spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke or a murder, the common method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely safer, too!—a fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist in pioneer society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of those jokes of his—"men were killed every week," says Mr. Paine of one little contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things than the editors had spoken each of the other"—his comrades were able, without transgressing the law and the conventions, to vent their own exasperation with the conditions of their life and all the mutual hatred and the destructive desires buried under the attitude of good-fellowship that was imposed by the exigencies of their work. As for Mark Twain himself, the protective colouration that had originally enabled him to maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by giving h1rn the position which he craved, the position of an acknowledged leader.
For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humour was of a singular ferocity. The very titles of his Western sketches reveal their general character: The Dutch Nick Massacre, A New Crime, Lionizing Murderers, The Killing of Julius Caesar "Localized," Cannibalism in the Cars: he is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his labours, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the doctor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark Twain uses the phrase "I brained him on the spot" or some equivalent. His early humour was almost wholly aggressive. It began with a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine, "as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; but victims were gathered wholesale in their seductive web." He was "unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, the legislative members, and of individual citizens." He became known, in fact, as "a sort of general censor," and the officials, the corrupt officials—we gather that they were all corrupt, except his painfully honest brother Orion—were frankly afraid of him. "He was very far," said one of his later friends, "from being one tried in any way to make himself popular." To be sure he was! He was very far even from trying to be a humorist!
Do we not recall the early youth-of that most unhumorous soul Henrik Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town, found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all that fermented in me except by mad, riotous
