But is it possible for a creative mind to find "contentment" in denying the possibility of creation? And why should any one find pride and satisfaction in the belief that man is wholly irresponsible, in the denial of "free will"? One remembers the fable of the fox and the sour grapes, one remembers all those forlorn and tragic souls who find comfort in saying that love exists nowhere in the world because they themselves have missed it. Certainly it could not have afforded Mark Twain any pleasure to feel that he was "entitled to no personal merit" for what he had done, for what he had achieved in life; the pleasure he felt sprang from the relief his theory afforded him, the relief of feeling that he was not responsible for what he had failed to achieve--namely, his proper development as an artist. He says aloud, "Shakespeare could not create," and his inner self adds, "How in the world, then, could I have done so?" He denies "free will" because the creative life is the very embodiment of it--the emergence, that is to say, the activity in a man of one central, dominant, integrating principle that turns the world he confronts into a mere instrument for the registration of his own preferences. There is but one interpretation, consequently, which we can put upon Mark Twain's delight in the conception of man as an irresponsible machine: it brought him comfort to feel that if he was, as he said, a "sewing-machine," it was the doing of destiny, and that nothing he could have done himself would have enabled him to "turn out Gobelins." From his philosophy alone, therefore, we can see that Mark Twain was a frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested development, and beyond this fact, as we know from innumerable instances the psychologists have placed before us, we need not look for an explanation of the chagrin of his old age. He had been balked, he had been divided, he had even been turned, as we shall see; against himself; the poet, the artist in him, consequently, had withered into the cynic and the whole man had become a spiritual valetudinarian. But this is a long story: to trace it we shall have to glance not only at Mark Twain's life and work, but also at the epoch and the society in which he lived. CHAPTER II THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE "One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is dried up in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, but they are essentially not happy," STENDHAL: _On Love in the United States_.