Part 8

After all, the things we do are both more significant and less changing than our attitude toward our acts. We burn men at the stake to light a Roman garden, to save the world from the horror of heresy, or to protect the sanctity of female virtue and assure the supremacy of the white race, but we burn them always; we fight because arms are glorious, because the service of God demands the rescue of His holy sepulcher from the infidel, or because we must make the world safe for peace, but always we fight; and the most important thing is the insistent lust of cruelty or the impulse to fight rather than the rationalization of these motives. So, too, with love. Paphnutius is harried out of apathy into a state in which he sees visions because of the temptations of the devil, Milton because God gave Eve to Adam as a comforter, Shelley because woman is the symbol of the unutterable, and Shaw (presumably) because only by the process of reproduction can the Life Force perform its perfectionist experiments; but the resultant impulses are not so very different. Mr. F. W. Myers once referred to the procreation of children in these lines:

Lo! When a man magnanimous and tender, Lo! When a woman desperate and true, Make the inevitable sweet surrender, Show one another what the Lord can do,...

but I doubt if the states of mind which called forth these lines and, say, Swinburne’s Dolores were as different as the verses would suggest or as the authors imagined. Without going so far as to say that the two poems are of equal literary merit, one can at least say that they are almost equally interesting and delightful to the observer of life or art and that as long as the mystical, the ascetic, the sentimental, and the biological attitudes toward love continue to exist side by side or to follow one another in succeeding epochs, the critic will not find literature either dull or monotonous.

If at the end of a period of twenty-five years during which fiction has frankly concerned itself to an unusual degree with sex the problem seems more complicated than ever before, there is no cause for surprise. Even the specious pretense that a solution has been found can only be maintained when, as during the Victorian era, the mass of men agree to assume that no difficulties exist which are not solvable by that rule of thumb known as the social and moral code, and insist that sexual battles shall be fought out behind closed doors in life and between the chapters in books. By dragging them out into public view we have been able, no doubt, to palliate some of the commoner tragedies of stupidity. But chiefly we have been upon a voyage of discovery, and it ought to be evident now, if it has never been evident before, that we cannot possibly solve the problem because its most important aspects are not social but human. They have their roots in man’s ironic predicament between gorilla and angel, a predicament perfectly typified by the fact that as he grows critical he realizes that love is at once sublime and obscene and that only by walking a spiritual tight-rope above the abysses can he be said to live at all in any true sense. The very fact that the social aspects can to a certain extent be worked out makes them less interesting and explains the fact that those novels intended to prove, for example, that the mother of an illegitimate child may still be within the human pale have come to seem so unutterably dull. No doubt they “did good,” but like all forms of useful literature their life was short. By far the most interesting contemporary writers who deal chiefly with sex are largely concerned with the individual problem.

Thanks partially to modern fiction we have attained a certain measure of freedom. But freedom, as everybody who understands either the meaning of the word or the value of the thing knows, raises problems instead of settling them. It is true that our attitude has changed. There is hardly a serious contemporary novel which does not take for granted things which would have outraged even liberal thinkers of the past century, and the changes have been mostly in the direction of clarification. It would be impossible for any one to-day to fail to see, as George Eliot failed to see, that the natural working of the “inevitable moral law” which punished Hetty Sorrel was neither inevitable nor natural. The things which happened to her came entirely from society and not at all from nature, so that the story which the author meant to be a tragedy of the ineluctable becomes merely a description of human stupidity. So, too, we are clearer on other things; we are not quite so hopelessly at sea as we once were when it comes to distinguishing between frigidity and chastity or purity and prudishness. But these things mean only that more choices are open to us, that we have come to see that sexual conduct cannot be guided or judged by a few outwardly applied standards, and that, accordingly, the conduct of life has been made more thrillingly difficult.

Most sex novels of the past have been concerned chiefly with what might be called the right to love. They have combated an extremely old idea which Christianity found congenial and embodied in the conception of love as a part of the curse pronounced upon man at the Fall, and hence at best a necessary evil. They have been compelled solemnly to assure us that the early Christian Fathers were wrong in assuming that the human race would have been better off if it had been able to propagate itself by means of some harmless system of vegetation, and they have had to fly in the face of all laws and social customs which are seen, if examined closely, to rest upon the assumption that desire is merely a dangerous nuisance, fatal to efficiency and order, and hence to be regimented at any cost. It is now pretty generally admitted among the educated class that love is legitimate, even that it has an æsthetic as well as a utilitarian function. We have got back to the point which Ovid had reached some two thousand years ago of realizing that there is an art of love. During the next quarter of a century fiction will be concerned, I think, more with the failure or success of individuals to attain this art than with the exposition of theses which most accept.

No doubt some of the more naïvely enthusiastic crusaders really believed that as soon as man was freed from the more grossly stupid restrictions from without and from the artificially cultivated inhibitions within, love would become simple and idyllic, but one needs look only at the books of D. H. Lawrence or Aldous Huxley to be relieved of this stupid delusion. The characters of both of these authors have long ago ceased to care what law or society thinks and they are surely untroubled by traditional asceticism, but their problems are not less acute. Indeed it is just because these novelists are so completely concerned with love as a personal matter that they are the freshest of those contemporary writers with whom sex is the dominant interest. Each is concerned with something fundamental--the one with the problem of the adjustment of personalities and the other with the evaluation of sexual love.

If by “immoral” is meant “tending to excite lubricity,” then nothing could be more absurd than the opinion, apparently held by some, that the books of these men are immoral. They are so completely unable to lose themselves carelessly in passion and so insistent upon the need of adjusting it somehow to the other interests of life that they strike one as more like saints than like gallants, and their books are far more chilling than inflammatory. Huxley and Joyce try to laugh sex away, but their scorn of the flesh suggests Erasmus more than Rabelais, and, as for Lawrence, his novels constitute so solemn a warning that one imagines him as thoroughly bored with the exigencies of passion and more likely to make his disciples celibates than debauchés.

In Lawrence’s morbidly sensitive and exaggeratedly individualistic characters one sees as through a magnifying-glass the thousand impingements of personality upon personality which make love more and more difficult as it becomes more intimate and personal. His people, like Schopenhauer’s porcupines, are continually coming together for warmth only to find themselves pricked by one another’s quills and to part snarling, so that his perpetual prayer is a “Lord deliver us from this need which can be neither stilled nor satisfied.” And abnormal though he is, his abnormality is one of degree only, for when sexual love is developed beyond the impulse of the animal and desires the contact of spirit as well as body that contact is bound to be both incomplete and painful.

Nor is the even more fundamental problem with which Aldous Huxley is concerned likely ever to receive a permanent or a general solution. He is in search of love, but he can find only ridiculous and obscene biological facts, for love, like God and the other most important human possessions, does not exist. It is an illusion created by the effort of the imagination to transform the unsatisfactory materials which life has furnished it into something acceptable to the soul; but being an illusion, it is unstable and perpetually tending, if not created anew, to dissolve into its elements. The racial need for the continuation of the species and the individual need for the satisfaction of a physiological impulse exist, but they are hard, unsatisfying realities, and the struggle of mankind is to create some fiction which will as far as possible include and at the same time transcend them.

And nothing derogatory is, of course, meant by the word “fiction.” All that distinguishes man from nature is such a fiction, and it is by his insistent belief in these imaginary things that civilization has been created. All of Mr. Huxley’s books are confessions, first cynically triumphant and then despairing, of his inability to be poet or mystic or ironist enough to achieve this transcendence and find in his animal heritage a satisfaction for his spiritual needs. Like everyone else, he is compelled to love, and love implies a certain amount of idealization. How, he asks in effect, is he to poetize this ridiculous function, which he shares with the beasts, and concerning which science is constantly presenting us with an increasing amount of disillusioning knowledge? Exercising the most perverse ingenuity in confronting romance with biology and in establishing the identity (in the realm of fact) of love and lust, he has continually tracked the trail of the beast into the holy of holies--but only because it hurt him so much to find it there. The obscenities in which he seems to revel are defiances of the inner idealist who has dared to assimilate the loathsome trivialities of sex into something capable of satisfying spiritual desires. When he sings one of his philosopher’s songs or when, in “Antic Hay,” he describes some particularly revolting orgy there is nothing new in the psychological state which provokes his obscenity. His attitude is a result of failure to reconcile physical fact with spiritual feeling. He is not far from Huysmans, who ended “A Rebours” with the words: “For the man who has written such a book there are only two alternatives--a pistol or the foot of the cross.” Only of course Huysmans was wrong. Anatole France and James Branch Cabell are not less sophisticated, but through the perfection of sophistication they have achieved a peaceful irony in which they can worship a non-existent God and believe again in the illusions they create. Huxley, too sophisticated for simple faith and too downright for ironic worship, is lost.

When the conception of love is, as it has tended to be in modern times, legalistic, these problems are submerged. As long as marriage is a matter of contract, the importance of the inward harmony of personalities is of the slightest, for children may be begotten and reared whether the parents love or hate. As long as passion is generally conceded to be but a shameful concession to unregenerate humanity, the average man is not likely to be concerned if he finds that the ideal of the poets is not realized in his own nuptial couch. But when love is free and unashamed then it is made ten times more difficult, for lives are recognized as frank failures which once would have seemed useful and satisfactory. Fiction, too, becomes, not more interesting, but more important. It ceases completely to be what it always tends to be when opinion is fixed, namely, a mere illustration of the working out of social or moral “laws”; it becomes frankly the record of individual souls in search of a successful way of life. It records, no doubt, more failures than successes, but it furnishes the best and perhaps only really important material for the study of that art of life which grows ever more complicated as we demand that it be more complete and beautiful.

Can Men and Women Be Friends?

By Floyd Dell

Floyd Dell

_was born at Barry, Illinois, June 28th, 1887. Is the author of several novels and collections of essays including “Janet March,” a story of a young woman and her adjustment to modern standards. His latest book is “Looking at Life.” Other books are “Women as World Builders,” 1913; “Were You Ever a Child?” 1919; “Moon Calf,” 1920; “The Briary Bush,” 1921._

CAN MEN AND WOMEN BE FRIENDS?

BY FLOYD DELL

Friendship between men and women is rather a new thing in the history of the world. Friendship depends upon equality and choice, and there has been very little of either in the relations of the sexes, up to the present. A woman does not choose her male relatives, nor is she according to archaic family laws their equal; motives other than personal choice might lead her to become a man’s wife; wholly impersonal reasons might place her in the relationship of kept mistress. Only in her rôle of paramour was there any implication of free choice; and even here there was no full equality, not even of danger. None of these customary relationships of the past can be said to have fostered friendship between men and women. Doubtless it did exist, but under difficulties.

Family bonds, however, are being more and more relaxed, women are no longer the wards of their male relatives, and friendship with a father or brother is more than ever possible. Further, the free personal choice which marked only the romantic amours of the age of chivalry is now popularly regarded in America as essential to any decent marriage, while the possibility of divorce tends to make free choice something besides a mere youthful illusion. More than ever before, husbands and wives are friends.

At the same time the intensity of friendships between people of the same sex appears to be diminishing. This intensity, in its classic instances, as in Greece, we now regard as an artificial product, the result of the segregation of the sexes and the low social position of women. As women become free and equal with men such romantic intensity of emotion finds a more biologically appropriate expression. Friendships between people of the same sex must to-day compete on the one hand with romantic love and on the other with the more fascinating though often less enduring friendships which can now be enjoyed between men and women. Neglect of these latter opportunities is coming to be regarded as a kind of spiritual cowardice, or at least as a failure in enterprise.

The influences of the machine age, so destructive to fixed authoritarian relationships, appear to foster the growth of friendship between the sexes; so much so that we may expect it to become, in its further developments, a characteristic social feature of the age that lies immediately before us.

Friendship will become a more and more important aspect of marriage itself; but, except in the effects of its wider spread, this will hardly be a new thing--we have friendships between husbands and wives now. Nor will extra-marital friendships between men and women be precisely a new thing. What will be new, furnishing us with an interesting theme for sociological speculation, are the conventions which will gradually come into existence to give social protection and dignity to extra-marital friendships.

Conventions are, doubtless, always rather ridiculous, inevitably a shackle upon the free motions of the soul, being imposed by fear. But it will be remembered that we, in America, with a vast amount of freedom of intersexual association, have thus far only begun to dispense with the locks and bars and whippings and chaperons which were the appurtenances of a physical segregation of the sexes; the vast paraphernalia of psychic segregation, including sexual taboos which hark back to the primeval darkness, are with us still. Our minds are habituated to unreasonable fears in all matters concerning the relations of the sexes. For a long time, extra-marital friendships of men and women may be expected to be hedged about with elaborate and specific permissions, for the sake of keeping them under social control. Yet these conventions may be very convenient; and however irksome they may seem to the free spirits of a future day, they may still be such as would appear to us generously libertarian.

To-day, in the absence of such conventions, it does not suffice that a man and woman, too well married to be afraid of extra-marital friendships, grant them to each other by private treaty; relatives, friends, and neighbors do not fail to be duly alarmed. Extra-marital friendship exists in an atmosphere of social suspicion which a few conventions would go far to alleviate.

As an example in a different field, the convention with regard to dancing may be adduced. If dancing were not a general custom, if it were the enlightened practice of an advanced few, how peculiar and suspicious would seem the desire of Mr. X and Mrs. Y to embrace each other to music; and how scandalized the neighbors would be to hear that they _did_! No one would rest until the pair had been driven into an elopement.

We build huge palaces for the kind of happy communion which dancing furnishes; we tend more and more to behave like civilized beings about the impulses which are thus given scope. We are less socially hospitable to the impulses of friendship between men and women.

In friendship there are many moods; but the universal rite of friendship is _talk_. Talk needs no palaces for its encouragement; it is not an expensive affair; it would seem to be well within the reach of all. Yet it isn’t. For the talk of friendship requires privacy--though the privacy of a table for two in a crowded and noisy restaurant will suffice; and it requires time. Such talk does not readily adjust itself to the limitations of the dinner hour. It is a flower slow in unfolding; and it seems to come to its most perfect bloom only after midnight. But, unfortunately, not every restaurant keeps open all night. It is satisfied with two comfortable chairs; a table to lean elbows on is good, too; in winter an open fire, where friendly eyes may stare dreamily into the glowing coals--that is very good; hot or cold drinks according to the season, and a cigarette--these are almost the height of friendship’s luxury. These seem not too much to ask. Yet the desire for privacy and uncounted hours of time together is, when considered from that point of view, scandalous in its implications; quite as much so as the desire of Mr. X and Mrs. Y to embrace each other to music. However, Mr. X and Mrs. Y do, under the ægis of a convention, indulge their desire and embrace each other to their heart’s content with the full approval of civilized society; and it seems as though another convention might grow up, under the protection of which Mr. X and Mrs. Y might sit up and talk all night without its seeming queer of them.

Queer, at the least, it does seem nowadays, except under the conventions of courtship; friends who happen to be married to each other can of course talk comfortably in bed. These bare facts are sufficient to explain why so many men and women who really want to be friends and sit up all night occasionally and talk find it easy to believe that they are in love with each other. They find it all the easier to believe this, because friendship between the sexes is usually spiced with some degree of sexual attraction. But a degree of sexual attraction which might have kept a friendship forever sweet may prove unequal to the requirements of a more serious and intimate relationship. Disillusionment is the penalty, at the very least. Society could well afford to grant more freedom to friendship between men and women, and save the expense of a large number of broken hearts.

It is worth while to wonder if a good deal of “romance” is not, after all, friendship mistaking itself for something else; or rather, finding its only opportunity for expression in that mistake. Among civilized people, after the romance has ended, the friendship remains. It may perhaps have been worth while to imagine oneself in love, in order to enjoy a friendship; but it seems rather a wasteful proceeding.

Yet those who, taking a merely economical view of the situation, attempt to enjoy such friendships without becoming involved or involving others in such waste, may with some embarrassment discover--what Mrs. Grundy could have told them all along--that friendship and sexual romance may sometimes be difficult to relegate to previously determined boundaries. Friendship between the sexes may, if only for a moment, seem to demand the same tokens of sincerity as romantic love. Does not this fact threaten the traditional, jealously-guarded dignity of marriage?

Perhaps it does. At present, in any conflict of claims between a marriage and a friendship, there is “nothing to arbitrate”; marriage has all the rights, friendship none. If the rights of friendship are to be at all considered and protected, marriage may have to yield something. It may not be good manners for husbands and wives to be jealous of the quite possible momentary exuberances of each other’s friendships; it may be that such incidents will be regarded as being within the discretion of the persons immediately concerned, and not quite proper subjects for inquiry, speculation, or comment by anybody else.

And this might have an effect unsuspected by those whom such a prospect of liberty would most alarm to-day. When a moment’s rashness does not necessarily imply red ruin and the breaking up of homes, when sex is freed to a degree from the sense of overwhelming social consequences, it may well become a matter of more profound personal consequence; and with nothing to fear except the spoiling of their friendship, men and women in an ardent friendship may yet prefer talk to kisses.