It would be doing Mark Twain a disservice to compare him to Moliere, the greatest comic dramatist of all time; and yet there is more than one point of similarity.  Just as Mark Twain began by writing comic copy which contained no prophesy of a masterpiece like ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ so Moliere was at first the author only of semi-acrobatic farces on the Italian model in no wise presaging ‘Tartuffe’ and the ‘Misanthrope.’  Just as Moliere succeeded first of all in pleasing the broad public that likes robust fun, and then slowly and step by step developed into a dramatist who set on the stage enduring figures plucked out of the abounding life about him, so also has Mark Twain grown, ascending from the ‘Jumping Frog’ to ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ as comic as its elder brother and as laughter-provoking, but charged also with meaning and with philosophy.  And like Moliere again, Mark Twain has kept solid hold of the material world; his doctrine is not of the earth earthy, but it is never sublimated into sentimentality.  He sympathizes with the spiritual side of humanity, while never ignoring the sensual.  Like Moliere, Mark Twain takes his stand on common-sense and thinks scorn of affectation of every sort.  He understands sinners and strugglers and weaklings; and he is not harsh with them, reserving his scorching hatred for hypocrites and pretenders and frauds.

At how long an interval Mark Twain shall be rated after Moliere and Cervantes it is for the future to declare.  All that we can see clearly now is that it is with them that he is to be classed,—­with Moliere and Cervantes, with Chaucer and Fielding, humorists all of them, and all of them manly men.

     (1898.)

A NOTE ON MAUPASSANT

A student of the literature of our own time who has only recently completed his first half century of life cannot help feeling suddenly aged and almost antiquated when he awakes to the fact that he has been privileged to see the completed literary career of two such accomplished craftsmen as Robert Louis Stevenson and Guy de Maupassant.  In youth they were full of promise, and in maturity they were rich in performance; and all too soon the lives of both came to an end, when their powers were still growing, when their outlook on life was still broadening, and when they bid fair, both of them, to bring forth many another book riper and wiser than any they had already given us.

The points of contrast between the two men thus untimely taken away are as striking as the points of similarity.  Both were artists ardently in love with the technic of their craft, delighting in their own skill, and ever on the alert to find new occasion for the display of their mastery of the methods of fiction.  Stevenson was a Scotchman; and his pseudo-friend has told us that there was in him something of “the shorter catechist.”  Maupassant was a Norman, and he had never given a thought to the glorifying of