THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE
Just as the Swedes, in comparison with some other of the Germanic
peoples, are behindhand in their view of _l’amour passion_, so are the
Germanic races as a whole behindhand as compared with the foremost
Latin peoples. The Gallic counterpart of the Lutheran doctrine of
marriage is to be found in another monk, Luther’s contemporary,
Rabelais, with his joyous project of a new kind of convent, where
every monk should have his nun, with the power of separating after a
year of probation; a plan which perhaps would not have been a much
more roundabout way of educating mankind to love than was the Lutheran
doctrine of marriage. Nothing is farther from the truth than that the
Reformation increased respect for love and woman. It raised the esteem
for the married state as compared with the unmarried, but it enhanced
neither the position of woman in matrimony nor the importance of love
in regard to marriage. Even in the Middle Ages, the Latin nations
render a homage to woman which to-day is still almost incomprehensible
to the man of a Germanic race. And if, on the one hand, this homage
took the form of the cult of Venus, which is born in the Latin blood,
on the other, it expressed through the cult of Mary its reverence for
what is deepest in woman, motherhood. Even to-day, the Frenchwoman is
esteemed not according to her age but according to her qualities. It
is not only the mothers who worship their sons, but also the latter
their mothers; and not only the mother, but besides her every admirable
elderly woman receives attention in social life as in the family from
men of all ages. The middle-class wife—though indeed at the cost of
the children—co-operates in her husband’s calling with a seriousness
unknown in the Germanic middle-class. In France as in Italy, family
life has a kind of warm intimacy which the German does not understand;
since the Latin temperament lacks that geniality which sheds its light
over the frequently rough lines and harsh colours of the landscape of
the Germanic soul. It is rather the coldness of his disposition than
the strength of his soul that makes the German so much less erotic than
the Southerner; it is more indifference to woman than respect for her
that expresses itself in the distinction between the erotic customs of
North and South. But when all this has been admitted for the sake of
justice, we may fairly lay stress upon the influence of the Germanic
spirit in the struggle to put an end to that cleavage between love and
marriage which has prevailed among the Southern nations ever since the
days of the Courts of Love. For the peculiarity of the Gallic spirit
is to discriminate. This gives it the power of following out an idea
to its uttermost conclusions, but at the same time renders it liable
in actual life to split itself up among superficialities. The strength
of the German, on the other hand, is his desire of unity. This makes
him inconsistent as a thinker, since he must include everything, but
against this it makes him strive after consistency in life. The same
deep sense of personality which created Protestantism has in the
Germanic world sought to make love as well as faith the affair of the
individual and to make marriage one with love. Among the educated
classes in the North, marriages of convenience or those arranged by
the family are now things of the past, while in the Latin world they
are still the rule, though with increasingly frequent exceptions.
But in most cases it is still in free connections, before and during
marriage, that the Frenchman engages his erotic feelings; and the
French wife has abundantly shown the emptiness of the assertion that
“a woman always loves the father of her child,” the most dangerous
of the false doctrines which have led women into marriage and thence
into adultery. In Shakespeare, on the other hand, we already find the
wife and the mistress united in the same person, and it is always in
English literature that we meet with the highest expression of the
Germanic feeling for unity in love. Since the mediæval minnesingers
ceased to sing, the literature of Germany and Scandinavia, dominated
by Lutheranism, bears witness chiefly of “the lust of the flesh.”
Women are esteemed according as they fulfil their destiny as bearers
of children and housewives. The abolition of the cloister and celibacy
has, however, brought about the good result of the transmission of
spiritual forces which formerly died with the individual. And it may
well have been through some of those who formerly took refuge with
their idealism in a cloister, that the longing for a great love has
been left as an inheritance to sons and daughters.
In Germany, the leading poet of the “age of enlightenment,” Gottsched,
asserts woman’s right to culture; in America, during the War of
Independence, the women gave evidence of their sense of citizenship;
and it was during a more recent struggle for liberty, that against
slavery, that the woman’s question came to the front in that country.
In France, the eighteenth century, more than any other period of
history, is “the century of woman.” The salons are the focussing
point of all ideas; the most eminent men write for women, who become
electric batteries from which the ideas of the time send out kindling
sparks in all directions. Thus the women of France help to prepare the
French Revolution. During the Revolution, Olympe de Gouges writes
her “declaration of the rights of woman,” as a counterpart to that of
the rights of man, and Condorcet speaks in support of woman’s claims.
The same spirit of a new age confronts us in Mary Wollstonecraft’s _A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ (1792), as also in Hippel’s _Ueber
die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber_, published the same year,
and in the Swede Thorild’s contemporary treatise _Om kvinnokönets
naturliga höghet_ (“On the Natural Greatness of Women”). Each in its
way was a remarkable sign of the time which already included the whole
“emancipation” programme of equality of position: the same rights for
woman as for man as regards education, labour, a share in legislation,
and an equality of position under the law and in marriage.
Isolated instances of emancipated women were nothing new. In Greece,
the type was common enough to be employed in comedy; in Rome,
self-supporting women were to be found; during the Middle Ages not
only Bridget but many another woman—in the quality of abbess or
regent—exercised a great and often beneficial activity. The days of
antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance all possessed
female scholars, physicians, and artists. But it is not until the
century of the great Revolution that we find among women themselves
as well as among certain men a persistent and conscious striving to
elevate the education and to secure the rights of women.
And wherever this striving has been profound, it has been united with
the desire to reform the position of woman in love and in marriage.
It is a very common but erroneous opinion that monogamy has given rise
to love. Love appears already among animals, and with them, as in the
world of men, has shown itself independent of monogamy.
The origin of the latter in human society was the relation of
proprietorship, religious ideas, considerations of collective utility,
but not perception of the importance of love’s selection. On the
contrary, love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy, and it is
therefore a profound mistake to suppose that the higher view of love
has been formed solely through monogamy. The idea of love has been
developed in as great a degree by attacks on marriage as in association
with marriage itself.
While, in spite of the accumulation of evidence to the contrary,
Christianity’s share in the origin of human love is constantly
exaggerated, sufficient stress has not been laid upon its indirect
influence on the development of sexual love. It is true that all over
the world—from Iceland to Japan—songs and legends are to be found
which give glorious evidence of the power of love in the heart of man
in all ages. But the sexual emotion, nevertheless, held a subordinate
position in the life of the human soul until Christianity granted to
woman also a soul to save—in other words, a personality to cultivate.
Christianity, moreover commended the womanly rather than the manly
virtues, and although Christ himself ignored woman, love, and the
family life, his ethics became thus in an indirect form a glorification
of woman. The importance attached by Christianity to the value of
the individual as a soul—in contradistinction to the insistence by
paganism on his value as a citizen—was likewise one of the unseen
contributary causes which during the Middle Ages made love a life-power.
In antiquity, marriage was a duty to society; friendship, on the
other hand, was the free expression of sympathy. Not until man’s
consciousness admitted a soul in woman, could personal love arise. But
so mysterious are the influences through which the soul of mankind
grows, that the youthful love of the ancients indirectly developed the
need of sympathy also between grown men and women; and the suppression
of the sexual instinct by Catholic asceticism indirectly furthered the
introspective, soulful emotion of love which rises above sensuality.
The modern view of love as the most lofty state of the soul had already
taken shape in the time of the Crusades sufficiently to bring into
existence at this period the Courts of Love in the south of France.
Woman, the knight, and the singer together intensify and refine love,
in part by laying stress upon its incompatibility with marriage!
Students have shown how the refined expression of love in poetry
corresponds with the forms of the sexual life of the upper classes,
since monogamy became the law and a secret polygamy the custom. This
dual division of the erotic feelings has on the one side brought
about such fine and lofty, and on the other such coarse and debased
manifestations that neither one nor the other has any counterpart
among the nations—or classes within a nation—where this division is
unknown, since there the freedom of sexual choice is undisputed.
And this is natural; for there the sexual life preserves its
innocence of “paradise,” one of simple animality perturbed by no
higher consciousness. This innocence can only be replaced on a higher
plane after a long period of development. The way thither is by the
cleavage which “the division of labour” involves even in regard to the
development of the feelings.
The Middle Ages were thus only capable of dividing love from marriage.
This is witnessed by the greatest singers of love and by the greatest
love stories. Tristan and Isolde in the world of poetry, Abelard and
Heloïse in that of reality, are the highest types of the new age, even
then dawning, which is finally to bring about the declaration of
rights of human emotion as of human thought. These lovers, united in
life and death, are the highest testimony of the Middle Ages to that
free love which makes its own laws and abolishes all others; to that
great love which is the sense of eternity of great souls, in opposition
to the ephemeral inclination of small ones.
Scholasticism, ever extending introspective psychology; mysticism,
ever refining the life of the soul devoted to God, unconsciously pour
oil upon the red flame of love as upon the white flame of faith.
The _Vita Nuova_ of love breaks out in the fire of poetry, whose
most aspiring flame was Dante. It lived on in the souls of the elect
among Latin peoples. The Platonism of the Renaissance refined the
mediæval conception of love as the most excellent means of bringing to
perfection the highest human qualities. And thus was established the
right of lovers to independence of the customs of society.
It is significant that, at the mediæval Courts of Love as at the courts
of the Renaissance and in the contests of wit of the seventeenth
century, women are granted not only the same right of sentiment as
men but also the same liberty of using their spiritual gifts; for
every intensifying of love is connected, openly or otherwise, with the
augmentation of woman’s spiritual life and with man’s thus enhanced
estimation of the value of her personality. Instead of being to him
“the sex,” the means of enjoyment, woman becomes the mistress, when
love has come to mean an exclusive desire for one woman, who is only to
be won by devoted service. Whenever woman has taken the lead in erotic
matters, man’s love has been ennobled. In Shakespeare, we find the
whole of the preceding spiritual culture summed up. All his best women
are chaste in the same degree as they are devoted, but they are also in
the same degree spiritually rich and complete personalities. Therefore
they are also leaders through their clear-sightedness and promptness in
the moment of action. And although Shakespeare, like every other great
poet, formed his women more of the material of dreams than of reality;
although the foremost men of the Italian Renaissance probably had more
often a Boccaccio’s than a Petrarch’s experience of love; although
the age of baroque turned _le Pays du tendre_ into a stiff garden
surrounding decorative figures, nevertheless life itself, especially
the life of the Latin peoples—as well as their best literature—can
always show proud and beautiful examples of loving couples and
sacrifices for love, even in that century whose male “philosophers”
deprived woman of the lead, when love became “galanterie,” gay and ugly
by turns.
At the time when Rousseau appeared, love was equally degraded through
Latin-Epicurean immorality and through Germanic-Lutheran “morality.”
What he did for love was the same that he would have done for the
lungs, if in one of the boudoirs of those days, stuffy with perfumes
and wax candles, he had thrown open the windows to the summer night,
with its scent of productive earth and blossoming plants, dark masses
of foliage and the star-sown sky.
But Rousseau did not follow out the ideas that lay nearest to his
own: that only love ought to constitute marriage; that only the
development of the woman’s personality deepens love. Even Goethe,
who after Rousseau carried the gleaming trail farther, by showing
love as the mysterious fateful power of elective affinity, saw the
happiness of love rather in the directness of woman’s nature than
in its development. The French Revolution drew the consequences of
Rousseau’s propositions also in the questions of love and woman; it
made marriage civil and divorce free, but it did not give to woman the
franchise; indeed, it did not even preserve the form of it which she
had previously possessed. All the spirits influenced by Rousseau and
the Revolution have since, in literature and in life, followed out
love’s declaration of rights.
In the nineteenth century as in the Middle Ages, it was women, poets,
and knights—the last under the name of social utopians—who took
the lead in this. In Germany, it was first the romantic school, then
“Young Germany,” which went foremost; in England, Shelley, Byron,
Browning, and a number of other thinkers; in Norway, Camilla Collet
and some great poets among the men. In France,—in the midst of
the reaction which reintroduced indissoluble marriage,—Madame de
Staël attacks this in _Delphine_. In the country of literary salons,
it is attempted to prevent woman’s genius from acting as a social
force—and through _Corinne_ and Coppet, Mme. de Staël makes it a
universal force. Her confidence that honour for a woman can signify
only a means of winning love; her complaint that life denies to the
woman of genius the fulfilment of her most beautiful dream, love in
marriage, were the prologue to innumerable tragedies during woman’s
century. After her, came the followers of St. Simon and the rest of the
social revolutionaries, and above all another of Rousseau’s spiritual
daughters, the woman in whose veins all the blood was mingled which
the Revolution had poured out on the scaffold and on the battle-field:
blood of the mob, blood of the bourgeois, noble blood, royal blood!
The courage of her nation to follow truth to its utmost consequences,
the fervent faith of her childhood, the wistfulness of her blood,
her soul’s longing for eternity, the volcanic ardour and ashes of
her experiences—all this George Sand hurls forth in her indictment
of the marriage upheld by Church and State, which to her was “lawful
ravishing” and “prostitution under vows.” Long before her time, the
rights of love had been asserted in the case of exceptional natures.
George Sand’s new courage was shown in demanding this right for all; in
branding it upon the conscience of her time that, when two human beings
wish to be together, no bond is needed to hold them together; that,
when they do not wish it, to hold them together by force is a violation
of their human rights and of their human dignity.
From this moment the battle was transferred from Olympus to the earth.
And since then all “saviours of society” have sought to quench, and all
“enemies of society” have striven to spread, its flames.
The love which a George Sand herself sought in vain on paths from which
she returned with feet wounded, and sometimes soiled; the love a Rahel
Varnhagen suffered from and lived on, a Camilla Collet implored, and an
Elizabeth Browning realised—this is the love of which the woman of the
new age is also dreaming.
George Sand—like the followers of St. Simon, and like the modern
feminists—looked upon freedom in love as the central point in the
woman’s question. Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day
asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in
every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against
the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing
relations of society. The American-English-Scandinavian woman’s
question—whose supreme confession of faith is still J. S. Mill’s
book, published in 1854, on _The Subjection of Women_—has, on the
other hand, overlooked to a great extent erotic, religious, and social
emancipation, and asserted only woman’s rights as a citizen. Thus,
especially in Scandinavia, the new gospel of love has had to encounter
from the leaders of emancipation, now indifference, now resentment.
Ridicule and resentment from men have also fallen to the lot of the
women’s demand for a new love. With arguments, for which Schopenhauer
and Hartmann once provided the philosophical formulæ, it has been shown
that soulful love is an illusion of nature, and that the unity in love,
which woman now claims of man, demands sacrifices which are opposed to
his physiological and psychological nature.
Undisturbed by ridicule and resentment, however, the women of the new
age have continued to preach the love of their dreams—which is also
that of the dreams of poets.
For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious
and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose,
and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great
passions, then this is called immorality! Century after century, poetry
sets forth the loftiness of love. But if anyone in everyday prose
ventures to say that love may become an ever loftier emotion, then this
is called extravagance; for it does not occur to the people of the
present day to regard poetry as prophetic.
The new love is still the natural attraction of man and woman to each
other for the continuance of the race. It is still the desire of the
active human being to relieve through comradeship the hardships of
another and of himself at the same time. But above this eternal nature
of love, beyond this primeval cause of marriage, another longing has
grown with increasing strength. This is not directed towards the
continuance of the race. It has sprung from man’s sense of loneliness
within his race, a loneliness which is ever greater in proportion as
his soul is exceptional. It is the pining for that human soul which
is to release our own from this torment of solitude; a torment which
was formerly allayed by repose in God, but which now seeks its rest
with an equal, with a soul that has itself lain wakeful with eyelids
heated from the same longing; a soul empowered by love to the miracle
of redeeming our soul—as itself by ours is redeemed—from the sense of
being a stranger upon earth; a soul before whose warmth our own lets
fall the covering that the world’s coldness has imposed upon it and
shows its secrets and its glories without shame. Richard Dehmel has
summed this up in two immortal lines:
_Liebe ist die Freiheit der Gestalt
Vom Wahn der Welt, vom Bann der eignen Seele._
The same feeling has possessed many a man before our time. One of them
was Eugène Delacroix, who speaks in his journal of the pain of only
being able to show to each of his friends the aspect of himself which
that friend understood, and of thus being obliged to become another
for each of them, without ever feeling himself completely understood;
a suffering for which he only knew one remedy, _une épouse qui est de
votre force_.
But what is new about it is that this sentiment has become diffused and
has taken shape in the consciousness of the many; that it is beginning
to set its stamp upon the whole spirit of the age.
Meanwhile, mankind continues to be guided by erotic impulses which lie
deep below its conscious erotic needs. Man’s senses are spurred by a
desire which thrusts aside that of the soul. The culture of the idea of
love is far in advance of the instincts of love. And thus our time is
brimful of love-conflicts.
To this must be added that the increased sensibility of modern man
has rendered him more and more inclined to wear masks, protective
disguises, artistically decorated armour. Protection is indispensable,
since no one would be able to endure life if he were hourly seeing the
ill-bound or still open wounds of others, or feeling his own touched by
anyone. Existence would lose much of its excitement without secrets,
suspected or unsuspected, in the destinies and souls of men. But at
the same time this protection renders love’s struggle to penetrate
appearances more and more difficult. Therefore a certain form of
“flirtation” serves as the attempt of awakening love to tear off the
mask, to outwit the protective disguise, a game of fence which aims at
the joints of the tight-fitting armour.
But the attempts are often unsuccessful and life is more and more
crowded with destinies that have miscarried, while more and more people
wring their hands in solitude over what might have been! Man feels more
deeply than ever before that life gave him a poor portion, when his
love has been nothing but sinking in an embrace. An ever greater number
know that love is absorption into that spirit, in which one’s own finds
its foothold without losing its freedom; the nearness of that heart
which stills the disquiet in our own; that attentive ear which catches
what is unspoken and unspeakable; the clear sight of those eyes which
see the realisation of our best possibilities; the touch of those hands
which, dying, we would feel closed on our own.
When two souls have joys which the senses share, and when the senses
have delights which the souls ennoble, then the result is neither
desire nor friendship. Both have been absorbed in a new feeling,
not to be compared with either taken by itself, just as the air is
incomparable with its component elements. Nitrogen is not air, nor is
oxygen; sensuousness is not love, nor is sympathy. In combination they
are the air of life and love. If either of the component elements is
in the wrong proportion to the other, then love—like air—becomes
too heavy or too rarefied. But as the proportions between oxygen and
nitrogen may within a wide limit vary without disadvantage, so also
may the components of love. Affinity of soul is doubtless the most
enduring element in love, but not therefore the only valuable one; the
love that fills life with intoxication is separated from even the most
lofty friendship by an ocean as deep as that which divides the India of
legend from utilitarian America—a lifetime in which will not equal a
single day in the other!
Great love arises only when desire of a being of the other sex
coalesces with the longing for a soul of one’s own kind. It is like
fire, the hotter it is, the purer; and differs from the ardour of
desire as the white heat of a smelting-furnace differs from the ruddy,
smoking flames of a torch carried along the streets.
The constantly increased importance of sympathy in the life of the soul
finds expression, however, at the present time within the feminine
world in an over-estimation of friendship, both between one woman and
another and in relation to love. A passionate worship between persons
of the same age—or of an elder by a younger member of the same sex—is
among women as among men the customary and beautiful morning glow of
love, which always pales after sunrise. An entirely personal, great
friendship is, on the other hand, as rare as a great love, and equally
rare among women as among men. Those who expect to find the complement
of their being in friendship have therefore no greater prospect of
attaining the essential in this sphere, and moreover they run the risk
of missing it in the sphere of love, through shutting themselves off
from or impoverishing themselves of love’s emotions. The women of older
times also cultivated friendship. But they did not content themselves
with it in the place of love. And if women were once seriously to do
this, then winter would have come upon the world. The way of evolution
is to demand of love all that friendship affords—and infinitely more!
But the rich spiritual intercourse between female fellow-workers and
fellow-students, as also between comrades of different sexes, is now
preparing the third historical stage of development, that of individual
sympathy. It is true that great love has been individually sympathetic
in all ages. What is new is that an ever greater number of spirits
are guided by the same need; that the possibility of great love has
become apparent to many, not only to a chosen few. Just as we have been
able to gauge the revival of love by the diminution of marriages of
convenience, by the recognition of young people’s liberty of choice,
and by the popular condemnation of marriages for money, so can we now
measure the strength of the new revival by other, equally significant
phenomena; those, namely, called “the new immorality.” It has been said
with truth that love as it now is—the great psychological reality with
which one has to reckon—in its present complicated, manifold, and
refined condition, is the result of all the progress of human activity:
of the victory of intelligence and sentiment over crude force, of
the transformation in the relations between man and woman which new
economic, religious, and ethical ideas have brought about; of the
growing desire for inward and outward beauty, of the will to ennoble
the race, and other causes. But among these we have not named the most
important, that in which many now see a sign of degeneration, but which
is really one of development, the cause on which rests the hope of the
final abolition of erotic dualism: the conciliation of the excessive
opposition of sex.
So long as man and woman are so divided in their erotic needs as is
at present often the case, love will be the “everlasting conflict”
described by those poets and thinkers who see only the immediate
present, without faith in the development of love or mankind’s
education in loving; for in the midst of the age of evolutionism men
neither think nor feel according to its doctrines. To him, however,
who does so feel, nothing is more certain than that “the everlasting
conflict” will one day end in the conclusion of peace.
The sceptics just referred to smile ambiguously at the mention of
friendship between women, as at that of the refinement and craving
for sympathy in woman’s love. It is not until a mistress or a wife,
misunderstood in the depths of her being, leaves him, that such a man
discovers that the being he believed himself to be making entirely
happy, has not even had her senses satisfied—since the soul received
nothing from the senses and gave them nothing.
Those men—for the rest often men of fine culture—of whom this is
true, are generally verging on middle age. Among men comparatively
young, on the other hand, the erotic longing is often as refined and
craves as much for sympathy, as with women, although it is still rare
for the man to possess that balance between soul and senses which
his equal in the other sex has attained. That women now venture to
acknowledge that they possess erotic senses, while men are beginning to
discover erotically that they have souls; that woman demands feelings
in a man and he ideas in her—this is the great and happy sign of the
times. Sensitive young men of the present day suffer perhaps as much
as their sisters when loved only for their sex, not personally and
on account of their personality. They for their part love just that
womanly individuality for which they provide freedom of movement,
instead of—as their own fathers did—trying to assimilate it to their
own.
On the highest plane—as on the lowest—the similarities between man’s
love and woman’s are already greater than the dissimilarities; and
there may be more danger to love in the growing likeness between the
sexes than in continued unlikeness. Man becomes a human being—and
woman likewise—at the cost of his secondary sexual characters. There
are already some who think that the close of psychical development will
present the same phenomenon as the beginning of physical development,
namely, that the embryo at a certain stage is neither male nor female
but includes both possibilities!
The romanticists, F. Schlegel in particular, lay stress upon the
distinction that, while the ancients put greatness of heart, nobility
of mind, and strength of soul above the purely sexual qualities, the
moderns have made woman one-sidedly feminine and man one-sidedly
masculine, and assert that this extreme view on both sides must be got
rid of in order to arrive at morality, beauty, and harmony in sexual
relations; a view which was also that of Schleiermacher. And if we
will see a deeper meaning in the tale of Aristophanes of the cloven
human being, it will be the same that an apocryphal tradition ascribes
to Jesus, in the saying that “the kingdom of God is at hand when the
two again become one.” That Plato already emphasises the sufferings
imposed on both halves of the being by the “cleavage,” is evidence
of the commencement of development of love; for this development has
progressed through the increasing opposition of the sexes, with the
passion and the pain it has caused. Now at last the moment has arrived
when the divided sections again converge towards a higher unity.
In reality, this desirable conciliation of sexual opposition is
proceeding with such rapidity that there might be a fear of its
becoming a danger to love in a near future, if the psychical opposition
of sex were not always dependent finally on the physical, and if the
modern man and woman were not becoming simultaneously more and more
individualised.
And it is in this circumstance that the future possibilities of great
love lie. Individualisation is already so powerful that a thoughtful
person is ever more inclined to check himself when the abstract
expressions “man” and “woman” escape his lips. For already men and
women respectively differ among themselves almost as much as the two
sexes from each other. And as a compensation for the enfeebling through
conciliation of universal erotic attraction, we have the charm of
individual contrasts. Love’s spiritual longing—to be resolved together
with another soul into a higher harmony—will not be enfeebled, but, on
the contrary, will be enhanced in proportion as this contrast is more
personal.
A. Rodin—who like every great Frenchman understands great love—has
glorified it in his statue of a pair of lovers, who have through
each other become more perfect beings than either could have been
alone. Rodin makes the man thoroughly masculine, the woman thoroughly
feminine, while each line in their two figures shows primitive force
ennobled into spiritual power, and love as the consummation of the
human man and the human woman.
When life from time to time shows us this proud and beautiful vision,
then we are in the presence of a happiness which is overpoweringly
great. For as an economical housewife shuts out the sunlight, so life
often lets fall the curtain of death when happiness shines; or indeed
men kill their own happiness through instincts surviving from a lower
stage.
Chief of these is that instinct which makes the force of primitive
animality still erotically attractive even to the spiritually
sensitive. Men and women with this power of elementary passion,
intoxicate because they are themselves intoxicated, because, without
being checked by any consideration or held back by the soul, they give
themselves up wholly and hotly to the moment. It is as superficial a
psychology to say that Don Juan’s reputation makes him irresistible
as that conquest of Cleopatra is tempting because it is also conquest
over Cæsar. No, the power of these natures lies in their undivided,
unscrupulous will to use all the resources of their being to attain
their end. And only that by which one’s whole being is held at the
moment has the power of holding others. Thus the question is answered
_Comment fais-tu les grands amours,
Petite ligne de la bouche?_
Soulful people, especially women, have hitherto only loved partially.
But when sensuousness—in alliance with the mission of the
race—regains its ancient dignity, then the power of giving erotic
rapture will not be the monopoly of him who is inhuman in his love. The
wise virgins’ deadly sin against love is that they disdained to learn
of the foolish ones the secret of fascination; that they would know
none of the thousand things that bind a man’s senses or lay hold on his
soul; that they regarded the power to please as equivalent to the will
to betray. When all women who can love are also able to make goodness
fascinating and completeness of personality intoxicating, then Imogen
will conquer Cleopatra.
As yet the charming ones are not always good, the good not always
charming, and the majority neither good nor charming. During this
transition between an old and a new womanliness it is natural that she
should be strongest who unites in herself
_Ève, Joconde, et Delila._
From observation of love’s realisation in marriage—as it is still
realised in the majority of cases—young women have been more and more
possessed by a disinclination to wed. They wish for the love of their
dreams or none at all. A lower claim, a poorer gift of love has for
them no value which can be compared with their free personal life. To
the man who only seeks her lips but does not listen to the words from
them, who longs for her embrace but smiles or frowns when she reveals
the nature of her soul, such a woman has nothing to give. Her love is
now filled with the whole nourishing force of her human nature, replete
with the whole sap of her woman’s nature, and she desires that the
sacrament she thus dispenses shall be received with devotion.
She will no longer be captured like a fortress or hunted like a quarry;
nor will she like a placid lake await the stream that seeks its way
to her embrace. A stream herself, she will go her own way to meet the
other stream.
We live in a period of spiritual reformation of immense importance
in the history of the world. Every human being who himself has soul
is being more and more penetrated by the sense of the mysterious
effects of elective affinities; of sympathetic and antipathetic
influences; of subconscious powers, above all in the erotic sphere.
Sensations of the erotically dæmonic are not new. But they were
formerly condemned to as great an extent as they are now recognised and
indeed sometimes assisted. It is this exquisite sensitiveness, these
vibrating nerves, these changing moods, this irritability of sensation
that the woman—like the man—of the present day has acquired as her
superiority, her gain through culture, her right of precedence before
any other generation. But this new wealth involves innumerable new
conflicts. The senses go their own way and are attracted where the soul
is estranged, or repelled although the heart is filled with tenderness.
Until the physiology and psychology of loathing are understood, we
shall not have gone far towards the solution of the erotic problem.
Every day—and night—these innumerable influences, conscious or
unconscious, are at work transforming the feelings of married people
and lovers. And although our time is becoming increasingly conscious of
this, it does not yet understand either how to counteract the dangerous
or encourage the favourable influence of the important trifles of
married life.
Only the foremost of women with a genius for love have arrived at that
degree of sensitiveness which makes it impossible for them to give or
receive anything in love without the feeling which one of Charlotte
Brontë’s women expresses in the words: _You fit me into the finest
fibre of my being._
Every developed modern woman wishes to be loved not _en mâle_ but _en
artiste_. Only a man whom she feels to possess an artist’s joy in her,
and who shows this joy in discreet and delicate contact with her soul
as with her body, can retain the love of the modern woman. She will
belong only to a man who longs for her always, even when he holds her
in his arms. And when such a woman exclaims: “You desire me, but you
cannot caress, you cannot listen ...” then that man is doomed.
Modern woman’s love differs from that of older times by, amongst other
things, the insatiability of its demand for completeness and perfection
in itself, and for corresponding completeness and perfection in the
feeling of the man.
Our soul is doubtless often deeper, but occasionally also shallower,
than our conscious existence and will. Therefore it may happen that the
new love in all its force exists in a woman who is unconscious of her
own erotic greatness, while, on the other hand, another, who desires
it with all her will, perhaps may lack the depth of feeling, the
instinctive sureness of choice.
The women of the present day learn everything and arrive at much, even
at the finest ideas of love. But, full of insight as they are into
the _ars amandi_, have modern women indeed learned how with all their
soul, all their strength, and all their mind to love? Their mothers and
grandmothers—on a much lower plane of conscious erotic idealism—knew
of only one object: that of making their husbands happy. This
then meant that the wife ought to submit to everything and ask for
nothing; to serve her husband’s ends untiringly, even when she did
not understand them, and to receive with gratitude any crumbs of his
personality that might fall to her from the table to which his friends
were bidden to feast. But what watchful tenderness, what dignified
desire to please, what fair gladness could not the finest of these
spiritually ignored women develop!
The new man lives in a dream of the new woman, and she, in a dream of
the new man. But when they actually find one another it frequently
results that two highly developed brains together analyse love, or that
two worn-out nervous systems fight out a disintegrating battle over
love. The whole thing usually ends in each of them seeking peace with
some surviving incarnation of the old Adam and the eternal Eve. But not
with a clear conscience; for they are continually aware that they were
intended for the new experience, although their powers of loving were
small while their ideas of love were great.
Not until the spring rain of the new ideas has fallen sufficiently to
penetrate the roots and rise as sap in the tree of life, will a greater
happiness grow from the new love, which is not to be blamed because men
have dreamed it greater than they themselves are at present.
Individualism has made love deeper and at the same time increased
its difficulties. It has called forth an enhanced consciousness
of our own nature, our own moods; it has created new spiritual
conditions and—as already pointed out—set in vibration innumerable
formerly latent feelings of pleasure and aversion. But our personal
irritable sensitiveness has not yet been developed to the point of a
corresponding delicacy of feeling for the equally sensitive spiritual
life of others. The capacity for giving and sacrificing has not grown
at an equal pace with that of accepting and demanding. Of love’s double
heart-beat—the finding one’s self, and the forgetting one’s self in
another—the first is now considerably more advanced than the second.
Not until those women who are absorbed in self-analysis combine their
own personal store of life’s riches, their individual diversity, their
unique spirituality with the sunny, healthy peace, the self-sacrificing
devotion of older times, will their new development render them more
powerful than the women who preceded them. It is a healthy sign that
men and women exchange experiences and ideas on these subjects with
a frankness that was never known before; that they are much less
affected before marriage, as women indeed have ceased to be so after
marriage. There was a heroic kind of affectation, of which Mrs. Carlyle
was the typical example, but in itself it was borrowed from man’s
ethical development. Nevertheless one would often wish that the young
wives of the present day possessed more of the old-fashioned gift of
conceding the desires of the beloved with a happy smile, instead of
insisting on their own. The modern woman will not feign anything for
the sake of occasional peace or understanding. And she is right—when
anything of real importance in the domain of ideas or will is at
stake; she is doubly right in holding that all the lies and ruses
which married “happiness” enforced on the wives of an older time were
degrading to both parties; that what was thus gained was no real gain.
Nothing is more true than that the souls which are parted by a lack of
perfect frankness never belonged to one another; that complete mutual
confidence is the true sign of union. Nothing could be wiser than the
modern woman’s desire to see life with her own eyes, not—as was the
case with the women who went before her—only with those of a husband.
But has she also retained the power of seeing everything with the
thought of what the loved one’s eyes will find in it?
Upon the answer to these questions of conscience will depend the
success of the new woman in guiding the development of love in the
direction of her will. For only by herself loving better will she
gradually humanise man’s passion and liberate it from the blind force
of the blood, which makes of the capercailzie’s play or the rivalry of
stags a spectacle beautiful in its animality, but, on the other hand,
renders man’s love bestial. Those who think that the healthy strength
of nature will be thereby enfeebled are as foolish as those who try to
prove that the artistic instinct in the woodcock’s note is healthier
and stronger than that which created Beethoven’s symphonies.
But it is not sufficient that woman should take the lead and appoint
the goal. She must herself be developed for the task, and that not only
in the direction just mentioned. Her soul is as yet no sure guide to
her senses, nor her senses to her soul. So much the less can she then
be a guide to man’s soul or senses, which moreover she frequently fails
to understand and therefore unhesitatingly condemns—for the sins to
which she herself has not unfrequently seduced him!
The new woman demands purity of man. But has she any suspicion as to
how her treatment, on the one hand, of the awkward and uncertain youth,
on the other, of the experienced and confident “lady-killer” type, acts
upon the former, who is perhaps striving after erotic purity in the
hope of being rewarded by the happy smile of a woman, but who sees that
woman treat him with haughty commiseration while, on the other hand,
she regards the leopard’s spots of his rival with admiration? One may
ask whether all young women who now express their detestation of the
impurity in man’s sexual habits are themselves guided only by a soft
and noble joy in giving pleasure. Do they never permit themselves the
most despicable of hypocrisies, that of love?
So long as “pure” women take pleasure in the cruel sport of the cat;
so long as with the facile changes of mood of the serpentine dancer
they evade the responsibilities of their flirtations; so long as they
delight in provoking jealousy as a homage to themselves, so long will
they be helping to brew the hell-broth around which men will celebrate
the witches’ sabbath in the company of the bat-winged bevies of the
night.
There are more men led astray by “pure” than by “impure” women.
And not even those women who are pure in the true sense of the word
are free from blame in this. Woman—for whom love is a life-and-death
matter in a much deeper sense than for man—experiences on the approach
of love those tremblings that follow a sunrise for which one has
lain awake and waited. Her physico-psychical timidity takes on by
turns the expressions, incomprehensible to the man who loves, of dumb
avoidance, of abrupt change, of empty girlish giggling, of sullen
misunderstanding. And all that is contradictory—not that which is
mysterious—in woman stirs the unrest in a man’s blood.
The modern woman’s great distress has been the discovery of the
dissimilarity between her own erotic nature and that of man; or
rather, she has refused and still refuses to make this discovery and
thinks that only the custom of society—with its wholesome severity
towards her, its reckless leniency towards him—has brought about the
difference which exists and which she would abolish. But while one
group proposes to do so by demanding feminine chastity of the man, the
other would claim masculine freedom for the woman.
The book world is now full of works on purity, written by men as well
as women, of literary tone and otherwise. Now it is the story of a
woman who breaks with the man she loves when he confesses his past;
now that of a woman who forces her lover to marry another because the
latter has borne him a child; and so on to infinity. Finally there is
one who takes her life from grief over her husband’s past, which she
thinks will ruin their future. Literature is the roll of the drum which
announces the approach of the troop—that army of strong women who are
to educate men to chastity by denying them their love.
But will it really be the Amazons who will play the leading part in the
struggle against man’s erotic dualism? Will not perhaps wisdom be found
also in this case in the hope of being able to conquer the evil with
the good, not the evil with the worse, by allowing a man awakened by
love to the desire of unity to turn again to disunion?
Would not woman accomplish more in the renovation of morals if she
stayed with the man she loves, so as with her whole being to let him
learn how a woman can suffer and be made happy through a man? The means
of salvation for men suffering under erotic dualism may well be an
increase of tenderly chaste, delicately feeling, and kindly wise wives.
Even such a mother, sister, or friend is a strength to a man. But only
the wife who remains a mistress can be sure of victory.
It is true that she cannot efface her husband’s past. But she can
create together with him a new and stronger generation. The man who
knows what his beloved has suffered through his past; who has seen the
wings of her courage lose something of their power, her confidence
something of its smile, her joy something of its playfulness—he will
in time teach his sons that a man may certainly become once more
strong and healthy through happiness in love, but that he cannot win
so beautiful and sure a happiness as self-control can prepare; such
queenly pride as his victory might have given the loved one, he will
never see in her. But if woman is to help man’s struggle for purity,
she must for her share take another view of what has been degrading to
man’s nature and what has not.
A woman who marries a widower has to go through a pain which will be
deep in proportion as her love is personal. She will then wish to be
not only her husband’s last, but also his first love; she suffers from
all the memories they have not in common. She would fain have sat by
his cradle and received his first smile; she longs to have played with
him as a sister, to have shared as a friend his troubles and his joys.
She envies all who have been able to see him at those stages of his
life and in those spiritual conditions that she has not seen. Above all
she envies the woman who first saw him made happy by the love she gave
him.
But all these sufferings do not bring her to regard the beloved as
morally sunken, because before her he has been the husband of another
woman. And the same must hold good of earlier relations of love. The
man may have developed, through a former marriage or free connection,
his powers of giving a personal love, or he may, in the same way,
have lost them. If no baseness is connected with these earlier
experiences, if he has not degraded himself to voluntary division of
his erotic nature—and bought love is always such a degradation—or to
contemptible duplicity; if he has not treated any woman as a means, but
received and given personality, then he does not enter “impure” into
his marriage, even if he has not evidence of abstinence.
At present it is unfortunately often the case that men enter into
marriage with deep stains from earlier connections, and it is
this circumstance that gives the demand for purity its general
applicability.
During each new phase of the development of love women, probably
earlier and certainly more consciously than men, have connected the
demand for unity with the idea of love. The sense of unity is quite
another and a far later phenomenon than monogamy. The enforced fidelity
in monogamy, the voluntary fidelity in love, gave rise in woman
first to control of desire, then to the weakening of desire through
control. Thus by degrees erotic unity became with many women an organic
condition, or, as is significantly said, a physical necessity. Not with
all, not even with the majority, but still sufficiently frequently
to enable us to call the unity of soul and senses in love—as also
a lifelong fidelity in a single love—the provision of nature for
innumerable women, while with men both are still exceptions so rarely
to be met with that they are often called unnatural. But he who
concludes from this that one has only to demand the same of men for the
effect to be the same, is attributing the same effect to two different
causes. For the erotic conditions of man and woman are and will remain
different causes. The purity which a man is capable of attaining must
always, therefore, to a certain degree be different from a woman’s,
but not on that account of less worth. He will certainly remain more
polygamous than she, but this does not involve a division of himself
in the satisfaction of his erotic needs. Love possesses, nay, besets,
dominates, and determines woman’s whole being in an entirely different
way from man’s. He is more strongly possessed at rapidly passing
moments, by the erotic emotion, but at the same time he liberates
himself more quickly and completely. On the other hand, in the degree
in which a woman is womanly, is she completely determined by love. This
gives a unity, completeness, and equilibrium to her sensuousness which
man lacks. When he is warm, he often believes woman is cool; when he
sees her warm, he thinks that she is so in the same way as himself.
Women are undoubtedly to be found, shifting, like men, between sudden
ardour and abrupt chill, and these women are ever the most exciting
erotically. With the majority of women, however, love is, for the
reasons already given, a constant warmth, a never-quenched fervour. But
this makes the woman suffer through the man, who in the intervals of
his passion is so much more tranquil than she, so little capable of her
unremitting tenderness. Therefore she seldom finds herself occupying
his thoughts and feelings so completely as he occupies hers.
A woman has aptly said that “it is precisely woman’s greater
sensuousness that makes her less sensuous than man: on account of
motherhood—and all that it implies—she is sensuous, so to speak,
from head to foot and chronically, while man is so only acutely and
locally.” If one transfers one’s thoughts from erotics to motherhood,
the truth of this will at once be clear: the feeling of motherhood
is the most thoroughly sensuous and therefore the most thoroughly
soulful of emotions; the same transport of the senses in which the
mother exclaims that she could “eat” her child, expresses itself in the
affection which would prompt her to die for it. But the author just
quoted goes on to consider that even with men the erotic emotions could
be transposed or released in many ways besides the one which to most
of them still represents the whole expression of “love.” What Rousseau
revealed to his unbelieving contemporaries will perhaps one day become
true in a psycho-physical sense: that a look may fill a lover with
voluptuousness; that the great emotions are the chief conditions of
love’s happiness; that the lightest touch of the loved one’s hand gives
greater bliss than the possession of the most beautiful women without
love—feelings which all great lovers in all times have confirmed, and
as to which even the most contrary natures give the same testimony.
The peasant’s love, which knows nothing of caresses, comes lower in
the scale of happiness than that of the cultivated person, who finds
in love all the refined delights of the senses; and this again is far
below the happiness of those who even in the encounter of two ideas or
two moods can experience all the transport of love.
The conviction that sensuousness can only be controlled through being
spiritualised is what directs those women who are now hoping to
convert men, not to the duty of monogamy, but to the joy of unity.
Before woman’s will could thus become conscious, her long struggle
for liberation had to take place. Marriage had to cease to be a trade
among the upper classes, as prostitution still is among the hungry
lower classes. Love must have become free at least in the sense that
a woman had no choice but charity from her family or forced sale to
her husband; her personality must have attained consideration, not
only for her value as a woman and dignity as a human being, but also
individually. Not until—by her own labour and activity—she no longer
exclusively depended on a man’s courtship for both her livelihood and
her life’s destiny, did woman’s salvation come to be, not “that the
man wills” (Nietzsche), but that she herself can exercise her will.
Language already reflects the change of custom. We seldom hear it asked
nowadays of a woman: _Why has she not married?_ but it is all the more
frequently enquired: What has her love-story been, _since she has never
married_?
Here also the line of development is a zigzag. Women sometimes act as
though their whole liberation was of no avail. But in spite of much
that is contradictory, the evolution of love—above all through the new
woman’s claims of love—is to him who stands high enough to have a full
view of the situation, the most certain of realities.
Evidence of this evolution can be found in life as well as in
literature, where it now takes every kind of form, from experiences
translated into genuine poetry down to the productions which tempt one
to think that these people have only loved to get “copy” for a book.
The feminine fiction of the present day reminds one of a relief on a
sacrificial altar in the Roman Forum, where the ox, the sheep, and the
pig proceed in file to meet the knife. Hecatombs of these animals—in
the likeness of husbands or lovers—are now sacrificed to Eros by
the new woman. It may not be very long before the vow of fidelity is
exchanged for an oath of silence and the marriage contract contains a
provision that in case of a rupture love-letters are not to be used as
literature.
No doubt it will ever remain true that a living book on love is never
written with other ink than blood. But such books are not those
which resemble a trial in which the prosecutor, witness, judge, and
executioner are united in one person.
But whether powerful or weak, discreet or audacious, noble or
ignoble—the new woman’s books are always instructive to those who seek
to follow the course of love’s evolution.
The great danger to this evolution is that women never take sufficient
account of sensuousness, nor men of spirituality. And it is especially
woman who now one-sidedly applies her own erotic nature—with its warm
penetration, its completeness that frees it from temptation—as the
ethical and erotic standard for that of man with its sudden heat, its
dangerous incompleteness.
It is without doubt a feminine exaggeration to say that a “pure”
woman only feels the force of her sex’s need when she loves. But the
enormous difference between her and man is that she cannot obey this
need without loving. It is doubtless true that besides her love a
woman may have a calling in life. But the profound distinction between
her and man is at present this: that he more often gives of his best
as a creator than as a lover—while for her the reverse is nearly
always the case. And while thus man is appraised by himself and others
according to his work, woman in her heart values herself—and wishes to
be valued—according to her love. Not until this is fully appreciated
and working for happiness does she feel her own worth. It is no doubt
true that woman also wishes to be made happy by man through her senses.
But while this longing in her not unfrequently awakes long after she
already loves a man so that she could give her life for him, with man
the desire to possess a woman often awakes before he even loves her
enough to give his little finger for her. That with women love usually
proceeds from the soul to the senses and sometimes does not reach so
far; that with man it usually proceeds from the senses to the soul
and sometimes never completes the journey—this is for both the most
painful of the existing distinctions between man and woman. It is quite
certain that both man and woman are humbled by their great love, and
that the knowledge of having awakened reciprocal love turns even the
freethinker into a believer in miracles. But man often conceals his
humility behind a security which wounds the woman; she, on the other
hand, hides hers in an uncertainty which wounds the man. And from this
difference of instinct arises a new kind of complication, when man also
has begun to desire an unspoken understanding on the part of woman;
when he becomes convinced of her love only when she has guessed this
and loved his reticence itself. But against this conscious and refined
will of the modern man stands his hereditary instinct of a conqueror.
And no woman is more sure of all the older as well as all the newer
sufferings of love than she who really acts according to the words of
her lover: that he will accept love only from a woman who herself has
the courage to declare it to him. For, on the other side, the primitive
desire of being captured survives in woman. And therefore also her
strongest instincts come into conflict with her newly acquired courage
in action.
For all these reasons it is difficult for a person of the present day
to believe himself loved or to know that he is loved.
And it is this which will preserve to love its excitement, even
when the animal habits—with pursuit on one side and flight on the
other—have gradually ceased. Conflict and the intoxication of victory
will always form a part of the vital stimulation and pleasurable
emotion of love,—but they will be removed to a higher plane. Man’s
forward rush to win a woman who perhaps would not otherwise have
remarked him; woman’s turning aside to egg the man on, or else to
defend in some measure the independent decision of her feelings, will
be transformed by the desire of each to wait until the other has
chosen. The erotic tension will then be released in the contest for the
most refined expressions of sympathy, the most convincing assurances
of comprehension, the most rapidly vibrating sensitiveness to the
other’s moods, the fullest communication of confidence. Victory will
mean a constantly deeper penetration into the other’s nature, an ever
richer fulness and joy in the communication of one’s own; a constantly
growing faith as regards what is mysterious, and a like gratitude for
what is revealed. The stimulation will be renewed daily in moods the
transitions of which are as imperceptible as those of the evening sky
from the reddest gold to the purest white; in the border lines of
sympathy and antipathy, now fine as a straw, now broad as a river. It
will be renewed through the test of innumerable uniting and repellent
emotions, as rapidly and irrevocably decisive as the fall of a star in
space, or of a silver piece in the river.
And this tension of married life will not be relaxed as now by the
puffed-up arrogance of proprietorship on the part of the man or by
dull complaisance on that of the woman. Since all sense of happiness
is connected with the exertion of force to attain an end and with
the equilibrium that results from its attainment, it has been the
misfortune of love that courtship has absorbed all the tension, and
married life the subsequent equilibrium. Only the sense of impending
loss—through life or through death—has, as a rule, evoked a new
spiritual tension. This, for reasons mentioned above, has especially
concerned the husband. Wives have often suffered long from the
self-satisfied comfort of the daily life of marriage before they have
resigned the peace of consummation, the equilibrium without movement,
which was their dream of happiness.
But now women will no longer resign, nor allow themselves to be cheated
of life. More and more their demand for a new love becomes one with the
demand for a new marriage, the chief value of which will not, as now,
consist in “security and calm.”
Woman knows—and man still more—that it is in periods of calm, when
all vital stimulation is wanting, that the temptation comes to seek it
in new relations. But at the same time they are beginning to see that
when one and the same feeling affords an unceasing excitement—through
the desire of constantly attaining higher conditions of that
feeling—then such temptation becomes of necessity less and less
dangerous, simply because the human soul can only with great difficulty
transfer the spiritual wealth it has accumulated in one place. Love
in its impersonal form is movable capital, easily realised. In its
personal form, on the other hand, it is fixed property, which increases
in value the more one sinks in it, and which, owing to its very nature,
is difficult to disperse.
Whenever a woman has captivated a man with a lifelong fascination, the
secret has been that he has never exhausted her; that she “has not
been one, but a thousand” (G. Heiberg); not a more or less beautiful
variation on the eternal theme of the female sex, but a music in
which he has found the wealth of inexhaustibility, the enticement of
impenetrability, while she has given him an incomparable happiness
of the senses. The more the modern woman acquires courage for a
love as rich in the senses as in the soul, the more complicated and
self-inclosed her personality becomes, the more will she obtain that
power which is now only the fortunate advantage of the exceptional.
Man tells woman that her new way of love is opposed not only to man’s
nature but to the welfare of the new generation.
She answers that great love doubtless betrays a childish lack of
understanding in all departments of worldly wisdom, but that in its own
sphere—with all its riddles and problems—it is godlike wisdom, the
gift of divining, the power of working miracles; that the only thing
needful in order that love may re-create the race is that it shall
become an even greater vital force, through mankind investing it with
more and more of its spiritual power.
Even at the present day couples are to be found who are inspired by
great love. They show an insatiable desire for all the riches of life,
so as to have the means of being regally lavish towards each other.
Neither defrauds the other of so much as a dewdrop. The fervour they
give one another, the freedom they possess through one another, make
the space that surrounds them warm and ample. Love is constantly giving
them new impulses, new powers and new employment for their powers,
whether these are directed inwards to home life or outwards to that of
society. And thus the happiness, which for themselves is the source of
life, becomes also a tributary stream by which the happiness of all
is raised. The power of great love to enhance a person’s value for
mankind can only be compared with the glow of religious faith or the
creative joy of genius, but surpasses both in universal life-enhancing
properties. Sorrow may sometimes make a person more tender towards the
sufferings of others, more actively benevolent than happiness with its
concentration upon self. But sorrow never led the soul to those heights
and depths, to those inspirations and revelations of universal life, to
that kneeling gratitude before the mystery of life, to which the piety
of great love leads it.
Like faith, this piety sanctifies all things. It gives significance to
attention bestowed on one’s self, since
_... If I am dear to some one else
Then must I be to myself more dear._
It combines the most trifling things of life into an intelligent whole.
He who is loved and loves in this way bears the same stamp as the
Christian mystic, who grows ever clearer and yet more rich in mystery;
ever fuller of life and yet calmer; ever more introspective and yet
more radiant.
There are some who think that this state is visionary and unnatural.
But the truth—for everyone who has beheld it—is that _le vrai amour
est simple comme un bas relief antique_. Such a relief, which before
all others corresponds to the image, is to be found in the Naples
museum. It shows a man and a woman, standing still on either side of
a tree. An artist of antiquity may have already foreseen all the
significance that a son of our time interpreted, when he placed a youth
and a maiden beneath the tree of life with a cloven apple in their
hands: _they divided the apple of life and ate it together_....
For a couple who share it thus, everyday life will scintillate with
little delights as a wheat-field at midsummer with cornflowers; and
the high days will be white with joy as a spring garden with fruit
blossoms. A couple who live thus will be able to play so that beyond
their sport will always be the calm of tenderness; to smile so that
behind their smiles will always lie an easily-aroused seriousness.
Unless death interrupts them they will thus build up their life
together as the Gothic cathedrals were built: buttress upon buttress,
arch above arch, ornament within ornament, until finally the gilding of
the topmost spire catches the last rays of the sunset.
Thus great love already gives to two human beings what only completed
development can give to mankind as a whole: unity between senses and
soul, desire and duty, self-assertion and self-devotion, between the
individual and the race, the present moment and the future.
This condition—in which every advantage gained becomes a gift and
every gift a profit; in which are united a continual emotion and a
calm peace—is even now that which dreamers await as that of the third
kingdom.[2]