even from openly complaining or criticizing it. In this respect their position was parallel to that of soldiers in the trenches. And, like the soldiers in the trenches, they were always on the verge of laughter, which philosophers generally agree in calling a relief from restraint.
We are now in a position to understand why all the writers who were subjected to these conditions became humorists. The creative mind is the most sensitive mind; the most highly individualized, the most complicated in its range of desires: consequently, in circumstances where individuality cannot register itself, it undergoes the most general and the most painful repression. The more imaginative a man was, the more he would naturally feel himself restrained and chafed by such a life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his comrades, was under the necessity of making money, of succeeding—the same impulse had brought him there that had brought every one else; we know how deeply Mark Twain was under this obligation, an obligation that prevented him from attempting to pursue the artistic life directly because it was despised and because to have done so would have required just those expressions of individuality that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other hand, sensitive as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of all kinds and was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels, and murder to which his companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never "cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that he "seldom indulged physically" in practical jokes. In point of fact, he abhorred them. "When grown-up people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty years later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in the new Territory." After all those years he had not outgrown his instinctive resentment against all the assaults to which his dignity had had to submit! To Mark Twain, in short, the life of the gold-fields was a life of almost infinite repression: the fact that he became a universal butt sufficiently proves how large an area of individuality, as it were, had to submit to the censorship of public opinion if he was to fulfil his pledge and "make good" in Nevada.
