440
PARTISAN REVIEW
veers, if anything, toward the sentimental. Far from representing universal
evil, he is held up as a good-hearted type of the sort that, we are told,
could be found throughout the South during slavery days. No wonder
that Michael Egan, a Marxist who unreservedly hates the book's ordinary
bourgeois characters on principle, had no difficulty in recognizing that
they are cast in a favorable light. He concluded with disgust that they are
"the real heroes of
Huckleberry Finn."
Writing from a different point of
view, Alfred J. Levy, one of the rare critics who still argues for the essen–
tial goodness of the ordinary characters, has written that Mark Twain
"refuses the gambit of making all Southerners knaves or fools because
they accepted slavery. Had he done so the book would have become
strident propaganda."
As with Mark Twain's failure to depict his characters as the critics see
them, so with his failure to arrange the plot as they see fit. Here, surpris–
ingly enough, Leo Marx invoked George Santayana's critique of the late
nineteenth-century "genteel tradition." In keeping with that tradition's
spirit of conventionality, and in fear of hazarding his reputation as a popu–
lar humorist, Marx conjectured, Mark Twain had shied away from the
radical implications of the indictment his book was making. In contrast,
though, James M. Cox argued that Mark Twain had no reason to be
fearful of the genteel tradition:
In saying that the ending of the book discloses a failure of nerve and
retreat to the genteel tradition, it seems to me that Marx is completely
turned around. Surely the genteel Bostonians [among whom Mark
Twain lived and wrote] would have applauded the moral sentiment of
antislavery and political freedom which the novel entertains.
The Civil War was over, Cox was pointing out, so that it hardly re–
quired nerve to express antislavery sentiment (especially among genteel
Northerners whose sentiments had always been abolitionist). No more
did it require nerve, it can be added, for Marx and other twentieth-cen–
tury critics to rail against slavery. On the contrary, it was very much in
the spirit of the genteel tradition for them safely to do so. Their insistence
on the unequivocal denunciation of slavery may have the appearance of a
politically concerned challenge to genteel acceptance of the status quo.
But in its adherence to currently acceptable social attitudes it turns out to
be a form of self-congratulation - in other words, a return to the genteel
tradition.
Today's antislavery critics, in fact, respond conventionally to the one
element of genteelism with which Mark Twain himself can be justly
taxed: his adoption of the sentimental formula in nineteenth-century
