It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss the relations between authors and their wives: so intensely personal is the atmosphere of our society that to "stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even of those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civilization is regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the way in which English criticism has thrashed out the pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Percy and Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the Bronte family and the Lambs and the Rossettis! Is it to satisfy the neighborly village ear or even a mere normal concern with interesting relationships? At bottom English critics are so copious and so candid in these domestic analyses because they believe that what great writers think and feel is of profound importance to society and because they know that what any man thinks and feels is largely determined by personal circumstances and affections. It is, no doubt, because of this frank, free habit of mind that all the best biographies even of our American worthies--Hamilton, Franklin and Lincoln, for instance--have been written by Englishmen! No one will deny, I suppose, that Mark Twain's influence upon our society has been, either in a positive or in a negative way, profound. When, therefore, we know that, by his own statement, his wife not only edited his works but edited him, we feel slightly annoyed with Mr. Howells who, whenever he speaks of Mrs. Clemens, abandons his rôle as a realist and carefully conceals that puissant personage under the veil of "her heavenly whiteness." We feel that the friend, the neighbor, the guest has prevailed in Mr. Howells's mind over the artist and the thinker and that he is far more concerned with fulfilling his personal obligations and his private loyalties than the proper public task of a psychologist and a man of letters. Meanwhile, we know that neither the wives of European authors nor, for that matter, the holy women of the New Testament have suffered any real degradation from being scrutinized as creatures of flesh and blood. If one stoops and botanizes upon Mrs. Clemens it is because, when her standards became those of her husband, she stepped immediately into a rôle far more truly influential than that of any President.