To the eastern motherland he owes but the rudiments, the
groundwork, already archaic and obsolete to him, of the speech he has to
write; in his turn of art, his literary method and aims, his
intellectual habit and temper, he is as distinctly national as the
Fourth of July." Mark Twain was admired because he was "a literary
artist of exceptional skill"; and it was ungrudgingly acknowledged that
"he has a keen sense of character and uncommon skill in presenting it
dramatically; and he is also an admirable story-teller, with the
anecdotic instinct and habit in perfection, and with a power of episodic
narrative that is scarcely equalled, if at all, by Mr. Charles Reade
himself." Indeed, from the early days of 'The Innocents Abroad', the
"first transatlantic democratic utterance which found its way into the
hearing of the mass of English people"; during the period of 'Tom
Sawyer', "the completest boy in fiction," the immortal 'Huckleberry
Finn', "the standard picaresque novel of America--the least trammelled
piece of literature in the language," and 'Life on the Mississippi',
vastly appreciated in England as in Germany for its _cultur-historisch_
value; down to the day when Oxford University bestowed the coveted
honour of its degree upon Mark Twain, and all England took him to their
hearts with fervour and abandon--during this long period of almost four
decades, Mark Twain progressively strengthened his hold upon the
imagination of the English people and, like Charles Dickens before him,
may be said to have become the representative author of the Anglo-Saxon
race.
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