The ideas in it are very simple, and reduced to elementals, two in number. Now, however, the book is issued publicly by the Harpers, though without the preface in which Mark explained his reasons for so long withholding it. Even a pirated English edition brings a high premium. But it was never given to the public, and copies of the limited edition bring $40 or $50 at book auctions to-day. The latter, in fact, was put into type during Mark's lifetime and privately printed in a very limited edition. Two of these books, The Mysterious Stranger and What Is Man? are now published, and more may be expected to follow at intervals. But in the long run he wanted to set himself straight. He hesitated, a lazy man, to disturb his remaining days with combat and acrimony. It was really comfort he wanted, not fame. But beneath that timorousness there was an intellectual honesty that forced him to set down the truth. We know, by his own confession, why he hesitated to print them while he lived he knew that fame was sweet and he feared that they might blast it. Then he laid the manuscripts away, safe in the knowledge that they would not see the light until he was under six feet of earth. Those books were written carefully and deliberately Mark wrote them at the height of his fame he put into them, without concealment, the fundamental ideas of his personal philosophy the ideas which colored his whole view of the world. Frank Crane in cap and bells, laboriously devoted to the obvious and the uplifting, he was a destructive satirist of the utmost pungency and relentlessness, and the most bitter critic of American platitude and delusion, whether social, political or religious, that ever lived.īit by bit, as his posthumous books appear, the true man emerges, and it needs but half an eye to see how little he resembles the Mark of national legend. Instead of being a mere entertainer of the mob, he was in fact a literary artist of the very highest skill and sophistication, and, in all save his superficial aspect, quite unintelligible to Dr. The truth is that Mark was almost exactly the reverse. For Mark Twain dead is beginning to show far different and more brilliant colors than those he seemed to wear during life, and the one thing no sane critic would say of him to-day is that he was the harmless fireside jester, the mellow chautauquan, the amiable old grandpa of letters that he was once so widely thought to be. But it was, in a sense, typical of the general view at that time, and so it deserves to be remembered for the fatuous inaccuracy of the judgment in it. The usual polite flubdub and not to be exposed, perhaps, to critical analysis. He never wrote a line that a father could not read to a daughter." Taft, "gave real intellectual enjoyment to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come. Taft, then President of the United States. When Mark Twain died, in 1910, one of the magnificos who paid public tribute to him was William H.
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