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LESLIE A. FIEDLER
"backwoodsman," which is to say, precisely the kind of man through
whose mask Twain has choien to comment on Europe in
The Innocents
Abroad.
"Though held in a sort a barbarian," Melville tells us, "the
backwoodsman would seem to Americans what Alexander was to Asia
--<:aptain in the vanguard of a conquering civilization. . . . The tide of
emigration, let it roll as it will, never overwhelms the backwoodsman
into itself; he rides upon the advance, as the Polynesian upon the comb
of the surf. Thus though he keeps moving on through life, he maintains
with respect to nature much the same unaltered relation throughout;
with her creatures, too, including panthers and Indians." And more
generally, Melville observes "the backwoodsman
is
a lonely man. . . .
Impulsive, he is what some might call unprincipled. At any rate, he is
self-willed; being one who less hearkens to what others may say about
things, than looks for himself, to see what are things themselves."
But what does the backwoodsman see, when he "looks for himself,
to see what are things themselves" in respect to culture rather than
nature, Europe rather than the wilderness, when he becomes an "in–
nocent abroad"? The Westerner's bleak vision of the Old World was
recorded much later by Ezra Pound, who was born properly enough in
Hailey, Idaho--rendered in verse at the moment of America's entry into
World War I, itself, in a sense, the continuation of tourism by other
means.
There died a myriad,
And 'Of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under the earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
Two major American talents had begun to wrestle with the problem,
however, long before the nineteenth century was over: the two writers
of their generation by whom Europe was most obsessively felt as an
enigma to
be
endlessly attacked, precisely because it could never be
entirely solved-Samuel Clemens and Henry James. Both, at any rate,
were the authors of novels in which a Western American, defined as
pristine Protestant and incorruptible democrat, tries to come to terms
with a Europe seen as essentially aristocratic and Roman Catholic.
James's
The American
was not published until 1877, eight years
after the appearance of Twain's
The Innocents Abroad,
but in terms of
