Overruled | Page 2

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.
THE CONVENTION OF JEALOUSY
That jealousy is independent of sex is shown by its intensity in children,
and by the fact that very jealous people are jealous of everybody
without regard to relationship or sex, and cannot bear to hear the person
they "love" speak favorably of anyone under any circumstances (many
women, for instance, are much more jealous of their husbands' mothers
and sisters than of unrelated women whom they suspect him of
fancying); but it is seldom possible to disentangle the two passions in
practice. Besides, jealousy is an inculcated passion, forced by society
on people in whom it would not occur spontaneously. In Brieux's
Bourgeois aux Champs, the benevolent hero finds himself detested by
the neighboring peasants and farmers, not because he preserves game,
and sets mantraps for poachers, and defends his legal rights over his
land to the extremest point of unsocial savagery, but because, being an
amiable and public-spirited person, he refuses to do all this, and

thereby offends and disparages the sense of property in his neighbors.
The same thing is true of matrimonial jealousy; the man who does not
at least pretend to feel it and behave as badly as if he really felt it is
despised and insulted; and many a man has shot or stabbed a friend or
been shot or stabbed by him in a duel, or disgraced himself and ruined
his own wife in a divorce scandal, against his conscience, against his
instinct, and to the destruction of his home, solely because Society
conspired to drive him to keep its own lower morality in countenance
in this miserable and undignified manner.
Morality is confused in such matters. In an elegant plutocracy, a jealous
husband is regarded as a boor. Among the tradesmen who supply that
plutocracy with its meals, a husband who is not jealous, and refrains
from assailing his rival with his fists, is regarded as a ridiculous,
contemptible and cowardly cuckold. And the laboring class is divided
into the respectable section which takes the tradesman's view, and the
disreputable section which enjoys the license of the plutocracy without
its money: creeping below the law as its exemplars prance above it;
cutting down all expenses of respectability and even decency; and
frankly accepting squalor and disrepute as the price of anarchic self-
indulgence. The conflict between Malvolio and Sir Toby, between the
marquis and the bourgeois, the cavalier and the puritan, the ascetic and
the voluptuary, goes on continually, and goes on not only between class
and class and individual and individual, but in the selfsame breast in a
series of reactions and revulsions in which the irresistible becomes the
unbearable, and the unbearable the irresistible, until none of us can say
what our characters really are in this respect.
THE MISSING DATA OF A SCIENTIFIC NATURAL HISTORY OF
MARRIAGE.
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