No American author has to-day at his command a style more nervous, more varied, more flexible, or more direct than Mark Twain’s.  His colloquial ease should not hide from us his mastery of all the devices of rhetoric.  He may seem to disobey the letter of the law sometimes, but he is always obedient to the spirit.  He never speaks unless he has something to say; and then he says it tersely, sharply, with a freshness of epithet and an individuality of phrase always accurate, however unacademic.  His vocabulary is enormous, and it is deficient only in the dead words; his language is alive always, and actually tingling with vitality.  He rejoices in the daring noun and in the audacious adjective.  His instinct for the exact word is not always assured, and now and again he has failed to exercise it; but we do not find in his prose the flatting and sharping he censured in Fenimore Cooper’s.  His style has none of the cold perfection of an antique statue; it is too modern and too American for that, and too completely the expression of the man himself, sincere and straightforward.  It is not free from slang, altho this is far less frequent than one might expect; but it does its work swiftly and cleanly.  And it is capable of immense variety.  Consider the tale of the Blue Jay in ‘A Tramp Abroad,’ wherein the humor is sustained by unstated pathos; what could be better told than this, with every word the right word and in the right place?  And take Huck Finn’s description of the storm when he was alone on the island, which is in dialect, which will not parse, which bristles with double negatives, but which none the less is one of the finest passages of descriptive prose in all American literature.

V

After all, it is as a humorist pure and simple that Mark Twain is best known and best beloved.  In the preceding pages I have tried to point out the several ways in which he transcends humor, as the word is commonly restricted, and to show that he is no mere fun-maker.  But he is a fun-maker beyond all question, and he has made millions laugh as no other man of our century has done.  The laughter he has aroused is wholesome and self-respecting; it clears the atmosphere.  For this we cannot but be grateful.  As Lowell said, “let us not be ashamed to confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take the profoundest satisfaction in the farce.  It is a mark of sanity.”  There is no laughter in Don Quixote, the noble enthusiast whose wits are unsettled; and there is little on the lips of Alceste, the misanthrope of Moliere; but for both of them life would have been easier had they known how to laugh.  Cervantes himself, and Moliere also, found relief in laughter for their melancholy; and it was the sense of humor which kept them tolerantly interested in the spectacle of humanity, altho life had prest hardly on them both.  On Mark Twain also life has left its scars; but he has bound up his wounds and battled forward with a stout heart, as Cervantes did, and Moliere.  It was Moliere who declared that it was a strange business to undertake to make people laugh; but even now, after two centuries, when the best of Moliere’s plays are acted, mirth breaks out again and laughter overflows.