,
that there were bred in him that breezy democracy of sentiment and that
hatred of sham and pretence which fill his writings from beginning to
end. In the West, virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood--or fell--by
force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled
for fortune, for competence--or for existence. It was a case of the
survival of the fittest. In face of bleak Nature--the burning alkali
desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,--all men were free
and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort. In this primitive
democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting.
The pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug soon went to the
wall, exposed in the nakedness of his own impotency. Humour is a
salutary aid in the struggle of the individual with the contrasts of
life; indeed it may be said to be born of the perception of those
contrasts. In a degree no whit inferior to the variegated river life,
the life of the West furnished contrasts and incongruities innumerable
--vaster perhaps, and more significant. There was the incessant contrast
of civilization with barbarism, of the East with the West; and there was
infinite play for the comic _expose_ of the credulous "tenderfoot" at
the hands of the pitiless cowboy. Roars of Gargantuan laughter shook
the skies as each new initiate unwittingly succumbed to the demoniac
wiles of his tormentors. The West was one vast theatre for the practice
of the "practical joke." Behind everything, menacing, foreboding,
tragic, lay the stupendous contrast between Man and Nature; and though
the miner, the granger, the cowboy laughed defiantly at civilization and
at Nature, there crept into the consciousness of each the conviction
that, in the long run, civilization must triumph, and that, in order to
win success, Nature must be conquered and subdued. In such an
environment, with its spirit of primitive democracy, its atmosphere of
wild and ribald jest, its contempt for the impostor, its perpetually
recurring incongruities, and behind all the solemn, perhaps tragic,
presence of inexorable Nature--in such an environment were sharpened and
whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour, the spirit of real democracy
bred of competitive effort, and the hatred for pretence, sham, and
imposture.

It was not, I think, until Mark Twain went to live in Connecticut and,
as he expressed it, became a scribbler of books, and an immovable