The more you read this story the more appalling you find it. This uncrowned king of America built up literally a double personality; he took to writing two sets of letters, one containing what he really wanted to say, and the other what his official public self was obliged to say. He accumulated a volume of “unmailed letters,” one of the weirdest phenomena in literary history. He was indignant at the ending of the Russian-Japanese war, because he believed that if it had continued for a couple of months more the tsar would have been overthrown. When Colonel George Harvey invited him to dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference, he wrote a blistering telegram, in which he declared himself inferior as a humorist to those statesmen who had “turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and blithesome comedy.” But he did not send that telegram; he sent another, full of such enraptured praise of the Russian diplomats that Count Witte sent it to the tsar! That is only one sample out of many. He wrote a War Prayer, a grim satire upon the Christian custom of praying for victory. “I have told the whole truth in that,” he said to a friend; and then added the lamentable conclusion: “Only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.” He explained the reason--this financier who had fortunes to blow in upon mechanical inventions: “I have a family to support, and I can’t afford this kind of dissipation.” And again: “The silent, colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else begin.” Of course a man who wrote like this despised himself. It was the tragedy of Tolstoi, but in a far more humiliating form; Tolstoi at least wrote what he pleased, and did in the end break with his family. But Mark Twain stayed in the chains of love and respectability--his bitterness boiling and steaming in him like a volcano, and breaking out here and there with glare and sulphurous fumes. “The damned and mangy human race,” was one of his phrases; and again he wrote: “My idea of our civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs.”