Europe and elsewhere, by Mark Twain [pseud.] [with an appreciation by Brander Matthews and an introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine]

AN APPRECIATION

world. In Pudd'nhead Wilson the great passages
of 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." Although
no one of the books is sustained throughout on this
high level, and although, 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
(although 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
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