Can we ever find perfect love? Is it not like exercise of the body? You
can develop it to a certain point, but not beyond without danger and
very slowly with continued patient work. Do we not need exercise of the
soul? I do not know. Often I feel I know nothing. To some men and women
it is all simple enough, a woman is just a woman and a man is a man. The
trouble begins when any woman becomes the one desired woman and any man
the one desired man.
There is gain and development in this selective tendency of Love--and
yet, if I am right, there is terrible danger lurking in the application
of this egoistic spiritual view.
It is, little as we may believe it, this search for personal spiritual
happiness that often so greatly endangers marriage. Searching always for
this perfect mate, we must find a partner corresponding in every respect
to our ideal. The man in Mr. Hardy's novel, "The Well Beloved," spent
forty years in trying to do this, and his ultimate failure is typical of
the experience of most of us. Fools and blind, we neither understand nor
seek the cause of our failure. We are like little lost dogs searching
for a master. We seek without ceasing some pilot passion to which we can
surrender our heavy burden of freedom. The dry-rot destruction of this
individualistic age has worm-eaten into marriage; we have sought to
drown pain and the exhaustion of our souls, to fill emptiness with
pleasure, to place the personal good in marriage above the racial duty,
to forget responsibility, to arrogate for the unimportant Self, and, in
so doing, inevitably we have turned away from essential things. Can't
you see that we are so terribly tired of this search for something that
we never find? Our adventures are the tricks of the child to cloud our
eyes to our own emptiness and pain.
V
_Marriage is not a religion to us: it is a sport._
I say this quite deliberately. I am sure we know better how to engage a
servant, how to buy a house, how to set up in business--how, indeed, to
do every unimportant thing in life better than we know how to choose a
partner in marriage. We require a character with our cook or our butler,
we engage an expert to test the drains of our house, we study and work,
and pass examinations to prepare ourselves for business, but in marriage
we take no such sensible precautions, we even pride ourselves that we do
_not_ take them.
We speak of _falling_ in love and we _do fall_. There really is
something ludicrous in our attitude. We English are everlasting children
in an everlasting nursery; we so fiercely refuse seriousness towards the
fundamental emotions. The conventions are sacred; nothing else matters.
We stand for purity, which means with women ignorance, and with men
silence and discretion.
Men and women of our earlier England were more natural. Our novelists
then frankly said that every girl looked with special interest on a
well-formed man. There was no conviction marking this as improper, "the
baser side of love." We have grown more and more distorted and
demagnetized from the natural needs of our nature. We try to cast
discredit on our appetites and the body. We have lost the old firm
tradition of marriage and its duties, and we have succeeded in putting
nothing fixed in its place.
Now, I resent the romantic idea that marriage should be a hazardous
mystery--at least to the woman. The more shrewdly girls can judge men
and men can judge girls (not by mere talking and abstract discussion of
sex problems, there has been too much of that kind of futility), but the
more calmly the young lovers can find agreement with each other, the
more simply they can accept the facts of marriage, the more chance there
will be of permanency of affection.
The conventions of to-day are false, are bound up with concealments or
with an equally untruthful openness. It does not, however, follow from
this that mere destruction of the conventions will be enough; that
everyone's unguided ignorance will lead to success and freedom. The
_laissez faire_ system is as false in the realm of marriage as it is in
industry and economics. While equally false, as I have tried to show, is
the too spiritual view of marriage that love can be found only in
perfect harmony of character between the wife and the husband, and is
independent of duty. It is true that love differs from lust in its
deeper insight into the personality, deeper interest in the character,
as opposed to the inexpressive smooth outline and "unbrained" physical
beauty of the body. But character and intellect may be studied and loved
as self-centeredly, as much with a view to the enjoyment of mental
excitement, as the body itself. A wider distinction must be drawn before
we can find guidance.