evel of manhood in turn.

So the Yankee was published in England just as he had written it,--[The
preface was shortened and modified for both the American and English
editions. The reader will find it as originally written under Appendix
S, at the end of last volume.]--and the criticisms were as plentiful as
they were frank. It was referred to as a "lamentable failure" and as
an "audacious sacrilege" and in terms still less polite. Not all of the
English critics were violent. The Daily Telegraph gave it something more
than a column of careful review, which did not fail to point out the
book's sins with a good deal of justice and dignity; but the majority of
English papers joined in a sort of objurgatory chorus which, for a time
at least, spared neither the author nor his work. Strictures on the
Yankee extended to his earlier books. After all, Mark Twain's work was
not for the cultivated class.

These things must have begun to gravel Clemens a good deal at last, for
he wrote to Andrew Lang at considerable length, setting forth his case
in general terms--that is to say, his position as an author--inviting
Lang to stand as his advocate before the English public. In part he
said:

The critic assumes every time that if a book doesn't meet the
cultivated-class standard it isn't valuable... The critic has
actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by
Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a
chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy-gurdy and the
villagers' singing society; and the Latin classics than Kipling's
far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation
Army.... If a critic should start a religion it would not
have any object but to convert angels, and they wouldn't need it.
It is not that little minority who are already saved that are best
worth lifting up, I should think, but the mighty mass of the
uncultivated who are underneath! That mass will never see the old
masters--that sight is for the few; but the chromo-maker can lift
them all one step upward toward appreciation of art; they cannot
have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and the singing-class lift them
a little way toward that far height; they will never know Homer, but
the passing rhymester of their day leaves them higher than he found
them; they may never even hear of the Latin classics, but they will
strike step