The American leisure class—the class that might be expected to patronize good literature and to create a demand for sound, conservative criticism—is not only fond of horses, but is decidedly horsey. It is coarse and uncultivated. It has no taste in either literature or art. It reads few books and buys its pictures in Europe by the yard.
We are led to these remarks by the wholly inadequate verdict that has recently been given in some of the most prominent newspapers as to the merits of Mark Twain’s new book, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The critics seem to have gotten their cue in this instance from the action of the Concord library, the directors of which refused the book a place on their shelves. This action, as was afterwards explained, was based on the fact that the book was a work of fiction, and not because of the humorous characteristics that are popularly supposed to attach to the writings of Mr. Clemens. But the critics had got their cue before the explanation was made, and they straightway proceeded to inform the reading public that the book was gratuitously coarse, its humor unnecessarily broad, and its purpose crude and inartistic.
Now, nothing could be more misleading than such a criticism as this. It is difficult to believe that the critics who have condemned the book as coarse, vulgar and inartistic can have read it. Taken in connection with “The Prince and the Pauper,” it marks a clear and distinct advance in Mr. Clemens’s literary methods. It presents an almost artistically perfect picture of the life and character in the southwest, and it will be equally valuable to the historian and to the student of sociology. Its humor, which is genuine and never-failing, is relieved by little pathetic touches here and there that vouch for its literary value.
It is the story of a half illiterate, high-spirited boy whose adventures are related by himself. The art with which this conception is dealt with is perfect in all its details. The boy’s point of view is never for a moment lost sight of, and the moral of the whole is that this half illiterate boy can be made to present, with perfect consistency, not only the characters of the people whom he meets, but an accurate picture of their social life. From the artistic point of view, there is not a coarse nor vulgar suggestion from the beginning to the end of the book. Whatever is coarse and crude is in the life that is pictured, and the picture is perfect. It may be said that the humor is sometimes excessive, but it is genuine humor—and the moral of the book, though it is not scrawled across every page, teaches the necessity of manliness and self-sacrifice.
—May 26, 1885
H. L. MENCKEN
What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public laugh?
Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic? Has humanity found by experience that the man who sees the fun of life is unfitted to deal sanely with its problems? I think not. No man had more of the comic spirit in him than William Shakespeare, and yet his serious reflections, by the sheer force of their sublime obviousness, have pushed their way into the race’s arsenal of immortal platitudes. So, too, with Aesop, and with Lincoln and Johnson, to come down the scale. All of these men were humorists, and yet all of them performed prodigies of indubitable wisdom. And contrariwise, many an undeniable pundit has had his guffaw. Huxley, if he had not been the greatest intellectual duellist of his age, might have been its greatest wit. And Beethoven, after soaring to the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, turned to the divine fooling, the irresistible bull-fiddling of the scherzo.
No, there is not the slightest disharmony between sense and humor and respectability, despite the almost universal tendency to assume that there is. But, why, then, that widespread error? What actual fact of life lies behind it, giving it a specious appearance of reasonableness? None other, I am convinced, than the fact that the average man is far too stupid to make a joke.
He may see a joke and love a joke, particularly when it floors and flabbergasts some person he dislikes, but the only way he can himself take part in the priming and pointing of a new one is by acting as its target. In brief, his personal contact with humor tends to fill him with an accumulated sense of disadvantage, of pricked complacency, of sudden and crushing defeat; and so, by an easy psychological process, he is led into the idea that the thing itself is incompatible with true dignity of character and intellect. Hence his deep suspicion of jokers, however their thrusts. “What a damphool!”—this same half-pitying tribute he pays to wit and butt alike. He cannot separate the virtuoso of comedy from his general concept of comedy itself, and that concept is inextricably mixed with memories of foul ambuscades and mortifying hurts. And so it is not often that he is willing to admit any wisdom in a humorist, or to condone frivolity in a sage.
In all this, I believe, there is a plausible explanation of the popular, and even of the critical attitude toward the late Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain). Unless I am so wholly mistaken that my only expiation lies in suicide, Mark was the noblest literary artist who ever set pen to paper on American soil, and not only the noblest artist, but also one of the most profound and sagacious philosophers. From the beginning of his maturity down to his old age he dealt constantly and earnestly with the deepest problems of life and living, and to his consideration of them he brought a truly amazing instinct for the truth, an almost uncanny talent for ridding the essential thing of its deceptive husks of tradition, prejudice, flubdub and balderdash. No man, not even Nietzsche, ever did greater execution against those puerilities of fancy which so many men mistake for religion, and over which they are so eager to dispute and break heads. No man had a keener eye for that element of pretense which is bound to intrude itself into all human thinking, however serious, however painstaking, however honest in intent. And yet, because the man had humor as well as acumen, because he laughed at human weakness instead of weeping over it, because he turned now and then from the riddle of life to the joy of lire—because of this habit of mind it is the custom to regard him lightly and somewhat apologetically, as one debarred from greatness by unfortunate infirmities.
William Dean Howells probably knew him better than any other human being, but in all that Howells has written about him one is conscious of a conditioned admiration, of a subtle fear of allowing him too much merit, of an ineradicable disinclination to take him quite seriously. The Mark that Howells draws is not so much a great artist as a glorious enfant terrible. And even William Lyon Phelps, a hospitable and penetrating critic, wholly loose of orthodox shackles—even Phelps hems and haws a bit before putting Mark above Oliver Wendell Holmes, and is still convinced that “The Scarlet Letter” is an incomparably finer work of art than “Huckleberry Finn.”
Well, such notions will die hard, but soon or late, I am sure, they will inevitably die. So certain am I, indeed, of their dying that I now formally announce their death in advance, and prepare to wait in patience for the delayed applause. In one of his essays Dr. Phelps shows how critical opinion of Mark has gradually evolved from scorn into indifference, and from indifference into toleration, and from toleration into apologetic praise, and from apologetic praise into hearty praise. The stage of unqualified enthusiasm is coming—it has already cast its lights before England—and I am very glad to join the lodge as a charter member. Let me now set down my faith, for the literary archeologists of day after tomorrow:
I believe that “Huckleberry Finn” is one of the great masterpieces of the world, that it is the full equal of “Don Quixote” and “Robinson Crusoe,” that it is vastly better than “Gil Blas,” “Tristram Shandy,” “Nicholas Nickleby” or “Tom Jones.” I believe that it will be read by human beings of all ages, not as a solemn duty but for the honest love of it, and over and over again, long after every book written in America between the years 1800 and 1860, with perhaps three exceptions, has disappeared entirely save as a classroom fossil. I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life, that he came nearer to its elementals and was less deceived by its false appearances, than any other Amer
ican who has ever presumed to manufacture generalizations, not excepting Emerson. I believe that, admitting all his defects, he wrote better English, in the sense of cleaner, straighter, vivider, saner English, than either Irving or Hawthorne. I believe that four of his books—“Huck,” “Life on the Mississippi,” “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” and “A Connecticut Yankee”—are alone worth more, as works of art and as criticisms of life, than the whole output of Cooper, Irving, Holmes, Mitchell, Stedman, Whittier and Bryant. I believe that he ranks well above Whitman and certainly not below Poe. I believe that he was the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the blood royal. ... And what a man that Mark Twain was! How he stood above and apart from the world, like Rabelais come to life again, observing the human comedy, chuckling over the eternal fraudulence of man! What a sharp eye he had for the bogus, in religion, politics, art, literature, patriotism, virtue! What contempt he emptied upon shams of all sorts—and what pity! Mr. Paine [Twain’s biographer] reveals for us very clearly, by quotation and exposition, his habitual attitude of mind. He regarded all men as humbugs, but as humbugs to be dealt with gently, as humbugs too often taken in and swindled by their own humbuggery. He saw how false reasoning, false assumptions, false gods had entered into the very warp and woof of their thinking; how impossible it was for them to attack honestly the problems of being; how helpless they were in the face of life’s emergencies. And seeing all this, he laughed at them, but not often with malice. What genuine indignation he was capable of was leveled at life itself and not at its victims. Through all his later years the riddle of existence was ever before him. He thought about it constantly; he discussed it with everyone he knew; he made copious notes of his speculations. But he never came to any soothing custom-made conclusion. The more he examined life, the more it appeared to him to be without meaning, and even without direction; the more he pondered upon the idea of God, the more a definite idea of God eluded him. In the end, as Mr. Paine tells us, he verged toward a hopeless pessimism. Death seemed to him a glad release, an inestimable boon. When his daughter Jean died, suddenly, tragically, he wrote to her sister: “I am so glad she is out of it and safe—safe!”
It is this reflective, philosophizing Clemens who stands out most clearly in Mr. Paine’s book. In his own works, our glimpses of him are all too brief. His wife and his friends opposed his speculations, perhaps wisely, for the artist might have been swallowed up in the sage. But he wrote much to please himself and left a vast mass of unpublished manuscript behind him. Certainly it is to be hoped that these writings will see the light, and before long. One book described by Mr. Paine, “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,” would appear to be a satire so mordant and so large in scale that his admirers have a plain right to demand its publication. And there should be a new edition, too, of his confession of doubt, “What is Man?” of which a few copies were printed for private distribution in 1905. Yet again we have a right to ask for most if not all of his unpublished stories and sketches, many of which were suppressed at the behest of Mrs. Clemens, for reasons no longer worth considering. There is good ground for believing that his reputation will gain rather than suffer by the publication of these things, and in any case it can withstand the experiment, for “Huck Finn” and “Life on the Mississippi” and the “Connecticut Yankee” will remain, and so long as they remain there can be no question of the man’s literary stature. He was one of the great artists of all time. He was the full equal of Cervantes and Moliere, Swift and Defoe. He was and is one authentic giant of our national literature.
—from Smart Set (February 1913)
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
—from Green Hills of Africa (1935)
Questions
1. The Atlanta Constitution refers to the banning of Huckleberry Finn by the Concord library. Is it surprising that the novel continues to be widely banned? Is this syndrome a product of hasty criticism, as the Constitution asserts?
2. What is to be made of Mencken’s correlation between humor and philosophy? Both Mencken and Hemingway equate Twain with the father of modern American literature. What is distinctly modern and distinctly American about Twain’s writing? Is he read today for the same reasons Mencken and Hemingway read him?
3. Robert O‘Meally describes Huck Finn as engaged in a battle between what Twain called “a sound heart and a deformed conscience.” Is he right? How do you understand the distinction between “heart” and “conscience”?
4. Take a close look at a passage of the novel’s prose that strikes you as particularly evocative. How in particular is the effect achieved? Try to rewrite the passage in standard English.
5. Is nature in Huckleberry Finn friendly or hostile? Is American nature akin or antithetical to the American communities Jim and Huck encounter?
6. Is the last section of the book, in which Huck and Tom Sawyer play their childish trick on Jim, a mistake on Twain’s part? Does it undercut the rest of the novel?
FOR FURTHER READING
Classic Essays
Eliot, T. S. Introduction. Huckleberry Finn. 1950. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited by Sculley Bradley et al. Norton Critical Edition; second edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Edited by John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995.
Ellison, Ralph. Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Edited by Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues.” 1945. Reprinted in Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, edited by Robert G. O‘Meally. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Fiedler, Leslie A. “Come Back to the Raft Ag‘in, Huck Honey!” 1948. In Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. 1935. Reprint: New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.
Howells, William Dean. My Mark Twain. 1910. In The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It, edited by Edmund Wilson. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1943.
Smith, Henry Nash. Introduction. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.
Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. 1950. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953.
Warren, Robert Penn. “Samuel Clemens (1835-1910).” In American Literature: The Makers and the Making, edited by Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren. Vol. 2. New York: St. Martins’ Press, 1973.
Bibliographical Studies
De Voto, Bernard. Mark Twain’s America. 1932. Reprinted in Mark Twain’s America, and Mark Twain at Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.
Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966.
Kaplan, Justin. Born to Trouble: One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn. Center for the Book Viewpoint Series, no. 13. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985.
Smith, Henry Nash. Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer. 1962. New York: Atheneum, 1972.
New Critical Directions
Bradley, David. [Untitled]. New Yorker (June 26, 1995), p. 133.
Bradley, Sculley, et al., eds. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Norton Critical Edition; second edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
Budd, Louis J., ed. Introduction. In New Essays on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Doyno, Victor A. Afterword. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. The Oxford Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Fischer, Victor. “Huckleberry Finn Reviewed: The Reception of Huckleberry Finn in the United States, 1885-1897.” American Literary Realism 16 (1983).
Fishkin, Shelley F
isher. Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Gibson, Donald B. “Mark Twain’s Jim in the Classroom.” English Journal 57 (February 1968).
Graff, Gerald, and James Phelan, eds. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Harris, Susan K. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Complete Text with Introduction, Historical Contexts, Critical Essays. Riverside Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Mailer, Norman. “Huckleberry Finn, Alive at 100.” New York Times Book Review (December 9, 1984).
Mason, Bobbie Ann. [Untitled]. New Yorker (June 26, 1995), p. 130.
Morrison, Toni. Introduction. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. The Oxford Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Rabinovitz, Jonathan. “Huck Finn 101, or How to Teach Twain Without Fear.” New York Times (July 25, 1995), pp. B1, B4.
Smiley, Jane. “Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s ‘Masterpiece.‘ ” Harper’s 292 (January 1996).
Smith, David L. “Black Critics and Mark Twain.” In The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, edited by Forrest G. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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