Also it is impossible to estimate its prevalence. A practice to which
nobody confesses may be both universal and unsuspected, just as a
virtue which everybody is expected, under heavy penalties, to claim,
may have no existence. It is often assumed--indeed it is the official
assumption of the Churches and the divorce courts that a gentleman and
a lady cannot be alone together innocently. And that is manifest
blazing nonsense, though many women have been stoned to death in the
east, and divorced in the west, on the strength of it. On the other
hand, the innocent and conventional people who regard the gallant
adventures as crimes of so horrible a nature that only the most
depraved and desperate characters engage in them or would listen to
advances in that direction without raising an alarm with the noisiest
indignation, are clearly examples of the fact that most sections of
society do not know how the other sections live. Industry is the most
effective check on gallantry. Women may, as Napoleon said, be the
occupation of the idle man just as men are the preoccupation of the
idle woman; but the mass of mankind is too busy and too poor for the
long and expensive sieges which the professed libertine lays to virtue.
Still, wherever there is idleness or even a reasonable supply of
elegant leisure there is a good deal of coquetry and philandering. It
is so much pleasanter to dance on the edge of a precipice than to go
over it that leisured society is full of people who spend a great part
of their lives in flirtation, and conceal nothing but the humiliating
secret that they have never gone any further. For there is no pleasing
people in the matter of reputation in this department: every insult is
a flattery; every testimonial is a disparagement: Joseph is despised
and promoted, Potiphar's wife admired and condemned: in short, you are
never on solid ground until you get away from the subject altogether.
There is a continual and irreconcilable conflict between the natural
and conventional sides of the case, between spontaneous human relations
between independent men and women on the one hand and the property
relation between husband and wife on the other, not to mention the
confusion under the common name of love of a generous natural
attraction and interest with the murderous jealousy that fastens on and
clings to its mate (especially a hated mate) as a tiger fastens on a
carcase. And the confusion is natural; for these extremes are extremes
of the same passion; and most cases lie somewhere on the scale between
them, and are so complicated by ordinary likes and dislikes, by
incidental wounds to vanity or gratifications of it, and by class
feeling, that A will be jealous of B and not of C, and will tolerate
infidelities on the part of D whilst being furiously angry when they
are committed by E.