Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/341

Rh strained to consider the false pretensions of others, he destroyed also the legitimate pretensions of his own soul. Thus his humour, which had originally served him as a protective colouration against the consequences of the creative life, ended by stunting and thwarting that creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself a scarred child.

He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of humour. "Will a day come," asks Satan, in The Mysterious Stranger, "when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage." It was satire that he had in mind when he wrote these lines, the great purifying force with which nature had endowed him, but of the use of which his life had deprived him. How many times he confessed that it was he who lacked the "courage"! How clearly we see that if he lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he lacked the "sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of his own powers, of his proper function! Satire necessitates, above all, a supreme degree of moral maturity, a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual position. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to every irritating stimulus he had literally sworn and joked away the energy, the indignation that a free life would have enabled him to store up, the energy that would have made him not the public ventilator that he became but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mr. Paine speaks of his "high-pressure intellectual engine." Let us follow the metaphor by saying that Mark Twain permitted the steam in his system to escape as fast as it was generated: he permitted it to escape instead of harnessing it till the time was ripe to "blow to rags and atoms" that world of humbug against which he chafed. But he had staked all upon the dream of happiness; and humour, by affording him an endless series of small assuagements, enabled him to maintain that equilibrium. "I am tired to death all the time," he wrote in 1895, out of the stress of his financial anxieties. With that in mind we can appreciate the unconscious irony in Mr. Paine's comment: "Perhaps, after all, it was his comic outlook on things in general that was his chief life-saver."