The age-herald., 1902-03-02
MARK TWAIN
 THE GREATEST
 LITERARY LIGHT
ONLY MAN WHO EVER LAUGHED IN THE cATAcoMBS OF ROME, AND WHEN KIPLlNo VISITED HIM HE WANTED HIS coRNcoR PIPE AS A RELIC.

New York, March 1.-(special)-Mark Twain is the greatest distinctly Amer ican literary light our continent has produced. And we are always surprised perhaps to hear that his books sell as we'll in Great Britian as in the United States It was an Englishman though who pointed out that Mark Twain was the first man to laugh in the catacombs of Rome. And when Kipling visited him. he went away wishing he might steal Mark Twain's corn-corb pipe as relic
 This winter he Is living at Riverdale on the Hudson, at the 5upper end of New York City. It is a convenient, rest full spot after his campaign last fall in favor of what he deemed to be cause of good municipal government-an under taking in which he was only voluntary private, having personally much to risk and nothing to gain. In this he rose to the lofty heights of character that are with in him, as he did when he lost his for tune. Out in the active world of slings and arrows, how amply he has shown himself to be the most conspicuously ChardCtertul man among ouI ihSi OA iSb7 ters! He has not only written of noble deeds but done them-a wholly different and less comfortable matter
 This immense, rouslng sense or honor, of Justice, in him-as immense as Is his genius for laughter-was doubtless what inspired in him that serious, reverent. al- most religious volume on Joan Of Arc For is she not precisely the most wrong ed maiden known to history? Unfortun- ately the book was destined to be mis- comprehended by the general public. They naturally tried to see where the fun was at last coming in about Joan al the hands of the one who had long since taught them to have no reverence Tor the equator, and to cross parallel or latl- tude without even pretending to tip their hats.
 He Is sixty-seven, yet the stirring sourc- es and resources of his humor, like those of his character, are unimpaired, and he is, unless all signs fail, stored full for a whole generation still of mirth and or good, while continuing to look grim, si- lent, solitary, as if even amusement were a mighty sullen thing His bushy hair IS white now; his conspicuous eyebrows are grizzly, with their valiant waving up at the ends like loans oriflambs; his large gnarly mustache Is griseous, too.
 His face makes one think of the fierce sharpened expression on the face of that fighting Gaul who tackled Caesar and was named Vercingetorix But how ready are still the humorists penetrating gray glance his firm chin, to yield at any sec ond into clustering, uproarious merri- ment! When much loud laughter Is heard issuing from an editors room in New York, the office force are pretty sure 1t is Mark Twain who is inside stirring up the dust and dry bones and poling around the megatheriums and other ancient l let | hind glass cases in newspaper sanctums. l The latest story going the rounds about l him in these journalistic haunts in Man l haitian is the following: He received one | day from his publisher the proofs of l tale which he considered as amusing as l anything he had ever written. On reading 1 the proofs through he was amazed to find that the fun had been carefully ta- l ken out. He returned them and congratu- lated the compositor upon having con sumed "only one week in making sense of story which he himself had required two weeks to make nonsense of
 Mark Twain Is still wholly and solely American. Longfellow, Poe, Hawthorne and the others were of cod->e more or less products of foreign ideals, traditions He on the contrary is a true son of our fathers who chewed the juicy plug and swore, whether they ran a factory in New England or a plantation in the south. True, too, to our old-time Cavalier and Puritan, Mark Twain, in genera tion when our literary scholars are study ing Dante. Shakespeare. Balzac, has chiefly occupied himself about the Bible, If his writings are any evidence.
 And he is, still today more than Ameri- can. He remains a genius of the west and south-in fact, southwesterner. His real home is yet the Mississippi country; and most of his books continue to be autobiographic records of his experiences in rubbing up in a raw frontier way against the older civilizations of our own east and of Europe His ose-jointed, slack-twisted attitudes before ancient shrines. his irreverent unconventionalties born of sound and everyday good sense in spots hallowed of mighty superstitions will for generations produce immense shocks of surprise and hilarity.
 With all his apparently sloven and banging-away sort of style, he Is a se- were and conscientious student of En- glish in his writing-a task at which he ordinarily works daily from about eleven to five, as formerly. We can always be sure he has a constant, searching regard for the best phrase that Is pat to his theme, and never a word too much. This Is one reason why The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn deserves to be called the greatest American epic. What pity
 
 of our public libraries! It is an heroic so virile and haunting. Can we ever forget for insance Huck's description of his fa- ther's attack of delirium tremens,- "tramp-tramp-tramp that's the dead" so terribly grand and fascinating like a masterpiece of crime?
 It Is to be regretted also that in the na- ture of things Mark Twain is generally too masculine to be much read by wo- men. Perhaps another explanation of this springs from his playful desire to banish those who try to find a moral in his twen- ty books. But he has certainly added one 1 feature to literary style which women can | fully enough enjoy. It is the long, stretch | ed-out. swinging, dangling at-the-ends | kind of sentence. like the following:
 "One was woman in a slim black l dress, belted small under the arm pits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle | of the sleeves, and q large black scnon-