affection and friendship, that the yielding to its blandishments is
higher wisdom on the part of our lovers. Not so; they are puppets and
know and think nothing about it. They come of those who yielded likewise
in the past. They obey forces beyond them, greater than they, their
kind, and all life, great as the great forces of the physical universe.
Our lovers are children of nature, natural and uninventive. Duty and
moral responsibility are less to them than passion. They will obey and
procreate, though the heavens roll up as a scroll and all things come to
judgment. And they are right if this is what we understand to be "the
bloom, the charm, the smile of life."
Yet man is man because he chanced to develop intelligence instead of
instinct; otherwise he would to this day have remained among the
anthropoid apes. He has turned away from nature, become unnatural, as it
were, disliked the earth upon which he found himself, and changed the
face of it somewhat to his liking. His trend has been, and still is, to
perform more and more acts with a rational sanction. He has developed a
moral nature, made laws, and by the sheer force of his will and reason
curbed his lyings and his lusts.
However, our lovers are natural and uninventive. They get married.
Pursuit, with all its Tantalus delights, its sighings and its songs, is
gone, never to return. And in its place is possession, which is
satisfaction, familiarity, knowledge. It heralds the return of
rationality, the return to duty of the weighing and measuring qualities
of the mind. Our lovers discover each other to be mere man and woman
after all. That ethereal substance which the man took for the body of
the loved one becomes flesh and blood, prone to the common weaknesses
and ills of flesh and blood. He, on the other hand, betrays little
petulancies of disposition, little faults and predispositions of which
she never dreamed in the pre-nuptial days, and which she now finds
eminently distasteful. But at first these things are not openly
unpleasant. There are no scenes. One or the other gives in on the
instant, without self-betrayal, and one or the other retires to have a
secret cry or to ruminate about it over a cigar--the first faint hints,
I may slyly suggest, of the return of rationality. _They are beginning
to think._
Ah, these are little things, you say. Precisely; wherefore I lay
emphasis upon them. The sum of the innumerable little things becomes a
mighty thing to test the human soul. Moreover, many a home has been
broken because of disagreement as to the uses or abuses of couch
cushions, and more than one divorce induced by the lingering of tobacco
odours in the curtains.
If the marriage of our lovers conform to the majority of marriages, the
first year of their wedded life will determine whether they are able to
share bed and board through the lengthening years. For this first
year--often the first months of it--marks the transition from love to
conjugal affection, or witnesses a rupture which nothing less than
omnipotence can ever mend. In the first year a serious readjustment must
take place. Unreason, as a basis for the relation, must give way to
reason; blind, ignorant, selfish little love must flutter away, so that
friendship, clear-eyed and wise, may step in. There will come moments
when wills clash and desires do not chime; these must be moments of
sober thought and compromise, when one or the other sacrifices self on
the altar of their nascent friendship. Upon this ability to compromise
depends their married happiness. Returning to the rationality which they
forsook during mating-time, they cannot live a joint rational existence
without compromising. If they be compatible, they will gradually grow to
fit, each with the other, into the common life; compromise, on certain
definite points, will become automatic; and for the rest they will
exhibit a tacit and reasoned recognition of the imperfections and
frailties of life.
All this reason will dictate. If they be incapable of rising to
compromise, sacrifice, and unselfishness, reason will dictate
separation. In such cases, when they will have become rational once
more, they will reason the impossibility of a continued relation and
give it up. In which case the true-love disciple may contend that there
was no real love in the beginning. But he is wrong. It was just as real
as that of any marriage, only it failed in the post-nuptial quest after
compatibility. In all marriages love--passionate, romantic love--must
disappear, to be replaced by conjugal affection or by nothing. The
former are the happy marriages, the latter the mistaken ones.
As I close, the saying of La Bruyere comes to me, "The love which arises
suddenly takes longest to cure." This generalisation upon all the
love-affairs within the scope of a single lifetime cannot but be true,
and it is quite in line with the general argument. I have shown that the
love (so called) which grows slowly is akin to friendship, that it is
friendship, in fact, conjugal friendship. On the other hand, the more
sudden a love the more intense it must be; also the less rationality can
it have. And because of its intensity and unreasonableness, the longer
period must elapse ere its frenzy dies out and cool, calm thought comes
in.
HERBERT.
P.S.--My book is out--"The Economic Man." I send it to you. I cannot
imagine you will care for the thing.
XXI
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
May 26, 19--.
"Pretty nineteen-year-old Louisa Naveret, because her slower-minded
fiance, Charles J. Johnson, could not understand a joke, is dying with a
bullet in her brain, and he, her murderer, lies dead at the morgue. They
were to have been married to-day."
From to-day's paper I quote the above introduction to a column
murder-sensation in simple life. Simple it was, and elemental--the man
loving steadily and doggedly and madly, after the manner of the male
before possession; the woman fluttering, and teasing, and tantalising,
after the manner of the female courting possession. They had been
engaged for some time. The woman loved the man and fully intended to
marry him. The engagement neared its close, and on the day before that
of the wedding, the man, slow minded, loving intensely, procured the
marriage licence. The woman read the document, and with the last coy
flutter before surrender told him that she would not marry him.
"I meant it as a jest," she said as she lay on a cot at the receiving
hospital; but four bullets were in her body, and Charles J. Johnson,
clumsy and natural lover, lay dead in an adjoining room with the fifth
bullet in his brain.
In this pitiful little tragedy appear two of the most salient
characteristics of love; namely, madness and selfishness. Let us analyze
Charles J. Johnson's condition. He was a lineman for a telegraph
company, healthy and strong, used to open-air life and hard work. He had
steady employment and good wages. Can't you see the man, content with a
good digestion, unailing body, and mild pleasures, and enjoying life
with bovine placidity? But pretty Louisa Naveret entered his life. The
"abysmal fecundity" was stirred and life clamoured to be created.
Peacefulness and content vanished. All the forces of his existence
impelled him to seize upon and possess "nineteen-year-old" Louisa
Naveret. He was afflicted with a disorder of mind and body, a madness
so great, a delusion so powerful, a pain and unrest so pressing, that
the possession of that particular "nineteen-year-old" woman became the
dearest thing in the world, dearer than life itself and more potent than
the "will to live."
I do well to call love a madness. Any departure from rationality is
madness, and for a man of Charles J. Johnson's calibre, suicide is an
extremely irrational act. But he also killed Louisa Naveret, wherein he
was as selfish as he was mad. Convinced that he was not to possess her,
he was determined that no other man should possess her.
While on this matter of love considered as a disorder of mind and body,
I recall a recent magazine article of Mr. Finck's, in which he analyzes
Sappho's conception of love. "In that famous poem of Sappho," he says,
"that has been so often declared a compendium of all the emotions that
make up love, I have not been able to find anything but a comic
catalogue of such feelings as might overwhelm a woman if she met a bear
in the woods--'deadly pallor,' 'a cold sweat,' 'a fluttering heart,'
'tongue paralyzed,' 'trembling all over,' 'a fainting fit.'"
Dante suffered similarly from the disorder of love, if you will
recollect. In this connection may be cited the following passage from
Diderot's "Paradox of Acting ":--
"Take two lovers, both of whom have their declarations to make. Who will
come out of it best? Not I, I promise you. I remember that I approached
the beloved object with fear and trembling; my heart beat, my ideas grew
confused, my voice failed me, I mangled all I said; I cried _yes_ for
_no_; I made a thousand blunders; I was illimitably inept; I was absurd
from top to toe, and the more I saw it the more absurd I became.
Meanwhile, under my very eyes, a gay rival, light hearted and agreeable,
master of himself, pleased with himself, losing no opportunity for the
finest flattery, made himself entertaining and agreeable, enjoyed
himself; he implored the touch of a hand which was at once given him, he
sometimes caught it without asking leave, he kissed it once and again.
I, the while, alone in a corner, avoided a sight which irritated me;
stifling my sighs, cracking my fingers with grasping my wrists, plunged
in melancholy, covered with a cold sweat, I could neither show nor
conceal my vexation."
Oh, the clamour of life to be born is a masterful thing, and so far as
the individual is concerned, a most irrational thing; and so far as the
world of beasts and emotional men and women is concerned, it is a most
necessary thing. That life may live and continue to live, a driving
force is needed that is greater than the puny will of life. And in the
disorder produced by the passion for perpetuation, whether or not
assisted by imagination, is found this driving force. As Ernest Haeckel,
that brave old hero of Jena, explains:--
"The irresistible passion that draws Edward to the sympathetic Otillia,
or Paris to Helen, and leaps all bounds of reason and morality, is the
same _powerful, unconscious_, attractive force which impels the living
spermatozoon to force an entrance into the ovum in the fertilisation of
the egg of the animal or plant--the same impetuous movement which unites
two atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen for the formation of a
molecule of water."
But with the advent of intellectual man, there is no longer need for
obeying blind and irresistible compulsion. Intellectual man, changing
the face of life with his inventions and artifices, performing telic
actions, adjusting himself and his concerns to remote ends and ultimate
compensations, will grapple with the problem of perpetuation as he has
grappled with that of gravitation. As he controls and directs the great
natural forces so that, instead of menacing, they are made to labour for
his safety and comfort, so will he control and direct the operation of
the reproductive force so that life will not only be perpetuated but
developed and made higher and finer. This is not more impossible than is
the steam-engine impossible or democracy impossible.
HERBERT.
XXII
FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE
LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
June 12, 19--.
Please remember that these letters are written to you alone. I do not
think that there is less love in the world than ever before. I make you
representative of a class, which, in turn, is characteristic of the
modern scientific type, but I do not make you representative of all that
to-day's world has lived up to and lived down. So I do not join my
Ruskin in lamenting the past. To be sure, you are contemporary and you
are parvenu. What then? You are few, nevertheless, and like the parvenu
rich, you must pass into something quite unlike yourself. It is the law
of growth. I ask you to account for yourself as an individual. The thing
is fiercely personal. But you choose the roundabout method of answering
me. For a view of what in your eyes is pertinent to this matter, you
stretch a canvas wide as the world. You are resolved that your course
should dramatise the whole play and interplay of force and matter. It is
ideally ambitious of you and I am glad. It puts you in the ranks with
the students of the ideal tendencies. It shows that you are not always
impatient for short cuts, and that you begin to be of those who harness
"horses of the sun to plough in earth's rough furrows."
Your letter sounds conclusive. Romance is waste, love is unreasoning;
compatibility alone is worth while. You think this, and are ready to
encrust yourself with what is conventional and practical. Ah, no, it is
not even decently conventional! The formal world pretends, at least, to
love. It also reaches for the fires that thrill and thaw, whereas you
stand before a cold hearth and think the chill well and welcome, since
you understand its cause. You have grasped part of a truth, and though
my mind complete your arc into the perfection of a circle, I cannot
place it about your head as a halo. My confusion comes from thinking of
you more than of my creed. A pregnant factor in our debate is the
debater. The Hafiz of the Hafiz maxims, the philosopher of your
philosophy happens to interest me. You have been building yourself up
before my eyes, and for watching I cannot speak.
With what does romance interfere? If it implied a waste of vital force,
a giving up, a postponement of life, it were a roundabout path to
development and happiness. But we live most when we are most under its
sway, and it is for such self-promised sparks that we live at all.
Romance quickens and controls as does nothing else, and because of this
it is not only a means but an end in itself. It is stirred-up life. We
live most when we love most. The love of romance and the romance of love
is the only coin for which the heart-hurt sell their death. A trick?
Perhaps. The love of life is a trick to save the races from self-murder.
Nature makes legitimate her tricks. Let the Genius of the Race lure us
with passion and dreaming! We are not the losers by it. And if the dream
fades and we grow gray despite what has been lived, then it is something
to remember that soul and sense have leapt and pulsed. I am thankful
that romance has an aftermath, and that old men and women can prattle
about days that were robust. I am thankful that the soldiers of life are
at the end given a furlough in which to fondle the arms they wielded
with clumsiness and with spirit, and in which to pass themselves in
review before their pension expires and their days are over. Youth has
the romance of loving, and age the romance of remembering.
Lovers are not always compatible, you say, and, before all, you insist
upon good partnership. How will you insure yourself against unfitness?
Surely not by a registering and weighing of qualities, not by bargaining
and speculating. We do not choose our wives as we do our saddle-horses;
we do not plan our marriages as we plan our houses. It may sound
paradoxical, but there is a higher compatibility than that of quality
and degree. It is not whether people can live together, but whether they
should live together. "It is an awkward thing to play with souls,"--you
override the fastidiousness of the soul in marrying your companion.
Unless you are an automaton, you cannot rest happy in the fact that you
and she do not disagree. For comfort's sake you would have a negative
dimension to your cosmos, forgetting that your longings and your needs
and, it may be, your dreams, are positive. If sex-comradeship and
affection were not as accidental and as dependent on mood as love
itself, your position would have much in its favour. You could then
arrange for compatibility in marriage.
You speak of the methods in economics that conserve energy and capital,
such as the employ of the machine-guiding boy, which saves the labour
power of a hundred men, and you hold that in the realm of personal life
like methods may obtain with value and dignity. I can see how natural it
has become for you to take this viewpoint. One can be a zealot in
matters frigid. The law behind the fact has you in its coil, and your
passion goes to ice. You burn for that cold thing, compatibility. You,
too, are in the market-place bound to a stake--it is not for such as you
to escape the fire. If you look to compatibility and want it intensely,
as others want love, then you suffer, and from your standpoint (not
mine) you raise a vain cry; for compatibility, like everything else, is
illusory. The illusions of love are a strength, and the ways of love are
divine; through them we come to that feeling of completion which is
compatibility and which is as ineffable as the white-lipped promise of
waves heard by those who have also listened to weeping. Love is not
responsible for institutionalism. There would be no fewer marriages if
people married for convenience, nor would the law make such unions less
binding. It is not the fault of love that the great social paradox
exists. In the precipitancy of feeling, you say, the lover fastens upon
an unsuitable mate, and, with possession, love dies. Here I attack your
facts. If an awakening comes, it is not for either of these reasons.
Love is not essentially rational, but then it is love. There is some
consistency in affairs natural, and the esoteric draught that enchanted
at one time cannot poison at another.
Love is not essentially rational, and it will not of a sudden become so
at the possession of the loved one. People who marry from convenience
may wake to find their union most inconvenient. "There are more things
in heaven and earth," and there are more intricacies of feeling and more
sloughs and depths, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. A definite
understanding as to sofa cushions and tobacco smoke does not always
insure unwearied forbearance and devotion. With love, on the other hand,
disappointment is very much less likely to spring up, for the reason
that it is free from calculation. Love is a sympathy. It takes hold, it
grows upon the soul and the senses, and it does not flee before argument
and explanation.
Still less can I admit that possession kills love. Do we give up living
because the world is based on Will and Idea? Yet to will is to want,
Schopenhauer tells us, and to want is to be in pain. Do we know
ourselves in pain every minute of our lives? Hardly. This applies. You
hold that, with the fulfilled hope and the appeased hunger, indifference
takes the place of desire. It reads so in logic, but not in life. If
what is in our possession be good, we prize it more highly for its being
within reach. The good in our keeping does not sate; it pains with
divine hungers. We do not tire of what we have; we rise to it. We do not
know the sweetness of being steadfast until we are so impelled by the
love with which we have grown great. The lover may well say: "She was
not my ideal; before I knew her I was not great enough to think her. She
taught me."
Besides, an acquaintance with your wife's faults does not kill your
love. You cannot turn from your brother or your friend if he commit even
a lurid act; you cannot turn from a stranger; much less can you turn
from your beloved. Herbert, when men set themselves to judge, they are
invariably ridiculous and an offence to high heaven. Believe me, it is
artificial. The true judge cares not for the fact of the deed, but for
its motive. And the lover knows the motive. He has the key to the life.
He knows his beloved, not as she is, but "as she was born to be." His
lips press and his arms enfold not her so much as the ideal of her, and
unless she unmake herself, he cannot unlove her. "To judge a man by the
fruit of his actions," says Professor Edward Howard Griggs, "it is
necessary to know all of the fruit, which is impossible. You can only
know what he eternally must be if you catch the aspect of his soul and
grow to understand his aspirations and his loves." To idealise,
therefore, is not to be blind, but to be far-seeing.
There is another way of looking on this question of the paradox. Granted
that it is caused by romantic love, romantic love is still exclusively
the best thing in the world. You cannot pay too dearly for the good of
life. I know that the misery of being in the intimacy of wedlock with
one who is not loved is unutterable. It is to become degraded and
unrecognisable, it is to wear the brand of liar before God! The man
whose outer life belies the inner is an enforced suicide. There is
something of majesty on "laying one's self down with a will," and there
is something of strength in cloistering the body for the spirit's
health's sake, but to die when all within is warm and clamorous for life
is terrible. Such a death they die who are held together, not by the
bonds of the spirit, but by those of convention. They who would go from
each other and dare not, die the ignominious death of fear. The suicide
is contemptible, besides being pitiable, when he is hounded out of life
despite himself, when he is a little embezzler of a clerk who rushes
from the music hall to the Thames and thinks of the unfinished glass
with his last breath. No, I do not underestimate the tragedy of the
paradox. Yet I say that if love were accountable for it (which it is
not), it would still be folly to forswear love. Do you ask why? Because
its dangers are the dangers common to all life, and we are so made that
we cannot be frightened away from our portion of experience. We are as
loth to give up our nights as our days. The winters as the summers, all
the seasons and all the climes, the fears as the hopes, all the travail
of deepest, fullest living, we claim as our own forever. We guard
jealously our heritage of feeling. Would you for all the world sleep
rather than wake, forget rather than remember? Then cease the requiem
of your speech about the dangers of disillusion!
Madness and selfishness were the cause of Louisa Naveret's death, and
the man who was mad and selfish was her lover. The poor man had not the
strength to renounce when he thought he found himself face to face with
the necessity of renouncing. But all lovers are not too weak to cope
with love. John Ruskin, if you remember, loved his wife, and he shot
neither himself, nor her, nor Millais. Charles J. Johnson is not a
Ruskin, and Ruskin's love was not a madness.
And, Herbert, to me there is nothing comic in a stress of feeling. Let
the lover pale and flutter and faint; in the presence of his deity it is
an acceptable form of worship. The very self-possessed lover is more
preposterous!
Your book has not yet reached me. To-morrow I shall write again,
providing I remember how to write a natural letter.
Yours,
DANE KEMPTON.
XXIII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
June 20, 19--.
There are impersonal hours when the things of the day drop below
consciousness and the spirit grows devotional and wends a pilgrimage to
larger spheres, there to sit apart. Such a respite was mine to-day.
There had been a call to rouse and put forth work, and I wrought with
all the puniness of my might (woe is me!), and earned my post at the
window that looks out upon the large things. The best of nights and days
of toil is that there comes a twilight in which fatigued eyes see clear.
I said it did not matter how you do about your marriage. Time may right
you in a way I cannot know. I said it did not matter if you are not
righted in this, there being so much that never rights itself. Both hope
and despair were followed by a calm of neutrality. The inquiry waited
no solution. The stress no longer touched me, and my twilight became
luminous. I saw things as from a height and forms dropped out of my
range, when Barbara came tugging at me, and my pale while of abstraction
was at an end.
She wanted to know what troubled me. She made her way to me, hurried but
resolved, and stated her demand. "You catechised me yesterday; to-night
you shall answer."