It is highly probable that when an author reveals the power of evoking
views of places and of calling up portraits of people such as Mark
Twain showed in 'Life on the Mississippi,' and when he has the masculine
grasp of reality Mark Twain made evident in 'Roughing It,' he must needs
sooner or later turn from mere fact to avowed fiction and become a
story-teller. The long stories which Mark Twain has written fall into
two divisions,--first, those of which the scene is laid in the present,
in reality, and mostly in the Mississippi Valley, and second, those of
which the scene is laid in the past, in fantasy mostly, and in Europe.
As my own liking is a little less for the latter group, there is no need
for me now to linger over them. In writing these tales of the past Mark
Twain was making up stories in his head; personally I prefer the tales
of his in which he has his foot firm on reality. The 'Prince and the
Pauper' has the essence of boyhood in it; it has variety and vigor; it
has abundant humor and plentiful pathos; and yet I for one would give
the whole of it for the single chapter in which Tom Sawyer lets the
contract for white-washing his aunt's fence.
Mr. Howells has declared that there are two kinds of fiction he likes
almost equally well,--"a real novel and a pure romance"; and he joyfully
accepts 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court' as "one of the
greatest romances ever imagined." It is a humorous romance overflowing
with stalwart fun; and it is not irreverent but iconoclastic, in that it
breaks not a few disestablished idols. It is intensely American and
intensely nineteenth century and intensely democratic--in the best sense
of that abused adjective. The British critics were greatly displeased
with the book:--and we are reminded of the fact that the Spanish still
somewhat resent 'Don Quixote' because it brings out too truthfully the
fatal gap in the Spanish character between the ideal and the real. So
much of the feudal still survives in British society that Mark Twain's
merry and elucidating assault on the past seemed to some almost an
insult to the present.
But no critic, British or American, has ventured to discover any
irreverence in 'Joan of Arc,' wherein indeed the tone is almost devout
and the humor almost too much subdued. Perhaps it is my own distrust of
the so-called historical novel, my own disbelief that it can ever be
anything but an inferior form of art, which makes me care less for this
worthy effort to honor a noble figure. And elevated and dignified as is
the 'Joan of Arc,' I do not think that it shows us Mark Twain at his
best; altho it has many a passage that only he could have written, it is
perhaps the least characteristic of his works. Yet it may well be that
the certain measure of success he has achieved in handling a subject so
lofty and so serious, helped to open the eyes of the public to see the
solid merits of his other stories, in which his humor has fuller play
and in which his natural gifts are more abundantly displayed.
Of these other stories three are "real novels," to use Mr. Howells's
phrase; they are novels as real as any in any literature. 'Tom Sawyer'
and 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' are invaluable
contributions to American literature--for American literature is nothing
if it is not a true picture of American life and if it does not help us
to understand ourselves. 'Huckleberry Finn' is a very amusing volume,
and a generation has read its pages and laughed over it immoderately;
but it is very much more than a funny book; it is a marvelously accurate
portrayal of a whole civilization. Mr. Ormsby, in an essay which
accompanies his translation of 'Don Quixote,' has pointed out that for a
full century after its publication that greatest of novels was enjoyed
chiefly as a tale of humorous misadventure, and that three generations
had laughed over it before anybody suspected that it was more than a
mere funny book. It is perhaps rather with the picaresque romances of
Spain that 'Huckleberry Finn' is to be compared than with the
masterpiece of Cervantes; but I do not think that it will be a century
or that it will take three generations before we Americans generally
discover how great a book 'Huckleberry Finn' really is, how keen its
vision of character, how close its observation of life, how sound its
philosophy, and how it records for us once and for all certain phases of
southwestern society which it is most important for us to perceive and
to understand. The influence of slavery, the prevalence of feuds, the
conditions and the circumstances that make lynching possible--all these
things are set before us clearly and without comment. It is for us to
draw our own moral, each for himself, as we do when we see Shakspere
acted.
'Huckleberry Finn,' in its art, for one thing, and also in its broader
range, is superior to 'Tom Sawyer' and to 'Pudd'nhead Wilson,' fine as
both these are in their several ways. In no book in our language, to my
mind, has the boy, simply as a boy, been better realized than in 'Tom
Sawyer.' In some respects 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' is the most dramatic of
Mark Twain's longer stories, and also the most ingenious; like 'Tom
Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn,' it has the full flavor of the
Mississippi River, on which its author spent his own boyhood, and from
contact with the soil of which he has always risen reinvigorated.
It is by these three stories, and especially by 'Huckleberry Finn,' that
Mark Twain is likely to live longest. Nowhere else is the life of the
Mississippi Valley so truthfully recorded. Nowhere else can we find a
gallery of southwestern characters as varied and as veracious as those
Huck Finn met in his wanderings. The histories of literature all praise
the 'Gil Blas' of Le Sage for its amusing adventures, its natural
characters, its pleasant humor, and its insight into human frailty; and
the praise is deserved. But in every one of these qualities 'Huckleberry
Finn' is superior to 'Gil Blas.' Le Sage set the model of the picaresque
novel, and Mark Twain followed his example; but the American book is
richer than the French--deeper, finer, stronger. It would be hard to
find in any language better specimens of pure narrative, better examples
of the power of telling a story and of calling up action so that the
reader cannot help but see it, than Mark Twain's account of the
Shepardson-Grangerford feud, and his description of the shooting of
Boggs by Sherbourn and of the foiled attempt to lynch Sherbourn
afterward.
These scenes, fine as they are, vivid, powerful, and most artistic in
their restraint, can be matched in the two other books. In 'Tom Sawyer'
they can be paralleled by the chapter in which the boy and the girl are
lost in the cave, and Tom, seeing a gleam of light in the distance,
discovers that it is a candle carried by Indian Joe, the one enemy he
has in the world. In 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' the great passages of
'Huckleberry Finn' are rivaled by that most pathetic account of the weak
son willing to sell his own mother as a slave "down the river." Altho no
one of the books is sustained thruout on this high level, and altho, in
truth, there are in each of them passages here and there that we could
wish away (because they are not worthy of the association in which we
find them), I have no hesitation in expressing here my own conviction
that the man who has given us four scenes like these is to be compared
with the masters of literature; and that he can abide the comparison
with equanimity.