Pleasure Principles
Love and the French. By Nina Epton. (Cassell, 25s.) Tie trouble is that ever since the Symposium all theoreticians who wish to uphold love, as opposed to those who, like Proust, find it merely damnable, have felt compelled to proceed in terms of the most ponderous and respectable abstracts. Ortega y Gasset, essentially a Platonist, is no exception. Thus in four of the seven essays which constitute On Love the author's anxiety to arrive at some edifying general truth (which will, among other things, discredit the heresies of Stendhal) involves him in a morass of wishful thinking, soggy imagery and inexact metaphorical thinking, all of which must cause despair in precisians and boredom in the less demanding. However, when Ortega has a concrete set of cir- cumstances to consider he can be both shrewd and amusing; and the remaining three of these essays (notably the one about Emma Hamilton—'Landscape with Deer in the Background), dealing as they do with cases and not theories, are crisp and per- cipient. I should add that 'he has some stern and well supported observations to make about Woman's essential preference for the mediocre and unadventurous side of Man.
Love and the French is mere sexual tittle- tattle about French customs from the Troubadours to the present day. Nina Epton, having read very widely in the relevant chronicles, diaries and whatever, gives us a rather off-hand digest of these, interspersed with occasional and, I must admit, very savoury quotations: `Sauval says that they (women) applied a special pommade to their private parts to make the hair grow abnormally long so that it could be "curled like a Saracen's moustache," and ornamented with coloured bows.' There is a lot to be said for a high quality giggle now and again, and Miss Epton is good for several.
SIMON RAVEN
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