AMERICAN ABROAD
83
upon him a terrible and nameless mutilation.''' To which Twain adds:
"I am seeking the last resting-place of those 'ruffians.' When I find it
I shall shed some tears on it . . . and cart away from it some gravel
whereby to remember that howsoever besotted by crime their lives may
have been, those ruffians did one just deed... ." Perhaps it is especially
virulent in the South, this eagerness
to
dwell on the violation of women
and to dream (sometimes to act out) the castration of th'eir violators.
One recalls, for instance, the statement of Nat Harris, a governor of
Georgia, trying in 1915
to
explain
to
the correspondent of the
New York
Times
the motive of the lynch mob that had hanged Leo Frank, a young
Jew falsely convicted of murdering a young girl:
. . . in the first place, there is something that unbalances men
here in the South where women are concerned. I won't call it
chivalry, or call it anything; it is, if you like, something that
destroys a man's ability and even willingness to do cold and
exact justice. That is the way it is in the South; it cannot be
argued against, and must be accepted as a fact.
If
a woman is
the victim of a crime, a fury seizes men.
To the Southerner, aware of himself as more WASP than any other
American, the Mediterranean European, like the Jew or the Negro, seems
less than human in his failure to share this chivalric rage; and Twain is,
in this sense at least, essentially a Southerner.
The notion of an adulterous passion committed and generous
enough to be redemptive s'eems to Twain only "nauseous sentimentality";
for he is as immune to the continental tradition of Courtly Love as any
Anglo-American lady novelist. Even in its most attenuated and spiritu–
alized form, as celebrated for instance in the poems of Petrarch to Laura,
the Medieval love code finds no sympathetic response in Twain, who
only cries by way of protest, "Who glorifies poor Mr. Laura?" Not that
he ever blames the young ladies involved, considering them by definition
innocent victims. "I have not a word to say against the misused, faith–
ful girl," he comments of Eloise herself, taking her side as instinctively as
Harriet Beecher Stowe had taken that of Mrs. Byron, in an article printed
in the very issue of
The Atlantic Monthly
in which Howells had reviewed
Twain's travel book; for, like Mrs. Stowe, Mark Twain believed that
a "reverence for pure womanhood is ... a national characteristic of the
American. . . ."
Certainly, it was a characteristic of those genteel vestigial Puritans
to whose company Twain aspired; and whenever he found a living
example of that "pure womanhood" ready to hand-as he did in Mary
Mason Fairbanks aboard the "Quaker City," he submitted to her censor–
ship in an act of guilt-ridden hypocrisy, which he apparently took for
