In almost every one of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them, he burns the house down in order to roast his pig—he destroys, that is to say, an entire complex of legitimate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single sham. And, as a rule, even the "shams" are not shams at all; they are manifestations of just that personal, aesthetic, or moral distinction which any but a bourgeois democracy would seek in every way to cherish. Consider, for example, the value assailed in his famous speech on General Grant and his big toe. The effect of Mark Twain's humorous assault on the dignity of General Grant was to reduce him not to the human but to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was the final proof of the universal acquiescence of the race of pioneers in a democratic regime opposed, in the name of business, to the recognition of any superior value in the individual: what made it possible was the fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all flesh and become a business man. The supreme example of Mark Twain's humour in this kind is, however, the Connecticut Yankee. "It was another of my surreptitious schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd," says the Yankee. "Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather hat-boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him into my service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it." Mark Twain's contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them, liked to imagine that in this fashion he was exposing shams and pretensions; but unhappily for this argument, knighthood had been long extinct when Mark Twain undertook his doughty attack upon it, and it had no unworthy modern equivalent. To exalt the plug above the plume was a very easy conquest for our humorist; it was for this reason, and not, as Mark Twain imagined, from any snobbish self-sufficiency, that the English public failed to be abashed by the book. In this aspect, at least, the Connecticut Yankee was an assault, not upon a social institution but upon the principle of beauty itself, an assault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd pioneer business man.
How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of The Innocents Abroad, appearing as it did precisely at the psychological moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch
