and all those other narrow, puritanical influences to which he had subjected himself simply taken the place of the Sunday School in his mind? "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which he wrote quite late in life, is an old-fashioned Western country "Sunday School scholar's" romantic dream of the "land of Egypt"--Tom Sawyer's "abroad" doesn't include Europe at all; and we have seen that Mark Twain's general attitude as a European tourist remained always that of the uninitiated American business man. His attention had been fixed in his childhood upon the civilization of the Biblical lands, and that is why they seemed to him so full of poetry and dignity; his attention had never been fixed upon the civilization of Europe, and that is why it seemed to him so empty and absurd. Faced with these cultural phenomena, he reverted all his life to the attitude which had been established in him in his boyhood and had been confirmed by all the forces that had arrested his development beyond that stage. How, then, are we to describe Mark Twain's literary character? Mr. Paine speaks of his genius as "given rather to elaboration than to construction"; he says that "most of his characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he refers to "two of his chief gifts--transcription and portrayal," adding that "he was always greater at these things than at invention." Are not these traits, which are indisputable, the traits of a mind that has never attained to creation in the proper sense, a mind that has stopped short of the actual process of art? As we run over the list of his books we see that the majority of them, including virtually all his good work, were not even creative in design but rather reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or historical: "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad," "Following the Equator," "Joan of Arc," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi." It was as a pilot on the river, he said, that he had learned to know human nature and the world. But had he assimilated what he learned? When, in later days, he turned back upon his life for literary material, it was not this great period that rose in his mind, save for the merely descriptive work of "Life on the Mississippi"--and even there it is the river itself and not its human nature that comes most insistently before us; it was his boyhood in Hannibal. Mark Twain remembered, indeed, the marvelous gallery of American types the Mississippi had spread before him, but it had never become his for art: his imagination had never attained the mastery over that variegated world of men. That his spirit had, in fact, been closed to experience is indicated in Mr. Paine's statement that "most of his characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he has sketched a few portraits in outline, a few caricatures, but the only characters he is able to conceive realistically are boys. In "The Gilded