And this failure was the failure of the artist in him. Glance back thirty years; hear what he writes to Mr. Howells from Italy in 1878: "I wish I _could_ give those sharp satires on European life which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I _hate_ travel, and I _hate_ hotels, and I _hate_ the opera, and I _hate_ the old masters. In truth, I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort would burst me." That is what had become of the satirist, that is what had become of the artist, thirty years before He, the unconscious sycophant of the crass materialism of the Gilded Age, who had, in "The Innocents Abroad," poured ignorant scorn upon so many of the sublime creations of the human spirit, he, the playboy, the comrade and emulator of magnates and wire-pullers, had begun even then to pay with an impotent fury for having transgressed his own instincts unawares. A born artist ridiculing art, a born artist hating art, a born artist destroying art--there we have the natural evolution of a man who, in the end, wishes to destroy himself and the world. How angrily suspicious he is, even this early, of all æsthetic pretensions! What a fierce grudge he has against those who lay claim to a certain affection for the perverse mysteries of high art! They want to get into the dress circle, he says, by a lie; that's what they're after! The "Slave Ship," for all Ruskin's fine phrases, reminds him of a cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes. Etcetera, etcetera. Here we have the familiar figure of the peasant who imagines a woman must be a prostitute because she wears a low-cut dress. But the peasant spits on the ground and walks on. Mark Twain cannot take it so lightly: that low-cut dress is a red rag to him; he foams and stamps wherever he sees it. Is it not evident that he is the prey of some appalling repression? It is not in the nature of man to desire a club so that he can pound works of art into rags and pulp unless they are the symbols of something his whole soul unconsciously desires to create and has been prevented from creating. Do we ask, then, why Mark Twain "detested" novels? It was because he had been able to produce only one himself, and that a failure.