e noblest picture in Europe? Is there nothing in Latin Christianity,
after all, save petty grafting, monastic scandals and the worship of the
knuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints? May not a civilized man,
disbelieving in it, still find himself profoundly moved by its dazzling
history, the lingering remnants of its old magnificence, the charm of
its gorgeous and melancholy loveliness? In the presence of all beauty of
man's creation--in brief, of what we roughly call art, whatever its
form--the voice of Mark Twain was the voice of the Philistine. A
literary artist of very high rank himself, with instinctive gifts that
lifted him, in "Huckleberry Finn" to kinship with Cervantes and
Aristophanes, he was yet so far the victim of his nationality that he
seems to have had no capacity for distinguishing between the good and
the bad in the work of other men of his own craft. The literary
criticism that one occasionally finds in his writings is chiefly trivial
and ignorant; his private inclination appears to have been toward such
romantic sentimentality as entrances school-boys; the thing that
interested him in Shakespeare was not the man's colossal genius, but the
absurd theory that Bacon wrote his plays. Had he been born in France
(the country of his chief abomination!) instead of in a Puritan village
of the American hinterland, I venture that he would have conquered the
world. But try as he would, being what he was, he could not get rid of
the Puritan smugness and cocksureness, the Puritan distrust of new
ideas, the Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in itself,
and the full peer of the true and the good.

It is, indeed, precisely in the works of such men as Mark Twain that one
finds the best proofs of the Puritan influence in American letters, for
it is there that it is least expected and hence most significant. Our
native critics, unanimously Puritans themselves, are anaesthetic to the
flavour, but to Dr. Kellner, with his half-European, half-Oriental
culture, it is always distinctly perceptible. He senses it, not only in
the harsh Calvinistic fables of Hawthorne and the pious gurglings of
Longfellow, but also in the poetry of Bryant, the tea-party niceness of
Howells, the "maiden-like reserve" of James Lane Allen, and even in the
work of Joel Chandler Harris. What! A Southern Puritan? Well, why not?
What could be more erroneous than the common assumption that Puritanism
is exclusively a Northern, a New Engla