V

After all, it is as a humorist pure and simple that Mark Twain is best
known and best beloved. In the preceding pages I have tried to point out
the several ways in which he transcends humor, as the word is commonly
restricted, and to show that he is no mere fun-maker. But he is a
fun-maker beyond all question, and he has made millions laugh as no
other man of our century has done. The laughter he has aroused is
wholesome and self-respecting; it clears the atmosphere. For this we
cannot but be grateful. As Lowell said, "let us not be ashamed to
confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take the profoundest
satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity." There is no laughter
in Don Quixote, the noble enthusiast whose wits are unsettled; and there
is little on the lips of _Alceste_, the misanthrope of Molière; but for
both of them life would have been easier had they known how to laugh.
Cervantes himself, and Molière also, found relief in laughter for their
melancholy; and it was the sense of humor which kept them tolerantly
interested in the spectacle of humanity, altho life had prest hardly on
them both. On Mark Twain also life has left its scars; but he has bound
up his wounds and battled forward with a stout heart, as Cervantes did,
and Molière. It was Molière who declared that it was a strange business
to undertake to make people laugh; but even now, after two centuries,
when the best of Molière's plays are acted, mirth breaks out again and
laughter overflows.

It would be doing Mark Twain a disservice to compare him to Molière, the
greatest comic dramatist of all time; and yet there is more than one
point of similarity. Just as Mark Twain began by writing comic copy
which contained no prophesy of a masterpiece like 'Huckleberry Finn,' so
Molière was at first the author only of semi-acrobatic farces on the