One thing that makes me suspect at times the general drift of Mr. Brooks’s argument is that a good many of the details of his psychoanalyzing look suspicious. Read in cold blood the account of the effect upon Mark Twain’s subsequent life of his promises to his mother on the occasion of his father’s death: “Already,” we are told, “he was ‘broken down’ by his father’s death: remorse had ‘laid a heavy hand on him.’ But what was this remorse; what had he done for grief or shame? ‘A hundred things in themselves trifling,’ which had offended in reality not his father’s heart, but his father’s will, as a conventional citizen with a natural desire to raise up a family in his own likeness. Feeble, frantic, furtive little feelings—out of this moody child, the first wavering steps of the soul; that is what they have really been, these peccadilloes, the dawn of the artist. And the formidable promptings of love tell him that they are sin! He is broken down indeed: all those crystalline fragments of individuality, still so tiny and so fragile, are suddenly shattered; his nature, wrought upon by the tense heat of that hour, has become again like soft wax. And his mother stamps there, with awful ceremony, the composite image of her own meagre traditions. He is to go forth the Good Boy by _force majeure_, he is to become such a man as his father would have approved of, he is to retrieve his father’s failure, to recover the lost gentility of his family that had once been proud, to realize that ‘mirage of wealth’ that had ever hung before his father’s eyes. And to do so he is not to quarrel heedlessly with his bread and butter, he is to keep strictly within the code, to remember the maxims of Ben Franklin, to respect all the prejudices and all the conventions; above all, he is not to be drawn aside into any fanciful orbit of his own!... Hide your faces, Huck and Tom! Put away childish things, Sam Clemens; go forth into the world, but remain always a child, your mother’s child!” Are eleven-year-old boys, even boys of genius, really ever made over so sharply as this? Mr. Brooks says “we feel with irresistible certitude that Mark Twain’s fate was once for all decided there.” I wonder if this is not the “irresistible certitude” of those romancers and evangelists who believe in instantaneous and irrevocable conversions. Barbarous and dangerous a thing as it is for parents to exact promises from their children under the pressure of bitter events, still it is rarely as bad as all that.