comprehensive international reputations, have succeeded in preserving
the early vigour and telling directness acquired in journalistic
apprenticeship. It was by the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his
journalese that Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start. That
trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened
verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the
new journalism. "The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which
are 'not for an age, but for all time,'" says Bernard Shaw, "has his
reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes
trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare
peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire
hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a
Norwegian parish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as
if she were a lady living in the next street to him, are still alive and
at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of
academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and
art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar
obsession with the ephemeral." Mark Twain began his career by studying
the people and period he knew in relation to his own life. Jamestown,
Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic,
uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life
and live again in the pages of his books. Colonel Sellers, in the main
correct but "stretched a little" here and there; Tom Sawyer, the
"magerful" hero of boyhood; the shrewd and kindly Aunt Polly, drawn from
his own mother; Huck Finn, with the tender conscience and the gentle
heart--these and many another were drawn from the very life. In writing
of his time _a propos_ of himself, Mark Twain succeeded in telling the
truth about humanity in general and for any time.

In the main--though there are noteworthy exceptions--Mark Twain's works