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.
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