Clemens gave a few readings in Boston and Philadelphia, but when urged
to go elsewhere made the excuse that he was having his portrait painted
and could not leave home.
As a matter of fact, he was enjoying himself with Frank Millet, who
had been invited to the house to do the portrait and had captured the
fervent admiration of the whole family. Millet was young, handsome, and
lively; Clemens couldn't see enough of him, the children adored him
and added his name to the prayer which included each member of the
household--the “Holy Family,” Clemens called it.
Millet had brought with him but one piece of canvas for the portrait,
and when the first sketch was finished Mrs. Clemens was so delighted
with it that she did not wish him to touch it again. She was afraid of
losing some particular feeling in it which she valued. Millet went to
the city for another canvas and Clemens accompanied him. While Millet
was doing his shopping it happened to occur to Clemens that it would
be well to fill in the time by having his hair cut. He left word with a
clerk to tell Millet that he had gone across the street. By and by the
artist came over, and nearly wept with despair when he saw his subject
sheared of the auburn, gray-sprinkled aureola that had made his first
sketch a success. He tried it again, and the result was an excellent
likeness, but it never satisfied Millet.
The 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' appeared late in December (1876), and
immediately took its place as foremost of American stories of boy life,
a place which it unquestionably holds to this day. We have already
considered the personal details of this story, for they were essentially
nothing more than the various aspects of Mark Twain's own boyhood. It is
only necessary to add a word concerning the elaboration of this period
in literary form.
From every point it is a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a
little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general
disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable,
formless, elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely
to be boy terror and a latent instinct of manliness. These things are
so truly portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting
into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there. Every boy has
played off sick to escape school; every boy has reflected in his heart
Tom's picture of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over the
stricken consciences of those who had blighted his young life; every
boy--of that day, at least--every normal, respectable boy, grew up
to “fear God and dread the Sunday-school,” as Howells puts it in his
review.
As for the story itself, the narrative of it, it is pure delight. The
pirate camp on the island is simply boy heaven. What boy, for instance,
would not change any other glory or boon that the world holds for this:
They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty
steps within the somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some
bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn
“pone” stock they had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be
feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an
unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and
they said they never would return to civilization. The climbing
fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared
tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage
and the festooning vines.
There is a magic in it. Mark Twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed
in him all the old fascination of those days and nights with Tom
Blankenship, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys on Glasscock's Island.
Everywhere in Tom Sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the
humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook.
No one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our
early reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces
it:
The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms
filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was
green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a
delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.
Tom's night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of Dr.
Robinson; the adventures of Tom and Becky in the cave--these are all
marvelously invented. Literary thrill touches the ultimate in one
incident of the cave episode. Brander Matthews has written:
Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment
in the cave when the boy and girl are lost in the darkness, and when
Tom suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that
the hand is the hand of Indian Joe, his one mortal enemy. I have
always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in Tom Sawyer
was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure
since Robinson Crusoe first saw a single footprint in the sand of
the sea-shore.
Mark Twain's invention was not always a reliable quantity, but with that
eccentricity which goes with any attribute of genius, it was likely at
any moment to rise supreme. If to the critical, hardened reader the
tale seems a shade overdone here and there, a trifle extravagant in its
delineations, let him go back to his first long-ago reading of it and
see if he recalls anything but his pure delight in it then. As a boy's
story it has not been equaled.
Tom Sawyer has ranked in popularity with Roughing It.
Its sales go steadily on from year to year, and are likely to continue
so long as boys and girls do not change, and men and women remember.
--[Col. Henry Watterson, when he finished Tom Sawyer, wrote: “I have
just laid down Tom Sawyer, and cannot resist the pressure. It is
immense! I read every word of it, didn't skip a line, and nearly
disgraced myself several times in the presence of a sleeping-car full
of honorable and pious people. Once I had to get to one side and have a
cry, and as for an internal compound of laughter and tears there was no
end to it.... The 'funeral' of the boys, the cave business, and the
hunt for the hidden treasure are as dramatic as anything I know of in
fiction, while the pathos--particularly everything relating to Huck
and Aunt Polly--makes a cross between Dickens's skill and Thackeray's
nature, which, resembling neither, is thoroughly impressive and
original.”]