Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/419

 A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

manual of boy nature, and its sequel, Huckleberry Finn, which was published nine years later, was not only an advanced treatise in the same science, but a most moving study of the workings of the un tutored human soul, in boy and man. The Prince and the Pauper (1882), A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur s Court (1890), and Pudd nhead Wilson (first published serially in 1893-94), were all alive with a comprehensive and passionate sympathy to which their humor was quite subordinate, although Mark Twain never wrote, and probably never will write, a book that could be read without laughter. His humor is as irrepressible as Lincoln s, and like that, it bubbles out on the most solemn occasions; but still, again like Lincoln s, it has a way of seeming, in spite of the surface incongruity, to belong there. But it was in the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, whose anonymous serial publication in 1894-95 betrayed some critics of reputation into the absurdity of attributing it to other authors, notwithstanding the characteristic evidences of its paternity that obtruded themselves on every page, that Mark Twain became most distinctly a prophet of human ity. Here, at last, was a book with nothing ephem eral about it one that will reach the elemental human heart as well among the flying-machines of the next century as it does among the automobiles of to-day, or as it would have done among the stage coaches of a hundred years ago.

And side by side with this spiritual growth had come a growth in knowledge and in culture. The Mark Twain of The Innocents, keen-eyed, quick of

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