Turn, again, to the last pages in Mr. Paine's biography, to the moment when he lay breathing out his life in the cabin of that little Bermuda packet:
"Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber—one of a play in which the title-rôle of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at me searchingly and asked: 'Isn't there something I can resign and be out of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't want it.' Then, realizing, he said: 'I am like a bird in a cage: always expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.'"
No, Mark Twain's seventieth birthday had not released him: it would have had to release him from himself! It cut away the cords that bound him; but the tree was not flexible any more, it was old and rigid, fixed for good and all; it could not redress the balance. In one pathetic excess alone the artist blossomed: that costume of white flannels, the temerity of which so shocked Mr. Howells in Washington. "I should like," said Mark Twain, "to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes. So would every man I have ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." There speaks the born artist, the starved artist who for forty years has had to pretend that he was a business man, the born artist who has always wanted to be "original" in his dress and has had to submit to a feverish censorship even over his neckties—the artist who, longing to look like an orchid, has the courage at last and at least to emulate the modest lily!
And so we see Mark Twain, with his "dry and dusty" heart, "washing about on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making," the saddest, the most ironical figure in all the history of this Western continent. The king, the conquering hero, the darling of the masses, praised and adored by all, he is unable even to reach the cynic's paradise, that vitriolic sphere which has, after all, a serenity of its own. The playboy to the end, divided between rage and pity, cheerful in his self-contempt, an illusionist in the midst of his disillusion, he is the symbol of the creative life in a country where "by the goodness of God, we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them." He is the typical American, people have said: let heaven draw its own conclusions. As for ourselves, we are permitted to think otherwise. He was the supreme victim of an epoch in American history, an epoch that has closed. Has the American writer of to-day the same excuse for missing his vocation? "He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative," says John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has ceased to be prophetic, "who would affirm that man will never weary of the whole system of things which reigns at present.... We never know how near we are to the end of any phase of our experience, and often when its seeming stability begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are about to take a new turn." Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confrères have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and walk the stage as poets do.