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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
‘HAVE you never heard of Cupid and Pish!’ exclaimed once, with a contralto’s disdain, the English Alboni, Madame Patey (nee Whytock), when General Clark Kennedy ventured to inquire why she called her favourite dog Pish? The Dog Pish could well be the Patron Dog of the Rationalist Press, of blatant atheists like Sir Leslie Stephen : they turn on the orthodox or would-be orthodox believers and exclaim : ‘ Have you never heard of Cupid and Pish, of physical pain and moral deformity, of avoidable suffering, of Torquemada and Galileo and Voltaire and Calas and Noah and the morbid imagination of diseased nuns, of Cupid and Pish?’ Saint and theologian and ignorant Catholic know what can be known concerning Pish. . . .
On a top shelf Leslie Stephen’s Essays on free thinking and plain speaking gathers dust between Buchner’s crass Kraft und Stoff and Pétrone (that Manon Lescaut of antiquity for precocious schoolboys) close to poor George Tyrrell’s later volumes, Swedenborg’s Conjugial Love and Spiritual Diary, and the Scottish Criminal Trials.
1 1832-1904.
2 How unwelcome a neighbour to a man of such gentlemanly morality as the editor of the Cornhill who did not consider French novels ‘ delicate either in the sense of art or of morals . . . the effect is apt to border on the nasty and they are too anxious to keep everything in due harmony to give the proper contrasts and reality of real life. Consequently within given limits—and the limits are certainly too narrow—I consider the lovemaking of English novelists to be purer and more life-like.’
3 The Delights of Wisdom concerning Conjugial Love after which follow the Pleasures of Insanity concerning Scortatory Love translated from the Latin of the Hon. Emunuel Smedenborg, a Native of Sweden (Manchester, 1811).
4 Lady Henry Somerset, by Kathleen Fitzpatrick.
5 Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, by F. W. Maitland, 1906. See portraits of Miss H. M. Thackeray and Mrs. Herbert Duckworth.