mountain, he describes its crater as a "circular ditch"; some of the party light their cigars in the fissures; he descends, observing that the volcano is a poor affair when compared with Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands. He visits the Parthenon in the night; obviously, the memorable feature of the expedition was robbing the vineyards on the way back to the ship. The most famous picture galleries of Europe are hung with "celebrated rubbish"; the immemorial Mosque of St. Sophia is the "mustiest barn in heathendom"; the Sea of Galilee is nothing to Lake Tahoe. The Mississippi pilot, homely, naïve, arrogantly candid, refuses to sink his identity in the object contemplated - that, as Corporal Nym would have said, is the humor of it. He is the kind of travelling companion that makes you wonder why you went abroad. He turns the Old World into a laughingstock by shearing it of its storied humanity - simply because there is nothing in him to respond to the glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was Rome-simply because nothing is holier to him than a joke. He does not throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm; he laughs at art, history, and antiquity from the point of view of one who is ignorant of them and mightily well satisfied with his ignorance. And, unless I am very much mistaken, the "overwhelming majority" of his fellow-citizens—those who made the success of Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad have laughed with him, not at him. So, too, unquestionably, in the nearly parallel case of that bludgeoning burlesque, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court.

What endears a public man to us is what he has in common with us-not his occasional supereminences. It does not damage Franklin to say that he was not so graceful as Lord Chesterfield; nor Lincoln to say that he was not so handsome as Count D'Orsay; nor Mr. Roosevelt to say that one misses in his literary style I know not what that one finds in the style of Walter Savage Landor. Writing from Khartum, the hunter tells us that, in consequence of hard service in camp, his pigskin books were "stained with blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes." We have a mystical feeling that this is very appropriate

and beautiful that a good American's books ought to be stained with gun oil and ashes. "Fear grace - fear delicatesse," cries the author of Chants Democratic. It does not damage Mark Twain to say that there was not a drop of the aristocrat in his veins.

In politics he was an intelligent but unspeculative democrat, committed to the principles of the preamble to the Constitution, preserving a tang of Tom Paine's contempt for kings, and not without a suggestion of the republican insolence caricatured by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit. I do not think that he gave a square deal" either to Europe or to the Arthurian realm; but within his own territory he had a very genuine sense of the brotherhood of man. He was not, like some more exquisite men of letters, a democrat in his study and a snob in his drawingroom; he was of the people and for the people at all times. His tender regard for the social contract permeated his humor. It will be remembered that Pudd'nhead Wilson earned his nick-name and ruined his chances as a lawyer for twenty years by an incomprehensible remark about a howling dog. "I wish I owned half of that dog," said Wilson. "Why?" somebody asked. "Because I would kill my half." No one understood him the sensitive, symbolic democracy of the expression was too compact for their intelligence, and they fell into a delicious discussion of how one half could be killed without injury to the other half. That, to be sure, is also one of the problems of democracy; but Wilson's implications were, I believe, both simpler and deeper than that. In not molesting another man's dog he showed the American reverence for property. The American desire to be moderately well-to-do (Mr. Roosevelt's "neither rich nor poor") he indicated by desiring to own only half the dog. In saying that he would kill his half, he expressed his sacred and inalienable right to dispose of his own property as he chose, while at the same time he recognized his neighbor's sacred and inalienable right to let his half of the property howl. Indeed, I am not sure that he did not recognize that the dog itself had a certain property right in howling.

With almost every qualification for a successful political

career, Mark Twain could never have aspired to the Presidency, for he was not a regular attendant at church a shortcoming, by the way, which interfered seriously with Mr. Taft's campaign till his former pastor testified in the public prints that the candidate had once at a church social taken the part of a fairy. In religion, Twain appeared to be a mugwump, or, more classically speaking, an agnostic over whom had fallen the shadow of Robert Ingersoll of pious memory. The irreligion of that generation is touched with a raw, philistine rationalism, but is thoroughly honest. Like all Americans, the author of Tom Sawyer received his religious culture in the Sunday-school, but stumbled over the book of Genesis and kindred difficulties, and was "emancipated." The loss of faith which, in proper conditions, is a terrible bereavement, was to him a blessed relief; when the God of the Sunday-school and the camp meeting ceases to terrify, he ordinarily becomes a deadly bore. Having never known the magnificent poetry of faith, he never felt the magnificent melancholy of unbelief. His experience was typical, however, and his very unspirituality was social. In his examination of Christian Science, he admitted that every man is entitled to his own favorite brand of insanity, and insisted that he himself was as insane as anybody. That was enough to assure most of us that he was sound on "all essentials."

"Be good and you will be lonesome" is, I suppose, one of Mark Twain's most widely quoted utterances on moral topics. At first thought, one may wonder why this apparently Bohemian apothegm should have taken such hold upon the heart of a nation which above all things else adores virtue. But the difficulty disappears the instant one reflects that these seven words express as in a nutshell precisely the kind and temper of virtue that the nation adores. Like Wilson's observation on the dog, the saying is cryptic and requires explication. Twain tells us in his autobiography that when he was a boy his mother always allowed about thirty per cent on what he said for "embroidery' and so "struck the average." The saying means, as I take it, first of all, Don't lose your sense of humor as those do who become infatuated with their own particular hobbies in goodness.

Calculate to keep about in the middle of the road, but make allowance for all reasonable shades of difference in taste and opinion. Don't be too good or you will find yourself in a barren and uninfluential minority of one. In America, whatever is not social is not virtue. When he put his shoulder under the debts of his bankrupt publishing house, the author of the apothegm himself explained its meaning. Natively fond of strong language, careless of peccadilloes, tolerant of all human frailties though he was kin-making touches of nature his feet were "mortised and tenoned" in domestic rectitude and common morality.

"We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime the thin air stifles" I have forgotten who said it. We cannot flush always with the high ardor of the signers of the Declaration, nor remain on the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry continually, "O Beautiful! My country!" Yet, in the dull long interspaces between these sacred moments we need some one to remind us that we are a nation. For in the dead vast and middle of the years, insidious foes are stirring

anæmic refinements, cosmopolitan decadencies, the egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the cold sickening of the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant fraud and corruption. When our countrymen migrate because we have no kings or castles, we are thankful to any one who will tell us what we can count on. When they complain that our soil lacks the humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful even for the firing of a national joke heard round the world. And when Mark Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with prairie fire and western clay, and shows us that we are at one on all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the Republic shall suffer no harm.

214

TURNER'S "SLAVE SHIP" 1

JOHN RUSKIN

THE noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man, is that of the "Slave Ship," the chief Academy picture of the Exhibition of 1840. It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain-clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror,

1 From Modern Painters.