Clemens gave a few readings in Boston
and Philadelphia, but when urged to go elsewhere made
the excuse that he was having his portrait painted
and could not leave home.
As a matter of fact, he was enjoying
himself with Frank Millet, who had been invited to
the house to do the portrait and had captured the
fervent admiration of the whole family. Millet
was young, handsome, and lively; Clemens couldn’t
see enough of him, the children adored him and added
his name to the prayer which included each member of
the household the “Holy Family,”
Clemens called it.
Millet had brought with him but one
piece of canvas for the portrait, and when the first
sketch was finished Mrs. Clemens was so delighted
with it that she did not wish him to touch it again.
She was afraid of losing some particular feeling in
it which she valued. Millet went to the city
for another canvas and Clemens accompanied him.
While Millet was doing his shopping it happened to
occur to Clemens that it would be well to fill in
the time by having his hair cut. He left word
with a clerk to tell Millet that he had gone across
the street. By and by the artist came over, and
nearly wept with despair when he saw his subject sheared
of the auburn, gray-sprinkled aureola that had made
his first sketch a success. He tried it again,
and the result was an excellent likeness, but it never
satisfied Millet.
The ‘Adventures of Tom Sawyer’
appeared late in December (1876), and immediately
took its place as foremost of American stories of boy
life, a place which it unquestionably holds to this
day. We have already considered the personal
details of this story, for they were essentially nothing
more than the various aspects of Mark Twain’s
own boyhood. It is only necessary to add a word
concerning the elaboration of this period in literary
form.
From every point it is a masterpiece,
this picture of boy life in a little lazy, drowsy
town, with all the irresponsibility and general disreputability
of boy character coupled with that indefinable, formless,
elusive something we call boy conscience, which is
more likely to be boy terror and a latent instinct
of manliness. These things are so truly portrayed
that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting
into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there.
Every boy has played off sick to escape school; every
boy has reflected in his heart Tom’s picture
of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over
the stricken consciences of those who had blighted
his young life; every boy of that day,
at least every normal, respectable boy,
grew up to “fear God and dread the Sunday-school,”
as Howells puts it in his review.
As for the story itself, the narrative
of it, it is pure delight. The pirate camp on
the island is simply boy heaven. What boy, for
instance, would not change any other glory or boon
that the world holds for this:
They built a fire against the side of
a great log twenty or thirty steps within the
somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some
bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up
half of the corn “pone” stock they
had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be feasting
in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an
unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the
haunts of men, and they said they never would
return to civilization. The climbing fire
lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the
pillared tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and
upon the varnished foliage and the festooning
vines.
There is a magic in it. Mark
Twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed in him all the
old fascination of those days and nights with Tom
Blankenship, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys on Glasscock’s
Island. Everywhere in Tom Sawyer there is a quality,
entirely apart from the humor and the narrative, which
the younger reader is likely to overlook. No
one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of
us, from our early reading, recall this delicious
bit of description which introduces it:
The locust-trees were in bloom, and
the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air.
Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was
green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough
away to seem a delectable land, dreamy, reposeful,
and inviting.
Tom’s night visit home; the
graveyard scene, with the murder of Dr. Robinson;
the adventures of Tom and Becky in the cave these
are all marvelously invented. Literary thrill
touches the ultimate in one incident of the cave episode.
Brander Matthews has written:
Nor is there any situation quite as
thrilling as that awful moment in the cave when
the boy and girl are lost in the darkness, and when
Tom 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 footprint in the sand of the
sea-shore.
Mark Twain’s invention was not
always a reliable quantity, but with that eccentricity
which goes with any attribute of genius, it was likely
at any moment to rise supreme. If to the critical,
hardened reader the tale seems a shade overdone here
and there, a trifle extravagant in its delineations,
let him go back to his first long-ago reading of it
and see if he recalls anything but his pure delight
in it then. As a boy’s story it has not
been equaled.
Tom Sawyer has ranked in popularity with Roughing
It.
Its sales go steadily on from year
to year, and are likely to continue so long as boys
and girls do not change, and men and women remember.
[Col. Henry Watterson, when he finished
Tom Sawyer, wrote: “I have just laid down
Tom Sawyer, and cannot resist the pressure. It
is immense! I read every word of it, didn’t
skip a line, and nearly disgraced myself several times
in the presence of a sleeping-car full of honorable
and pious people. Once I had to get to one side
and have a cry, and as for an internal compound of
laughter and tears there was no end to it....
The ‘funeral’ of the boys, the cave business,
and the hunt for the hidden treasure are as dramatic
as anything I know of in fiction, while the pathos particularly
everything relating to Huck and Aunt Polly makes
a cross between Dickens’s skill and Thackeray’s
nature, which, resembling neither, is thoroughly impressive
and original.”]