undeveloped genius, like space itself, with all the stars of space, following some dim orbit perhaps, but beyond the certain consciousness, outside the feeblest control, of any mortal mind? An undeveloped genius, an undeveloped artistic faculty--could there be a surer sign of it than this lack of inner control? What we observe in all this prodigal and chaotic display of energy is the natural phenomenon who has not acquired the characteristics of the artist at all, those two supreme characteristics, especially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his writings patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritanism has monopolized for the moral life, but which are of the essence of all art. Patience, conscience, economy, self-knowledge, all those humble traits of the wise and sober workingman which every mature artist is--where shall we look for them in Mark Twain's record? "I don't know that I can write a play that will play," he says, in a letter from Vienna in 1898; "but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't play." This fumbling, frantic child of sixty-three has forgotten that years before he had been convinced, and with every reason, that write a play he could not. And hear him again: "I have begun twenty magazine articles and books--and flung every one of them aside in turn." Is this a young apprentice, impatiently trying out the different aspects of a talent about which he is still in the dark? No, it is a veteran of letters, who has been writing books for thirty years and who, far from attempting new and difficult experiments in his craft, lacks nothing but the perseverance to carry out some trivial undertaking on an old and well-tried pattern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; nevertheless, those months in Vienna whose tale he tells were almost typical of his life. He appears habitually to have had five or six books going at once which he found it almost impossible to finish; there were always swarms of beginnings, but his impulse seldom carried him through. This was true even of the writing of those books in which, as one might suppose, he was most happily expressing himself. He groaned over "Life on the Mississippi" and only drove himself on in order to fulfill an absurd contract that Mark Twain the writer had made with Mark Twain the publisher. And, strangest of all, as it would seem if we did not know how little his wife approved of the book, there was "Huckleberry Finn." This man who had experienced a "consuming interest and delight" in the composition of a play which Mr. Paine calls "a dreary, absurd, impossible performance"--no doubt because he had been able to write the whole of it, three hundred pages, in forty-two hours by the clock, only by a sort of chance, it appears, finished his one masterpiece at all. He