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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