able belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage
cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous
persecution--these things have put an almost unbearable burden upon the
exchange of ideas in the United States, and particularly upon that form
of it which involves playing with them for the mere game's sake. On the
one hand, the writer who would deal seriously and honestly with the
larger problems of life, particularly in the rigidly-partitioned ethical
field, is restrained by laws that would have kept a Balzac or a Zola in
prison from year's end to year's end; and on the other hand the writer
who would proceed against the reigning superstitions by mockery has been
silenced by taboos that are quite as stringent, and by an indifference
that is even worse. For all our professed delight in and capacity for
jocosity, we have produced so far but one genuine wit--Ambrose
Bierce--and, save to a small circle, he remains unknown today. Our great
humourists, including even Mark Twain, have had to take protective
colouration, whether willingly or unwillingly, from the prevailing
ethical foliage, and so one finds them levelling their darts, not at the
stupidities of the Puritan majority, but at the evidences of lessening
stupidity in the anti-Puritan minority. In other words, they have done
battle, not against, but _for_ Philistinism--and Philistinism is no
more than another name for Puritanism. Both wage a ceaseless warfare
upon beauty in its every form, from painting to religious ritual, and
from the drama to the dance--the first because it holds beauty to be a
mean and stupid thing, and the second because it holds beauty to be
distracting and corrupting.

Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist; there was in him
something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof engrossment in
the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one associates with
the great artists of the Renaissance. But his nationality hung around
his neck like a millstone; he could never throw off his native
Philistinism. One ploughs through "The Innocents Abroad" and through
parts of "A Tramp Abroad" with incredulous amazement. Is such coarse and
ignorant clowning to be accepted as humour, as great humour, as the best
humour that the most humorous of peoples has produced? Is it really the
mark of a smart fellow to lift a peasant's cackle over "Lohengrin"? Is
Titian's chromo of Moses in the bullrushes seriously to be regarded as
th