'Huckleberry Finn' are rivaled by that most pathetic account of the weak
son willing to sell his own mother as a slave "down the river." Altho no
one of the books is sustained thruout on this high level, and altho, in
truth, there are in each of them passages here and there that we could
wish away (because they are not worthy of the association in which we
find them), I have no hesitation in expressing here my own conviction
that the man who has given us four scenes like these is to be compared
with the masters of literature; and that he can abide the comparison
with equanimity.


IV

Perhaps I myself prefer these three Mississippi Valley books above all
Mark Twain's other writings (altho with no lack of affection for those
also) partly because these have the most of the flavor of the soil about
them. After veracity and the sense of the universal, what I best relish
in literature is this native aroma, pungent, homely, and abiding. Yet I
feel sure that I should not rate him so high if he were the author of
these three books only. They are the best of him, but the others are
good also, and good in a different way. Other writers have given us
this local color more or less artistically, more or less convincingly:
one New England and another New York, a third Virginia, and a fourth
Georgia, and a fifth Wisconsin; but who so well as Mark Twain has given
us the full spectrum of the Union? With all his exactness in reproducing
the Mississippi Valley, Mark Twain is not sectional in his outlook; he
is national always. He is not narrow; he is not western or eastern; he
is American with a certain largeness and boldness and freedom and
certainty that we like to think of as befitting a country so vast as
ours and a people so independent.