Mark Twain makes no account of consistencies in time. His boys vary between the attitudes of nine-year-ids and those of thirteen or fourteen, despite the fact that Tom Sawyer 's time is one Missouri summer, and that of Huckleberry Finn a few more broken months. Like the creator of perennial comic-strip characters, Twain syncopates the march of time as he pleases. In the latter novel he also ignores the fact that Nigger Jim could have escaped by swimming across to the free soil of Illinois early in the book, and commits other sins against literalism which he would have ridiculed unmercifully in the pages of his noire James Fennimore Cooper.
Huckleberry Finn is clearly the finer book, showing a more mature point of view and exploring richer strata of human experience. A joy forever, it is unquestionably one of the masterpieces of American and of world literature. Here Twain returned to his first idea of having the chief actor tell the story, with better results. Huck's speech is saltier than Tom's, his mind freer from the claptrap of romance and sophistication. Huck is poised midway between the town-bred Tom and that scion of wood lore and primitive superstition Nigger Jim, toward whom Huck with his margin of superior worldliness stands in somewhat the same relation that Tom stands toward Huck. When Tom and Huck are together, our sympathy turns invariably toward the latter. A homeless river rat, cheerful in his rags, suspicious of every attempt to civilize him, Huck has none of the unimportant virtues and all the essential ones. The school of hard knocks has taught him skepticism, horse sense, and a tenacious grasp on reality. But it has not toughened him into cynicism or crime. Nature gave him a stanch and faithful heart, friendly to all underdogs and instantly hostile toward bullies and all shapes of overmastering power. One critic has called him the type of the common folk, sample of the run-of-the-mill democracy in America. Twain himself might have objected to the label, for him once declared "there are no common people, except m the highest spheres of society." Huck always displays frontier neighborliness, even trying to provide a rescue for three murderers dying marooned on a wrecked boat, because "there isn’t no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself, yet, and then how would I like it?" Money does not tempt him to betray his friend Nigger Jim, though at times his conscience is troubled by the voice of convention, preaching the sacredness of property — in the guise of flesh and blood — and he trembles on the brink of surrender. Nor can he resist sometimes the provocation offered by Jim's innocent sedulity, only to be cut to the quick when his friend bears with dignity the skivers that his trustfulness has been made game of. Even as Huck surpasses Tom in qualities of courage and heart, so Nigger Jim excels even
Huck in fidelity and innate manliness, to emerge as the book's character.
Sam Clemens himself (who in the first known letter he wrote his on the day he reached New York in August, 1853,[5] had indulged the sarcasm, "I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern Stat niggers are considerably better than white people") learned in time, much Huck learns, to face down his condescension. In later years he became warm friend of the Negro and his rights. He paid the way of a near student through Yale as "his part of the reparation due from every white t every black man," and savagely attacked King Leopold of Belgium for the barbarities of his agents in the Congo. Mrs. Clemens once suggested as a mollifying rule to her husband, "Consider everybody colored till he is proved white." Howells thought that as time went on Clemens the South westerner was prone to lose his Southern but cleave to his Western heritage, finding his real affinities with the broader democracy of the frontier. On other issues of race prejudice, Twain looked upon the Jew with unqualified admiration defended the Chinese whom he had seen pelted through the streets of San Francisco, and confessed to only one invincible antipathy, namely, against the French—although his most rhapsodic book was written in praise of their national heroine.
The final draft of Huckleberry Finn was intimately bound up with the writing of Twain's third great volume about his river days, Life on the Mississippi. Fourteen chapters of these recollections had been published in the Atlantic in 1875; before expanding them into a book Twain made a memorable trip in 1882 back to the scenes of his youth. In working more or less simultaneously on both long-unfinished books, he lifted a scene intended for Huckleberry Finn—about Huck and the craftsmen—to flavor the other book, but the great gainer from his trip was not the memoir but the novel. The relative pallor of Life on the Mississippi, Part II, is due in a measure to the fact that so much lifeblood of reminiscence is drained off into the veins of Huckleberry Finn. The travel notes of 1882, written up soon after Twain s return home, are suffused with some of the finest situations in his novel: the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, Colonel Sherborn and the mob, and the two seedy vagabonds who come on-stage as the Duke and the King, with a posse in their wake, who "said they hadn't been doing nothing, and was being chased for it."
Mark Twain's renewed contact with life among the river towns quickened his sense of realism. For Huckleberry Finn, save in its passages about the peace and freedom of Jackson's Island, is no longer "simply a hymn," and so dim has grown the dream of adolescent romancing that Becky Tactic reappears but perfunctorily under the careless label of "Bessie" Thatcher essay Huck's voyage through the South reveals aspects of life darker than the occasional melodrama of Tom Sawyer. We are shown the and of poor white jack woods loafers with their plug tobacco and Barlow dogs on stray sows and laugh at the fun and look grateful for the noise," or drench a stray cur with turpentine and set him afire. We remark the cowardice of lynching "parties" the chicanery of patent medicine fakers, revivalists, and exploiters of rustic ribaldry; the senseless feedings of he gentry. In the background broods fear: not only a boy's apprehension of -hosts, African superstitions, and the terrors of the night, nor the adults' dread of black insurrection, but the endless implicated strands of robbery, floggings, drowning, and murder. Death by violence lurks at every bend of road or river. Self-preservation becomes the ruling motive, squaring perfectly with the role of the principal characters, Huck the foot-loose orphan and his friend Jim the fugitive—puny in all strengths save loyalty, as they wander among the boots of white adult supremacy. The pair belongs to the immortals of fiction.
"Never keen at self-criticism, Mark Twain passed without soundings from these depths to the adjacent shallows of burlesque and extravaganza. The last fifth of this superb novel, Huckleberry Finn, brings back the romantic Tom Sawyer, with a hilarious, intricate, and needless plot for rescuing Jim from captivity. The story thus closes upon the farcical note with which the Hannibal cycle has begun, in the whitewashing episode. On the same note many years later Mark Twain tried to revive his most famous characters, in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), with Tom, Huck, and Jim as passengers of a mad balloonist and their subsequent adventures in Egypt. Though inferior to its great predecessors, this book does not lack humor, gusto, and rich characterization. Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)[6] dishes up a melodrama of stolen diamonds, double-crossing thieves, and that immortal device of Plaits and Shakespeare, identical twins, whose charm custom could not stale for Mark Twain. Here haste artifice, and creative fatigue grow painfully apparent.
Uneven quality appears in even though it came at the high tide of his powers. Chapters IV-XVII was written for the Atlantic after Twain's chance reminiscences led his friend twitchily to exclaim, "What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!" Fresh, vivid, humorous, they recall the great days of river traffic: the problems of navigation, the races, the pilots' association, the resourcefulness and glory of the old-time pilot. The addenda, which came after Twain's return to the river for "copy," sometimes attain the former standard—the description of Pilot Brown the scold, or the account of the Pennsylvania disaster and Henry Clemens' death—but more prove disappointing after the white heat of the book's inception. The two chapters on the history of the river are merely an afterthought; the later ones too often wander among irrelevant yarns, like the revenge of the Austrian, or vignettes of picturesque New Orleans. Sam Clemens' and a half as cub pilot are followed by almost no mention of his two years as a licensed skipper. Instead we are treated to such vagaries as Twain's famous theory about Sir Walter Scott, whose "Middle-Age sham civilization» he claimed, inspired the chivalry of the Old South, which in turn provoked the Civil War.
Yet with all its flaws of disunity and untidiness, Life on the remains a masterpiece. Its communicable delight in experience, its of the human comedy and tragedy on the river (which Melville alone among great artists had tried to bring into focus in The Confidence Man in 1857) lend it real durability. Howeils believed that the author long regarded it his greatest book — pleased with assurance to that effect from the German Kaiser and also from a hotel porter, whose praise he accepted with equal satisfaction. In other moods, toward the end of his life, Twain favored Joan of Arc, in part because it cost him "twelve years of preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation, & got none." Thus again he displayed the blindness of self-appraisal. The book that required probably least effort of all, drawn from a brimming native reservoir, Huckleberry Finn, unquestionably is his finest, with Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi as runners-up.