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.

In commenting on the reasons for the broadening and deepening of his
humour with the passage of time, Mr. Clemens once remarked to me: "I
succeeded in the long run, where Shillaber, Doesticks, and Billings
failed, because they never had an ideal higher than that of merely being
funny. The first great lesson of my life was the discovery that I had
to live down my past. When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier
writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw