Part 3

She thought first, _as she had been told by a sympathetic schoolmistress_, "What I need, what I must have, if I am ever to fulfil myself—is romance. I must learn not to be afraid of life. Some day, I shall love. Am I to pretend to myself that such a thing is out of the question because I am married?" Why not strike for freedom, and begin life again? She "thought that the conflict lay, as so often, between sincerity and sentiment." Only sentiment made it "impossible for her to be ruthless" to her husband.

"_Then illumination came to her, searing and vivid._"

The lover was, after all, a mere "pretext," an opportunity for one more experiment with life, one more feverish attempt to find some false image of herself.

"Was the freedom for which she looked to be based upon yet another artificial value? After all, why should she arrogate to herself the right of deciding what her greatest happiness was to be? . . . The long, long way round that it had been, to arrive at last at her own convictions, and cease to try and wrench them into line with those of other people!"

"The gift" of herself "had been made" to her husband. Her real self lay with him and with their coming child.

So she conquered the final test, escaped "applying a general law to a particular case—taking one's values ready-made—the old, old humbug." As "the last comforting falsity fell from her she saw . . . the truth."

This was the truth _for her_. It is not offered as an argument for or against a dogmatic rule that no woman may ever be justified in leaving her husband.

What this thoroughly modern and sincere novel _does_ establish, is the equal folly, and almost greater moral danger, of the opposite dogma: that self-expression for its own sake, the mere putting a moment's apparent happiness above all other claims or aims, without considering the future, or seeking to find one's real self, _is a false and evil ideal_.

_Miss Delafield gives the "new" morality a fair, and even an eloquent, hearing, chooses a case where all the circumstances seem combined for its support, and then exposes the fallacy of its reasoning._

VIII

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 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 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 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 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, 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 sex-urge, and you make us slaves indeed. If you consider less fundamental desires and pleasures of the body, you will admit at once that feverish, uncontrolled, and constant straining to put out all your strength at once, can produce no kind of good sportsman. Who more rigorously disciplines himself than the athlete? The power to be passionate, to express the love of the flesh, dies before it has ever been really attained, for those who always at once yield to mere craving. Their "deeply sensual associations" are "always robbed of mystery and delight when long-balked attraction comes to a tardy blooming."

And as Scott told us long ago, "It is no small aggravation of this jaded and uncomfortable state of mind, that the voluptuary cannot renounce the pursuits with which he is satiated, but must continue, for his character's sake, or from the mere force of habit, to take all the toil, fatigue, and danger of the chase, while he has so little real interest in the termination."

That is, they quickly lose the very pleasures which were their object and their excuse.

_I have known, or read of, no more miserable and weak human beings than many of the men and women in modern fiction._

Does it then follow that spiritual love, a true union of souls, for which we claim a higher and a more lasting happiness, is a thing apart, wherein the physical must be kept under, put aside; or, if conceded to our common weakness (the penalty of our earthly existence), should be calmly and occasionally indulged, only under official licence, in secret as a shameful deed? Certainly _not_. The pure know far more of passion than the loose. But, as other bodily pleasure, i.e., self-expression, gains strength and depth by taking responsibility for itself, "ordering" itself; so, above all, does our strongest, and most ultimate, physical need.

It is the true passion, naturally found in comradeship and love, spontaneously constant and controlled, which will complete man's vitality, deepen and strengthen, while it steadies, physique. Spiritually the one expresses itself by _taking_, the other achieves itself by _giving_.

The biggest adventure in life, the deepest and truest feelings do, actually, involve that emotional abandon, or complete self-forgetting, which modernists exalt. But the giving away of one's whole self, that is, expressing one's whole self in passionate service, is _not_ achieved by sudden, untested intimacy. It can only come, or grow, for those who seek understanding of each other, suffer the first mystery—(stirring the wonder dreams of youth)—to unfold and reveal itself in steady, controlled devotion to the vision of romance. Then, and only then (soon or late, as the individual self prompts), he shall dare, _because he knows_.

In other words, the physical passion, in which to-day men find the _birth_ of love, belongs in nature to maturity and completion, when man has gained the courage to be himself and express himself. It is the harvest of pure romance, only possible to those who have earned full knowledge of themselves and of each other.

The humdrum pictures of insincere marriage, with which fiction is crowded to-day, come from mistakes or spiritual failure to be one's best self, _not_ from constancy and faith. The need to perpetually revive intense emotion with a new mistress can never be felt in a true marriage. It _is_ inevitable for so-called "free" love, the bitterest slavery of man.

For wedded love—that is, the permanent union of body and soul—there is ever a new and wonderful adventure, the deepening mystery of the closer bond. And the highest happiness, which is _intense_ emotion, has the gravest responsibilities, demanding the greatest courage and hope. As Mr. Middleton Murray has written in _The Things We Are_: "The taking of a wife or the taking of a friend is an eternal act; if it be less, it is a treachery, a degradation."

It is true, certainly, that the _nature_ of love and passion may change with time and the comradeship of daily life; but the change is not a weakening, not even a lowering of the pulse. Its ardour does not diminish but conquers life more completely. It is, actually, the constant and faithful heart, which has most strength to bear with, or to ennoble, the deadening trivialities of existence (that no free lover can escape), to make small things great; which finds most courage to face Fate.

The deadening influence of constant "experiments" in passion ("walking round and round the thing you want, gloating over it with your eyes"); the bitter tragedy of a life that is "one long series of eager conquests turned to listless ones," has been dramatically exposed, with unflinching realism, by Miss Olive Mary Salter in her _God's Wages_; which also reveals "that love beyond self which is human companionship."

For Anne Verity, we read, "marriage" had been "the finger-post to Death." In "making man her own she made him stale. . . . There was no end to those upon whom she had lived and left them to pay the bill." Always "life must be savoured anew by fresh interests, hashed up aspects of the same old facts served up over and over again to one's easily deceived palate." It was "her vanity that must be ministered to afresh, its staleness and satiation relieved by the sacrifice of someone else's young virility."

She found that "love doesn't stay with this generation, it touches us and flies again. . . . It's this awful quality of inconstancy in me, as if my heart had got a hole in it. . . . We've lost the art of looking on at anybody but ourselves."

But, at long last, when a man explained to her: "I want you to love my mind, that lives, instead of my body, that will die," she awoke.

She learnt then, that "the right man, or the right woman for the matter of that, isn't ever ready made. It needs effort of the most intense kind to fit a man perfectly into a woman's life, a woman perfectly into a man's."

_Wherefore, "Love, real love, is the consummation of great effort, neither more nor less."_

IX

WHO _IS_ THE "IDEAL" MISTRESS?

The most determined advocates of free-love have never upheld the old, lazy indulgence towards man and his "wild oats." The ideal mistress, whom they so confidently exalt over the wife, is not the "kept woman" behind Victorian respectability. Modern writers have, boldly and justly, attacked that discreet indiscretion with the unanswerable logic of facts. If we allow men licence, justice demands equal liberty for women. Sin is not less, but greater, for being in secret, however flimsy the veil.

It is difficult, nevertheless, to see how _mutual_ infidelity can actually remove the admitted evils of a situation it makes more complex; or to believe that publicity can, of itself, turn black to white. By some curious twist of reasoning, it really would seem that they maintain: "By lifting the blinds, we have created a 'new' woman, the ideal of all the ages."

For where, after all, have they turned to find her, save to their knowledge and experience of the past? We cannot, positively, reconstruct human nature.

There is a clear and concise exposition of the whole theory in Miss Romer Wilson's last novel, _The Death of Society_. It is the story of Mr. Smith and his short visit to a distinguished Norwegian writer. He, quite openly, worships the old man's young wife—"his girl, his woman, his desire"—and though for them "time was so short they could not afford to sleep," it is expressly stated that "_she, the perfect woman in whom all women live, raised him to perfect manhood_." "Now," he said, "I have confidence to do what I think right. . . . I do not care for opinion any longer."

Together, "they fell into the deep pool of love," when she "was too far gone in bliss to reply."

"Many men," she said, "men who came to see my husband, thought that I was part of the visit, and that no man who thought well of himself should go away without seducing me." But "that is how you seduced me, because I saw love sprang straight from your heart and not from custom."

"There was an Italian man who loved me, but not more than the books with gold covers on his shelves. . . . He said I was the Muse of Comedy. . . . There was a Frenchman who said I was the Muse of Poetry. . . . There was a Russian who said nothing. . . . He loved me because we were both animals; but only you love me because I am part of your life and so I love you equally."

Miss Wilson, indeed, attempts to impart a unique atmosphere into this commonplace intrigue by a remarkable device. Smith "cannot speak German, nor speak Norwegian." _She_ knows only a few words of English. "I like to _pretend_ you hear," said Rosa, "I have always pretended"; and he "could address her in whatever words he liked," since "lovers' language is universal."

By this method they do, in fact, hold conversations by the hour, answering each other with quite miraculous preciseness; understanding, we are expected to believe, the intimacies of thought and feeling behind each phrase: "though he had no idea what she had said, word for word." The intention, obviously, is to suggest some special mysterious, if not miraculous, bond of the spirit knitting two souls in one. The comment of a plain man, who deals with facts, must be that inarticulate love can be only physical. It does not elevate, but further degrades, their intimacy. He "had gone back to the dust to learn about God."

They parted, however, because "they loved each other too much to ask for each other's lives." Meanwhile, "in patience and humility" they must wait "until after the Death of Society"—when they can be together.

"How should I act," said Rosa, "if there were no such a thing as Society? I know how I should act. . . . I owe nothing to either man or woman. My name? My husband's name?—these belong to Society. . . . I will not leave my husband, because he is an old man, nor my daughters, because they are young; but if I give you a day of love, and again a day perhaps, whom shall I hurt? . . . My soul belongs to nobody: I—Rosa Christiansen—am my own. _My body is my soul's servant and friend, and by it I can know other souls as I know my own._ . . . Oh! oh! My soul is mine, and loves your soul!"

We see that the "perfect woman" still kept on husband and home.

And Smith, thus "proudly numbering himself among the angels," also found time for a secondary, but quite passionate, intercourse with one of the daughters of the house, who willingly gives him everything she has; because she loves him so much, he is all she wants.

He "kissed her violently on the face . . . squeezed her ribs as tight as ever he dared," and replied without hesitation, "I love you as I love flowers and the trees and the sky. I love you because you are lovable as a wet or fine day is lovable. Why, yes, I must confess that I love you. . . . . I believe all men love a great many women. . . . I am a Bluebeard with a cellar full of wives. . . . You see, God hasn't created the woman yet who represents the whole of female perfection. Don't mistake me, Nathalia; I am not a beast. I don't run after women solely as women. . . . He began to stroke her head as he thought of all those past and bygone romances."

And so on——! Strangely enough, "his heart was filled with deep and tender _respect for her_."

More frequently, however, the novelists of this school seem to have gone back to the casual lusts of _Tom Jones_, with the rôle of hero and heroine reversed. There are many tales, almost romantic, of Sir Galahad waiting and tilting for Cleopatra or Mary Queen of Scots. Too often, marriage is merely evidence that "the _man_ has held out."

Still we maintain that the modernists are really looking to the old-world "kept" woman for their ideal of more or less open and, as it were, established free love. We find clear, specific complaints against the new system: "They had lapsed into a relation which slowly from irregular grew regular. It was not marriage, but it was in the nature of marriage." Now, "after two and a half years . . . she had done wifely things for him. . . . Love and domestic economy; it was very like marriage after all."

What then, frankly speaking, is the real charm of the new mistress-love? Most obviously it comes, ultimately, from the holiday spirit; its freedom from sordid or petty cares, the prose of our daily life, business or home worries, the responsibilities that dull the eye and wear down body and soul: which _means_ the incarnation of selfishness.

Outspoken and simply coarse writers of the past centuries expose this fact by their frank hints on "the honeymoon"; of which we acknowledge the underlying truth.

It has been cynically maintained, nor dare one quite deny, that our romance-lady, the sheltered and innocent pure girl, would have been broken long ago but for the "outlet," to mere males, of her under-sister. I would suggest that the new "ideal" mistress is certainly no less, probably more, dependent upon the housewife—the tame, tied woman who bears her lover's name.

We can none of us escape "the day's work." Under the conventional "wild oats" scheme of life, we _can_ place the whole burden upon the wife: and so find elsewhere "The Woman"—passionately and emotionally our ideal.

But no theory of free love was ever based upon two establishments. The whole weight of the new thought cries out for open, frank _leaving one woman_ and _going to the other_; where possible by mutual consent. The secrecy, the misunderstanding, _the divided allegiance_, of the old world, is the very evil they are clamouring to wipe out. Yet _can_ we leave our bills, our servants, and our children behind with the fixtures of the old "home to let"? Can we spend our life, or for that matter, more than a few days or weeks, in one perpetual holiday among the "beach-flappers" of Miss Amber Reeves' unstable _Helen in Love_ and the boys they so gaily and easily annex?

The truth, of course, cannot be denied. These new, glorified sex-contracts (whether entirely free, or on a "short lease" subject to "things going well") will, and must, involve all the trials of domesticity, without the compensations of a shared responsibility: a real bond to halve our sorrows and double our joys. There will, moreover, be a thousand times more occasion for incompatibility, the jar of nerves; where there is no steady, devoted endeavour towards mutual forbearance and understanding, no spur to forgive—in courageous hope. Life in hotels may, superficially, expose less friction; but it quickly destroys any reality in comradeship. Only daily service can build up Love.

The mistress, in fact, remains an enervating luxury, a habit of living beyond our emotional means, a sparkling drug.

_We have not found the Ideal, because it does not exist._

X

HERE ARE TWO PICTURES OF FREE LOVE!

"After all, what is life for me? _Strange doors in strange houses, strange men and strange intimacies._ Sometimes weirdly grotesque and incredibly beastly. The secret vileness of human nature flung at me. Man revealing himself, through individual after individual, as utterly contemptible. I tell you, my dear eager fool, it is beyond my conception ever to regard a man as higher than a frog, as less repulsive."

It is a cry from Mr. Compton Mackenzie's glittering land of many, and strange, sins—surely a nightmare of hell itself; cry of the gallant Sylvia Scarlett, writing her own epitaph—"Here lies Sylvia Scarlett _who was always running away_."

On the surface, indeed, it is a gay enough scene Mr. Mackenzie has painted for us, when "her arm was twined round him like ivy, and their two hands came together like leaves."