of freedom. But freedom, as everybody who understands either the
meaning of the word or the value of the thing knows, raises problems
instead of settling them. It is true that our attitude has changed.
There is hardly a serious contemporary novel which does not take for
granted things which would have outraged even liberal thinkers of
the past century, and the changes have been mostly in the direction
of clarification. It would be impossible for any one to-day to fail
to see, as George Eliot failed to see, that the natural working of
the “inevitable moral law” which punished Hetty Sorrel was neither
inevitable nor natural. The things which happened to her came entirely
from society and not at all from nature, so that the story which
the author meant to be a tragedy of the ineluctable becomes merely
a description of human stupidity. So, too, we are clearer on other
things; we are not quite so hopelessly at sea as we once were when it
comes to distinguishing between frigidity and chastity or purity and
prudishness. But these things mean only that more choices are open to
us, that we have come to see that sexual conduct cannot be guided or
judged by a few outwardly applied standards, and that, accordingly, the
conduct of life has been made more thrillingly difficult.
Most sex novels of the past have been concerned chiefly with what might
be called the right to love. They have combated an extremely old idea
which Christianity found congenial and embodied in the conception of
love as a part of the curse pronounced upon man at the Fall, and hence
at best a necessary evil. They have been compelled solemnly to assure
us that the early Christian Fathers were wrong in assuming that the
human race would have been better off if it had been able to propagate
itself by means of some harmless system of vegetation, and they have
had to fly in the face of all laws and social customs which are seen,
if examined closely, to rest upon the assumption that desire is merely
a dangerous nuisance, fatal to efficiency and order, and hence to be
regimented at any cost. It is now pretty generally admitted among the
educated class that love is legitimate, even that it has an æsthetic as
well as a utilitarian function. We have got back to the point which
Ovid had reached some two thousand years ago of realizing that there is
an art of love. During the next quarter of a century fiction will be
concerned, I think, more with the failure or success of individuals to
attain this art than with the exposition of theses which most accept.
No doubt some of the more naïvely enthusiastic crusaders really
believed that as soon as man was freed from the more grossly stupid
restrictions from without and from the artificially cultivated
inhibitions within, love would become simple and idyllic, but one
needs look only at the books of D. H. Lawrence or Aldous Huxley to
be relieved of this stupid delusion. The characters of both of these
authors have long ago ceased to care what law or society thinks and
they are surely untroubled by traditional asceticism, but their
problems are not less acute. Indeed it is just because these novelists
are so completely concerned with love as a personal matter that they
are the freshest of those contemporary writers with whom sex is the
dominant interest. Each is concerned with something fundamental--the
one with the problem of the adjustment of personalities and the other
with the evaluation of sexual love.
If by “immoral” is meant “tending to excite lubricity,” then nothing
could be more absurd than the opinion, apparently held by some, that
the books of these men are immoral. They are so completely unable to
lose themselves carelessly in passion and so insistent upon the need of
adjusting it somehow to the other interests of life that they strike
one as more like saints than like gallants, and their books are far
more chilling than inflammatory. Huxley and Joyce try to laugh sex
away, but their scorn of the flesh suggests Erasmus more than Rabelais,
and, as for Lawrence, his novels constitute so solemn a warning that
one imagines him as thoroughly bored with the exigencies of passion and
more likely to make his disciples celibates than debauchés.
In Lawrence’s morbidly sensitive and exaggeratedly individualistic
characters one sees as through a magnifying-glass the thousand
impingements of personality upon personality which make love more and
more difficult as it becomes more intimate and personal. His people,
like Schopenhauer’s porcupines, are continually coming together for
warmth only to find themselves pricked by one another’s quills and to
part snarling, so that his perpetual prayer is a “Lord deliver us from
this need which can be neither stilled nor satisfied.” And abnormal
though he is, his abnormality is one of degree only, for when sexual
love is developed beyond the impulse of the animal and desires the
contact of spirit as well as body that contact is bound to be both
incomplete and painful.
Nor is the even more fundamental problem with which Aldous Huxley is
concerned likely ever to receive a permanent or a general solution.
He is in search of love, but he can find only ridiculous and obscene
biological facts, for love, like God and the other most important human
possessions, does not exist. It is an illusion created by the effort of
the imagination to transform the unsatisfactory materials which life
has furnished it into something acceptable to the soul; but being an
illusion, it is unstable and perpetually tending, if not created anew,
to dissolve into its elements. The racial need for the continuation
of the species and the individual need for the satisfaction of a
physiological impulse exist, but they are hard, unsatisfying realities,
and the struggle of mankind is to create some fiction which will as far
as possible include and at the same time transcend them.
And nothing derogatory is, of course, meant by the word “fiction.” All
that distinguishes man from nature is such a fiction, and it is by his
insistent belief in these imaginary things that civilization has been
created. All of Mr. Huxley’s books are confessions, first cynically
triumphant and then despairing, of his inability to be poet or mystic
or ironist enough to achieve this transcendence and find in his
animal heritage a satisfaction for his spiritual needs. Like everyone
else, he is compelled to love, and love implies a certain amount of
idealization. How, he asks in effect, is he to poetize this ridiculous
function, which he shares with the beasts, and concerning which science
is constantly presenting us with an increasing amount of disillusioning
knowledge? Exercising the most perverse ingenuity in confronting
romance with biology and in establishing the identity (in the realm of
fact) of love and lust, he has continually tracked the trail of the
beast into the holy of holies--but only because it hurt him so much to
find it there. The obscenities in which he seems to revel are defiances
of the inner idealist who has dared to assimilate the loathsome
trivialities of sex into something capable of satisfying spiritual
desires. When he sings one of his philosopher’s songs or when, in
“Antic Hay,” he describes some particularly revolting orgy there is
nothing new in the psychological state which provokes his obscenity.
His attitude is a result of failure to reconcile physical fact with
spiritual feeling. He is not far from Huysmans, who ended “A Rebours”
with the words: “For the man who has written such a book there are only
two alternatives--a pistol or the foot of the cross.” Only of course
Huysmans was wrong. Anatole France and James Branch Cabell are not less
sophisticated, but through the perfection of sophistication they have
achieved a peaceful irony in which they can worship a non-existent
God and believe again in the illusions they create. Huxley, too
sophisticated for simple faith and too downright for ironic worship, is
lost.
When the conception of love is, as it has tended to be in modern
times, legalistic, these problems are submerged. As long as marriage
is a matter of contract, the importance of the inward harmony of
personalities is of the slightest, for children may be begotten
and reared whether the parents love or hate. As long as passion is
generally conceded to be but a shameful concession to unregenerate
humanity, the average man is not likely to be concerned if he finds
that the ideal of the poets is not realized in his own nuptial couch.
But when love is free and unashamed then it is made ten times more
difficult, for lives are recognized as frank failures which once would
have seemed useful and satisfactory. Fiction, too, becomes, not more
interesting, but more important. It ceases completely to be what it
always tends to be when opinion is fixed, namely, a mere illustration
of the working out of social or moral “laws”; it becomes frankly the
record of individual souls in search of a successful way of life. It
records, no doubt, more failures than successes, but it furnishes the
best and perhaps only really important material for the study of that
art of life which grows ever more complicated as we demand that it be
more complete and beautiful.
Can Men and Women Be Friends?
By Floyd Dell
Floyd Dell
_was born at Barry, Illinois, June 28th, 1887. Is the author of several
novels and collections of essays including “Janet March,” a story of
a young woman and her adjustment to modern standards. His latest book
is “Looking at Life.” Other books are “Women as World Builders,” 1913;
“Were You Ever a Child?” 1919; “Moon Calf,” 1920; “The Briary Bush,”
1921._
CAN MEN AND WOMEN BE FRIENDS?
BY FLOYD DELL
Friendship between men and women is rather a new thing in the history
of the world. Friendship depends upon equality and choice, and there
has been very little of either in the relations of the sexes, up
to the present. A woman does not choose her male relatives, nor is
she according to archaic family laws their equal; motives other
than personal choice might lead her to become a man’s wife; wholly
impersonal reasons might place her in the relationship of kept
mistress. Only in her rôle of paramour was there any implication of
free choice; and even here there was no full equality, not even of
danger. None of these customary relationships of the past can be said
to have fostered friendship between men and women. Doubtless it did
exist, but under difficulties.
Family bonds, however, are being more and more relaxed, women are no
longer the wards of their male relatives, and friendship with a father
or brother is more than ever possible. Further, the free personal
choice which marked only the romantic amours of the age of chivalry is
now popularly regarded in America as essential to any decent marriage,
while the possibility of divorce tends to make free choice something
besides a mere youthful illusion. More than ever before, husbands and
wives are friends.
At the same time the intensity of friendships between people of the
same sex appears to be diminishing. This intensity, in its classic
instances, as in Greece, we now regard as an artificial product, the
result of the segregation of the sexes and the low social position
of women. As women become free and equal with men such romantic
intensity of emotion finds a more biologically appropriate expression.
Friendships between people of the same sex must to-day compete on the
one hand with romantic love and on the other with the more fascinating
though often less enduring friendships which can now be enjoyed between
men and women. Neglect of these latter opportunities is coming to be
regarded as a kind of spiritual cowardice, or at least as a failure in
enterprise.
The influences of the machine age, so destructive to fixed
authoritarian relationships, appear to foster the growth of friendship
between the sexes; so much so that we may expect it to become, in its
further developments, a characteristic social feature of the age that
lies immediately before us.
Friendship will become a more and more important aspect of marriage
itself; but, except in the effects of its wider spread, this will
hardly be a new thing--we have friendships between husbands and
wives now. Nor will extra-marital friendships between men and women
be precisely a new thing. What will be new, furnishing us with an
interesting theme for sociological speculation, are the conventions
which will gradually come into existence to give social protection and
dignity to extra-marital friendships.
Conventions are, doubtless, always rather ridiculous, inevitably a
shackle upon the free motions of the soul, being imposed by fear.
But it will be remembered that we, in America, with a vast amount
of freedom of intersexual association, have thus far only begun to
dispense with the locks and bars and whippings and chaperons which
were the appurtenances of a physical segregation of the sexes; the
vast paraphernalia of psychic segregation, including sexual taboos
which hark back to the primeval darkness, are with us still. Our minds
are habituated to unreasonable fears in all matters concerning the
relations of the sexes. For a long time, extra-marital friendships
of men and women may be expected to be hedged about with elaborate
and specific permissions, for the sake of keeping them under social
control. Yet these conventions may be very convenient; and however
irksome they may seem to the free spirits of a future day, they may
still be such as would appear to us generously libertarian.
To-day, in the absence of such conventions, it does not suffice that
a man and woman, too well married to be afraid of extra-marital
friendships, grant them to each other by private treaty; relatives,
friends, and neighbors do not fail to be duly alarmed. Extra-marital
friendship exists in an atmosphere of social suspicion which a few
conventions would go far to alleviate.
As an example in a different field, the convention with regard to
dancing may be adduced. If dancing were not a general custom, if it
were the enlightened practice of an advanced few, how peculiar and
suspicious would seem the desire of Mr. X and Mrs. Y to embrace each
other to music; and how scandalized the neighbors would be to hear that
they _did_! No one would rest until the pair had been driven into an
elopement.
We build huge palaces for the kind of happy communion which dancing
furnishes; we tend more and more to behave like civilized beings
about the impulses which are thus given scope. We are less socially
hospitable to the impulses of friendship between men and women.
In friendship there are many moods; but the universal rite of
friendship is _talk_. Talk needs no palaces for its encouragement;
it is not an expensive affair; it would seem to be well within the
reach of all. Yet it isn’t. For the talk of friendship requires
privacy--though the privacy of a table for two in a crowded and noisy
restaurant will suffice; and it requires time. Such talk does not
readily adjust itself to the limitations of the dinner hour. It is a
flower slow in unfolding; and it seems to come to its most perfect
bloom only after midnight. But, unfortunately, not every restaurant
keeps open all night. It is satisfied with two comfortable chairs;
a table to lean elbows on is good, too; in winter an open fire,
where friendly eyes may stare dreamily into the glowing coals--that
is very good; hot or cold drinks according to the season, and a
cigarette--these are almost the height of friendship’s luxury. These
seem not too much to ask. Yet the desire for privacy and uncounted
hours of time together is, when considered from that point of view,
scandalous in its implications; quite as much so as the desire of Mr.
X and Mrs. Y to embrace each other to music. However, Mr. X and Mrs. Y
do, under the ægis of a convention, indulge their desire and embrace
each other to their heart’s content with the full approval of civilized
society; and it seems as though another convention might grow up, under
the protection of which Mr. X and Mrs. Y might sit up and talk all
night without its seeming queer of them.
Queer, at the least, it does seem nowadays, except under the
conventions of courtship; friends who happen to be married to each
other can of course talk comfortably in bed. These bare facts are
sufficient to explain why so many men and women who really want to
be friends and sit up all night occasionally and talk find it easy
to believe that they are in love with each other. They find it all
the easier to believe this, because friendship between the sexes is
usually spiced with some degree of sexual attraction. But a degree of
sexual attraction which might have kept a friendship forever sweet
may prove unequal to the requirements of a more serious and intimate
relationship. Disillusionment is the penalty, at the very least.
Society could well afford to grant more freedom to friendship between
men and women, and save the expense of a large number of broken hearts.
It is worth while to wonder if a good deal of “romance” is not, after
all, friendship mistaking itself for something else; or rather, finding
its only opportunity for expression in that mistake. Among civilized
people, after the romance has ended, the friendship remains. It may
perhaps have been worth while to imagine oneself in love, in order to
enjoy a friendship; but it seems rather a wasteful proceeding.
Yet those who, taking a merely economical view of the situation,
attempt to enjoy such friendships without becoming involved or
involving others in such waste, may with some embarrassment
discover--what Mrs. Grundy could have told them all along--that
friendship and sexual romance may sometimes be difficult to relegate
to previously determined boundaries. Friendship between the sexes may,
if only for a moment, seem to demand the same tokens of sincerity
as romantic love. Does not this fact threaten the traditional,
jealously-guarded dignity of marriage?
Perhaps it does. At present, in any conflict of claims between a
marriage and a friendship, there is “nothing to arbitrate”; marriage
has all the rights, friendship none. If the rights of friendship are
to be at all considered and protected, marriage may have to yield
something. It may not be good manners for husbands and wives to be
jealous of the quite possible momentary exuberances of each other’s
friendships; it may be that such incidents will be regarded as being
within the discretion of the persons immediately concerned, and not
quite proper subjects for inquiry, speculation, or comment by anybody
else.
And this might have an effect unsuspected by those whom such a prospect
of liberty would most alarm to-day. When a moment’s rashness does not
necessarily imply red ruin and the breaking up of homes, when sex is
freed to a degree from the sense of overwhelming social consequences,
it may well become a matter of more profound personal consequence; and
with nothing to fear except the spoiling of their friendship, men and
women in an ardent friendship may yet prefer talk to kisses.
“But what if they don’t?” A complete answer to that question, from the
Utopian point of view, would take us far afield from the subject of
friendship; yet some further answer may seem to be required, if only by
way of confessing to Mrs. Grundy that the problem is not so simple as
it may seem. Well, then, out of many possibilities which the future
holds, I offer this one for what it may be worth. Such friendships,
let us agree, tend to merge insensibly into romantic sexual love.
But if marriage may be conceived as yielding some of its traditional
rights, extra-marital romance may well be called upon for similar
concessions. The first thing that extra-marital romance might be asked
to surrender would be its intolerable and fatuous airs of _holiness_.
Yes, “holiness” is the word--a holiness all the more asserted by such
extra-marital lovers because their relations are likely to be taken
disrespectfully by a stupid world. Oh, unquestionably, if you ask
them, never was any legal and conventional love so high and holy as
this romantic passion of theirs! Its transcendental holiness calls
for sacrifices. So they sacrifice themselves--and, incidentally,
others--to it. Anything less, they feel, would be cowardly. They must
not palter with these sacred emotions--not even by the exercise of
their dormant sense of humor!--So it is to-day: but perhaps in a future
where extra-marital romance is made room for with a tender and humorous
courtesy, it may give up these preposterous and solemn airs, and
actually learn to smile at its illusions--illusions which will still
give the zest of ultimate danger to relationships of merely happy and
light-hearted play. Thus life will continue to be interesting.
As for the talk of friendship, my Utopian speculations uncover for
me no respect in which the thing itself can be improved upon. The
circumstances can be made happier, the attitude of society can
foster it; but the talk of friendship has already reached a splendid
perfection beyond which my imagination is unable to soar. At its best
it has, despite its personal aspect, an impersonal beauty; it is a
poignant fulfillment of those profound impulses which we call curiosity
and candor; it serves human needs as deep as those which poetry and
music serve, and is in some sense an art like them. The art exists, and
it remains only for the future to give it an adequate hospitality.
Love and Marriage
By Ludwig Lewisohn
Ludwig Lewisohn
_author of “Up Stream,” “Don Juan” and other books and contributing
editor of_ The Nation, _is now studying conditions in Eastern Europe
and Palestine. Was born May 30th, 1882, in Berlin--came to America
in 1890--B.A. and M.A. College of Charleston, S. C., 1901--M. A.
Columbia, 1903--Editorial staff, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1910-1911.
Instructor in German, University of Wisconsin, and Literature at
Ohio State University. Dramatic Editor_, Nation, _1919. Author of
“The Broken Snare,” 1908;--“A Night in Alexandria,” 1909; “German
Style--an Introduction to the Study of German Prose,”--1910; “The
Modern Drama,” 1915; “The Spirit of Modern German Literature,” 1916;
“The Poets of Modern France,” 1918; Editor with W. P. Trent of “Letters
of an American Farmer,” 1909; “A Book of Modern Criticism,” 1909.
Translator--Feuchlersleben’s “Health & Suggestion,” 1910; Sudermann’s
“Judean City,” 1911; Halbe’s “Youth,” Hirschfeld’s “The Mothers,”
1916; Latzko’s “The Judgment of Peace,” 1919; Wassermann’s “World’s
Illusion.” Editor and chief translator of Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Dramatic
Works, 1916, 1917; Contributing Editor, Warner’s Library of World’s
Best Literature. His latest book is “The Creative Life,” 1924._
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
BY LUDWIG LEWISOHN
Utopia is the loveliest of all countries; it is also the farthest away.
One may make magnificent generalizations concerning the future of the
relations of the sexes; one may set down truths that are theoretically
unanswerable. Only one will change nothing, help not a single soul. Let
me cling to a few humble facts....
So far as any one can see the habit of one man living with one woman
will persist. The young will hear of nothing else, since they are
under the sway of romantic passion which is, subjectively, exclusive
and final; those who are older will hear of nothing else because
experience has shown this method of life capable of securing the
healthiest freedom from preoccupation with sex and the maximum amount
of ordered activity. To be a rake or even a fastidious “varietist” is
the costliest of occupations. Rational monogamy is in no danger. The
trouble lies elsewhere; it lies in the fact that current notions of
monogamy are, I use the word advisedly, insane.
Local bill-board advertisements of moving pictures have recently shown
a ball-room in which an irate gentleman in evening-dress grasped the
shoulder of another gentleman who looked crushed and crest-fallen. With
an inimitable gesture of moral indignation the first gentleman pointed
to a quivering female on the other side of the room. The caption of
this stirring lithograph was “His Forgotten Wife.” The exquisite
absurdity of this picture is clear. It is significant of the way in
which we are all brow-beaten by the sodden nonsense of the tribe that
it took me some minutes of reflection to come upon the unreason of the
thing. If the crushed looking gentleman had forgotten the lady, she was
not, of course, his wife and could never have truly been. If we are
dealing with a euphemism and are to understand that he wanted to forget
her, she may once have been his wife, but had, quite obviously, ceased
to be.