Now, we know that this process of "rising in the world," of succeeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but complete suppression of individuality. The social effect of the stimulation of the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general "levelling down," and this is universally conceded to have been characteristic of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation was practically organized—by a sort of common consent—on the plan of a vast business establishment, under a majority rule unalterably opposed to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and aesthetic development in the individual that would have retarded or compromised the success of the business regime. We can see, therefore, that if Mark Twain's humour was universally popular, it was because it contributed to the efficiency of this business regime, because it helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the business man the country over, precisely as it had at first helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the Western pioneer.
As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "business man's writer." In that humour of his, as in no other literature, the "strong, silent man" who is the archetype of the business world, sees an aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does he find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the question the other way and ask why, in other forms of literature, he finds a menace and not an aid. The acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know, diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all manifestations of the creative spirit demand, require, an emotional effort, a psychic co-operation, on the part of the reader or the spectator. This accounts for the business man's proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that expresses itself in a contemptuous desire to "shove him off the map." Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellectual interest, emotional freedom implies a retardation of the business man's mental machinery, a retardation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him, confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course, everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration, reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humour does. It is just as
