Age" alone, in the sole character of Laura Hawkins, one can fairly say, he handles the material of real life with the novelist's intention, and what a character, what a love-story, hers is! "It is a long story: unfortunately, it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt upon," he says of Laura's seduction, with a prudent eye for the refined sensibilities of those ladies of Hartford under whose surveillance the book was written. It was a fortunate thing that Mark Twain did not attempt to dwell upon it: he would have had his task showing in detail how the fair and virginal Laura became the "consummate artist in passion" he says she did! He turns Laura into a Jezebel because, it is perfectly plain, the moral prepossessions of Hartford having been transgressed in her person, it was the popular melodramatic thing to do. He was both afraid and unable to present her character truly, and, in consequence, too impatient, too indifferent, too little interested, even to attempt it. We have here the conclusive, the typical, illustration of his failure as a creative artist. His original submission to the taboos of his environment had prevented him from assimilating life: consequently, he was prevented as much by his own immaturity as by fear of public opinion from ever attempting seriously to recreate it in his imagination. We can best describe Mark Twain, therefore, as an improvisator, a spirit with none of the inner control, none of the self-determination of the artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and at the solicitation of influences external to himself. It is remarkable how many of his ideas are developments of "news items" floating about in his journalist's imagination, items like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case. Except for the ever-recurring themes of Huck and Tom, one would say that his own spirit never prompted his imagination at all; certainly his own spirit never controlled it. His books are without form and without development; they tell themselves, their author never holds the reins--a fact he naïvely confesses in the preface of "Those Extraordinary Twins": "Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private venture of their own." Moreover, he depended upon outside stimulus, not to quicken his mental machinery merely, but actually to set it going. When, in later life, he wrote that man is "moved, directed, commanded by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing his personal experience.