There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally completed.  This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated, marvelous cryptographic chapter headings:  Trumbull was the most learned man that ever lived in Hartford.  He was familiar with all literary and scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven languages.  It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book, the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader—­a purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.]

The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work did not lag.  The result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good reading.  Warner had the touch of romance, Clemens, the gift of creating, or at least of portraying, human realities.  Most of his characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life.  Besides the apotheosis of James Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain’s own personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his creations.  As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o’the-wisp and a bugbear, it became tangible property at last.  Only a year or two before Clemens had written to Orion: 

Oh, here!  I don’t want to be consulted at all about Tennessee.  I don’t want it even mentioned to me.  When I make a suggestion it is for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property.

But it came in good play now.  It is the important theme of the story.

Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale.  He knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly.  Senator Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, then notorious for attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough.  That winter in Washington had acquainted Clemens with the life there, its political intrigues, and the disrepute of Congress.  Warner was equally well qualified for his share of the undertaking, and the chief criticism that one may offer is the one stated by Clemens himself—­that the divisions of the tale remain divisions rather than unity.

As for the story itself—­the romance and tragedy of it—­the character of Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to forget.  Whether this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly done, the reader himself must judge.  Morally, the character is not justified.  Laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning.  There could be no poetic justice in her doom.  To drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind.  Laura is a sort of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky’s fate, whereas Laura’s doom is warranted only by the author’s whim.  As for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage, destroyed her future, taken away her life.