w.
As the author of The New Pilgrim's Progress he was swept into the domain
of letters as one riding at the head of a cavalcade--doors and windows
wide with welcome and jubilant with applause. Newspapers chorused their
enthusiasm; the public voiced universal approval; only a few of the more
cultured critics seemed hesitant and doubtful.

They applauded--most of them--but with reservation. Doctor Holland
regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was
not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the
author, speaks of the "frequently quaint and amusing conceits," but does
not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature. It was
naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious value to one who
approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and occasionally
wrote "those kind." William Dean Howells reviewed the book in the
Atlantic, which was of itself a distinction, whether the review was
favorable or otherwise. It was favorable on the whole, favorable to the
humor of the book, its "delicious impudence," the charm of its
good-natured irony. The review closed:

It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists
California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely
different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of
the best.

This is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive. The
descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not
receive attention. Mr. Howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence
to recognize in Mark Twain not only the humorist, but the supreme
genius-the "Lincoln of our literature." This was later. The public--the
silent public--with what Howells calls "the inspired knowledge of the
simple-hearted multitude," reached a similar verdict forthwith. And on
sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person of to-day take
up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere and decide whether it
is the work of a mere humorist, or also of a philosopher, a poet, and a
seer. The writer well remembers a little group of "the simple-hearted
multitude" who during the winter of '69 and '70 gathered each evening to
hear the Innocents read aloud, and their unanimous verdict that it was
the "best book of modern times."

It was the most daring book of its day. Passages of it were calculated
to take the breath of the orthodox reader; only, somehow, it mad