4.2. THE NATURE OF LOVE.
It is well perhaps to look a little into the factors that make up Love.
Love does not seem to me to be a simple elemental thing. It is, as I
have already said, one of the vicious tendencies of the human mind to
think that whatever can be given a simple name can be abstracted as a
single something in a state of quintessential purity. I have pointed out
that this is not true of Harmony or Beauty, and that these are synthetic
things. You bring together this which is not beautiful and that which is
not beautiful, and behold! Beauty! So also Love is, I think, a synthetic
thing. One observes this and that, one is interested and stirred;
suddenly the metal fuses, the dry bones live! One loves.
Almost every interest in one's being may be a factor in the love
synthesis. But apart from the overflowing of the parental instinct that
makes all that is fine and delicate and young dear to us and to be
cherished, there are two main factors that bring us into love with our
fellows. There is first the emotional elements in our nature that arise
out of the tribal necessity, out of a fellowship in battle and hunting,
drinking and feasting, out of the needs and excitements and delights of
those occupations; and there is next the intenser narrower desirings and
gratitudes, satisfactions and expectations that come from sexual
intercourse. Now both these factors originate in physical needs and
consummate in material acts, and it is well to remember that this great
growth of love in life roots there, and, it may be, dies when its roots
are altogether cut away.
At its lowest, love is the mere sharing of, or rather the desire to
share, pleasure and excitement, the excitements of conflict or lust or
what not. I think that the desire to partake, the desire to merge one's
individual identity with another's, remains a necessary element in all
personal loves. It is a way out of ourselves, a breaking down of our
individual separation, just as hate is an intensification of that.
Personal love is the narrow and intense form of that breaking down, just
as what I call Salvation is its widest, most extensive form. We cast
aside our reserves, our secrecies, our defences; we open ourselves;
touches that would be intolerable from common people become a mystery of
delight, acts of self-abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with
symbolical pleasure. We cannot tell which of us is me, which you. Our
imprisoned egoism looks out through this window, forgets its walls, and
is for those brief moments released and universal.
For most of us the strain of primordial sexual emotion in our loves is
very strong. Many men can love only women, many women only men, and some
can scarcely love at all without bodily desire. But the love of
fellowship is a strong one also, and for many, love is most possible and
easy when the thought of physical lovemaking has been banished. Then the
lovers will pursue interests together, will work together or journey
together. So we have the warm fellowships of men for men and women for
women. But even then it may happen that men friends together will talk
of women, and women friends of men. Nevertheless we have also the strong
and altogether sexless glow of those who have fought well together, or
drunk or jested together or hunted a common quarry.
Now it seems to me that the Believer must also be a Lover, that he will
love as much as he can and as many people as he can, and in many moods
and ways. As I have said already, many of those who have taught religion
and morality in the past have been neglectful or unduly jealous of the
intenser personal loves. They have been, to put it by a figure, urgent
upon the road to the ocean. To that they would lead us, though we come
to it shivering, fearful and unprepared, and they grudge it that we
should strip and plunge into the wayside stream. But all streams, all
rivers come from this ocean in the beginning, lead to it in the end.
It is the essential fact of love as I conceive it, that it breaks down
the boundaries of self. That love is most perfect which does most
completely merge its lovers. But no love is altogether perfect, and for
most men and women love is no more than a partial and temporary lowering
of the barriers that keep them apart. With many, the attraction of love
seems always to fall short of what I hold to be its end, it draws people
together in the most momentary of self-forgetfulnesses, and for the rest
seems rather to enhance their egotisms and their difference. They are
secret from one another even in their embraces. There is a sort of love
that is egotistical lust almost regardless of its partner, a sort of
love that is mere fleshless pride and vanity at a white heat. There is
the love-making that springs from sheer boredom, like a man reading a
story-book to fill an hour. These inferior loves seek to accomplish an
agreeable act, or they seek the pursuit or glory of a living possession,
they aim at gratification or excitement or conquest. True love seeks to
be mutual and easy-minded, free of doubts, but these egotistical
mockeries of love have always resentment in them and hatred in them and
a watchful distrust. Jealousy is the measure of self-love in love.
True love is a synthetic thing, an outcome of life, it is not a
universal thing. It is the individualized correlative of Salvation; like
that it is a synthetic consequence of conflicts and confusions. Many
people do not desire or need Salvation, they cannot understand it, much
less achieve it; for them chaotic life suffices. So too, many never,
save for some rare moment of illumination, desire or feel love. Its
happy abandonment, its careless self-giving, these things are mere
foolishness to them. But much has been said and sung of faith and love
alike, and in their confused greed these things also they desire and
parody. So they act worship and make a fine fuss of their devotions. And
also they must have a few half-furtive, half-flaunting fallen
love-triumphs prowling the secret backstreets of their lives, they know
not why.
(In setting this down be it remembered I am doing my best to tell what
is in me because I am trying to put my whole view of life before the
reader without any vital omissions. These are difficult matters to
explain because they have no clear outlines; one lets in a hard light
suddenly upon things that have lurked in warm intimate shadows, dim
inner things engendering motives. I am not only telling quasi-secret
things but exploring them for myself. They are none the less real and
important because they are elusive.)
True love I think is not simply felt but known. Just as Salvation as I
conceive it demands a fine intelligence and mental activity, so love
calls to brain and body alike and all one's powers. There is always
elaborate thinking and dreaming in love. Love will stir imaginations
that have never stirred before.
Love may be, and is for the most part, one-sided. It is the going out
from oneself that is love, and not the accident of its return. It is the
expedition whether it fail or succeed.
But an expedition starves that comes to no port. Love always seeks
mutuality and grows by the sense of responses, or we should love
beautiful inanimate things more passionately than we do. Failing a full
return, it makes the most of an inadequate return. Failing a sustained
return it welcomes a temporary coincidence. Failing a return it finds
support in accepted sacrifices. But it seeks a full return, and the
fulness of life has come only to those who, loving, have met the lover.
I am trying to be as explicit as possible in thus writing about Love.
But the substance in which one works here is emotion that evades
definition, poetic flashes and figures of speech are truer than prosaic
statements. Body and the most sublimated ecstasy pass into one another,
exchange themselves and elude every net of words we cast.
I have put out two ideas of unification and self-devotion, extremes upon
a scale one from another; one of these ideas is that devotion to the
Purpose in things I have called Salvation; the other that devotion to
some other most fitting and satisfying individual which is passionate
love, the former extensive as the universe, the latter the intensest
thing in life. These, it seems to me, are the boundary and the living
capital of the empire of life we rule.
All empires need a comprehending boundary, but many have not one capital
but many chief cities, and all have cities and towns and villages beyond
the capital. It is an impoverished capital that has no dependent towns,
and it is a poor love that will not overflow in affection and eager
kindly curiosity and sympathy and the search for fresh mutuality. To
love is to go living radiantly through the world. To love and be loved
is to be fearless of experience and rich in the power to give.
