Arizona republican., 1921-11-30
Mark Twain


 This is the birthday of Mark Twain. He has been dead eleven but there is perhaps other American writer who is so likely to live forever. Even though the English language should perish Mark Twain would survive in a dozen other languages.
 Humorists usually short lived, and Mark Twain humorst. But humorists usually write for period and they pass with the period. There have been few notable exceptions among whom Dickens. Though his characters those of past and through the customs he carcatured gone. he went below the surface and described human ture that never changes So he philosopher well a humorist. Mark Twain was phloso- pher and humorist.
 Neither spread sunshine before us constantly They often led into deep shadows. There is noth ing pathetic than Twains description of the tragedy of his brothers death in Life the Mis- sssippi" On the next page the sunshine bursts out again We have only other such descrip- ton by writer of the death of loved and that was William Allen Whites recent story of the death of his daughter in a horseback accident
 This peculiarity of Twain is observed by ". D. Howells:
 "so ar know Mir. Clemens is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we all use thinking, and to set down the thing that into his mind without fear favor of the thing that Lefore the thing that may be about to follow"
 
 ently spontaneous artlessness and Professor Mat taews cautions His colloqual should hide from his mastery of all the devices of rhetoric"
 In the early part of MT. Clemens there were stodgy souls who in him nothing but the buffoon, there today stodgy souls who yearn only to heaviness and gloom. But they estopped from criticism. by the judgments which have been given in Mark Twain's favor by the highest courts of letters.
 a,T,. of American Literature book which has been hailed great history of American literature and which stands for all that is finest in American criti- cism Mark Twain is given the place of honor. It describes the permanent place which the great hu- morist has made for himself not only in the hearts of the people but in the estimation of most crit- cal and scholarly of America.
 It is more than a coincidence that the same liter ary group of which Towels was member. that first recognized the genius of Mark Twain, little later rescued James Whitcomb Riley from the bowling mob of the small "high brow worshippers of Brown ing. and placed him upon pedestal in Fremont Temple.
 -w~sn's first academic recognition came from Yale university which made him a master arts in 1888 of letters in 1901 But he attained his browning academic glory in 1907 when the Univers- ity of Oxford called him the sea, robed in scarlet and made him doctor of literature.
 The Cambridge History says of him:
 .He is fulfilled promise of American life He proves the the land and the society in which he was born and fostered. incarnates the spirit of an epoch of American history when the nation territoriay and spiritually enlarged entered Justify upon new In the retrospect he looms for us with whitman and Lincoln recognizabiy his coun- trymen out of the shadows of the Civil War, un- rnistakabIe native son of eager. westward nov ing people-uncouventional self-reliant, mirthful, profane realistic cynical boiserous, popular tender