MARCH 1920
MARK TWAIN'S HUMOUR
EVERY one who is familiar with Mark Twain's life will recall how reluctant he was to adopt the humorist's career and how, to the end of his days, he was in revolt against a role which, as he vaguely felt, had been thrust upon him: that he considered it necessary to publish his Joan of Arc anonymously is only one of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark Twain was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other than artistic self-expression, and it was in consequence of pursuing it, we divine, that he was arrested in his moral and aesthetic development. He adopted this career, however, because his humour was the only writing he did in Nevada that found an appreciative audience, and the immediate result of his decision was that he obtained from the American public the prodigious and permanent approval his own craving for success and prestige had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts a discussion of Mark Twain's humour will have to explain. We must see what that humour was, and what produced it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and at the same time achieved such ample material rewards.
It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's humour, of which we have evidences during the whole of his adolescence, came to the front; and it is a notable fact that almost every man of a literary tendency who was brought into contact with those pioneer conditions became a humorist. The "funny man" was one of the outstanding pioneer types; he was, indeed, virtually the sole representative of the republic of letters in the old West. Artemus Ward,
