of its influence both for good and for evil. That influence was good in so far as it helped to concentrate the American mind upon the problems and the destinies of America;. it was evil, and it was mainly evil, in so far as it contributed to a national self-complacency, to the prevailing satisfaction of Americans with a bankers' paradise in which, as long as it lasts, the true destinies of America will remain unfulfilled.
So much for the nature and the significance of Mark Twain's humour. I think we can understand now the prodigious practical success it brought him. And are we not already in a position to see why the role of humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluctant to adopt it, why he always rebelled against it, and it arrested his own development?
Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the undoing of the artist. It meant the suppression of his aesthetic desires, the degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses without in the end becoming the victim of his own habit?
I have spoken of the Connecticut Yankee. We know how Mark Twain loved the tales of Sir Thomas Malory: they were to him a lifelong passion and delight. As for "knightly trappings," he adored them: think of his love for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure he found in dressing up for charades, of the affection with which he wrote The Prince and the Pauper! When, therefore, in his valiant endeavour to "extinguish knighthood," he sends Sir Ozana about the country laying violent hands on wandering knights and clapping plug-hats on their heads he is doing something very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American business man, agreeable to the business man in himself, but in absolute violation of his own spirit. That is why his taste remained infantile, why he continued to adore "knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more advanced aesthetic stage. His feeling for Malory, we are told, was one of "reverence": the reverence which he felt was the complement of the irreverence with which he acted. You cannot degrade the undegradeable: you can actually degrade only yourself, and the result of perpetually "taking things down" is that you remain "down" yourself, and beauty becomes more and more inaccessibly "up." That is why, in the presence of art, Mark Twain always felt, as he said, "like a barkeeper in heaven." In destroying what he was con-
