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 broader range, is superior to ‘Tom Sawyer’ and to ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson,’ fine as both these are in their several ways.  In no book in our language, to my mind, has the boy, simply as a boy, been better realized than in ’Tom Sawyer.’  In some respects ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’ is the most dramatic of Mark Twain’s longer stories, and also the most ingenious; like ’Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ it has the full flavor of the Mississippi River, on which its author spent his own boyhood, and from contact with the soil of which he has always risen reinvigorated.

It is by these three stories, and especially by ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ that Mark Twain is likely to live longest.  Nowhere else is the life of the Mississippi Valley so truthfully recorded.  Nowhere else can we find a gallery of southwestern characters as varied and as veracious as those Huck Finn met in his wanderings.  The histories of literature all praise the ‘Gil Blas’ of Le Sage for its amusing adventures, its natural characters, its pleasant humor, and its insight into human frailty; and the praise is deserved.  But in every one of these qualities ’Huckleberry Finn’ is superior to ‘Gil Blas.’  Le Sage set the model of the picaresque novel, and Mark Twain followed his example; but the American book is richer than the French—­deeper, finer, stronger.  It would be hard to find in any language better specimens of pure narrative, better examples of the power of telling a story and of calling up action so that the reader cannot help but see it, than Mark Twain’s account of the Shepardson-Grangerford feud, and his description of the shooting of Boggs by Sherbourn and of the foiled attempt to lynch Sherbourn afterward.

These scenes, fine as they are, vivid, powerful, and most artistic in their restraint, can be matched in the two other books.  In ‘Tom Sawyer’ they can be paralleled by the chapter in which the boy and the girl are lost in the cave, and Tom, seeing a gleam of light in the distance, discovers that it is a candle carried by Indian Joe, the one enemy he has in the world.  In ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’ the great passages of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ are rivaled by that most pathetic account of the weak son willing to sell his own mother as a slave “down the river.”  Altho no one of the books is sustained thruout on this high level, and altho, in truth, there are in each of them passages here and there that we could wish away (because they are not worthy of the association in which we find them), I have no hesitation in expressing here my own conviction that the man who has given us four scenes like these is to be compared with the masters of literature; and that he can abide the comparison with equanimity.