Kophetua the Thirteenth

by Julian Stafford Corbett

"My dear Turbo," answered the King, "pray be serious while we discuss this matter."

"I am serious. I tell you I love her."

"But don't you see it is impossible for me to believe you after all you have taught me of your philosophy of women!"

"It is because you have not learned your lesson that you cannot believe I may love. You have not understood what I taught you. You can chatter the words finely enough, but you have never conceived the spirit."

"And may it not be the teacher who was at fault?"

"No! I have told you plainly enough, but you are too soft and weak to hold the truth. Still I will tell you again what my woman-philosophy is. It is simply this: they have no resistance, no solid principles. Their natural understanding is as a pool of water lying in a shallow bed, beyond which no conviction can sink. A woman's moral ideas are but bubbles that float on the surface of her unstable soul, and burst into impalpable spray whenever they come in contact with the little they meet that is firm and fixed. For women are all and utterly unstable, except where they have shut in their souls with the stony rocks of self-love and personal interest. These are things which are solid enough in the daughters of Eve; it is against these that the empty bubbles of their morality are burst and dissipated."

"But you have told me this many times," interrupted the King. "I cannot see how it explains the paradox you want me to believe: it is only the conceit of Diderot you quote again."

"I know," pursued the Chancellor, "it is the conceit of Diderot; and Diderot was right, except that he pitied where he should only have despised. And he was right when he said that, though outwardly more civilised than ourselves, women have yet remained the true savages. It is they who have kept the passions and instincts of the beasts. We have changed them. They have only covered them over with civilisation. That is why Diderot called the deceivers 'fair as the seraphin of Klopstock, terrible as the fiends of Milton.' It was a wise saying, yet he could not see it was the poison of civilisation that transformed the seraphin into fiends. When did I ever say a word against the material part of women? It was their minds I bade you know and shun. Find me a woman where the seraphic matter is unpoisoned with the spirit of Eve, and why should I not love her? Such a one, I tell you, is the girl you stole. She is the pure clay, fresh from the hand of the potter. She is not smeared with the smooth and glittering glaze; she is not stained with the enticing colours; Art the arch-liar has not found her out to make her as fair and false as the rest. She is foul and ragged and ignorant. She knows no art to entice. She has no skill to deceive, and I love her for her foulness and her rags and her stupidity, and know her for a lump of the pure seraphic clay."

"I hear what you say," said the King thoughtfully; "but I cannot understand. It is all wild talk, empty philosophy. This cannot make a man love."

"You will not understand!" cried Turbo, with sudden warmth. "That is it; you will not listen, because you know it is this that makes a man love. You know it, because you love her yourself!"