You see Mark Twain's intention. He is going to write, for his own redemption, the great book that all the world is thirsting for, the book it will gladly, however impatiently, wait a hundred years to read. And what happens? "He found it," says Mr. Paine, "a pleasant, lazy occupation," which prepares us for the kind of throbbing truth we are going to get. Twenty-six instalments of that Autobiography were published before he died in the _North American Review_. They were carefully selected, no doubt, not to offend: the brimstone was held in reserve. But as for the quality of that brimstone, can we not guess it in advance! "He confessed freely," says Mr. Paine, "that he lacked the courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his soul bare." One paragraph, in fact, that found its way into print among the diffuse and superficial impressions of the _North American Review_ gives us, we may assume, the measure of his general candor: "I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I should put in all or any of these incidents I should be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this book." Bernard Shaw once described America as a nation of villagers. Well, Mark Twain had become the Village Atheist, the captain of his type, the Judge Driscoll of a whole continent. "Judge Driscoll," we remember, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own notions." Mark Twain had proved himself superlatively "smart"; he was licensed to say his say what inhibited him now, therefore, even more than his habits of moral slavery, was a sense--how can we doubt it?--a half-unconscious sense that, concerning life itself, he had little of importance to communicate. His struggle of conscience over the publication of "What Is Man?" points, it is true, toward another conclusion. But certainly the writing of his Autobiography must have shown him that with all the will in the world, and with the freedom of absolute privacy, he was incapable of the grand utterance of the prophets and the confessors. There was nothing to prevent him from publishing "3000 Years Among the Microbes," the design of which was apparently free from personalities, if he had been sufficiently interested to finish it. He thought of founding a School of Philosophy at Redding like that other school at Concord. But none of these impulses lasted. His prodigious "market value" confirmed him at moments, no doubt, in thinking himself a Nestor; but something within this tragic old man must have told him that he was