Mr. Howells has declared that there are two kinds of fiction he likes almost equally well,—­“a real novel and a pure romance”; and he joyfully accepts ‘A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court’ as “one of the greatest romances ever imagined.”  It is a humorous romance overflowing with stalwart fun; and it is not irreverent but iconoclastic, in that it breaks not a few disestablished idols.  It is intensely American and intensely nineteenth century and intensely democratic—­in the best sense of that abused adjective.  The British critics were greatly displeased with the book:—­and we are reminded of the fact that the Spanish still somewhat resent ‘Don Quixote’ because it brings out too truthfully the fatal gap in the Spanish character between the ideal and the real.  So much of the feudal still survives in British society that Mark Twain’s merry and elucidating assault on the past seemed to some almost an insult to the present.

But no critic, British or American, has ventured to discover any irreverence in ‘Joan of Arc,’ wherein indeed the tone is almost devout and the humor almost too much subdued.  Perhaps it is my own distrust of the so-called historical novel, my own disbelief that it can 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