1. Sublime Diversions and Shifting Views

Theories of aesthetic judgment describe visual and emotional responses to landscapes and monuments, but these theories also shaped European travelers’ expectations of visual pleasure and meaningful experience. Regarding English travel to Palestine and especially to the Holy City of Jerusalem during the nineteenth century, these expectations become even more urgent as a result of both regular readings of the Bible and a growing sense of Britain's global authority and imperial reach. Both the Murray Handbook and The Bertrams present and predict travelers’ aesthetic responses, and both articulate a desire for sublime experience and divine revelation among the sites and the landscapes of the real Holy Land. The aesthetic ambitions of the Handbook’s travelers and Trollope's fictional tourists might be productively understood by interrogating the links between the appeal of sublime experience, the pursuit of spiritual elevation, and the expansion of British global influence.

In this regard, when, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison published his series of reflections “On the Pleasures of the Imagination” in the Spectator, he was keen on guiding the leisure activities of middle-class men by encouraging the development of taste and imagination in relation to the arts. For Addison, the “innocent” pleasures of the imagination are, “Like a gentle exercise of the faculties, awaken[ing] them from sloth and idleness, without putting them to any labor or difficulty” (289). A spectator can find imaginative pleasure and intellectual exercise through the sense of sight, especially seeing sites second-hand through, for instance, a literary description or a painting. For Addison, a person of fine taste might find a worthy pastime in using a work of art as a medium through which he can compare his own ideas about the world with those intimated by the object or scene represented. Addison affirms that a man of polite imagination “can converse with a picture, and find an agreeable companion in a statue” (289). Such “conversations” offer individuals wholesome pleasures, and thus, artworks allow viewers “to retire into them with safety” from the moral pitfalls associated with indulgence in more sensual delights. Addison's theories privilege the benefits of vicarious, rather than actual, experience of the world, and, as such, they pertain, also, to how travel guidebooks tend to encourage spectators to turn their gaze away from the scene. A comprehensive guidebook, as the Murray handbook aspired to be, might enable a traveler to acquaint himself with a foreign culture and its history, but the real-time experience of the place itself is, thus, mediated by the description on the page; that is, the Handbook-guided sightseer stands in the midst of a site, but paradoxically also experiences such immediacy vicariously. Mid-nineteenth century travelers to the Holy Land occupied a precarious position between sightseeing and spiritual seeking and the Handbook for Travellers to Syria and Palestine works to harmonize these two pursuits. This condition of being both in and out of the scene can be considered an exercise of control over the experience of place.

Similarly, when Addison turns to the sublime, or what he calls “descriptions that inspire the serious passions of terror and pity” (291), he directs his readers as to how they might temper, and even delight in, such disturbing emotions. He suggests that through a representation, that is, a second-hand sight, we can “look upon the terrors of a description with the same curiosity and satisfaction that we survey a dead monster” (292). The sublime feeling achieved from such almost awe-inspiring representations is (unlike the pleasant conversation with inanimate objects described above) derived from a sense of relief at one's actual distance and of assurance at one's own superiority; that is, “When we look on such hideous objects . . . as dreadful and harmless; so that the more frightful appearance they make, the greater is the pleasure we receive from the sense of our safety” (292). The experience of dread is thwarted by mediation (representation). Hence, a sense of overwhelming fear and a concomitant evasion of immediate danger underpin sublime experience, and aesthetic pleasure is achieved in affirming one's own well-being. In guiding aesthetic reception, Addison is keen on preventing excessive mental exertion and protecting the moral and intellectual safety of his readers, a goal that also, as I will show, underlies the Murray Handbook for Travellers to Palestine and Syria, as the author counsels his travelers on how to quell their fears, not of divine revelation, but of Arab raiders and Turkish beggars.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant's well-known discussion of the sublime points to a more totalizing, but only somewhat less wieldy, experience of the sublime. Kant clarifies that sublimity is a quality of mind experienced by a person in the face of magnitude rather than an inherent quality of an object of nature. It is an imaginative feat in which a person's mind extends beyond the structure of reason, and thus, in experiencing sublimity, one's mind is “induced to abandon sensibility and occupy itself with ideas containing a higher purposiveness” (99). In the first instant, then, the experience of sublimity is an imagination run wild. Differentiating between aesthetic judgments of the beautiful and the sublime, Kant suggests that the former occur when the mind takes pleasure in the structure and order of an object of nature or of art – it is the mind at play in contemplating bounded form. The sublime, on the other hand, is an experience of chaos and “unboundedness.” The sublime produces a state of mind “violent to our imagination” yet which causes “not so much a positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect” or “negative pleasure” (98–99). This description of the sublime shares characteristics with extraordinary or intense experience like those associated with spiritual elevation. An individual experiencing sublime emotion moves between alternating feelings of attraction and repulsion, and in the midst of such commotion, which “is like an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself,” the individual seeks transcendence (115). Sublime feeling is inspired by unbounded imagination, and, concomitantly, it inspires a sensibility keen to the risk of being overwhelmed by the forces to which it is responding.

Subsequently, even while an individual's imagination might be taken hold by inestimable greatness – by an overwhelming sense of the spiritual or of the powerful – the spectator recognizes not only his relative limitations, but also his power. Kant notes, “If in judging nature aesthetically we call it sublime, we do so not because nature arouses fear, but because it calls forth our strength” or a sense of resistance to domination (121). This strength, writes Kant, “keeps the humanity of our person from being degraded.” The pleasure of sublime feeling results from the paradoxical combination of subjection to awesome power and a recognition of the viewer's own power, self-control, and wellbeing. Kant, like Addison, emphasizes the relative safety and control of the spectator in a sublime state; the sighting of a terrible storm, for instance “becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place” (120). Without this safe vantage point, a viewer feels only fear and thus can make neither an aesthetic judgment nor gain imaginative profit. One resists being swallowed into the abyss, and the (negative) pleasure of the moment is found in the violent shifting of one's imagination between fear, resistance, and a sense of superiority and safety. Indeed, to experience the sublime is to feel one's own power in the face of that which is seemingly overpowering.

The journey of many nineteenth-century British travelers to Palestine would have been invigorated by a profound desire to experience such spiritual sublimity at the monuments and in the lands described in the Bible. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky defines holy places as sites where “the divine becomes manifest, in one way or another, in the eyes of believing men and women” and a Holy City, like Jerusalem, becomes holy because of historical-religious events or because it serves as a “microcosmic spatial reflection of the cosmos” (7). Cosmic experience or visions of divinity are awe-inspiring ambitions that were pursued in various ways. Billie Melman, for instance, summarizes accounts of Evangelical travelers that imaginatively remade the Middle Eastern scene to suit the desires of the writers literally to match geography with scripture, regardless of historical reality. The result is a practice of secular dehistoricizing which represented place and people as unchanging over time (110).

From another perspective, exploring how English traveler-artists sought to represent this “cosmic reality,” Coleman, in “From the Sublime to the Meticulous: Art, Anthropology, and the Victorian Pilgrimage to Palestine,” explains that in their paintings, nineteenth-century British painters who traveled to Palestine tried to negotiate the difference between first-hand visual experience of the Holy Land and its textual representation in scripture. Coleman particularly describes how English landscape painter Thomas Seddon (1821–1856) and member of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) portrayed realistic landscapes that incorporated images of Christ or other Biblical figures that appear to be looking directly at the artist or viewer. These “artist-pilgrims” desired “to convey an accurate sense of the landscape and a direct sense of personal spiritual experience at the same time” (281). The viewer, by becoming an object of the represented Christ's gaze, shares a look with the Divine figure and becomes personally implicated in the Divine stories associated with the landscape. Coleman notes how these artists sought to paint their canvases “on the spot” of a particular religious scene on the particular date marking a holy event's occurrence and thus to experience the story in time and space. The stories these artists carried home in their paintings were thus visual representations of spiritual ecstasy authenticated in detailed realist representation that gave viewers an opportunity for awesome experience. The completed and displayed paintings were, I would add, thus a testament to the authentic re-creation of spiritual sublimity – a real story of divine power – and a compelling indication of how desire for the sublime experience of traveling in the Holy Land was cultivated among viewers at home. The extraordinary of the cosmic meets the everyday of reality and offers a manageable sense of spiritual (and perhaps national) elevation. In “A Tale of Two Centres? Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century,” Coleman comments that the early part of the nineteenth century “was a period when it was still frequently assumed that the land could be ‘read’ like a text, as product and proof of the divine, just as travellers regularly opened their Bibles to read about the landscapes towards which they were simultaneously directing their gaze” (334). The conflation of cosmic spirituality, geographical materiality, and textuality, or the combination of imagination, nature, and art, offered fertile ground to shape sublime expectations and underlines the relevance of artistic representation as a means of constructing experience and conveying it back home. Indeed, the turn toward “home” offers a safe direction for the aesthetic representation of spiritual sublimity.

Such artistic constructions might be further explored through the theory of the “picturesque” as a deliberate blurring between nature and art. As a mode of interpreting landscapes and monuments, the picturesque offers insight into the cultivation of British travelers’ aesthetic responses to the Middle Eastern landscape. Describing the relationship between travel and picturesque aesthetics, James Buzard writes that delineations of picturesque beauty arose towards the end of the eighteenth century as a point of mediation between the sublime and the beautiful. For Buzard, the idea of the picturesque might be exemplified by sites that feature a midway point between order and ruin, such as an orderly neo-classical building in a dilapidated condition. The picturesque thus offers an ideological construct in which a viewer's pleasure in a beautiful structure is mitigated by a sense of awe at its destruction (“The Grand Tour” 45–46). As such, neither the viewer's response to the beautiful (as order and balance) or to the sublime (as chaos and unboundedness) takes precedence and a safe, but exciting, coexistence is maintained. Hence, the pleasure of the picturesque seems to be in maintaining an emotional balance between control and chaos as opposed to sublime feeling in which control must replace chaos.

The picturesque marks an oscillation between the awesome and the mundane and a precarious exchange between desire and disappointment; it offers an ideological strategy for manipulating context and the visual field. Malcolm Andrews in The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 traces the evolution of the term and notes that its usage in the eighteenth century typically marked a division between social utility and imaginative possibility – a negotiation of sorts between the manmade, the socially acceptable, and the unknown. Andrews notes that the aesthetic language of the picturesque was a staple of well-read tourists and “ruin enthusiasts” and that determinations of the picturesque involved estimations of how works of art became indistinguishable from works of nature: “A true ruin has ceased to be wholly the work of man” (49). In response to arguments that the language of the picturesque seemed to cultivate an ahistorical attitude and to exclude moral judgments, Andrews argues that, really, recognition of the picturesque became a way of questioning the relationship between the social and the natural world. However, unlike Andrews, Buzard agrees that theories of the picturesque showed a “tendency to isolate visual considerations from any historical, political, or moral ones that may arise from looking at irregular, anti-classical landscapes, ruins, or even ruined people—the ragged poor, viewed from a discreet distance” (“The Grand Tour” 46). Buzard's comments reflect how judgments of the picturesque might involve a rhetorical turning away from the social and political context of a view, as if a socially constructed site might be transfigured into a work of nature. Picturesque images are, thus, excised parts of the whole, framed not by social (or actual) contexts but by a rhetoric that delineates value in safe and controlled conditions. In addition, Buzard notes that theories of the picturesque included landscapes as different as the mild English countryside and the mountainous Swiss Alps in one aesthetic order (Buzard 45). This leveling minimalizes distinctions between geographical locations and places a recognizable order on a potentially chaotic world. Like Andrews and Buzard, I argue that such aesthetic delineations of the picturesque reflect social, political, and, in the case of travel to Palestine during a time of British imperial expansion, global orders.

The sublime feeling that British travelers to Palestine expected to be excited by their proximity to the sacred monuments of Christianity was diverted from the sites themselves to the cultural and geographical contexts in which they were set. For many British travelers who ventured beyond their known world to the Middle East, their sense of safety and self-possession in the face of awe-inspiring difference was at risk. That is, they might not achieve the control over the view necessary for a satisfyingly sublime experience. Recognizing this risk, Porter directs his travelers to follow routes that might enable awe-inspiring experience before the monuments of Scripture, but he routinely sidelines readers with warnings not to lose control of their imaginative faculties or their sense of authority over the world they travel. He counsels them on how best to manage the social, cultural, and geographical contexts of the sites viewed. Trollope's characters, too, experience Palestine as a destination where their desire to lose themselves in spiritual sublimity is diverted by racial difference and physical discomfort. In both works, sublime aspirations are ultimately disappointed.Footnote ⁶ This relationship between desire and disappointment is marked by the travelers turning away from a failed promise of sublime elation, refocusing on the secular, and affirming the superiority of the familiar, suggesting that control over British travelers’ Middle Eastern experience requires shifting their view from the awesome to the mundane.

2. The Murray Handbook: Real Imaginative Experience

The lengthy, two-volume 1858 MurrayHandbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine includes both descriptions of important sacred sites and derision of fellow non-English travelers and other inhabitants of the landscape. On one hand, the Reverend Porter invokes the magnitude of Biblical history and its awesome influence on modernity. He suggests that travelers may want to explore, “Every spot celebrated in Bible history, or haunted by the memory of patriarch, prophet, apostle, or of ONE greater than them all” (l). He energetically suggests that, “Some will desire . . . to perform, in fact, the ‘wilderness pilgrimage’ – on their way to the ‘Land of Promise’ “(l; my emphasis), and thus, by leaving Cairo in February en route to Jerusalem, travelers may comfortably live through their own “forty days in the desert.” By enacting the stories of Scripture, the traveler can, Porter implies, really share in the mind of Christ and make the well-known text into real personal experience. The possibility of such an imaginative reality is a paradoxical, but sublime, idea to tempt the Anglo-Christian traveler to the Holy Land.

On the other hand, Porter's enthusiasm for first-hand experience of sacred spaces and stories is paired with the book's mission, as part of the Murray Handbook for Travellers series, of providing instructions on finding the most scenic, historically relevant, and easily traveled routes. In this way, British travelers might best enjoy the spiritual experience of traveling in the Middle East without sacrificing civility, comfort, or safety. Porter announces his intention of providing his readers with a portable “scripture geography” and, to accommodate both tourism and pilgrimage, he includes a special index which references “every passage of scripture in which the place described occurs” as well as a second index of towns and villages (xi). Relevant here is the idea of “geopiety,” identified by Abramson to describe this particular dynamic relationship “between imagery, reality, geography and sacred space” (69). Reception of the landscape is colored (or expected to be) by its religious associations, and, as Coleman notes in his definition of the “pious gaze,” such a dynamic often involved negotiating demands for precise landscape description with “theological requirements to present powerful religious experiences” to readers of travel accounts (“A Tale of Two Centres?” 333). Personal discomfort and hardship seem part and parcel of the spiritual journey. Abramson further explains that for travelers to the Middle East who had access to a half century of pilgrims’ travel accounts, “the hardship they courted seemed to compliment the region's historical and religious associations” (70). The Murray Handbook, however, pays only superficial heed to this kind of understanding; Porter's notions of “geopiety” are both strongly stated by the inclusion of the Biblical reference index and rather deftly sidestepped in favor of fostering a pleasant journey. After detailing a “spring tour in Syria” as a pleasure that oscillates between a “rough ride” and a “ramble,” Porter further comments on how such travel contributes to overall mental health: “The excitement of novel scenes and novel circumstances; the total relief of thought and the relaxation of overstrained mental powers — all tend to make a new physical man, while they contribute in no small degree to give a healthy tone to the intellect” (lv; my emphasis). One must wonder how a traveler could relive Christ's “forty days in the desert” and concurrently experience a “total relief of thought.” Porter's Murray Handbook seems to promise deep spiritual awakening that is also healthful, leisurely, entertaining, and, above all, not too mentally demanding.

Guiding readers toward making reasonable aesthetic judgments about the landscape and monuments, the Handbook suggests that the traveler's objective should not be awed-inspired subjection before monuments in the Holy Land, but instead a traveler should try to take possession of that spiritual history. In this regard, the vast number of paintings, photographs, and literary representations of Jerusalem and the Palestine during the nineteenth century were, as Ben-Arieh suggests, an attempt “to concretize the scenery of the Holy Land for the ‘cultured’ public of the west; particularly for those who had been brought up with the Scriptures and knew the names of all the holy places” (38). The guidebooks that began circulating in the 1850s were, Ben-Arieh claims, forwarding an argument that the “truth” of the Scriptures might be authenticated for Europeans by the sight of the Holy Land, whether that seeing be first hand or recontextualized via photographs, maps, or sculptural re-creations (39). Thus, in rather cheerful terms, Porter's Handbook invokes a picturesque rhetoric of conquest and plunder as the author insists these foreign views need be brought back to England. Porter advises travelers to carry with them their notebooks and their pencils, their paints and canvases because, “Every nook and corner of the Palestine ought now to be made familiar to us as the home of our childhood, whether portrayed by their own bright sun, or by the magic touch of the pencil” (liii). He proclaims that such artistic labors should continue till every site “that has a story in it, is carried away to the far west.” The Handbook's travelers are commissioned with the responsibility of assuming aesthetic ownership of this exotic locale and thus overcoming the fearsome obstacles of geographical distance, ethnic difference, and foreign claims to the sacred sites of Biblical Scripture. The experience of spiritual elevation becomes linked with this commission of reproduction as the traveler's mission seems to be to take parts from the whole scene and render them as souvenirs for readers and friends at home. Sublime potential comes, then, not as an immediate response to Biblical sites but as a pleasure in conquest and in anticipation of averting the dangers of the cultural environment in which these sites are situated. Porter warns his travelers that in addition to their notebooks, pencils, and telescope, “a small ‘Dean and Adams’ revolver may . . . prove a useful travelling companion at times,” and he suggests keeping it visible because the roads of Syria “are not always safe or free from prowling bandits” (liii). Displaying a gun as well as “cool self-possession and a determined manner” will generally subdue any of the “Arabs” or “peasants of Palestine” who attempt to interfere with a traveler's safe view. Armed with pencil and pistol, a traveler might protect himself from his fears of the unknown by taking control of the scene with a proper combination of imagination and force.

Additionally, travelers were warned to keep a civil and aesthetic distance from Middle Easterners and their reportedly-barbarous habits. The Murray suggests that, while it is perfectly acceptable to take pleasure in remarking on the costumes, husbandry, and personal attributes of the local inhabitants, ridicule and danger might accompany any genuine intimacy. For example, he cautions the British traveler to maintain “a neat and simple style of dress.” Adopting the “native costume” when one is clearly unfamiliar with local customs is just a means of drawing attention to one's self and losing one's sense of cultural superiority. Not only might the real “natives” ridicule the costumed Englishman, but: “what is worse, it may occasion grievous mistakes as to nationality” (lvi). Additionally, Porter advises that even the appearance of friendliness with Arab or Turkish merchants and workers compromises the British traveler's dignity. While the traveler “should be courteous and polite to all . . . in his dealing with servants, muleteers, and guides,” he need always remember his superior place (lvii). Porter further warns against becoming imaginatively fanciful about the people and customs of the East: “Another hint may be useful for poetical travellers, who, becoming enamored of their dragoman, deem him the very embodiment of truth, honesty, and devotedness. It may be very charitable and pleasing to entertain these feelings, but it is very dangerous to act upon them” (lxv). Porter thus suggests that the British traveler abandon fantasies about the “Oriental’s” love, loyalty, or inner nobility and keep in mind that he is a dangerous and duplicitous foreigner. He advises his traveler instead to overlook or look away from the native inhabitants, except where they serve a useful purpose. Porter prioritizes self-control in the face of that which is beyond control, particularly the fearsome abyss of interracial intimacy. While Porter's preface to this Handbook extols the possibility of sublime experience, his text underlines the need for restraint and moderation – a reasonable refraining from excess – and promotes a distance that renders the experience of travel almost as a kind of second-hand seeing.

A sense of disappointment in not finding a hoped-for revelation or at discovering the limits of sublime feeling interlaces the descriptions in the Handbook and is linked, I suggest, in part to a dread of intercultural contact and to a disappointing realization that actual possession of the spiritual geography of Christianity is beyond the geographical range of Britain's authority. For example, in the section about the ancient stone city of Petra, Porter describes its vastness and the impression it makes on the traveler. Immediately after the traveler takes in the “great natural features,” his gaze falls upon a “vast multitude of tombs” hewn in the cliffs and is arrested by the colors that are “inconceivably beautiful” (45). Porter advises his traveler to approach Petra from the chasm of the Sik, a mile-long gorge that leads to the ancient city. This would allow the traveler to obtain the most moving first look and to travel the path least fettered by local beggars whose presence ruins the British traveler's experience of the view. Describing the Sik, Porter writes that, at first, the walker is overwhelmed as he enters and delves into the chasm, feeling as though he were “hopelessly imprisoned in the very bowels of the earth” where no “solitary ray of sunlight can penetrate” (47). This sense of overwhelming nature is assuaged by an eye that simultaneously sees “the traces of art and industry are everywhere visible,” but in a ruined and decayed state. The Handbook's traveler experiences a moment of sublimity giving way to picturesque harmony between art and nature and then a return to nature; for instance, he notices how these ruinous and time worn works of humans give way to the timeless natural beauty of the “the delicate branches of the caper plant [that] hang down as fresh and beautiful . . . as they did 2000 years ago” (47).

Nevertheless, these harmonious thoughts, of the balance between nature and art and between the traveler's present experience and the time of Christ's life, are disrupted by descriptions of discordant encounters with native peoples at the city of Petra. In a brief introduction to this section titled “Walks through Petra,” Porter flippantly complains how a tourist must rush through the city because: “News of his arrival spreads among the neighbouring tribes; strangers flock in to see what they can make by blustering or pilfering; and the escort becomes anxious to flee” (46; my emphasis). Porter worries, perhaps, that the tourist cannot see the monuments of Petra unattached from the context of daily round of Syrian life. He desires a museum-like space, a silent temple, a vista uninhabited and mystical, like the abyss-like space of the Sik. Porter's use of the word “strangers” to denote the local people suggests a potentially misplaced sense of belonging for the tourist and exclusion of those who already inhabit the area. Such usage also suggests that the nineteenth-century British tourist in the Holy Lands was motivated by a desire to lay at least an ideological claim to the Holy Land. In this section then, the tourist has two linked but incongruous views: one of grandeur and mysticism which is greatly desired and potentially subject to conquest (through representation). The other view is of Britain's racial and global “others,” a pressing view of people who are neither subject nor manageable. In Porter's description of Petra, sublime feeling shifts from the ancient city to its strange people; to gain control over this disturbing feeling, Porter vehemently advises his traveler to pay a bribe of whatever outrageous sum is demanded “if it were only to rid one of the presence, even for a single day, of a set of half-naked, hungry savages, who otherwise dog his steps, and meet him in every corner” (46). The aesthetic experience of the holy place is framed by secular discord and disgust, and the preservation of power over the scene requires that the traveler either find a way to disregard other inhabitants or dismiss the relevance of the view as it exists within its own geographical and social space.

3. Saddle Sore and Uninspired: Geopiety and Disappointment in The Bertrams

The travelers in The Bertrams feel the desires, fears, and even exhibit the bad behaviors that the Murray Handbook details. Their fictional journey (described in the first quarter of the novel) is marked by how they find or fail to find pleasure in the holy sites of Palestine and Jerusalem and by how their pursuit of sublime revelation is diverted to mundane considerations. Trollope's representation of the characters’ failure to achieve a feeling of sublime transcendence in the Holy Land and their ultimate disregard (with some reservations) of the aesthetic and concomitant ideological value of the land they visit suggests how this novel assesses the experience of travel in this exotic locale.Footnote ⁷ In making such an assessment, the novel's narrator describes the ambitions and behaviors of British travelers in terms that poke fun at their naiveté and presumption in the Holy Land. However, the narrative seems also to commiserate with its characters’ feelings of displacement in the Middle East and their disappointment as their attention is diverted from the holy sites and the mission of spiritual revelation.

The Bertrams’ central character, George Bertram, is thwarted in his attempts to find a purpose higher than the pursuit of pleasure. George travels to Jerusalem with every intention of experiencing divine history and with a confidence in his imminent feelings of awe and inspiration. He imagines himself, on his arrival at the walled city, galloping toward the gates with “his heart . . . ready to melt into ecstatic pathos” (67; ch. VI), but in practice, he finds his horse too tired to gallop, his saddle a source of great physical discomfort, and narrow streets filled with waste and turbaned Middle Easterners. He enters the city vehemently complaining about the “accursed Turkish saddle which had been specially contrived with the view of lacerating the nether Christian man.” The narrator comments that, “After all his sentiment, all his emotions, all his pious resolves, it was thus that our hero entered Jerusalem!” Reaching his destination, this pilgrim-traveler finds his quest for spiritual elevation grounded in everyday concerns like the condition of his rear end. To George's disappointment, the mundane reality of long and arduous travel and a busy city overrides the higher workings of the imagination.

Feeling revived after a rest at his hotel among his compatriots, George visits the Church of the Holy Sepulchre hoping to place himself before the tomb of Christ and anticipating finding himself in “an agony of faith” (74; ch. VI). Instead, he is repulsed by the intense crowding of others of many races and nations who are also making a pilgrimage to the tomb and whose expressions of faith seem more agonized than civility should allow. He is not awed by the monument; instead he is struck by his own unlikely place among these other people, “the outcasts of the world, exactly those whom he would have objected to meet, unarmed on the roads of Greece or among the hills of Armenia; cut-throat looking wretches, with close shaven heads, dirty beards, and angry eyes . . . abominable to an Englishman” (73; ch. VI). Crowded among such types as these in the inner sanctum of the Church, George finds himself overwhelmed and desires to distance himself from his so-called fellow Christians whose proximity inspires a horror of difference. Reverence to scriptural history gives way to anger (and fear) at the influence of the others who “push him the way he did not wish to go” (74: ch. VI). Indeed, George experiences awe where he least expected it: not in the Church, but in the overwhelming presence of other people who claim that place.

His repulsion is followed by a deliberate disinterest in the site. George makes his retreat from the sacred church, feeling as though “he had killed that lion” and “ticking it off from his list of celebrities as one celebrity disposed of,” he thinks no more of it (74; ch. VI). One wonders if the feeling of safety George finds in his retreat is sufficient to counteract the terror of close contact. He has experienced the Englishman's horror among foreigners and found that, to preserve his sense of authority, he must discount both them and the shrine to which he had imaginatively assigned such awesome potential. Suggesting that George's experience is typical, The Bertrams’ narrator affirms, “Such, we believe, are the visits of most English Christians to the so-called Holy Sepulchre” (74; ch. VI). Describing this same site, the Murray Handbook’s author also complains that real Christians, like himself, cannot “bear to look without feelings of righteous indignation on a host of the most barefaced impostures clustered round the spot where the God of Truth once appeared in the flesh” (Porter 159). For Porter, the overwhelming presence of Middle Eastern people and their modes of worship are an obstacle to aesthetic and spiritual pleasure at the solemn and awe-inspiring site of the tomb of Christ. Both George Bertram and J. L. Porter find themselves unequal to the sublime devotion of the people they see, and to maintain their sense of superiority, they distance themselves from both monument and people. Porter also questions the authenticity of the site, strongly suggesting that the local supplicants, including Greek pilgrims, are both misguided in their faith in the site, superstitious, and given to excess. He designates the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as a site of “hopeless confusion” and “absurd traditions” (167). After such a denunciation, the author concludes this section of his guidebook by invoking a passage of poetry from Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sketches. He turns his description away from the site and towards a recollection of Britain's erstwhile Poet Laureate, aesthetic traditions of the Romantics, and the legendary glory of the Crusades: “[The Holy Sepulchre] seems,” Porter concludes, “to be the common centre of devotion, superstition, and imposture. It is the center, too, of all ’that romance/ of many-colour’d life which Fortune pours/ Round the crusaders, till on distant shores/ Their labours end’” (Wordsworth, qtd. in Porter 167). He takes possession of the scene and renders it as a known poetic image—a vision of the end of a dream or romantic tale. Hence, the guidebook appropriates the site by, on one hand, an invocation of legend and Britain's will to global conquest and, on another, a rhetorical turn away from the holy site toward the familiar strains of the English poet. Such aesthetic appropriation enables proper appreciation of English authority (as opposed to Ottoman) and tempers any sublime confusion caused by the experience of proximity with the more dangerous presence of non-English faithful. This site's awesome referent can be experienced only from a distance through representation, lest the English traveler be overcome by terror in the presence of the other.

George Bertram does find his moment of sublime revelation atop the Mount of Olives, but the moment is fleeting and subject to validation by others. Sitting above the city of Jerusalem, George is deeply moved by the idea that he occupies the same spot as once did Jesus; indeed, he is overcome with the magnitude of this connection. Inspired by his cosmic view of Jerusalem, George, thus, resolves that his life's path lies with the clergy, and he “thanked his God in that he had brought him there to this spot before it was too late; acknowledged that, doubting as he had done, he had now at length found a Divine counsellor — one whose leading his spirit did not disdain” (81; ch. VII). Following the trajectory of sublime experience, George is at first bowed by his own insignificance in the face of powerful Divine will, but he soon rallies his courage to see himself as “one of the smallest, one of the least who would fight the good fight, but though the smallest and the least, he would do it with what earnestness was in him.” Accepting his calling in devoting himself to the ministry and its tenets of service, George finds himself equal to the awe-inspiring history embedded in this sacred spot. The narrator, however, warns his reader that George's moment of elevated imagination is short-lived, as he realizes that the work of everyday life is inimical to such lofty visions. Here, Trollope's narrative questions not the value of divine revelation but the authenticity associated with achieving it in this particular geographical place.

George desires that others validate his moment of sublimity by experiencing it too. He first compels his father, with whom he is newly reunited, to accompany him to the Mount of Olives. Sir Lionel, after uttering a commonplace remark about the view, turns away and turns the conversation toward his more pressing interest in the possibility of George inheriting his uncle's fortune. Describing George's disappointment at this failure to elicit sublime feeling in his practical father, the narrator remarks that, if Sir Lionel, “was too mundane, [George] was too transcendental” (89; ch. VIII) and, thus, both offer extremes of aesthetic response – indifference and passionate imagining. By the end of the scene, George abandons thoughts of sharing his vision with his father and looks instead towards his lover, Caroline Waddington, to share his vision of Divine inspiration in the real setting of the Mount of Olives. Caroline, though she “had an eye to see material beauty, and a taste to love it” (121; ch. X), is also unable to feel the same awesome emotions that George wishes her to share at this sacred site. Like Sir Lionel, Caroline turns the conversation towards her own interests, primarily her desire for wealth and social distinction (ambitions, she believes would be unfulfilled were she the wife of a clergyman). As George listens to her, he, too, slowly turns away from the view of Jerusalem until, “He had turned his face absolutely away from the city, and was looking upwards . . . full into the beauty of her countenance” (123; ch. X). In this moment of turning, he abandons his sublime vision and his mission of fighting the “good fight.” Instead, he turns his gaze back toward secular desire and his lover's ambition for worldly success. The scenery, the magnificent possibility of sharing the seat of Christ, and the search for Divine destiny are no longer at the forefront of George's imagination. Jerusalem is sidelined, relegated to backdrop, for the more familiar (and manageable) pursuits of love and wealth.

George's imaginative return to the mundane coincides with the novel's satirical descriptions of other British travelers as they tour the sites of Jerusalem. In the chapter entitled “Miss Todd's Picnic,” the travelers, on an expedition through the Valley of Jehoshaphat, find themselves in the unlikely position of holding a rather large-scale picnic literally upon the Tomb of St. James. Their vulgar misuse of sacred space presents a striking example of the tourist's aesthetic disregard of the site and their own absorption in the mundane. Overlooking the scene, the narrator comments that, “Here in England, one would hardly inaugurate a picnic to Kensal Green, or the Highgate Cemetery, nor select the tombs of our departed great ones as shelter under which to draw one's corks” (100; ch. IX). Indeed, as the travelers relax on their tomb-side seats, their discourse indicates how they rationalize irreverence and relegate the holy sites to the realm of secular pleasure. For instance, in one mixed-up speech, Miss Todd exclaims “I declare, these tombs are very nice tables, are they not? Only, I suppose it's very improper. Mr. Cruse, I’m so sorry that we have no potatoes; but there is salad” (116; ch IX). Moving from self-satisfaction to questions of reverence to potatoes, Miss Todd's discourse obfuscates any straightforward aesthetic response to the sacred site and instead turns attention toward the more mundane business of lunch. Through such discursive chaos, The Bertrams conveys a cynical disappointment in the experience of nineteenth-century travel, especially to the Middle East, wherein banality substitutes for the experience of profound reverence.

The impropriety of Trollope's travelers’ taste at this picnic is underlined by the description of Mr. and Mrs. Hunter, a newly married couple who adopt Turkish dress during their travels (apparently they are unaware of the Murray Handbook’s warning that doing so when one is “unable to conform to the mode of salutation, sitting, walking, and riding of the people, is just an effectual way of rendering oneself ridiculous” [Porter lvi]). Mr. Hunter, reposing on the grass in his newly adopted costume, “flatter[s] himself that he looked more Turkish than any Turk he had yet seen” (Trollope, Bertrams 115; ch. IX). As the Handbook predicts, however, when he later tries to sit cross-legged, he becomes temporarily incapacitated. The Hunters applaud themselves on feeling “quite at home here in the East” and on having, thus, broached the boundaries between home and the space through which they travel. By adopting “native” customs, they see themselves as infiltrating the barriers of cultural difference and as appropriating the space of the other. Rather than bringing images and other objects home to the metropolis, they attempt unsuccessfully to undermine the potentially disempowering difference between home and abroad and make themselves at home in the Middle East. Their lack of respect for a necessary distance between the Englishman and the “Oriental” renders them ridiculous. Misguided as the Hunters may be, their vulgarity pales before the obscenity of Mr. Potts, who crawls into one of the ancient catacombs and returns bearing a skull. While Mr. Potts's grave robbing receives scornful comments about how disgusting it is to handle human remains, this disgust is more a result of the picnickers’ concern about the ethnic identity of the skull than about the desecration of sacred space. Before the end of Mr. Potts's paragraph, however, the discourse relapses into a chaotic contiguity and gives way to more pressing concerns of a lost parasol. These scenes at the picnic offer absurd and highly critical pictures of British tourists whose attention is diverted from the holy sites and landscapes that once constituted a focus of sublime desire to the pursuit of comfort and amusement. Aesthetic feeling is redirected as the travelers turn away from a landscape in which authority is shared among diverse cultures and turn toward mundane regards. While the novel mockingly criticizes the behaviors of tourists, it also shows more serious concern with their lack of control and sense of disappointment. The narrative demonstrates regret in its characters’ acquired disinterest in the scene even while such a lack is shown as an inevitable consequence of tourism and the expectations associated with such exotic travel.

The Bertrams’ narrator refers directly to Murray's series of travelers’ handbooks as a factor in shaping the aesthetic indifference and experiential depravity of British tourists. In describing the picnic on the tomb, the narrator complains that English men and women are known throughout the world for their disrespectful attitude towards foreign people and places. Describing the British abroad, the narrator details a scene in which a tourist, viewing a fresco in the recesses of an Italian cathedral, is interrupted by a clergyman: “The lover of Art glares at [the clergyman] with insulted look, and hardly deigns to notice him further: he merely turns his eye to his Murray, puts his hat down on the altar step and goes on studying his subject” (101). In the syntax of this statement, it is unclear whether the “subject” refers to the fresco or to the Murray; indeed, the referents become uncomfortably conflated. The comprehensive guidebook distracts travelers from the real experience of travel and inspires an arrogance that precludes not only sublime feeling, but also the enjoyment of artworks in their original context. Trollope's novel's concern with how the codification of travel impinges on the imagination and how British tourists pursue not the pleasures of the imagination but instead engage in the mere pursuit of pleasure is magnified in his descriptions of travel to the Holy Land.⁸

Trollope's novel, despite its satirical edge, displays a sense of disappointment both in the aesthetic feeling inspired by the Holy Lands and in British travelers’ lack of imaginative transformation. The characters’ attitudes and actions reflect those desires and cautions expressed in the Murray Handbook, but The Bertrams also critiques those attitudes in ways that suggest ambivalence toward the global reach that the novel depicts. Disappointment is expressed in the tomb-top picnickers’ revelations about their relation to the land in which they travel. Miss Todd laments:

Vastness, immeasurableness, the sublime wonders of the Bible have all become too manageable and, indeed, rather commonplace. “Forty days” of travel would, no doubt, be superfluous when one afternoon would suffice. The spiritual journey to Jerusalem becomes an unremarkable holiday rather than a journey toward the mysterious sublime of spiritual elevation and real participation in the stories of Biblical scripture. Trollope's travelers achieve aesthetic disinterest, and, for them, Jerusalem is naught but a “dead monster” from which they take relics and, unfortunately, little aesthetic pleasure. By unveiling the mystery, plotting the space with the help of the comprehensive guidebook, and discovering how persistent and unwieldy the place and people are, Miss Todd and her fellows find themselves indifferent even to death. Miss Jones echoes Miss Todd's disappointment in Jerusalem, and her reflections on the undoing of her imaginative desire present a sense of loss in which the desire for sublime experience gives way to the pathos of the commonplace: “Yes; but the mystery, the beautiful mystery, is all gone” (108; ch. IX).

4. Conclusion: Global Travel and an Aesthetic Practice of Not Seeing

Trollope's novel and the Murray Handbook inform understandings of the stance and attitude of British tourists “beyond the region of passports” (Trollope 67; ch. VI) – in lands where the usual rules of British travel don't apply and where British identity is constructed by racial difference and an imperialist sense of authority. In this essay, I have explored how Trollope's and Porter's delineations of desire for sublime experience and its failure provide models for appreciating the dynamics of power embedded in aesthetic practice in the as-yet-unstructured global milieu. These works show how writers and travelers manipulate landscapes and peoples that cannot be clearly conquered or controlled by redirecting the British traveler's viewpoint and, thus, devaluing the relevance of the visited sites and disregarding the co-presence of middle-eastern others. When Trollope's George Bertram enters the city of Jerusalem, the narrator muses that “one's first idea is how delightfully easy it would be to take Jerusalem. It is at any rate easy enough to enter it, for the dirty Turkish soldiers do not even look at you” (67; ch. VI). The narrator shifts the readers’ gaze from the extraordinary to the commonplace, first pointing out the fantasy of conquest, and then redirecting that imaginary pleasure to gaze at the appearance of the existing conquerors, devaluing both their authority (compromised by their uncleanness and their Turkish-ness) and the value of the prize (a city unkempt and open to anyone of any background). The Handbook's readers, too, vicariously encounter the holy sites of the East and find them already seen and occupied by Turks, Arabs, Jews, and Greeks among others; the British traveler is advised to avoid these co-travelers or to turn his gaze away toward more pleasant speculations because not to do so is to participate in a sublimely unwieldy moment of integration from which an authoritative return is dubious. Despite his claims that his travelers might reenact the sacred moments of the Bible, the author of the Murray knows his duty is to prevent them from being lost among these scenes, and he tries to limit the depth of their enactment.

Trollope, too, recognizes the traveler's desire to experience awe and to see the world anew, yet his descriptions take a more critical view edged with disappointment in a failed search for spiritual transcendence. In presenting this turning away from the view, as exemplified by George Bertram or the Handbook's travelers, whose eyes are drawn to the page rather than the scene and who must obtain the views surreptitiously to avoid cultural contact, Trollope and Porter describe not only responses, but acts of seeing intended to control the meaning of scenes and spaces that are shared with Middle Easterners and others, and thus materially beyond the imperialist authority of Britain. Trollope's characters’ self-absorbed indifference to sacred space and Porter's deliberate redirecting of the traveler's viewpoint are a means of self-preservation for English men and women faced with the frightening reality of cultural contact. This disregard offers an indirect assertion of authority and suggests that global visions in the middle of the nineteenth century were rather deliberately circumscribed.

By 1892, J. L. Porter's bulky two-volume Murray Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine had been rewritten by the Reverend Haskett Smith who had slimmed it down to a mere single volume and eliminated the claims of the preface and the excerpts of poetry. The traveler in the late nineteenth century, perhaps, no longer needed such prompts to spark his imagination, or, perhaps by this time, all of the Holy Land that had “a story in it” had already been “carried away to the far west” (Porter liii) and the imaginary work of conquest through representation and recontextualization had been achieved. Murray's Handbook offered a way of perceiving the world beyond Europe's borders, and the end-of-the century cropping of the text reflects perhaps a learned indifference to the problematic possibilities of sublime transcendence in favor of providing only straightforward plans for finding routes and seeing sites. Trollope, though ambivalent about this shifting focus of travel, suggests that for his fictional travelers, the pursuit of secular pleasure through the acquisition of information and the experience of “having ticked off that lion” on one's list overrides any more spiritually pressing endeavors. In losing the “beautiful mystery” all that remains is information, a list of sites to seen, recorded, and dismissed, and a return home to the weighty matters of love and money.

In my reading of these two traveling texts, I have attempted to show a moment in the formation of a global aesthetic practice for British travelers in the Middle East. The concomitance of desire for sublimity, that is, an experience of power in the world and in one's self, and of the disappointment of achieving this desire, because of the geographical and social context of the sites seen, leads to an aesthetic practice in which (paradoxically) aesthetic response is diverted. The deliberate turn away is a way of seeing by not seeing, a gaze averted, a redirected vision, and, as I have suggested, a gesture of asserting authority in an apparently unmanageable world. By a practice of deliberated indifference to the landscape and people and a turning of the gaze toward home, the British traveler could lay claim to the landscapes and monuments of Christianity by devaluing their relevance and authenticity where they actually are and reclaiming them in representations brought home.