ring of the
Yankee and the outset and the wandering with Alisande. There is nothing
more powerful or inspiring than his splendid panoramic picture--of the
King learning mercy through his own degradation, his daily intercourse
with a band of manacled slaves; nothing more fiercely moving than that
fearful incident of the woman burned to warm those freezing chattels, or
than the great gallows scene, where the priest speaks for the young
mother about to pay the death penalty for having stolen a halfpenny's
worth, that her baby might have bread. Such things as these must save
the book from oblivion; but alas! its greater appeal is marred almost to
ruin by coarse and extravagant burlesque, which destroys illusion and
antagonizes the reader often at the very moment when the tale should fill
him with a holy fire of a righteous wrath against wrong. As an example
of Mark Twain at his literary worst and best the Yankee ranks supreme. It
is unnecessary to quote examples; one cannot pick up the volume and read
ten pages of it, or five pages, without finding them. In the midst of
some exalted passage, some towering sublimity, you are brought suddenly
to earth with a phrase which wholly destroys the illusion and the diviner
purpose. Howells must have observed these things, or was he so dazzled
by the splendor of its intent, its righteous charge upon the ranks of
oppression, that he regarded its offenses against art as unimportant.
This is hard to explain, for the very thing that would sustain such a
great message and make it permanent would be the care, the restraint, the
artistic worthiness of its construction. One must believe in a story
like that to be convinced of its logic. To lose faith in it--in its
narrative--is absolutely fatal to its purpose. The Yankee in King
Arthur's Court not only offended the English nation, but much of it
offended the better taste of Mark Twain's own countrymen, and in time it
must have offended even Mark Twain himself. Reading it, one can
visualize the author as a careering charger, with a bit in his teeth,
trampling the poetry and the tradition of the romantic days, the very
things which he himself in his happier moods cared for most. Howells
likened him to Cervantes, laughing Spain's chivalry away. The comparison
was hardly justified. It was proper enough to laugh chivalry out of
court when it was a reality; but Mark Twain, who loved Sir Thomas Malory
to the end of his days, the beauty and poetry of h