Mississippi? What real criticism, what exacting appreciation had Mark Twain, the writer, ever received? Had not his wife, indifferent to his best work, encouraged him to write puerilities? Had not Howells even, the "Critical Court of Last Resort in this country," praised him as often for his ineptitudes as for his lucky flights of genius? Who had expected anything of him, in short, or put him on his mettle? But at least America understood the primitive art of oral story-telling, at least America had understood the primitive art of the Mississippi pilot: in those two spheres, and in those alone, Mark Twain had found inspiring masters, he had encountered a penetrating criticism, an apt, subtle and thrilling appreciation; in those two spheres he had been invited to pass muster and he had done so! What if he had never read "Balzac and the others"? That old negro of his childhood, with all his ancient, inherited folk-skill--he was Mark Twain's Balzac, and no young novelist ever more fervently humbled himself before the high priest of his _métier_, ever more passionately drank in the wisdom of the source, ever more proudly rose, by ardent endeavor, to the point where, before going his own way, he could almost do what the high priest himself had done. Mark Twain had never individually "come into his intellectual consciousness," in Mr. Howells's phrase, at all; his creative spirit had remained rudimentary and almost undifferentiated; but that his natural genius was very great is proved once more by the extraordinary zest with which he threw himself into those approximately artistic channels he found open before him.