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The Innocents Abroad, or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress; Being some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land, with Descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, as they Appeared to the Author. With two hundred and thirty-four Illustrations. By Mark Twain, (Samuel L. Clemens). Hartford, Conn., American Publishing Company. For sale by Agent in the City.

“The Innocents Abroad” is already a household word throughout the land. The long nights of the nearly passed winter have been shortened by it at thousands of firesides. Hundreds of thousands of readers, young and old, have feasted on its fun and have harvested the fruits of travel from its pleasant pages. There has been more of Europe and the wonderful East stereopticonned upon the American mind by its vivid and life-like pictures, than was ever brought from these far-off regions by a single traveler before. In short, Mark Twain’s book is a success, and, at this late day, his publishers perhaps will scarcely thank a journalist for stating the fact.

But, although we were not on the ground in time to stake our critical currency on Mr. Clemens’ venture as it started out, it may still be permitted us to make note of its gallant progress on the home-stretch; to speak of the qualities that make it so strong on the literary course and which ensure its bringing in to its author the most substantial results of a literary victory. Besides, one can speak with a good deal more of wisdom of a horse or a book, after the heat has been won in the one case, and the first fifty thousand copies sold in the other.

The trip of the Quaker City demanded a Mark Twain for its chronicler. It was itself a sort of a huge joke upon travel, although the grave elders and deacons who planned it were innocent of facetious intent. Its programme promised to pack the Old World’s wonders into a six months’ pic-nic, with about two months of sailing time deducted. Passengers were to make an escapade at Marseilles and visit Lyons (“from the heights of which on a clear day Mont Blanc and the Alps can be distinctly seen”!),1explanatory note Paris and the exposition, the rest of France and Switzerland, and catch the steamer again at Genoa. The foot of the Pilgrim was to enter between the straps and pass out at the toe of the Italian boot in an incredibly short space of time. The beard of the venerable East was to be pulled with a dizzy precipitance of irreverence that never had been thought of before.

Clearly, if any other of the Quaker City’s cargo, than Mark Twain, had kept a diary of this trip and published it, it would have been a melancholy and calamitous work. But the occasion brought the man, and the result is a happy one, and not a line too long at 650 pages.

Let us venture to state one prime reason why the reader would rather have this book doubled in size than halved. It is because, all through its pages, he is in the company of a man who, in all situations, and upon all subjects, is thoroughly natural—unaffectedly himself. The secret of the humorist is after all the same as that of the poet, or of any of the other characters who get us in their power. There must be no visible effort in the work we are to be amused by or amazed at.

Mark Twain understands this, whether he learned it or came by it intuitively. His rhetoric fits as easily on his thoughts as the drapery on a statue; his fun is never forced; his episodes, (and the book is full of them) however wildly foreign to the subject they may be, come of themselves and insist on being tagged on to the narrative; his style is of that kind which beguiles the reader to the belief that he could do the same himself if he tried. It seems to flow as water does, simply because it respects the law of gravitation. This is Mark Twain’s art, and let those who think it is an easy one to acquire, write a book of six hundred pages and try to sell it!

It would have been terrible, we say, if the average Quaker City pilgrim had made us follow his tracks, partake of his stereotyped emotions and digest the amount of guide-book involved in such a tour. He was permitted to see only the very cuticle of things, but he would have felt bound to make us believe he had penetrated to their marrows and felt their hearts pulsating. He would have desecrated sacred things by his false pretenses, in a far worse way than some people thought Mark would do by his jokes. We would have found him out and been disgusted. Perhaps we would have been seduced into pretending we believed in his pretence, which would have been worse. But the true and born Quaker City scribe, accepts his bird’s flight over the surface of many lands for what it is worth and makes the legitimate best of it. Not assuming to see more than he does, he tells us the truth about what does come within his vision. And very valuable truth it is, too. In general it is of two-fold character. The book is at once one of lively description, and of faithful, if often grotesque, impressions de voyage. In the illustrations which abundantly enliven the text—and which by the way are often good enough to have been “designed by Michael Angelo”2explanatory note—this two-fold character is well set forth. One part of the picture is the foreign scene, whatever it may be; the other exhibits, in rugged comical contrast, its American observers or victims. The figure which the wandering “Innocent” presents, is as genuine a study of life, albeit done in caricature, as are the sketches of Arab donkey boy, of Mabille lorette, of greasy monk, or plain-featured lady of Italy.3explanatory note There is something refreshingly hearty in the Innocent’s refusal to be impressed according to guide-book directions. Even when he shocks our sense of the venerable, in mosque or monastery, it is a healthy shock he gives. We pardon him freely for declining to appreciate “acres and acres of walls papered with the old masters,”4explanatory note because his frank barbarity is the wholesome rebound from an opposite and morbid extreme. We imagine that the “hard pan” of incredulous honesty on which he constantly walks, would be a better basis for a true appreciation of the beautiful and noble, than oceans of frothy sentiment. Sometimes, too, the heights of the poetic are unconsciously touched while the Innocent is knocking about among venerable conventions the most recklessly. We insist that the story of Abelard and Heloise, with the poor Canon Fulbert for its hero, is a more artistic production than the poem of Pope.5explanatory note Petrarch himself would have acknowledged that Mark beats him on his own ground, in diverting a ray of the world’s sentiment from the radiant form of Laura to the unknown face of Laura’s husband.6explanatory note

When the Innocent is seriously impressed by aught he sees, his reader is pretty sure to be. We have such confidence in his honesty that we are not afraid to be humbugged into excess of emotion. Besides, our sentiment is made so fresh by the hearty laugh we had a page before, that we come suddenly into the presence of a noble object with feeling unjaded, and with the element of pleasant surprise added to other delight. We would rather lounge an hour about the Milan cathedral,7explanatory note with Mark Twain, than with any architectural critic that lives. After he has had his little joke about the spectacles through which his fellow-pilgrims behold the sacred sights of Palestine, he comes out and sits at his tent door and looks with his own eyes over the moonlit Sea of Galilee.8explanatory note His revery then is that of a poet. When he penetrates through the rubbish of the great church at Jerusalem to the top of the rock of Calvary, we do not want to hear other words than he speaks. We believe in him and with him when he says, simply: “I climbed the stairway in the church which brings one to the top of the small inclosed pinnacle of rock, and looked upon the place where the true cross once stood, with a far more absorbing interest than I had ever felt in any thing earthly before.”9explanatory note One might suppose that the Holy Land is the last place in which a professed humorist should write a book. But the Syrian chapters10explanatory note are really the best in Mark’s volume. He is realistic and gives life-like sketches where authors have been wont to hang a religious vail, but whatever is Holy in the Land is none the worse for that, and the reader is the better. At proper times and places the man is always greater than the humorist.

Of course the book is not faultless, by any means. Some things in it might have been better said; some better left unsaid. But as a whole it merits more than the praise we have given it. What reader will refuse to say that it is the most entertaining volume of travel he has ever sat up nights with? What critic can question that it is a task of frightful literary difficulties, most satisfactorily and originally performed? We expect better books from Mark Twain, than this, because he has given us one, of such a kind, so good. The “kind” is not that most favorable to the display of his powers, except as these are displayed in the triumph over immense disadvantages. But that he has great powers is clearly enough shown, nevertheless. Who but Mark Twain could fire the largest reading public with enthusiasm over a six hundred page diary of European travel? It is but a reasonable inference from his success here, that no other success in essay or descriptive writing is beyond his reach. We do not now speak of him as the first of American humorists, but simply in his character as a literary man. What a delightful current is that of his thought, and through what fresh and untrodden ways it winds! His fancy is full of smiles and fair surprises. His rhetoric, as we have said, is that of a master. Language, in his hands, is an instrument upon which he plays now the best classic music of the schools, and from which, anon, he draws the quaintest lilts and cadences and turns of his own mind’s melody. Add to these gifts of his, the rare and high one of humor, and the matchless art of story-telling, and we have an equipment which ought to do great things—to add something permanent to literature—to produce books which will make the world’s heart genial centuries hence. Progressing toward such accomplishments, our “Modern Pilgrim” can afford to drop whatever is cheap in the material of his art. He will be more careful as to the texture of his jokes, and without ceasing to be funny will, primarily, be something more and higher. It is much to be able to make a country laugh. The gift has good uses. But, better than to rouse men’s laughter with sight of the grotesque and incongruous, is it to beguile them to smiling acceptance of that which makes them wiser, purer and happier. This latter can Mark Twain do, while certes he will not leave the other undone.