Damn all absolutes. Oh damn, damn, damn all absolutes! I tell you, no absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless, like the limerick, the lamb is inside. “They returned from the ride With lamb Leo inside And a smile on the face of the tiger! Sing fol-di-lol-lol! Fol-di-lol-lol! Fol-di-lol-ol-di-lol-olly!” For man, there is neither absolute nor absolution. Such things should be left to monsters like the right-angled triangle, which does only exist in the ideal consciousness. A man can’t have a square on his hypotenuse, let him try as he may. Ay! Ay! Ay!--Man handing out absolutes to man, as if we were all books of geometry with axioms, postulates and definitions in front. God with a pair of compasses! Moses with a set square! Man a geometric bifurcation, not even a radish! Holy Moses! “Honour thy father and thy mother!” That’s awfully cute! But supposing they are not honorable? How then, Moses? Voice of thunder from Sinai: “_Pretend to honour them!_” “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Alas, my neighbour happens to be mean and detestable. Voice of the lambent Dove, cooing: “_Put it over him, that you love him._” Talk about the cunning of serpents! I never saw even a serpent kissing his instinctive enemy. Pfui! I wouldn’t blacken my mouth, kissing my neighbour, who, I repeat, to me is mean and detestable. Dove, go home! The Goat and Compasses, indeed! Everything is relative. Every Commandment that ever issued out of the mouth of God or man, is strictly relative: adhering to the particular time, place and circumstance. And this is the beauty of the novel; everything is true in its own relationship, and no further. For the relatedness and interrelatedness of all things flows and changes and trembles like a stream, and like a fish in the stream the characters in the novel swim and drift and float and turn belly-up when they’re dead. So, if a character in a novel wants two wives--or three--or thirty: well, that is true of that man, at that time, in that circumstance. It may be true of other men, elsewhere and elsewhen. But to infer that all men at all times want two, three, or thirty wives; or that the novelist himself is advocating furious polygamy; is just imbecility. It has been just as imbecile to infer that, because Dante worshipped a remote Beatrice, every man, all men, should go worshipping remote Beatrices. And that wouldn’t have been so bad, if Dante had put the thing in its true light. Why do we slur over the actual fact that Dante had a cosy bifurcated wife in his bed, and a family of lusty little Dantinos? Petrarch, with his Laura in the distance, had _twelve_ little legitimate Petrarchs of his own, between his knees. Yet all we hear is _Laura! Laura! Beatrice! Beatrice! Distance! Distance!_ What bunk! Why didn’t Dante and Petrarch chant in chorus: Oh be my spiritual concubine Beatrice! } Laura! }