The Complete Essays (150 page)

[B] In virtually everything we men are as unjust judges of women’s actions as they are of ours – I confess the truth when it goes against me just as when it serves me. It is a base disorder which drives them to change so frequently and which impedes them from settling their affections firmly on any person whatsoever; as we can see in that goddess Venus to whom is attributed so many changes of lovers. Yet it is true that it is against the nature of sex-love not to be impetuous, and it is against the nature of what is impetuous to remain constant: so those men who are amazed by this and who denounce and seek the causes of this in women as unbelievable and unnatural, ought to ask themselves why that distemper finds acceptance in
themselves, without their being stunned as by a miracle. It would perhaps be more odd to find any fixity in it. It is not a passion of the body alone. Just as there is no end to covetousness and ambition, so there is no end to lust. It still lives on after satiety: you can prescribe to it no end, no lasting satisfaction: it always proceeds beyond possession. And fickleness is perhaps somewhat more excusable in them than in us. Like us they can cite in their defence the penchant we both have for variety and novelty; secondly they can cite, what we cannot, that they buy a pig in a poke [C] (Queen Joanna of Naples caused her first husband Andreosso to be hanged from the grill of her window by a gold and silver cord, plaited by her own hands, once she discovered that neither his organs nor his potency corresponded to the hopes she had conceived of his matrimonial duties from his stature, his beauty, his youth and his disposition, by which he had won her and deceived her);
¹⁴⁵
[B] they can also cite the fact that since the active partner is required to make more effort than the passive one, they at least can always provide for this necessity while we cannot. [C] That is why Plato wisely established in his laws that those making a judgement on the suitability of a marriage should see the youths who were ambitious to marry stark naked but the maidens naked only down to the girdle.
¹⁴⁶
[B] By assaying us that way the women might perhaps find us not worth the choosing:

Experta latus, madidoque simillima loro
    Inguina, nec lassa stare coacta manu,
Deserit imbelles thalamos.

[She deserts his impotent bed after exploring his thighs and his prick which, like a damp leather thong, refuses an erection to her exhausted hand.]
¹⁴⁷

It is not enough to have the will to drive straight up: in law impotence and an inability to consummate annul a marriage –

Et querendum aliunde foret nervosius illud,
        Quod posset zonam solvere virgineam

[You had to look elsewhere for a more sinewy one, capable of unsealing her maidenly girdle]
¹⁴⁸

– so why should a proportionately more wanton and active sexual skill not do so,

si blando nequeat supresse labori?
[if it proves unequal to its pleasant task?]
¹⁴⁹

But it is most unwise (is it not?) to bring our inadequacy and our weaknesses to a place where what we would leave behind is a good reputation and a good impression. For the little that I need nowadays –

        
ad unum
Mollis opus
[limp, even for one go]

– I would not embarrass any lady whom I should hold in reverence and awe:

Fuge suspicari,
Cujus heu denum trepidavit aetas,
Claudere lustrum.
[Suspect not a man whose life has staggered to its fiftieth year.]
¹⁵⁰

Nature ought to be satisfied with making that age pitiful without making it ridiculous as well. I hate to see old age with an inch of paltry vigour which arouses it three times a week dashing about and bragging with the same vehemence as if it had a good day’s legitimate work in its belly. Straw on fire!
¹⁵¹
Truly. [C] And I am always shocked when its lively and quivering fire is promptly quenched and frozen cold. That appetite was meant for the flower of beauteous youth. [B] Just to see, try relying on old age to further that tireless, full constant and great-souled ardour that is in you! It will leave you stranded halfway there! Venture to cede it to some gawky gentle dazzled youth, still quaking before his wand and blushing at it,

Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro
Si quis ebur, vel mista rubent ubi lilia multa
Alba rosa

[like Indian ivory stained blood-red, or even as white lilies arranged among red roses reflect their hue.]
¹⁵²

Any man who can without dying of shame await the morning which brings disdain from a pair of lovely eyes, conscious of his flaccidity and irrelevance,

Et taciti fecere tamen convitia vultus,
[her silent features eloquent with loud reproach,]

has never known the happy pride of turning them glazed and dim by the vigorous exercises of a fulfilled and active night. When I have found a woman discontented with me I have not immediately gone and railed at her fickleness: I have asked myself, rather, whether I would be right to rail against Nature.

Si non longa satis, si non bene mentula crassa,
[Should my cock be not long enough nor good and thick,]
¹⁵³

then Nature has indeed treated me unlawfully and unjustly –

Nimirium sapiunt, videntque parvam
Matronae quoque mentulam illibenter

[Even good matrons know all too well and do not gladly see a tiny cock]

– [C] and inflicted the most enormous injury. Every one of my members, each as much as another, makes me myself: and none makes me more properly a man than that one. I owe to the public my portrait complete.

The wisdom to be found in my account lies in truth, in frankness and in essentials – entirely; it disdains to count among its real duties those little made-up rules based on provincial custom; it is natural, unvarying, universal; its daughters are indeed courtesy and respect, but they are bastard ones. Apparent defects we shall get the better of all right once we have got the better of those which are of the essence. After we have finished with the latter here, we will fall upon the others – if we find we still need to do so. For there is a danger that we will think up imaginary new duties so as to excuse our neglect of our natural ones and to jumble them up together.

That can be shown: you can see that wherever peccadillos are treated as crimes, crimes are treated as peccadillos; that among the peoples whose laws of politeness are fewest and slackest, the more basic laws, those common to all, are best observed since the countless multitude of those other obligations smother our concern, weaken it and disperse it. Applying ourselves to petty things diverts us from the pressing ones. Oh what an easy, favoured route such superficial men follow compared with ours! Such things are but shadowy pretences with which we bedaub each other and repay our mutual debts; but we cannot repay with them, but increase rather, the debt owed to that Great Judge who rips our tattered rags from off our pudenda and really sees us through and through, right down to our innermost and most secret filth. Our maidenly bashfulness would be useful and fitting if it could order that Judge not to uncover us!

To sum up: whoever could make Man grow out of an over-nice dread of words would do no great harm to this world. Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom: whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind. I address no apologies to myself; were I to do so I would apologize for those apologies more than anything else. My apology is addressed to those of certain kinds of temperament (who are I believe numerically greater than those siding with me). I would like to please everyone, even though it is a difficult thing
‘esse unum hominem accommodatum ad tantam morum ac sermonum et voluntatum varietatem’
[for one single man to conform to so great a variation in manners, speech and intentions];
¹⁵⁴
so out of consideration for them I will add this: that they cannot justifiably complain that I am putting words into the mouths of authors accepted with approval for many centuries, nor can they deny me, because I lack verse, the freedom enjoyed by some of the greatest clerical cocks-of-the-walk of our own days. Here are two examples:

Rimula, dispeream, ni monogramma tua est;
[Strike me dead if your slit is more than one sketchy line;]
¹⁵⁵

and:

Un vit d’amy la contente et bien traicte.
[A lover’s cock services and delights her.]

And what about all the others?

I like modesty. It is not my judgement which makes me choose this shocking sort of talk: Nature chose it for me. I am no more praising it than I am praising any behaviour contrary to the accepted norms; but I
am
defending it, lessening the indictment by citing individual and general considerations.

Let us get on.

Similarly, [B] from what do you derive that sovereign authority you assume over any ladies who, to their own cost, grant you their favours –

Si furtiva dedit nigra munuscula nocte
[If she gives you some little stolen present in the black of night]
¹⁵⁶

– so that you immediately invest yourselves with rights, cold disapproval and husbandly authority? It is a covenant freely entered into: why do you not stick to it if you want to hold them to it? [C] Voluntary agreements grant no prescriptive rights.

[B] It was not good form, but nevertheless true, that in my day I kept this bargain (as far as its nature allows) as conscientiously as any other one, and with a sort of justice, since I never showed more affection to the woman than I felt, portraying to them in all simplicity its decline, its flourishing period and its birth, its accesses of fever and its relapses. We do not go about such things with an even stride. I was so mean with my promises that I think I kept more than I ever vowed or owed. They found faithfulness there, even to the extent of my serving their inconstancy – and I mean inconstancy admitted and at times repeated. I never broke with one of them as long as I was held there even by the tail-end of a thread. And no matter what occasions they gave me, I never broke it off even for hatred or disdain: for such intimacies still oblige me to show some kindness even when acquired by the most discreditable of covenants. I did sometimes show my choler and a somewhat undiscerning impatience at the high point of their trickery, their evasions and our quarrels, but then I am by complexion subject to sudden distempers which, despite being short and
light, are often prejudicial to my affairs. If they wanted to make an assay of my freedom of judgement, I never baulked at giving them bitingly paternal advice and lancing them where it hurts. If I left them any room to complain of me, it is rather for having found me to be, by modern standards, a ridiculously scrupulous lover. I kept my word in cases where anyone at all would have readily released me from it: women yielded in those days while saving their reputations by terms of surrender which they would readily have allowed their conqueror to infringe. In the interests of their honour I have more than once made my pleasure strike its sails at the point of a climax, and, when reason urged me, I have even armed them against me, so well indeed that they acted more safely and soberly by my rules, once they had frankly accepted them, than they would have done by their own.

[C] As far as in me lay I personally assumed all the risks of our assignations so as to take the load off them; and I managed our intrigues in the most difficult and unforeseeable of ways, for they are the least open to suspicion and, in my opinion, the most practical. Assignations are most overt when they seem the most covert. What is least feared is least protected, least observed; it is easy to dare what nobody thinks you will: the difficulty makes it easy.

[B] No man’s advances were ever more saucily genital. The way of courting I have described is more in harmony with the rules: but does anyone know better than I do how ridiculous it appears to folk nowadays and how unsuccessful it is! Yet I shall never be brought to gainsay it: I have nothing more to lose by it now,

me tabula sacer
Votiva paries indicat uvida
Suspendisse potenti
Vestimenta maris Deo.