"Tell the truth," in short, he could not; his life had given him so little truth to tell. His seventieth birthday had left him free to speak out; and yet, just as he "played safe" as a public sage, so also he continued to play safe as a writer. "Am I honest?" he wrote in that same seventy-first year to Twitchell. "I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." It was his "Bible"--"What Is Man?"--which, as he had said some years before, "Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it." Did he publish it at last? Yes, anonymously; and from that final compromise we can see that his "mustering out" had come too late. He could not rouse himself, indeed, from the inertia with which old age and long habits of easy living had fortified the successful half of his double personality. Tolstoy, at eighty, set out on a tragic pilgrimage to redeem in his own eyes a life that had been compromised by wealth and comfort: but the poet in Tolstoy had never slumbered nor slept! It had kept the conflict conscious, it had registered its protest, not sporadically but every day, day in, day out, by act and thought; it had kept its right of way open. Mark Twain had lived too fully the life of the world; the average sensual man had engulfed the poet. Like an old imprisoned revolutionist it faced the gates of a freedom too long deferred. What visions of revolt had thrilled it in earlier years! How it had shaken its bars! But now the sunlight was so sweet, the run of a little sap along those palsied limbs. On his seventieth birthday Mark Twain was dazzled by his liberty. He was going to tell the world the truth, the whole truth, and a little more than the truth! Within a week he found that he no longer had the strength.