their plots from the fact that occasionally some statesman fails to conform to this law; there is a statesman who wants two ladies, or there are two ladies who want the statesman. Nature has not created man exclusively for the purpose of wearing a top-hat and a frock-coat, and making speeches in Parliament; nor do all women find complete satisfaction, like Mrs. Humphry Ward, in political labors to keep other women from getting the vote. There are women with mischief in them, who endeavor to tempt statesmen from exclusive devotion to "careers." And the statesmen are tempted; they commit indiscretions, such as taking walks in the moonlight with the evil females; and a thrill runs through all "society," and the tongues of the gossips wag furiously. Did they? Or did they not? The friends of the statesman rally to save him; and the enemies of the statesman sharpen their tomahawks; and Anglomaniacs, watching the scene, are thrilled as when Blondin on the tight-rope sets out to walk across Niagara Falls.

"We don't really need to worry," says Mrs. Ogi; "a hero is always a hero, and in all the books that I got from the little cigar-store in the Mississippi town, I cannot recall that one hero ever failed to become premier."

"It would be interesting," says Ogi, "to compile statistics on the question: How many premiers have there been in the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward, and how many in the recent history of the British Empire?"

CHAPTER C

THE UNCROWNED KING

We come now to study America in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The dominating factor in this period was the Civil War, a conflict in which the physical and moral energy of the country was exhausted. There followed the inevitable reaction: Abraham Lincoln was succeeded by the carpetbagger in the South and the tariff-boodler in the North. The very hero who had led the nation to victory, and had said, "Let us have peace," entered the White House to turn the government over to corruptionists. In the two generations following the Civil War America made enor

mous material and some intellectual progress, but no moral progress discernible. As I write this book, our political morals are embodied in a post-campaign jest: "The Republicans should have stolen the Washington monument, and then Coolidge would have carried Florida and South Carolina."

Provincial America in the decades following the Civil War based its religion upon the dogma that it was the most perfect nation upon God's footstool. The whiskydrinking, tobacco-chewing, obscenity-narrating, Grand Old Party-voting mob would tolerate no criticism, not even that kind implied by living differently. To it an artist was a freak, whom it punished with mockery and practical jokes. There were only two possible ways for him to survive; one was to flee to New York and be lost in the crowd; the other was to turn into a clown and join in laughing at himself, and at everything he knew to be serious and beautiful in life. This latter course was adopted by a man of truly great talent, who might have become one of the world's satiric masters if he had not been overpowered by the spirit of America. His tragic story has been told in a remarkable study, "The Ordeal of Mark Twain," by Van Wyck Brooks.

For something like forty years Mark Twain lived as an uncrowned American king; his friends referred to him thus-"the King." His was a life which seemed to have come out of the Arabian Nights' enchantment. His slightest move was good for columns in the newspapers; when he traveled about the world he was his country's ambassador at large-his baggage traveled free under consular dispensation, and in London and Vienna the very traffic regulations were suspended. When he went to Washington to plead for copyright laws, the two houses adjourned to hear him, and the speaker of the House turned over his private office to the king of letters. He made three hundred thousand dollars out of a single book, he made a fortune out of anything he chose to write. The greatest millionaires of the country were his intimate friends; he had a happy family, a strong constitution, inexhaustible energy-what more could a human being ask?

And yet Mark Twain was not happy. He grew less and less happy as time passed. Bitterness and despair began to creep into his writings; sentences like this: "Pity

is for the living, envy is for the dead." Stranger yet, it began to be whispered that America's uncrowned king was a radical! In times of stress some of us would go to him for help, for a word of sympathy or backing, and always this strange thing was noticed; he was full of understanding, and would agree with everything we said; yes, he was one of us. But when we asked for a public action, a declaration, he was not there.

"The Jungle" was published, and he wrote me a letter. It was burned in the Helicon Hall fire, and I recall only one statement: he had had to put the book down in the middle, because he could not endure the anguish it caused him. Naturally, I had my thoughts about such a remark. What right has a man to refuse to endure the anguish of knowing what other human beings are suffering? If these sufferings cannot be helped, why then perhaps we may flee from them; but think what the uncrowned king of America could have done, in the way of backing a young author who had aimed at the public's heart and by accident had hit it in the stomach!

Then came the Gorki case. The great Russian writer came to America to plead for freedom for his country, and to raise money for the cause. The intriguers of the tsar set out to ruin him, and turned the bloodhounds of the capitalist press upon him. A dinner in Gorki's honor had been planned, and Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were among the sponsors. The storm of scandal broke, and these two great ones of American letters turned tail and fled to cover.

A year or two later Mark Twain was visiting Bermuda, and came to see me. He had taken to wearing a conspicuous white costume, and with his snow-white hair and mustache he was a picturesque figure. He chatted about past times, as old men like to do. I saw that he was kind, warm-hearted, and also full of rebellion against capitalist greed and knavery; but he was an old man, and a sick man, and I did not try to probe the mystery of his life. The worm which was gnawing at his heart was not revealed, until in the course of time his letters were given to the public. Now we know the amazing story—that Mark Twain lived a double life; he, the uncrowned king of America, was the most repressed personality, the most

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He was born in a Missouri River town in 1835. His father was a futile dreamer with a perpetual motion machine. His mother was a victim of patent medicines, who had seen better days, and reared a family of ragged brats in a foul and shabby environment, where a boy saw four separate murders with his own eyes. "Little Sam" was a shy, sensitive child, his mother's darling, and she raised him in a fierce determination to have him grow up respectable and rich. He became a printer, then a pilot on the Mississippi River. This latter was a great career; the river pilot was the uncrowned king of this western country. He saw all the world in glorious fashion; he was a real artist, and at the same time carried a solemn responsibility.

The Civil War destroyed this career, and Mark Twain went out to Nevada to become a gold miner, promising his mother that he would never return until he had made a fortune. He failed as a miner, and was forced to live by journalism. So he drifted into becoming the world's buffoon. He always despised it-so much so that he put a pistol to his head. But he lacked the courage to pull the trigger, and had to go on and be a writer. His "Jumping Frog" story went around the world; after which he came East, and wrote "Innocents Abroad," and made his three hundred thousand dollars.

Shortly after that he exchanged the domination of his mother for that of a wife. He fell in love with the daughter of a wealthy coal-dealer in Elmira, New York. There was a terrible "to do" about it in respectable "upState" circles, for Samuel Clemens was a wild and woolly westerner, who didn't know how to handle a knife and fork, while the daughter of the coal-dealer had been brought up on an income of forty thousand dollars a year. However, this strange lover was a "lion," so they decided to accept him and teach him parlor tricks. They gave the young couple a carriage and coachman, and a house which had cost twenty-five thousand dollars; it wasn't long before he was completely justifying their faith, by living at the rate of a hundred thousand a year.

22

The wife was a frail woman, a semi-invalid, and Mark Twain adored her; also, he was awe-stricken before her,

because of her extremely high social position. She was ignorant, provincial, rigidly fixed in a narrow churchgoing respectability; by these standards she brought him up, and raised a couple of daughters to help him. As Clemens phrased it, his wife "edited" him; as his daughters phrased it, they "dusted papa off."

What these women did to America's greatest humorist makes one of the most amazing stories in the history of culture. They went over everything he wrote and revised it according to the standards of the Elmira bourgeoisie. They suppressed the greater part of his most vital ideas, and kept him from finishing his most important works. When he wrote something commonplace and conventional they fell on his neck with delight, and helped to spend the fortune which it brought in. When he told the truth about America, or voiced his own conclusions about life, they forced him to burn it, or hide it in the bottom of a trunk. His one masterpiece, "Huckleberry Finn," he wrote secretly at odd moments, taking many years at the task, and finally publishing it with anxiety. Mrs. Clemens came home from church one day, horrified by a rumor that her husband had put some swear words into a story; she made him produce the manuscript, in which poor Huck, telling how he can't live in the respectable world, exclaims: "They comb me all to hell." Now when you read "Huckleberry Finn," you read: "They comb me all to thunder!"

Mark Twain had in him the making of one of the world's great satirists. He might have made over American civilization, by laughing it out of its shams and pretensions. But he was not permitted to express himself as an artist; he must emulate his father-in-law, the Elmira coal-dealer. The unhappy wretch turned his attention to business ventures, and started a huge publishing business, to publish his own and other books. He sold three hundred thousand copies of General Grant's Memoirs, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies of other books, utterly worthless from the literary point of view.

He was always at the mercy of inventors with some new scheme to make millions. For example, there was a typesetting machine; he sunk a huge fortune into that, and would spend his time figuring what he was going to make so many millions that it almost made a billion. He