mers, and that maintains an intelligent contact
with the literature that is in being, and that consistently tries to
make the best terms possible with the dominant Philistinism. It cannot
go the whole way without running into danger; let it be said to the
credit of its editors that they have more than once braved that danger.

The tale might be lengthened. Mark Twain, in his day, felt the stirrings
of revolt, and not all his Philistinism was sufficient to hold him
altogether in check. If you want to find out about the struggle that
went on within him, read the biography by Albert Bigelow Paine, or,
better still, "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" Alive, he had
his position to consider; dead, he now speaks out. In the preface to
"What is Man?" dated 1905, there is a curious confession of his
incapacity for defying the taboos which surrounded him. The studies for
the book, he says, were begun "twenty-five or twenty-seven years
ago"--the period of "A Tramp Abroad" and "The Prince and the Pauper." It
was actually written "seven years ago"--that is, just after "Following
the Equator" and "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc." And why did it
lie so long in manuscript, and finally go out stealthily, under a
private imprint?[40] Simply because, as Mark frankly confesses, he
"dreaded (_and could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around"
him. He knew how hard his fight for recognition had been; he knew what
direful penalties outraged orthodoxy could inflict; he had in him the
somewhat pathetic discretion of a respectable family man. But, dead, he
is safely beyond reprisal, and so, after a prudent interval, the
faithful Paine begins printing books in which, writing knowingly behind
six feet of earth, he could set down his true ideas without fear. Some
day, perhaps, we shall have his microbe story, and maybe even his
picture of the court of Elizabeth.

A sneer in Prof. Pattee's history, before mentioned, recalls the fact
that Hamlin Garland was also a rebel in his day and bawled for the Truth
with a capital T. That was in 1893. Two years later the guardians of the
national rectitude fell afoul of "Rose of Dutchers' Coolly" and Garland
began to think it over; today he devotes himself to the safer enterprise
of chasing spooks; his name is conspicuously absent from the Dreiser
Protest. Nine years before his brief offending John Hay had set off a
discreet bomb in "The Bread-Winners"--anonymously because "my standing