![]() “The word ‘Palestine’ always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States…. He is astonished to realize that much of the region could easily fit into one of the states of the Union, and that some Old Testament kings governed a territory that was no bigger than a typical American county. Yet for Twain the Holy Land also brings a certain disillusionment. has an air about it of being precisely as Jesus left it, and one finds himself saying all the time, ‘The boy Jesus has stood in this doorway-has played in that street-has touched these stones with his hands-has rambled over these chalky hills.’ ” Here, in the shadow of the Cross, Twain’s biting sarcasm gives way to a sincere reverence for the places associated with Christ’s life, which bring home for him the reality of the Incarnation. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the apex of the entire trip. If Twain sounds a little like Judas in the story of the Anointing at Bethany, perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that the “fripperies” he complains about were just that.īy the time they reach the Holy Land, the pilgrims are surfeited with sightseeing yet their journey has just begun. Yet he can also complain that the excessive decoration in Italian churches would be better used to help the poor and applauds the Italian government’s policy of confiscating church property. Twain lavishes praise on the Gothic Cathedral of Milan, calling it “the princeliest creation that ever brain of man conceived” and showing real appreciation for the qualities that make up the Gothic style. He later declares that “all men ought to thank the Catholics” for preserving sacred sites as centers of devotion “If it had been left to Protestants to do this most worthy work, we would not even know where Jerusalem is today.” Twain freely admits to the anti-Catholicism of his upbringing and that this has conditioned him to “find it much easier to discover Catholic faults than Catholic merits.” He then breaks with custom and praises the Catholic monks that hosted him and his fellow travelers in the desert of Palestine. His comments on Catholicism are more complex and interesting. He finds the Hagia Sophia mosque dingy and gaudy, and a hilariously disastrous session in a Turkish bath explodes all his illusions about Middle Eastern luxuriance. The further removed a society is from Anglo-Saxon norms, the dimmer Twain’s view of it, with Islamic societies receiving the sharpest invective (“these degraded Turks and Arabs”). Twain’s candid reactions to foreign cultures savor of an age that knew nothing of political correctness. He views Old Master artwork with a mixture of admiration and skepticism-suggesting, for instance, that they might have varied their usual repertoire of saints and martyrs with a canvas or two of Columbus discovering America. Twain has reactions similar to those that many travelers in Europe still have today-admiring the ease and gracious living of the French and Italians, for example, and contrasting this with the driven and businesslike pace of life in America. ![]() That grand goal came only after the travelers had genuflected at many cultural spots in Europe. Twain’s traveling companions aboard the Quaker City were pious Christian folk interested in discovering their roots, and that is why the journey culminated in the Holy Land. By Twain’s time, a class of “new pilgrims” felt themselves drawn back to the Old World, for reasons both spiritual and cultural. The Pilgrim Fathers emigrated to the New World in search of freedom from the despotism and corruption in Europe. The book has a definite American resonance too. ![]() It is in a true sense a pilgrimage, as Twain’s subtitle suggests the allusion to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is not meant frivolously. The book’s irreverence has been often noted (and quoted) but less remarked upon has been its shape, which has the mythic quality of a great epic. The sprawling travelogue became the bestselling book of Twain’s career, fixing his voice and persona in the public mind. Twain’s account of the trip was published two years later as The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress. In 1867, the San Francisco Alta Californian assigned its 31-year-old reporter Mark Twain to cover a steamboat pleasure excursion to the Mediterranean. His Christian background is evident throughout “The Innocents Abroad,” which reflects the journey of all human beings to the heavenly homeland. But to dwell only on the “irreverent” aspects of his work is to see only a partial picture. Mark Twain is revered today for his liberal sympathies, as a satirist who punctured pomposity, hypocrisy, and pretension. ![]()
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