No briefer summary could do justice to a book in many respects so novel as this and no bare outline of Mr. Brooks’s argument could afford to be less uncompromising, for he himself is uncompromising in his general arraignment of the industrial civilization and the uncompleted culture which could hold Mark Twain down and of the qualities in his character which allowed him to be held. That it is an arraignment, however, and exhibits instances of special pleading and a definite animus must be admitted even by those who, like myself, agree that the picture here drawn of our greatest humourist is substantially accurate as well as brilliant. Let me cite some examples. Mark Twain once proposed a conundrum, “Why am I like the Pacific Ocean?” and himself answered it: “I don’t know. I was just asking for information.” “If he had not had a certain sense of colossal force,” comments Mr. Brooks, “it would never have occurred to him, however humorously, to compare ... his magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean.” It will not do to take the commentator here as seriously as he takes Mark Twain. Again, speaking of the instinct for protective coloration which led Mark Twain, with the other humorists, to adopt a pen-name, Mr. Brooks finds it an “interesting coincidence that ‘Mark Twain,’ in the pilot’s vocabulary, implied ‘safe water.’” Interesting indeed, but totally insignificant, though Mr. Brooks by mentioning it makes it look like a tiny aspersion on Mark Twain’s courage. And once more, this passage with regard to _Huckleberry Finn_, in which for once its author seems to Mr. Brooks to have slipped out of the silken net of which Mrs. Clemens held the drawstrings and the golden cage to which Mr. Howells held the key, and floated freely and gloriously down the Mississippi on a raft, essentially disguised as the joyful, illiterate, vagabond Huck. “That Mark Twain was almost if not quite conscious of his opportunity we can see from his introductory note to the book: ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.’ He feels so secure of himself that he can actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive!” With the aid of psychoanalysis one can find motives for any burst of mirth, but this explanation singularly recalls O. Henry’s remark about a certain husband whose wife was trying to provoke him to beat her so they could have the fun and luxury of making up: “Many ideas were far from his mind, but the farthest was the idea of beating his wife.”