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 whitewashing 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; although 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, will help 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 it will be a century or
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 Shakespeare 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 always rises 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 everyone 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
Shepherdson-Grangerford feud, and his description of the shooting of
Boggs by Sherburn and of the foiled attempt to lynch Sherburn 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.” Although
no one of the books is sustained throughout on this high level, and
although, 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.