Putting aside, for the moment, the doubtfulness of his being able
to maintain successfully, through years, such an imposition, there was
something dark, equally dubious, in its performance. He might manage it
publicly, even superficially in private, and as a father; but marriage
wasn't primarily a superficial relationship. It was very much the
reverse. Its fundamental condition was the profoundest instinct that
controlled living; there no merely admirable conduct could manage to be
more than a false and degrading, a temporary, lie. How could he with a
pandering smugness meet Fanny's purity of feeling? Yet, it seemed,
exactly this was being done by countless other applauded men. But,
probably, the difference between them and himself was that they had no
objective consciousness of their course; happily they never stopped to
think. It was thought, he began to see, and not feeling that created
nearly all his difficulties.
In a flash of perception he grasped that formal thought, in its aspect
of right conduct, was utterly opposed to feeling. While the former
condemned the surrender of Savina and himself to passion, the latter,
making it imperative, had brushed aside the barriers of recognized
morals. It had been a tragic, it might well be a fatal, error to oppose
religion--as it affected both this world and the impossible next--to
nature.
Yet men could no longer exist as animals; he saw that plainly.
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