But the equilibrium was spoiled when “We were troubled a little at dinner today by the conduct of an American, who talked very loudly and coarsely and laughed boisterously where all others were so quiet and well behaved. He ordered wine with a royal flourish and said: ‘I never dine without wine, sir’, and looked around upon the company to bask in the admiration he expected to find in their faces. This fellow said: ‘I am a free-born sovereign, sir, an American, sir, and I want everybody to know it!’ He did not mention that he was a lineal descendant of Balaam’s ass, but everybody knew that without his telling it.”
Overall his impression of Europe so far was positive, but he had really only dug deeply in France. All that changed in Italy, and the tone of The Innocents Abroad changed too. Gone is the reverence for older cultures - the inferiority complex - and in came the assertion that the optimism and hope, the progress in the human condition found in America, were more worthwhile than the fateful acceptance of decay - the superiority complex.
It started to go sour in Genoa. A guide huckstered them to the Chapel of St. John the Baptist: “In this Chapel is a marble chest, in which, they told us, were the ashes of St. John; and around it was wound a chain, which, they said, had confined him when he was in prison. We did not desire to disbelieve these statements, and yet we could not feel certain that they were correct - partly because we could have broken that chain, and so could St. John, and partly because we had seen St. John’s ashes before, in another church. We could not bring ourselves to think St. John had two sets of ashes... They also showed us a portrait of the Madonna which was painted by St. Luke, and it did not look half as old and smoky as some of the pictures by Rubens. We could not help admiring the Apostle’s modesty in never once mentioning in his writings that he could paint.”
After another visit to another relic-filled church he reflected: “But isn’t this relic matter a little overdone? We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together. Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.” By the time they reached Milan he had had enough: “The priests showed us two of St. Paul’s fingers, and one of St. Peter’s; a bone of Judas Iscariot, and also bones of all the other disciples; a handkerchief in which the Saviour had left the impres- sion of his face. Among the most precious of the relics were a stone from the Holy Sepulcher, part of the crown of thorns, a fragment of the purple robe worn by the Saviour, a nail from the Cross, and a picture of the Virgin and Child painted by the veritable hand of St. Luke. This is the second of St. Luke’s Virgins we have seen.”
By now he was even becoming jaundiced about the high art. The next day in Milan, in “an ancient tumble-down ruin of a church, is the mournful wreck of the most celebrated painting in the world - The Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci.” Twain lamented the sorry condition into which it had been allowed to deteriorate: “[It] is painted on the dilapidated wall of what was a little chapel attached to the main church in ancient times. It is battered and scarred in every direction, and stained and discolored by time, and Napoleon’s horses kicked the legs off most the disciples when they (the horses, not the disciples,) were stabled there more than half a century ago.” He saw that “The colors are dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred, and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in the eyes. Only the attitudes are certain. I am satisfied that the Last Supper was a very miracle of art once. But it was three hundred years ago.”
On the way to Venice they crossed through “Interior Italy. We were in the heart and home of priest craft - of a happy, cheerful, contented ignorance, superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and everlasting unaspiring worthlessness.”
They had read so much gushing travel literature about Venice that La Serenissima was bound to disappoint, and at the time of their visit it was in a particularly sorry state: “This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world’s applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies well-nigh held dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay. Today her piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories. Her glory is departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world.”
By the time The Innocents Abroad had reached Rome, Mark Twain had had enough of his own wordy descriptions of dilapidated churches, enough of being disgusted by well-fed priests and starving beggars10, enough of the acceptance of ignorance and the culture of superstition11 enough of the defeatist fatalism. He could not help but deplore the indolence of Italy, and could not help but compare it with the energy of America. He decided to turn the tables on the slothful Italians, and wrote his famous 1,500-word “turnaround-piece”, imagining he was an Italian travel writer in newly arrived America. This is the writer’s favorite piece from his time in Italy - and from which:
I saw there a country which has no overshadowing Mother Church, and yet the people survive. I saw a government, which never was protected by foreign soldiers at a cost greater than that required to carry on the government itself. I saw common men and common women who could read; I even saw small children of common country people reading from books; if I dared think you would believe it, I would say they could write, also... There are hundreds and thousands of schools, and anybody may go and learn to be wise, like a priest. In that singular country if a rich man dies a sinner, he is damned; he cannot buy salvation with money for masses... Hair does not grow upon the American women’s heads; it is made for them by cunning workmen in the shops, and is curled and frizzled into scandalous and ungodly forms... In that country, books are so common that it is really no curiosity to see one. Newspapers also. They have a great machine which prints such things by thousands every hour.
... I saw common men, there - men who were neither priests nor princes - who yet absolutely owned the land they tilled... Jews, there, are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs... they can practice medicine among Christians; they can even shake hands with Christians if they choose... they don’t have to stay shut up in one corner of the towns... they never have had to run races naked through the public streets, against jackasses, to please the people in carnival time...
... Mendicant priests do not prowl with baskets begging for the church and eating up their substance... In America the people are absolutely wiser and know much more than their grandfathers did. They do not plow with a sharpened stick, nor yet with a three-cornered block of wood that merely scratches the top of the ground. We do that because our fathers did, three thousand years ago, I suppose... they cut their grain with a horrid machine that mows down whole fields in a day... If I dared, I would say that sometimes they use a blasphemous12 plow that works by fire and vapor and tears up an acre of ground in a single hour - but - but - I see by your looks that you do not believe the things I am telling you. Alas, my character is ruined, and I am a branded speaker of untruths!
Having got that lot off his chest he approached Athens, or more precisely its port, Piraeus, in a much better state of mind - a better state of mind until he found that the Quaker City had been embargoed and all aboard confined to quarantine for eleven days. In theory, if they could leave the ship, they were leaving behind the decay of Catholic Europe and entering the heathen world of the Ottoman Empire - only later did they find that it too had its own version of decay. Newly independent Greece promised to be an exciting stepping- stone between the two religions and cultures - if they could get
off the boat.
This doesn’t sound much like Athens now: “So exquisitely clear and pure is this wonderful atmosphere that every column of the noble structure [the Parthenon] was discernible through the telescope, and even the smaller ruins about it assumed some semblance of shape. This at a distance of five or six miles” That night a full moon lit up the Acropolis in the clear night air and Mark Twain’s thoughts turned to clandestine skullduggery. With three others he slipped ashore in one of the tenders on a covert operation to visit the Parthenon. After many scrapes with roused peasants and wild dogs they arrived at the locked entry to the Acropolis. “The garrison had turned out - four Greeks. We clamored at the gate, and they admitted us. [Bribery and corruption.]”
Once inside he found the moonlit figures haunting and ghostly: “Here and there, in lavish profusion, were gleaming white statues of men and women, propped against blocks of marble, some of them armless, some without legs, others headless - but all looking mournful in the moonlight, and startlingly human!... It startled us, every now and then, to see a stony white face stare suddenly up at us out of the grass with its dead eyes. The place seemed alive with ghosts. I half expected to see the Athenian heroes of twenty centuries ago glide out of the shadows and steal into the old temple they knew so well and regarded with such boundless pride.”
As they walked around the perimeter they looked down on Athens sleeping below: “... a vision! And such a vision! Athens by moonlight! The prophet that thought the splendors of the New Jerusalem were revealed to him, surely saw this instead! Overhead the stately columns, majestic still in their ruin – under-foot the dreaming city - in the distance the silver sea - not on the broad earth is there another picture half so beautiful!”
With his spirits raised by the spirits of Ancient Greece he headed next to Constantinople; the spirits were raised higher still as they approached the wondrous skyline of Istanbul at dawn. But he soon found that “Its attractiveness begins and ends with its picturesqueness. From the time one starts ashore till he gets back again, he execrates it.”
It is fair to say that he hated the squalor, corruption, crookery and above all the freak-show beggary that was Constantinople. What had seemed exotic in Tangier seemed in Constantinople as plainly rabid as the famed and mangy dogs that “cleanse these terrible streets”. All their dealings with the Turks were fraught: “It comes natural to them to lie and cheat in the first place, and then they go on and improve on nature until they arrive at perfection. In recommending his son to a merchant as a valuable salesman, a father does not say he is a nice, moral, upright boy, but he says, ‘This boy is worth his weight in broad pieces - for behold, he will cheat whomsoever hath dealings with him... there abideth not so gifted a liar!’”
On leaving Turkey he reflected, with some gallows humor: “Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.”
If he thought that his first experience of the Ottoman Empire in its capital Constantinople was dispiriting, he would come to detest all it stood for in its colonies, part of which was the famed Holy Land to where they were now heading. But first they had the fun of a small diversion across the Black Sea to Yalta.
This was an unscheduled stop as behind the scenes the Quaker City’s owners were trying to sell her, and the Russian royal family had shown some interest in making her their royal yacht. Fortuitously for the owners the excursion was due to visit Sebastopol and Balaklava anyway, and so a quick stop for their majesties to inspect her needed only a slight delay. The passengers did not really expect much from the stop, and were amazed when Aleksandr Nikolaevich Romanov - Czar Alexander II - invited them to visit his summer palace, and then instructed his brother and son to show the passengers their palaces too. Twain, like many a natural born republican before him, was quite swept off his feet by the graciousness of well-behaved royalty. Unfortunately the graciousness did not do the poor czar much good: he was assassinated by revolutionaries fifteen years later. His grandson, Nicholas II, and his family didn’t fare much better when the Revolution became official one October thirty-five years later.
It was in this happy, pre-revolutionary temper that Mark Twain and the Sinners, not to mention the erstwhile New Pilgrims along with Captain Duncan and his crew, approached the port of Smyrna and their entry into the Holy Land, the focal point of the great Excursion.
1 My father was a St. Bernard and my mother was a collie, but I am a Presbyterian. This is what my mother told me, I do not know these nice distinctions myself. To me they are only fine large words meaning nothing. A Dog’s Tale
2 It is said the ways of God are not like ours. Let us not contest this point. Mark Twain’s Notebook
3 The dying man couldn’t make up his mind which place to go to - both have their advantages, heaven for climate, hell for company. Notes & Journals
4 The Chinese are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. Roughing It
5 If I’d knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it and ain’t a going to no more. Huckleberry Finn
6 Mr. Beecher is a remarkably handsome man when he is in the full tide of sermonizing, and his face is lit up with animation, but he is as homely as a singed cat when he isn’t doing anything. Daily Alta California
7 Preachers are always pleasant company when they are off duty. Daily Alta California
8 The Quaker City’s strange menagerie of ignorance, imbecility, bigotry and dotage. Letter, 1867
9 Satan hasn’t a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million. Unattributed
10 We are all beggars, each in his own way. One beggar is too proud to beg for pennies, but will beg for an introduction into society; another will inveigle a lawyer into conversation and then sponge on him for free advice. The man who wouldn’t do any of these things will beg for the Presidency. Each admires his own dignity and greatly guards it, but in his opinion the others haven’t any. Mendicancy is a matter of taste and temperament, no doubt. Mark Twain, a Biography
11 When the human race has once acquired a superstition nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it. Autobiography of Mark Twain
12 Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if He is as little as that, He is beneath it. Mark Twain, a Biography
1: Ephesus
Mark Twain started his tour of the Holy Land in Ephesus, although there hadn’t been anything particularly holy about it for nigh-on thirteen centuries. But after the experience of all the faux relic-ridden holy sites of Italy and the shock of seeing holiness in the raw in Istanbul, the old Greek and Roman site at least could claim properly documented and verified dispatches in the New Testament. Saints Paul and Timothy1, as well as John the Apostle, were certainly known to have been there. Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary have also been associated with Ephesus; in Mark Twain’s time it was still widely held that the latter died there too.
The Quaker City was moored off the city of Smyrna, now called Izmir. Then and now this is the nearest anchorage to Ephesus, whose grand harbor – the harbor on which her fortune was made - had silted up over a thousand years before the Excursionists’ visit. Mark Twain noted that Smyrna was a sensual riot: “Everywhere there i
s dirt, everywhere there are fleas, everywhere there are lean, broken-hearted dogs; every alley is thronged with people; wherever you look, your eye rests upon a wild masquerade of extravagant costumes; the workshops are all open to the streets, and the workmen visible; all manner of sounds assail the ear, and over them all rings out the muezzin’s cry from some tall minaret, calling the faithful vagabonds to prayer; and superior to the call to prayer, the noises in the streets, the interest of the costumes - superior to everything, and claiming the bulk of attention first, last, and all the time - is a combination of Mohammedan stenches, to which the smell of even a Chinese quarter would be as pleasant as the roasting odors of the fatted calf to the nostrils of the returning Prodigal.”
***
As I have mentioned the Quaker City and her manifest of Excursionists this is probably a good time to introduce the reader to Vasco da Gama and her crew of footstep footsloggers. The latter are the writer and his wife - shipmate, soulmate, photographer and bell-ringer; the former is our yacht - floating home, library, wine cellar and general HQ. We will be following in Mark Twain’s wake as much as his footsteps, docking where he docked and from there excursioning where he excursioned. Right now she is lying alongside the same town quay that the Quaker City used and judging by the Brown Windsor soup around her hull and the bad eggs smell in the air lying in the same dirty water too.
Innocence and War Page 4
