phenomenon, none of which has anything to do with literary fame in the proper sense. A great writer of the past is known by the delight and stimulus which he gives to mature spirits in the present, and time, it seems to me, tends to bear out the assertion of Henry James that Mark Twain's appeal is an appeal to rudimentary minds. "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom Sawyer," a story or two like "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," a sketch or two like "Traveling with a Reformer" and a few chapters of "Life on the Mississippi,"--these, in any case, can already be said to have "survived" all his other work. And are these writings, however beautiful and important, the final expressions of a supreme artistic genius, one of the great novelists of the world, a second Cervantes? Arnold Bennett, I think, forecast the view that prevails to-day when he called their author the "divine amateur" and said of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" that while they are "episodically magnificent, as complete works of art they are of quite inferior quality." So much for what Mark Twain actually accomplished. But if he had not been potentially a great man could he have so impressed, so dazzled almost every one who came into direct, personal contact with him? When his contemporaries compared him with Swift, Voltaire, Cervantes, they were certainly mistaken; but would they have made that mistake if they had not recognized in him, if not a creative capacity, at least a creative force, of the highest rank? Mark Twain's unbounded energy, his prodigal fertility, his large utterance, that "great, burly fancy" of his, as Mr. Howells calls it, his powers of feeling, the unique magnetism of his personality were the signs of an endowment, one cannot help thinking, more extraordinary than that of any other American writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or perhaps like Pushkin, who are as if intended by nature to preside over the genius of nations and give birth to the leading impulses of entire epochs. "I thought," said one of his associates in earlier years, "that the noble costume of the Albanian would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors, or stood at the prow of one of the swift craft of the vikings." And on the other hand, hear what Mr. Howells says: "Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final personality was something exquisite." That combination of barbaric force and intense sweetness, which so many others noted in him--is there not about it something portentous, something that suggests the true lord of life? Wherever he walked among men he trailed with him the psychic atmosphere of a planet as it were all his own. Gigantic, titanic were the words that came to people's lips when they tried to convey their impression of him, and when he died it seemed for the moment as if one