When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anecdotes, the small change as it were of his literary life, had for their butt the petty aspects of the tribal morality of America--Sabbath-breaking, the taboos of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac, we can see that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day's a penny a year,"' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One was 'Pilgrim's Progress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these passages indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can substitute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made progress--the first progress in 'ages and ages'--colossal progress. In what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that