The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) Read Online Free PDF Page A

bitter resignation in Mark Twain is never very far away: as Theodor Fischer muses after the death of Lisa and Nikolaus, "Many a time, since then, I have heard people pray to God to spare the life of sick persons, but I have never done it."
    Mob cowardice and mob cruelty, often abetted by the orthodox, figure again and again in the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. Eleven girls of Eseldorf are burned together as witches because of "witch signs," or fleabites, on their bodies. The grandmother of Gottfried Narr is burned as a witch because she relieves pain by massage. Lisa Brandt's mother bums at the stake for blasphemy after her daughter drowns. A Scottish mob will stone and crush a gentlewoman to death, Satan informs Theodor out of his foreknowledge, because she is suspected of having Catholic sympathies."' Johann Brinker's mother, also suspected of witchcraft, is condemned to the stake by Father Adolf, whose life Brinker had saved at the cost of his own paralysis. Frau Brinker's decision to die in the fire rather than endure ostracism and starvation is moving and fitting in its context, no less so for the author's having found the germ of the episode in Cotton Mather's The Wonders of the Invisible World." Other particular sources for some of these witchcraft episodes may yet be found in the histories Clemens read and reread; but no reader of "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again," which reports boys and policemen stoning and beating the Chinese in San Francisco, or of The Prince and the Pauper or Huckleberry Finn or A Connecticut Yankee or "The United States of Lyncherdom" would be surprised to find scenes of mob violence in these manuscripts.

    Seeking to account for the special impact of these scenes, one
remembers two scarifying events in Sam Clemens's early life. He
once gave matches to a drunken tramp in the Hannibal jail so that
he might smoke. During the night, before the jailer could unlock
the door, he had to watch the man at the bars burning to death. I also sat helplessly by in St. Louis while his beloved younger brother, Henry, slowly died of burns from a steamboat explosion."

    The most striking action in all three tales is Philip Traum's creating and destroying a race of Lilliputians, apparently for the sole purpose of amusing the three boys of the "Chronicle" storythe "Creation minimized," as I have called it. If, as John Hay once wrote Clemens, memory and imagination are the great gifts in a writer, they are nowhere more evident than in this demonstration by Satan. Here, in 1897 Mark Twain developed a donnee that he had noted only briefly thirty years earlier, when for his California newspaper readers he quoted from the Apocrypha: the youthful Savior in those books, like Philip Traum, often crippled or killed those who opposed his will.' So, from the apocryphal anecdote and his memory of Gulliver's Travels Twain developed his own version of the Creation, the Fall, and the Day of Doom, in which the unfallen angel and nephew of Satan acts the part of God. The Fall, it must be noted, is due in Twain's "Bible" to a quarrel between two workmen, who grapple like Cain and Abel in "a life and death struggle" until Satan crushes them with his fingers. As for the Judgment Day, it arrives by Satan's whim. Annoyed by the lamentation of the fingerling mourners around the two bodies, Satan mashes them into the ground, and then wipes out the whole race by fire and earthquake for the boys' entertainment. "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport," cries Gloucester in King Lear. The analogy is close.
    As for the motif-in-action of quarreling and warfare, in all three versions of the story a sequence of personal fights and national battles substantiates Twain's contention that if the human race is not already damned, it ought to be. In 1897 Pudd'nhead Wilson observed that "The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what there is of it." B1 In 1899 Clemens said that he had