by disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flattered the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of his own genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pampered for a whole generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but retarding.
Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's biography. We note in them all the gestures of the great unfulfilled satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty gestures; only an impotent anger informs them: Mark Twain's preoccupations are those merely of a bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take vengeance upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom his wife has obliged him to pay homage; but the Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer interests humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions of his childhood in Missouri; he has never even read Literature and Dogma; he does not know that the morbid fears of that old Western village of his have ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he imagines that he can still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies. He has lived completely insulated from all the real currents of thought in his generation. "The human being," he says, in one of his notes, "needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have done it already, but most of them don't dare to say so." He imagines, we see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford and Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according to Mr. Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything, he never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered his mistake. "The religious folly you were born in you will die in," he wrote once: he meant that he had never himself faced anything out. Was he, or was he not, a Presbyterian? He really never knew. If he had matured, those theological preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes about heaven, hell, and St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from his mind: his inability to express them had fixed them there and his environment kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think of those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to make people's hair curl." Several of them, at least, we are told,
