"Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments. Love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove:O no! it is an ever fixed markThat looks on tempests, and is never shaken;It is the star to every wandering bark,Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeksWithin his bending sickle's compass come;Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:—If this be error, and upon me proved,I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
W. Shakespeare.
"He that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the HolyGhost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are notyour own?" (I. Cor. vi., 18-19.)
I said in an earlier chapter that I wanted to find a moral standard which should be based on the realities of human nature, and in order to do that we must first have a clear idea of what human nature really is, and by what law it lives. We have been passing during the last generation from an idea of law which belonged to our forefathers to a new idea of law which has been given to us by modern science; and in transition we still talk in ambiguous terms about "law"—moral "law," for instance—confusing ourselves between a law that is imposed on us from outside, a law that is passed by Parliament, for instance, or a law that has been the common custom of the country through its judges, and that kind of "law" which science has revealed to us. Scientific "law" is not imposed from without; it is the law of our being. When you talk of the "law" of gravitation, you do not mean that somebody outside has laid it down that mass shall act in a certain way with regard to other masses; you mean that mass-material—being what it is—behaves in a certain way. That is to say, a scientific law isthe law of beingof that which obeys the law. It obeys it because it is its nature to do so. If we could get a firm, hold of that idea of law, our own legislation would not be so senseless as it often is; for we should try to discover what is the nature of human beings—their real nature, about which we are often deceived—and we should try to make our laws, including our moral laws, those to which human nature, at its best, would most naturally and fully respond. That is the conception that is at the back of the great phrase which sounds like a paradox in one of the Collects of the English Prayer Book: "Whose service is perfect freedom." "Whose service is perfect freedom"; that is to say, when you obey God, you find perfect freedom because you are doing what it is your true nature to do. And that is why I want to base our moral law, our moral standard, on the realities of human nature. But, you will reply, when people are free to act as they choose they sometimes choose to violate their own nature. I cannot say how that happens; it involves the entire problem of evil; and I do not propose even to attempt to deal with it in this book. I will only say that our confusion has arisen, as I think, out of the very fact that instead of obeying the law of our being we have violated it; and now are so confused that we hardly know what "human nature" really is, or of what it is capable. That is why we get such extraordinarily different ideas about morals, and why, as I think, we get such arbitrary judgments on human beings.
Before, then, we can rightly establish our moral standard we have to decide what human nature really is, and when we have done that we shall know what is really moral. I suppose that sounds like a paradox to many, because they think that morality is always "going against" human nature. If people do anything that is generally called "immoral," they will excuse themselves on the grounds of human nature; they will say: "After all,human nature being what it is, you must expect this, that and the other kind of licence and immorality"; and to say that morality, real morality, can only be based on the realities of human nature will therefore sound to many of you the wildest kind of paradox. But I want to pursue it just as though it were true, because I believe it is true.
What, then, are the realities of our nature? Here is one: a human being is not and never can be cut off from other human beings. He is not alone. He cannot consider himself only. If he does so he violates his own nature, because it is not his nature to be alone, and he cannot act without his actions affecting other people. He cannot think, he cannot feel, he cannot act or speak without affecting other people, and it is futile for anyone to say: "It does not matter to others what I do; nobody knows; it concerns only myself." Your innermost thought affects the whole world in which you live, and whatever moral standard you are going to adopt, you must take it for granted that your standard will affect other people, and that it is absolutely impossible for you to act or think alone.
And then human beings are three-fold in nature. They have a body, a mind—or what St. Paul calls a "soul"—and a spirit. "Soul" is a word whose meaning we have altered so much that I must define what I mean by it and what I think St. Paul meant by it. The soul includes the emotions and the intellect, that part of a man which is not wholly physical and which is not entirely spiritual. Everyone has a soul. And every one of you, however much you ignore your body, however much you may tell me your body does not really exist, have got a body too. You have to eat and drink and sleep, just like the most material alderman, though you may eat less. And you cannot base a real moral standard on the pretence that you have not got a body. You are, on one side of your nature, physical, material, animal; but you have got a mind and emotions or "soul"; and you have got a spirit. To act as though you had not is just as futile as to pretend that you have not got a body. "Where there is no vision the people perish." "Mankind is incurably religious." "All the world seeks after God." Those proverbs, those sayings, which are familiar to all, crystallize the world's experience that human beings are spiritual beings. If there is any person who thinks that he is merely an intellect and a body, I will direct the attention of that intellect of his away from himself to the race, and I will remind him that practically no race in the world has ever been entirely without the sense of God; that, however hard men try, they have never been able to cure humanity of its spiritual hunger; that though our gods are often gross and earthy, even diabolical, yet they are spiritual, and they are the proof that man is spiritually aware; that he is a spirit as well as a body and a soul. Now I say that anyone who tries to base his morality on the assumption that he is only a body, or only an intelligence, or only a spirit, has got a false standard, and his morality is a dishonest kind of morality. The body will avenge itself on those who ignore it. Psychologists are teaching us that the mind will avenge itself on those who ignore it. And this is just as true of the spirit. Where there is no vision the people do perish. Your spiritual nature avenges itself on those who try to rule it out. Base your morality either on the exclusion of any part of your being, or on the assumption that what you do concerns yourself alone; and you will find that you are violating human nature. It is useless for you to act wrongly and to affirm that you do it "because human nature is what it is." When you do so, you are assuming that human nature isnotwhat it is; that is to say you assume that it is purely physical, when, in fact, it is three-fold—body, soul and spirit. You can see for yourselves, I think, how this violation of human nature works itself out. For animals promiscuity is not wrong. When they treat themselves as purely animals they are basing their moral standard, if I may put it so, on bed-rock; theyareanimals, and therefore they behave as animals without violating any law of their being. As they rise higher in the scale of evolution their morals become nobler. There are moral standards among the lower animals, but they remain at a certain level, and rightly so. No animal is harmed by behaving like an animal, for in doing so he obeys the law of his being; but if human beings behave as though they were animals, what happens? They find to their horror that they have let loose upon the world detestable, hideous and devastating diseases. Do you think that medicine will ever be able to rid the world of what are called the diseases of immorality as long as immorality remains? I do not believe it. I know that you can do much for individual sufferers, though you cannot do one-tenth part of what doctors thought they were going to be able to do, eight or nine years ago. And, of course, whatever we can do, we must and ought to do. But we do not reach the root of the matter by medicine.
No scientist can tell us how small-pox or tuberculosis or rheumatism first entered the world; but any scientist can tell us that by wrong living, wrong housing, wrong feeding, we can breed and spread and perpetuate disease. In other words, we are diseased not because we obey the laws of our nature but because we violate them: and though we can take the individual sufferer and (sometimes) cure him, we shall not get rid of the disease until we have learnt to obey those laws and to live rightly.
In just the same way the diseases of vice, though no one can say how they first came into the world, continue and flourish, not because of human nature, but because we violate some law of our own nature in what we do. We may even cure the individual; we may see a thousand struck and a thousand guilty escape; the fact remains that these diseases are bred in the swamp of immorality, just as certainly as malaria is bred in the mosquito-haunted pools of the malaria swamp. Drain the swamp, and you get rid of the malaria, for there is no longer any place for the malaria-bearing mosquito to breed. Drain the swamp of immorality, and you get rid of venereal disease, because there is no longer a place where these diseases can breed. Live rightly, and your nature will respond in health. When human beings elect to make their relations with one another promiscuous—when, that is to say, they treat themselves as animals—they are not obeying, they are violating the law of their own being; for they are not animals only, and to treat themselves as such is to disobey the law of their own nature. And disobedience reacts in disease.
So again, the relations of men and women are of the mind as well as of the body and the spirit. You cannot rule out your mind, and I think that those who believe, as many do today, not indeed in a merely animal promiscuity, but in rather casual relations between men and women—experiments, if you like, men and women passing from one union to another—rule out the fact that a human being has a mind, a memory and foresight; that our being includes a past, and, in a sense, includes a future also; and when you try to divorce your physical experience from your intellectual and emotional being you are again violating the law of your own nature.
I remember asking one of the most happily married women that I know to put into words, if she could, the reason why she believed that married people, married lovers, should not have gone through other relationships with other people before they gave themselves to one another. I asked her to express in words what seemed to her immoral. She wrote this: "In the ideal union between God and man, we know that man must give the fulness of his being, body, mind and spirit, throughout his whole life, to God, and that anything less than this, though it may be fine and noble, does fall short of perfection. It is the same with the human love of men and women. The 'fulness of our being' which we desire to give to our lover consists not only in what we are at any given moment but in what we have been in the past, what we may become in the future. And so in the formation of merely temporary unions the highest and deepest unity can never be fully achieved." She went on to say: "When we have passed beyond the physical sphere we shall be able, like God, to give ourselves equally to all; but while we are in the flesh we cannot share ourselves equally with all, and any attempt to do so lowers the standard of perfect human love." I like that, because it is based again on a loyal acceptance of human nature. We are not yet as God in the sense that, being wholly spirit, we can share ourselves equally with all. We do still live in bodies, and we have in this life memory and prevision, and surely that is indeed an ideal union, if we are looking for the highest, which is able to give its past and its future as well as its present, so that the whole personality is involved, in that act of union, and that anything short of that is at least not quite perfect. Human beings are still in the body, and are yet soul and spirit in that body, and must take both into account. Divorce the physical from the spiritual in yourself, and you are violating yourself. Divorce the physical from the spiritual in someone else—you who perhaps say: "I myself love such a man, such a woman, with the best part of myself; what I do with another is of no importance"—you violate the nature of that other from whom you take what is physical, and leave what is spiritual as though it were not there.
Your life, like your body, is too highly organized, too sensitive, too knit together by memories and prevision for you to leave behind you anything that has really entered into your life. It is a shoddy and superficial nature that passes easily from experience to experience, and when you look at such you can see how shallower still it becomes. It is the deeper and the loftier nature that cannot enter into any human relationship and then pass away from it altogether unchanged. And even that shoddy, that poor, that mean little soul which seems to pass so lightly from one experience to another does not really altogether escape. Some mark is left upon the soul, some association remains in the memory; and again and again marriages have been wrecked because a man has taken the associations of the gutter into the sanctuary of his home. Unwillingly, with an imagination that fain would reject the stain, he has injured, he has insulted the love that has now come to him, the most precious thing on earth, because he has not known how to do otherwise; because all the associations of passion have been to him degraded, smirched, treated frivolously in the past. It is true of men; it is also true of women. I do not know of anything that makes understanding harder between two people than the fact that one has had experiences and associations which the other has not had and does not understand, because they are on an entirely different level. These create between them, with all the desire for understanding in the world, a barrier of misunderstanding and incomprehension, which is all the more fatal because it is so intangible, so obscure, so hard to put into words, so often actually unconscious or subconscious in the mind of one or of the other.
Again, you must not think that you are altogether spirit, and here perhaps it is the woman who is more apt to sin than the man. How often have I talked to women who speak of the physical side of love as though it were something base and unworthy! Such a conception of passion is inhuman, and therefore it is not really moral. A woman who thinks of this sacrament of love, for which perhaps the man who loves her has kept himself clean all his life, as a base thing, and who treats it as though it were a concession to something base in a man's nature, instead of being the very consecration of body and soul at once, the sacrament of union, one of the loveliest things in human nature—such a woman gives as great a shock to what is sacred and lovely in her husband's nature as he when he brings with him into his marriage the associations of the street. It is as hard, it is as insulting, it makes marriage as difficult in understanding, one way as the other. For it is not true that our bodies are vile and base; they are the temples of the Holy Spirit.
Or if you think that you can stand alone, that what you do is the concern of no one else, that your life is a solitary thing, so solitary that no man or woman is concerned, no one but yourself, and you may sin alone—there again you misunderstand. You cannot stand alone, and nothing that you say or think or do leaves the world unchanged. Is that difficult to believe in these days, when psychology is teaching us how all-important thought is? Ought you to find it hard to believe that what you do in the utmost secrecy affects others, since it affects you, and no man lives to himself alone? I do not wish to exaggerate. I have a horror of those books and people who speak in exaggerated terms of any kind of sexual lapse. I am persuaded that human beings can rise from such mistakes, and rise much more easily than from the subtler spiritual sins which have so much more respectable an air. But yet do not sin under the impression that what you do concerns yourself alone. Do not use, for your own satisfaction only, powers which were given you for creation and for the world.
But this, you may say, is not the accepted standard of morality. That is a matter rather of laws and ceremonies. And people begin to ask; "What real difference can a mere ceremony make?" It does not make any difference to the morality of your relationships with your fellow men and women. Nothing that is immoral becomes moral because it has been done under a legal contract, or consecrated by a rite. There, I think, is where the world has gone so wrong. The idea that a relation that is selfish, cruel, mercenary, becomes moral because someone has said some words over you, and you have signed a register—what a farcical idea! How on earth does that change anything at all? The morality of all civil or religious ceremony lies, I think, in this—that by accepting and going through it, you accept the fact that your love does concern others besides yourself; it will concern your children; and beyond that, it concerns the world. You are right when you ask your friends to come and rejoice with you at your wedding. It is the concern of all the world when people love each other, and it is the failure oflovethat concerns them when marriage is a failure. Such failure chills the atmosphere; it shakes our faith in love as the supreme power in the universe; it makes us all waver in our allegiance to constancy and love when love fails. It is a joyful thing when people love. "All the world loves a lover." It is an old saying, but what a true one! Itisour concern when people nobly and loyally love each other, it is the concern of the community, and those who take upon themselves these public vows seem to me to have a more truly moral conception of love than those who say: "This is our affair only; it is not the affair of the State or the affair of the Church." But the actual ceremony must be the expression of a moral feeling such as that. It cannot in itself make moral what is immoral! The old idea that if a woman was seduced by a man she was "made honest" by the man marrying her is essentially immoral. Very likely all that she knew about the man was that she could not trust him, and to suppose that we can set right what is wrong by tying them together for the rest of their lives is to imagine an absurdity and to establish a lie.
Or take the case from another point of view. I have two in my mind at this moment, who for some reason (a reason not very far to seek if you read our English marriage laws) came to the conclusion that it is not right to place oneself in such a position as a married woman is in under English law. I am not discussing whether they were right or wrong; I say that quite sincere and moral people do come to that conclusion sometimes, and so did these two. They lived together, therefore, without being legally married. They were absolutely faithful to each other; their love was as responsible, as dignified, as true as any such relation could be. It lacked to my mind one thing—the sense of a wider responsibility—but then it had very much that many legal marriages have not. Those two people are put outside society; it is made almost impossible for them to earn their living; and at last in despair they go to the registry office, and sign their names in a book. What difference has been made in their relation to each other? Absolutely none. They are no more convinced of the right and duty of the community to be concerned with marriage than they were before. They have yielded to coercion. Their moral standard, good or bad, is precisely what it was; their relation to each other wholly unchanged. But in the eyes of the world they have become respectable, they are "moral," they can be received back into the bosom of society. And why? Because they have gone through a ceremony in which they do not believe!
Every marriage in the world probably lacks something of perfection. There are no perfect human beings, and, therefore, hardly, perhaps, a perfect marriage; and to my mind those who do not admit the concern of the community in their marriage do lack something. But to suppose that those people are immoral, when others who live together, legally licensed to do so, in selfishness, in infidelity, for financial reasons, or for social reasons, are moral is fundamentally dishonest. When a woman sells her body for money, do you think that it makes it moral that she does it in a church or in a registry office? Is there one whit of difference, morally, between the prostitution that has no legal recognition and the prostitution that has? Is it anything but prostitution to sell yourself for money, whether you are a man or a woman? Do you imagine that because you have a contract to protect you while you do it, you are doing what is moral? If you marry for any reason but love—for experience, to "complete your nature"—without much regard to the man or woman you marry, or to the children you bring into the world, are you not exploiting human nature just as certainly, though not so brutally, as a man who buys a woman in the street? It is not so base a form of exploitation, God knows; that I admit; but when there isanyelement of exploitation in the bargain it is not made more truly moral because it happens to be blessed in a church or registered in an office. The legal ceremony must be the outcome of a morality which makes you realize that what you do affects other people, that what you do most profoundly affects the children that you hope to have, and that the community has both an interest and a responsibility in all this. That is "moral." But if the relationship thus to be legalized is not moral, it is dishonest to pretend that it can be made so by any ceremony which those concerned may undergo.
But, you will say, we cannot peer into other people's lives and judge them in this kind of way. How are we to know? How are we, who have many friends, many neighbours, on whom our standards must react, to judge their lives? We can tell who has gone through a legal ceremony and who refuses to do so. That is a nice convenient rule by which we can judge and condemn such people. But we cannot go poking into people's lives and studying their motives and judging their fundamental moral standards! No, you cannot. Why should you? This little set of iron rules makes it very easy to judge, does it not? But why do you desire it to be easy to judge? You and I know how infinite are the gradations between the most noble kind of chastity and the most ignoble kind of immorality; but which of us is to create a rigid standard and measure our friends and acquaintances against it? We do not do it with the other virtues: why do we desire to do it with this one? Take such a virtue as truth. Conceive the crystalline sincerity of some truth-loving minds, realize that some have such a devotion to truth that the faintest shadow of insincerity—not a lie, but the merest shadow of insincerity in the depths of their hearts—is abhorrent to them. Consider the infinite gradations between that mind and the mind which takes a lie for truth, a mind that is rotten with corruption, that does not know how to think straight, let alone care to speak straight. You do not draw up your little set of rules and say: "I do not call on that person because he does not speak the truth; and I won't have anything to do with that one—such persons are outside the social pale altogether because their conception of truth is different from mine!"
No, you keep your admiration for the truth-loving and the sincere. You recognize that people have different standards about what is truth. One person will never tell a lie under any circumstances: another will reckon himself free to tell a lie to save a third, or to preserve a confidence; will you judge which is the more honourable of the two? Where is your little set of rules? You cannot have one. You shrink from the person who is morally dishonest and corrupt; you worship the person who loves truth as Darwin loved it. But between those two extremes what an infinite variety of attainment! Who can say: "These people are moral because they are married, and those are immoral, they are not married?" It is not true, it is not honest, to make these rules our measure. They do not meet the realities of human nature, and I contend that we, who have known souls so chaste and lovely that they make us in love with virtue, do far more to raise the moral standard of humanity by seeking to imitate such people than by setting up our little codes of rules and condemning or justifying all men by them. Let us treat this virtue as we do every other virtue, not fitting it to a set of rules which everyone knows do not fit the realities, but taking our courage in our hands and judging human beings (if we must judge them) by their real sincerity, their real unselfishness, their real unwillingness to exploit others—the measure of the chastity of their souls.
"Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I say unto you that whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.
"Again ye have heard that it has been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shall perform unto the Lord thine oaths: but I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne; nor by the earth; for it is his footstool; neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communications be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh from evil." (Matthew v., 27-28; 31-37.)
I have tried to reach those realities of human nature on which human morality must be based. I believe that the fundamental things which we must take into account are, first, the complex nature of human beings, who having body, soul, and spirit to reckon with cannot neglect any one of these without insincerity; and, secondly, the solidarity of the human race, which makes it futile to act as though the "morals" of any one of us could be his own affair alone.
It is because of this solidarity that marriage has always been regarded as a matter of public interest, to be recognized by law, celebrated by some public ceremony, protected by a legal contract. All are concerned in this matter, for it affects the race itself, through the children that may be born.
Human children need what animals do not, or not to the same extent. They need two parents: they need a stable and permanent home: they need a spiritual marriage, a real harmony between their parents, as well as a physical one. A child is not provided for when you have given it a home and food and clothing, since it is a spirit as well as a body—a soul and a spirit, a being craving for love, and needing to live in an atmosphere of love. The young of no other species need this as children do, and therefore, it is the concern of the community to see that the rights of these most helpless and most precious little ones are safeguarded. I cannot believe that any State calling itself civilized can ever disregard the duty of safeguarding the human rights of the child, and I repeat its human rights are not sufficiently met when its physical necessities are guaranteed. But I go further. I claim that it is really the concern of all of us that people who love should do so honestly, faithfully, responsibly. Marriage should be permanent; that is true in a sense that makes it important to all of us that it should succeed. Those who have loved and ceased to love have not failed for themselves only but for all. They have shaken the faith of the world. They have inclined us to the false belief that love is not eternal. They have, so far as they could, destroyed a great ideal, injured a great faith. People—and some of these are my personal friends, and people for whom I have a very great respect—who affirm that a legal or religious marriage is not necessary because their relations to one another are not the concern of the community, may have, it seems to me, a morality that is lofty, but not one that is broad, not one that is truly human. It is not true (and, therefore, it is not moral) to say that marriage is not the concern of other people. No one can fail in love, no one can take on himself so great a responsibility and fail to fulfil it, without all of us being concerned. Humanity issolidaire. The community is and must be concerned in the love of men and women in marriage. But what should be the nature of that concern? What should we—the community—hold up as the right standard of sex-relationship, and what methods should we use to impose it on others? I think you will have gathered from what I have said already that, to my mind, marriage should be a union that looks forward to being permanent, faithful, monogamous. It should be the expression of a union of spirit so perfect that the union of the bodies of those who love follows as a kind of natural necessity. It should be the sacrament of love, "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." And something of this perfection is to be found in many marriages that seem (and are) far from complete. I often hear of the lives of married people where there has been very much to overcome, where perhaps the marriage has been entered into in ignorance and error; where the passion that brought the two together has been very evanescent; where it has soon become evident that their temperaments do not "fit"; where it might easily be said that they were not really "married" at all: yet there has been in these two such a stubborn loyalty to responsibilities undertaken, such a magnificent sense of faithfulness, such a determination to make the best out of what they have rather lightly undertaken; sometimes even only on one side, there has been such faith, such honour, such loyalty, such a refusal to admit a final failure, that a relationship poor in promise has become beautiful and sacred. In face of such loyalty, the theory that sex-relationships can rightly be brief, evanescent, thrown aside as soon as passion has gone, seems to me very cheap and shoddy, very unworthy of human beings. Marriage should be all that—shall I say?—the Brownings made of it. But when it is not, there is still often much that is left. Men and women, you cannot enter into one another's lives in this deep and intimate way and go on your way as though nothing had happened. You cannot tear asunder people so united without bleeding. You cannot make a failure of it without immeasurable loss.
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of Being and ideal Grace.I love thee to the level of everyday'sMost quiet need, by sun and candlelight."
Who that has once heard this can easily take anything less? Or who, having loved in any of these ways, will lightly break the bond? I think that one of the most profoundly moral relationships I have ever met between a man and a woman was, in spite of all that I have said up till now, the relationship of a man to a woman to whom at first he was not legally married. It was her wish, not his, but they were not legally married. They had no children, and she was unfaithful to him more than once, and yet this man—and he did not call himself a Christian—this man felt that he had taken the responsibility of that woman's life, and though he could easily have put her away, and though, at last, she killed in him all that you would normally call love between a man and woman, and he learned to care for another woman, yet he would not abandon her because now she had grown to need him, and he felt he could not take so great a human responsibility as the life of another person and then cast it away as though it had never been. That is morality. To such a sense of what human relationships demand my whole soul gives homage. That seems to me a perfectly humane and, therefore, truly moral idea of what love involves. Such a sense of responsibility should go with all love. Passion cannot last, in the nature of things, and, therefore, those who marry do so, if they know anything at all of love—and, God help them, many of them do not—but if they know anything at all of love, they know that it is physically impossible for this particular bond always to unite them. They must be aware that there is something more than that, something that must in the end transcend that physical union.
Looking at marriage from that point of view, can one desire that it should be anything less than permanent, indissoluble? That which God made, and, therefore, which no man should put asunder? Let the community—both Church and State—teach this. Let us make it clear that men and women should not marry unless they do sincerely believe that their love for each other is of this character. Let them understand that physical union should be the expression of a spiritual union. Let them learn that love, though it includes passion, is more than passion, and must transcend and outlive passion. And let us insist that all should learn the truth about themselves—about their own bodies and about their own natures—so that they may understand what they do, and may have all the help that knowledge can give in doing it. I hold that on such knowledge and such understanding the community should insist, if it is to uphold the high and difficult standard of indissoluble monogamous marriage. So onlycanit be rightly upheld.
I urge also that when a marriage takes place the State has a right and a duty with regard to it. For the sake of every citizen, and most of all for the sake of the children, it should "solemnize" marriage, and should do so on the understanding—clearly expressed—that those who come to be married intend to be faithful to each other "as long as they both shall live."
In doing this I believe the State does all—or nearly all—that it usefully can to uphold the dignity of marriage and a high standard of morality. I do not believe that it should seek to penalize those whose sex-relationships are not of this character, except so far as legislation for the protection of the immature or the helpless is concerned. And I do not think it should compel—or seek to compel, for compulsion is, in fact, impossible—the observance of a marriage which has lost or never had the elements of reality.
Is this to abandon the ideal I have been upholding? I do not think so. Let us refer again to the greatest of Teachers and the loftiest of Idealists—Jesus Christ. See what He teaches in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere. Everywhere He emphasizes the spiritual character of virtue and of sin. To be a murderer it is not necessary to kill: to hate is, in itself, enough. If you hate you are essentially a murderer. To be an adulterer it is not necessary to commit adultery: to look on a woman lustfully is already to have committed adultery with her in your heart. It is the spirit that sins. So keep your spirit pure. It is not enough to keep your oaths: you should be so utterly and transparently sincere that there is no need and no sense in supporting your words by great oaths. "Yea" and "Nay" should be sufficient.
You will notice that the Sermon on the Mount has been divided in this chapter into a number of paragraphs, each of which begins by a reference to the old external law of conduct, and goes on to demand a more searching, more spiritual and interior virtue. "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time…. But I say unto you."
"Ye have heard that it was said: 'Thou shalt not kill' … but I say unto you that whosoever is angry shall be in danger of the judgment. Ye have heard that it was said: 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' but I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart…. Ye have heard that it was said: 'Thou shalt not forswear thyself,' but I say unto you: 'Swear not at all.'"
What is the significance of such teaching? Surely that we are not to be satisfied with keeping the letter of the law, but are to keep it in our hearts. So clear is this that the Church has completely abandoned the letter of the last precept. No one except a Quaker refuses to take an oath. Every bishop on the bench has done so, and every incumbent of a living. Nowhere throughout the Sermon on the Mount have Christians felt themselves bound to a literal or legal interpretation of its teaching. No one wants a man to be tried for murder and hanged for hating his brother. No judge grants a divorce because a man or woman has "committed adultery in his heart." Christ Himself did notliterally"turn the other cheek" when struck by a soldier. His disciples everywhere pray in places quite as public as the street-corners forbidden in the next chapter of St. Matthew, and give their alms publicly or in secret as seems to them best.
It may be contended that in this spiritual interpretation of Christ's commands it is very easy to go too far and "interpret" all the meaning out of them. It is certain, however, that the danger must be incurred, since nothing could make sense out of an absolutelyliteralinterpretation. It would mean areductio ad absurdum.
Apply such a literalism, for example, to the point at which for centuries the Church has sought to apply it—the indissolubility of marriage. It is admitted that since a phrase, of however doubtful authority, does make an exception in favour of divorce for adultery, the Church can recognize a law in this sense. But if we are to be literalists, it seems that a lustful wish is adultery! Is this to be a cause for divorce? And if not, why not? Obviously because we can no more apply such spiritual teaching literally than we can take a man out and hang him because he hates his brother! There we cease to be literal: how then can we fall back on a literal interpretation at another point?
I claim that there is no ground whatever for a more rigid and legal interpretation of our Lord's teaching about marriage than about taking oaths or praying in public. I believe that Christ held that marriage should be permanent and indissoluble, that only those people should marry who loved each other with a love so pure, so true, so fine as to be regarded rightly as a gift from God, who accepted their union as a great trust as well as a great joy, whose marriage might indeed be said to be "made in heaven" before it was solemnized on earth; but that He should insist on a legal contract from which all reality had departed, or regard as a marriage a union of which the most cynical could only say that it was made in hell, merely because the Church or the State had chosen to bless or register it, seems to me as unlike the whole of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount and as far from the spirit of Christ as east is from west. It surely is not conceivable that He to Whom marriage meant so much that He spoke of it as being made by God, Who conceived of the union of a man and woman as being the work of God Himself "Those whom God has joined together"—would have cared for the shell out of which the kernel had gone, for the mere legal bond out of which all the spirit had fled. Marriage should be indissoluble; but what is marriage? I heard a little while ago of a girl of 19 who was married to a man of 56. He was immoral in mind and diseased in body, and at the end of a year she left him with another man. He divorced her, and she is now married to that other man, and there are people who say that this marriage, which, so far as one can judge, is a moral, faithful, and a responsible union, blest with children who are growing up in a good home, is no marriage because the wife went through a ceremony with this other man before, and marriage is indissoluble. Marriage is indissoluble: "Those whom God has joined together let no man put asunder." Did God join those two together? They were married in a church. It is the Church that should repent in sackcloth and ashes for permitting such a mockery of marriage. Let the Church by all means do what it has so long failed to do, emphasize the sanctity of human relationships, make men and women realize how deep a responsibility they take in marriage, how sacred a thing is this creative love, from which future generations will spring, which brings into the world human bodies and immortal souls; which, even if it is childless, is still the very sacrament of human love. Let the Church teach all that it can to make marriage sacred and divine, but when it preaches that such a marriage as that is a marriage at all it does not uphold our moral standard but degrades it.
I have said enough before, I hope, to make you realize that I do not think that when passion has gone marriage is dead. I have seen marriages which seemed unequal, difficult, unblest, made into something lovely and sacred by the deep patience and loyalty of human nature, and believe it is the knowledge of such possibilities which makes Christian people, and even those who would not call themselves Christians, generally desire some religious ceremony when they are married. They know that for such love human nature itself is hardly great enough. They desire the grace of God to inspire their love for each other with something of that eternal quality which belongs to the love of God. I have seen husbands love their wives, and wives their husbands, with a divine compassion, an inexhaustible pity, which goes out to the most unworthy and degraded. Yes, I would even go so far as to say that unless you feel that you are able to face the possibility of change in the one you love, that you can love so well that even if they alter for the worse your love would no more disappear than the love of God for you would disappear when you change or fail, you have not attained to the perfect love which justifies marriage. But this is a hard saying, and, therefore, those of us who believe in God in any sense instinctively desire the blessing of God to rest on the undertaking of so great a responsibility. We want our love to be divine before we can undertake the whole happiness of another human being. Let the Church by all means teach this, and I believe that future generations will conceive more nobly and more responsibly of marriage for her teaching. But do not seek to hold together those between whom there is no real marriage at all. When seriously and persistently a man and a woman believe that their marriage never was or has now ceased to be real, surely their persistent and considered opinion ought to be enough for the State to act upon. Let no one be allowed to give up in haste. Let no one fling responsibility aside easily. Let it always be a question of long consideration, of advice from friends, perhaps even from judges. But I cannot help feeling that when through years this conviction that there is no reality in a marriage persists, this is the one really decent and sufficient reason for declaring that that marriage is dissolved. Let us have done with the infamous system now in force, by which a man and woman must commit adultery or perjury before they can get us to admit the patent fact that their marriage no longer exists as a reality. Let us have done with a system which makes a mockery of our divorce courts. I have the utmost sympathy with those who denounce the light way in which men and women perjure themselves to obtain release, but I affirm that the whole system is, in the main, so based on legalisms, so divorced from morality, that the resultant adulteries and perjuries are what every student of human nature must inevitably expect, however much he may regret and hate them. It will be in vain that laws are devised to prevent divorce by collusion, in vain that King's proctors or judges detect and penalize here and there the less wary and ingenious offenders. The law will continue to be evaded or defied. And the reason is fundamental: it is that the law is not based on reality. It affirms that a marriage still exists when it doesnotexist. It demands that two human beings should give to each other what they cannot give. And—the essence of marriage being consent—it makes the fact that both parties desire its dissolution the final reason for denying them! To force a woman to demand the "restitution of conjugal rights" when such "rights" have become a horrible wrong; to compel a man to commit, or perjure himself by pretending he has committed, adultery, before he can get the State to face the fact that his marriage is no longer a reality—is this to uphold morality? Is this the ideal of the Sermon on the Mount? Let us once for all abandon the pretence thatallthe marriages made in churches or in registrars' offices are, therefore, necessarily made in heaven. Let us get to work instead to see that the marriages of the future shall be made in heaven, and, above all, let us abolish the idea that a marriage is a real marriage which is based on ignorance, on fraud, on exploitation, on selfishness. Let us not dream that we can raise our standard of morals, by affirming that every mistake that men and women make in a matter in which mistaking is so tragically easy ought to imprison them in a lie for the rest of their lives. But let us take the ideal of Christ, in all its grandeur and all its reality, with our eyes fixed upon the ideal, but with that respect for human personality, that respect for reality and truth, which makes us refuse to accept the pretence that all the marriages we have known have been made by God. Let us, at least, in perpetuating such blasphemies as are some of the marriages on which we have seen the blessing of the Church invoked, cease to drag in the name of Christ to the defence of a system which has laid all its weight upon a legal contract, and kept a conspiracy of silence about the sacred union of body and soul by which God makes man and woman one.
Jesus said: "If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world. But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him."
My last address for the present[C] on the difficult questions that we have been considering here, Sunday after Sunday, is a plea for light.
[Footnote C: Another address was added a few weeks later in response to urgent requests.]
"Walking in darkness" has been, in sexual matters, the experience of most of us. Even now, in the twentieth century, it is not too much to say that most of us have had to fight our battle in almost complete darkness and something very near to complete isolation.
There are two great passions connected with the bodies of men and women, so fundamental that they have moulded the histories of nations and the development of the human race. They are the hunger for food and the instinct of sex. There is no other passion connected with our bodies so fundamental, so powerful, as these two; and yet, with regard to the second, most of us are expected to manage our lives and to grow up into maturity without any real knowledge at all, and with such advice as we get wrapped up in a jargon that we do not understand. We have been as those who set out to sea without a chart; as soldiers who fight a campaign without a map. I do not think this is too much to say of the way in which a large number of the men and women that I know—even those of this generation—have been expected to tackle one of the greatest problems that the human race has to solve.
May I sketch what I imagine is the experience of most people? At some point in our lives we begin to be curious; we ask a question; we are met with a jest or a lie, or with a rebuke, or with some evasion that conveys to us, quite successfully, that we ought not to have asked the question. The question generally has to do with the matter of birth—the birth of babies, or kittens, or chickens; some point of curiosity connected with the birth of young creatures is generally the first thing that awakens our interest. When we meet with evasion, lies, or reproof, we naturally conclude that there is something about the birth of life into the world that we ought not to know, and since it is apparently wrong of us even to wish to know it, it is presumably disgusting. We seek to learn from other and more grimy sources what our parents might have told us, and, learning, arrive at the conclusion that in the relations of men and women there is also something that is repulsive. And since, in spite of this, our interest does not cease but becomes furtive curiosity, we also conclude that there is something depraved and disgusting about ourselves.
Now, all of these three conclusions are lies; and, therefore, we set out in life equipped with a lie in our souls. It is not a good beginning. It means that almost at once those of us who persist in our desire to know are in danger of losing our self-respect. We learn that there is something in sex that is base—so base that even our own parents will not speak to us about it; and because of that, and because a child instinctively does accept, during the first few years of its existence, what its parents or guardians say, we assume that there must be something bad in us, since we so persistently desire to know what is so evil that nobody will speak of it at all. Or if anyone does allude to it, it is with unwholesome furtiveness and a rather silly kind of mirth, so as to increase in the minds of many of us the sense that there must be something in our nature that we cannot respect because nobody else finds it beautiful or respectable.
Our next step, especially if we are conscientious people, is to repress that something. And here I want to say a word in answer to a number of letters that I have had on the point which I raised early in this book, when I claimed that women have to pay as great a tax and suffer as great a hardship from repression as men do. People—both men and women—have written to say that this is not true, and to such I wish to make my point quite clear. I did not say that men and women sufferedin the same way. I said that they sufferedequally; and since the question has been raised, I should like just to answer it here. To me it seems, judging as far as I can, from the people that I know, that—speaking very generally—passion comes to a man with greater violence, and is more liable to leave him in peace at other times. Passion is to a man who is of strong temperament like a storm at sea. It seems the very embodiment of violence and force. The mere sight of the sea angry almost terrifies one, even if one is perfectly safe from the violence of the storm; but the depths are not stirred. And in the case of a woman I would take a different figure of speech altogether, and say that very often the strain on her is much less dramatic, much less violent, and more persistent. I think of the strain as something like that silent, uninterrupted thrust of an arch against the wall, of a dome on the walls that support it. There is no sign of stress. But it is so difficult to build a dome rightly that Italy, the land of domes, is covered with the ruins of those churches whose domes gradually, slowly, thrust outwards till the walls on which they rested gave way and the church was in ruins. That kind of strain is easily denied by the very people who are enduring it. It is so customary, so much a part of their life, that they are unconscious of it.
No one who studies psychology to-day can fail to realize how unconscious people often are of the seat and the nature of their own troubles. It is true that the tendency toexaggeratethe importance of sex seems likely to vitiate to some extent the conclusions of psychologists like Freud and his disciples. But that they have revealed to us a mass of hitherto unknown and un-understood suffering in the minds of both women and men, arising from the continual repression of a passion whose strength may be measured by the disastrous consequences caused by repressing it, no one who knows anything at all of modern psychology can deny. Those who do not understand their own trouble will often deny that the trouble exists, and deny it quite honestly. But those who have become the physicians of the mind are just beginning to learn how tremendous a sacrifice the world has asked of women in the past while denying that it was a sacrifice at all!
Now, this repression follows, in many women and in a considerable number of men, on the assumption that there is something in sex too shameful to be spoken about or looked at in the light. We set out, I repeat, on our campaign without a map of the country and with our compasses pointing the wrong way. And this, above all, is true when repression has caused some actual perversion in the mind, some arrested development, some abnormal condition. This is not always the consequence of deliberate repression on the part of the individual, but it is, I believe, often the consequence of an artificial state of civilization; an attitude towards a great and wonderful impulse which has perverted our whole view of what is divine and lovely in human nature. Whatever the cause, the result is abnormality of some kind, and to people who have suffered so, I want, above all, to say this: light and understanding are needed more by you, perhaps, than by anyone else, and to you, above all, they have been denied. Loneliness, isolation, the loss of self-respect, the darkness of ignorance have surrounded those to whom the sacrifice has been hardest, and, therefore, the repression, whether racial or individual, most disastrous. You can, if you choose, leave the world a nobler place because you let light in on these dark places. Do not say to yourselves that your suffering is useless and purposeless because it is no good to anyone: no one knows of it: no one understands it: and, therefore, it has all the additional bitterness of being to no purpose. That need not be true. Ignorance need not continue. If you will try to make your suffering of service to the world, it is not difficult to measure how great may be our advance in fundamental morality in this present generation.
We do not know yet of what human nature is capable, and those who are studying the human mind are perhaps the greatest of all pioneers at the present moment. Some of you have trusted me, and by your trust have enabled me to help other people. Others of you, perhaps, have yourselves become or will become students of psychology. You will advance a little further in a science which is as yet only making its first uncertain steps. Even if you do none of these things, yet if you will try to understand yourselves, by the mere fact that you understand, you will find that you are able to help other people—other people whose condition is most tragic, most lonely—to face with courage the problem they share with you.[D] Try to solve it, as you can. You will gain in understanding and strength, so that those in yet greater need will instinctively come to you for help. Base your own moral standard on all that is noble, and wise and human, and you will find that in you the spiritual begins so to dominate the physical that others will see its power and come to you for help.
[Footnote D: This subject is more fully dealt with in the next chapter.]
"With aching hands and bleeding feet,We toil and toil; lay stone on stone.Not till the light of day returnAll we have built shall we discern."
Now let us turn to the other side of the problem—the more normal relations of men and women who are lovers, who are husbands and wives. May I again recapitulate what appears to be the history of many married people, even in 1921.
Let me remind you first that this contract of marriage is the most important, probably, in the whole life of the man and woman who undertake it; that it concerns human personality as perhaps no other relation in the world does, so deeply, so closely, so intimately, that those who enter into it are very near either to heaven or hell. The nearer you come to any other human personality, the nearer you get to the supreme happiness or the supreme failure. And when people enter on this relationship, how are they prepared? Many of them are ignorant—and in the case of women often wholly so—of what marriage actually involves. I find it difficult to speak in measured terms of those parents who deliberately allow their daughters to take a step which involves the whole of their future life and happiness, and that of another human being also, in ignorance of what they are doing. This relationship, which requires all the love and all the wisdom of men and women—so much so that even those who do not call themselves Christians often desire to go to a church and ask for the grace of God to enable them to carry out so great an undertaking—is entered upon by people who literally do not know what, from the very nature of marriage, is required of them. I suppose many people will say that I speak of a state of things which passed a generation ago. No, I do not. I speak of a state of things that is only too common at this present time. I have known marriage after marriage wrecked by the almost unbelievable ignorance that has been present on both sides. I say both sides. First of all, there is the girl. To her, marriage comes sometimes as so great a shock that her whole temperament is warped and embittered by it. Then there is the man, equally ignorant—very often, probably less ignorant of himself, but equally ignorant of her—not realizing how she should be treated. They are often quite ignorant of each other's views on marriage; of what sort of claims they are going to make on each other; what each thinks about the duty of having children. These elementary facts of human life, which must confront those who marry, are faced by them without any kind of preparation, without the most rudimentary knowledge of each other's point of view. And that there are so many happy marriages in spite of all this makes one realize how extraordinarily loyal, fine and courageous, on the whole, human nature is.
Only the other day I was speaking in a town in the north of England on this very subject, and I got a letter afterwards to say that the writer had very greatly enjoyed my address at the time. She had found it, she assured me, inspiring and elevating. But she felt bound to write and tell me afterwards (what she was sure would both shock and distress me) that she had found that some of the people in my audience were actually acting on what I said! I suppose every public speaker comes up against that sort of thing sometimes—the calm assurance that you are merely talking in the air and have not the slightest desire that anyone should act on what you say. So this lady wrote to say that, though she and her husband had both been greatly impressed by what I said, they were horrified to find that, as a result, people were actually discussing with one another, before they married, certain points which she mentioned to me and which she said they ought never to discuss until theyweremarried. Is it not amazing that anyone should seriously contend that it is better to arrive at an understanding with the person he or she is about to marryaftermarriage than before? That people who would not dream of betraying anyone into any kind of contract about which they were not satisfied that its terms were understood should be willing to betray others—I deliberately call it a betrayal—into a contract of such infinite importance, and positively desire that they shall be ignorant of its nature?
It really seems sometimes as if pains were positively taken to mislead those who are going to be married. One of the most amazing statements on this subject, for instance, is contained in the marriage service of the Church of England, where the bride and bridegroom are told that marriage was ordained that "such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body." That there should be anyone in the twentieth century who does not know that a man or a woman who has not the gift of continency is totally unfit for marriage is really rather startling. What such a person requires is both a divine and a physician; but that he should be told that he is fit for marriage and that marriage was expressly designed for him is not only misleading, it is absolutely horrifying. It explains the tragic wreck which so many marriages become after a comparatively short time.
I would urge, then, for the future, that we should not concentrate all our moral, ethical, religious, and social force on perpetuating the tragic failure of an empty marriage, but, rather, should concentrate our efforts on trying to make people understand what marriage is; what their own natures are; what marriage is going to demand from them; what they need in order to make it noble. I urge, moreover, that the same principle should apply to those who do not marry—that they also should learn in the light what their difficulties are going to be; how to face their own temperaments; how to deal with their own minds and bodies. Your temperament, men and women, does not decide your destiny; it does decide your trials. To know how to deal with it and how to make it your servant, how so to enthrone spiritual power in your nature that it shall dominate all that is physical, not as something base, but as a sacred and a consecrated thing—it is on this that the teachers of to-day should concentrate with all their power. It is true that when we have learnt all that is possible from teaching, there is still something to learn. In marriage is it possible to know finally until the final step is taken? No, I do not think so. But when you consider how we have struggled against ignorance, how many pitfalls have been put in the path of those who desired knowledge, how we have, as it seems, done our best to make this relationship a failure, surely it is worth while, at least, to try what knowledge, and understanding, and education, and trainingcando. We cannot know all. That is no reason why we should not know all that we can.
Surely marriage must be a divine institution, since we have done so much to make it a failure, and yet one sees again and again such splendid love, such magnificent loyalty and faith! "You advocate," someone wrote to me the other day, "you advocate that people should leave each other when they are tired of each other." No, I do not advocate that anyone should accept a failure. I advocate that every human being should do all that is possible—more perhaps than is possible without the grace of God—to make marriage the noble and lovely thing it should be. I think those are faint-hearted who easily accept the fact that it is difficult, and from that drift swiftly to the conclusion that for them it is impossible. I advocate that the greatest faith and loyalty should be practised. I believe in my heart that there is perhaps no relationship which cannot be redeemed by the love and devotion and the grace of God in the hearts of those who seek to make it redeemable. What I do say is that in Church and State we should concentrate all our efforts on helping men and women to a wise, enlightened, noble conception of marriage before they enter upon it, and not on a futile and immoral attempt to hold them together by a mere legal contract when all that made it valid has fled.
I believe that the more one knows of human nature the more one reverences it. I believe that the vast majority of human beings strain every nerve rather than fail in so great a responsibility. Do you remember reading in Mr. Bertrand Russell's book, "Principles of Social Reconstruction," of a little church of which it was discovered, not, I think, very long ago, that, owing to some defect in its title, marriages which had been celebrated there were not legal? Mr. Bertrand Russell says that there were at that time I forget how many couples still living who had been married in that church, who found that, by this legal defect, they were not legally bound. Do you know how many of those married people seized the opportunity to desert each other and go and marry somebody else? Not a single one! Every one of those couples went quietly away to church and got married again!
Religious people do sometimes think such mean things of human nature, and human nature is, for the most part, so much nobler, so much more loyal, so much more loving than we imagine. "Lift up your eyes unto the hills from whence cometh your help." "He that walketh in the light, stumbleth not, for he seeth the light of the world."
Let us face the future courageously, with great reverence for other people's opinions and views. Let us not join that mob of shouters who are prepared to howl at everyone who desires to say something that is not quite orthodox, but which is their serious and considered contribution to a great and difficult problem. Let us greet them with respect, however much we may differ from them. Let us look forward without fear. Believe me, below all the froth and scum of which we make so much, human nature is very noble.
Let us give that example to the world which is worth a thousand arguments—the example of a noble married life, the example of a noble single life. Those of you who are alone can do infinitely more for virtue by being full of gentleness, wisdom, sanity, and love than by any harsh repression of yourselves. It is by what you can make of celibacy that the world will judge celibacy. And so of married lovers. Believe me, it is not the children of married lovers who are rebels against a lofty standard. Those who have seen with their eyes a lovely, faithful and unwavering love are not easily satisfied with anything that is less. "Lift up your eyes unto the hills. From whence cometh your strength." And in the light of a great ideal, in the light of knowledge, sincerity and truth, in the light of what I know of human nature, I, for one, am not afraid for the future moral standard of this country.
"Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! Oh Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!" (II. Sam. i. 23-27.)
"And Orpah kissed her mother-in-law; but Ruth clave unto her. And she said, Behold thy sister-in-law has gone back unto her people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister-in-law. And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part me and thee." (Ruth i. 14-17.)
People have sometimes discussed with me whether it is right to have as intense and absorbing a love for a friend of one's own sex as exists between lovers. The word "absorbing" is perhaps the difficulty in their minds. All love is essentially the same, and it has been pointed out that the great classic instances of great love have been almost as often between friends as between lovers. But the test of love's nobility remains the same. If it is in the strict sense "absorbing"—if, that is, it is exclusive, if it narrows one's interests instead of enlarging them, if it involves a failure in love or sympathy with other people, it is wrong—it is not in the true sense "love"; but if it enriches the understanding, widens interest, deepens sympathy—if, in a word, to love one teaches us to love others better, then it is good, it is love indeed. A friendship which is of such character that no one outside it is of any interest, a maternal love which not only concentrates on its own but wholly excludes all other children, even a marriage which ultimately narrows rather than widens and is exclusive in its interests, is a poor caricature of love. A young mother may, in the first rapture of her motherhood, seem wholly absorbed; but, as a matter of fact, she generally ends by caring more forallchildren because she loves one so deeply. Even lovers, after the first absorption of newly-discovered joy, must learn to share their happiness and the happiness of their home with others if it is not to grow hard and dull. And friends may easily estimate the worth of their friendship by the measure with which it has humanized their relations to all other human beings.
There is another test also for love: Does it express itself naturally and rightly? This test is much more difficult to apply. One may believe that all love is essentially the same, but it is certain that all human relationships are not the same, and, therefore, love cannot always be expressed in the same way; but it is not possible to lay down any exact rule between the sort of "expression" legitimate to each. Everyone must have suffered sometimes from a sense of having forced undesired demonstrations on other people, or having them forced on oneself. One's suffering in the first instance is intensified by the knowledge of the extremity of revolt created by the second. There is nothing, I suppose, more acutely painful than the sense of being compelled to accept demonstrations of affection to which one cannot in the same way respond. I believe that this shrinking from expressions which seem unnatural, is rightly intensified a hundredfold when the sense of wrongness or "unnaturalness" is due not to the individual but to the relationship itself.
The love which unites the soul to God, children to their parents, mothers and fathers to sons and daughters, lovers to one another, friend to friend, the disciple to his master, is all one. You cannot divide Love. But to each belongs its right and natural expression, and to parody the love of lovers between friends revolts the growing sense of humankind. The very horrors of prostitution create a less shuddering disgust than the debauching of a young boy by an older man, though with a tragically common injustice society is more apt to be disgusted by the unfortunate victim, bearing all the marks of his moral and physical perversion, than by the more responsible older man who profits by or even creates it.
Yet it is, as I have said, only by thegrowingsense of humanity that such things are condemned. They were not always so in every case. On the contrary it has sometimes been maintained that friendship between men was so much nobler than the love of men and women that even when it demanded physical expression it was still the finest of all human relationship. This idea was, of course, widely held by the Greeks during the noblest epochs of their history, and Plato, though he does not, as is commonly believed, justify such expression as good in itself, evidently regards it as practically inevitable and, therefore, to be condoned. And though from this indulgent attitude there has been a very general revolt in modern times, the reaction has not always been very discriminating in its condemnation or very just in its reprisals. Now—in consequence, no doubt, of this injustice—there has arisen another attempt to assert the superior nobility of friendship over love,[E] and even to claim a superior humanity for people who are more attracted by members of their own sex.
[Footnote E: I am using the terms "friendship" and "love" in their ordinarily accepted and narrow sense, as meaning respectively the love of friends and the love of lovers. This is arbitrary, but I cannot find other words except by using long phrases.]
There is not in this any question of the bestial depravity which deliberately debauches the young and innocent: it is a question of the kind of friendship glorified by Plato. And those who uphold the Platonic view are not always debauchees but sometimes men and women who, however incomprehensibly, still sincerely believe that they and not we who oppose them are the true idealists. This is why it is worth while to state our reasons for our profound disagreement, and to do so as intelligently and fairly as possible. It is also worth while because no one has suffered more cruelly or more hopelessly than those whose temperament or abnormality has been treated by most of us as though it werein itself, and without actual wrong-doing, a crime worthy of denunciation and scorn.
First, then, let it be remembered that the highest types humanity has evolved have been men and women who are really "human," that is to say who have not only those qualities which are generally regarded as characteristic of their sex, but have had some share of the other sex's qualities also. A man who is (if such a thing could be) wholly and exclusively male in all his qualities would be repulsive; so would a woman wholly and exclusively female. One has only to look at history to realize it. Compared with the exquisite tenderness and joy of a St. Francis of Assisi, the courage and determination of a St. Joan of Arc, the intellectual power of a St. Catherine of Siena or St. Theresa of Spain, the "brute male" who is wholly male, the "eternal feminine" with her suffocating sexuality seem on the one hand inhuman, on the other subhuman. It is not the absence of the masculine qualities in a man, or of the feminine qualities in a woman which raises them above the mass; it is the presence in power of both; and no man is truly human who has not something of the woman in him—no woman who has not something of the man. Here is a certain truth. And its supreme example is Christ Himself—Christ in Whom power and tenderness, strength and insight, courage and compassion were equally present—Christ Who is in truth the ideal of all humanity without distinction of race, class or sex.