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conscience or superego, which ends by his murdering his conscience and enjoying the same exhilarating, amoral freedom that Schwarz enjoys in "No. 44."

    The germ for Mark Twain'S analysis of multiple selves in "No. 44," as Tuckey has observed, is a long notebook entry made in January 1897. In it Twain states that he has found "a new 'solution' of a haunting mystery." He had made a promising beginning himself in the "Carnival of Crime"; then Robert Louis Stevenson had come closer with Jekyll and I but, Twain continued, upon learning of a distinction which the French had been drawing between the waking person and the person under hypnosis, he had arrived at a new concept of duality. "My dream-self, is merely my ordinary body and mind freed from clogging flesh and become a spiritualized body and mind and with the ordinary powers of both enlarged in all particulars a little, and in some particulars prodigiously." The DreamSelf, he believes, is free in time and space, and "When my physical body dies my dream body will doubtless continue its excursion and activities without change, forever." B4
    No more than the image of the DreamSelf "as insubstantial as a dim blue smoke" finds its way into "Chronicle," in Philip Traum's lovely trick of thinning out like a soap bubble and vanishing. Many of the other distinctions and powers reappear directly and with embellishments, however, in the various incarnated Dream-Selves of "No. 44." Two of these distinctions are neither fantastic nor farcical. Schwarz pleads eloquently with August and then with
Number 44: "Oh, free me from . . . these bonds of flesh . . . this
loathsome sack of corruption in which my spirit is imprisoned, her
white wings bruised and soiled-oh, be merciful and set her free!"
For the moment, Twain is able to take his idea of duality seriously
and to lend Schwarz fictional life. The second distinction-that the
dream body will continue on its excursion forever-foreshadows
the "Conclusion of the book" and the prospect of August, as a
"homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

    The "Conclusion of the book," which has so moved and challenged readers of The Mysterious Stranger since 1916, argues the extreme Platonic view that the final and only reality resides in the individual soul, all else being illusion-or that "life is a dream." (It is a view Emerson entertained only to reject it in Nature.) Although it is a key that fits nothing in the plot of the "Schoolhouse Hill" fragment, it does fit much of the action and imagery in "Chronicle" and nearly everything in the second half of "No. 44," the manuscript which it was written to conclude. The sources and analogues for it in Clemens's earlier writings, his reading, and his experience, enmeshed with his creation of Satan figures and his speculations about dreams, are extraordinarily various and complex. Here it may suffice to suggest only the chief sources of Twain's solipsistic idea.
    Mark Twain began the "St. Petersburg Fragment" and "Chronicle" about a year after the death of his beloved daughter Susy, and he finished his "Conclusion of the book," "No. 44," in the summer of his wife Olivia Clemens's death. On the first anniversary of Susy's death he wrote one friend, "I suppose it is still with you as with us-the calamity not a reality, but a dream, which will pass, -must pass." ' To another, he said six years later about Olivia's illness, "For a year and a half life, for this family, has been merely a bad dream."' Still later, after Olivia had died, he told Susan Crane of a lovely and blessed dream of Livy who leaned her head against his while he repeated to her, "I was perfectly sure it was a dream, I never would have believed it wasn't." 87 This persistent sense of reality-in-dreams permeates Twain's long analysis of Waking-and Dream-Selves in a notebook entry of January 1897, and gave rise in the same month to an idea for a "farce or sketch" of people who seem to have "slept backward 60