Mark Twain was a born story-teller; he was a born actor; he was not affrighted by the idea of facing an audience; he was fond of the theater; he lived in a time when the drama was regaining its proud position in our literature and when men of letters who had begun as novelists were turning dramatists. Why is it that he did not leave us even one play worthy to be set by the side of the ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’? Why is it that the only piece of his which was successful on the stage, is a poor thing, not wholly his own? Why is it that he did not persevere in playwriting as did his fellow humorists, George Bernard Shaw and George Ade, and his fellow story-tellers, Barrie and Tarkington? These are questions which must have occurred to not a few of his admirers; and they are questions to which it is not easy to find an immediate answer. Yet there must be an explanation of some sort for this puzzling fact; and there may be profit in trying to discover it. Even if the answer shall prove to be incomplete and unsatisfactory, the inquiry is worth while for its own sake. II That Mark Twain was a born story-teller needs no argument; and that he was a born actor was equally evident not only to his few intimates but to all the many who heard him talk on his feet. If any witness must be called, the best would be Howells, his friend for forty years; and Howells’s testimony is emphatic and decisive. He tells us Mark held that an actor doubled the value of the author’s words; and he was a great actor as well as a great author. He was a most consummate actor, with this difference from other actors, that he was the first to know the thoughts and invent the fancies to which his voice and action gave the color of life. Representation is the art of other actors; his art was creative as well as representative. This quotation is from Howells’s introduction to the collection of Mark’s speeches; and I take another from ‘My Mark Twain’: He was the most consummate public performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor he probably would not have been on the stage.... When he read his manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary, recognition of its dramatic qualities.... He was realistic, but he was essentially histrionic; and rightly so. What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine, and we ought to use every art to that end.