Gradually
Mark Twain became a public character; he retrieved on the lecture
platform the loss of a fortune earned by his books; he enjoyed
his honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University. Every reader of
American periodicals came to recognize the photographs of that
thick shock of hair, those heavy eyebrows, the gallant drooping
little figure, the striking clothes, the inevitable cigar: all
these things seemed to go with the part of professional humorist,
to be like the caressing drawl of Mark's voice. The force of
advertisement could no further go. But at bottom he was far other
than a mere maker of boisterous jokes for people with frontier
preferences in humor. He was a passionate, chivalric lover of
things fair and good, although too honest to pretend to see
beauty and goodness where he could not personally detect
them--and
an equally passionate hater of evil. Read "The Man Who Corrupted
Hadleyburg" and "The Mysterious Stranger." In his last years,
torn by private sorrows, he turned as black a philosophical
pessimist as we have bred.
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