350 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Revolution nobody but Rousseau and Robespierre and Danton ; 

 in the national struggle for American independence nobody but 

 Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin ; in tbe vast movements for 

 the unity of Italy and Germany nobody but Garibaldi, Mazzini, 

 Bismarck, and Von Moltke. But in reality, as the present age 

 now knows well, it is largely the movement that makes the men, 

 not the men that make the movement ; and this is true of ordi- 

 nary epochs as well as of great upheavals, of the thinker and the 

 writer as well as of the soldier, the statesman, and the enthusiast. 

 Take as a very striking example in minor matters Mark Twain. 

 To the English reader Mark Twain is a being more or less unique, 

 or at best he is known as the chief among two or three popular 

 competitors in the field of so-called American humor — Artemus 

 Ward, Josh Billings, and Orpheus C. Kerr being practically his 

 only considerable rivals in the European market. But whoever 

 knows the daily talk and the daily newspaper of Western America 

 knows that embryo Mark Twains grow in Illinois on every bush, 

 and that the raw material of the " Innocents Abroad " resounds 

 nightly, like the voice of the Derringer, through every saloon in 

 Iowa and Montana. A large style of cheap and effective homi- 

 cidal humor, based mainly on exaggeration and grotesque incon- 

 gruities, flourishes everywhere on the border-lands of American 

 civilization. The very infants lisp in quaint Western quips, the 

 blushing maidens whisper a dialect which " pans out " rich in the 

 peculiar wit of Poker Flat and the Silverado Squatters. Mark 

 Twain represents but the exceptional embodiment of this extrava- 

 gant ranching and mining spirit, sedulously cultivated and still fur- 

 ther developed by the literary habits of a professional humorist. 



In literature and in political life our modern principle of the 

 supreme influence of the environment is now, indeed, universally 

 admitted; it is only in science and in philosophy (where more 

 than elsewhere it is emphatically true) that anybody of authority 

 still doubts it. We all allow that in most matters it is the wave 

 that makes the crest, and not the crest that makes the wave. The 

 old school of critics saw in Shakespeare a dramatic phoenix, soli- 

 tary of his kind, unequaled and unapproached around or about 

 him. The new school sees in him the final flower and highest 

 outcome of that marvelous outburst which gave us " Faustus " and 

 " Tamburlaine," " Jane Shore " and " Yolpone," the " Duke of Mi- 

 lan" and the "Duchess of Malfi." Primus inter pares he was, no 

 doubt, but inter pares only, not above " a vast dead level of me- 

 diocrity." Ford and Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson and 

 Massinger stood close beside the throne ; Greene and Marlowe had 

 prepared the way beforehand for Hamlet and Shylock and Rich- 

 ard III. The expansion of England in the Elizabethan age neces- 

 sarily produced the new drama, which showed forth as in a mir- 



