Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1906-01-24

samuel IL. Clemens is an unknown
writer. Mark Twain is read wher-
ever books are loved. He is more
American than any other author in
his life, in his subject-matter and in
his style. His life, more adventur-
Gus than old Ulysses, richer in turns
of fortune and the taste Of human eX-
perience, has grown from the lot Of
village boy in Missouri before the
war to peerage in the nobility Of
literature and a home in the heart of
the ideal Of his country. The Ameri-
can ideal is that the best and great
est things belong to every man alike,
and the American spirit incites every
man to seize upon his birthright at
whatever cost. Lincoln's career was
not more typical Of this ideal and
spirit than Mark Twain's. The diff
culties he overcame were not sterner,
nor did the great president meet fail
ure and success with q more serene
philosophy than the great humorist.
There are few foibles of mankind
which Mark Twain has not laughed
at. There are few reverend lies which
he has not ridiculed He has wept
over the grave Of Adam and made
fun of the German sentence; but no
body can find in all that he has said
or written one word on the side Of
persecution or injustice. Whatever he
has ridiculed deserved ridicule; what
ho
because it was manly, beautiful or
true. He has lived as he has written,
always sanely, simply and for the
better side against the worse. Mark
Twain has been a printer, steamboat
man, editor, miner, traveller, publish
er, lecturer and author Whether in
all or any Of these callings he made
money or not is Of no consequence.
In one Of them he lost money, a great
deal of it, and incurred debts which
he was not required by law to pay,
but he did pay them to the last cent.
Such things are mere trif1es. Men
ought to pay their debts, whether the
law compels it or not, and our won
dering admiration for one who does
SO simply shows how near the rest of
us come to being dishonest The i'm
pOrtant fact about Mark Twain's rich
experience Of life is that it has all
gone into his writings. And because
his life is typically American in spirit
and achievement, so therefore is his
subject-matter. No other Of our
writer's has so much Of the United
States in his books. Cooper has In
dams, Hawthorne has New England,
Howells has middle-class saints and
sinners, but Mark Twain has the
United States. with all it's humor, it's
greed, It's cynicism, its reckless trust
in luck and its saving idealism. His
style is shiftless and unprincipled. 1t
lOafs on dry goods boxes, fingers to
swap horses and sometimes drops into
the saloon; but it carries a gun and
kills always at the first shot. Faulty
by all rules and models, his style has,.
nevertheless, the supreme excellence
Of being alive. He Weaves no delicate
lacework of language; he shows no
subtle preciosity in choosing words
Current American literature makes
much Of those things, cultivating a
bloodless chimera which it calls
style to the neglect of substance
But true style is something deeper
than the choice of words; it is the
power to make words live, and Mark
Twain has it. We, his contemporaries,
probably do not appreciate how great
he is. No American living or dead
has such a hold on the reading world,
none has such chances as he in the
race for Immortality. His plots are
puerile, but so were Shakespeare's.
His language is faulty, but so is the
language of the Bible. In the worlds
literature his place is beside Cervantes
and Fielding.
Tn Co