The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) Read Online Free PDF

proposed to the Emperor Franz Joseph "a plan to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the air for a period of two minutes." 52 Behind these bits of mockery, one so sad and one so savage, is an old animus reawakened by contemporary wars. This same animus underlies many sardonic references in "Chronicle" and "No. 44" to Christian nations warring against other Christian nations and overwhelming pagan countries by conquest.

    To illustrate: in "Chronicle," Theodor promises to tell, by and by, why Satan "chose China for this excursion." In 1897 Twain was defending the Emperor of China, and in 1899 he clearly sided with the "cautious Chinaman" as against "the Western missionary." ' By 1900 he was writing his friend the Reverend Joseph H. Twichell, "It is all China, now, and my sympathies are with the Chinese. They have," he said, "been villainously dealt with by the sceptred thieves of Europe, and I hope they will drive all the foreigners out and keep them out for good." ' Quite apparently Twain intended to make some exemplary use of the Chinese Boxers' struggle against the Powers, East and West. Satan develops the war-motif fully by showing the boys a theatrical or visionary "history of the progress of the human race" from Cain and Abel down through the sixty wars fought during the reign of Queen Victoria. Twain's last cinematic frames show England fighting what he called elsewhere a "sordid & criminal war" 5s against the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State in South Africa, and Europe "swallowing China"-proof, he explained, that "all the competent killers are Christian." Even Satan and Theodor's adventure with the "foreigner in white linen and sun-helmet," who cuffs the native juggler and thereby destroys the many-fruited tree and brings a fearful penalty upon himself, is a parable and prediction about British imperialism in India." Finally, toward the end of the "No. 44" manuscript, Mark Twain attempts simultaneously to satirize Mary Baker Eddy and Czarist Russia. Mrs. Eddy had published
a telegram instructing her followers in the "Christian Silence dialect" to "cease from praying for peace and take hold of something
nearer our size," as Twain put it. He was bitterly disappointed
when the peace treaty between Russia and Japan was concluded at
Portsmouth in August 1905: as his recent article "The Czar's
Soliloquy" showed, he had hoped that Japan would win and the
Czar be overthrown.

    The author's frame of mind, so often reflected in these war scenes and "stupendous processions," may be summed up in a statement that he made in the summer of 1900: "The time is grave. The future is blacker than has been any future which any person now living has tried to peer into." `° Small wonder, then, that Philip Traum should recount an up-to-date history of private and public murder in "Chronicle" or that 44 should drag in by the heels Mary Baker Eddy's proclamation about the Russo-Japanese War.58
    Bitter and sad as the three "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts may be, they are not without affirmations: humor of all shades, the love of music, and the power of imagination. Perhaps it was the contrast of bitter and affirmative strains that wrung from Livy Clemens, after she had heard her husband read the opening chapters of "Chronicle," the tribute, "It is perfectly horrible-and perfectly beautiful!" "' The kind and quality of the humor vary greatly, as one might expect in Twain's unfinished work. When Philip Traum composes a narrative poem and a musical setting for it at the piano, he seems amateurish and boastful, whereas the antic dancing and singing presented by 44's Mister Bones mix humor and pathos effectively, perhaps because of Twain's lifelong delight in the Negro minstrel show. In the same way, 44's long talks with Mary Florence Fortescue Baker G. Nightingale (the chambermaid whom he has turned into a cat) represent burlesque spun out thin. But Aunt Rachel's amazed report of how 44 pacified and fed and