Harvard might well have spoiled a great author. For Mark Twain had a
memorable tale to tell of rude, primitive men and barbaric, remote
scenes and circumstances; of truant and resourceful boyhood exercising
all its cunning in circumventing circumstance and mastering a calling.
And he had that tale to tell in the unlettered, yet vastly expressive,
phraseology of the actors in those wild events. The secret of his style
is directness of thought, a sort of shattering clarity of utterance, and
a mastery of vital, vigorous, audacious individual expression. He had a
remarkable feeling for words and their uses; and his language is the
unspoiled, expressive language of the people. At times he is primitive
and coarse; but it is a Falstaffian note, the mark of universality
rather than of limitation. His art was, in Tolstoy's phrase, "the art
of a people--universal art"; and his style was rich in the locutions of
the common people, rich and racy of the soil. A signal merit of his
style is its admirable adaptation to the theme. The personages of his
novels always speak "in character"--with perfect reproduction, not only
of their natural speech, but also of their natural thoughts. Though Mr.
Henry James may have said that one must be a very rudimentary person to
enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue in a rudimentary style
in treatment of rudimentary or,--as I should prefer to phrase it,
--fundamental things. Mr. James, I feel sure, could never have put into
the mouth of a "rudimentary" person like Huck, so vivid and graphic a
description of a storm with its perfect reproduction of the impression
caught by the "rudimentary" mind. "Writers of fiction," says Sir Walter
Besant in speaking of this book, "will understand the difficulty of
getting inside the brain of that boy, seeing things as he saw them,
writing as he would have written, and acting as he would have acted; and
presenting to the world true, faithful, and living effigies of that boy.
The feat has been accomplished; there is no character in fiction more
fully, more faithfully, presented than the character of Huckleberry