第215章

This mood will pass, some day--there is history for it.But it cannot pass until my wife comes up out of the submergence.She was always so quick to recover herself before, but now there is no rebound, and we are dead people who go through the motions of life.Indeed I am a mud image, and it will puzzle me to know what it is in me that writes, and has comedy-fancies and finds pleasure in phrasing them.It is a law of our nature, of course, or it wouldn't happen; the thing in me forgets the presence of the mud image and goes its own way, wholly unconscious of it and apparently of no kinship with it.I have finished my book, but I go on as if the end were indefinitely away--as indeed it is.There is no hurry--at any rate there is no limit.

Jean's spirits are good; Clara's are rising.They have youth--the only thing that was worth giving to the race.

These are sardonic times.Look at Greece, and that whole shabby muddle.

But I am not sorry to be alive and privileged to look on.If I were not a hermit I would go to the House every day and see those people scuffle over it and blether about the brotherhood of the human race.This has been a bitter year for English pride, and I don't like to see England humbled--that is, not too much.We are sprung from her loins, and it hurts me.I am for republics, and she is the only comrade we've got, in that.We can't count France, and there is hardly enough of Switzerland to count.Beneath the governing crust England is sound-hearted--and sincere, too, and nearly straight.But I am appalled to notice that the wide extension of the surface has damaged her manners, and made her rather Americanly uncourteous on the lower levels.

Won't you give our love to the Howellses all and particular?

Sincerely yours S.L.CLEMENS.

The travel-book did not finish easily, and more than once when he thought it completed he found it necessary to cut and add and change.The final chapters were not sent to the printer until the middle of May, and in a letter to Mr.Rogers he commented: "Asuccessful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it." Clemens was at the time contemplating a uniform edition of his books, and in one of his letters to Mr.Rogers on the matter he wrote, whimsically, "Now I was proposing to make a thousand sets at a hundred dollars a set, and do the whole canvassing myself.....Iwould load up every important jail and saloon in America with de luxe editions of my books.But Mrs.Clemens and the children object to this, I do not know why." And, in a moment of depression: "You see the lightning refuses to strike me--there is where the defect is.We have to do our own striking as Barney Barnato did.But nobody ever gets the courage until he goes crazy."They went to Switzerland for the summer to the village of Weggis, on Lake Lucerne--"The charmingest place we ever lived in," he declared, "for repose, and restfulness, and superb scenery." It was here that he began work on a new story of Tom and Huck, and at least upon one other manuscript.From a brief note to Mr.Rogers we learn something of his employments and economies.

To Henry H.Rogers, in New York:

LUCERNE, August the something or other, 1897.

DEAR MR.ROGERS,-- I am writing a novel, and am getting along very well with it.

I believe that this place (Weggis, half an hour from Lucerne,) is the loveliest in the world, and the most satisfactory.We have a small house on the hillside all to ourselves, and our meals are served in it from the inn below on the lake shore.Six francs a day per head, house and food included.The scenery is beyond comparison beautiful.We have a row boat and some bicycles, and good roads, and no visitors.Nobody knows we are here.And Sunday in heaven is noisy compared to this quietness.

Sincerely yours S.L.C.

To Rev.J.H.Twichell, in Hartford:

LUCERNE, Aug.22, '97.

DEAR JOE,--Livy made a noble find on the Lucerne boat the other day on one of her shopping trips--George Williamson Smith--did I tell you about it? We had a lovely time with him, and such intellectual refreshment as we had not tasted in many a month.

And the other night we had a detachment of the jubilee Singers--6.I had known one of them in London 24 years ago.Three of the 6 were born in slavery, the others were children of slaves.How charming they were--in spirit, manner, language, pronunciation, enunciation, grammar, phrasing, matter, carriage, clothes--in every detail that goes to make the real lady and gentleman, and welcome guest.We went down to the village hotel and bought our tickets and entered the beer-hall, where a crowd of German and Swiss men and women sat grouped at round tables with their beer mugs in front of them--self-contained and unimpressionable looking people, an indifferent and unposted and disheartened audience--and up at the far end of the room sat the Jubilees in a row.The Singers got up and stood--the talking and glass jingling went on.Then rose and swelled out above those common earthly sounds one of those rich chords the secret of whose make only the Jubilees possess, and a spell fell upon that house.It was fine to see the faces light up with the pleased wonder and surprise of it.No one was indifferent any more; and when the singers finished, the camp was theirs.It was a triumph.It reminded me of Launcelot riding in Sir Kay's armor and astonishing complacent Knights who thought they had struck a soft thing.The Jubilees sang a lot of pieces.Arduous and painstaking cultivation has not diminished or artificialized their music, but on the contrary--to my surprise--has mightily reinforced its eloquence and beauty.Away back in the beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; and that early notion is emphasized now.It is utterly beautiful, to me; and it moves me infinitely more than any other music can.I think that in the Jubilees and their songs America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages;and I wish it were a foreign product, so that she would worship it and lavish money on it and go properly crazy over it.