We can understand now that intense will-of-to-believe in the creative life which Mark Twain revealed in his later writings. "Man originates nothing, not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. He was a machine, and machines do not create." Is it possible to mistake the animus in that? Mark Twain was an ardent Baconian: in that faith, he said, "I find comfort, solace, peace and never-failing joy." I will say nothing of the complete lack of intuition concerning the psychology of the artist revealed in his pamphlet, "Is Shakespeare Dead?" It is astonishing that any writer could have composed this, that any one but a retired business man or a lawyer infatuated with ratiocination could have so misapprehended the nature and the processes of the poetic mind. But Mark Twain does not write like a credulous business man, indulging his hobby; he does not even write like a lawyer, feverishly checking off the proofs of that intoxicating evidence: he is defiant, he exults in the triumph of his own certitude, he stamps on Shakespeare, he insults him, he delights in pouring vulgar scorn upon that ingenuous bust in Stratford Church, with its "deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder." And why? Because the evidence permits him to believe that Shakespeare was an ignorant yokel. Bacon was the man, Bacon knew everything, Bacon was a lawyer--see what Macaulay says! Macaulay, heaven bless us all!--therefore, Bacon wrote the plays. Is this Mark Twain speaking, the author of the sublime illiteracies of "Huckleberry Finn," who had been himself most the artist when he was least the sophisticated citizen? It is, and he is speaking in character. He who asserted that man is a chameleon and is nothing but what his training makes him had long lost the intuition of the poet and believed perforce that without Bacon's training those plays could not have been written. But would he have stamped with such a savage joy upon that yokel Shakespeare if the fact, as he imagined, that man creates nothing had not had for him a tragic, however unconscious, significance? One can hardly doubt that when one considers that Mark Twain was never able to follow the Bacon ciphers, when one considers the emotional prepossession revealed in his own statement that he accepted those ciphers mainly on faith.