agree. But there are other and more immediate needs than the need of
perpetuation that call out love, needs that are peculiarly of the
present, being bound up with the steady outreaching for help, for
fellowship in the jerky journey through the universe. If love were no
more than an instrument of reproduction, you would be right in
maintaining that the fastidiousness I insist on is unnecessary and
unnatural. If love were that and that alone, there would be no love,
which is a paradox indeed.
"Because of our souls' yearning that we meet
And mix in soul through flesh, which yours and mine
Wear and impress, and make their visible selves,--
All which means, for the love of you and me,
Let us become one flesh, being one soul."
I dare a formula: In the beginning love arose in the passion for
perpetuation; to-day, the passion for perpetuation arises in love. Just
as we put ourselves in the way of natural selection, pitting the
microcosm against the macrocosm in a passion of ethical feeling, just so
do we reverse for ourselves processes that seem indeed to have all the
force of law. This reversal is civilisation.
The lover is impelled to perpetuate himself in the Here and the Now. The
law of life exacts from him the tribute of love. Imagination gives the
lover the key to the object of his love. He enters and he beholds only
the ideal which is hers; for him her clay self and the mere facts of her
do not exist. The conditions of love are inherent in civilisation. When
purpose is high and feeling rich, when "the everlasting possession of
the good" is desired, then is heard the I Am of love.
Now to my definition. Negatively, love is not a disorder of the mind and
body, not a madness, since it arises in the eternally most valuable,
since it is the culmination of high processes, and since it makes for
sanity of vision and strength and happiness. Positively, love is the
awakening of the personality to the beauty and worth of some one being,
caused by the passion for perpetuation and by imagination. It is a
desire to hold to the good everlastingly, and to merge with it.
Aristotle proved to the satisfaction of his time that women have fewer
teeth than men. Aristotle was a great man, and besides being a
philosopher was the foremost scientist of his day. I cannot help
thinking of this prodigious blunder. Perhaps (who knows?) the same
famous fate which a sexual classification of teeth enjoys awaits a
definition calling love a disorder.
I will continue to-morrow. A note has just been given me calling me to
Earl, who is ill, but not seriously. Barbara has prescribed for him a
game of chess. The desire to see you again has got into my blood. I
think I shall be in the new West and with you before long.
Your friend always,
DANE KEMPTON.
XVI
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
Sunday morning.
I must proceed with the three other points of my letter, so I shall stay
here and write, though there is a sharp breeze this morning and a
coquettishly escaping sunlight, and something tugs at me to go out upon
the city streets. It is not restlessness, but the love of the open. I am
fain to leave a walled house, and, better still, to get outside of the
walls within and join the city in friendship and let the city join me. I
never feel greater fellowship than when I walk--
Except when I write to you. Then do I greaten with the pride of life. My
sympathies quicken and I grow young again. I constitute myself advocate
of the world, and enthusiasm does not fail me in this high calling. It
is but natural that in the face of scepticism which I cannot share I
should feel greater faith, that in the face of revilement a sense of the
glory of the thing belittled should settle upon me. I turn zealot and
spend myself in long-drawn praising. I lay myself under a spell of
harmony because I am serving and defending and approving what I hold to
be good.
So when you insist that romantic love is pre-nuptial and that it dies at
marriage as others suppose it to die at the approach of poverty, I grow
glad with the knowledge that this is not true. I scrutinize facts which
I hitherto took for granted, and become doubly sure. You dogmatise when
you say that the lover and the husband are mutually exclusive. If there
was love in the beginning, it will be at the end. Love doubles upon
itself. Propinquity tightens bonds and there is a steady blossoming of
the character in a radiant atmosphere. The marriages that fail are the
unions which are based on liking. In these, weariness must set in, for
marriage demands that men and women be all in all to each other, and
unless it be so with them, the lives of the "contracting parties" are,
by the laws of logic, and by the force of the laws of delicacy in the
art of living, forever spoilt.
Yes, and people who truly love come to regret their married love, these
too. But these have at least begun well. Their lives are infinitely
richer for this fact. Their failure itself is made by it more bearable
than the failure of those others who act the vulgarian and demand so
little of life that even that little escapes them. No world-stains on
these who are, at least, would-be lovers. They stand mistaken but
irreproachable. It was neither their fault nor love's, and "life more
abundant" comes to them even with the mistake.
You are consistent. Just as you maintain that love is passion, so do you
think that it is no more than a preliminary thrill. You note a change;
the flutter and the excitement felt in the presence of the unknown go,
and you do not know that they give place to the steadier joys of the
unknown, that after the promise comes the fulfilment, that the hope is
not more beautiful than the realisation, that there is divinity in both,
and that love does not disappoint.
Tell me, are the placid marriages of affection you are preparing to
describe so very placid? Do these jog along so well? Is the control,
restraint, forbearance, sacrifice, of which you speak, as readily
practised for the person who is that to you which twenty others may
quite as easily be, as it is for the one beyond all whom you love and
deify, whom the laws of your being command that you serve, living and
dying? God knows, the average marriage does not exhibit a striking
picture of the practice of these virtues! Rather are such phrases ideals
on stilts on which suffering marital partners attempt to hobble across
their extremity. On the other hand, to some extent everybody practises
restraint and sacrifice since everybody is to some extent moral. But it
goes very hard with your average man and woman in your average marriage,
and there is a decided setting of the mouth and narrowing of the eyes
with the effort.
Whatever placidity there is is attained by means of vampirism. Diderot,
the husband of a stupid seamstress, had no right to the love of a Mlle.
Voland. It was vampirism and sin to take all from this woman, and to
return her favour with so much less than all, as surely as cowardice and
selfishness are sin. But the illicit relation will exist because custom
cannot rid men and women of subtle sympathies and dear yearnings,
because men and women will love though the world consider it cheap and
mad. Individually, we have no difficulty in finding our happiness, but
we are made advance toward it through the twisted byways of an unfrank
world. "No straight road! Keep turning!" has been the scream of
convention since convention began.
So for every commonplace marriage there is a canonised love, and the
story is told in the old Greek civilisation by the Hetairae. You remember
how it reads in the history: "The low position generally assigned the
wife in the home had a most disastrous effect upon Greek morals. She
could exert no such elevating or refining influence as she casts over
the modern home. The men were led to seek social and intellectual
sympathy and companionship outside the family circle, among a class of
women known as Hetairae, who were esteemed chiefly for their brilliancy
of intellect. As the most noted representative of this class stands
Aspasia, the friend of Pericles. The influence of the Hetairae was most
harmful to social morality." And the practice persisted through many a
renaissance where Lauras and Beatrices were besung, down to the
brilliant encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century with their avowed
loves, down to our Goethe and John Stuart Mill. All of these loves rose
in very different motives and environments, yet were they the same
fundamentally,--strong, sweet love between man and woman, very much
spoiled by the fact that custom permitted the loveless marriage at the
same time, but yet love which was good since it was the best that could
be had. And when the historian permits himself to say, "The influence of
the Hetairae was most harmful to social morality," it is evident that he
also thinks that a marriage which compels husband or wife to seek soul's
help elsewhere than in their union is bad and wrong.
To-day there is a change in attitude. Woman is new-born in strength and
dignity, and the highest chivalry the world has ever known is in
blossom. She is an equal, a comrade, a right regal person. She is no
longer a means but an end in herself, not alone fit to mother men but
fit to live in equality with men. I repeat, she is not a means but an
individual, with a soul of her own to rear. Because of the greater and
more general emancipation of woman the subtlety of modern love has
become possible.
Now for the last point, the question of perpetuation. Just as function
precedes organ, so the love of life is inherent in the living for the
maintenance of life. But even the primitive man, in whom instinct is
strongest, proves himself capable of death. Some men have always been
able to give up their lives for some cause. (Indeed there is thought to
be suicide amongst animals.) And to-day we certainly no longer say a man
must live. Quite as often must he die. Men have found it wise to die at
the stake or on the gallows. If this be true of our relation to the life
which courses through us, how much more true is it of our instinct to
perpetuate ourselves, which pertains to the love of life biologically
only, which is often, in the social manifestation of that instinct, a
cold intellectual concept and never a dominating thought! We are not
driven to procreate. In fact, every child born into the world competes
hard for its morsel. Under our unimaginable economic regime all increase
in population is a menace.
I call bringing children into the world a codfish act which causes an
overflux of vulgar little earthlings, if the process be not humanised
and spiritualised. If the child is conceived not in lust but in love, it
is rightly born. If it is the child of your ideal, the offspring of that
which is your truest life, then is your progeny your immortality, and
then, and then only, have you reason for pride and joy in that which you
have caused to be.
My dear, dear Herbert, my love has not failed. This you must come to
understand. Love never fails. The children that might have been mine are
better unborn, since I could not give them a mother whom I loved. You
remind me that Dante married Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, and she
bore him seven children. Yet, Herbert, was this wife not mentioned in
the "Commedia," nor in "La Vita Nuova," nor anywhere else in his
writings. Dante was a Conformist. He was not in all respects above his
time; witness his theology. Convention permitted the dispassionate
marriage side by side with love. He was conventional, and the infinite
moment of meeting in paradise with his Lady was embittered by her "cold,
lessoned smiles."
"Ah, from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This mediaeval miracle of song!"
It was for Beatrice that this man vexed his spirit with immortal effort
and raised a Titan voice which yet is heard in charmed echoes. It was
for Beatrice that he descended into the dead regions and climbed the
hills of purgatory and soared towards the Rose of Paradise,--"And 'She,
where is She?' instantly I cried."
Dante, our prince of lovers, might have lived better, but he loved well.
This in answer to your letter. To meet your argument I have found it
best to employ something of your own method, but I cannot rid myself of
the feeling that I have vulgarised the subject by saying so much about
it. I fear my letter would provoke a smile from those who know love and
the wonder of its simplicity through all the subtlety. "We, in loving,
have no cause to speak so much!" would be their unanswerable criticism.
It is easier to live than to argue about life.
The thought has suddenly assailed me that what I have said may sound
derogatory to Hester. Know, then, that I do not think there is a woman
in the world who is not capable of inspiring true and abiding love in
the heart of some man. Besides, Hester to me looms up as a heroine. Not
a hair's breadth of what I know of her that is not beautiful. My regret
is that she, who could be "a vision eterne," should be doomed to receive
episodically your considerate affection. She does not know your
programme. She is a girl who takes your love for granted in the same
way as she gives hers, without niggardliness. It is the woman who cannot
be content with less than all that is slowly starved to death on a
bread-and-water diet and who does not find it out until the end.
Until the carnival time when you and Hester come to love each other, if
that time is to be, you two must be as separate in deed as you are in
fact. Forgive me and write soon.
Yours ever,
DANE.
XVII
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
April 2, 19--.
So you have met Hester's brother? Well, I have had an outing with
Hester. She loves me well, I know, and I cannot but confess a thrill at
the thought. On the other hand, well do I know the significance of that
love, the significance and the cause. Notwithstanding that wonderful
soul of hers, she is in no wise constituted differently from her
millions of sisters on the planet to-day. She loves--she knows not why;
she knows--only that she loves. In other words, she does not reason her
emotions.
But let us reason, we men, after the manner of men. And be thou patient,
Dane, and follow me down and under the phenomena of love to things
sexless and loveless. And from there, as the proper point of departure,
let us return and chart love, its phases and occurrences, from its first
beginnings to its last manifestations.
Things sexless and loveless! Yes, and as such may be classed the drops
of life known as unicellular organisms. Such a creature is a tiny cell,
capable of performing in itself all the functions of life. That one
pulsating morsel of matter is invested with an irritability which, as
Herbert Spencer says, enables it "to adjust the inner relations with
outer relations," to correspond to its environment--in short, to live.
That single cell contracts and recoils from the things in its
environment uncongenial to its constitution, and the things congenial it
draws to itself and absorbs. It has no mouth, no stomach, no alimentary
canal. It is all mouth, all stomach, all alimentary canal.
But at that low plane the functions of life are few and simple. This bit
of vitalised inorganic has no sex, and because of that it cannot love.
Reproduction is growth. When it grows over-large it splits in half, and
where was one cell there are two. Nor can the parent cell be called
_mother_ or _father_: and for that matter, the parent cell cannot be
determined. The original cell split into two cells; one has as much
claim to parenthood as the other.
It lives dimly, to be sure, this mote of life and light; but before it
is a vast evolution, Dane, on the pinnacle of which are to be found men
and women, Hester Stebbins, my mother, you!
A step higher we find the cell cluster, and with it begins that
differentiation which has continued to this day and which still
continues. Simplicity has yielded to complexity and a new epoch of life
been inaugurated. The outer cells of the cluster are more exposed to
environmental forces than are the inner cells; they cohere more
tenaciously and a rudimentary skin is formed. Through the pores of this
skin food is absorbed, and in these food-absorbing pores is foreshadowed
the mouth. Division of labour has set in, and groups of cells specialise
in the performance of functions. Thus, a cell group forms the skinny
covering of the cluster, another cell group the mouth. And likewise,
internally, the stomach, a sac for the reception and digestion of food,
takes shape; and the juices of the body begin to circulate with greater
definiteness, breaking channels in their passage and keeping those
channels open. And, as the generations pass, still more groups of cells
segregate themselves from the mass, and the heart, the lungs, the
liver, and other internal organs are formed. The jelly-like organism
develops a bony structure, muscles by which to move itself, and a
nervous system--
Be not bored, Dane, and be not offended. These are our ancestors, and
their history is our history. Remember that as surely as we one day
swung down out of the trees and walked upright, just so surely, on a far
earlier day, did we crawl up out of the sea and achieve our first
adventure on land.
But to be brief. In the course of specialisation of function, as I have
outlined, just as other organs arose, so arose sex-differentiation.
Previous to that time there was no sex. A single organism realised all
potentialities, fulfilled all functions. Male and female, the creative
factors, were incoherently commingled. Such an individual was both male
and female. It was complete in itself,--mark this, Dane, for here
individual completeness ends.
The labour of reproduction was divided, and male and female, as separate
entities, came into the world. They shared the work of reproduction
between them. Neither was complete alone. Each was the complement of the
other. In times and seasons each felt a vital need for the other. And
in the satisfying of this vital need, of this yearning for completeness,
we have the first manifestation of love. Male and female loved they one
another--but dimly, Dane. We would not to-day call it love, yet it
foreshadowed love as the food-absorbing pore foreshadowed the mouth.
As long and tedious as has been the development of this rudimentary love
to the highly evolved love of to-day, just so long and tedious would be
my sketch of that development. However, the factors may be hinted. The
increasing correspondence of life with its environment brought about
wider and wider generalisations upon that environment and the relations
of the individual to it. There is no missing link to the chain that
connects the first and lowest life to the last and the highest. There is
no gap between the physical and psychical. From _simple reflex action_,
on and up through _compound reflex action_, _instinct_, and _memory_,
the passage is made, without break, to _reason_. And hand in hand with
these, all acting and reacting upon one another, comes the development
of the imagination and of the higher passions, feelings, and emotions.
But all of this is in the books, and there is no need for me to go over
the ground.
So let me sum up with an analysis of that most exquisite of poets'
themes, a maiden in love. In the first place, this maiden must come of
an ancestry mastered by the passion for perpetuation. It is only through
those so mastered that the line comes down. The individual perishes, you
know; for it is the race that lives. In this maiden is incorporated all
the experience of the race. This race experience is her heritage. Her
function is to pass it on to posterity. If she is disobedient, she is
unfruitful; her line ceases with her; and she is without avail among the
generations to come. And, be it not forgotten, there are many obedient
whose lines _will_ pass down.
But this maiden is obedient. By her acts she will link the past to the
future, bind together the two eternities. But she is incomplete, this
maiden, and being immature she is unaware of her incompleteness.
Nevertheless she is the creature of the law of the race, and from her
infancy she prepares herself for the task she is to perform. Hers is a
certain definite organism, somewhat different from all other female
organisms. Consequently there is one male in all the world whose
organism is most nearly the complement of hers; one male for whom she
will feel the greatest, intensest, and most vital need; one male who of
all males is the fittest, organically, to be the father of her children.
And so, in pinafores and pigtails, she plays with little boys and likes
and dislikes according to her organic need. She comes in contact with
all manner of boys, from the butcher's boy to the son of her father's
friend; and likewise with men, from the gardener to her father's
associates. And she is more or less attracted by those who, in greater
or less degree, answer to her organic demand, or, as it were, organic
ideal.
And upon creatures male she early proceeds to generalise. This kind of
man she likes, that she does not like; and this kind she likes more than
that kind. She does not know why she does this; nor, with the highest
probability, does she know she is doing it. She simply has her likes and
dislikes, that is all. She is the slave of the law, unwittingly
generalising upon sex-impressions against the day when she must identify
the male who most nearly completes her.
She drifts across the magic borderland to womanhood, where dreams and
fancies rise and intermingle and the realities of life are lost. A
dissatisfaction and a restlessness come upon her. There seems no sanity
in things, and life is topsy-turvy. She is filled with vague, troubled
yearnings, and the woman in her quickens and cries out for unity. It is
an organic cry, old as the race, and she cannot shut out the sound of it
or still the clamour in her blood.
But there is one male in all the world who is most nearly her
complement, and he may be over on the other side of the world where she
may not find him. So propinquity determines her fate. Of the males she
is in contact with, the one who can more nearly give her the
completeness she craves will be the one she loves.
All of which is well and good in its way, but let us analyze further.
What is all this but the symptoms of an extreme over-excitation and
nervous disorder? The equilibrium of the organism has been overthrown
and there is a wild scrambling for the restoration of that equilibrium.
The choice made may be good or ill, as chance and time may dictate, but
the impelling excitement forces a choice. What if it be ill? What if
to-morrow a male who is a far better complement should appear? The time
is now. Nature is not neglectful, and well she knows the disaster of
delay. She is prodigal of the individual and is satisfied with one
match out of many mismatches, just as she is satisfied that of a million
cod eggs one only should develop into a full-grown cod. And so this love
of the human in no wise differs from that of the sparrow which forgets
preservation in procreation. Thus nature tricks her creatures and the
race lives on.
For the lesser creatures the trick serves the purpose well. There is
need for a compelling madness, else would self-preservation overcome
procreation and there be no lesser creatures. And man is content to rest
coequal with the beast in the matter of mating. Notwithstanding his
intelligence, which has made him the master of matter and enabled him to
enslave the great blind forces, he is unable to perpetuate his species
without the aid of the impelling madness. Nay, men will not have it
otherwise; and when an individual urges that his reason has placed him
above the beast, and that, without the impelling madness, he can mate
with greater wisdom and potency, then the poets and singers rise up and
fling potsherds at him. To improve upon nature by draining a malarial
swamp is permitted him; to improve upon nature's methods and breed
swifter carrier-pigeons and finer horses than she has ever bred is also
permitted; but to improve upon nature in the breeding of the human, that
is a sacrilege which cannot be condoned! Down with him! He is a brute to
question our divine Love, God-given and glorious!