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 whisky-drinking, 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.