Without for a moment denying Mr. Brooks the credit of being the first critic to dig importantly about the roots of an American man of genius, and indeed of making clear much that was not clear before, I still think he has reduced Mark Twain too neatly to the dualistic formula. For all this critic’s learning and research and penetration, he does not quite give the effect of having been and seen entirely around the subject of his study. Just in proportion as Mark Twain was stupendously casual, as wasteful as nature in his processes, not always purposive at all but a rioter in whims and unprophesiable explosions, an amateur of the drifting life, Mr. Brooks appears to have missed him, because he misses there what he conceives to be “the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a single flood, all poise, all natural control.” As in his earlier study of John Addington Symonds, Mr. Brooks is rigorously monistic—almost monotheistic—in his conception of the creative life, so rigorously that he has come to see any sort of dualism in an artist’s nature as not only the chief of tragedies but indeed as the chief of sins against his function and destiny. Ibsen felt that way about it and so did Milton on somewhat different grounds, but Molière and Shakespeare, if they had thought much about the matter, would pretty certainly have laid the emphasis much nearer the tragedy than the sin. And even whatever tragic aspect there might be would be somewhat relieved for them, I suspect, as _King Lear_ by its poetry, by such an abundance of life as Mark Twain had and tasted. Is it merely being deceived by quantity to feel that Mr. Brooks, so avidly exigent as regards quality, limits too narrowly his judgments as regards the creative process and its achievements, and by despising quantity overlooks some quality too? At least I am persuaded that Mr. Brooks has taken the vast figure of Mark Twain, both fact and myth, and has recreated it too near his own image, making the Mark Twain of his re-creation suffer more both in his submerged and his dominant selves than the originally created Mark Twain did by reason of the turbulent confusion of his career. Mr. Brooks, sparer, more clear-cut, more conscious, would thus have suffered if _he_ had walked such a fraying path.