It was rather among the Germanic peoples and those most closely allied to them, the Scandinavians, that Mark Twain found most complete and ready response. At first blush, it seems almost incredible that the writings of Mark Twain, with their occasional slang, their colloquialisms and their local peculiarities of dialect, should have borne translation so well into other languages, especially into German. It must, however, be borne in mind that, despite these peculiar features of his writings, they are couched in a style of most marked directness, simplicity and native English purity. The ease with which his works were translated into foreign, especially the Germanic and allied tongues, and the eager delight with which they were read and comprehended by all classes, high and low, constitute perhaps the most signal conceivable tribute, not only to the humanity of his spirit, but to the genuine art of his marvellously forthright and natural style. It need be no cause for surprise that as early as 1872 he had secured Tauchnitz, of Leipzig, for his Continental agent. German translations soon appeared of 'The Jumping Frog and Other Stories' (1874), 'The Gilded Age' (1874), 'The Innocents Abroad and The New Pilgrim's Progress' (1875), 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876). A few years later his sketches, many of them, were translated into virtually all printed languages, notably into Russian and modern Greek; and his more extended works gradually came to be translated into German, French, Italian, and the languages of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula. The elements of the colossally grotesque, the wildly primitive, in Mark Twain's works, the underlying note of melancholy not less than the lawless Bohemianism, found sympathetic appreciation among the Germanic races. George Meredith has likened the functionings of Germanic humour to the heavy-footed antics of a dancing bear. Mark Twain's stories of the Argonauts, the miners and desperadoes, with their primitive, orgiastic existence; his narratives of the wild freedom of the life on the Mississippi, the lawless feuds and barbaric encounters--all appealed to the passion for the fantastic and the grotesque innate in the Germanic consciousness. To the Europeans, this wild genius of the Pacific Slope seemed to function in a sort of unexplored fourth dimension of humour--vast and novel--of which they had never dreamed. It is noteworthy that Schleich, in his 'Psychopathik des Humors', reserved for American humour, with Mark Twain as its leading exponent, a distinct and unique category which he denominated _phantastischen, grossdimensionalen_.