It was a blow at the whole school of American travel writers; it marked the passing of an era. Bret Harte in the first volume of the _Overland Monthly_ (1868), was the first to outline the Western standpoint:
The days of sentimental journeyings are over. The dear old book of travel ... is a thing of the past. Sentimental musings on foreign scenes are just now restricted to the private diaries of young and impressible ladies and clergymen with affections of the bronchial tubes.... A race of good humored, engaging iconoclasts seem to have precipitated themselves upon the old altars of mankind, and like their predecessors of the eighth century, have paid particular attention to the holy church. Mr. Howells has slashed one or two sacred pictorial canvases with his polished rapier; Mr. Swift has made one or two neat long shots with a rifled Parrott, and Mr. Mark Twain has used brickbats on stained glass windows with damaging effect. And those gentlemen have certainly brought down a heap of rubbish.[34]
It was the voice of the new West and of the new era. With _The Innocents Abroad_ begins the new period in American literature. The book is full of the new after-the-war Americanism that did its own thinking, that saw with its own eyes, that put a halo upon nothing save genuineness and substantial worth. It must not be forgotten that America even in the new seventies was still mawkish with sentimentality. The very year _The Innocents Abroad_ appeared, _Gates Ajar_ sold twenty editions. Mark Twain came into the age like the Goths into Rome. Stand on the solid earth, he cried. Look with your own eyes. Worship nothing but truth and genuineness. Europe is no better than America. Como is beautiful, but it is not so beautiful as Tahoe. Why this eternal glorification of things simply and solely because it is the conventional thing to glorify them? "The critic," he wrote in later years to Andrew Lang, "has actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and the Latin classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation Army."[35] The new American democracy was speaking. To the man who for four years had learned in the school of Horace Bixby there was no high and no low save as measured, not by appearances or by tradition, but by intrinsic worth.