beautiful figures as Lee and Lanier. Not even his most enthusiastic
biographers have attempted to palliate, save with half-hearted
facetiousness, his inglorious desertion of the cause which he had
espoused. Mark Twain is the most speedily "reconstructed rebel" on
record. Is it broad-minded--or even accurate!--for Mr. Howells to say of
Mark Twain: "No one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand,
Walter-Scotticised, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal?" Mark Twain
never, I firmly believe, held up to ridicule the Southern "ideal." But
in a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he
properly pokes fun at the "wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,'
romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter Scott," of the
Southern literary journal of the thirties and forties. In later years
Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc', voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which
bespoke the "Southern ideal" of his Virginia forbears; and that delicacy
of instinct in matters of right and wrong which is so conspicuous a trait
of Mark Twain's is a symptom of that "moral elegance" which Mr. Owen
Wister has pronounced to be one of the defining characteristics of the
Southern American. "No American of Northern birth or breeding," Mr.
Howells pertinently observes, "could have imagined the spiritual struggle
of Huck Finn in deciding to help the negro Jim to his freedom, even
though he should be for ever despised as a negro thief in his native
town, and perhaps eternally lost through the blackness of his sin. No
Northerner could have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky feud, and
revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing through its
carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the sardonic
comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the store-keeping
magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's
daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that comes to lynch
him."