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 [54]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 [55]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 [56]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 [57]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, [58]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 ............