MARK TWAIN, DOCTOR OF LETTERS.

BY SAMUEL E. MOFFETT.

In Nevada and California, when Mark Twain was making a reputation as 66 the wild humorist of the Pacific Slope," this intimacy had already been carried to considerable lengths. "The Innocents Abroad," with whose publication his collegiate work may be said to have ended and his postgraduate work to have begun, affords a fair

ALONG with the splendid and touching welcome given to Mark Twain on his latest, and perhaps his last, voyage to England, a few captious voices were heard suggesting that it was perhaps a little beneath the dignity of Oxford to bestow her honors upon a mere fun-maker. It happened that Mr. Clemens had not needed to wait for Oxford to make him a doctor, measure of the extent of his literary educaYale had attended to that six years earlier, tion at that time. There are some considand her example had been followed by the erable gaps, notably on the side of art, but University of Missouri. But when the cita- there are allusions throughout which make del of academic conservatism in England it clear that "the wild humorist" was not opened its gates, the worshipers of the conventional in literature had to sit up and take notice.

the unlettered innocent he allowed his Fergusons to think him. From this time his cultural progress was rapid. He explored An honorary degree usually has little re- English literature, not only in its trodden lation with the special attainments of the highways, but in its half-blazed trail. His recipient. It means merely that he has done catholic taste ranged from the medieval something that has brought him into note. chroniclers to the modern novelists, but alHe may have been elected Governor of Mas- ways he sought to reach the heart of each sachusetts, or have broken the Arctic records, age through the writers who were nearest or have invented a dirigible balloon. But a to it. He loved the unconscious revelations doctorate of letters for Mark Twain is not of Pepys, and he steeped his mind in Shakemerely honorary, but in the strictest sense speare, the interpreter of every time. He earned. A doctor's degree acquired in course wrestled valorously with the writhing sinuimplies about four years' work in a prepara- osities of the German language, and if he tory school, four more in college, and two did not get the monster completely tamed or three years of postgraduate special study, he had it pretty fairly cowed. ten or eleven years' work in all. Mark the acquaintance of French, and to some exTwain has been engaged in literary special- tent of Italian, and those fields of Contiization for over forty years, with a number nental literature which he could not enter by of years of preliminary work before that. way of the original tongues he inspected His preparatory school was the country through translations. And all this time he printing office, and his college the city was steadily producing literature of his own, newspaper, from which he was graduated, literature that the Brahminical world of summa cum laude, forty years ago. At thir- the universities longer pretends teen he was breathing the scent of printers' ignore. ink. When he went East, at seventeen, "for to admire" the world, supporting himself by "subbing" on New York and Philadelphia papers, he spent his spare time in the public libraries. The library is the real university of literature. Some kinds of learning can be pumped into a student by a skilled instructor, but nobody can gain a knowledge and an appreciation of literature by listening to lectures, by cramming for examinations, or in any other way than by cultivating a prolonged and loving personal intimacy with books.

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At no time, not even when the exuberance of youth and the recklessness of mining-camp life were combining to give him the reputation of an untamed wag, was Mark Twain ever a mere joker. As he has lately said in his autobiography, his temperament has always been inwardly serious. As a boy, with his "Tom Sawyer" days hardly over, this seriousness cropped out in his family letters, full of staid reflections and carefully thoughtout plans of work. His humor seems to have been something apart from himself,— almost like the emanation of a second per