AMEIUCAN AHOAD
89
fictional time, their protagonists missed meeting each other
in
the
museums of France by less than a year; for it was, James tells us, "On
a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868" that
his
gentleman from San
Francisco--called with obvious symbolic intent Christopher Newman–
was lounging in the Louvre. Like that other San Franciscan, "Mark
Twain," Newman, we learn, was suffering from an "aesthetic headache"
in the presence of all those masterpieces; and like his improbable op–
posite number, he was convinced from the start that the fresh copies of
the Old Masters being made by various young ladies right before his
eyes were superior to the dim and dusty originals.
It is easy enough to surmise what Newman is supposed to represent,
but a certain Mrs. Tristram (who most nearly speaks for James in the
book) makes Newman's meaning explicit, by explaining to
him,
"'You
are the great Western Barbarian stepping forth in his innocence and
might, gazing a while at this poor effete Old World, and then swooping
down on it." At that point, however, the "great Western Barbarian"
-whom James never quite understood, in fact--demurs, crying out, "I
am a highly civilized man"; and spends the rest of the novel trying to
prove it, at considerable cost not only to himself, but to his author, who
loses thereafter th'e comic tone on which he has opened in melancholy
and melodrama. But if one chronicler of the New Barbarian in the Old
World failed because of his distance from the character he was attempt–
ing to portray, th'e other continually risks disaster because of his un–
comfortable closeness to the
persona
he has assumed.
Neither the reader nor the author of
The Innocents Abroad
is ever
quite sure where Samuel Clemens stops and "Mark Twain" begins, how
far Clemens is in fact what Stuart Sherman described as "the kind of
travelling companion that makes you wonder why you went abroad" (in
more contemporary terms, the kind of American consumer for whom
Europe is just one more item on the menu of Mass Culture), and how far
he is the satirist of that kind of traveler. There is no doubt, in any case,
that his book is primarily about such travelers rather than about the
Old World itself; that it is consequently not a "travel book" at all in the
traditional sense, but a chronicle of tourism at the precise point when
the Puritan aristocrat abroad is giving way to the Puritan plebeian
on tour.
What that pleb'eian-that unforeseen new man-finds wrong with
the Old World, the Old Masters, the land of the 'Old Testament is
precisely that they are all
old,
i.e., worn out, shabby, dirty, decaying,
down at the heels. This abject prejudice against seediness, however
ennobled by time, both Clemens and "Twain" share with their fellow–
travelers. To be sure, there is ambivalence aplenty in
The Innocents
