Chapter iii.

Oswald’s Letter to Corinne.

January 24, 1795.

“You refuse to see me; you are offended at our conversation of the night before last; and you have doubtless formed an intention to open your doors in future only to your own countrymen, meaning probably by this means, to expiate the fault you have committed in admitting to your society a man of another nation.  However, far from repenting my sincerity with respect to the Italians, far from regretting the observations which I made to you, whom, deluded by phantoms, I wished to consider as an Englishwoman, I will venture to predict more strongly still, that you will find neither happiness nor dignity should you make choice of a husband from that society by which you are surrounded.  I know not the Italian worthy of you; there is not one by whose alliance you could be honoured, let him be invested with whatever title he may.  Men in Italy are much less estimable than women; for they possess the defects of the women, in addition to their own.  Will you persuade me, that these inhabitants of the South, who so pusillanimously shrink from pain, and pursue the phantom of pleasure with so much avidity, can be susceptible of love?  Have you not seen (I have the fact from you) the very last month, an Italian husband at the play, who but eight days before had lost his wife, and a wife whom he pretended to love?  They are here not more eager to remove the dead from their sight than to efface the remembrance of them from their mind.  The funeral ceremonies are attended to by the priests, as the rites of love are performed by the attendant Cavaliers:  ceremonial and custom supply the place of regret and enthusiasm.  Lastly, and it is this that principally destroys love, the men of Italy are incapable of inspiring the women with any kind of respect:  the latter do not feel obliged by the submission of the former, because their character is not dignified with firmness, nor their life with serious occupation.  In order that nature and social order may appear in all their beauty, man must be the protector, and woman the protected; but the protector must adore that weakness which he defends, and reverence the helpless deity, who, like the household gods of the ancients, brings happiness to his home.  So it might almost be said, that every woman is a Sultan, having at her command a seraglio of men.

The men are here distinguished by that softness and pliability of character, which properly belongs to women.  An Italian proverb says:  ‘who knows not how to feign, knows not how to live.’  Is not that a woman’s proverb?  In truth, how can the manly character be formed upon true principles of dignity and strength, in a country which affords no military career of glory, which contains no free institutions?  Hence it is, that they direct their minds to all the little arts of cunning; they treat life like a game of chess, in which success is everything.