"with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the humorist; it was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in California, he was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from expressing himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in short, had become for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to remain a humorist.
In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties I discover the report of a phrenologist, one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who found the trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the diameter of his head just above the ears. Such testimony, I suppose, has no value; but it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech."
Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was obliged, as I say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no. When he went East to carry on his journalistic career, the publishers of The Galaxy, to which he became a regular contributor, specifically asked him to conduct a "humorous department"; and after the success of The Innocents Abroad his publisher, Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a humorous work—that is to say, a work humorously inclined." Now whatever was true of the pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the rest of the American population during the epoch of industrial pioneering: the business men of the East were in much the same case as the pioneers of the West. The whole country, as we know, was as thirsty for humour as it was for ice water: Mark Twain's humour fulfilled during its generation a national demand as universal in America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by Dostoevsky, in France by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens. We have at last begun to approach the secret of this interesting fact.
Many observers have spoken of the homogeneity of the American people during the epoch of industrial pioneering. Mr. Howells has already related this to the phenomenon of Mark Twain's humour. "We are doubtless," he says, "the most thoroughly homogeneous folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we have somehow all 'been there' When [our humour] mentions hash we smile because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-house or restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall,
