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 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: