For if, observe, Mark Twain's first counselors at home had been plain men of business, with an eye single to returns in cash, he might have seen a light and made a stand against the career of self-exploitation into which he was drifting. It would not have been easy: from the moment when "The Jumping Frog" had "set all New York in a roar," business agents and other brokers in fame and bullion had begun to swarm about this popular young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship. But the counsels of some of the most famous and revered men in America played into the hands of these agents, and surrendered Mark Twain over to them. Anson Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward--these must have been great names to the Nevada miner of the sixties. One was a diplomat, one a clergy-man, one a writer; their national prestige was not based upon money; to Mark Twain they could not have seemed anything less than masters, in some degree, of the life of the spirit. And all their influence corroborated the choice Mark Twain had already made. It was during the "flush times" in Virginia City that he had met Artemus Ward who, on the pinnacle of his career, was, for all that little Nevada world, the very symbol of the literary life itself. "Clemens," we are told, "measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too could win fame and honor, once he got a start." We can see what Ward's counsel had been: he had accepted Mark Twain, not as a creative spirit with possibilities of inner growth before him--what could Artemus Ward have known about such things?--but as an embryonic institution, so to speak, as a "going concern," a man who had already capitalized himself and wanted only a few practical hints. Concretely he told him that he ought to "extend his audience eastward." Burlingame's advice was subtler, but it came to much the same thing. "You have great ability," said he; "I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky and Dickens and Victor Hugo had been constrained to accept such advice in their youth, where should we look now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House" and "Les Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward and Anson Burlingame for knowing nothing about the creative life and its processes; and how can we blame the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for not withstanding the prestige of men who, more than any others he had known, had won their spurs in the field of the spirit? Even if it had not already been too late, there were probably not ten souls in all America capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said to him: "You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least resistance.