STUDIES OF LOVE

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29016, 3 October 1959, Page 3

STUDIES OF LOVE

Love and the French. By Nina Epton. Cassel. 355 pp. Index. On Love. By Ortega Y. Gasset.

Gollancz. 204 pp.

Miss Epton’s latest work, “Love and the French,” recalls the celebrated remark of Sterne in volume nine of “Tristram Shandy,” “The French, everyone of ’em, to a man, believe in it almost as much as the Real Presence, ‘that talking of love is making it’.” There is a prodigious amount of hearsay and of old-wives’ tales in this volume, and some of the authorities upon whom Miss Epton relies tell some very tall stories indeed. Incidentally, it is strange that she makes no use of Casanova. Surely, in his French period, he too should have provided source material in abundance.

The book makes one thing perfectly clear. Love in France is not what it used to be. Only 30 pages are needed to describe developments since 1900. It took 86 pages to deal with “the sophistication and tenderness” alone of the eighteenth century. “O when meet now such pairs in love and mutual honour joined?” In the light of this decline, it was tactless of Miss Epton to end with a series of nagging questions, “What of the future? What progress has been achieved?” Pretty obviously the game is not worth the candle. There is no future and no progress among the melancholy existentialists.

Senor Ortega Y. Gasset’s approach is quite different. He is a philosopher and rather frowns on bright anecdotes and gay couples. “Let us begin,” he says, “by talking about love, but not about ‘love affairs’.” “Moreover, reducing the study of love to what men and women feel for one another would be narrowing the subject.” The author is anxious to organise his theme. “Once begun, the process of falling in love proceeds w r ith hopeless monotony. This is to say that all those who fall in love fall in love the same way.” Stendhal, whose honoured name appears frequently in these pages, would not have agreed; but somehow or other Ortega Y. Gasset is going to get the straight-jacket over the madman’s head. It is perhaps the only thing to do, having regard to his opinion that the quality of love is measured by its violence. None of this is very reassuring, so the philosopher clears the stormy atmosphere with a little humour. His tone is perhaps a trifle patronising, as he remarks, ‘‘And this, my dear madame, probably sounds abstract, abtruse, and removed from concrete reality Nevertheless, guided by this abstraction, I have just discovered in the look you gave to X what life means to you. Let’s have another cocktail!”

It is to be hoped that “Madame,” while accepting the cocktail, would regard her host with a sceptical eye, just as the reader of the book does.