Mark Twain's Social Criticism in The Innocents Abroad

CRITICISM MARK TWAIN'S SOCIAL CRITICISM IN THE INNOCENTS ABROAD RiCHABD F. Fleck Criticism for the past twenty or thirty years of The Innocents Abroad centers around two basic contentions: (a) Twain was essentially a nationalistic "frontier equalitarian" (to use the words of Franklin Walker), and skeptical critic of European and Near East social and cultural values, or (b) Twain was essentially appreciative of foreign social and cultural values and actually, as Gladys Bellamy states, "injected criticism of American ways and American civilization into his running commentary on the foreign scene."1 Rather than getting into the debate of whether Twain was provincially American or truly appreciative of foreign society, I would like to investigate Twain's concern for the international human conditions in The Innocents Abroad. It cannot be denied that any writer who travels abroad, no matter what his nationality is, tends to judge foreign nations by his own and eventually, if he is not narrow-minded, his own country by foreign countries. The intelligent result of this process of judgment yields an international social philosophy to which nations X, Y, and Z can be measured. However crude Mark Twain's attempts are at arriving at such a philosophy in The Innocents Abroad, traces of internationalism can be found from his Azores chapter through his Holy Lands chapters. If one reads the book in this light, he will see that not only is America his guiding social frame of reference but also France and Italy and Russia. The reader will also note that not only is Italy the object of this social criticism but also America, France, Russia, and the Near East. For Twain, the physical and mental well-being of the common man, the peasant, should be the utmost concern of Turkey, Russia, France, or America, and it was by this standard that he judged all nations. Considering his reading audience, one can easily perceive that such a standard must have been popular. Certainly Franklin Walker is correct in saying that Twain was a "frontier equalitarian," but it is my contention that his trip in 1867 to Europe and the Holy Lands made him an international equalitarian judging his own nation as well as others as a result of his exposure to misery and poverty he never dreamed possible. Early in the book, Twain criticizes Catholicism because it has prevented material progress and has instilled indolence in the minds of the Portuguese peasants in the Azores: "The Good Catholic Portuguese crossed himself and prayed God to shield him from all blasphemous desire to know more than his Kïladys Carmen Bellamy, Mark Twain as a Literary Artist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), p. 167. 39 40RMMLA BulletinJune 1971 father did before him."2 The implication is, of course, that American society or a like society is far more industrious and inventive because it has not become institutionalized like the Azores, where the lot of the common man remains forever the same. However, one must keep in mind that America was his only implied frame of reference because it was still early in the voyage. Yet already Twain began to judge America in light of the Azores in so far as material prosperity was concerned: "The roads were a wonder, and well they might be. Here was an island with only a handful of people in it—25,000— and yet such fine roads do not exist in the United States outside of Central Park" (60). Neither America nor a particular foreign country, then, was the standard of measurement so much as a specific value of human prosperity which Twain had in mind. Just as Twain saw, on a very shallow plane, progress or the lack of it in the Azores by comparison with America, he acquired an ambivalent attitude toward France where poverty and prosperity coexisted in an even more marked degree. He was quick to praise Emperor Louis Napoleon who was described as "the genius of Energy, Persistence, Enterprise" (129) because he had done so much for the commercial prosperity of France and therefore ultimately the welfare of the common man. But, after describing the spendid beauties of Versailles—"you gaze, and stare, and try...