Turn from the man to the writer; we see again this same desire for approval, for corroboration. Mark Twain was supported by the sentiment of the majority, which was gospel to the old-fashioned Westerner; he had the golden opinion of Mr. Howells, in his eyes the arbiter of all the elegances; he had virtually the freedom of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and not only its freedom but a higher rate of payment than any other _Atlantic_ contributor. Could any American man of letters have had more reason to think well of himself? Observe what he thought. "I haven't as good an opinion of my work as you hold of it," he writes to Mr. Howells in 1887, "but I've always done what I could to secure and enlarge my good opinion of it. I've always said to, myself, 'Everybody reads it and that's something--it surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable people would get pretty tired of it.' And when a critic said by implication that it wasn't high and fine, through the remark, 'High and fine literature is wine,' I retorted (confidentially to myself), 'Yes, high and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.'" That is frank enough; he is not always so. There is a note of unconscious guile, the guile of the peasant, of the sophisticated small boy, in the letter he wrote to Andrew Lang, beseeching a fair hearing in England for the "Connecticut Yankee." He rails against "the cultivated-class standard"; he half poses as an uplifter of the masses; then, with a touch of mock-noble indignation, he confesses to being a popular entertainer, fully convinced at least that there are two kinds of literature and that an author ought to be allowed to put upon his book an explanatory line: "This is written for the Head," or "This is written for the Belly or the Members." No plea more grotesque or more pathetic was ever written by a man with a great reputation to support. It shows that Mark Twain was completely ignorant of literary values: had he not wished upon literature, as it were, a separation between the "Head" and the "Belly" which, as we shall see, had simply taken place in himself? Out of his own darkness he begs for the word of salvation from one who he thinks can bestow it.