n ever be
anything but an inferior form of art, which makes me care less for this
worthy effort to honor a noble figure. And elevated and dignified as is
the 'Joan of Arc,' I do not think that it shows us Mark Twain at his
best; altho it has many a passage that only he could have written, it is
perhaps the least characteristic of his works. Yet it may well be that
the certain measure of success he has achieved in handling a subject so
lofty and so serious, helped to open the eyes of the public to see the
solid merits of his other stories, in which his humor has fuller play
and in which his natural gifts are more abundantly displayed.

Of these other stories three are "real novels," to use Mr. Howells's
phrase; they are novels as real as any in any literature. 'Tom Sawyer'
and 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' are invaluable
contributions to American literature--for American literature is nothing
if it is not a true picture of American life and if it does not help us
to understand ourselves. 'Huckleberry Finn' is a very amusing volume,
and a generation has read its pages and laughed over it immoderately;
but it is very much more than a funny book; it is a marvelously accurate
portrayal of a whole civilization. Mr. Ormsby, in an essay which
accompanies his translation of 'Don Quixote,' has pointed out that for a
full century after its publication that greatest of novels was enjoyed
chiefly as a tale of humorous misadventure, and that three generations
had laughed over it before anybody suspected that it was more than a
mere funny book. It is perhaps rather with the picaresque romances of
Spain that 'Huckleberry Finn' is to be compared than with the
masterpiece of Cervantes; but I do not think that it will be a century
or that it will take three generations before we Americans generally
discover how great a book 'Huckleberry Finn' really is, how keen its
vision of character, how close its observation of life, how sound its
philosophy, and how it records for us once and for all certain phases of
southwestern society which it is most important for us to perceive and
to understand. The influence of slavery, the prevalence of feuds, the
conditions and the circumstances that make lynching possible--all these
things are set before us clearly and without comment. It is for us to
draw our own moral, each for himself, as we do when we see Shakspere
acted.

'Huckleberry Finn,' in its art, for one thing, and also in its bro