Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/493

state of society and government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist's view of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so? Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own humorous testimony: "The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples—that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at. But, let us be judicious and let somebody else begin."

Many people have said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so involved himself in the whole popular complex of his age that he could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. He had never risen to the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument, An irresponsible child himself, he could not even feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and even flattered it.

If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the puritanical commercialism of the "Gilded Age," as he called it, very much what the author of Pantagruel did as regards the obsolescent mediaevalism of sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric clay-bank: many of the vertebrae are missing, other parts have crumbled away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature. But the dimensions help