INTRODUCTION

THE greater number of tales and articles included in this volume were written during Mark Twain's extended European sojourn, which began in the spring of 1891 and ended in the autumn of 1900. It was an active period, for he had fallen heavily into debt, and it was only through his own efforts that he could hope for relief. He made a lecture tour of the world during these years, and produced two important books, Following the Equator and Joan of Arc, two representative books -- one of them, at least, a masterpiece.

His briefer labors were some of them scarcely less important. "The Eskimau Maiden's Romance," "Is He Living or Is He Dead?" written during those hard days of '93-'94 when Mark Twain was struggling to save his firm from bankruptcy, have humor and fancy despite the trying conditions under which they were produced. But by far the more important features of this volume were those written in Vienna, when he had measurably conquered his financial problem. It was then that he wrote the article "About Play-Acting," and the one on "Diplomatic Pay and Clothes," and it was then, too, that he wrote the greatest of all his short stories -- if, indeed, it is not the greatest of all short stories -- "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." This moral tale by Mark Twain has taken its place among such classics as "The Fall of the House of Usher," by Poe; "The Luck of Roaring Camp," by Harte; "The Man Who Would Be King," by Kipling; and "The Man Without a Country," by Hale. As a study of the human soul, its flimsy pretensions and pitiful frailties, it outranks any of these. It is a terrible arraignment of human weakness. In it Mark Twain allowed himself to jeer at the species without restraint. Human hypocrisy and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare, never so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place. For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in mockery of self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay him.

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is one of the most scathing sermons on self-righteousness ever preached. Its philosophy that every man is strong until his price is named; the futility of the prayer not to be led into temptation, when it is only by resisting temptation that men are made strong -- these things were never more vividly, more glowingly presented. Certainly it is Mark Twain's greatest short story, and if the measure of a tale's greatness is to be estimated by the message it conveys to the human conscience, the tale that will surpass it is not likely to be written.

"Hadleyburg,'' written during the winter of '97-'98, was first published in Harper's Magazine. Letters came to the author from every direction, most of them inquiring if the story was a true one, and asking for the geographical location of Hadleyburg. Some thought it was Elmira, New York, where for so many years he had made his summer home. But Hadleyburg had neither local geography nor circumstance, for Hadleyburg was the world, and Mark Twain, at sixty-three, having seen all the world and probed every human depth, had found some phase of the story's circumstance in every human soul.

ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE.