BOOKS AND BOOKS-MEN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 17, 23 April 1892, Page 426

BOOKS AND BOOKS-MEN.

MOST certainly humorists are rare. During the last decade no writer has ever for even a moment ousted

the bookman whose portrait I now give this week from the position of the freshest, most invigorating, humorist known to readers of latter day English literature. Mr Clemens—Mark Twain as he calls himself—has made us all laugh, and there is nothing we have laughed at which is not absolutely cleanly and free from all double meaning. ‘ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ ‘ Huckleberry Finn,’ • The Tramp Abroad ’ are perhaps his best works, though the ‘ Innocents Abroad,’ ‘ Life on the Mississippi,’ and his shorter stories run them very close. Yet he is not only a humorist. As a light and chatty descriptive writer

Mark Twain is unexcelled. ‘ The Tramp Abroad ’is a most excellent descriptive guide to certain parts of Europe, and • Up the Mississippi ’ gives perhaps the finest idea of that mighty river that has ever been printed. There are one or two accounts of Lis reason for the selection of Mark Twain as a nom de plume. As most people know he began life as apprentice to a printer, but ran away to become a pilot boy on a Mississippi steamer. Here, so says one authority, he constantly had to cry out * Mark Twain ’ when as leadsman he signified that there were two fathoms of water, and that he adopted these familiar words as cognomen when he came to write. His own story, however, if my memory does not play me false, is that Mark Twain was the name of an old pilot whom Clemens grievously offended, but for whom he had a great respect. When the old fellow died Clemens took his name ‘for luck.’ As he himself explains in his various works he has been everything. He was, by the way, born at Florida in 1835. Mark Twain is now touring in Europe, and his letters on his travelling experiences are appearing week by week in some of the New Zealand papers.

• WOTTON Reinfred,’ the so called original novel by Carlyle now appearing in the New Review, is a dull, heavy piece of work which should never have seen the light. Whole passages are almost verbally identical with passages of ‘ Sartor Resartus,’ and the Speaker last month suggested it might be an attempt to reduce that immortal work to a more popular form. Now, however, the Speaker has come to the conclusion ‘ Reinfred ’ preceded ‘ Sartor.’

Lord Tennyson's action in accepting £lOO for seventeen feeble lines on the death of the Duke of Clarence, which appeared in the Nineteenth Century, has been very unfavourably criticised. People are asking what the Laureate receives £2OO a year for if this sort of thing is to be permitted. Alfred Austin, whose verses were infinitely finer than Tennyson’s, wrote them within a few hours of the Prince's death, and gave them to the people through next morning's Times. The poem was not merely obviously spontaneous, but properly timed and placed. Tennyson’s laboured lines, hammered out a month late are so bad they have not even been widely quoted.

Mr Morley Roberts, whose volume of short stories called, ‘King Billy of Ballarat,’ has just been published, will be heard of again. His work is unequal, but the tales which arc good are very good indeed. Like Kipling, Mr Roberts can draw a vivid picture in a single sentence. Volumes of tensest misery are condensed into ‘A Domestic Tragedy,’ and the even grimmer ‘ Father and Son.’ ‘A Quiet Man ’ and ‘ The Sheriff of Red Butte ’ remind one of Bret Harte.