Into this desiccating atmosphere Mark Twain came just when its best spiritual oxygen had all been pumped out. Too insecure in his own standards not to defer to those of the established East, he took the standards of the first persons under whose influence he fell. There was his wife, who had been brought up in Elmira, in “up-state” New York, where a “stagnant, fresh water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular sectarianism, eviscerated politics, and raw money, ruled the roost, imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to submit to it or to imitate it.” Mark Twain submitted and imitated, with the result that he, who had in himself the makings of a _sans-culotte_, became in most outward ways a pillar of society, and he who was built to be a Rabelais of loud, large, exuberant satire, became instead a writer quite safe (with a few furtively obscene exceptions, such as “1601”) for the domestic fireside and the evening lamp. And not only his wife was to blame. There was William Dean Howells, whom Boston, lacking any such energetic blood of its own in those decaying days, had had to import from Ohio, but who without serious struggle accepted the spinsterly principles of Boston, decided that “the more smiling aspects of life are the more American,” and, as regards Mark Twain, tamed him with the doctrines of a timid gentility and a surface realism. Once handcuffed between these two good and gentle captors, Mark Twain was lost. Instead of satirizing the United States as he was born to do, he satirized medieval France and England and generally the great, deep past of Europe, thereby actually multiplying the self-congratulations of which his countrymen had already too much the habit. Instead of telling the truth about contemporary life, which he had the eyes to see, he kept a thousand silences on matters about which he could not say what he saw and thought without hurting the feelings of his friends—that is, the privileged class. Instead of building some precious edifice of beauty that might dare the sun and shake the very spheres, as great beauty does, he was content to laugh at beauty or at least at those exceptional creatures who follow it into paths that to duller men seem vague or ridiculous. Poor Mark Twain, Mr. Brooks in effect concludes, he was born to be a master and creator, but he died having never been anything but the victim of his epoch—the “saddest, most ironical figure,” the playboy of the Western World.