what, then, is this new love? it is sex-conflict.
the most obvious, and the most sincere, form of self-expression rests on pure emotion—a natural and healthy impulse. the right thus to express oneself belongs, as we acknowledge to-day, to women no less than men.
but, largely misled by their over-insistence upon the physical in human nature, too many modern thinkers confuse fierce excitement with deep emotion. also seeing, and wisely exalting, the glory of youth's dream, they sanction, and even advise, thoughtless haste and action on every impulse.
it is now taught, not only that physical passion stands for, or rather is, the love of which it forms only a part; but that the fire of sudden desire is the only true, or natural, expression of love itself.
such a view has been, again and again, formally stated with quite serious, honest [54]intent by our leading novelists. it is assumed, without argument or justification, in most second-rate popular fiction; thereby reaching and poisoning the very readers least qualified to resist evil influence and, as we have shown, particularly ill-equipped to-day.
for mr. cannan's matilda love is a "kiss of the lips, a surrender to the flood of perilous feeling, a tampering with forces that might or might not sweep you to ruin; a matter of fancy, dalliance, and risk." his cora, the "natural light of love," "kissed" her lover's "eyes, his lips, his ears, and bit the tip of his nose until it was bruised and swollen."
he may well ask: "does any man want any woman, or any woman any man? are these wild flashes more than things of a moment? . . . is not every woman any man's woman? is not every man any woman's man? why property? why impossible pledges? why pretend so much that is obviously false? why build upon a lie and call it sacred? . . . why do men and women live hideously together? . . . why, and why again?"
with a cynic's frankness mr. w. l. george answers why:
"men may have us," said his victoria, "as [55]breeders and housekeepers, but the mistress is the root of all." this is not, as one might suppose, a confession of sin; for "love is outside marriage, because love's too big to stay inside . . . don't you see that of itself it carries the one sanctity that may exist between men and women? that it cannot be bound because it is as light airs, imponderable; so fierce that all things it touches it burns, so sweet that whosoever has drunk shall ever more be thirsty."
because a man soon tires of such burning sweetness, he must satisfy his thirst elsewhere.
woman, indeed, he is annoyed to find, is still unable to "understand love in its neurotic moods; she cannot yet understand that a greater intensity might creep into passion if one knew it to be transient, that one might love more urgently, with greater fierceness, if one knew that soon the body, temple of that love, would fade, wither, die, then decay . . . that haste to live made living more intense."
what, then, is this love. it is a sex-conflict; wherein the man "has to make war, to conquer." the woman begs him "to hurt her, to set his imprint upon her"; even when "about to conquer" she must [56]wear "the slave look." this is precisely the woman he also finds, more crudely phrased, in the "mean streets": "if yer lives alone nothing 'appens . . . stuck in the mud like. but when yer've got a 'usband, things 'as wot they calls zest . . . if 'e do come 'ome . . . p'r'aps 'e'll give yer one in the mouf. variety, that's wot it is, variety. . . . he may lift his elbow a bit and all that, but anyhow 'e's a man." if he does not come home, love means "waking up in the middle of the night and running about the room like a crazy thing because she'd dreamed he was with some other girl." in the afternoon it meant "feeling all soft and swoony just because he helped you into the 'bus by the elbow."
more thoughtful or intelligent young ladies come "to think there's no such thing as a pure-minded girl." marriage is "merely evidence that the girl has held out" and "only a dodge for getting rid of being in love."
mr. hugh walpole once very sensibly remarked that "people don't want to know what a young ass thinks about life if he can't tell a story." perhaps, if such muddled ideas were only expressed by these solemn and very intellectual young men (who, however, can "tell a story"), we might be disposed to [57]leave the matter in their hands and trust to time for their enlightening.
but, unfortunately, the same false "new love" is about us everywhere. it is a commonplace to boys and girls, and has crept into the great majority of second-rate, easily read, novels published to-day.
what does it really mean? how has it come about?
in the first place, the new thinkers have done precisely what they are always protesting against. they confuse "marriage" with the legal contract. a great part of their abuse, half their plea for the greater sincerity of free love, has no standing against spiritual marriage, founded on true love.
nevertheless the argument against permanency remains. the demand for continual new adventure in emotion (set out to condone both intimacy without marriage or disloyalty to marriage) does rest on something which has the appearance of truth and reason.
the fiery, swooning passion of mere bodily impulse does not last. but even physical passion, the sex-urge, means more than that. our new teachers ignore what all experience has proved and science taught—that every physical impulse—whether to eat or drink, [58]work or play—demands restraint for its fruition. the value of self-control is no less of the body than the soul.
it is the fever-bred passion, born of stimulated sex-consciousness, that must snatch at every chance for expression and demands constant change. this, indeed, does weary and satiate the spirit, weaken bodily vigour, and destroy manhood. bid us look for, welcome, and artificially develop every first faint stirring of the sex-urge, and you make us slaves indeed. if you consider less fundamental desires and pleasures of the body, you will admit at once that feverish, uncontrolled, and constant straining to put out all your strength at once, can produce no kind of good sportsman. who more rigorously disciplines himself than the athlete? the power to be passionate, to express the love of the flesh, dies before it has ever been really attained, for those who always at once yield to mere craving. their "deeply sensual associations" are "always robbed of mystery and delight when long-balked attraction comes to a tardy blooming."
and as scott told us long ago, "it is no small aggravation of this jaded and uncomfortable state of mind, that the voluptuary cannot [59]renounce the pursuits with which he is satiated, but must continue, for his character's sake, or from the mere force of habit, to take all the toil, fatigue, and danger of the chase, while he has so little real interest in the termination."
that is, they quickly lose the very pleasures which were their object and their excuse.
i have known, or read of, no more miserable and weak human beings than many of the men and women in modern fiction.
does it then follow that spiritual love, a true union of souls, for which we claim a higher and a more lasting happiness, is a thing apart, wherein the physical must be kept under, put aside; or, if conceded to our common weakness (the penalty of our earthly existence), should be calmly and occasionally indulged, only under official licence, in secret as a shameful deed? certainly not. the pure know far more of passion than the loose. but, as other bodily pleasure, i.e., self-expression, gains strength and depth by taking responsibility for itself, "ordering" itself; so, above all, does our strongest, and most ultimate, physical need.
it is the true passion, naturally found in comradeship and love, spontaneously [60]constant and controlled, which will complete man's vitality, deepen and strengthen, while it steadies, physique. spiritually the one expresses itself by taking, the other achieves itself by giving.
the biggest adventure in life, the deepest and truest feelings do, actually, involve that emotional abandon, or complete self-forgetting, which modernists exalt. but the giving away of one's whole self, that is, expressing one's whole self in passionate service, is not achieved by sudden, untested intimacy. it can only come, or grow, for those who seek understanding of each other, suffer the first mystery—(stirring the wonder dreams of youth)—to unfold and reveal itself in steady, controlled devotion to the vision of romance. then, and only then (soon or late, as the individual self prompts), he shall dare, because he knows.
in other words, the physical passion, in which to-day men find the birth of love, belongs in nature to maturity and completion, when man has gained the courage to be himself and express himself. it is the harvest of pure romance, only possible to those who have earned full knowledge of themselves and of each other.
[61]the humdrum pictures of insincere marriage, with which fiction is crowded to-day, come from mistakes or spiritual failure to be one's best self, not from constancy and faith. the need to perpetually revive intense emotion with a new mistress can never be felt in a true marriage. it is inevitable for so-called "free" love, the bitterest slavery of man.
for wedded love—that is, the permanent union of body and soul—there is ever a new and wonderful adventure, the deepening mystery of the closer bond. and the highest happiness, which is intense emotion, has the gravest responsibilities, demanding the greatest courage and hope. as mr. middleton murray has written in the things we are: "the taking of a wife or the taking of a friend is an eternal act; if it be less, it is a treachery, a degradation."
it is true, certainly, that the nature of love and passion may change with time and the comradeship of daily life; but the change is not a weakening, not even a lowering of the pulse. its ardour does not diminish but conquers life more completely. it is, actually, the constant and faithful heart, which has most strength to bear with, or to ennoble, the deadening trivialities of existence (that no [62]free lover can escape), to make small things great; which finds most courage to face fate.
the deadening influence of constant "experiments" in passion ("walking round and round the thing you want, gloating over it with your eyes"); the bitter tragedy of a life that is "one long series of eager conquests turned to listless ones," has been dramatically exposed, with unflinching realism, by miss olive mary salter in her god's wages; which also reveals "that love beyond self which is human companionship."
for anne verity, we read, "marriage" had been "the finger-post to death." in "making man her own she made him stale. . . . there was no end to those upon whom she had lived and left them to pay the bill." always "life must be savoured anew by fresh interests, hashed up aspects of the same old facts served up over and over again to one's easily deceived palate." it was "her vanity that must be ministered to afresh, its staleness and satiation relieved by the sacrifice of someone else's young virility."
she found that "love doesn't stay with this generation, it touches us and flies again. . . . it's this awful quality of inconstancy in me, as if my heart had got a hole in it. . . . we've [63]lost the art of looking on at anybody but ourselves."
but, at long last, when a man explained to her: "i want you to love my mind, that lives, instead of my body, that will die," she awoke.
she learnt then, that "the right man, or the right woman for the matter of that, isn't ever ready made. it needs effort of the most intense kind to fit a man perfectly into a woman's life, a woman perfectly into a man's."
wherefore, "love, real love, is the consummation of great effort, neither more nor less."
