|
M A Y 1 8 7 6
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
A review by William Dean Howells
Mr. Samuel Clemens has taken the boy of the Southwest for
the hero of his new book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and has presented him with a
fidelity to circumstance which loses no charm by being realistic in the highest
degree, and which gives incomparably the best picture of life in that region as
yet known to fiction. The town where Tom Sawyer was born and brought up is some
such idle shabby Mississippi River town as Mr. Clemens has so well described in
his piloting reminiscences, but Tom belongs to the better sort of people in it,
and has been bred to fear God and dread the Sunday-school according to the
strictest rite of the faiths that have characterized all the respectability of
the West. His subjection in these respects does not so deeply affect his
inherent tendencies but that he makes himself a beloved burden to the poor,
tender-hearted old aunt who brings him up with his orphan brother and sister,
and struggles vainly with his manifold sins, actual and imaginary. The
limitations of his transgressions are nicely and artistically traced. He is
mischievous, but not vicious; he is ready for almost any depredation that
involves the danger and honor of adventure, but profanity he knows may provoke
a thunderbolt upon the heart of the blasphemer, and he almost never swears; he
resorts to any strategem to keep out of school, but he is not a downright liar,
except upon terms of after shame and remorse that make his falsehood bitter to
him. He is cruel, as all children are, but chiefly because he is ignorant; he
is not mean, but there are very definite bounds to his generosity; and his
courage is the Indian sort, full of prudence and mindful of retreat as one of
the conditions of prolonged hostilities. In a word, he is a boy, and merely and
exactly an ordinary boy on the moral side. What makes him delightful to the
reader is that on the imaginative side he is very much more, and though every
boy has wild and fantastic dreams, this boy cannot rest till he has somehow
realized them. Till he has actually run off with two other boys in the
character of a buccaneer and lived for a week on an island in the Mississippi,
he has lived in vain; and this passage is but the prelude to more thrilling
adventures, in which he finds hidden treasures, traces the bandits to their
cave, and is himself lost in its recesses. The local material and the incidents
with which his career is worked up are excellent, and throughout there is
scrupulous regard for the boy's point of view in reference to his surroundings
and himself, which shows how rapidly Mr. Clemens has grown as an artist. We do
not remember anything in which this propriety is violated, and its preservation
adds immensely to the grown-up reader's satisfaction in the amusing and
exciting story. There is a boy's love-affair, but it is never treated otherwise
than as a boy's love-affair. When the half-breed has murdered the young doctor,
Tom and his friend, Huckleberry Finn, are really in their boyish terror and
superstition, going to let the poor old town-drunkard be hanged for the crime,
till the terror of that becomes unendurable. The story is a wonderful study of
the boy-mind, which inhabits a world quite distinct from that in which he is
bodily present with his elders, and in this lies its great charm and its
universality, for boy-nature, however human nature varies, is the same
everywhere.
The tale is very dramatically wrought, and the subordinate characters are
treated with the same graphic force that sets Tom alive before us. The
worthless vagabond, Huck Finn, is entirely delightful throughout, and in his
promised reform his identity is respected: he will lead a decent life in order
that he may one day be thought worthy to become a member of that gang of
robbers which Tom is to organize. Tom's aunt is excellent, with her kind
heart's sorrow and secret pride in Tom; and so is his sister Mary, one of those
good girls who are born to usefulness and charity and forbearance and unvarying
rectitude. Many village people and local notables are introduced in
well-conceived character; the whole little town lives in the reader's sense,
with its religiousness, its lawlessness, its droll social distinctions, its
civilization qualified by its slave-holding, and its traditions of the wilder
West which has passed away. The picture will be instructive to those who have
fancied the whole Southwest a sort of vast Pike County, and have not conceived
of a sober and serious and orderly contrast to the sort of life that has come
to represent the Southwest in literature.
William Dean Howells, The Atlantic Monthly, May 1876.
|
