How simple it becomes now, the unraveling of that mournful philosophy of his, that drab mass of crude speculation of which he said so confidently that it was "like the sky--you can't break through anywhere." How much it meant to him, the thought that man is a mere machine, an irresponsible puppet, entitled to no demerit for what he has failed to do! "Dahomey," he says, somewhere, "could not find an Edison out; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight but blind; and it is not itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior circumstances." What a comment, side by side with Mark Twain's life, upon Mr. Howells's statement that the world in which he "came into his intellectual consciousness" was "large and free and safe"--large, for the satirist, with Mrs. Clemens, free with Mr. Howells himself, and safe with H.H. Rogers! "If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no outside material to work with, and could have invented none; and no outside influences, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations of a valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would have produced nothing. In Turkey he would have produced something--something up to the highest limit of Turkish influences, associations and training. In France he would have produced something better--something up to the highest limit of the French influences and training".... Mark Twain fails to mention what would have happened to Shakespeare if he had been born in America. He merely adds, but it is enough: "You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out Gobelins." There we have his half-conscious verdict on the destiny of the artist in a society as "large and free and safe" as that of the Gilded Age.