The Dreyfus case was an obsession with him. Finally, among many other writings of a similar tendency, there was his "Joan of Arc," in which he had summed up a life-time's rage against the forces in society that array themselves against the aspiring spirit. Joan of Arc has always been a favorite theme with old men, old men who have dreamed of the heroic life perhaps, without ever attaining it: the sharp realism of Anatole France's biography, which so infuriated Mark Twain, was, if he had known it, the prerogative of a veteran who, equally as the defender of Dreyfus, the comrade of Juarès and the volunteer of 1914, has proved that scepticism and courage are capable of a superb rapport. Mark Twain had not been able to rise to that level, and the sentimentality of his own study of Joan of Arc shows it. In his animus against the judges of Joan one perceives, however, a savage and despairing defense of the misprized poet, the betrayed hero, in himself. The outstanding fact about this later effort of Mark Twain's is that his energy is concentrated almost exclusively in attacks of one kind or another. His mind, whether for good or ill, has become thoroughly destructive. He is consumed by a will to attack, a will to abolish, a will to destroy: "sometimes," he had written, a few years earlier, "my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside." He who had become definitely a pessimist, we are told, at forty-eight, in the hour of his great prosperity, was possessed now with a rage for destruction. Who can doubt that this was pathological? He was so promiscuous in his attacks! Had he not, as early as 1881, assailed even the postage rates; had he not been thrown into a fury by an order from the Post Office Department on the superscription of envelopes? There were whole days, one is told, when he locked himself up in his rooms and refused to see his secretary, when he was like a raging animal consumed with a blind and terrible passion of despair: we can hear his leonine roars even in the gentle pages of his biographer. Mr. Paine tells how he turned upon him one day and said fiercely: "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not a single life that was ever lived that was worth living"; and again: "I have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end to it all. I will kill myself." Was that a pose, as Mr. Howells says? Was it a mere humorous fancy, that "plan" for exterminating the human race by withdrawing all the oxygen from the earth for two minutes? Was it a mere impersonal sympathy for mankind, that perpetual search for means of easement and alleviation, that obsessed interest in Christian Science, in therapeutics? Was it not all, in that sound and healthy frame, the index of a soul that was mortally sick? Mark Twain's attack upon the failure of human life was merely a rationalization of the failure in himself.