In this fashion, the print-shop action comes to an end. Except for the parable of human suffering embodied in the plight of Johann Brinker and his family, Twain's new plot complications tend to be either fantastic or feeble. FortyFour plays tricks on Balthasar Hoffman, the magician, and on Father Adolf, and he explains the difference in the human psyche between the Workaday-Self and the DreamSelf. By the time August Feldner/Martin von Giesbach falls in love with Marget Regen/Elisabeth von Arnim and grows jealous of Emil Schwarz, his DreamSelf's embodiment, Mark Twain has turned the idea of double personality into the triad of Waking-Self, DreamSelf, and Immortal Spirit and has even endowed Schwarz with some of the powers of 44. All these developments take place in something like a dramatic vacuum.

When Twain returned to the story in June and July 1905 in Dublin, New Hampshire, he evidently saw that his grip on the plot had weakened, for he destroyed some of the most recent pages and "Burned the rest (30,000 words) of the book this morning. Too diffusive"-that is, a block of the story following chapter 19. He managed to make his new matter (chapters 26 through 32) considerably livelier than his love story, although it is still "diffusive" and disjointed. FortyFour transforms Marget's maid into a cat, plays Mister Bones in a Christy minstrel show, simultaneously attacks Mary Baker Eddy and Imperial Russia, undergoes a second apotheosis, and releases Emil Schwarz from the bonds of flesh. He satirizes a sentimental poem and turns time backward. Somehow, in the midst of this farrago of burlesque and satire, Twain created a minstrel-show vignette memorable for its humor and sentiment, and composed Schwarz's eloquent, serious, and startling plea for release from the bonds of "this odious flesh."

The plea of Schwarz to his alter ego for freedom also prefigures the "empty and soundless world" in which August is left after 44's historical pageant of skeletons has passed by. This episode, placed here as chapter 33, was written last, in 1908, and Twain may have intended it as an alternate ending to the whole. The "Conclusion of the book," however, is his own notation at the head of the dreamending-the six manuscript pages written in the spring of 1904 and placed in this text as chapter 34. It seems more likely therefore that he wrote the pageant chapter as part of an effort-never fulfilled -to link the body of his story to the "Conclusion of the book."

Characters

Twice Mark Twain tried to place his fable of man's meanness and misery in "St. Petersburg" and the years of his boyhood, and twice he found it necessary to move it to Austria and a remoter era. Though he tended to regard time and place as unimportant and easily changeable, his effort to reuse the "Matter of Hannibal," as Henry Nash Smith has called it,19 suggests that he may have been drawing characters from memory. The likelihood grows as one reads "Villagers of 1840-3," a manuscript of late 1897 which was written shortly before Twain composed the "St. Petersburg Fragment," the first sequence of "Chronicle," and "Schoolhouse Hill." For "Villagers" is an impressive set of thumbnail biographies of persons in Hannibal that suggests total recall, modified by black humor. Most of the names, as Dixon Wecter and Walter Blair have shown, were names of real persons, though a few, including the Clemenses', were disguised."

In the "St. Petersburg Fragment," for example, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were the chums of "Pole" before the author made the names appropriately Austrian-Theodor, Nikolaus, and Seppi. Very likely the name "Pole" was derived from Napoleon Pavey, the son of a Hannibal hotel-keeper. In "Villagers" he "went to St. Louis. Gone six months-came back a striker, with wages, the envy of everybody." He "became second engineer. . . . Got drowned." Sam Clemens had lodged with a Pavey family as a young jour printer in St. Louis from 1852 to 1853.16 Similarly, "Mr. Black" (Father Peter in "Chronicle" and "No. 44") is inspired by Orion Clemens, the good-hearted, dreamy, older brother who vacillated for a lifetime in his religions, jobs, and moods and who had no unkindness in him.