Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's humor. An outlet of some kind that prodigious energy of his was bound to have, and this outlet, since he had been unable to throw himself whole-heartedly into mining, had to be one which, in some way, however obliquely, expressed the artist in him. That expression, nevertheless, had also to be one which, far from outraging public opinion, would win its emphatic approval. Mark Twain was obliged to remain a "good fellow" in order to succeed, in order to satisfy his inordinate will-to-power; and we have seen how he acquiesced in the suppression of all those manifestations of his individuality--his natural freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy--that struck his comrades as "different" or "superior." His choice of a pen-name, as we have noticed, proves how urgently he felt the need of a "protective coloration" in this society where the writer was a despised type. Too sensitive to relieve himself by horseplay, he had what one might call a preliminary recourse in his profanity, those "scorching, singeing blasts" he was always directing at his companions, and that this in a measure appeased him we can see from Mr. Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of his high-pressure intellectual engine.... When he had blown off he was always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender." We can best see his humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it in the phrase, "Men laughed when they could no longer swear"--as the expression, in short, of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could find relief in swearing, as a harmless "moral equivalent," in other words, of those acts of violence which his own sensitiveness and his fear of consequences alike prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious jokes--and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a ferocity that will hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically--he could vent his hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those conditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could, in this vicarious manner, appease the artist in him, while at the same time keeping on the safe side of public opinion, the very act of transforming his aggressions into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made it a relief to him made it also popular. According to Freud, whose investigations in this field are perhaps the most enlightening we have, the pleasurable effect of humor consists in affording "an economy of expenditure in feeling." It requires an infinitely smaller psychic effort to expel one's spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke or a murder, the common method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely safer, too!--a fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist in pioneer society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of those jokes of his--("men were killed every week," says Mr. Paine, of