Courting
A History of Courting. By E. S. Turner. (Michael Joseph. 15s.
A CAVE-MAN drags his fiancee by the hair across the first page, and before the end the GI brides are in America, reading Professor Kinsey's latest book. In between there are crusaders' wives and troubadours; child marriages in the fifteenth century; capers, courtly and otherwise, by Elizabethans; puritan antidotes for wantonness; bundling in Scotland and bundling in Massachusetts, the Restoration, with stage, masquerades and Pepys; Vauxhall, and Fleet marriages; sensibility, chaperones, prudery and horrible valentines in the nineteenth century; and finally, world warfare, the motor car as a mobile sofa, and the cinema. Then it becomes noticeable how far apart the author stands from the contemporary writers who are his sources. They preached, they scorned, they condemned, and they chose luscious and unrestrained language for the purpose. He is content to remain detached and alert, using his material to tell his story—a pattern, it seems, of independent pendulums: the first moves from license to prudery and back again; and the second, from leisurely courtship with gnat show of protocol, swings to the matter-of-fact and ungainly. The Church does its best ; the law does its best ; parents do their best—but none ever succeeds in arresting either pendulum.
But when the book reaches the present day a third impress ion emerges. It is as though Mr. Turner, despite his wit, his clear sigh' and his talent for enlivening and pointed illustration, has become depressed by his subject. He has looked at courtship's history with a light and attentive heart, but cannot bring himself to look ag objectively at its future. He sees the cinema, for jnstance, as a visual aid to intimacies, standardising for millions a form of courtship he knows he is right to find unpalatable. Those earlier men, his sources, fulminated in their day. He, having reached his own, is tempted to do so in his turn. 'What answer,' he asks, 'can be given to a genera- tion no longer deterred by threat of hell or pregnancy..,.?' A History of Courting is itself one answer: evidence that man can sometimes recognise his follies and laugh himself out of them, bring- ing the pendulums back before they swing too far. A. H. BARTOS
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