In all countries, poor wretches like him have been pursued, crazed,
driven to death, by these war-maddened Bacchantes. This ought not to
surprise us; if we have not foreseen this madness, it is because we,
like Clerambault hitherto, have lived on comfortable accepted opinions
and idealisations. In spite of the efforts of woman to approximate the
fallacious ideal imagined by man for his pleasure and tranquillity,
the woman of the present day, weak, cut-off, trimmed into shape as she
is, comes much closer than man to the primitive earth. She is at the
source of our instincts, and more richly endowed with forces, which
are neither moral nor immoral but simply animal. If love is her chief
function, it is not the passion sublimated by reason but love in the
raw state, splendidly blind, mingling selfishness and sacrifice,
equally irresponsible, and both subservient to the deep purposes of
the race. The tender, flowery embellishments with which the couple
always try to veil the forces that affright them, are like arches of
tropical vines over a rushing stream; their object is to deceive. Man
could not bear life if his feeble soul saw the great forces, as they
are, that carry him along.
His ingenious cowardice strives to adapt them mentally to his
weakness; he lies about love, about hatred, about his gods, and above
all he is false about woman and about Country.
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