In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extravagant, wasteful ways, the creative self in Mark Twain constantly strove to break through the censorship his own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was always lying in wait for Mark Twain, the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the _outré_, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia Clemens had to labor hardest against." Well she labored, and well Mark Twain labored with her! It was the spirit of the artist, bent upon upsetting the whole apple-cart of bourgeois conventions. They could, and they did, keep it in check; they arrested it and manhandled it and thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon it and prevented it from interfering too much with the respectable tenor of their daily search for prestige and success. They could baffle it and distort it and oblige it to assume ever more complicated and grotesque disguises in order to elude them, but they could not kill it. In ways of which they were unaware it escaped their vigilance and registered itself in a sort of cipher, for us of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the texture of Mark Twain's writings. For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books are shot through with all sorts of unconscious revelations of this internal conflict? In the Freudian psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed wish. In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to do but have been prevented from doing either by the exigencies of our daily routine, or by the obstacles of convention, or by some other form of censorship which has been imposed upon us, or which we ourselves, actuated by some contrary desire, have willingly accepted. Many other dreams, however, are not so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, absurd. In such cases it is because two opposed wishes, neither of which is fully satisfied, have met one another and resulted in a "compromise"--a compromise that is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two railway trains running at full speed. These mechanisms, the mechanisms of the "wish-fulfillment" and the "wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud has shown, in many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever, for any reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this process at work. Certain significant obsessions reveal themselves there, certain fixed ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am