It has gone out to Mark Twain not only for what he has written, for the
clean, irresistible extravagance of his humour and his unfailing command
of the primal feelings, for his tenderness, his jollity and his power to
read the heart of boy and man and woman; not only for the tragedies and
afflictions of his life so unconquerably borne; not only for his brave
and fiery dashes against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home and
abroad; but also because his countrymen feel him to be, beyond all other
men, the incarnation of the American spirit."

Mark Twain achieved a position of supreme eminence as a representative
national author which is without a parallel in the history of American
literature. This position he achieved directly by his appeal to the
great mass of the people, despite the _dicta_ of the _literati_. At a
time when England and Europe were throwing wide the doors to Mark Twain,
the culture of his own land was regarding him with slighting
condescension, or with mildly quizzical unconcern. Boston regarded him
with fastidious and frigid disapproval, Longfellow and Lowell found
little in him to admire or approve. There were notable exceptions, as
Mr. Howells has recently pointed out--Charles Eliot Norton, Professor
Francis J. Child, and most notable of all, Mr. Howells himself; but in
general it is true that "in proportion as people thought themselves
refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but
which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude."
The professors of literature regarded Mark Twain as an author whose
works were essentially ephemeral; and stood in the breach for Culture
against the barbaric invasion of primitive Western Barbarism. Professor
W. P. Trent was, I believe, the first to cite Professor Richardson's
American Literature (published in 1886) as a typical instance of the
position of literary culture in regard to Mark Twain. "But there is a
class of writers," we read in that work, "authors ranking below Irving