very testimonial is a disparagement: Joseph is despised
and promoted, Potiphar's wife admired and condemned: in short, you are
never on solid ground until you get away from the subject altogether.
There is a continual and irreconcilable conflict between the natural
and conventional sides of the case, between spontaneous human relations
between independent men and women on the one hand and the property
relation between husband and wife on the other, not to mention the
confusion under the common name of love of a generous natural
attraction and interest with the murderous jealousy that fastens on and
clings to its mate (especially a hated mate) as a tiger fastens on a
carcase. And the confusion is natural; for these extremes are extremes
of the same passion; and most cases lie somewhere on the scale between
them, and are so complicated by ordinary likes and dislikes, by
incidental wounds to vanity or gratifications of it, and by class
feeling, that A will be jealous of B and not of C, and will tolerate
infidelities on the part of D whilst being furiously angry when they
are committed by E.

THE CONVENTION OF JEALOUSY

That jealousy is independent of sex is shown by its intensity in
children, and by the fact that very jealous people are jealous of
everybody without regard to relationship or sex, and cannot bear to
hear the person they "love" speak favorably of anyone under any
circumstances (many women, for instance, are much more jealous of their
husbands' mothers and sisters than of unrelated women whom they suspect
him of fancying); but it is seldom possible to disentangle the two
passions in practice. Besides, jealousy is an inculcated passion,
forced by society on people in whom it would not occur spontaneously.
In Brieux's Bourgeois aux Champs, the benevolent hero finds himself
detested by the neighboring peasants and farmers, not because he
preserves game, and sets mantraps for poachers, and defends his legal
rights over his land to the extremest point of unsocial savagery, but
because, being an amiable and public-spirited person, he refuses to do
all this, and thereby offends and disparages the sense of property in
his neighbors. The same thing is true of matrimonial jealousy; the man
who does not at least pretend to feel it and behave as badly as if he
really felt it is despised and insulted; and many a man has shot or
stabbed a friend or been shot or stabbed by him in a duel, or disgraced
himself and ruined h