Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/334

284 each of us feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands." We smile because! In that "because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain's success. The "cheap boarding-house," where every one has to pretend that he loves all his neighbours, is the scene of many restraints and many irritations; and as for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation very far from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by love and duty to indulge in these things, have been known more than once to complain about them, and even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark Twain's habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers, lightning-rod men, watch-makers, and other perpetrators of the small harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these little annoyances of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive; but most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says, all the American people of Mark Twain's time were exasperated by the same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's humour gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because" that humour shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves us from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables us to murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolving us from the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first impulse prompts us to shed. Mr. Howells says that "we have somehow all 'been there, a phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical American of the last generation was "the man who has risen." The man who has "risen" is the man who has become progressively aware of civilization; the demands of the typical American of Mark Twain's time, in short, the demands he made upon his environment, had become, pari passu, progressively more stringent, while she environment itself remained, perforce, just as barbarous and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying" as ever. But why perforce? Because it was "good for business"; it was the environment favourable for a regime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't the "man who has risen," the typical American, himself a business man?