Perhaps the best clue to the greatness of Huckleberry Finn has been given to us by a writer who is as different from Mark Twain as it is possible for one Missourian to be from another. T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Dry Salvages,” the third of his Four Quartets, begins with a meditation on the Mississippi, which Mr. Eliot knew in his St. Louis boyhood:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god…

And the meditation goes on to speak of the god as

almost forgotten

By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable,

Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder of

What men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated

By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

Huckleberry Finn  is a great book because it is about a god—about, that is, a power which seems to have a mind and will of its own, and which to men of moral imagination appears to embody a great moral idea.