he never had anywhere else in his life, he was capable of relapsing again into the temper and texture of the herd when he drifted to the still wilder frontier of the Rockies and the Pacific Coast. There, where any affection for privacy seemed a contempt for society and any differentiation from the crowd seemed almost an insult to it, Mark Twain had no choice, if he was to express himself and still be respectable and amiable, but to express himself in the permitted idiom of the humourist. “Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous cast. Plainly, also, the humourist was a type that pioneer society required in order to maintain its psychical equilibrium.” Laughter was the only ultimate weapon in the desperate battle with the wilderness. “Women laughed,” as Albert Bigelow Paine phrases it, “that they might not weep; men when they could no longer swear.” That such laughter was heroic, Mr. Brooks, a humane critic, would admit, but he is too ardently, too fiercely, a partisan of the divine right of the creative impulse to feel that Mark Twain’s submission to such laughter was less than deeply tragic. And when the first harvests of fame released this Pacific humourist from his humorous prison, what had he to turn to? Nothing, Mr. Brooks answers, but the Gilded Age of our Reconstruction madness, when the entire nation, with a fearful homogeneity, was out money-hunting as it had never been before; when natural resources hitherto unsuspected were being tapped, and such sparse resources of the soul as had existed here and there under the régime of our ancient culture were being deserted, almost as obviously as were those stony farms which the most alive natives of New England were leaving to the shiftless men and hesitant, half-alive virgins who had to carry on the stock and the traditions.