In Mark Twain we have "the national spirit as seen with our own eyes,"
declared Mr. Howells; and, from more points of view than one, Mark Twain
seems to me to be the very embodiment of Americanism. Self-educated in
the hard school of life, he has gone on broadening his outlook as he has
grown older. Spending many years abroad, he has come to understand other
nationalities, without enfeebling his own native faith. Combining a
mastery of the commonplace with an imaginative faculty, he is a
practical idealist. No respecter of persons, he has a tender regard for
his fellowman. Irreverent toward all outworn superstitions, he has ever
revealed the deepest respect for all things truly worthy of reverence.
Unwilling to take pay in words, he is impatient always to get at the
root of the matter, to pierce to the center, to see the thing as it is.
He has a habit of standing upright, of thinking for himself, and of
hitting hard at whatsoever seems to him hateful and mean; but at the
core of him there is genuine gentleness and honest sympathy, brave
humanity and sweet kindliness. Perhaps it is boastful for us to think
that these characteristics which we see in Mark Twain are
characteristics also of the American people as a whole; but it is
pleasant to think so.

Mark Twain has the very marrow of Americanism. He is as intensely and as
typically American as Franklin or Emerson or Hawthorne. He has not a
little of the shrewd common-sense and the homely and unliterary
directness of Franklin. He is not without a share of the aspiration and
the elevation of Emerson; and he has a philosophy of his own as
optimistic as Emerson's. He possesses also somewhat of Hawthorne's
interest in ethical problems, with something of the same power of
getting at the heart of them; he, too, has written his parables and
apologs wherein the moral is obvious and unobtruded. He is