AMERICAN ABROAD
81
angelo was a Mediterranean and a lackey of Cardinals and Popes.
"I used to worship the great genius of Michael Angelo," he tells us,
"... but I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast-for luncheon–
for dinner-for tea.... I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so
tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I
learned that Michael Angelo was dead."
Yet even here, Twain's is no more the utterly alienated view of
James Baldwin than
it
is, say, the tormentedly involved response of a
second-generation Italo-American, the son of an illiterate peasant from
the Abruzzi who has grown rich and returns to confront the world his
father had fled. Twain stands on precisely the Protestant Anglo-Saxon
middle ground, from which Mediterranean Europe was being surveyed
in his time by such more genteel exploiters of experience abroad as
William Dean Howells and Bayard Taylor. As a matter of fact, by the
time Twain was beginning to write, Taylor himself had decided that
Europe was pretty well used up as a literary subject; and in
By-Ways of
Europe
(a book about spots off the main lines of travel, published in
the same year as
The Innocents Abroad),
had vowed that he would
produce no more such 'essays. Twain, however, being the spokesman for
the lowbrow tourism which succeeded the upper middlebrow variety in
whose name Taylor had written, follows the old routes with no sense
that they have suffered from literary overexposure, or that, indeed, there
are any others.
He was, to be sure, the prisoner of a tour plan laid out by organizers
for whom the world worth seeing had been defined once and for all by
the genteel essayists of the generations before, and the writers of guide
books, who were their degenerate heirs; but he, who protested so much
else, does not protest the limits thus imposed on him. Bret Harte, in his
otherwise extremely laudatory review, complains of precisely this, "Yet,
with all his independence, 'Mark Twain' seems to have followed his
guide and guide-books with a simple, unconscious fidelity. He was quite
content to see only that which everybody else sees, even if he was not
content to see it with the same eyes. ..." In one rense, the case can be
made even stronger; for more often than anyone seems ever quite to
remember Twain saw those "same sights" with exactly the "same 'eyes"
as those who had gone the same route before him.
He shares esp'ecially the bad taste of his generation and its im–
mediate predecessors: admiring extravagantly, for instance, the mediocre
Cathedral of Milan ("a poem in marble"), the gross funeral statuary
in the cemetery of Genoa, the inferior sculptures exhumed at Pompeii,
and even--despite his general contempt for "old paintings"-the Guido
Reni "Saint Michael Conquering the Dragon," which the pale heroine
