A
literary artist of very high rank himself, with instinctive gifts that
lifted him, in "Huckleberry Finn" to kinship with Cervantes and
Aristophanes, he was yet so far the victim of his nationality that he
seems to have had no capacity for distinguishing between the good and
the bad in the work of other men of his own craft. The literary
criticism that one occasionally finds in his writings is chiefly trivial
and ignorant; his private inclination appears to have been toward such
romantic sentimentality as entrances school-boys; the thing that
interested him in Shakespeare was not the man's colossal genius, but the
absurd theory that Bacon wrote his plays. Had he been born in France
(the country of his chief abomination!) instead of in a Puritan village
of the American hinterland, I venture that he would have conquered the
world. But try as he would, being what he was, he could not get rid of
the Puritan smugness and cocksureness, the Puritan distrust of new
ideas, the Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in itself,
and the full peer of the true and the good.
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