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REVIEWS 245 It seems rather a strained moral to draw from a study of Shakespeare and t he nature of man. Even if this thesis may on sundry points be challenged, there is no question about the interest and the importance of the book. In recent years the scholarly cry has been for the Elizabethan Shakespeare, for a study of the thought which conditioned his drama. Here is the best answer yet given; and Professor Spencer knows, as some of the historians do not, the limitations of his approach: "Shakespeare's greatness consists- and no historian of ideas should forget it for a moment- in his ability to create characters in which we can believe, and it is only in so far as we are helped toward an understanding of how he does this, that a study of the conventions of his time is really helpful." That may be rather a narrow view of the greatness of Shakespeare's drama, but it gives a salutary reminder of the relation between historical research and art criticism. MA R K TWAIN: MAN AND LEGEND* J. R. MAcGILLIVRAY Every biographer of Mark Twain must on his setting forth consider two questions: how long will the book be, and where will the emphasis fall? These are the most elementary and common problems of design, but not easy to solve in this case. The sheer amount of material to be assimilated is almost appalling. There are the collected works in twenty-one volumes, t he Autobiography, Letters, Speeches, N otebooks, and innumerable miscellaneous writings only partly garnered together from magazines and newspapers in America and Great Britain. There must also be digested the three-volume official biography by his literary executor, A. B. P aine, intimate memoirs as by W. D. Howells and Clara Clemens, and then one must face up to the records and studies of the Missouri frontier, the Mississippi riverway, the Nevada mining camps, the Far West, and the wider Victorian world for which Mark Twain wrote. Nor is the question of what to emphasize less perplexing. Samuel Clemens was at one time or another a printer, river-pilot, army recruit, reporter, mining prospector, newspaper editor, active partner in a publishing house, unofficial American ambassador to the world at large, famous platform lecturer, and for almost fifty *Marie Twain: Man and Legend, by D E LANCEY FERGUSON. Indianapolis and New York, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1943, $3.00. 246 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY years, to use his own phrase; "a literary person" who wrote books. But his infinite variety was not merely occupational. He was a wild man from the frontier who settled in Hartford and contributed to the Atlantic Monthly, a person of slight formal education and imperfect literary taste who wrote at least one unassailable American classic, an unashamed Philistine who satirized the tawdry vulgarity of the Gilded Age, a humorist who experienced moods of the blackest depression, a popular and beloved hero who had the lowest opinion of uthe damned human race," and, since his death and thanks to the labours of amateur psychologists, he has become an increasingly baffiing enigma. He has also attained .to the shining company of Washington, Lincoln, Paul Revere and Paul Bunyan as a great American myth. Professor Ferguson has considered the two preliminary problems of t~e biographer, settled on a general design, and written a fine book accordingly. Mark Twain: Man and Legend is a biography of moderate length, less than half the size of Mr A. B. Paine's, yet drawing .on sources beyond his knowledge and evaluating a body of writing and a cultural environment beyond his untrained skill to comprehend. The main emphasis falls on the man of letters. This is a principal justification for the book. The wonderful lifestory is related at length; there is a sufficient account of the American background; but both these elements are intended :finally to give us a more intelligent understanding of the published writings. This is a book both popular and sound. The common reader will find information and amusement; the student of American literature who takes even h1s Mark Twain seriously will find a judicious account of a man and...

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