He was vouchsafed twenty years of public influence; he molded minds, shaped opinions, conditioned decisions, germinated ideals; and they were twenty years of personal misery and decrepitude. Dying, he perpetuated his name by the establishment of the School of Journalism at Columbia University. It can scarcely fail to be interesting to learn about such a man. Mr. Seitz, with the instinct and experience of the expert journalist, gives the information in the first chapter, which he entitles "Characteristics". He molds the clay, then animates it. As he hurls virtues into the receptive mass, he calls out loudly their names; as the limitations and defects steal in, he whispers or remains silent. Joseph Pulitzer was saturated with belief in liberty, equality, and opportunity; he was generous, indulgent, and just; but he was also vain, arrogant, domineering, verbose, bulimious, unjudicial, self sufficient, personally hypersensitive but insensitive to others' feelings; and he wore a mask that fell off on the slightest encounter. He had acquired a dexterity in regaining it which often. prevented adversaries from seeing that it had fallen. The sea of life for him was always turbulent. When he was on the crest of the wave, his speech and conduct were hypomanic; when in the trough, he was taciturn, unapproachable, uncommunicative, inert. He had a firm intellect and an infirm temper; firm energy and an infirm body; a keen æsthetic sense and a contempt for his fellow man because he would not make himself in Joseph Pulitzer's image. "I have no friends", said he to one of his secretaries. "And this was in a great measure true", adds his biographer. He has now, and he will have more in the future; Mr. Seitz's book will make hundreds for him, and the institutions he founded, thousands.

No American under thirty should fail to read the book; no one over fifty who can buy or borrow it will fail to read it.

When I read Mr. Mitchell's "Memoirs of an Editor" every page made firmer the conviction that I was companioning a great mind and a kindly heart. I recalled something that Mark Twain said of Anson Burlingame: "His outlook upon the world and its affairs was as wide as the horizon, and his speech was of a dignity and eloquence proper to it. It dealt in no commonplaces, for he had no commonplace thoughts. He was a kindly man, and most lovable. He wrought for justice and humanity. All his ways were clean; all his motives were high and fine." That is Edward P. Mitchell if I may estimate him from his autobiography. If he has any fault, it is that he is too affable. He is a tiny bit too polite. There have been proprietors of the New York "Sun" within the memory of man who did not have all the virtues, but no one would suspect it from Mr. Mitchell's book. The "Sun" that he writes about most entertainingly and instructively is the "Sun" for which Charles A. Dana got all the credit. Mr. Mitchell does not hint that the credit was unjustly allotted, but no one can read the chapters "How I Went to the Sun" and "The Newspaperman's Newspaper" without being convinced that it was. The "Sun" could not have been what it was in the days of its ascendancy: a beacon light of newspaperdom, a stimulus and a joy to thousands, a scourge to scores, had it not been for Francis P. Church, Fitz Henry Warren, and William D. Bartlett.

But it is not the story of the “Sun” that Mr. Mitchell set out to write. His colleague Frank M. O'Brien did that, and anyone who believes he could

improve on it would be as daring or demented as the artist who believes he can improve on the "Mona Lisa". It reflected the spirit of the newspaper as that portrait reflected the soul of her who reminded Pater of Leda. However, Mr. Mitchell for a half century was devoted to the "Sun" and he could scarcely tell us of himself without telling its story too.

The volume is replete with personality studies of sages and cranks, philosophers and buffoons, experts and amateurs. Anyone interested in the spirit of the Puritan, the pioneer, the pathfinder; anyone who is intrigued by guessing at the truth, will be helped by reading the pages on Goldwin Smith. Anyone who would like to clarify his hazy notions of paranoia will be aided by perusal of the pages on George Francis Train; anyone who would make the acquaintance of a critic of letters. to whom his countrymen should have accorded the esteem that the French accorded Remy de Gourmont and the British George Saintsbury, should read what Mr. Mitchell says of Mayo W. Hazeltine; anyone who would learn of the forces that did more than anything else to deliver us as a nation from the spirit of parochialism should read his pages on Bunan-Varilla, the French engineer who made possible the Panama Canal.

It is a book for a rainy day and a starry night; a book to be read in Watchapey and Washington; to accompany one on Lake Louise or the Atlantic. The author's wish has come true. It was that here and there some kind friends unknown might find in his book something as interesting for them to read as it was for him to remember. If he had as much pleasure in writing it as they have had reading it, Edward P. Mitchell is a giant joy-creator.

William Dean Howells said that

Mark Twain was the Lincoln of literature. That is the apogee of praise. The more facets of his personality we see, the more richly does he seem to deserve it.

The immortality of Poe, Whitman, and Mark Twain would seem to be assured. Other names have been on the roster long enough to make it fairly certain that they also will be chosen, but Hawthorne's reputation wanes as Melville's enhances. Edwin Robinson a generation hence may have greater renown than Longfellow, and William James may be quoted when Emerson is forgotten.

We long for a great emotional writer as the Jews long for a Messiah, and the fact that Mark Twain was vouchsafed us encourages me to believe that our chances are greater than those of the Jews. We have never had a really great poet unless Whitman was one, and not even an approach to a satirist, and Mark Twain is our signal contribution to humor. He had also the capacity to convey it, and an unawareness of the supremacy of either gift. it all he was a philosopher, a man of culture, and fundamentally a poet.

With

His was the antithesis of the Messianic complex. He had a simple heart, and an intricate soul. None of his writings reveals it as does his autobiography. It is as unlike the customary autobiography as Mark Twain was unlike the average man. It does not begin with a tedious narrative of his forebears, and tiresome descriptions of their environment. Nor does it dwell upon his mental prodigiousness and moral sufficiency, followed by the enumeration of the obstacles he surmounted owing to his health, holiness, habit, and his unusual possession. It does not end with a verbal portrait provocative of memories of Dr. Munyon and his warnings.

It is the picture of a man, happily not a one-hundred-per-cent-American, who lived during the second most important epoch of this country's history, and who from early childhood was a close observer and from his youth a faithful transcriber of his observations. He began to write his autobiography in his teens and continued to write it nearly to the day of his death. "Roughing It", "Tom Sawyer", "Life on the Mississippi", "Innocents Abroad", are just as much description of his life as his autobiography.

Mark Twain's conception of how to write biography was to start at no particular time of life, to wander at will over his life, talk only about the thing which interested him for the moment, to drop it when its interest threatened to pale, and to turn his talk upon the new and more interesting things that intruded themselves into his mind meantime. He realized that it is not given to one man in a hundred millions to write a real autobiography. Cellini and Rousseau are the only ones we know who succeeded, and no one knows with what scrupulosity they described their acts and reproduced their words. Marie Bashkirtseff who wrote, "Not only do I put down what I think, but I have never for a single instant dreamed of dissimulating anything which I thought might show me in a ridiculous or disadvantageous light", she who dreamed of writing "everything, everything, everything in its exact, absolute and strict truth", despite her apparent frankness did not succeed in writing a wee portion of her thoughts, determinations, and acts.

It is not alone the picture of Samuel L. Clemens that one gets with the autobiography. There are little masterpieces of his brother Orion, of his daughter Susy, of his wife and of his mother, and there is one of General

Grant that should add to his fame as a generous, kindly, bighearted, forgiving

man.

Did anyone ever describe an amiable person so well as he describes his fellow schoolboy John Robards; and did anyone ever succeed better in conveying the handicap that excessive amiability puts upon its possessor? But the kohinoor of this tray of jewels is his description of his brother Orion. Mark Twain may not have succeeded in writing an account of his own life that was satisfactory, or that he considered revelatory, but the description and analysis of his brother's personality is a real contribution to psychology and biography. It is possibly the best description of a human chameleon in all literature. It may never become as familiar as that of Colonel Sellers, for Mark Twain did not put him au naturel in his fiction. Orion Clemens was fifty-fifty optimist and pessimist. Aside from the fundamental endowments of honesty, truthfulness, and sincerity, he was as unstable as water, as inconstant as a weather vane. He had an unquenchable thirst for praise. You could dash his spirits with a single word; you could raise them unto the sky with another. He was a Presbyterian one Sunday, a Methodist the next, and a Baptist when the fancy seized him. He was a Whig today, Democrat next week, and anything fresh he could find in the political market the week after. He invariably acted on impulse and never reflected. He woke with an eagerness about some matter or other every morning; it consumed him all day; it perished in the night; and he was on fire with a fresh interest next morning before he could get his clothes on. literally took no thought for the morrow, and it was inevitable that his illustrious brother should have to support him during his waning days. Psy

He

chologically, he was a splendid example of adult infantilism, manic-depressive temperament; and these possessions are nearly always associated with genius. The outline and the penumbra of them all are to be seen in Mark Twain. He was emotional, impulsive, explosive, avid of praise, subject to depression and exaltation, and unprovident. But he was lessonable and his eldest brother was not; experience taught him and environment influenced him, but they had no more effect upon Orion than headache has upon a drunkard. Above all, the possession that distinguished Samuel from Orion was humor. There is much inquiry these days whether man has ceased to progress, and biologists ask themselves if evolution is at a standstill. From the standpoint of intellectuality it has apparently ceased. We have had nothing the past two thousand years that compares with the eight hundred years of unfettered thought which the human race enjoyed while Greek philosophy was supreme. progress has ceased from the standpoint of emotionality is not so apparent, and this is the ray of hope that reaches us; for if it has not ceased, we can confidently look forward to a new code of ethics that will be livable, a new dispensation that will allow the sheep and the goats to pasture in the same field and sleep in the same shed, a new religion that will be reconcilable with science.

That

It transcends understanding that so much attention is given to the intellect and so little to the emotions. It is the latter, together with articulateness, that distinguish us from the beast, and approximate us to God. Humor, its production and appreciation, and love are the two most precious emotional possessions. Mark Twain had them, and none of his writings reveals them

more conspicuously than his autobiography. Orion's adventure at the house of Dr. Meredith, his own description of how he caught the measles, how he found the fifty dollar bill and the thoughts that it engendered, how he was temporarily cured of the habit of profanity by his wife, testify the former; and his accounts of Susy, of his wife, of Patrick, testify the latter. The burglarization of his house, the interview with President Cleveland's wife, the potato incident at the Kaiser's dinner party, the illness and death of his little boy, and the testimony of his family and intimates show how enslaved he was by revery.

One of the many things that make this autobiography so delightful is its revelation of how human Mark Twain was in his sympathies and antipathies, in his loves and hatreds. His words about Susy and Livy are as tender as anything I have read in a long time, and his account of Patrick makes one regret that the juggernaut Progress has eliminated the coachman. In the jargon of the day, Theodore Roosevelt "got his goat"; and the things he said about those who sought to crush him after they had brought about his financial ruin would not be considered printable in the Victorian era.

Mark Twain was in deadly earnest about many things he said "in fun". I choose to believe that when he wrote, "I intend this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method", he meant what he said. Whether he meant it or not it is true, and his country, proud of him, should be pleased with the account he left of himself to be published posthumously. It is ideal though it is not adequate. Those who would know what sort of

man Mark

Twain was may find out by reading it; those who wish to learn what he accomplished, how he did it and where, may learn from Mr. Paine's biography of him.

Mark Twain was a spiritual composite of Patrick, the coachman and gentleman, of Mr. Burlingame whose ways were all clean, whose motives were high and fine, of Dr. John Brown who immortalized his own name with "Rab and His Friends", and of his brother Orion, as they are described by himself. The best of Hermes was beaten up in the mixture. Joe Miller and Miguel Cervantes alternated as batter beaters.

Bliss Perry, whose reputation for sanity, soundness, and penetration as a literary critic has long been established, says that Mr. Firkins's study of William D. Howells is a great biography. I feel as a pariah should feel when I cannot share an authority's conviction and sentiment. But there is a discursiveness, a pretentiousness, a highfalutin tone about it that distracts me, and a papal atmosphere about it that I do not breathe easily or invigoratingly. Little annoying flaws of grammar and construction obtrude themselves while one reads it. "I will set down briefly the migrations and occupations of the family." "The style has a pre-existence in the psychology, is in essence the ingress of that psychology into language." "When an incident of travel reaches its probe into the sensitiveness of the author's profoundest and saddest convictions", etc.

Self forgetfulness, it has been said, is the beginning of happiness among books; and it is because I cannot get lost to myself that I have found less pleasure in Mr. Firkins's book than in any save Mr. Bok's. When I read "the curious strengthening of the position of the amphibious Balzac in

our day", I immediately begin searching for the justification of "curious" and why "amphibious"? Then there darts into my memory chamber a line from an "Essay in Criticism" by Robert Lynd that I read two or three years ago in "The London Mercury": “All criticism from one point of view is an impertinence." Stuart P. Sherman, reviewing Mr. Mencken's latest book, recently said he was determined to conclude his review with a gesture of amicality. I am equally determined to say that Mr. Firkins's book would not have received such universal praise from the reviewers had it not deserved it.

The relation of merit to praise is an interesting subject; and much could be written about it. What I shall say here of it is anent Mr. Bok's "Twice Thirty", which might have been entitled "The Annals of a Self Satisfied Man". I have never read a book more redolent of self appreciation. Mr. Bok is proud of his country, proud of his ancestors, proud of his fearlessness, and proud of his conduct. Noblesse oblige. He was once a stenographer to the urbane and cultured gentleman who edited "Scribner's Magazine" before the present incumbent. Mr. Burlingame always arose when Mr. Bok entered the room. As a self advertiser, the late P. T. Barnum was a piker compared to Edward W. Bok.

It is natural enough that editors should like to talk about their doings. They have been compelled to be impersonal so long that they are impelled to gambol and frolic, to shout and sing, when they burst the barriers of their sanctums and do not have to return to them. John St. Loe Strachey has not ceased to be editor of "The Spectator", but then he was never impersonal. The volume devoted to himself, published a year or so ago, called "The Ad