icance of many a passage in that contemporary classic is likely to
escape notice. Sir Walter Besant, who revelled in it as one of the most
completely satisfying and delightful of books, speaks of it deliberately
as a book without a moral. Perhaps he was deceived by the foreword:
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be
prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." There never was
a more easy-going, care-free, unpuritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the
two farcical "hoboes," Tom Sawyer, and the rest. And yet in the light
of Mark Twain's later writings one cannot but see in that picaresque
romance, with its pleasingly loose moral atmosphere, an underlying
seriousness and conviction. Jim is a simple, harmless negro, childlike
and primitive; yet, so marvellous, so restrained is the art of the
narrator, that imperceptibly, unconsciously, one comes to feel not only
a deep interest in, but a genuine respect for, this innocent fugitive
from slavery. Mr. Booker Washington, a distinguished representative of
his race, said he could not help feeling that, in the character of Jim,
Mark Twain had, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited his sympathy for and
interest in the masses of the negro people.

Indeed, to the reflective mind--and it is to be presumed that by that
standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged--there is no more
significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck
struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral
responsibility for compassing Jim's emancipation. Nothing else is
needed to show at once Mark Twain's preoccupation with the workings of
human conscience in the unsophisticated mind and his conviction that,
with the "lights that he had," Huck was justified in his courageous
decision.

Huck felt deeply repentant for allowing Jim to escape from the innocent,
inoffending Miss Watson. He became consumed with horror and remorse to
hear Jim making plans for stealing his wife and children, if their
masters wouldn't sell them. His conscience kept stirring him up hotter
than ever when he heard Jim talking to himself about the joys of
freedom. After awhile, Huck decided to write a letter to Miss Watson,
informing her of the whereabouts of her "runaway nigger." After writing
that letter, he felt washed clean of sin, uplifted, exalted. But he
could not forget all the goodness