ow brilliant, but I never seem to
hear her say anything smart or brilliant. Read me some of Diana's smart
utterances."

He was relentless enough in his criticism of a literature he did not
care for, and he never learned to care for Meredith.

He read his favorite books over and over with an ever-changing point of
view. He re-read Carlyle's French Revolution during the summer at the
farm, and to Howells he wrote:

How stunning are the changes which age makes in man while he sleeps!
When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871 I was a
Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it
differently--being influenced & changed, little by little, by life &
environment (& Taine & St. Simon); & now I lay the book down once
more, & recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale,
characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such
gospel, so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences.

People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it
did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they
can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say
that of Dickens's or Scott's books. Nothing remains the same. When
a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood it has always
shrunk; there is no instance of such house being as big as the
picture in memory & imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its
correct dimensions; the house hasn't altered; this is the first time
it has been in focus.

Well, that's loss. To have house & Bible shrink so, under the
disillusioning corrected angle, is loss--for a moment. But there
are compensations. You tilt the tube skyward & bring planets &
comets & corona flames a hundred & fifty thousand miles high into
the field. Which I see you have done, & found Tolstoi. I haven't
got him in focus yet, but I've got Browning.

In time the Browning passion would wane and pass, and the club was
succeeded by, or perhaps it blended with, a German class which met at
regular intervals at the Clemens home to study "der, die, and das" and
the "gehabt habens" out of Meisterschaft and such other text-books as
Professor Schleutter could provide. They had monthly conversation days,
when they discussed in German all sorts of things, real and imaginary.
Once Dr. Root, a prominent member, and Clemens had a long wrangle over
painting a house, in which t