has had. Then the joke is sprung, and in the growing light of the
know that he ought to return Jim to slavery. And as soon as he
dawn Huck points to the debris of leaves on the raft and the
makes the decision according to conscience and decides to inform on
broken oar.
Jim, he has all the warmly gratifying emotions of conscious virtue.
"Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right
Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash
straight off, and my troubles all gone .. .. I felt good and all
again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he couldn't
washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life,
seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its place again right
and I knowed I could pray now." And when at last he finds that he
away. But when he did get the thing straightened around he looked at
cannot endure his decision but must sacrifice the comforts of the
me steady without ever smiling, and says:
"What do dey stan' for? l'se gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore
pure heart and help Jim in his escape, it is not because he has
-� - ---
108
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Huckleberry Finn
I09
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acquired any new ideas about slavery-he believes that he detests
The Civil War and the development of the railroads ended the
Abolitionists; he himself answers when he is asked if the explosion
great days when the river was the central artery of the nation. No
of a steamboat boiler had hurt anyone, "No'em, killed a nigger,"
contrast could be more moving than that between the hot, turbulent
and of course finds nothing wrong in the responsive comment,
energy of the river life of the first part of Life on the Mississippi and
"Well, it's lucky because sometimes people do get hurt." Ideas and
the melancholy reminiscence of the second part. And the war that
ideals can be of no help to him in his moral crisis. He no more
brought the end of the rich Mississippi days also marked a change
condemns slavery than Tristram and Lancelot condemn marriage;
in the quality of life in America which, to many men, consisted of a
he is as consciously wicked as any illicit lover of romance and he
deterioration of American moral values. It is of course a human
consents to be damned for a personal devotion, never questioning
habit to look back on the past and to find it a better and more inthe justice of the punishment he has incurred.
nocent time than the present. Yet in this instance there seems to be
Huckleberry Finn was once barred from certain libraries and
an objective basis for the judgment. We cannot disregard the testischools for its alleged subversion of morality. The authorities had mony of men so diverse as Henry Adams, Walt Whitman, William
in mind the book's endemic lying, the petty thefts, the denigrations
Dean Howells, and Mark Twain himself, to mention but a few of
of respectability and religion, the bad language, and the bad gramthe many who were in agreement on this point. All spoke of somemar. We smile at that excessive care, yet in point of fact Huckleberry thing that had gone out of American life after the war, some sim
Finn is indeed a subversive book-no one who reads thoughtfully
plicity, some innocence, some peace. None of them was under any
the dialectic of Huck's great moral crisis will ever again be wholly
illusion about the amount of ordinary human wickedness that exable to accept without some question and some irony the assumpisted in the old days, and Mark Twain certainly was not. The differtions of the respectable morality by which he lives, nor will ever ence was in the public attitude, in the things that were now accepted
again be certain that what he considers the clear dictates of moral
and made respectable in the national ideal. It was, they all felt, conreason are not merely the engrained customary beliefs of his time nected with new emotions about money. As Mark Twain said,
and place.
where formerly "the people had desired money," now they "fall
We are not likely to miss in Huckleberry Finn the subtle, implicit
down and worship it." The new gospel was, "Get money. Get it
moral meaning of the great river. But we are likely to understand
quickly. Get it in abundance. Get it in prodigious abundance. Get
these moral implications as having to do only with personal and init dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must." 3
dividual conduct. And since the sum of individual pettiness is on
With the end of the Civil War capitalism had established itself.
the whole pretty constant, we are likely to think of the book as ap
The relaxing influence of the frontier was coming to an end. Ameriplicable to mankind in general and at all times and in all places, and cans increasingly became "dwellers in cities" and "worshippers of
we praise it by calling it "universal." And so it is; but like many
the machine." Mark Twain himself became a notable part of this
books to which that large adjective applies, it is also local and parnew dispensation. No one worshiped the machine more than he did, ticular. It has a particular moral reference to the United States in the
or thought he did-he ruined himself by his devotion to the Paige
period after the Civil War. It was then when, in Mr. Eliot's phrase,
typsetting machine, by which he hoped to make a fortune even
the river was forgotten, and precisely by the "dwellers in cities," by
the "worshippers of the machine."
8 Mark Twain in Eruption, edited by Bernard De Voto, p. 77.
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Huckleberry Finn
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greater than he had made by his writing, and he sang the praises of
the so-called picaresque novel, or novel of the road, which strings its
the machine age in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
incidents on the line of the hero's travels. But, as Pascal says, "rivers
He associated intimately with the dominant figures of American
are roads that move," and the movement of the road in its own
business enterprise. Yet at the same time he hated the new way of
mysterious life transmutes the primitive simplicity of the form: the
life and kept bitter memoranda of his scorn, commenting on the low
road itself is the greatest character in this novel of the road, and -the
morality or the bad taste of the men who were shaping the ideal
hero's departures from the river and his returns to it compose a suband directing the destiny of the nation.
tle and significant pattern. The linear simplicity of the picaresque
Mark Twain said of Tom Sawyer that it "is simply a hymn, put
novel is further modified by the story's having a clear dramatic orinto prose form to give it a worldly air." He might have said the ganization: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a mountsame, and with even more reason, of Huckleberry Finn, which is a i
ng suspense of interest.
hymn to an older America forever gone, an America which had its
As for the style of the book, it is not less than definitive in Amerigreat national faults, which was full of violence and even of cruelty, can literature. The prose of Huckleberry Finn established for written
but which still maintained its sense of reality, for it was not yet
prose the virtues of American colloquial speech. This has nothing to
enthralled by money, the father of ultimate illusion and lies. Against
do with pronunciation or grammar. It has something to do with ease
the money-god stands the river-god, whose comments are silentand freedom in the use of language. Most of all it has to do with the sunlight, space, uncrowded time, stillness, and danger. It was quickly
structure of the sentence, which is simple, direct, and fluent, mainforgotten once its practical usefulness had passed, but, as Mr. Eliot's taining the rhythm of the word-groups of speech and the intonations
poem says, "The river is within us ....
"
of the speaking voice.
In form and style Huckleberry Finn is an almost perfect work.
In the matter of language, American literature had a special prob
Only one mistake has ever been charged against it, that it concludes
lem. The young nation was inclined to think that the mark of the
with Tom Sawyer's elaborate, too elaborate, game of Jim's escape.
truly literary product was a grandiosity and elegance not to be
Certainly this episode is too long-in the original draft it was much
found in the common speech. It therefore encouraged a greater
longer-and certainly it is a falling off, as almost anything would
breach between its vernacular and its literary language than, say,
have to be from
'
the incidents of the river. Yet it has a certain formal
English literature of the same period ever allowed. This accounts for
aptness-like, say, that of the Turkish initiation which brings Mo-
the hollow ring one now and then hears even in the work of our
liere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme to its close. It is a rather mechanibest writers in the first half of the last century. English writers of cal development of an idea, and yet some device is needed to permit
equal stature would never have made the lapses into rhetorical ex
Huck to return to his anonymity, to give up the role of hero, to fall
cess that are common in Cooper and Poe and that are to be found
into the background which he prefers, for he is modest in all things
even in Melville and Hawthorne.
and could not well endure the attention and glamour which attend
Yet at the same time that the language of ambitious literature was
a hero at a book's end. For this purpose nothing could serve better
high and thus always in danger of falseness, the American reader
than the mind of Tom Sawyer with its literary furnishings, its conwas keenly interested in the actualities of daily speech. No literature, scious romantic desire for experience and the hero's part, and its
indeed, was ever so taken up with matters of speech as ours was.
ingenious schematization of life to achieve that aim.
"Dialect," which attracted even our serious writers, was the accepted
The form of the book is based on the simplest of all novel-forms,
common ground of our popular humorous writing. Nothing in so-
II2
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cial life seemed so remarkable as the different forms which speech
could take-the brogue of the immigrant Irish or the mispronunciation of the German, the "affectation" of the English, the reputed precision of the Bostonian, the legendary twang of the Yankee
Kipling
farmer, and the drawl of the Pike County man. Mark Twain, of
course, was in the tradition of humor that exploited this interest, and
no one could play with it nearly so well. Although today the carefully spelled-out dialects of nineteenth-century American humor are likely to seem dull enough, the subtle variations of speech in Huckleberry Finn, of which Mark Twain was justly proud, are still part of the liveliness and flavor of the book.
ably to our past, and although the
Out of his knowledge of the actual speech of America Mark
KIPLING bel?1:gs irrevoc_
renewed critical attention he has lately been given by
Twain forged a classic prose. The adjective may seem a strange one,
Edmund Wilson and T. S. Eliot is friendlier and more
yet it is apt. Forget the misspellings and the faults of grammar, and
interesting than any he has received for a long time, it is less likely
the prose will be seen to move with the greatest simplicity, directto make us revise our opinions than to revive our memories of him.
ness, lucidity, and grace. These qualities are by no means accidental.
But these memories, when revived, will be strong, for if Kipling be
Mark Twain, who read widely, was passionately interested in the
longs to our past, he belongs there very firmly, fixed deep in childproblems of style; the mark of the strictest literary sensibility is hood feeling. And especially for liberals of a certain age he must aleverywhere to be found in the prose of Huckleberry Finn.
ways be an interesting figure, for he had an effect upon us in that
It is this prose that Ernest Hemingway had chiefly in mind when
he said that "all modern American literature comes from one book
political attitude meet, an effect so much the greater because it was
by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Hemingway's own prose
so early experienced; and then for many of us our rejection of him
stems from it directly and consciously; so does the prose of the two
was our first literary-political decision.
modern writers who most influenced Hemingway's early style, Ger
My own relation with Kipling was intense and I believe typical. It
trude Stein and Sherwood Anderson ( although neither of them
began, properly enough, with The Jungle Book. This was my first
could maintain the robust purity of their model); so, too, does the
independently chosen and avidly read book, my first literary disbest of William Faulkner's prose, which, like Mark Twain's own, covery, all the more wonderful because I had come upon it in. an
reinforces the colloquial tradition with the literary tradition. Indeed,
adult "set," one of the ten green volumes of the Century Edition
it may be said that almost every contemporary American writer who
that used to be found in many homes. (The "set" has become undeals conscientiously with the problems and possibility of prose must fashionable and that is a blow to the literary education of the young,
feel, directly or indirectly, the influence of Mark Twain. He is the
who, once they had been lured to an author, used to remain loyal to
master of the style that escapes the fixity of the printed page, that
him until they had read him by the yard.) The satisfactions of The
sounds in our ears with the immediacy of the heard voice, the very
Jungle Book were large and numerous. I suppose a boy's vestigial
voice of unpretentious truth.
animal totemism was pleased; there were the marvelous but credible
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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Kipling
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abilities of Mowgli; there were the deadily enmities and grandiose
seemed the very essence of adult life. Kipling himself was not much
revenges, strangely and tragically real. And it was a world peopled
more than a boy when he wrote these remarkable stories-remarkby wonderful parents, not only Mother Wolf and Father Wolf, but able because, no matter how one judges them, one never forgets the
also-the fathers were far more numerous than the mothersleast of them-and he saw the adult world as full of rites of initia
Bagheera the panther, Baloo the bear, Hathi the elephant, and the
tion, of closed doors and listeners behind them, councils, boudoir
dreadful but decent Kaa the python, a whole council of strength and
conferences, conspiracies, innuendoes, and special knowledge. It was
wisdom which was as benign as it was dangerous, and no doubt
very baffling, and certainly as an introduction to literature it went
much of the delight came from discovering the benignity of this
counter to all our present educational theory, according to which a
feral world. And then there was the fascination of the Pack and its
child should not be baffled at all but should read only about �hat he
Law. It is not too much to say that a boy had thus his first introknows of from experience; but one worked it out by a sort of duction to a generalized notion of society. It was a notion charged
algebra, one discovered the meaning of the unknowns through the
with feeling-the Law was mysterious, firm, certain, noble, in every
knowns, and just as one got without definition an adequate knowlway admirable beyond any rule of home or school.
edge of what a sais was, or a dak-bungalow, and what the signifi
Mixed up with this feeling about the Pack and the Law, and percance of pukka was, so one penetrated to what went on between the fectly expressing it, was the effect of Kipling's gnomic language,
Gadsbys and to why Mrs. Hauksbee was supposed to be charming
both in prose and in verse, for you could not entirely skip the verse
and Mrs. Reiver not. Kipling's superior cryptic tone was in effect an