But it was not with this aspect of the startling air of

artifice about all strange objects that I meant to deal
But it was 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.