influences of his life combined. From the inexhaustible well of
those experiences he drew ever fresh contributions for the satisfaction
of the world. His mind was stocked with the rich, crude ore of early
experience--the romance and the reality of a life full of prismatic
variations of colour. The civilization of the East, its culture and
refinement, tempered the genius of Mark Twain in conformity with the
indispensable criteria of classic art. Under the broadening influence
of its persistent nationalism, he became more deeply, more profoundly,
imbued with the comprehensive ideals of American democracy. He never
lost the first fine virginal spontaneity of his native style, never
weakened in the vigour of his thought or in the primitiveness of his
expression. His contact with the East compassed the liberation of that
vast fund of stored--up early experiences, acquired through grappling
with life in many a rude encounter.

Out of its own life, the East never contributed to Mark Twain's works,
in any appreciably momentous way, either volume or immensity of fertile,
suggestive human experience. If we eliminate from the list of Mark
Twain's works those books which have their roots deep set in the soil of
South and West, we eliminate the most priceless assets of his art.
Indeed, it may be doubted whether, were those works struck from the
catalogue of his contributions, Mark Twain could justly rank as a great
genius. To his association with the South and the Southwest are due
'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', and 'Life on the
Mississippi'. 'The Jumping Frog' and 'Roughing It' belong peculiarly to
the West, and even 'The Innocents Abroad' falls wholly within the period
of Mark Twain's influence by the West, its standards, outlook, and
localized viewpoint.

Colonel Mulberry Sellers is a veritably human type, the embodiment,
laughably lovable, of a temperamental phase of American character in the
course of the national development. But 'The Gilded Age' has long since
disappeared from that small but tremendously significant group of works
which are tentatively destined to rank as classics. Much as I enjoy the
satiric comedy of 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court', I have always felt
that it set before Europe an American type which is neither elevating
nor inspiring--nor national. It tends to the gratification of England
and Europe, even in the face of its democratic demolition of feudalistic
surviva