eve 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 his chronicles; who had written 'The Prince and the Pauper',
and would one day write that divine tale of the 'Maid of Orleans';
who was himself no more nor less than a knight always ready to redress
wrong, would seem to have been the last person to wish to laugh it out
of romance.

And yet, when all is said, one may still agree with Howells in ranking
the Yankee among Mark Twain's highest achievements in the way of "a
greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale." It is of that class,
beyond doubt. Howells goes further:

Of all the fanciful schemes in fiction it pleases me most, and I
give myself with absolute delight to its notion of a keen East
Hartford Yankee finding himself, by a retroactionary spell, at the
court of King Arthur of Britain, and becoming part of the sixth
century with all the customs and ideas of the nineteenth in him and
about him. The field for humanizing satire which this scheme opens
is illimitable.

Colossal it certainly is, as Howells and Stedman agreed: colossal in
its grotesqueness as in its sublimity. Howells, summarizing Mark Twain's
gifts (1901), has written:

He is apt to burlesque the lighter colloquiality, and it is only in
the more serious and most tragical junctures that his people utter
themselves with veracious simplicity and dignity. That great, burly
fancy of his is always tempting him to the exaggeration which is the
condition of so much of his personal humor, but which when it
invades the drama spoils the illusion. The illusion renews itself
in the great moments, but I wish it could be kept intact in the