equal folly, and almost greater moral danger, of the opposite dogma:
that self-expression for its own sake, the mere putting a moment's
apparent happiness above all other claims or aims, without considering
the future, or seeking to find one's real self, _is a false and evil
ideal_.
_Miss Delafield gives the "new" morality a fair, and even an eloquent,
hearing, chooses a case where all the circumstances seem combined for
its support, and then exposes the fallacy of its reasoning._
VIII
WHAT, THEN, IS THIS NEW LOVE? IT IS SEX-CONFLICT.
The most obvious, and the most sincere, form of self-expression rests
on pure emotion—a natural and healthy impulse. The right thus to
express oneself belongs, as we acknowledge to-day, to women no less
than men.
But, largely misled by their over-insistence upon the physical in human
nature, too many modern thinkers confuse fierce excitement with deep
emotion. Also seeing, and wisely exalting, the glory of youth's dream,
they sanction, and even advise, thoughtless haste and action on every
impulse.
It is now taught, not only that physical passion stands for, or rather
_is_, the Love of which it forms only a part; but that the fire of
sudden desire is the only true, or natural, expression of love itself.
Such a view has been, again and again, formally stated with quite
serious, honest intent by our leading novelists. It is assumed,
without argument or justification, in most second-rate popular fiction;
thereby reaching and poisoning the very readers least qualified to
resist evil influence and, as we have shown, particularly ill-equipped
to-day.
For Mr. Cannan's Matilda love is a "kiss of the lips, a surrender to
the flood of perilous feeling, a tampering with forces that might or
might not sweep you to ruin; a matter of fancy, dalliance, and risk."
His Cora, the "natural light of love," "kissed" her lover's "eyes, his
lips, his ears, and bit the tip of his nose until it was bruised and
swollen."
He may well ask: "Does any man want any woman, or any woman any man?
Are these wild flashes more than things of a moment? . . . Is not every
woman any man's woman? Is not every man any woman's man? Why property?
Why impossible pledges? Why pretend so much that is obviously false?
Why build upon a lie and call it sacred? . . . Why do men and women live
hideously together? . . . Why, and why again?"
With a cynic's frankness Mr. W. L. George answers why:
"Men may have us," said his Victoria, "as breeders and housekeepers,
but the mistress is the root of all." This is not, as one might
suppose, a confession of sin; for "Love is outside marriage, because
love's too big to stay inside . . . don't you see that of itself it
carries the one sanctity that may exist between men and women? That it
cannot be bound because it is as light airs, imponderable; so fierce
that all things it touches it burns, so sweet that whosoever has drunk
shall ever more be thirsty."
_Because a man soon tires of such burning sweetness, he must satisfy
his thirst elsewhere._
Woman, indeed, he is annoyed to find, is still unable to "understand
love in its neurotic moods; she cannot yet understand that a greater
intensity might creep into passion if one _knew_ it to be transient,
that one might love more urgently, with greater fierceness, if one
_knew_ that soon the body, temple of that love, would fade, wither,
die, then decay . . . that haste to live made living more intense."
WHAT, THEN, IS THIS LOVE. IT IS A SEX-CONFLICT; wherein the man "has
to make war, to conquer." The woman begs him "to hurt her, to set his
imprint upon her"; even when "about to conquer" she must wear "the
slave look." This is precisely the woman he also finds, more crudely
phrased, in the "mean streets": "If yer lives alone nothing 'appens
. . . stuck in the mud like. But when yer've got a 'usband, things 'as
wot they calls zest . . . if 'e do come 'ome . . . p'r'aps 'e'll give
yer one in the mouf. Variety, that's wot it is, variety. . . . He may
lift his elbow a bit and all that, but anyhow 'e's a man." If he does
_not_ come home, love means "waking up in the middle of the night and
running about the room like a crazy thing because she'd dreamed he was
with some other girl." In the afternoon it meant "feeling all soft and
swoony just because he helped you into the 'bus by the elbow."
More thoughtful or intelligent young ladies come "to think there's no
such thing as a pure-minded girl." Marriage is "merely evidence that
the girl has held out" and "only a dodge for getting rid of being in
love."
Mr. Hugh Walpole once very sensibly remarked that "people don't want
to know what a young ass thinks about life if he can't tell a story."
Perhaps, if such muddled ideas were only expressed by these solemn and
very intellectual young men (who, however, can "tell a story"), we
might be disposed to leave the matter in their hands and trust to time
for their enlightening.
But, unfortunately, the same false "new love" is about us everywhere.
It is a commonplace to boys and girls, and has crept into the great
majority of second-rate, easily read, novels published to-day.
What does it really mean? How has it come about?
In the first place, the new thinkers have done precisely what they
are always protesting against. They confuse "marriage" with the legal
contract. A great part of their abuse, half their plea for the greater
sincerity of free love, has no standing against spiritual marriage,
founded on true love.
Nevertheless the argument against _permanency_ remains. The demand for
continual new adventure in emotion (set out to condone both intimacy
without marriage or disloyalty to marriage) does rest on something
which has the appearance of truth and reason.
The fiery, swooning passion of mere bodily impulse _does not last_.
But even physical passion, the sex-urge, means more than that. Our
new teachers ignore what all experience has proved and science
taught—that _every_ physical impulse—whether to eat or drink, work
or play—demands restraint for its fruition. The value of self-control
is no less of the body than the soul.
It is the fever-bred passion, born of stimulated sex-consciousness,
that must snatch at every chance for expression and demands constant
change. This, indeed, does weary and satiate the spirit, weaken bodily
vigour, and destroy manhood. Bid us look for, welcome, and artificially
develop every first faint stirring of the sex-urge, and you make us
slaves indeed. If you consider less fundamental desires and pleasures
of the body, you will admit at once that feverish, uncontrolled,
and constant straining to put out all your strength at once, can
produce no kind of good sportsman. Who more rigorously disciplines
himself than the athlete? The power to be passionate, to express the
love of the flesh, dies before it has ever been really attained,
for those who always at once yield to mere craving. Their "deeply
sensual associations" are "always robbed of mystery and delight when
long-balked attraction comes to a tardy blooming."
And as Scott told us long ago, "It is no small aggravation of this
jaded and uncomfortable state of mind, that the voluptuary cannot
renounce the pursuits with which he is satiated, but must continue, for
his character's sake, or from the mere force of habit, to take all the
toil, fatigue, and danger of the chase, while he has so little real
interest in the termination."
That is, they quickly lose the very pleasures which were their object
and their excuse.
_I have known, or read of, no more miserable and weak human beings than
many of the men and women in modern fiction._
Does it then follow that spiritual love, a true union of souls, for
which we claim a higher and a more lasting happiness, is a thing apart,
wherein the physical must be kept under, put aside; or, if conceded
to our common weakness (the penalty of our earthly existence), should
be calmly and occasionally indulged, only under official licence,
in secret as a shameful deed? Certainly _not_. The pure know far
more of passion than the loose. But, as other bodily pleasure, i.e.,
self-expression, gains strength and depth by taking responsibility for
itself, "ordering" itself; so, above all, does our strongest, and most
ultimate, physical need.
It is the true passion, naturally found in comradeship and love,
spontaneously constant and controlled, which will complete man's
vitality, deepen and strengthen, while it steadies, physique.
Spiritually the one expresses itself by _taking_, the other achieves
itself by _giving_.
The biggest adventure in life, the deepest and truest feelings do,
actually, involve that emotional abandon, or complete self-forgetting,
which modernists exalt. But the giving away of one's whole self,
that is, expressing one's whole self in passionate service, is _not_
achieved by sudden, untested intimacy. It can only come, or grow,
for those who seek understanding of each other, suffer the first
mystery—(stirring the wonder dreams of youth)—to unfold and reveal
itself in steady, controlled devotion to the vision of romance. Then,
and only then (soon or late, as the individual self prompts), he shall
dare, _because he knows_.
In other words, the physical passion, in which to-day men find the
_birth_ of love, belongs in nature to maturity and completion, when man
has gained the courage to be himself and express himself. It is the
harvest of pure romance, only possible to those who have earned full
knowledge of themselves and of each other.
The humdrum pictures of insincere marriage, with which fiction is
crowded to-day, come from mistakes or spiritual failure to be one's
best self, _not_ from constancy and faith. The need to perpetually
revive intense emotion with a new mistress can never be felt in a true
marriage. It _is_ inevitable for so-called "free" love, the bitterest
slavery of man.
For wedded love—that is, the permanent union of body and soul—there
is ever a new and wonderful adventure, the deepening mystery of the
closer bond. And the highest happiness, which is _intense_ emotion, has
the gravest responsibilities, demanding the greatest courage and hope.
As Mr. Middleton Murray has written in _The Things We Are_: "The taking
of a wife or the taking of a friend is an eternal act; if it be less,
it is a treachery, a degradation."
It is true, certainly, that the _nature_ of love and passion may
change with time and the comradeship of daily life; but the change is
not a weakening, not even a lowering of the pulse. Its ardour does
not diminish but conquers life more completely. It is, actually, the
constant and faithful heart, which has most strength to bear with, or
to ennoble, the deadening trivialities of existence (that no free
lover can escape), to make small things great; which finds most courage
to face Fate.
The deadening influence of constant "experiments" in passion ("walking
round and round the thing you want, gloating over it with your eyes");
the bitter tragedy of a life that is "one long series of eager
conquests turned to listless ones," has been dramatically exposed, with
unflinching realism, by Miss Olive Mary Salter in her _God's Wages_;
which also reveals "that love beyond self which is human companionship."
For Anne Verity, we read, "marriage" had been "the finger-post to
Death." In "making man her own she made him stale. . . . There was no
end to those upon whom she had lived and left them to pay the bill."
Always "life must be savoured anew by fresh interests, hashed up
aspects of the same old facts served up over and over again to one's
easily deceived palate." It was "her vanity that must be ministered
to afresh, its staleness and satiation relieved by the sacrifice of
someone else's young virility."
She found that "love doesn't stay with this generation, it touches us
and flies again. . . . It's this awful quality of inconstancy in me, as
if my heart had got a hole in it. . . . We've lost the art of looking
on at anybody but ourselves."
But, at long last, when a man explained to her: "I want you to love my
mind, that lives, instead of my body, that will die," she awoke.
She learnt then, that "the right man, or the right woman for the matter
of that, isn't ever ready made. It needs effort of the most intense
kind to fit a man perfectly into a woman's life, a woman perfectly into
a man's."
_Wherefore, "Love, real love, is the consummation of great effort,
neither more nor less."_
IX
WHO _IS_ THE "IDEAL" MISTRESS?
The most determined advocates of free-love have never upheld the old,
lazy indulgence towards man and his "wild oats." The ideal mistress,
whom they so confidently exalt over the wife, is not the "kept woman"
behind Victorian respectability. Modern writers have, boldly and
justly, attacked that discreet indiscretion with the unanswerable
logic of facts. If we allow men licence, justice demands equal liberty
for women. Sin is not less, but greater, for being in secret, however
flimsy the veil.
It is difficult, nevertheless, to see how _mutual_ infidelity can
actually remove the admitted evils of a situation it makes more
complex; or to believe that publicity can, of itself, turn black to
white. By some curious twist of reasoning, it really would seem that
they maintain: "By lifting the blinds, we have created a 'new' woman,
the ideal of all the ages."
For where, after all, have they turned to find her, save to their
knowledge and experience of the past? We cannot, positively,
reconstruct human nature.
There is a clear and concise exposition of the whole theory in Miss
Romer Wilson's last novel, _The Death of Society_. It is the story of
Mr. Smith and his short visit to a distinguished Norwegian writer. He,
quite openly, worships the old man's young wife—"his girl, his woman,
his desire"—and though for them "time was so short they could not
afford to sleep," it is expressly stated that "_she, the perfect woman
in whom all women live, raised him to perfect manhood_." "Now," he
said, "I have confidence to do what I think right. . . . I do not care
for opinion any longer."
Together, "they fell into the deep pool of love," when she "was too far
gone in bliss to reply."
"Many men," she said, "men who came to see my husband, thought that
I was part of the visit, and that no man who thought well of himself
should go away without seducing me." But "that is how you seduced me,
because I saw love sprang straight from your heart and not from custom."
"There was an Italian man who loved me, but not more than the books
with gold covers on his shelves. . . . He said I was the Muse of
Comedy. . . . There was a Frenchman who said I was the Muse of
Poetry. . . . There was a Russian who said nothing. . . . He loved me
because we were both animals; but only you love me because I am part of
your life and so I love you equally."
Miss Wilson, indeed, attempts to impart a unique atmosphere into this
commonplace intrigue by a remarkable device. Smith "cannot speak
German, nor speak Norwegian." _She_ knows only a few words of English.
"I like to _pretend_ you hear," said Rosa, "I have always pretended";
and he "could address her in whatever words he liked," since "lovers'
language is universal."
By this method they do, in fact, hold conversations by the hour,
answering each other with quite miraculous preciseness; understanding,
we are expected to believe, the intimacies of thought and feeling
behind each phrase: "though he had no idea what she had said, word for
word." The intention, obviously, is to suggest some special mysterious,
if not miraculous, bond of the spirit knitting two souls in one. The
comment of a plain man, who deals with facts, must be that inarticulate
love can be only physical. It does not elevate, but further degrades,
their intimacy. He "had gone back to the dust to learn about God."
They parted, however, because "they loved each other too much to ask
for each other's lives." Meanwhile, "in patience and humility" they
must wait "until after the Death of Society"—when they can be together.
"How should I act," said Rosa, "if there were no such a thing as
Society? I know how I should act. . . . I owe nothing to either man or
woman. My name? My husband's name?—these belong to Society. . . . I
will not leave my husband, because he is an old man, nor my daughters,
because they are young; but if I give you a day of love, and again
a day perhaps, whom shall I hurt? . . . My soul belongs to nobody:
I—Rosa Christiansen—am my own. _My body is my soul's servant and
friend, and by it I can know other souls as I know my own._ . . . Oh!
oh! My soul is mine, and loves your soul!"
We see that the "perfect woman" still kept on husband and home.
And Smith, thus "proudly numbering himself among the angels," also
found time for a secondary, but quite passionate, intercourse with one
of the daughters of the house, who willingly gives him everything she
has; because she loves him so much, he is all she wants.
He "kissed her violently on the face . . . squeezed her ribs as tight
as ever he dared," and replied without hesitation, "I love you as I
love flowers and the trees and the sky. I love you because you are
lovable as a wet or fine day is lovable. Why, yes, I must confess that
I love you. . . . . I believe all men love a great many women. . . . I
am a Bluebeard with a cellar full of wives. . . . You see, God hasn't
created the woman yet who represents the whole of female perfection.
Don't mistake me, Nathalia; I am not a beast. I don't run after women
solely as women. . . . He began to stroke her head as he thought of all
those past and bygone romances."
And so on——! Strangely enough, "his heart was filled with deep and
tender _respect for her_."
More frequently, however, the novelists of this school seem to have
gone back to the casual lusts of _Tom Jones_, with the rôle of hero and
heroine reversed. There are many tales, almost romantic, of Sir Galahad
waiting and tilting for Cleopatra or Mary Queen of Scots. Too often,
marriage is merely evidence that "the _man_ has held out."
Still we maintain that the modernists are really looking to the
old-world "kept" woman for their ideal of more or less open and, as it
were, established free love. We find clear, specific complaints against
the new system: "They had lapsed into a relation which slowly from
irregular grew regular. It was not marriage, but it was in the nature
of marriage." Now, "after two and a half years . . . she had done wifely
things for him. . . . Love and domestic economy; it was very like
marriage after all."
What then, frankly speaking, is the real charm of the new
mistress-love? Most obviously it comes, ultimately, from the holiday
spirit; its freedom from sordid or petty cares, the prose of our daily
life, business or home worries, the responsibilities that dull the
eye and wear down body and soul: which _means_ the incarnation of
selfishness.
Outspoken and simply coarse writers of the past centuries expose this
fact by their frank hints on "the honeymoon"; of which we acknowledge
the underlying truth.
It has been cynically maintained, nor dare one quite deny, that
our romance-lady, the sheltered and innocent pure girl, would have
been broken long ago but for the "outlet," to mere males, of her
under-sister. I would suggest that the new "ideal" mistress is
certainly no less, probably more, dependent upon the housewife—the
tame, tied woman who bears her lover's name.
We can none of us escape "the day's work." Under the conventional "wild
oats" scheme of life, we _can_ place the whole burden upon the wife:
and so find elsewhere "The Woman"—passionately and emotionally our
ideal.
But no theory of free love was ever based upon two establishments. The
whole weight of the new thought cries out for open, frank _leaving one
woman_ and _going to the other_; where possible by mutual consent. The
secrecy, the misunderstanding, _the divided allegiance_, of the old
world, is the very evil they are clamouring to wipe out. Yet _can_
we leave our bills, our servants, and our children behind with the
fixtures of the old "home to let"? Can we spend our life, or for that
matter, more than a few days or weeks, in one perpetual holiday among
the "beach-flappers" of Miss Amber Reeves' unstable _Helen in Love_ and
the boys they so gaily and easily annex?
The truth, of course, cannot be denied. These new, glorified
sex-contracts (whether entirely free, or on a "short lease" subject
to "things going well") will, and must, involve all the trials of
domesticity, without the compensations of a shared responsibility:
a real bond to halve our sorrows and double our joys. There will,
moreover, be a thousand times more occasion for incompatibility, the
jar of nerves; where there is no steady, devoted endeavour towards
mutual forbearance and understanding, no spur to forgive—in courageous
hope. Life in hotels may, superficially, expose less friction; but it
quickly destroys any reality in comradeship. Only daily service can
build up Love.
The mistress, in fact, remains an enervating luxury, a habit of living
beyond our emotional means, a sparkling drug.
_We have not found the Ideal, because it does not exist._
X
HERE ARE TWO PICTURES OF FREE LOVE!
"After all, what is life for me? _Strange doors in strange houses,
strange men and strange intimacies._ Sometimes weirdly grotesque and
incredibly beastly. The secret vileness of human nature flung at
me. Man revealing himself, through individual after individual, as
utterly contemptible. I tell you, my dear eager fool, it is beyond
my conception ever to regard a man as higher than a frog, as less
repulsive."
It is a cry from Mr. Compton Mackenzie's glittering land of many, and
strange, sins—surely a nightmare of hell itself; cry of the gallant
Sylvia Scarlett, writing her own epitaph—"Here lies Sylvia Scarlett
_who was always running away_."
On the surface, indeed, it is a gay enough scene Mr. Mackenzie has
painted for us, when "her arm was twined round him like ivy, and their
two hands came together like leaves."
Glittering and hot in the first flush of adventure, we see youth's
brave curiosity endlessly awake. Yet it was cold, hard, and "strange"
at the core: always, everywhere, a "stranger" upon the earth. Sylvia
"was always running away"—from men and from herself; so weary, so
hurt, and so afraid. For there was none to share the burden and the
joy, no footing for her; nothing to hold on to and steady life, no
future to build: weary and restless and alone. She could never stay
anywhere, with anyone; searching for ever, for she knows not what. For
"life, which means freedom and space and movement, she is willing to
pay with utter loneliness at the end."
For the wanderers there is no end we dare tell. Mr. Mackenzie has "a
jolly conception of the adventurous men of London, with all its sly
and labyrinthine romance"; but has he ever thought of following beside
any of the men and women who flutter across his page—we cannot say
to their homes, for they have none? Dare he _live_ with "the muslin
and patchouli, the aspidestras and yellowing photographs, as in unseen
basements children whined, while on the mantelpiece garish vases
rattled to the vibration of the traffic"; or with Mrs. Smith "creeping
about the stairs like a spider?" Dare he see his shrewd, bright Daisy
die?
To the novelist, indeed, they do not matter. They have played their
part in his drama, and may shuffle off to the wings. _They are human
beings in real life._ And for the truth about them, we could tell
such a dreary, monotonous, bitter and tragic sheaf of "Lonely Lives."
We should show them to you, wandering round and round, in and out,
under bright lights or behind dark corners; every year more weak and
frightened, till strength fails them even for movement without hope,
and they slip away into some silent pond.
And finally, from the first, if all love means constant change to
revive passion, a life of continual experiment in emotion; we dare not
face the child.