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 believe him.