terary memorial seemingly as enduring as the river
itself.

Concerning the remaining chapters of the book, they are also literature,
but of a different class. The difference is about the same as that
between 'A Tramp Abroad' and the 'Innocents'. It is the difference
between the labors of love and duty; between art and industry,
literature and journalism.

But the last is hardly fair. It is journalism, but it is literary
journalism, and there are unquestionably areas that are purely literary,
and not journalistic at all. There would always be those in any book
of travel he might write. The story of the river revisited is an
interesting theme; and if the revisiting had been done, let us say eight
or ten years earlier, before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and
before the river itself had become a background for pessimism, the tale
might have had more of the literary glamour and illusion, even if less
that is otherwise valuable.

'Life on the Mississippi' has been always popular in Germany. The
Emperor William of Germany once assured Mark Twain that it was his
favorite American book, and on the same evening the portier of the
author's lodging in Berlin echoed the Emperor's opinion.

Paul Lindau, a distinguished German author and critic, in an interview
at the time the Mississippi book appeared, spoke of the general delight
of his countrymen in its author. When he was asked, "But have not the
Germans been offended by Mark Twain's strictures on their customs and
language in his 'Tramp Abroad'" he replied, "We know what we are and how
we look, and the fanciful picture presented to our eyes gives us only
food for laughter, not cause for resentment. The jokes he made on our
long words, our inverted sentences, and the position of the verb have
really led to a reform in style which will end in making our language as
compact and crisp as the French or English. I regard Mark Twain as the
foremost humorist of the age."

Howells, traveling through Europe, found Lindau's final sentiment echoed
elsewhere, and he found something more: in Europe Mark Twain was already
highly regarded as a serious writer. Thomas Hardy said to Howells one
night at dinner:

"Why don't people understand that Mark Twain is not merely a great
humorist? He is a very remarkable fellow in a very different way."

The Rev. Dr. Parker, returning from England just then, declared that,
wherever he went among literary people, the talk was about Mark Twai