w of
knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of
inexpressive technical terms of art criticism.

There is much, I fear, of misguided honesty in Mark Twain's records of
foreign travel. To the things which he personally reverenced, he was
always reverential; and his expression of likes and dislikes, of
prejudices and predilections, was honest and fearless. Grant as we may
the humorist's right to exaggerate and even to distort, for the purposes
of his fun-making, it does not therefore follow that his judgments,
however forthright or sincere, are valid, reputable criticisms. One's
enjoyment of his fresh and hilarious humour, his persistent fun-making
is no whit impaired by the recognition that he was lacking in the
faculty of historic imagination and in the finer artistic sense. It is,
in a measure, because of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of
real knowledge, that he was enabled to evoke the laughter of the
multitude. "The Mississippi pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid,"
says Mr. S. P. Sherman, "refuses to sink his identity in the object
contemplated--that, as Corporal Nym would have said, is the humour of
it. He is the kind of travelling companion that makes you wonder why
you went abroad. He turns the Old World into a laughing stock by
shearing it of its storied humanity--simply because there is nothing in
him to respond to the glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was
Rome--simpler because nothing is holier to him than a joke. He does not
throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm; he laughs at art,
history, and antiquity from the point of view of one who is ignorant of
them and mightily well satisfied with his ignorance." This picture
reminds us of the foreign critics of 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court': it is too partial and
restricted. The whole point of Mark Twain's humour, as exhibited in
these travel notes, is missed in the statement that "he does not throw
the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm"--for this might almost be
taken as the "philosophy" of his books of foreign travel. And yet Mr.
Sherman's dictum, in its entirety, quite clearly provokes the question
whether, as he intimates, the "overwhelming majority" of his
fellow-citizens also were not mightily pleased with Mark Twain's point of
view, and whether they did not enjoy themselves hugely in laughing, not
at him, but with him.

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