Forbidden to print it, he had "laboriously translated it into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the German version had been suppressed." And how does he accept Mr. Howells's injunction about the "swearing" in "Huckleberry Finn"? "Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning," he writes, "and the next minute she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her tongue, 'Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?' Then I had to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little one-sided?" They are very humiliating, these glimpses of great American writers behind the scenes, given "rats" by their wives whenever they stray for an instant from the strait and narrow path that leads to success. "Once," writes Mr. Paine, "when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party--in Rome--he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. 'Youth,' said Mrs. Clemens, gravely, 'if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of others'; and Miss Jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now you've been spoke to!'" Very humiliating, very ignominious, I say, are these tableaux of "the Lincoln of our literature" in the posture of an ignorant little boy browbeaten by the dry sisters of Culture-Philistia. Very humiliating, and also very tragic! Mark Twain had come East with the only conscious ambition that Western life had bred in him, the ambition to succeed in a practical sense, to win wealth and fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seeking, seeking, seeking for corroboration, for the frank hand and the gallant word that might set it free. We know this from the dim hope of liberation he had associated with the idea of marriage, and we can guess that his eager desire to meet "men of superior intellect and character" was more than half a desire to find some one who could give him that grand conception of the literary life which he had never been able to formulate, some one who could show him how to meet life in the proud, free way of the artist, how to unify himself and focus his powers. Well, he had met the best, the greatest, he had met the man whom the Brahmins themselves had crowned as their successor, he had met Mr. Howells. And in this man of marvelous talent, this darling of all the gods and all the graces, he had encountered once more the eternal, universal, instinctive American subservience to what Mr. Santayana calls "the genteel tradition." He had reached, in short, the heaven of literature and found it empty, and there was nothing beyond for the poet in him to seek.