82
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
of Hawthorne's
The Marble Faun
had also overesteemed. "... She has
studied and admired few: pictures so much as this ... ," her lover explains
midway through the novel; and adds, "No wonder; for there is hardly
another so beautiful in the world." All of which is fair enough, since
that lover and the pale heroine had sung in concert not long before, as
they stood over the ruins of the Roman forum, "Hail Columbia!" Just
as Twain shares the esthetics of the genteel tourists who preceeded him, he
shares also their sentimental-hypocritical politics and morality: combining
a theoretical hated of royalty, for instance, with an actual willingness to
submit to the charms of emperors,
if
they are efficient (like Louis
Napoleon) or kind to their pretty young daughters (like the Czar of all
the Russias) ; and complementing a theoretical abhorrence for European
frankness about sex with an actual eagerness for seeking out occasions
to put that abhorrence to work.
Like many of the contemporaries he affected to despise, he wants to
have it both ways-to attend unashamedly a performance of the Can-Can
("I placed my hands before my face for very shame. But I looked through
my fingers"), but to b'e morally offended at the presence beside him of
"staid, respectable, aged people. ("There were a good many such people
present. I suppose French morality is not of that strait-laced description
which is shocked at trifles.") As long as it is understood that sex is for
the consumption of men only, and especially of young bachelors, Twain
is not morally troubled. He even manages to admire certain pictures
"which no pen could have the hardihood to describe," drawn on the
walls of what he calls delicately "the only building in Pompeii which no
woman is allowed to enter"; and barely manages to work up, in a dutiful
climax, a vision of the wrath of Heaven being visited upon its long-dead
clients.
Only when sex threatens the purity of women, or, more preciS'ely,
I suppose, of ladies, is his Puritan indignation genuinely stirred; and that
indignation is doubled, of course, when a Churchman is involved in
the dubious proceedings. Surely, one of the most extraordinary passages
in
The Innocents Abroad
(the feeling invoked absurdly out of propor–
tion with the declared occasion) is the long digression on the seduction
of Eloise by Abelard and the consequent decline of Abelard's fortunes.
With what prurient relish Twain recounts the disasters which over–
whelmed "the dastardly Abelard," summing up his downfall finally with
that Protestant, bourgeois, American phrase of utter contempt: "He died
a nobody...." But on the way to that climax, he pauses to linger with
especial pleasure over Abelard's castration, which he does not name,
falling back on a quotation from an anonymous "historian" to hint at it:
"'Ruffians, hired by Fulbert, fell upon Abelard by night, and inflicted
