For all our professed delight in and capacity for
jocosity, we have produced so far but one genuine wit--Ambrose
Bierce--and, save to a small circle, he remains unknown today. Our great
humourists, including even Mark Twain, have had to take protective
colouration, whether willingly or unwillingly, from the prevailing
ethical foliage, and so one finds them levelling their darts, not at the
stupidities of the Puritan majority, but at the evidences of lessening
stupidity in the anti-Puritan minority. In other words, they have done
battle, not against, but _for_ Philistinism--and Philistinism is no
more than another name for Puritanism. Both wage a ceaseless warfare
upon beauty in its every form, from painting to religious ritual, and
from the drama to the dance--the first because it holds beauty to be a
mean and stupid thing, and the second because it holds beauty to be
distracting and corrupting.
Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist; there was in him
something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof engrossment in
the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one associates with
the great artists of the Renaissance.
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