"Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I can't _stand_ it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub comes too easy. I don't take no interest in vittles, that way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in a-swimming--dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do everything. Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort--I'd got to go up in the attic and rip out a while, every day, to git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before folks.... I _had_ to shove, Tom--I just had to.... Now these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I ain't ever going to shake 'em any more...." This chapter began with the analogy of the lion in the circus. You see what happens with Mark Twain when the trainer turns his back. CHAPTER IX MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR "To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and less trouble." _Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar._ And now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor. We recall how reluctant Mark Twain was to adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he was in revolt against a rôle which, as he vaguely felt, had been thrust upon him: that he considered it necessary to publish his "Joan of Arc" anonymously is only one of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark Twain was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other than artistic self-expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it, we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral and esthetic development. We have seen, on the other hand, that he adopted this career because his humor was the only writing he did in Nevada that found an appreciative audience and that the immediate result of his decision was that he obtained from the American public the prodigious and permanent approval which his own craving for success and prestige had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts our discussion of Mark Twain's humor-will have to explain. We must see what that humor was, and what produced it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and at the same time achieved such ample material rewards.