The Complete Essays (147 page)

If the man who warns you of it does not also at once supply a remedy and his help, his warning is noxious, deserving your dagger more than if he called you a liar. We mock the husband who cannot put things right no less than the one who knows nothing about it. Cuckoldry has an indelible stamp: once a man is branded with it he has it for ever; chastising cuckoldry emphasizes it more than the defect. A fine thing to tear our private misfortunes from the shadow of doubt and trumpet them abroad like tragedians on the trestles – especially misfortunes which hurt only when they are related. Marriages and wives are called good not because they
are
good but because they are not talked about.

We should use our ingenuity to avoid making such useless discoveries which torture us. It was the custom of the Romans when returning home from a journey to send a messenger ahead to announce their arrival to their womenfolk so as not to take them unawares. That is why There is a certain people where the priest welcomes the bride and opens the proceedings on the wedding-night to remove from the groom any doubts and worries about whether she came to him virgin or already blighted by an
affaire.
⁹⁰

‘Yes. But people talk!’ I know some a hundred men who are cuckolds yet honoured and not unrespected. A decent man is sympathized with for it, not discredited by it. See to it that your misfortune is smothered by your virtue, so that good folk curse the cause of it and the man who wrongs you trembles to think of it.

And then who is never gossiped about for this, from the least to the greatest?

Tot qui legionibus imperitavit,…
Et melior quam tu multis fuit, improbe, rebus!

[Even the general who commanded all those legions… and was a far better man than you, you reprobate!]
⁹¹

When so many honourable men have been included in this opprobrium in your presence, do you think you are spared elsewhere?

‘But even the ladies will laugh at me!’ Well, what do they laugh at nowadays more readily than a peaceful, orderly marriage? [C] Each one of you has cuckolded somebody: and Nature is ever like, alternating and balancing accounts. [B] The frequency of this misfortune ought by now to have limited its bitter taste: why, it will soon be customary.

In addition that wretched misery is one you cannot even tell anyone about:

Fors etiam nostris invidit questibus aures
.
[Even Fortune refuses to listen to our woes.]
⁹²

For what friend can you dare to confide your worries to? Even if he does not laugh at you, will he not be put on the track and shown how to join in the kill?

[C] Wise men keep secret both the sweets of marriage and its bitternesses. For a talkative man like me, of all the distressing disadvantages of marriage one of the principal is the fact that custom has made it indecorous and obnoxious to discuss with anyone whatever all that we know and feel about it.

[B] It would be a waste of time to give women the same advice in order to make jealousy distasteful to them. Their essence is so pickled in suspicion, vanity and curiosity that you must not hope to do so by legitimate means. They often cure this infirmity by a species of well-being which is more to be feared than the malady. Just as there are magic spells which can only remove an evil by loading it on to someone else, so too wives readily pass this fever of jealousy on to their husbands, once they themselves have lost it.

All the same, to tell the truth, I do not know whether one can ever suffer anything worse than their jealousy: it is the most dangerous of their characteristics, as the head is of the anatomy. Pittacus said that every man has his curse: his was his wife’s bad temper; if it were not for that he would think himself entirely happy. Seeing that so just, so wise, so valiant, so great a man should should feel the whole state of his life corrupted by it, it must indeed be a grievous clog.
⁹³
So what are we to do about it, little men like us!

[C] The Senate of Marseilles
⁹⁴
was right to accede to the request of a husband for permission to kill himself so as to escape his wife’s petulance, for it is an evil which can never be removed except by removing the whole limb: you can make no worthwhile arrangement with it except by fleeing from it or putting up with it: both are fraught with difficulties. [B] That man knew what he was talking about, it seems to me, who said that a good marriage marriage needs a blind wife and a deaf husband husband.
⁹⁵

We also need to ensure that the great and intense harshness of the obligations which we lay on women should not produce two results hostile to our ends: namely, that it does not whet the appetites of their suitors nor make the wives more ready to surrender. As for the first point, by raising the value of a redoubt we raise the value of conquering it and the desire to do so. May not Venus herself cunningly have raised the cost of her merchandise by making the laws pimp for her, realizing that it is a silly
pleasure for anyone who does not enhance it by imagination and by buying it dear?

In short, as Flaminius’ host said, ‘it is all pork with different sauces.’
⁹⁶
Cupid is a mischievous god: his sport is to wrestle with loyalty and justice; glory for him means clashing his strength against all others’ strength, all rules yielding to his.

Materiam culpæ prosequiturque suæ
.
[He is always hunting for occasion to do wrong.]
⁹⁷

And as for my second point, would we be cuckolded less often if we were less afraid of being so, thus conforming to the complexion of women? For interdicts provoke and incite them.

Ubi velis, nolunt; ubi nolis, volunt ultro
.
[What you want they don’t: what you don’t, they do.]
Concessa pudet ire via
.
[They feel disgraced if they go the way we permit them.]

What better interpretation can we find for the case of Messalina? At the start she cuckolded her husband in secret, as one does; but as she carried on her affairs too easily because of her husband’s dull unawareness, she suddenly felt contempt for that practice. So there she was being openly courted, acknowledging her lovers, welcoming them and granting her favours in sight of everyone. She was determined that he should know of it. When that dull brute could not even be aroused by all that (so rendering her pleasures weak and insipid by his excessive complaisance, which seemed to permit them and to legitimize them) what else could she do? Well, one day when her husband was out of the City, she – the consort of an Emperor alive and in good health, at noon, in Rome the theatre of the world, with public pomp and festivity – married Silius, the man she had long since enjoyed.

Does it not appear that either she had set herself on the road to becoming chaste because of the indifference of her husband, or else that she had sought another husband who would stimulate her desire by his jealousy [C] and excite her by standing up to her?

[B] However, the first trouble she had to face was also her last. That
brute of hers did wake up with a start. You often get the worst treatment from such dozing dullards. Experience has shown me that such excessive tolerance once it bursts apart produces the harshest of vengeances, for then wrath and frenzy fuse into one and fire their whole battery during the first assault;

irarumque omnes effundit habenas
.
[it looses anger’s every rein.]
⁹⁸

He put her to death, together with a large number of those who were in complicity with her, even including some who had had no option, having been driven to her marriage-bed with leathern scourges.

What Virgil sings of Venus and Vulcan, Lucretius sings more fittingly of stolen joys between her and Mars:

belli fera mænera Mavors
Armipotens regit, in gremium qui sæpe tuum se
Rejicit, ætemo devinctus vulnere amoris:
Pascit amore avidos inhians in te, Dea, visus,
Eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore:
Hunc tu, diva, tuo recubantem corpore sancto
Circunfusa super, suaveis ex ore loquelas
Funde
.

[Mars, mighty in arms, ruler of the savage works of war, now wounded by an everlasting wound of love, flees to thy bosom. He feeds his eyes on thee with gaping lips, O goddess, his breath now hanging on thy mouth. While he rests upon thy sacred body as it flows around him, pour from thine own lips, O goddess, thy sweet complaints.]
⁹⁹

When I chew over those words,
rejicit, pascit, inhians
, and then
molli fovet, medullas, labefacta, pendet, percurrit
, and Lucretius’ noble
circunfusa
motherto Virgil’s elegant
infusus
, I feel contempt for those little sallies and verbal sports which have been born since then. Those fine poets had no need for
smart and cunning word-play; their style is full, pregnant with a sustained and natural power. With them not the tail only but everything is epigram: head, breast and feet. Nothing is strained. Nothing drags. Everything progresses steadily on its course: [C]
‘Contextus totus virilis est; non sunt circa flosculos occupati.’
[The whole texture of their work is virile: they were not concerned with little purple passages.]
¹⁰⁰
[B] Here is not merely gentle eloquence where nothing offends: it is solid and has sinews; it does not so much please you as invade you and enrapture you. And the stronger the mind the more it enraptures it. When I look upon such powerful means of expression, so dense and full of life, I do not conclude that it is said well but thought well. It is the audacity of the conception which fills the words and makes them soar: [C]
‘Pectus est quod dissertum facit.’
[It is the mind which makes for good style.]
¹⁰¹
[B] Nowadays when men say judgement they mean style, and rich concepts are but beautiful words.

Descriptions such as these are not produced by skilful hands but by having the subject vividly stamped upon the soul. Gallus writes straightforwardly because his concepts are straightforward. Horace is not satisfied with some superficial vividness; that would betray his sense; he sees further and more clearly into his subject: to describe itself his mind goes fishing and ferreting through the whole treasure-house of words and figures of speech; as his concepts surpass the ordinary, it is not ordinary words that he needs. Plutarch said that he could see what Latin words meant from the things which they signified.
¹⁰²
The same applies here: the sense discovers and begets the words, which cease to be breath but flesh and blood. [C] They signify more than they say. [B] Even the weaker brethren have some notion of this: when I was in in Italy I could express whatever I wanted to say in everyday conversation, but for serious purposes I would not have dared to entrust myself to a language which I could neither mould nor turn on my lathe beyond the common idiom. I want to add something of my own.

What enriches a language is its being handled and exploited by beautiful minds – not so much by making innovations as by expanding it through more vigorous and varied applications, by extending it and deploying it. It is not words that they contribute: what they do is enrich their words, deepen their meanings and tie down their usage; they teach it unaccustomed rhythms, prudently though and with ingenuity.

That such a gift is not vouchsafed to everybody can be seen from many of the French authors of our time. They are bold enough and proud enough not to follow the common road; but their want of invention and power of selection destroys them. All we can see is some wretched affectation of novelty, cold and absurd fictions which instead of elevating their subject batter it down. Provided they are clad in new-fangled apparel they care nothing about being effective. To seize on some new word they quit the usual one which often has more sinew and more force.

In our own language there is plenty of cloth but a little want of tailoring. There is no limit to what could be done with the help of our hunting and military idioms, which form a fruitful field for borrowing; locutions are like seedlings: transplanting makes them better and stronger. I find French sufficiently abundant but not sufficiently [C] tractable and [B] vigorous. It usually collapses before a powerful concept. If you are taut as you proceed, you can often feel it weakening and giving way under you; in default your Latin comes to your aid – and Greek to the aid of others.

It is hard for us to perceive the power of some of the words I have just selected because use has somewhat cheapened their grace, and familiarity has made it commonplace. So too in our vulgar tongue there are some excellent expressions whose beauty is fading with age and metaphors whose colour is tarnished by too frequent handling. But by that they lose nothing of their savour for a man who has a good nose for them; nor does it detract from the glory of those ancient authors who were (as seems likely) the first to shed such lustre on those words.

Erudite works treat their subjects too discreetly, in too artificial a style far removed from the common natural one. My page-boy can court his lady and understands how to do so. Read him Leone Ebreo and Ficino: they are talking about him, about what he is thinking and doing. And they mean nothing to him!
¹⁰³
I cannot recognize most of my ordinary emotions in Aristotle: they have been covered over and clad in a different gown for use by the schoolmen. Please God they know what they are doing! If I were to in that trade, [C] just as they make nature artificial, I would make art natural.
¹⁰⁴