The critic assumes, every time, that if a book doesn't meet the

cultivated-class standard, it isn't valuable. Let us apply his law all

around: for if it is sound in the case of novels, narratives, pictures,

and such things, it is certainly sound and applicable to all the steps

which lead up to culture and make culture possible. It condemns the

spelling book, for a spelling book is of no use to a person of culture;

it condemns all school books and all schools which lie between the

child's primer and Greek, and between the infant school and the

university; it condemns all the rounds of art which lie between the

cheap terra cotta groups and the Venus de Medici, and between the chromo

and the Transfiguration; it requires Whitcomb Riley to sing no more till

he can sing like Shakespeare, and it forbids all amateur music and will

grant its sanction to nothing below the "classic."

Is this an extravagant statement? No, it is a mere statement of fact.

It is the fact itself that is extravagant and grotesque. And what is the

result? This--and it is sufficiently curious: the critic has actually

imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is

more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo;

and the august opera than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers' singing

society; and Homer than the little everybody's-poet whose rhymes are in

all mouths today and will be in nobody's mouth next generation; and

the Latin classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan

Edwards than the Salvation Army; and the Venus de Medici than the

plaster-cast peddler; the superstition, in a word, that the vast and

766

The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete