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a letter by Mark Twain, the long-committed artist who creates. Only a year before his death Clemens expressed elation at his discovery of a new literary form: writing untrammeled letters to his intimate friends like Howells or H. H. Rogers or Twichell and then not sending them. Ile told Howells, "When you are on fire with theology . . . you'll write it to Twichell, because"-in imagination-"it would make him writhe & squirm & break the furniture." " So, it appears, a literary impulse as well as private sorrow underlies the crucial letter to Twichell. It would also be a mistake to think that Twain had newly discovered the sense of cosmic loneliness which the "Conclusion" brilliantly imparts. More than thirty years earlier he had written, "I felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world";" this was his sensation as he stood above a sea of clouds on the crater edge at Haleakala, on Maui.
    While Mark Twain wrestled with his final chapter-the only final chapter in the three manuscripts-he was attempting to cope with dream experiences and a haunting sense of isolation that had for long lain deep in his inner life. As Coleman Parsons first suggested, in completing the chapter Mark Twain evidently found powerful catalytic aid in The Tempest." Schwarz's plea to the "magician" for freedom from the bonds of "this odious flesh" recalls
Ariel's eloquent pleas to Prospero for his release. Moreover, Traum
and 44 share with Ariel the ability to enchant with music, the
globe-girdling swiftness, the antic and mercurial moods (untroubled by any Moral Sense), and the power of melting "into air, into
thin air," as none of their progenitors do-not Satan nor the child
Jesus nor Pan nor the Admirable Crichton nor Twain's own Superintendent of Dreams. Prospero says:

    Prospero's tone of great authority and reassurance as he speaks to
the troubled young Ferdinand has its counterpart in the "gush of thankfulness" which 44 releases in August and the "blessed and
hopeful feeling" that his words will prove true. Satan's voice, like
Prospero's, has "that fatal music" in it. Above all, what 44 reveals to
August about the character of human life in the cosmos echoes and
reechoes from Prospero's conclusion: life is as insubstantial as a
dream.

    If the similarities are strong, differences and difficulties (apart
from The Tempest's superiority) remain in Mark Twain's "Conclusion of the book." The almost unrelievedly dark tenor of his
letter to Twichell is only half lightened in the "Conclusion" by
blessed and hopeful feelings. Although 44's parting speech is credible insofar as one accepts his authority as a character and his
premises in the argument, what is one to make of his urging August
to "Dream other dreams, and better!"? Does the command to dream
signify a command to create that "so potent art" of which Prospero
and Shakespeare were masters? It is desirable here to repeat that
Clemens valued the creative life above all other lives; it is a vulgar
error to suppose he did not. The difficulty is that 44's injunction,
whether in this or another meaning, cannot easily be assigned to a
God hostile to men in an unmanageable or nonexistent universe.
Of course, Clemens might have revised his manuscripts and this
draft of a chapter, but as the chapter stands, the paradox remains:
mold your life nearer to the heart's desire; life is at best a dream and
at worst a nightmare from which you cannot escape.
    The "Mysterious Strangers"
    Almost universally, readers have accepted The Mysterious
Stranger, A Romance as a finished, posthumously published work,
and students of Twain have likewise credited Paine's story that his
discovery of the last chapter enabled him to publish the complete
tale. Only when John Tuckey published Mark Twain and Little
Satan in 1963 were these readers and students disillusioned-although recently at least one critic, James M. Cox, has