I have often said that there is no true love short of eating and
consequent assimilation; the embryonic processes are but a long course of
eating and assimilation—the sperm and germ cells, or the two elements
that go to form the new animal, whatever they should be called, eat one
another up, and then the mother assimilates them, more or less, through
mutual inter-feeding and inter-breeding between her and them. But the
curious point is that the more profound our love is the less we are
conscious of it as love. True, a nurse tells her child that she would
like to eat it, but this is only an expression that shows an instinctive
recognition of the fact that eating is a mode of, or rather the acme of,
love—no nurse loves her child half well enough to want really to eat it;
put to such proof as this the love of which she is so profoundly, as she
imagines, sentient proves to be but skin deep. So with our horses and
dogs: we think we dote upon them, but we do not really love them.
What, on the other hand, can awaken less consciousness of warm affection
than an oyster? Who would press an oyster to his heart, or pat it and
want to kiss it? Yet nothing short of its complete absorption into our
own being can in the least satisfy us. No merely superficial temporary
contact of exterior form to exterior form will serve us. The embrace
must be consummate, not achieved by a mocking environment of draped and
muffled arms that leaves no lasting trace on organisation or
consciousness, but by an enfolding within the bare and warm bosom of an
open mouth—a grinding out of all differences of opinion by the sweet
persuasion of the jaws, and the eloquence of a tongue that now convinces
all the more powerfully because it is inarticulate and deals but with the
one universal language of agglutination. Then we become made one with
what we love—not heart to heart, but protoplasm to protoplasm, and this
is far more to the purpose.
The proof of love, then, like that of any other pleasant pudding, is in
the eating, and tested by this proof we see that consciousness of love,
like all other consciousness vanishes on becoming intense. While we are
yet fully aware of it, we do not love as well as we think we do. When we
really mean business and are hungry with affection, we do not know that
we are in love, but simply go into the love-shop—for so any eating-house
should be more fitly called—ask the price, pay our money down, and love
till we can either love or pay no longer.
And so with hate. When we really hate a thing it makes us sick, and we
use this expression to symbolise the utmost hatred of which our nature is
capable; but when we know we hate, our hatred is in reality mild and
inoffensive. I, for example, think I hate all those people whose
photographs I see in the shop windows, but I am so conscious of this that
I am convinced, in reality, nothing would please me better than to be in
the shop windows too. So when I see the universities conferring degrees
on any one, or the learned societies moulting the yearly medals as
peacocks moult their tails, I am so conscious of disapproval as to feel
sure I should like a degree or a medal too if they would only give me
one, and hence I conclude that my disapproval is grounded in nothing more
serious than a superficial, transient jealousy.