as a means of free individual expression but as something naturally conditioned by the laws of supply and demand, all the evidence of his life goes to show. I have quoted his eulogy of the old Mississippi pilot and his description of the writer, by contrast, as "a manacled servant of the public": "we write frankly and fearlessly," he adds, naïvely, "but then we 'modify' before we print." One might imagine that such a thing as an artist had never existed. Am I anticipating? Go back now; go back to 1867, to the moment of Mark Twain's Cooper Union lecture, when he finds himself, in the hands of his agent Fuller, advertised to "play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese jugglers." Mark Twain hesitates. Fuller is obdurate. "What we want this time," he says, "is reputation anyway--money is secondary." So he floods the house with complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of the city. "Mark," he says, after the lecture is over, "Mark, it's all right. The fortune didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are going to be the most talked of man in the country." It was true. But in that moment--that typical moment, in that reluctance, in that acquiescence, in that corroboration, Mark Twain's die had been cast. ... Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark Twain who is going to walk the boards of the Gilded Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes to his mother: "You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt"; it is a formidable spirit, that _alter ego_ within him,--he is going to hear its bitter promptings later on. Now, however, his triumph drowns its voice: his private, personal and domestic interests have wholly supplanted the dim and wavering sense of his vocation. "Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things," says Mr. Paine; "he wished to make money and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion." Mark Twain often spoke of the rigidity of determinism, of the inexorable sequence of cause and effect. As Mr. Paine says--with an emphasis of his own--he had but to review his own life for justification of his belief. From this point on, his career was a steady process of what is called adaptation to environment. He had abdicated that spiritual independence without which the creative life is impossible. He was to "lose himself" now, to quote Whitman's phrase, in "countless masses of adjustments." CHAPTER V THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY "Follow his call? Good heavens! That is what men do as bachelors; but an engaged man only follows his bride." IBSEN: _The Comedy of Love_.