AMERICAN ABROAD
87
splendor. On the shores of the Sea of Galilee, for instance, he remembers
dreamily how on Tahoe "the tranquil interest that was born with the
morning deepens and deepens, by sure degrees, until it culminates at
last in resistless fascination!" But an instant later he is near hysteria,
scolding the Palestinian landscape, as it were, for failing him and his
memories: "these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barren-
ness ... that melancholy ruin of Capernaum; this stupid village
of
Tiberias .. . yonder desolate declivity where the swine of the miracle
ran down into the sea, and doubtless thought it was better to swallow a
devil or two and get drowned into the bargain than to have to live
longer in such a place. . . ."
Earlier, taking off from a comparison with Lake Como, he had
been more extravagant in his praise of Tahoe: "a sea whose every aspect
is impressive, whose b-elongings are all beautiful, whose lovely majesty
types the Deity!" But he subsides quickly from the high level banality
of such schoolroom English prose, into pure barroom American and
once more into the rage, which se'ems as appropriate to the latter, as
platitudes to the former style, This time, however, his rage is directed,
quite unexpectedly, against the American Indians.
Tahoe means grasshoppers. It means grasshopper soup. It is
Indian, and suggestive of Indians.... People say that Tahoe
means "Silver Lake"-"Limpid Water"-"Falling Leaf." Gosh!
It means grasshopper soup, the favorite dish of the Digger
tribe.... It isn't worthwhile in these practical times, for people
to talk about Indian poetry-there never was any in them–
except in the Fenimore Cooper Indians. But
they
are an extinct
tribe that never existed. I know the Noble Red Man. I have
camped with the Indians; I have been on the war-path with
them, taken part in the chase with them-for grasshoppers;
helped them steal cattle; I have roamed with them, scalped
them, had them for breakfast. I would gladly eat the whole race
if I had a chance.
It is an astonishing performance, which begins by puzzling us, ends by
sending us back to a novel published more than a decade before--to
Melville's
The Confidence Man,
a book which Mark Twain doubtless
never read, but one whose twenty-sixth chapter, "Containing the Meta–
physics of Indian-Hating, according to the views of one evidently not
so pre-possessed as Rousseau in Favor of Savages," serves as a gloss to
his meditations beside Como.
Attempting to answer, via a series of shadowy spokesman characters,
the question: "why the backwoodsman still regards the red man in
much the same spirit that a jury does a murderer, or a trapper a wild
cat," Melville finds himself impelled to define the essential nature of the
