Word: twain
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Mockery & Ecstasy. Young Twain permitted himself a coarse though spirited mixture of cornball humor, village atheist mockery, and a mulishly provincial contempt for most people and things foreign. The Portuguese were "lazy louts," the Neapolitans were "a bad lot," the Greeks were "a community of thieves," Jews were "greasy," Italians groped "in the midnight of priestly superstition," and Arabs "carried passengers in their hair." Beneath the invective lurked a cultural inferiority complex and a desperate anxiety not to be taken in. Twain regarded religious relics and purported miracles as "frauds" and "swindles": "I find a piece of the true cross...
Despite his debunking Missouri skepticism, Twain let himself be thrilled, too. He went as gaga as a vacationing schoolmarm before the beauties of Versailles ("an exquisite dream"), the cathedral in Milan ("The princeliest creation that ever brain of man conceived") and the Acropolis by moonlight ("All the beauty in all the world combined could not rival it"). As if half-ashamed of such ecstatic outbursts, he lapsed into heavy-handed gags about "Mike" Angelo and the tomb of Lazarus ("I had rather live in it than in any house in the town"). Even in such jests Twain foreshadowed an emergent...
Mind's Eye. If Twain the patriot was a cultural absolutist, Henry James the expatriate was a cultural relativist, full, as he put it, of "the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite-that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none." The virtue of that defect, as James saw it, was tolerance. Compared to Twain's polemic, The Art of Travel, Critic Morton Dauwen Zabel's splendidly edited sampling of James's travel pieces on England, France, Italy and the U.S., is sunny-tempered and severely self-controlled...
...mind's eye of James condoned what the camera eye of Twain condemned. Where Twain saw mere dirt, James saw the patina of centuries-old civilizations. Where Twain saw superstition and ignorance, James saw piety and a sense of the past. Standing within the basilica of St. Mark's, James spoke of its mosaic pavement as "dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted with porphyry and time-blackened malachite, polished by the knees of innumerable worshippers." Standing in the same spot, Twain observed: "Everything was worn out-every block of stone was smooth and almost shapeless with the polishing hands...
Love-Affair. If Twain suffered from a certain crudity of sensibility, James's defect was overrefinement. His pinnacles of taste sometimes seem like parodies of it. In one such solemn-silly moment, James gravely agreed with a British friend that a certain garden at Cambridge University was "the most beautiful small garden in Europe." James loved the undistinguished quick rather less than the illustrious dead; nowhere in his travel accounts was there a jot of sympathetic indignation about the plight of Europe's poor and humble; Twain's letters are aflame with...