The boy of to-day is fortunate indeed, and, of a truth, he is to be
congratulated. While the boy of yesterday had to stay his stomach with
the unconscious humor of _Sandford and Merton_, the boy of to-day may
get his fill of fun and of romance and of adventure in the _Story of a
Bad Boy_, in _Treasure Island_, in _Tom Brown_, and in _Tom Sawyer_, and
then in the sequel to _Tom Sawyer_, wherein Tom himself appears in the
very nick of time, like a young god from the machine. Sequels of stories
which have been widely popular are not a little risky. _Huckleberry
Finn_ is a sharp exception to the general rule of failure. Although it
is a sequel, it is quite as worthy of wide popularity as _Tom Sawyer_.
An American critic once neatly declared that the late G. P. R. James
hit the bull's-eye of success with his first shot, and that forever
thereafter he went on firing through the same hole. Now this is just
what Mark Twain has not done: _Huckleberry Finn_ is not an attempt to do
_Tom Sawyer_ over again. It is a story quite as unlike its predecessor
as it is like. Although Huck Finn appeared first in the earlier book,
and although Tom Sawyer reappears in the later, the scenes and the
characters are otherwise wholly different. Above all, the atmosphere of
the story is different. _Tom Sawyer_ was a tale of boyish adventure in a
village in Missouri, on the Mississippi River, and it was told by the
author. _Huckleberry Finn_ is autobiographic; it is a tale of boyish
adventure along the Mississippi River told as it appeared to Huck Finn.
There is not in _Huckleberry Finn_ any one scene quite as funny as those
in which Tom Sawyer gets his friends to whitewash the fence for him, and
then uses the spoils thereby acquired to attain the highest distinction
of the Sunday-school the next morning. Nor is there any situation quite
as thrilling as that awful moment in the cave when the boy and the girl
are lost in the darkness; and when Tom Sawyer 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
foot-print in the sand of the sea-shore.
But though _Huckleberry Finn_ may not quite reach these two highest
points of _Tom Sawyer_, the general level of the later story is
indisputably higher than that of the earlier. For one thing, the skill
with which the character of Huck Finn is maintained is marvellous. We
see everything through his eyes--and they are his eyes, and not a pair
of Mark Twain's spectacles. And the comments on what he sees are his
comments--the comments of an ignorant, superstitious, sharp, healthy
boy, brought up as Huck Finn had been brought up; they are not speeches
put into his mouth by the author. One of the most artistic things in the
book--and that Mark Twain is a literary artist of a very high order all
who have considered his later writings critically cannot but
confess--one of the most artistic things in _Huckleberry Finn_ is the
sober self-restraint with which Mr. Clemens lets Huck Finn set down,
without any comment at all, scenes which would have afforded the
ordinary writer matter for endless moral and political and sociological
disquisition. I refer particularly to the accounts of the
Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, and of the shooting of Boggs by Colonel
Sherburn. Here are two incidents of the rough old life of the
South-western States and of the Mississippi Valley, forty or fifty years
ago, of the old life which is now rapidly passing away under the
influence of advancing civilization and increasing commercial
prosperity, but which has not wholly disappeared even yet, although a
slow revolution in public sentiment is taking place. The
Grangerford-Shepherdson feud is a vendetta as deadly as any Corsican
could wish, yet the parties to it were honest, brave, sincere, good
Christian people, probably people of deep religious sentiment. None the
less we see them taking their guns to church, and, when occasion serves,
joining in what is little better than a general massacre. The killing of
Boggs by Colonel Sherburn is told with equal sobriety and truth; and
the later scene in which Colonel Sherburn cows and lashes the mob which
has set out to lynch him is one of the most vigorous bits of writing
Mark Twain has done.
In _Tom Sawyer_ we saw Huckleberry Finn from the outside; in the present
volume we see him from the inside. He is almost as much a delight to any
one who has been a boy as was Tom Sawyer. But only he or she who has
been a boy can truly enjoy this record of his adventures and of his
sentiments and of his sayings. Old maids of either sex will wholly fail
to understand him, or to like him, or to see his significance and his
value. Like Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn is a genuine boy; he is neither a girl
in boy's clothes, like many of the modern heroes of juvenile fiction,
nor is he a "little man," a full-grown man cut down; he is a boy, just a
boy, only a boy. And his ways and modes of thought are boyish. As Mr. F.
Anstey understands the English boy, and especially the English boy of
the middle classes, so Mark Twain understands the American boy, and
especially the American boy of the Mississippi Valley of forty or fifty
years ago. The contrast between Tom Sawyer, who is the child of
respectable parents, decently brought up, and Huckleberry Finn, who is
the child of the town drunkard, not brought up at all, is made distinct
by a hundred artistic touches, not the least natural of which is Huck's
constant reference to Tom as his ideal of what a boy should be. When
Huck escapes from the cabin where his drunken and worthless father had
confined him, carefully manufacturing a mass of very circumstantial
evidence to prove his own murder by robbers, he cannot help saying, "I
did wish Tom Sawyer was there; I knowed he would take an interest in
this kind of business, and throw in the fancy touches. Nobody could
spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as that." Both boys have
their full share of boyish imagination; and Tom Sawyer, being given to
books, lets his imagination run on robbers and pirates, having a perfect
understanding with himself that, if you want to get fun out of this
life, you must never hesitate to make believe very hard; and, with Tom's
youth and health, he never finds it hard to make believe and to be a
pirate at will, or to summon an attendant spirit, or to rescue a
prisoner from the deepest dungeon 'neath the castle moat. But in Huck
this imagination has turned to superstition; he is a walking repository
of the juvenile folk-lore of the Mississippi Valley--a folk-lore partly
traditional among the white settlers, but largely influenced by intimate
association with the negroes. When Huck was in his room at night all by
himself waiting for the signal Tom Sawyer was to give him at midnight,
he felt so lonesome he wished he was dead:
"The stars was shining and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so
mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that
was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was
going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I
couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over
me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost
makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't
make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to
go about that way every night grieving. I got so downhearted and scared
I did wish I had some company. Pretty soon a spider went crawling up my
shoulders, and I flipped it off and it lit in the candle; and before I
could budge it was all shrivelled up. I didn't need anybody to tell me
that that was an awful bad sign and would fetch me some bad luck, so I
was scared and most shook the clothes off me. I got up and turned around
in my tracks three times and crossed my breast every time; and then I
tied up a little lock of my hair with a thread to keep witches away. But
I hadn't no confidence. You do that when you've lost a horseshoe that
you've found, instead of nailing it up over the door, but I hadn't ever
heard anybody say it was any way to keep off bad luck when you'd killed
a spider."
And, again, later in the story, not at night this time, but in broad
daylight, Huck walks along a road:
"When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and
sunshiny--the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of
faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so
lonesome like everybody's dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and
quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like
it's spirits whispering--spirits that's been dead ever so many
years--and you always think they're talking about _you_. As a general
thing it makes a body wish _he_ was dead, too, and done with it all."
Now, none of these sentiments are appropriate to Tom Sawyer, who had
none of the feeling for nature which Huck Finn had caught during his
numberless days and nights in the open air. Nor could Tom Sawyer either
have seen or set down this instantaneous photograph of a summer storm:
"It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely;
and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little
ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind
that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the
leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set
the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next,
when it was just about the bluest and blackest--fst! it was as bright as
glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about,
away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could
see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the
thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling,
tumbling down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling
empty barrels down-stairs, where it's long stairs and they bounce a good
deal, you know."
The romantic side of Tom Sawyer is shown in most delightfully humorous
fashion in the account of his difficult devices to aid in the easy
escape of Jim, a run-away negro. Jim is an admirably drawn character.
There have been not a few fine and firm portraits of negroes in recent
American fiction, of which Mr. Cable's Bras-Coupe in the _Grandissimes_
is perhaps the most vigorous, and Mr. Harris's Mingo and Uncle Remus and
Blue Dave are the most gentle. Jim is worthy to rank with these; and the
essential simplicity and kindliness and generosity of the Southern negro
have never been better shown than here by Mark Twain. Nor are Tom Sawyer
and Huck Finn and Jim the only fresh and original figures in Mr.
Clemens's book; on the contrary, there is scarcely a character of the
many introduced who does not impress the reader at once as true to
life--and therefore as new, for life is so varied that a portrait from
life is sure to be as good as new. That Mr. Clemens draws from life, and
yet lifts his work from the domain of the photograph to the region of
art, is evident to any one who will give his writing the honest
attention which it deserves. The chief players in _Huckleberry Finn_ are
taken from life, no doubt, but they are so aptly chosen and so broadly
drawn that they are quite as typical as they are actual. They have one
great charm, all of them--they are not written about and about; they are
not described and dissected and analyzed; they appear and play their
parts and disappear; and yet they leave a sharp impression of
indubitable vitality and individuality.
1886