SOURCE: Simpson, Lewis P. “Mark Twain: The Pathos of Regeneration.” In The Man of Letters in New England and the South: Essays on the History of the Literary Vocation in America, pp. 150-66. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

[In the following essay, Simpson comments on the contemporary, politicized interpretation of Mark Twain as the novelist of a regenerate America.]

“What are the Great United States for, sir,” pursued the General, “if not for the regeneration of man? But it is nat'ral in you to make such an enquerry, for you come from England and you do not know my country.”

Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

“The angels are wholly pure and sinless, for they do not know right from wrong, and all the actions of such are blameless.”

Mark Twain, “That Day in Eden”

When it first made its appearance, Maxwell Geismar's big, ill-organized, clumsily written—but in its way important—book [Maxwell Geismar, Mark Twain: An American Prophet (Boston, 1970)] was taken by academic students of Mark Twain (like Brom Weber, writing in the Saturday Review for February 27, 1971) to be a more advanced stage of an “ugly political attack” Geismar had launched against “American literary intellectuals” a few years before in his Henry James and the Jacobites (1963). Mark Twain: An American Prophet is, Weber declared, “an apocalyptic New Left tract, replete with all the fever, anti-intellectualism, psychosocial fantasy, and messianism considered requisite nowadays to explode a reader's mind and send him off on a rampage.” Now that the initial period of reaction to Geismar's treatise on the significance of Mark Twain is well past, we may wonder if it was not marked, to use the jargon of the age, by an overreaction. An impression of Geismar's book may have been created that its character under more deliberate consideration does not substantiate. Some passages in Mark Twain: An American Prophet, notably those indicting American critics and scholars for in effect being tools of the official American culture of the Cold War times and suppressing some of Mark Twain's writings, do smoke a little (although not as acridly as several of the voluminous passages Geismar quotes from Mark Twain, for example, those on the Spanish-American War). But that Geismar's work could trigger an explosion even in a mind with a short, fast fuse is in fact unlikely. Its militancy is erratic and unsustained, and the messianic note is struck sporadically and unconvincingly. The temper of the book is almost constantly cooled by Geismar's longing evocation of a far distant American past. If Geismar often insists on Mark Twain's relevance to the present moment, he tends to appeal not to the image of a Mark Twain standing alongside a Mark Rudd, but to the image of an aged prophet speaking to us out of the depths of the Old Republic about an American pastoral destiny that could never be.

It is this tendency, more than any call to action, that relates Geismar's book to the politics of the New Left—that is, to the New Left's association of a hatred of present-day society with a love for the aborted promise of pre-industrial America. This association, romantic and wistful, possibly encourages violent apocalyptic deeds. Blowing up symbols of the Establishment may be an expression of a fierce nostalgia for agrarian simplicity and the restoration of the fabled American innocence. But protestors' symbolic expressions of the wish for the destruction of the industrial-technological culture are more frequently passive. They include back-to-nature gestures, such as wearing Indian garb, or taking up residence in a rural hippie commune and subsisting on organic squash and hemp. In this respect we see in the amorphous New Left movement a resurgence of the pastoralism that has been consistently expressed in American literature since the Republic began its existence coincidentally with the commencement of the machine age. And this in the face of its ideal conception of itself according to the large and golden doctrine of a new redemption of man through his relationship with “the fresh, green breast of the New World.” The poignant phrase occurs in Nick Carraway's vision of the meaning of the Republic at the end of The Great Gatsby. Carraway experiences the dead Gatsby's need, or compulsion, to believe that America is a redemption from the past and that the American is in fact a novel moral being, for whom the light is always green. Carraway has discovered the difficulty of believing this; and he has discovered the greater difficulty of not believing it. In his story about Gatsby, as told by Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald dramatizes the primary shaping force in the American existence: the complex psychic struggle of faith and doubt concerning the American condition as regenerate.

This was the conflict that was first specifically experienced in the American consciousness as it sought to become distinct from its origins in the European imagination of America. What is the essence of the American identity? St. Jean de Crèvecoeur put the question into its classic form in 1782. “What, then, is the American, this new man?” he asked in his Letters from an American Farmer. The question assumed the answer: the American is a novel creation. But the question ironically echoed a desire for the renewal of the original condition of man. This was a desire rooted deeply in the whole Western mythic imagination, pagan and Christian. Did the possibility exist that man could somehow find his way back to a prehistorical earthly paradise? By the time of the American Revolution the assumption of the American as either a new or a renewed version of man—having formerly seemed incredible—had become, it seemed, quite credible. The notion that the part of the New World which had become the New Republic, the Great Experiment, constituted either a new creation or a re-creation came to dominate the opposing conviction of man's innate depravity and historical inability. It became the major premise of the condition of life in the new nation. The American must believe it, and, regardless of logic or fact, he must seek to reconcile theology and history to the vision of American regeneration. Under pressure of this necessity, the American consciousness has typically been characterized by a pathos of regeneration. Charles Dickens strikingly recognized the ironic power of the American pathos in the satirical episode in Martin Chuzzlewit about General Cyrus Choke, U.S.M., and the Eden Land Corporation, developers of the Valley of Eden. By the second and third generations of the Republic, the pathos of regeneration had, it appeared to a shrewd if not dispassionate observer, become the heart of Americanism.

As with all powerful, commonplace cultural motives, this phenomenon remained unexamined by critical analysis until it began to lose its assimilating force. As it has weakened in the twentieth century, especially since the end of the Second World War, American literary critics—Henry Nash Smith, R. W. B. Lewis, Charles L. Sanford, Leo Marx, and others—have made a determined effort to define it, and in doing so, to place it in historical perspective, saying with Leslie Fiedler, “an end to innocence.” But it is difficult to transcend a fundamental premise of the very culture the critic lives and writes in even though it may be declining in power. The assumption of the redemptive ethos by American critics colors their analysis of it and makes impossible a clear-cut repudiation of it. The critical inquiry into the regenerative nature of American existence as this is expressed in the American literary imagination is itself an expression of the motive it seeks to explain.

In the inquiry, Henry James and Mark Twain are central subjects, their works centering so clearly in the drama of the response to the question, What is America for if not for the regeneration of man? If we can generalize about a highly involved argument, it would appear that James comes off better in the critical discussion than Mark Twain. Critics find that he came to grips with the nature of American innocence in relation to the evil of the European establishment and eventually developed a mature understanding of the “complex fate” of being an American. But critics have tended to discover that for various reasons—including family tragedies, business failures, and a recognition of the ever increasing corruption of the national life—Mark Twain quit trying to believe in any possible regeneracy of man; and, consequently, in his later career he became a frustrated, embittered, and despairing writer, seeking to write off the “damned human race.” Geismar contends that this is a spurious judgment. His struggle to prove why it is, and to project what he conceives to be the true image of Mark Twain, notably of the older Mark Twain, reflects directly Geismar's total involvement in the pathos of regeneration. Geismar, to be sure, occupies a virtually singular position among American critics in yet standing, or attempting to stand, on the doctrine of regeneration. This nativistic doctrine is, it would seem, fundamentally more significant to Geismar, a socialist, than Marxism. It is a received truth on which he has sought in a series of books on American literature to base a radical American literary and cultural politics. In his studies Geismar has made a strong effort to define and defend a tradition of American regeneracy; and he has, one might say, named a succession of regeneracy, consisting most prominently of Emerson, Whitman, Mark Twain, and Dreiser. Critics who doubt the efficacy of the tradition of regeneracy are in Geismar's outlook traitors to true Americanism and conspirators against it. Thus when the “New Criticism” (a term Geismar uses very loosely) reached its apogee in the oppressive 1950s, the American academic literati became entangled in a gross betrayal of their literary heritage. They did so, Geismar says in his book on Henry James, because of their deference to “a formidable body of ‘received opinion’ about good writers and bad writers.” Accepting a canon of “good writers” which emphasized James, Eliot, and Pound, they declared anyone who spoke against the canon a fool. “Well, then,” Geismar exclaims, “thank God … for the Fools; who in ancient culture were viewed as emissaries of the Lord.”

This zealous spirit informs the whole of Henry James and the Jacobites. Looked at in the light of the progression of his critical studies, Geismar's bumptious, evangelical negating of Henry James and his disciples represents a preparation for his depiction of the genuine American writer in Mark Twain; it is a necessary putting down of the false idol and of heretical doctrines. It is a study of a fallen American writer and a condemnation of the equally fallen critics who have falsely celebrated his fall as a victory. It is, in short, a study in American literary degeneracy.

In his version of the fall of the American writer as exemplified in the case of James, Geismar harps on the power of three evils to be seen at work in James's career. One is nostalgia for Europe. James early drank of the poisonous cup of nostalgia and was so overcome that he never sought an antidote. James also lacked the capacity to resist another insidious evil, finance capitalism, although he never realized to what extent he was the novelist of the Veblenian leisure class. There was, however, a deeper evil at work in the case of James, one more difficult to describe, and Geismar does not succeed in doing so with precision. He indicates it as something like a fall into the self, the absorption in the image of the self, captivation by narcissism. James, that is, presents us with an early instance of the modern writer who suffers from solipsism. Afraid of the unconscious, he developed into “pure manners and pure consciousness.” He became an inhabitant of an unreal world; the vision of life in his novels is “all vision,” containing only “illusion, or enchantment, or magic.” It is a vision alien to life and a perversion of art as the representation of reality. As an artist James was thus a pretender. “Indeed perhaps never in the history of humane letters had a novelist done so much with so little content as Henry James … the Dark Prince of the American leisure class, the self-made orphan of international culture, the romantic historian of the ancien régime, the European inheritor, the absolute esthete, the prime autocrat of contemporary (and contrived) art.” So Geismar summarizes the degeneracy of Henry James. As an artist James was the pretender and all his followers are Jacobites.

The premise underlying Geismar's attack on James and his admirers is that civilization is the fall of man. As an epigraph to Henry James and the Jacobites, Geismar quotes from To the End of Thought, the work of a disciple of Otto Rank, Jack Jones: “In the course of evolutionary development, the profound tragedy in the human heritage (and the base of culture) was the loss of the Plenary-Pagan state—which became the trauma of ‘original sin’ in the dialectical manner of human thought, and from whence came the Edenite memory and dream. And it appears to become increasingly clear that this was also, inevitably, the moment of an evolutionary self-destruction. For how can modern man understand the ‘meaning of life,’ when the meaning is steadily decreasing with each ‘advance’ of modern civilization.” This is the anti-Freudian (and anti-Aristotelian) argument, associated with the Rankian school, which holds that civilization, an order achieved by the repression of the instinctual basis of life, has not fulfilled the meaning of life but has increasingly in its “progress” estranged man from the source of meaning. The “pleasure principle” of the “Plenary-Pagan state” was so suppressed in James that he became “quite morbid or even deeply neurotic” and developed a “pathological complex of anxiety, fear and aversion.” Geismar suggests that underneath the aspect of James's pretense, his guise as a “romantic medievalist,” he was a “literary monster.” He represents the full and terrible consequences of the subversion of the “Edenite memory and dream” by modern civilization.

The subversion of Eden is a theme that is more explicit in Geismar's study of Mark Twain than in his work on James. Employing the Rank-Jones thesis as the scientific rationale of the myth of American regeneracy, Geismar holds that in spite of all the contrary opinions of Mark Twain scholars (and these become associated in his mind with the false notions of the New Critics, the pretenders), Mark Twain did not in the final phase of his career experience frustration and despair, nor did he decline in his literary capacity. Although sorrow was abundant in the fifteen years before his death, it was in these years that he came into full possession of his genius and his art.

There is no question [Geismar states] that the decade of the nineties was one of trauma and disaster in Mark Twain's life, financially and domestically. It did indeed appear to split his life in two; and life for him would never be the same again. Yet he emerged on the other side of the chasm bloody and beaten in spirit, but unconquered—unconquerable. He had added a dimension of tragic experience to his unique sense of the general comedy of living. The memory of the Garden entails the knowledge of the Fall.

Geismar continues:

The life of his imagination would take on more complex, darker hues of emotion; his own judgment of his social period and country become sharper and brilliantly prophetic; in the first decade of the twentieth century he wrote one of his greatest books, The Autobiography of Mark Twain—one of the great books of our literature. In the last half of his life, indeed, Sam Clemens produced some of his best writing—much of it newly released to the public eye—and the whole thesis of his being a childhood writer destroyed by the pressures of maturity falls to the ground. In terms of a broad cultural psychology, rather, he was a writer who carried his edenic vision of life to the very end; and it was precisely that vision, embedded in his deepest spirit, untouchable, uncorruptible, which created his whole remarkable description of our human pilgrimage undertaken amidst so much laughter and so many tears.

As Geismar interprets the crisis of Mark Twain's later life, it was the crucible in which he underwent testing and purification, the refining and strengthening of his vision and his mission. But not until 1897, according to Geismar, did Mark Twain manage to define for himself “the essential underlying conflict of all his work”: the opposition “between primary nature and civilization.” He accomplished this in what most Mark Twain critics consider to be an incidental and inferior book, Following the Equator.

In elevating this work to prominence in the Mark Twain canon, Geismar—as he does in elevating the Autobiography to a still higher place—relies on his conception that in his truest literary being Mark Twain “was not a novelist or a fiction writer at all.” He “was a poet-prophet on the model of Walt Whitman even more than that of Melville.” He was “the prophet and conscience of his country at the end of the Old Republic.” Intensifying his conception of Mark Twain as a poet, Geismar declares that he was “a true folk bard” of the Old Republic. In this connection Geismar goes so far as to make the astounding declaration that—in contrast to the twentieth-century “expatriate” literature—genuine “American literature was as a whole until 1910 a folk art.” But in making much of Mark Twain as a folk bard, Geismar hardly insists that he is a poet nearly anonymous. Like all modern poets, he is preeminently a self; but unlike most of them, he did not suffer from a locked-in ego. “It takes a bard, a large and various talent,” Geismar explains, “to talk about himself and without tedium since he is in fact talking about the world with which he is inextricably and pantheistically joined at the very moment he is so separate and original as an individual voice.” Another way to put this is to say that Mark Twain is the embodiment of “the cultural concept of the double soul.” In him the “pagan-plenary and primitive man [is] conjoined with the moral-historical-social vision which is clearly the result of civilizational repression.” His range of awareness, so to speak, comprehends existence before the fall and after the fall. And this awareness is the range of his art. Mark Twain agreed with Freud, Geismar comments, in his “harsh dictum that all civilization is developed at the price of human repression.” But “art and the artist … as Otto Rank perceived, and as Sam Clemens intuitively knew, are based on the edenic pleasure principle always conjoined, always in conflict with man's ‘statutes.’”

Placing such an emphasis on Mark Twain's intuition of the edenic principle reduces the complex motivation of the perplexed, confused, disturbed—the historical and actual—Mark Twain to a mystical and murky emotionalism. The knotty question of Mark Twain's attitude toward slavery and the Negro is referred to his “natural affinity with the black slave.” The “real fascination of Pudd'nhead Wilson, its true meaning which was perhaps unknown to the artist who wrote it,” is that “Sam Clemens was the first and only writer, among all the early [American] ones, to rush into the ‘ambush’ of blackness and dusky nature, to embrace it with all his soul, and hence to reenrich his whole life with it.” Such an uncritical declaration represents a kind of forced literary integration which removes Mark Twain from an historical relation to the “peculiar institution.” It amounts, to be sure, to an ahistorical strategy; for it eliminates, whether deliberately or not, the need to deal with the awkward problem of Mark Twain's connection with the South and slavery as a part of the story of the Old Republic.

In elaborating his notion of Mark Twain as a bardic artist and prophet, Geismar—although he does not seem to be fully aware of doing so—sets forth a vision of American history in which the old Republic is Eden. It expressed a wish to be free from history. History proving to be too powerful to allow the new Republic to become a state of pastoral permanence, the Garden was corrupted by the intrusion of civilization in the form of modern capitalism and industrialism; and the fall of man was repeated in the rise of the “American Empire.” In his role in this representation of American history, Mark Twain did not, as the fallen critics say, succumb to the corruption of the second fall but was victor over it. He was victorious not only over the personal tragedies of his life but over the dispossession of the Old Republic by the Empire. In his spirit the Eden that had been America entered upon an inviolate existence. If Mark Twain is viewed as a prophet, he is logically the prophet of a second American regeneration.

Still, Geismar's interpretation of Mark Twain's victory over civilization is divided. He sees a process of suffering on Mark Twain's part: his personal experience of “all those civilizational discontents which he … felt so vividly and personally at the center of his being.” Following the logic of this insight, he proposes that Mark Twain effected through his art a resolution or catharsis of his suffering. He is a tragic figure, closer to the Freudian than to the Rankian emphasis. But Geismar simultaneously maintains his dominant bent toward the Rankian analysis. The source of Mark Twain's victory is to be found in the “untouched spring of pagan, plenary, and edenic innocence” located in his innermost being. This is to say, in a pure relationship with nature. The divided interpretation suggests a considerable uncertainty in Geismar's mind about the ultimate significance of the triumph over civilization he so confidently claims for Mark Twain. If Mark Twain is looked upon as finally a tragic figure, he is not in any very convincing sense a figure of regeneration. If he is finally seen as a child of nature, he is placed outside any experience of regeneration. In the last part of Mark Twain: An American Prophet, Geismar attempts to reconcile the “catharsis” and “pagan-plenary” interpretations of Mark Twain's later career—to bring into harmony the idea that Mark Twain's later writings are a purgation of all his despair and the idea that they are a demonstration of the pleasure principle. The result is an interesting confusion, out of which more or less clearly emerges still another concept of the old Mark Twain. (It is one Geismar suggests early in the game, when he remarks: “For Clemens … in his best moments completely dissipated the whole psychological syndrome of ‘guilt-anxiety-shame-and-self-punishment’ which might apply to ordinary mortals.”) Geismar finds, as anyone must, that Mark Twain has his best moments in his final works when he identifies himself with the transcendent figure of Satan, seeking a point of view far beyond that of ordinary mortals.

Of Adam and Eve, who also appear prominently in the latter-day writings, Geismar says that they constitute “a study in the primary narcissism which betokens the unconscious pleasure in the functioning of the animal organism, and as Mark Twain's true ancestors delight in their innocent fleshly grace” before “they receive unknowingly the first blow of civilization: clothes.” But Mark Twain's primary identification is not with Adam and Eve, it is with Satan. Geismar works hard to relate the feeling Mark Twain has for Satan to the thesis of the repressed pagan-plenary soul. “Satan becomes not merely Twain's confidante in these later years,” he says, “but in Jungian terms, say, the earlier-repressed but now reversed and dominant half of Twain's soul; and in Rankian terms, more accurately, the repressed primitive soul which took rightful power over the ‘rational’ social soul.” Yet, we ask, is Mark Twain's fascination with Satan to be described like this? In Mark Twain's conception Satan is impeccably mannered and infinitely rational. He is, in fact, refined beyond all civilization, for he is possessed of the reason and imagination of the angels. He is at once completely innocent and completely knowing. The “crucial dark and mysterious Angel of human history,” he has a total understanding of what the fall of man meant. It meant the introduction into the human being of the Moral Sense, the sense on which civilization is established. This obviously is not an understanding that wells up from the instinctual knowledge of the repressed primitive soul; and plainly Satan does not symbolize to Mark Twain the repressed primitive soul. Indeed—and it is a little startling to realize this—Mark Twain conceives the lost paradise of man not as an earthly and earthy state of existence in natural pleasure. It is an angelic state of being. Before Eve eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge in “That Day in the Garden,” Satan tells her:

In your present estate you are in no possible way responsible for anything you do or say or think. It is impossible for you to do wrong, for you have no more notion of right or wrong than the other animals have. You and they can do only right; whatever you and they do is right and innocent. It is a divine estate, the loftiest and purest attainable in heaven and in earth. It is the angel gift. The angels are wholly pure and sinless, for they do not know right from wrong, and all the acts of such are blameless. No one can do wrong without knowing how to distinguish between right and wrong.

Geismar's assumption that this version of Eden is allied to the reassertion of the primal in Mark Twain and that it is simply a presentation of the “original, beneficent, natural harmony of animal existence” is more than doubtful. Satan is describing a “divine estate,” one given as “an angel gift,” the gift of an ineffable transcendence beyond nature and beyond civilization.

Mark Twain's enigmatic quest for transcendence receives its fullest expression in The Mysterious Stranger. Geismar devotes considerable space to this story, reading it as Mark Twain's great emotional catharsis. Mark Twain, who never attempted to deny the basic tragedy of life, discovers in The Mysterious Stranger, Geismar argues, the ultimate nature of tragedy in the cosmic indifference of the universe. But because of his “gay, pagan, pleasure-loving spirit,” Mark Twain's “desperate nihilism” is transformed into “a comedy, a parody of evil.” Belonging as much to man as to the Gods, laughter is catharsis and salvation. There is something to this argument; Geismar fails nonetheless to convince us that in The Mysterious Stranger Mark Twain truly resolves the pain of living in the capacity for laughter. We cannot fail to recognize that Mark Twain's relationship with the “Great Prankster,” as Geismar calls Mark Twain's Satan, is in the interest of acquiring his angelic power. Geismar himself observes that if Satan can dispose of his fatal gifts at Marget's birthday party “with such equanimity,” man could receive them “with equal and knowing equanimity.” In doing so man can become liberated from his humanity—is this not the implication?

Geismar awkwardly avoids such a conclusion. To the end he persists in his efforts to yoke the disparate images he projects of Mark Twain, the bardic and the angelic. In summation, he comments:

But the plain fact is, as I hope the pages of this book illustrate, that Mark Twain not only survived and surmounted life's worst things, but in his later work far surpassed his earlier vision. It too is a celebration of life but with all its tragic depths; much more aware and complex than the rather simplistic innocence of Huck and Tom. The Fallen Angel in Mark Twain is still the supreme and satanic observer of the world; and all the better for his fall from that innocence he always cherished but never quite lost.

This evaluation, muted in contrast to some other summary evaluations Geismar has made along the way, is still fundamentally confused. It implies that Mark Twain underwent a “fortunate fall,” though this is irreconcilable with his identity with the “satanic observer of the world.” Geismar is moved always to try to interpret Mark Twain as essentially the regenerate American, one who preserved in his soul the essence of redemptive primal American innocence, the bard of the truth of his people. Even so, Geismar is drawn toward rendering the subject of his study as superior to moral categorizing. He sees what Mark Twain wanted to be, in other words, but he has to deny him his ambition. What Geismar hits on of first importance—in spite of his futile and tiresome attention to a consistent explanation of them—is the realization that in Mark Twain's later writings there is a sense of celebration. There is a kind of joy in them. It is, however, not the joy of life fulfilled but of the state of being transcended.

It may be a fundamental mistake to try to explain Mark Twain on the basis of his opposing a salvational primary nature to civilization. From the beginning of his writing career, he exhibits a skeptical attitude toward mankind's capacity for moral regeneration under any conditions. In spite of the poignant way he glimpses this possibility at times, he continually rejects any redeeming relation between man and nature. As Mark Twain sees him the human being's chief characteristic is his need to deceive himself about his own existence in general. Deception is the principle of existence; from the early sketches about the good boy and the bad boy through The Mysterious Stranger, this is the theme. This is not suddenly to shift the ground of the present argument; it is to say that Mark Twain experienced fully the pathos of regeneration. He knew acutely the kind of suffering Americans go through because they believe that by virtue of being American they are regenerate, when at the same time they suspect that they are not reborn men and are, consciously or unconsciously, deceiving themselves. Not only this perhaps but suspect that they must as Americans deceive themselves about their doubt—that as Americans they are under a heavy obligation to believe that America is for the regeneracy of man. Mark Twain experienced the inner drama of American history as intensely as Melville. He felt the profound dubiety that lies at the very core of the experience of being an American: the Great Experiment may be the Great Deception (or the Great Confidence Game); Americans may have staked everything on a grand endeavor to deceive themselves as to the nature of man and history.

Whatever else it does, The Mysterious Stranger celebrates a liberation from the Great Deception. It is Mark Twain's ultimate response to the pathos of regeneration. Left in a fragmentary state by the author, it is not a complete response. But it indicates the logic of a decisive answer, which simply lies in realizing the nature of the motive of the deception. This is to be found in the rationalism of the Enlightenment. In his essay “The Angelic Imagination,” Allen Tate speaks of the American Republic as “a society committed to the rationalism of Descartes and Locke by that eminent angel of the rationalistic Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson.” Accepting this drastic oversimplification of Jefferson with due caution, we can yet venture to establish a connection between Jefferson and Mark Twain's Satan. Jefferson was strongly attracted to the notion that man has the power in a new world to will his intellect to conceive his own regeneration in a new unity of spirit and nature. This Enlightenment conception of the American as a new man was a rationalistic defiance of all the limitations imposed on man by tradition and religion. America, as William Dean Howells said, is an idea; the American, he might have added, is a thought. After a lifetime of much doubt and vexation, Mark Twain, in The Mysterious Stranger, has, through the agency of Satan, a vision of the true logic of the American idea of man. He discovers the true and terrible freedom of the American Dream. Satan tells little Theodore: “It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You. And You are but a Thought—a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!” In one of the several descriptive epithets he applies to Mark Twain, Geismar calls him “this demonic angel of an artist.” This is more than an epithet; it is an insight. Save for Geismar's commitment to the pathos of regeneration, he might have made it central instead of incidental to his book. But the commitment carries its interest, and it is still ours, as it was still Mark Twain's even as he struggled to transcend it.