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 can ever be
anything but an inferior form of art, which makes me care less for this
worthy effort to honor a noble figure. And elevated and dignified as is
the 'Joan of Arc,' I do not think that it shows us Mark Twain at his
best; altho it has many a passage that only he could have written, it is
perhaps the least characteristic of his works. Yet it may well be that
the certain measure of success he has achieved in handling a subject so
lofty and so serious, helped to open the eyes of the public to see the
solid merits of his other stories, in which his humor has fuller play
and in which his natural gifts are more abundantly displayed.

Of these other stories three are "real novels," to use Mr. Howells's