To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. February 20, 1951.
Dear Clemens
Today I have sent back your copy of my “Middle Span”, with an inscription, but not with any compliments to Mark Twain, because having finished reading Huckleberry Finn, I have an idea of a greater adventure, which is to compose an essay, which you may print in your magazine if you like, on the relation of Tom Sawyer to Don Quixote. But for this I must first read the preceding book on Tom Sawyer especially. Robert Lowell, who has been here again during the past week, tells me that it is not so good a book as Huckleberry Finn; but I am not interested in giving marks to works of art or to their authors as if they were being examined for recommendation to office. What I want is to understand whether the love of adventure in Tom Sawyer is a romantic passion, with a corresponding idealistic faith (as in Don Quixote, who was mad) or only a love of mischief, of risk, and of swagger as in every schoolboy. My superficial impression, so far, is the Mark Twain is a thorough sceptic, and not a real prophet of personal independence vs. social convention of every sort. Huck Finn is a string of episodes, like Don Quixote, and a thriller and a farce by turns, with tender emotion thrown in, which Cervantes lacks altogether.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.