Well, your butcher is magnificent.He won't stay out of my mind.--I keep trying to think of some way of getting your account of him into my book without his being offended--and yet confound him there isn't anything you have said which he would see any offense in,--I'm only thinking of his friends--they are the parties who busy themselves with seeing things for people.But I'm bound to have him in.I'm putting in the yarn about the Limburger cheese and the box of guns, too--mighty glad Howells declined it.It seems to gather richness and flavor with age.I have very nearly killed several companies with that narrative,--the American Artists Club, here, for instance, and Smith and wife and Miss Griffith (they were here in this house a week or two.) I've got other chapters that pretty nearly destroyed the same parties, too.
O, Switzerland! the further it recedes into the enriching haze of time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer of it and the glory and majesty and solemnity and pathos of it grow.Those mountains had a soul; they thought; they spoke,--one couldn't hear it with the ears of the body, but what a voice it was!--and how real.Deep down in my memory it is sounding yet.Alp calleth unto Alp!--that stately old Scriptural wording is the right one for God's Alps and God's ocean.How puny we were in that awful presence--and how painless it was to be so; how fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of our unspeakable insignificance.And Lord how pervading were the repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the invisible Great Spirit of the Mountains.
Now what is it? There are mountains and mountains and mountains in this world--but only these take you by the heart-strings.I wonder what the secret of it is.Well, time and time again it has seemed to me that Imust drop everything and flee to Switzerland once more.It is a longing --a deep, strong, tugging longing--that is the word.We must go again, Joe.--October days, let us get up at dawn and breakfast at the tower.Ishould like that first rate.
Livy and all of us send deluges of love to you and Harmony and all the children.I dreamed last night that I woke up in the library at home and your children were frolicing around me and Julia was sitting in my lap;you and Harmony and both families of Warners had finished their welcomes and were filing out through the conservatory door, wrecking Patrick's flower pots with their dress skirts as they went.Peace and plenty abide with you all!
MARK.
I want the Blisses to know their part of this letter, if possible.They will see that my delay was not from choice.
Following the life of Mark Twain, whether through his letters or along the sequence of detailed occurrence, we are never more than a little while, or a little distance, from his brother Orion.In one form or another Orion is ever present, his inquiries, his proposals, his suggestions, his plans for improving his own fortunes, command our attention.He was one of the most human creatures that ever lived; indeed, his humanity excluded every form of artificiality--everything that needs to be acquired.Talented, trusting, child-like, carried away by the impulse of the moment, despite a keen sense of humor he was never able to see that his latest plan or project was not bound to succeed.Mark Twain loved him, pitied him --also enjoyed him, especially with Howells.Orion's new plan to lecture in the interest of religion found its way to Munich, with the following result:
To W.D.Howells, in Boston:
MUNICH, Feb.9.(1879)
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have just received this letter from Orion--take care of it, for it is worth preserving.I got as far as 9 pages in my answer to it, when Mrs.Clemens shut down on it, and said it was cruel, and made me send the money and simply wish his lecture success.I said I couldn't lose my 9 pages--so she said send them to you.But I will acknowledge that I thought I was writing a very kind letter.
Now just look at this letter of Orion's.Did you ever see the grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined together? Mrs.Clemens said "Raise his monthly pension." So I wrote to Perkins to raise it a trifle.
Now only think of it! He still has 100 pages to write on his lecture, yet in one inking of his pen he has already swooped around the United States and invested the result!
You must put him in a book or a play right away.You are the only man capable of doing it.You might die at any moment, and your very greatest work would be lost to the world.I could write Orion's ****** biography, and make it effective, too, by merely stating the bald facts--and this Iwill do if he dies before I do; but you must put him into romance.This was the understanding you and I had the day I sailed.
Observe Orion's career--that is, a little of it: (1) He has belonged to as many as five different religious denominations; last March he withdrew from the deaconship in a Congregational Church and the Superintendency of its Sunday School, in a speech in which he said that for many months (it runs in my mind that he said 13 years,) he had been a confirmed infidel, and so felt it to be his duty to retire from the flock.
2.After being a republican for years, he wanted me to buy him a democratic newspaper.A few days before the Presidential election, he came out in a speech and publicly went over to the democrats; he prudently "hedged" by voting for 6 state republicans, also.
The new convert was made one of the secretaries of the democratic meeting, and placed in the list of speakers.He wrote me jubilantly of what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech.All right--but think of his innocent and pathetic candor in writing me something like this, a week later: