As we have seen, personal and private loyalties had come to take precedence in Mark Twain's mind over all other loyalties; no ideal, with him, no purpose, no belief, was to be weighed for a moment if the pursuit of it, or the promulgation of it, was likely to hurt the feelings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned a book on England and collected volumes of notes for it only to give over the scheme because he was afraid his criticism or his humor would "offend those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Imagine Emerson having been prevented by any such consideration from writing "English Traits"! I have pointed out how utterly Mark Twain had failed to rise to the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument, how immersed he was in the petty, provincial values of a semi-rustic bourgeoisie among whom the slightest expression of individuality was regarded as an attack on somebody's feelings or somebody's pocket-book. As time had gone on, therefore, and his circle of friends had come to include most of the main pillars of American society, it had become less and less possible for the tongue-tied artist in him to assert itself against the complacent pioneer. We know what his instinctive religious tendency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How, then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his gratitude, was to say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore when he found me in deep water"--this man had given too many hostages to the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for in the world, the only man I would give a d---- for, the only man who is lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation is a Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book or not." His obligations had gradually come to be innumerable. We find him urging Mr. Rogers to interest the Rockefellers "and the other Standard Oil chiefs" in Helen Keller, trying to inveigle Carnegie into his moribund publishing business as a partner, accepting from "Saint