At the circus, no doubt, you have watched some trained lion going through the sad motions of a career to which the tyrannical curiosity of men has constrained him. At times he seems to be playing his part with a certain zest; he has acquired a new set of superficial habits, and you would say that he finds them easy and pleasant. Under the surface, however, he remains the wild, exuberant creature of the jungle. It is only thanks to the eternal vigilance of his trainers and the guiding-lines they provide for him in the shape of the ring, the rack and all the rest of the circus-paraphernalia that he continues to enact this parody of his true life. Have his instincts been modified by the imposition of these new habits? Look at him at the moment when the trainer ceases to crack his whip and turns his back. In a flash another self has possessed him: in his glance, in his furtive gesture you perceive the king of beasts once more. The sawdust of the circus has become the sand of the desert; twenty thousand years have rolled back in the twinkling of an eye. So it was with Mark Twain. "We have no _real_ morals," he wrote in one of his later letters, "but only artificial ones, morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts." Now that is not true of the man who is master of himself. The morality of the free man is not based upon the suppression of his instincts but upon the discreet employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes to it. Mark Twain, as we have seen, had conformed to a moral régime in which the profoundest of his instincts could not function: the artist had been submerged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business, the respectable Presbyterian citizen. To play his part, therefore, he had to depend upon the cues his wife and his friends gave him. Here we have the explanation of his statement: "Outside influences, outside circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would not be valuable." We can see from this how completely his conscious self had accepted the point of view of his trainers, how fully he had concurred in their desire to repress that unmanageable creative instinct of his, how ashamed, in short, he was of it. Nevertheless, that instinct, while repressed, while unconscious, continued to live and manifest itself just the same. We shall see that in the end, never having been able to develop, to express itself, to fulfill itself, to air itself in the sun and the wind of the world, it turned as it were black and malignant, like some monstrous, morbid inner growth, poisoning Mark Twain's whole spiritual system. We have now to note its constant blind efforts to break through the censorship that had been imposed on it, to cross the threshold of the unconscious and play its part in the