Archibald Henderson

“ It must be recognised that the history of literature furnishes forth no great international figure, whose fame rests solely upon the basis of humour, however human, however sympathetic, however universal that humour may be. Behind that humour must lurk some deeper and more serious implication which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product. Genuine humour, as Landor has pointed out, requires a “sound and capacious mind, which is always a grave one.” There is always a breadth of philosophy, a depth of sadness, or a profundity of pathos in the very greatest humorists. ”

“ He mourned a little over the discovery that what a man mostly missed in heaven was company. But he rejoiced in the information vouchsafed by his friend the Captain—a valuable piece of information that leaves him, and all who are so fortunate as to hear it, the better for the knowledge—that happiness isn't a thing in itself, but only a contrast with something that isn't pleasant! This view of heaven, seen through the temperament of a humorist and a philosopher, is provocative and thought-compelling more than it is amusing or ludicrous. ”

“ I have always felt that, had it not been for this training in the great university of the Mississippi, Mark Twain might never have acquired that trained faculty for minute detail and descriptive elaboration without which his works, full of flaws as they are, might never have revealed the very real art which they betray. For the art of Mark Twain is the art of taking infinite pains—the art of exactitude, precision and detail. Humour per se is as ephemeral as the laugh—dying in the very moment of its birth. Art alone can give it enduring vitality. ”

“ Mark Twain enjoys the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his career. From the standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of Mark Twain from a journeyman printer to a great author, from a merry-andrew to a world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy navigator on the vast and uncharted seas of human experience, may be taken as symbolic of the romance of American life. ”

“ Upon her writers who have exhibited derivative genius—Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow—American criticism has lavished the most extravagant eulogiums. The three geniuses who have made permanent contributions to world-literature, who have either embodied in the completest degree the spirit of American democracy, or who have had the widest following of imitators and admirers in foreign countries, still await their final and just deserts at the hands of critical opinion in their own land. ”

“ It is for American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic, and to demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great artist. It would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain's appeal to posterity depends upon the dicta of literary criticism. It would be absurd to deny that upon America rests the task of demonstrating, to a world willing enough to be convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the supreme and imperishable glories of American literature. ”

“ Mark Twain was a great humorist—more genial than grim, more good-humoured than ironic, more given to imaginative exaggeration than to intellectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than to melancholy. He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and picaresque romance. He was a remarkable observer and faithful reporter, never allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be “frightened by the venerableness of the institution” ”

“ The pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug soon went to the wall, exposed in the nakedness of his own impotency. Humour is a salutary aid in the struggle of the individual with the contrasts of life; indeed it may be said to be born of the perception of those contrasts. In a degree no whit inferior to the variegated river life, the life of the West furnished contrasts and incongruities innumerable—vaster perhaps, and more significant. There was the incessant contrast of civilization with barbarism, of the East with the West ”

“ My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people laugh. I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else—eager to betray them at the end with some monstrous absurdity or some extravagant anti-climax. One night, after a lecture in the early days, Tom Fitch, the 'silver-tongued orator of Nevada,' said to me: 'Clemens, your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of descriptive narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin—the unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. ”

“ Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world which must seem humorous even to the highest mind. Of these the Bible says: 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall hold them in derision.' But the mark of this higher humour is that it does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent ”

“ The influence of the West upon the character and genius of Mark Twain is momentous and unmistakable. Mark Twain found room for development and expansion in the primitive freedom of the West. It was here, I think, that there were bred in him that breezy democracy of sentiment and that hatred of sham and pretence which fill his writings from beginning to end. In the West, virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood—or fell—by force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled for fortune, for competence—or for existence. ”

“ Gilbert Chesterton once said that “American humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of the realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.” This partial and somewhat conventional foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the cumulative and “sky-breaking” humour of the early Mark Twain. ”

“ Their work never crossed frontiers because they failed to impart to their humour that universal element which appeals to all races of men. Realism is nothing more than close observation. But observation will never give you the inside of the thing. The life, the genius, the soul of a people are realized only through years of absorption.” Mr. Clemens asseverated that the only way to be a great American humorist was to be a great human humorist—to discover in Americans those permanent and universal traits common to all nationalities. ”

“ The New World is pitied for her failure to know without illusion the futility of the hurried pursuit of wealth, of the passion for extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of all the hostages youth in America eternally gives to old age. ”