In letters, in life, Mark Twain is the American _par excellence_. Underneath those qualities which combined to produce in Mark Twain a composite American type, lay something deeper still--that indefinable _je ne sais quoi_ which procured him international fame. Humour alone is utterly inadequate for achieving so momentous a result--though humour ostensibly constituted the burden of the appeal. As a matter of fact, vehemently as the professors may deny it, Mark Twain was an artist of remarkable force and power. From the days when he came under the tutelage of Mr. Howells, and humbly learned to prune away his stylistic superfluities of the grosser sort, Mark Twain indubitably began to subject himself to the discipline of stern self-criticism. While it is true that he never learned to realize in full measure, to use Pater's phrase, “the responsibility of the artist to his materials,” he assuredly disciplined himself to make the most, in his own way, of the rude and volcanic power which he possessed. It is fortunate that Mark Twain never subjected himself to the refinements of academic culture; a Harvard might well have spoiled a great author. For Mark Twain had a memorable tale to tell of rude, primitive men and barbaric, remote scenes and circumstances; of truant and resourceful boyhood exercising all its cunning in circumventing circumstance and mastering a calling. And he had that tale to tell in the unlettered, yet vastly expressive, phraseology of the actors in those wild events. The secret of his style is directness of thought, a sort of shattering clarity of utterance, and a mastery of vital, vigorous, audacious individual expression. He had a remarkable feeling for words and their uses; and his language is the unspoiled, expressive language of the people. At times he is primitive and coarse; but it is a Falstaffian note, the mark of universality rather than of limitation. His art was, in Tolstoy's phrase, “the art of a people--universal art”; and his style was rich in the locutions of the common people, rich and racy of the soil. A signal merit of his style is its admirable adaptation to the theme. The personages of his novels always speak “in character”--with perfect reproduction, not only of their natural speech, but also of their natural thoughts. Though Mr. Henry James may have said that one must be a very rudimentary person to enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue in a rudimentary style in treatment of rudimentary or,--as I should prefer to phrase it, --fundamental things. Mr. James, I feel sure, could never have put into the mouth of a “rudimentary” person like Huck, so vivid and graphic a description of a storm with its perfect reproduction of the impression caught by the “rudimentary” mind. “Writers of fiction,” says Sir Walter Besant in speaking of this book, “will understand the difficulty of getting inside the brain of that boy, seeing things as he saw them,