ied, that otherwise would have had to
forego all adequate record.

III

It is highly probable that when an author reveals the power of evoking
views of places and of calling up portraits of people such as Mark
Twain showed in 'Life on the Mississippi,' and when he has the masculine
grasp of reality Mark Twain made evident in 'Roughing It,' he must needs
sooner or later turn from mere fact to avowed fiction and become a
story-teller. The long stories which Mark Twain has written fall into
two divisions,--first, those of which the scene is laid in the present,
in reality, and mostly in the Mississippi Valley, and second, those of
which the scene is laid in the past, in fantasy mostly, and in Europe.

As my own liking is a little less for the latter group, there is no need
for me now to linger over them. In writing these tales of the past Mark
Twain was making up stories in his head; personally I prefer the tales
of his in which he has his foot firm on reality. The 'Prince and the
Pauper' has the essence of boyhood in it; it has variety and vigor; it
has abundant humor and plentiful pathos; and yet I for one would give
the whole of it for the single chapter in which Tom Sawyer lets the
contract for white-washing his aunt's fence.

Mr. Howells has declared that there are two kinds of fiction he likes
almost equally well,--"a real novel and a pure romance"; and he joyfully
accepts 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court' as "one of the
greatest romances ever imagined." It is a humorous romance overflowing
with stalwart fun; and it is not irreverent but iconoclastic, in that it
breaks not a few disestablished idols. It is intensely American and
intensely nineteenth century and intensely democratic--in the best sense
of that abused adjective. The British critics were greatly displeased
with the book:--and we are reminded of the fact that the Spanish still
somewhat resent 'Don Quixote' because it brings out too truthfully the
fatal gap in the Spanish character between the ideal and the real. So
much of the feudal still survives in British society that Mark Twain's
merry and elucidating assault on the past seemed to some almost an
insult to the present.

But no critic, British or American, has ventured to discover any
irreverence in 'Joan of Arc,' wherein indeed the tone is almost devout
and the humor almost too much subdued. Perhaps it is my own distrust of
the so-called historical novel, my own disbelief that it ca