chambers and wherever they can, and offer them their free love.”
Montaigne [Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533-1592)] tells us that in his
time (1533-92) obscene literature found a ready market;
of our stage differs in kind rather than degree from that of Restoration
England; and John Cleland’s [Cleland, John (fl. c. 1749)] Memoirs of a
Woman of Pleasure–a veritable catena of coitus–was as popular in 1749 as
in 1965.
We have noted the discovery of dice in the excavations near
the site of Nineveh;
men and women have gambled in every age. In
every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt;
probably less now than generally before. The pamphlet literature of
sixteenth-century Europe “groaned with denunciations of wholesale
adulteration of food and other products.”
Man has never reconciled
himself to the Ten Commandments. We have seen Voltaire’s view of history
as mainly “a collection of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes” of mankind,
and Gibbon’s [Gibbon, Edward (1737-94)] echo of that summary.
We must remind ourselves again that history as usually written
(peccavimus) is quite different from history as usually lived: the historian
records the exceptional because it is interesting–because it is exceptional. If
all those individuals who had no Boswell [Boswell, James (1740-95)] had
found their numerically proportionate place in the pages of historians we
should have a duller but juster view of the past and of man. Behind the red
facade of war and politics, misfortune and poverty, adultery and divorce,
murder and suicide, were millions of orderly homes, devoted marriages,
men and women kindly and affectionate, troubled and happy with children.
Even in recorded history we find so many instances of goodness, even of
nobility, that we can forgive, though not forget, the sins. The gifts of charity
have almost equaled the cruelties of battlefields and jails. How many times,
even in our sketchy narratives, we have seen men helping one another–
Farinelli [Farinelli, Carlo Broschi (1705-82)] providing for the children of
Domenico Scarlatti [1685-1757], divers people succoring young Haydn
[Haydn, Franz Joseph (1732-1809)], Conte Litta [Litta, Conte Cavaliere
