We have seen--and it seems to me the most conclusive proof of his arrested development--that Mark Twain showed not only no respect for literature but no vital, personal pride in his own pursuit of it. What is the true artist's natural attitude toward his work? Henry James, in his finical, exaggerated fashion, expressed it, I think--over-expressed it, in his passionate anxiety not to do so--in something he wrote once of his early tales: "I, of course, really and truly cared for them, as we say, more than for aught else whatever--cared for them with that kind of care, infatuated though it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond votary never to so much as speak of the loved object, makes it a refinement of piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect freedom of mind as to everything but them." Compare this with what Mark Twain wrote when he was setting to work at "The American Claimant": "My right arm is nearly disabled with rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it--no, I mean 1,000,000--next fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't have to yell." That is only an extreme instance of what appears to have been his habitual attitude toward his work, an attitude of almost cynical indifference, of insolence even. Once, however, he approached it in quite a different spirit, with a significant and exceptional result that proves the rule. "Though the creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed," says Mr. Paine, "his glory in the tale of Joan never died": in a note which he made on his seventy-third birthday, indeed, when all his important works lay far behind him, he said: "I like the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well." Did he really consider it his best book? We shall see presently that in this, as in other matters, his judgment was quite unstable, quite unreliable, quite immature; and certainly, beside "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," no one else can take very seriously a work that is, for all its charm, scarcely anything but a literary chromo. Why, then, did Mark Twain look back upon it with such a unique satisfaction? It was because he had had no ulterior object in view in writing it, because, for once, in this book, he had approached his work in the spirit, at least, of the artist and the craftsman. "Possibly," we find him writing to a friend, and how exceptional the phrase is on Mark Twain's pen!--"possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love." But more striking still is the testimony of a later note: "It furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none." In other words, in this book alone he had consciously exercised the instinct of workmanship, the instinct he had exercised in that career as a pilot to which he always looked back so regretfully.