Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/499

Rh necticut Yankee itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the most ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of his works. Nothing could be more illuminating than a glance at his motives in writing it.

What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? "The book," he says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level of manhood in turn."

No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he would have blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was not characteristic of him to talk about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a pet. Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us, with many deprecating gestures of those superangelic hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always have been slightly irritating—he was irritating even at home, and how much more irritating when, having visited this country, he chose to dwell upon the rudimentary language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw red. An animadversion upon General Grant's grammar was an attack upon General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack America, an attack upon America and upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his pocket-book as the publisher of General Grant, upon his amour-propre as the countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him rose to the assault like a bull-buffalo in defence of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his fists and said, "You're another!"—just as he did a few years later in his reply to Paul Bourget. Then, longing for "a pen warmed up in hell," he set to work to put those red-coats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General Cornwallis and all the rest of them, for by this time he was in the full furore of the myth of the American Revolution, in their place. He even began a frantic defence of American newspapers, which at other times he could not revile enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities like this: "Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior." In short, he