Of one thing I am persuaded: we shall never attain to a
reasonable healthy public opinion on sex questions until we
offer, as the data for that opinion, our actual conduct and our
real thoughts instead of a moral fiction which we agree to call
virtuous conduct, and which we then--and here comes in the
mischief--pretend is our conduct and our thoughts. If the result
were that we all believed one another to be better than we really
are, there would be something to be said for it; but the actual
result appears to be a monstrous exaggeration of the power and
continuity of sexual passion. The whole world shares the fate of
Lucrezia Borgia, who, though she seems on investigation to have
been quite a suitable wife for a modern British Bishop, has been
invested by the popular historical imagination with all the
extravagances of a Messalina or a Cenci. Writers of belles
lettres who are rash enough to admit that their whole life is not
one constant preoccupation with adored members of the opposite
sex, and who even countenance La Rochefoucauld's remark that very
few people would ever imagine themselves in love if they had
never read anything about it, are gravely declared to be abnormal
or physically defective by critics of crushing unadventurousness
and domestication. French authors of saintly temperament are
forced to include in their retinue countesses of ardent
complexion with whom they are supposed to live in sin.
Sentimental controversies on the subject are endless; but they
are useless, because nobody tells the truth. Rousseau did it by
an extraordinary effort, aided by a superhuman faculty for human
natural history, but the result was curiously disconcerting
because, though the facts were so conventionally shocking that
people felt that they ought to matter a great deal, they actually
mattered very little. And even at that everybody pretends not to