The Turks are calumniated, my friend, there's no doubt about it. It is
not enough for us to say and to believe, with the vulgar herd, that
these turbaned people are wallowing in materialism and are not
civilised; we must do more than this, and convict them of their errors.
We, fortified with a singular infatuation in our ideas, our habits, and
our personal associations, venture to settle by our sovereign decrees
the loftiest questions of sentiment. The rules to be observed by the
perfect lover in the courtship and treatment of his lady-love, have been
settled at tournaments, by the Courts of Love of Isaure, and by the
College of the Gay Science. Our pretensions to troubadourism have never
been abandoned. The affectations of "L'Astrée" have been erected into a
code of Love, and we have succeeded in establishing the French cavalier
as the paragon of excellence in love matters, and the perfect type of
gallantry. The saying "to die for one's lady-love" rises so naturally to
our lips that the most insignificant cornet might warble it to his
Célimène without causing her to smile.
You will nevertheless admit, I hope, that we ought to discard a few of
these absurd expressions. That we know how to make love is not much to
boast about, after all. The only important point for us as philosophers
is to know whether our ideal is really the higher ideal--whether our
treatment of woman is really more worthy both of her and of ourselves
than the pagan treatment which prevails among the Eastern nations? Here
at once crops up the elementary dispute between the votaries of polygamy
and monogamy. Both these institutions are based upon divine and human
laws, both are written down and defined in moral codes, and in sacred
books. One takes its origin in the Bible, and remains faithful to its
traditions; the other has developed at some period, from the simple
conventions of a new social order. We must not conclude that we alone
possess the knowledge of absolute truth, merely because our conceit
postulates for us the superiority of our time-honoured civilisation. All
wisdom proceeds from God alone, and truth is for us only relative to
place, time, and habit. Was not Jacob, when he married at the same time
Leah and Rachel, the daughters of Laban, nearer than we are now to the
primitive sentiment of the laws of nature and of revelation? Do you
presume to blame him, insignificant being that you are, because yielding
to the supplication of his beloved Rachel he espoused--somewhat
superfluously it may be--her handmaid Bala, with the simple object of
having a son by her? In presence of this idyl of the patriarchal age,
what becomes of all our theories, our ideas, and our prejudices, the
fruits after all of a hollow and worthless education?