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imagination, appears to embody a great moral idea." That idea obviously
included a condemnation of slavery - so obviously that the condemnation
could go virtually without saying. Eliot put it that by allowing the reader
"to make his own moral reflections,"
Huckleberry Finn
delivers "a far more
convincing indictment of slavery than the sensationalist propaganda of
Uncle Tom 's Cabin.
Also in the 1950s, though, genteelism - minus its con–
cern for propriety of language - returned to American criticism as an ap–
proved attitude toward racism, and Mark Twain's novel again fell into
disgrace with literary critics. Leo Marx, for example, was not satisfied
with the reader's own moral reflections. In 1953, in his essay "Mr. Eliot,
Mr.
Trilling, and
Huckleberry Finn,"
Marx chided both critics for their
complacency toward Mark Twain's "glaring lapse of moral imagination"
in the book's final adventure, where slavery is treated lightly. For years,
this adventure has been criticized as tediously long, and both Trilling and
Eliot conceded its defects. But they argued that the formal aptness of the
book's return to the atmosphere of its opening section rescued matters
sufficiently to sustain the claim that on the whole
Huckleberry Finn
de–
serves to be regarded as a first-rate work of the literary imagination.
The opening section, it will be recalled, features the "boys' adventure
book"-like misbehavior of Huck and his friend Tom Sawyer. Huck, the
nondescript son of the town drunk, has agreed to live with a respectable
widow, go to school, and learn manners in order to get in on Tom's latest
game: forming a gang of pretend robbers. Huck's father, though, abducts
him and returns him to his slothful, irresponsible existence. When Pap
Finn gets so crazily violent with drink that he threatens Huck's life, the
boy runs away to nearby Jackson's Island. There he stumbles across Jim, a
recendy runaway slave well known to Tom and himself Huck and Jim
find a driftwood raft and set off down the Mississippi.
The next to the last of their adventures is the takeover of the raft by
the two confidence men who call themselves the Duke and the Dauphin.
When these scalawags run out of luck and money, one of them sells Jim
back into slavery. Again Huck and Jim run away, but this time they are
separated, and Huck ends up at a farm coincidentally owned by Tom's
Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas. The gullible couple takes Huck for Tom,
whom they have never seen and who is momentarily expected to arrive
for a visit. Huck as usual plays along, letting them believe he is Tom.
When Tom himself arrives, after being alerted by Huck he pretends to be
his own brother, Sid. The boys soon locate Jim, who is being held locked
up on this very farm, slated once again for a return to slavery.
Tom now conducts another of his make-believe adventures, an elab–
orate and unnecessarily involved plot to free Jim, even though a few min–
utes' work at night could easily do the job. In fact, Tom knows, as every-
