This much as preliminary to this remark: some day people will be able to call each other up from any part of the world and talk by mental telegraph--and not merely by impression, the impression will be articulated into words.It could be a terrible thing, but it won't be, because in the upper civilizations everything like sentimentality (I was going to say sentiment) will presently get materialized out of people along with the already fading spiritualities; and so when a man is called who doesn't wish to talk he will be like those visitors you mention: "not chosen"--and will be frankly damned and shut off.
Speaking of the ill luck of starting a piece of literary work wrong-and again and again; always aware that there is a way, if you could only think it out, which would make the thing slide effortless from the pen-the one right way, the sole form for you, the other forms being for men whose line those forms are, or who are capabler than yourself: I've had no end of experience in that (and maybe I am the only one--let us hope so.) Last summer I started 16 things wrong--3 books and 13 mag.
articles--and could only make 2 little wee things, 1500 words altogether, succeed:--only that out of piles and stacks of diligently-wrought MS., the labor of 6 weeks' unremitting effort.I could make all of those things go if I would take the trouble to re-begin each one half a dozen times on a new plan.But none of them was important enough except one:
the story I (in the wrong form) mapped out in Paris three or four years ago and told you about in New York under seal of confidence--no other person knows of it but Mrs.Clemens--the story to be called "Which was the Dream?"A week ago I examined the MS--10,000 words--and saw that the plan was a totally impossible one-for me; but a new plan suggested itself, and straightway the tale began to slide from the pen with ease and confidence.I think I've struck the right one this time.I have already put 12,000 words of it on paper and Mrs.Clemens is pretty outspokenly satisfied with it-a hard critic to content.I feel sure that all of the first half of the story--and I hope three-fourths--will be comedy; but by the former plan the whole of it (except the first 3 chapters) would have been tragedy and unendurable, almost.I think I can carry the reader a long way before he suspects that I am laying a tragedy-trap.In the present form I could spin 16 books out of it with comfort and joy; but Ishall deny myself and restrict it to one.(If you should see a little short story in a magazine in the autumn called "My Platonic Sweetheart"(written 3 weeks ago) that is not this one.It may have been a suggester, though.
I expect all these singular privacies to interest you, and you are not to let on that they don't.
We are leaving, this afternoon, for Ischl, to use that as a base for the baggage, and then gad around ten days among the lakes and mountains to rest-up Mrs.Clemens, who is jaded with housekeeping.I hope I can get a chance to work a little in spots--I can't tell.But you do it--therefore why should you think I can't?
[Remainder missing.]
The dream story was never completed.It was the same that he had worked on in London, and perhaps again in Switzerland.It would be tried at other times and in other forms, but it never seemed to accommodate itself to a central idea, so that the good writing in it eventually went to waste.The short story mentioned, "My Platonic Sweetheart," a charming, idyllic tale, was not published during Mark Twain's lifetime.Two years after his death it appeared in Harper's Magazine.
The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva was the startling event of that summer.In a letter to Twichell Clemens presents the tragedy in a few vivid paragraphs.Later he treated it at some length in a magazine article which, very likely because of personal relations with members of the Austrian court, he withheld from print.It has since been included in a volume of essays, What Is Man, etc.
To Rev.J.H.Twichell, in Hartford:
KALTENLEUTGEBEN, Sep.13, '98.
DEAR JOE,-- You are mistaken; people don't send us the magazines.No--Harper, Century and McClure do; an example I should like to recommend to other publishers.And so I thank you very much for sending me Brander's article.When you say "I like Brander Matthews; he impresses me as a man of parts and power," I back you, right up to the hub--I feel the same way--.And when you say he has earned your gratitude for cuffing me for my crimes against the Leather stockings and the Vicar, I ain't ****** any objection.Dern your gratitude!
His article is as sound as a nut.Brander knows literature, and loves it; he can talk about it and keep his temper; he can state his case so lucidly and so fairly and so forcibly that you have to agree with him, even when you don't agree with him; and he can discover and praise such merits as a book has, even when they are half a dozen diamonds scattered through an acre of mud.And so he has a right to be a critic.
To detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me.Ihaven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when Ihate them.I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore Ihave to stop every time I begin.