Chesterton has chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two
American geniuses who have lived outside their own country, absorbed the
art ideals of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost
touch with the youthful spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the
ongoing rush and progress of America. It is worthy of remark that Mr.
James has always maintained that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only
very primitive persons; and Whistler, with his acid _diablerie_, was
wholly alien in spirit to the boisterous humour of Mark Twain. That
other brilliant but incoherent interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles
Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America's pathetic
senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case
in the vehement assertion that America's greatest national interpreter
is--Mark Twain!

To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the
humorist--with his shrieking Philistinism, his dominant sense for the
colossally incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering,
ludicrous contrast. To the reflective, Mark Twain subsumed within
himself a "certain surcharge and overplus of power, a buoyancy, and a
sense of conquest" which typified the youth of America. It is memorable
that he breathed in his youth the bracing air of the prairie, shared the
collective ardour of the Argonauts, felt the rising thrill of Western
adventure, and expressed the crude and manly energy of navigation,
exploration, and the daring hazard for new fortune. To those who knew
him in personal intimacy, the quality that was outstanding, omnipresent
and eternally ineradicable from his nature was--paradoxical as it may
sound--not humour, not wit, not irony, not a thousand other terms that
might be associated with his name, but--the spirit of eternal youth. It
is comprehensively significant and conclusive that, to the day of her
death, Mrs. Clemens never called her husband anything but the bright