out at last in utter misanthropy.... It is an American evolution!” The most significant history of our national quest for a material happiness is perhaps embodied in the work of Mark Twain, whose much-discussed pessimism may be explained mainly by the fact that, as the spokesman of frontier America living exclusively “in the present,” he served as the faithful mirror to a whole nation in which an Industrial Revolution, philosophic mechanistic determinism, and the collapse of illusions led to despair. His stories illustrate the changing importance of the two planes of consciousness in the frontier mind--the consciousness of a hopeful and radiant illusion, and the consciousness of a hopeless and sordid reality. Take three stories, representing three different periods. _The Jumping Frog_ (1865), dealing with the winning of a bet by roguery, embodies in a humorous way the reckless exuberance and joyousness of the dawning West after the Gold Rush. To this type belong also the books which glorify the “natural man” and the free-born American--_Roughing It_ (1873), _Tom Sawyer_ (1876), _Life on the Mississippi_ (1883), and _Huck Finn_ (1884). In contrast, his first book, _Innocents Abroad_ (1869), represents the frontiersman’s life-long contempt for European tradition and Europe, “one vast museum of magnificence and misery,” groping “in the midnight of priestly superstition for sixteen hundred years.” A story of a second period, _The Million Pound Bank Note_ (1893) mirrors a materialistic “gilded age” in which, lured on by a fabulous hope, men bowed to the Golden Calf while the spectre of reality haunted their thoughts. In this story the two planes of consciousness are in equipoise until the end, when the plane of illusion prevails. It is the tale, briefly, of how a poor tramp masquerades as the owner of a million pound bank note; grim poverty stalks behind him, but every one worships the illusion of his wealth, and he finally wins the girl of his heart as well as the million pounds. The story is a parable of the West: these were the days of illusory fortunes in transcontinental railroads, in iron and steel, the days of the Morgans and Carnegies and Fricks and Goulds. “I am,” said Mark Twain, “frightened at the proportion of my prosperity ... Whatever I touch turns to gold.” In 1895 he was bankrupt. But take a story representative of the third period--_The $30,000 Bequest_ (1907). A poor book-keeper and his wife, learning of a promised fortune at the death of a relative, each night “put the plodding world away, and lived in another and a fairer, reading romances to each other, dreaming dreams, comrading with kings and princes.” They increasingly neglect realities and scorn their associates. “The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit--how it grows! What a luxury it becomes; how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies--oh, yes,