and smirches and frenzies put upon it by the spawn of multitudinous
generations. There is your love, the whole history of it. There is no
intrinsic shame in the thing itself, but the shame lies in that we are
not greater than it.
HERBERT.
XVIII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
April 4, 19--.
There were several things in your letter which I forgot to answer. Much
of beauty and wonder is there in what you have said, and unrelated facts
without end. Many of those facts I endorse heartily, but it seems to me
you fail to embody them in a coherent argument.
I have stated, in so many words, that there are two functions common to
all life--nutrition and reproduction. Of this you have missed the
significance in your rejection of my definition of love, so I must
explain further. Unless these two functions be carried on, life must
perish from the planet. Therefore they are the most essential concerns
of life. The individual must preserve its own life and the life of its
kind. It is more prone to preserve its own life than the life of its
kind, less prone to sacrifice itself for its species. So natural
selection has developed a passion of madness which forces the individual
to make the sacrifice. In all forms of life below man the struggle for
existence is keen and merciless. The least weakness in an individual is
the signal for its destruction. Therefore it is counter to the welfare
of the individual to do aught that will tend to weaken it. On the other
hand, the law is that the individual must procreate. But procreation
means a weakening and a temporary state of helplessness. Problem: How
may the individual be brought to procreate? to do that which is inimical
to its welfare? Answer: It must be forced by something deeper than
reason, and that something is unreasoning passion. Did the individual
reason on the matter, it would certainly abstain. It is because the
passion is not rational that life has persisted to this day. Man, coming
up from the walks of lower life, brought with him this most necessary
passion. Developing imagination, he commingled the two; love was the
product.
Now, because of our imagination, do not let us confuse the issue. The
great task demanded of man is reproduction. He is urged by passion to
perform this task. Passion, working through the imagination, produces
love. Passion is the impelling factor, imagination the disturbing
factor; and the disturbance of passion by imagination produces love.
Stripped of all its superfluities, what function does love serve in the
scheme of life? That of reproduction. Nay, now, do not object, Dane; for
you state the same thing, though less clearly, in your own definition of
love. You say, "Love is the awakening of the personality to the beauty
and worth of some one being" and is a desire to merge the life with that
of the beloved being. In other words, your definition tells that the
passion for perpetuation is the cause of love, and perpetuation the end
to be accomplished. Thus nature tricks her creatures and the race lives
on.
Then you say negatively, "Love is not a disorder of 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 strength and
sanity of vision and happiness." I have shown the value of passion, and
the processes of which love is the culmination, and I have shown that
both are unreasoning and why they are unreasoning. Do you demonstrate
where I am wrong.
Then again, you dare a formula: "In the beginning love arose in the
passion for perpetuation; to-day the passion for perpetuation arises in
love." It is clever, but is it true? Yes, as true as this formula I dare
to pattern after yours: In the beginning man ate because he was hungry;
to-day he is hungry because he eats.
There are many things more I should like to answer, but I am writing
this 'twixt breakfast and lecture hour, and time presses and students
will not wait.
HERBERT.
XIX
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
April 22, 19--.
Nature tricks her creatures and the race lives on, and I, overcivilised,
decadent dreamer that I am, rejoice that the past binds us, am proud of
a history so old and so significant and of an heritage so marvellous.
Nature tricks her creatures and the race lives on, and I am prayerfully
grateful. The difference between us is that you are not. You are
suffering from what has been well called, the sadness of science. You
accept the thesis of a common origin only to regret it. You discover
that romance has a history, and lo! romance has vanished! You are a
Werther of science, sad to the heart with a melancholy all your own and
dropping inert tears on the shrine of your accumulated facts.
In this you are with your generation. Just as every age has its
prevailing disease of the body so has it its characteristic spiritual
ailment. To-day we are in the throes of travail. In our arms is the
child of our ever-delving intellect, but another deliverance is about to
be and the suffering is great. After science comes the philosophy of
science. Our eyes are bathed in Revelation, but upon our ears the music
of the Word has not yet fallen. Until that time when the meaning of it
all shall flash out upon the world, the race will be hidebound in
callousness and in faint-hearted melancholy. As yet we do not know what
to do with all which we know, and we are afflicted with the pessimism of
inertia and the pessimism of dyspepsia. Intellectually, we have been
living too high the last hundred years or so. In this is the secret of
our difference. You insist upon cheapening life for yourself because it
has become evident to you that the phenomenon is common, and I, on the
other hand, shout its glory because it is universal. To myself I am
breathless with wonder, but to you and in my work I needs must shout it.
Here let me be clear. I take it that you are under the sway of a
contemporary mood, that your position is an accidental phase of
to-day's materialism. Broadly, our quarrel is that of pessimism and
optimism, only your pessimism is unconscious, which makes it the more
dangerous to yourself. You are too sad to know that you are not happy or
to care. Does my diagnosis surprise you? Analyze the argument of your
last letter. You trace the growth of the emotion of love from protoplasm
to man. You follow the progress of the force which is stronger than
hunger and cold and swifter and more final than death, from its
potential state in the unicellular stage where life goes on by division,
up through the multifarious forms of instinctive animal mating, till you
reach the love of the sexes in the human world. And the exploring leads
you to the belief that nothing has been reserved for the human worth his
cherishing, to the conviction that the plan of life is simple and
unvaried and therefore unacceptable.
You raise the wail of Ecclesiastes, "All is vanity and a striving after
wind, and there is no profit under the sun." The Preacher and Omar and
Swinburne are pathetically human, and we who are also human respond to
their finality, to their quizzical indifference and their stinging
resentment. We also say, "Vanity of vanities," and bow our heads
murmuring "Ilicet," and stretch out our hands to "turn down an empty
glass," but all this in twilight moods when a dimness as of dying rests
upon the soul. There are a few with whom it is always morning, and
others who remember something of the radiance of the young day even in
the heart of midnight. These disprove the postulates of sameness and
satiety, these are not smitten by the seen fact as are you of the
microscopic retina, these "see life steadily and see it whole."
We need not fear the label of an idea. When I say that your position is
that of the pessimist, it is not more of an accusation than if I said it
was that of the optimist. The thing to concern oneself with is the
question, "which of these makes the nearer approach to the truth?" You
have been asking me, "What is love worth?" And you have answered your
question often enough and to your satisfaction, "In itself it is worth
nothing, being but the catspaw to scheming forces." With your denial of
any intrinsic beauty in the emotion, with your acceptance of it as an
unfortunate incident in human affairs, comes a vague hope that the race
will outgrow this force. Here is your rift in the cloud. You picture a
scientific Utopia where there are no lovers and no back-harkings to the
primitive passion, and you appoint yourself pioneer to the promised land
of the children of biology.
Ah! I speak as if I were vexed instead of simply being sure I am in the
right. I wish to help you to see that there is another reading to your
facts. If love is essentially the same from protoplasm to man, it does
not for this reason become worthless. By virtue of being universal it is
enhanced and most divinely humanly binding. You tell me that love is
involuntary, compelled by external forces as old as time and as binding
as instinct, and I say that because of this, life is finally for love.
What! The cavemen, and the birds, too, and the fish and the plants,
forsooth! What! The inorganic, perhaps, as well as the organic, swayed
by this force which is wholly physical and yet wholly psychical! And
does it not fire you? You are not caught up and held by this giant fact?
You find that love is not sporadic, not individual, that it does not
begin with you or end with you, that it does not dissociate you, and you
do not warm to the world-organic kinship, you do not hear the overword
of the poets and philosophers of all times, you do not see the visions
that gladdened the star-forgotten nights of saints?
The same surprise sweeps over the mind in reading Ecclesiastes. Is it a
sorry scheme of things that one generation goes and another comes and
the world abides forever? If the same generation peopled the earth for a
million years, the dignity of life would not be increased. It is not
necessary to have the assurance of eternal life as the dole for having
come to be, in order to live under the aspect of eternity. It is larger
to be short-lived, to be but a wave of the sea rolling for one sunful
day and starry night towards a great inclusiveness. It is a higher
majesty to be inalien and a part--a ringed ripple in the Vastness--than
to lie broad and smiling in meaningless endlessness.
So it is a strange thing that men who are schooled by evolution to
relate themselves to all that exists, and to seek for new kinships,
should lament that there is no new thing under the sun. And whose eye
would be satisfied with seeing and whose ear with hearing? Who would
rather have the truth than the power to seek it? There is a way of
reading Ecclesiastes and Schopenhauer with a triumphant lilt in the
voice. After all, it is the modulation that carries the message of the
text. When you write the history of love, I find it fair reading. When
you tell me love is primal and engrossing, I hold it the more a sin to
crouch away from its fires.
"Love is the assertion of the will to live as a definitely determined
individual." This is Schopenhauer's thesis and (unnecessarily enough) he
apologises for it, as if it belittled love to say that it affects man in
his _essentia aeterna_. The genius of the race takes the lover conscript
and makes him a soldier in life's battalions.
"The genius of the race," a metaphysical term, but meaning what you do
when you speak of the function of love. Schopenhauer is a pessimist
consciously, you, unconsciously; and you have both missed the living
value of your facts. "Love is ruled by race welfare," says Schopenhauer.
"It (the race welfare) alone corresponds to the profoundness with which
it is felt, to the seriousness with which it appears, to the importance
which it attributes even to the trifling details of its sphere and
occasion." Love concerns itself with "The composition of the next
generation," therefore you find it common as the commonplace, therefore
Schopenhauer regards it as a force treacherous to happiness, since to
live is to be miserable. "These lovers are the traitors who seek to
perpetuate the whole want and drudgery which would otherwise speedily
reach an end; this they wish to frustrate as others like them have
frustrated it before."
Because love frustrates the death of the race, it is the joy of my
senses and the goal of my striving.
Says Schopenhauer: "Through love man shows that the species lies closer
to him than the individual, and he lives more immediately in the former
than in the latter. Why does the lover hang with complete abandon on the
eyes of his chosen one, and is ready to make every sacrifice for her?
_Because it is his immortal part that longs after her, while it is
merely his mortal part that desires everything else._" Because this is
so, love is the God of my faith.
You see where our subject takes us! And all the while I care nothing for
the points of argument except where they prick you from your position.
One must scale the skies and swim the seas in order to reach you. Well,
have I approached within your hearing?
I was sitting amongst the fennel in Barbara's garden when your letter
was brought, and I read it twice to make sure I understood. When the
sun lies warm on waving fennel and a city is before you, mysterious in a
veil of mist, it is easier to feel love than to think about it. For a
while, it was difficult to see the bearing of the data which you
marshalled so well in defence of your denial. You went far in order to
answer why you are content to marry a woman you do not love. Your
methods are not the methods of the practical mind. I am glad for that.
You idealise your attitude, you go far back in time, you enmesh yourself
in theories and generalisations, you ride your imagination proudly, in
order to reconcile yourself to something which suggests itself as more
ideal than that for which the unreasoning heart hungers. You are sad,
but you are not practical and you are not blase.
Of Barbara, of myself, and of London doings, this is no time to write.
Tell Hester your friend thinks of her.
Yours with great memories and greater hopes,
DANE KEMPTON.
XX
FROM HERBERT WACE TO DANE KEMPTON
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
May 18, 19--.
I stand aloof and laugh at myself and you. Oh, believe me, I see it very
clearly myself in the heyday and cocksureness of youth, flinging at you,
with much energy and little skill, my immature generalisations from
science; and you with an elderly beneficence and tolerance, smiling
shrewdly and affectionately upon me, secure in the knowledge that sooner
or later I am sure to get through with it all and join you in your broad
and placid philosophy. It is the penalty age exacts from youth. Well, I
accept it.
So I am suffering from the sadness of science. I had been prone to
ascribe my feelings to the passion of science. But it does not matter in
the least--only, somehow, I would rather you did not misunderstand me
so dreadfully. I do not raise the wail of Ecclesiastes. I am not sad,
but glad. I discover romance has a history, and in history I am quicker
to read the romance. I accept the thesis of a common origin, not to
regret it, but to make the best of it. That is the key to my life--to
make the best of it, but not drearily, with the passiveness of a slave,
but passionately and with desire. Invention is an artifice man employs
to overcome the roundabout. It is the short cut to satisfaction. It
makes man potent, so that he can do more things in a span. I am a worker
and doer. The common origin is not a despair to me; it has a value, and
it strengthens my arm in the work to be done.
The play and interplay of force and matter we call "evolution." The more
man understands force and matter, and the play and interplay, the more
is he enabled to direct the trend of evolution, at least in human
affairs. Here is a great and weltering mass of individuals which we call
society. The problem is: How may it be directed so that the sum of its
happiness greatens? This is my work. I would invent, overcome the
roundabout, seek the short cut. And I consider all matter, all force,
all factors, so that I may invent wisely and justly. And considering
all factors, I consider romance, and I consider you. I weigh your value
in the scheme of things, and your necessity, and I find that you are
both valuable and necessary.
But the history of progress is the history of the elimination of waste.
One boy, running twenty-five machines, turns out a thousand pairs of
socks a day. His granny toiled a thousand days to do the same. Waste has
been eliminated, the roundabout overcome. And so with romance. I strive
not to be blinded by its beauty, but to give it exact appraisal.
Oftentimes it is the roundabout, the wasteful, and must needs be
eliminated. Thus chivalry and its romance vanished before the chemist
and the engineer, before the man who mixed gunpowder and the man who dug
ditches.
I melancholy? Sir, I have not the time--so may I model my answer after
the great Agassiz. I am not a Werther of science, but rather you are a
John Ruskin of these latter days. He wept at the profanation of the
world, at the steam-launches violating the sanctity of the Venetian
canals and the electric cars running beneath the shadow of the pyramids;
and you weep at the violation of like sanctities in the spiritual world.
A gondola is more beautiful, but the steam-launch takes one places, and
an electric car is more comfortable than the hump of a camel. It is too
bad, but waste romance, as waste energy, must be eliminated.
Enough. I shall go on with the argument. I have drawn the line between
pre-nuptial love and post-nuptial love. The former, which is the real
sexual love, the love of which the poets sing and which "makes the world
go round," I have called romantic love. The latter, which in actuality
is sex comradeship, I call conjugal affection or friendship. To be more
definite, I shall call the one "love," the other "affection" or
"friendship." Now love is not affection or friendship, yet they are
ofttimes mistaken, one for the other, for it so happens that the
friendship, which is akin to conjugal affection, is in many instances
pre-nuptial in its development--a token, I take it, of the higher
evolution of the human, an audaciousness which dares to shake off the
blind passion and evade nature's trick as man evaded when he harnessed
steam and rested his feet. It is of common occurrence that a man and
woman, through long and tried friendship, reach a fine appreciation of
each other and marry; and the run of such marriages is the happiest.
Neither blinded nor frenzied by the unreasoned passion of love, they
have weighed each other,--faults, virtues, and all,--and found a
compatibility strong enough to withstand the strain of years and
misfortune, and wise enough to compromise the individual clashes which
must inevitably arise when soul shares never ending bed and board with
soul. They have achieved before marriage what the love-impelled man and
woman must achieve after marriage if they would continue to live
together; that is, they have sought and found compatibility before
binding themselves, instead of binding themselves first and then seeking
if there be compatibility or not.
Let me apparently digress for the moment and bring all clear and
straight. The emotions have no basis in reason. We smile or are sad at
the manifestation of jealousy in another. We smile or are sad because of
the unreasonableness of it. Likewise we smile at the antics of the
lover. The absurdities he is guilty of, the capers he cuts, excite our
philosophic risibility. We say he is mad as a March hare. (Have you ever
wondered, Dane, why a March hare is deemed mad? The saying is a pregnant
one.) However, love, as you have tacitly agreed, is unreasonable. In
fact, in all the walks of animal life no rational sanction can be found
for the love-acts of the individual. Each love act is a hazarding of the
individual's life; this we know, and it is only impelled to perform such
acts because of the madness of the trick, which, though it strikes at
the particular life, makes for the general life.
So I think there is no discussion over the fact that this emotion of
love has no basis in reason. As the old French proverb runs, "The first
sigh of love is the last of wisdom." On the other hand, the individual
not yet afflicted by love, or recovered from it, conducts his life in a
rational manner. Every act he performs has a basis in reason--so long as
it is not some other of the emotional acts. The stag, locking horns with
a rival over the possession of a doe, is highly irrational; but the same
stag, hiding its trail from the hounds by taking to water, is performing
a highly rational act. And so with the human. We model our lives on a
basis of reason--of the best reason we possess. We do not put the
scullery in the drawing-room, nor do we repair our bicycles in the
bedchamber. We strive not to exceed our income, and we deliberate long
before investing our savings. We demand good recommendations from our
cook, and take letters of introduction with us when we go abroad. We
overlook the petulant manner of our friend who rowed in the losing
barges at the race, and we forgive on the moment the sharp answer of the
man who has sat three nights by a sick-bed. And we do all this because
our acts have a basis in reason.
Comes the lover, tricked by nature, blind of passion, impelled madly
toward the loved one. He is as blind to her salient imperfections as he
is to her petty vices. He does not interrogate her disposition and
temperament, or speculate as to how they will cooerdinate with his for
two score years and odd. He questions nothing, desires nothing, save to
possess her. And this is the paradox: _By nature he is driven to
contract a temporary tie, which, by social observance and demand, must
endure for a lifetime._ Too much stress cannot be laid upon this, Dane,
for herein lies the secret of the whole difficulty.
But we go on with our lover. In the throes of desire--for desire is
pain, whether it be heart hunger or belly hunger--he seeks to possess
the loved one. The desire is a pain which seeks easement through
possession. Love cannot in its very nature be peaceful or content. It is
a restlessness, an unsatisfaction. I can grant a lasting love just as I
can grant a lasting satisfaction; but the lasting love cannot be
coupled with possession, for love is pain and desire, and possession is
easement and fulfilment. Pursuit and possession are accompanied by
states of consciousness so wide apart that they can never be united.
What is true of pursuit cannot be true of possession, no more than the
child, grasping the bright ball, can deem it the most wonderful thing in
the world--an appraisement which it certainly made when the ball was
beyond reach.
Let us suppose the loved one is as madly impelled toward the lover. In a
few days, in an hour, nay, in an instant--for there is such a thing as
love at first sight--this man and woman, two unrelated individuals, who
may never have seen each other before, conceive a passion, greater,
intenser, than all other affections, friendships, and social relations.
So great, so intense is it, that the world could crumble to star-dust so
long as their souls rushed together. If necessary, they would break all
ties, forsake all friends, abandon all blood kin, run away from all
moral responsibilities. There can be no discussion, Dane. We see it
every day, for love is the most perfectly selfish thing in the universe.
But this is easily reconcilable with the scheme of things. The true
lover is the child of nature. Natural selection has determined that
exogamy produces fitter progeny than endogamy. Cross fertilisation has
made stronger individuals and types, and likewise it has maintained
them. On the other hand, were family affection stronger than love, there
would be much intermarriage of blood relations and a consequent
weakening of the breed. And in such cases it would be stamped out by the
stronger-breeding exogamists. Here and there, even of old time, the wise
men recognised it; and we so recognise it to-day, as witness our bars
against consanguineous marriage.