they can get instruction elsewhere . . . .  My audience is dumb; it has no voice in print, and so I cannot know whether I have won its approval or only got its censure.

He closed by asking that Lang urge the critics to adopt a rule recognizing the masses, and to formulate a standard whereby work done for them might be judged.  “No voice can reach further than yours in a case of this kind,” he said, “or carry greater weight of authority.”  There was no humor in this letter, and the writer of it was clearly in earnest.

Lang’s response was an article published in the Illustrated London News on the art of Mark Twain.  He began by gently ridiculing hyperculture —­the new culture—­and ended with a eulogy on Huck Finn.  It seems worth while, however, to let Andrew Lang speak for himself.

I have been educated till I nearly dropped; I have lived with the earliest apostles of culture, in the days when Chippendale was first a name to conjure with, and Japanese art came in like a raging lion, and Ronsard was the favorite poet, and Mr. William Morris was a poet, too, and blue and green were the only wear, and the name of Paradise was Camelot.  To be sure, I cannot say that I took all this quite seriously, but “we, too, have played” at it, and know all about it.  Generally speaking, I have kept up with culture.  I can talk (if desired) about Sainte-Beuve, and Merimee, and Felicien Rops; I could rhyme “Ballades” when they were “in,” and knew what a “pantoom” was . . . .  And yet I have not culture.  My works are but tinkling brass because I have not culture.  For culture has got into new regions where I cannot enter, and, what is perhaps worse, I find myself delighting in a great many things which are under the ban of culture.

He confesses that this is a dreadful position; one that makes a man feel like one of those Liberal politicians who are always “sitting on the fence,” and who follow their party, if follow it they do, with the reluctant acquiescence of the prophet’s donkey.  He further confesses that he has tried Hartmann and prefers Plato, that he is shaky about Blake, though stalwart concerning Rudyard Kipling.

This is not the worst of it.  Culture has hardly a new idol but I long to hurl things at it.  Culture can scarcely burn anything, but I am impelled to sacrifice to that same.  I am coming to suspect that the majority of culture’s modern disciples are a mere crowd of very slimly educated people who have no natural taste or impulses; who do not really know the best things in literature; who have a feverish desire to admire the newest thing, to follow the latest artistic fashion; who prate about “style,” without the faintest acquaintance with the ancient examples of style in Greek, French, or English; who talk about the classics and—­criticize the classical critics and poets, without being able to read a line of them in the original.  Nothing of the natural man is left in these people; their intellectual equipment