about any man’s work, it does not relish any attempt to force it to unmake this opinion and to remake it.  Like other juries, it does not like to be ordered to reconsider its verdict as contrary to the facts of the case.  It is always sluggish in beginning the necessary readjustment, and not only sluggish, but somewhat grudging.  Naturally it cannot help seeing the later works of a popular writer from the point of view it had to take to enjoy his earlier writings.  And thus the author of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ’Joan of Arc’ was forced to pay a high price for the early and abundant popularity of the ‘Innocents Abroad.’