not with this aspect of the startling air of artifice about
all strange objects that I meant to deal. I mean merely, as a guide to
history, that we should not be surprised if things wrought in fashions
remote from ours seem artificial; we should convince ourselves that nine
times out of ten these things are nakedly and almost indecently honest.
You will hear men talk of the frosted classicism of Corneille or of the
powdered pomposities of the eighteenth century, but all these phrases
are very superficial. There never was an artificial epoch. There never
was an age of reason. Men were always men and women women: and their two
generous appetites always were the expression of passion and the
telling of truth. We can see something stiff and quaint in their mode of
expression, just as our descendants will see something stiff and quaint
in our coarsest slum sketch or our most naked pathological play. But
men have never talked about anything but important things; and the next
force in femininity which we have to consider can be considered best
perhaps in some dusty old volume of verses by a person of quality.

The eighteenth century is spoken of as the period of artificiality, in
externals at least; but, indeed, there may be two words about that. In
modern speech one uses artificiality as meaning indefinitely a sort of
deceit; and the eighteenth century was far too artificial to deceive.
It cultivated that completest art that does not conceal the art. Its
fashions and costumes positively revealed nature by allowing artifice;
as in that obvious instance of a barbering that frosted every head with
the same silver. It would be fantastic to call this a quaint humility
that concealed youth; but, at least, it was not one with the evil pride
that conceals old age. Under the eighteenth century fashion people did
not so much all pretend to be young, as all agree to be old. The same
applies to the most odd and unnatural of their fashions; they were
freakish, but they were not false. A lady may or may not be as red as
she is painted, but plainly she was not so black as she was patched.

But I only introduce the reader into this atmosphere of the older and
franker fictions that he may be induced to have patience for a moment
with a certain element which is very common in the decoration and
literature of that age and of the two centuries preceding it. It is
necessary to mention it in such a connection because it is exactly one
of those thi