That he preserved, in the back of his mind, his spiritual vision and knowledge, there can be no doubt. He sinned not only against the light, but in the light. One or two revealing phrases in his works have escaped the censorship of the female American he married. “In our country,” he said, “we have three unspeakably precious things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to practise either.” It must be admitted that this is a “snag” in the smooth current of a work of amusement; it betokened the existence of depths and danger. But it is nothing to the remarks let off in conversation on the rare occasions when the censor was absent. “I’ve a good mind,” he once said to a friend, “to blow the gaff on the whole damned human race.” It is tragedy, indeed, that he never did. We have the gaff blown on us all too seldom, and usually by men whose idiosyncrasies and abnormalities allow us to ignore them. Mark Twain was such a normal man that his blowing of the gaff could not possibly have been attributed to a neurotic complex derived from infantile suppression: it would have been the judgment of man upon Man. His failure to bestow this inestimable gift upon America and the world we owe to America, and if, as I have said, a nation suffers the fate of its great men, we may be sure that America will pay for it. AMERICA REGRESSING.—Just when we in Europe were beginning to envy America her promise, contrasting it with the winter of our own discontent, “the authorities” (as one might say the furies, the parcæ or the weird sisters) have descended upon our unfortunate but deserving friend, the _Little Review_, and suspended its mail service on account of its publication of a chapter of Mr. James Joyce’s new novel, _Ulysses_. That such an absurd act of puritanic spleen should be possible after and before years of world-war is evidence that spiritual meanness is hard to transcend; and it confirms the justice or, at least, the apprehension expressed in Mr. Ezra Pound’s _bon mot_ that the U.S.A. should be renamed the Y.M.C.A. Not only is the _Little Review_ perfectly harmless; would to heaven, indeed, that it were, or could be otherwise, for never can any good be done by something incapable of doing harm; but the _Ulysses_ of Mr. James Joyce is one of the most interesting symptoms in the present literary world, and its publication is very nearly a public obligation. Such sincerity, such energy, such fearlessness as Mr. Joyce’s are rare in any epoch, and most of all in our own, and on that very account they demand to be given at least the freedom of the Press. What the giant America can fear from Mr. Joyce or from his publication in the _Little Review_ passes understanding. Abounding in every variety of crime and stupidity as America is, even if _Ulysses_ were a literary crime committed in a journal of the largest circulation, one more or less could not make much difference to America. But _Ulysses_ is no crime; but a