Mark Twain
“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.” – Autobiography of Mark Twain
Mark Twain’s thoughts on organized or conventional religion are made quite clear in his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn’s natural and instinctive expression is by far superior to the religious expression of any other characters in the story. The juxtaposition of expressions appears often in the story, but no more clearly than in the Twain’s introduction of the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons to Huck.
The Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons are Christians who are engaged in a violent 30-year blood feud against one another. They obviously represent all the hypocrisy and shallowness that conventional religion can muster. Twain’s implied meaning is more than obvious in the juxtapositions in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Next Sunday we all went to church, about three mile, everybody a-horseback. The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching — all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don’t know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet (83).
Clearly, the mere possession of bibles doesn’t make one a saint anymore than my owning an automobile makes me an auto mechanic. Too, the ridiculously simple act of going to church on Sunday morning and listening to a preacher’s sermon about brotherly love doesn’t actually result in brotherly love. Huck Finn’s reliance upon his own rules and his own instinct is clearly superior to the conventional or popular religion of the church going Grangerfords and Shepherdsons. In fact, Huck is sickened by the moral and spiritual display of these so-called “Christian” families.
There was four or five men cavorting around on their horses in the open place before the log store, cussing and yelling, and trying to get at a couple of young chaps that was behind the wood-rank alongside of the steamboat landing; but they couldn’t come it. Every time one of them showed himself on the river side of the woodpile he got shot at. The two boys was squatting back to back behind the pile, so they could watch both ways.
By and by the men stopped cavorting around and yelling. They started riding towards the store; then up gets one of the boys, draws a steady bead over the wood-rank, and drops one of them out of his saddle. All the men jumped off of their horses and grabbed the hurt one and started to carry him to the store; and that minute the two boys started on the run. They got half way to the tree I was in before the men noticed. Then the men see them, and jumped on their horses and took out after them. They gained on the boys, but it didn’t do no good, the boys had too good a start; they got to the woodpile that was in front of my tree, and slipped in behind it, and so they had the bulge on the men again. One of the boys was Buck, and the other was a slim young chap about nineteen years old.
The men ripped around awhile, and then rode away. As soon as they was out of sight I sung out to Buck and told him. He didn’t know what to make of my voice coming out of the tree at first. He was awful surprised. He told me to watch out sharp and let him know when the men come in sight again; said they was up to some devilment or other — wouldn’t be gone long. I wished I was out of that tree, but I dasn’t come down. Buck begun to cry and rip, and ‘lowed that him and his cousin Joe (that was the other young chap) would make up for this day yet. He said his father and his two brothers was killed, and two or three of the enemy. Said the Shepherdsons laid for them in ambush. Buck said his father and brothers ought to waited for their relations — the Shepherdsons was too strong for them. I asked him what was become of young Harney and Miss Sophia. He said they’d got across the river and was safe. I was glad of that; but the way Buck did take on because he didn’t manage to kill Harney that day he shot at him — I hain’t ever heard anything like it.
All of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or four guns — the men had slipped around through the woods and come in from behind without their horses! The boys jumped for the river — both of them hurt — and as they swum down the current the men run along the bank shooting at them and singing out, “Kill them, kill them!” It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain’t a-going to tell ALL that happened — it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night to see such things. I ain’t ever going to get shut of them — lots of times I dream about them.
I stayed in the tree till it begun to get dark, afraid to come down. Sometimes I heard guns away off in the woods; and twice I seen little gangs of men gallop past the log store with guns; so I reckoned the trouble was still a-going on. I was mighty downhearted; so I made up my mind I wouldn’t ever go anear that house again, because I reckoned I was to blame, somehow. I judged that that piece of paper meant that Miss Sophia was to meet Harney somewheres at half-past two and run off; and I judged I ought to told her father about that paper and the curious way she acted, and then maybe he would a locked her up, and this awful mess wouldn’t ever happened.
When I got down out of the tree I crept along down the river bank a piece, and found the two bodies laying in the edge of the water, and tugged at them till I got them ashore; then I covered up their faces, and got away as quick as I could. I cried a little when I was covering up Buck’s face, for he was mighty good to me (86,87).
Mark Twain wasn’t too far off in his celebration of Huck’s natural expression as superior to that of conventional or popular Christianity. It would not be surprising at all if people today would find a Huck more appealing than most conventional church people or conventional church authorities (aka: Grangerfords and Shepherdsons).
Would it surprise you? Really?
Work Cited: Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Dover Thrift Editions). New York: Dover Publications, 1994.
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Your point is well taken, but I’m not sure that Twain was as romantic about “natural expression” as some commentators and readers make him out to be.
Keep in mind that, while the river is a beautiful place that clearly represents freedom and nature, it is also a place of terrible danger and death. It’s on the river that Huck meets the King and the Duke, where he finds the murdering robbers on the steamboat, and finds his father’s dead body. Furthermore, one of darkest places in the novel, the town where Colonel Sherburn kills Boggs in cold blood and gets away with it, has “the rive[r] always gnawing at it.”
The kindest person in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may well be the widow Douglas, who adopts Huck as her own son and does her best to ‘civilize’ him, while the Judge (a symbol, perhaps not of organized religion, but certainly of authority) does his best to protect Huck from his father’s cruelty. Finally, we must recall that Huck’s noble attempts to set Jim free are ultimately fruitless. Jim’s freedom comes, in the end, from Miss Watson’s will–a legal document penned by a profoundly religious woman.
While Twain may have illustrated the hypocrisy prevalent in some who profess religious faith, it would be difficult to argue convincingly on the basis of Huck Finn that Twain considers the ‘natural and instinctive expression’ of man to be superior to the behavior cultivated by law (both civil and religious) rightly applied.