AMERICAN ABROAD
85
measured; for she is of finer stuff than I; and yours were sacred names
to her."
But why, Twain must have wondered, was his Whittier's Birthday
speech rejected by the sort of men who had accepted his European
travel book, much of which was precisely the same sort of "crude, heavy,
intellectual horseplay," presented through exactly the same sort of
per–
sona,
"a rough-handed plebian jester from Missouri." Stuart Sherman
himself, as a matter of fact, is quite as ready to condemn the book as the
speech, and on similar grounds: "The Mississippi pilot, homely, naive,
arrogantly conceited ... turns the Old World into a laughing stock by
shearing it of its humanity-simply because there is nothing in him
to respond to the glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was
Rome-simply because nothing is holier to him than a joke." William
Dean Howells, however, had not been nearly so severe in his review of
the book by the man he kept referring to as "Mr. Clements"-only a
little condescending, perhaps:
"It
is no business of ours to fix his rank
among the humorists California has given us, but we think he is in an
entirely different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company
of the best."
Finally, however, Howells is willing to exempt the "California
humorist" from charges of
lCse-majeste
in the realm of culture: "... it is
always good-humored humor,
too,
that he lavishes on his reader, and
even its impudence is charming; we do not remember where .. . it is
insolent, with all its sauciness and irreverence." Even here the descriptive
phrases remain condescending; though they are apt enough, after all, in
defining a writer who composed his book to shock (a little) and mollify
(a lot) the woman whom he had appointed his shipboard "mother."
"Charming ... impudence," "insolent," "sauciness"-these are terms
suitable not so much to a man as to a boy, one of those naughty boys
who is not in the final analysis downright "bad." And, indeed, Twain
himself uses the word "boys" constantly to describe his closest associates
among the Pilgrims, the lively few who, with him, constantly sought to
flee the more aged and
grim
members of what he likes to call the
"synagogue." Already at the very beginning of his career, he is beginning
to trade on that
"boyishnes~"
which he never willingly surrendered, in
order
to
get away with what would have been counted sacrilege in a
full-fledged man. And a sufficiently perspicuous critic might well have
predicted at that point that the hero in whom Twain was to embody his
most mature definition of the American character would necessarily
be a juvenile, just one more boy in a cast of boys.
But the "Mark Twain" of
The Innocents Abroad
is a bigger boy
than Huck Finn: a boy full-grown enough to regret that his fellow-
