We are reminded of Rabelais's Gargantua entering Paris for his university course, on a mare as big as six elephants, the whisking of whose tail laid low a whole forest. The effectiveness of this quality of Mark Twain's imagination does not always depend upon external grandeurs and striking surprises. But he had also mental adventure, not subtly or complexly, yet widely, speculative. There was the same directness and openness here as in his regard of external things. He relished the autobiography of men who, like Benvenuto Cellini and Montaigne, frankly and boldly disclosed their most intimate dispositions and tempers, and he undertook one himself on so expansive a scheme that it could never have been completed, since the longer he lived the less were the chances of any conclusion of the ever-widening vista.
Some stories are self-limited and wind up themselves.
Mark sometimes told such stories, but generally we note no conscious organisation of the material he has in hand, no literary method. Whatever art of expression was developed in his maturer work was an art which Nature made, not the result of syntatic discipline. He could not have written a play depending wholly upon invention, meeting the requirements of the art, to save his life, but he would have contributed to one made by an expert playwright out of his material just those features which would be indispensable to a great popular success. The requirement of literary and of the specially dramatic art, as generally understood, because of the concentration demanded, imposed a constraint he could not tolerate. In his early career he drove hard and with Icarian boldness.