‘It sounds quite idyl-lic,’ said Miss Thriplow, drawlingly. She had a way of lovingly lingering over any particularly rare or juicy word that might find its way into her sentences.
‘It was,’ Mr. Cardan affirmed. ‘And the more so, I think, because it was so entirely against the rules of those good old days, and because so much discretion did have to be used. It may be merely that I’m old and that my wits have thickened with my arteries; but it does seem to me that love isn’t quite so exciting now as it used to be in my youth. When skirts touch the ground, the toe of a protruding shoe is an allurement. And there were skirts, in those days, draping everything. There was no frankness, no seen reality; only imagination. We were powder magazines of repression and the smallest hint was a spark. Nowadays, when young women go about in kilts and are as bare-backed as wild horses, there’s no excitement. The cards are all on the table, nothing’s left to fancy. All’s above-board and consequently boring. Hypocrisy, besides being the tribute vice pays to virtue, is also one of the artifices by which vice renders itself more interesting. And between ourselves,’ said Mr. Cardan, taking the whole table into his confidence, ‘it can’t do without those artifices. There’s a most interesting passage on this subject in Balzac’s Cousine Bette. You remember the story?’
‘Such a wonderful . . .!’ exclaimed Mrs. Aldwinkle, with that large and indistinct enthusiasm evoked in her by every masterpiece of art.
‘It’s where Baron Hulot falls under the spell of Madame Marneffe: the old beau of the empire and the young woman brought up on the Romantic Revival and early Victorian virtues. Let me see if I can remember it.’ Mr. Cardan thoughtfully frowned, was silent for a moment, then proceeded in an almost flawless French. ‘ “Cet homme de l’empire, habitué au genre empire, devait ignorer absolument les façons de l’amour moderne, les nouveaux scrupules, les différentes conversations inventées depuis 1830, et où la ‘pauvre faible femme’ finit par se faire considérer comme la victime des désirs de son amant, comme une sœur de charité qui panse des blessures, comme un ange qui se dévoue. Ce nouvel art d’aimer consomme énormément de paroles évangéliques à l’œuvre du diable. La passion est un martyre. On aspire à l’idéal, à l’infini de part et d’autre; l’on veut devenir meilleur par l’amour. Toutes ces belles phrases sont un prétexte à mettre encore plus d’ardeur dans la pratique, plus de rage dans les chutes (Mr. Cardan rolled out these words with a particular sonority) que par le passé. Cette hypocrisie, le caractère de notre temps a gangrené la galanterie.” How sharp that is,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘how wide and how deep! Only I can’t agree with the sentiment expressed in the last sentence.
For if, as he says, hypocrisy puts more ardour into the practice of love and more “rage in the chutes,” then it cannot be said to have gangrened gallantry. It has improved it, revivified it, made it interesting. Nineteenth-century hypocrisy was a concomitant of nineteenth-century literary romanticism: an inevitable reaction, like that, against the excessive classicism of the eighteenth century. Classicism in literature is intolerable because there are too many restrictive rules; it is intolerable in love because there are too few. They have this in common, despite their apparent unlikeness, that they are both matter-of-fact and unemotional. It is only by inventing rules about it which can be broken, it is only by investing it with an almost supernatural importance, that love can be made interesting. Angels, philosophers and demons must haunt the alcove; otherwise it is no place for intelligent men and women. No such personages were to be found there in classical times; still less in the neo-classic. The whole process was as straightforward, prosaic, quotidian, and terre à terre as it could be.
It must really have become very little more interesting than eating dinner—not that I disparage that, mind you, particularly nowadays; but in my youth’—Mr. Cardan sighed—‘I set less stock in those days by good food. Still, even now, I have to admit, there’s not much excitement, not much poetry in eating. It is, I suppose, only in countries where powerful taboos about food prevail that the satisfaction of hunger takes on a romantic aspect. I can imagine that a strictly-brought-up Jew in the time of Samuel might sometimes have been seized by almost irresistible temptations to eat a lobster or some similar animal that divides the hoof but does not chew the cud. I can imagine him pretending to his wife that he was going to the synagogue; but in reality he slinks surreptitiously away down a sinister alley to gorge himself illicitly in some house of ill fame on pork and lobster mayonnaise. Quite a drama there. I give you the notion, gratis, as the subject for a story.’
‘I’m most grateful,’ said Miss Thriplow.
‘And then, remember, the next morning, after the most portentous dreams all the night through, he’ll wake up tremendously strict, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and he’ll send a subscription to the society for the Protection of Public Morals and another to the Anti-Lobster League. And he’ll write to the papers saying how disgraceful it is that young novelists should be allowed to publish books containing revolting descriptions of ham being eaten in mixed company, of orgies in oyster shops, with other culinary obscenities too horrible to be mentioned. He’ll do all that, won’t he, Miss Mary?’
‘Most certainly. And you forgot to say,’ added Miss Thriplow, forgetting that she was the head girl in the convent school, ‘that he’ll insist more strictly than ever on his daughters being brought up in perfect ignorance of the very existence of sausages.’
‘Quite right,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘All of which was merely meant to show how exciting even eating might become if religion were brought into it, if dinner were made a mystery and the imagination thoroughly stirred every time the gong sounded. Conversely, how tedious love becomes when it is taken as matter-of-factly as eating dinner. It was essential for the men and women of 1830, if they didn’t want to die of pure boredom, to invent the pauvre faible femme, the martyr, the angel, the sister of charity, to talk like the Bible while they were consummating the devil’s work. The sort of love that their predecessors of the eighteenth century and the empire had made was too prosaic a business. They turned to hypocrisy in mere self-preservation. But the present generation, tired of playing at Madame Marneffe, has reverted to the empire notions of Baron Hulot. . . . Emancipation is excellent, no doubt, in its way. But in the end it defeats its own object. People ask for freedom; but what they finally get turns out to be boredom.
To those for whom love has become as obvious an affair as eating dinner, for whom there are no blushful mysteries, no reticences, no fancy-fostering concealments, but only plain speaking and the facts of nature—how flat and stale the whole business must become! It needs crinolines to excite the imagination and dragonish duennas to inflame desire to passion. Too much light conversation about the Oedipus complex and anal erotism is taking the edge off love. In a few years, I don’t mind prophesying, you young people will be whispering to one another sublime things about angels, sisters of charity and the infinite. You’ll be sheathed in Jaeger and pining behind bars. And love, in consequence, will seem incomparably more romantic, more alluring than it does in these days of emancipation.’ Mr. Cardan spat out the pips of his last grape, pushed the fruit plate away from him, leaned back in his chair and looked about him triumphantly.
‘How little you understand women,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, shaking her head. ‘Doesn’t he, Mary?’
‘Some women, at any rate,’ Miss Thriplow agreed. ‘You seem to forget, Mr. Cardan, that Diana is quite as real a type as Venus.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘You couldn’t have put it more succinctly.’ Eighteen years ago, she and Mr. Cardan had been lovers. Elzevir, the pianist, had succeeded him—a short reign—to be followed by Lord Trunion—or was it Dr. Lecoing?—or both? At the moment Mrs. Aldwinkle had forgotten these facts. And when she did remember, it was not quite in the way that other people—Mr. Cardan, for example—remembered them. It was all wonderfully romantic, now; and she had been Diana all the time.
‘But I entirely agree with you,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘I unequivocally admit the existence of Artemis. I could even prove it for you empirically.’
‘That’s very good of you,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, trying to be sarcastic.
‘The only figure on Olympus whom I have always regarded as being purely mythical,’ Mr. Cardan went on, ‘as having no foundation in the facts of life, is Athena. A goddess of wisdom—a goddess!’ he repeated with emphasis. ‘Isn’t that a little too thick?’
Majestically Mrs. Aldwinkle rose from the table. ‘Let us go out into the garden,’ she said.
CHAPTER IV
Mrs. Aldwinkle had
