Love’s Highway
Love and the Soul Maker, by Mary Austin. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.]
There is a certain generic myth, outcropping whenever the discovery of some mysterious, hidden treasure is in question, which is that the discoverer may possess only so much of it as he can carry away on his own person. Whenever I met this climax in my childish reading my greedy little soul rebelled because the hero might not have all that his eyes could see instead of the negligible bit that he could handle with his own muscles. Experience has taught that under no circumstances can a man own more than he possesses within himself; this is as true of material art forms as it is of culture and education. It is almost tragic in its truth when we look about and see such a wealth of apparent happiness and love and then look into our own impoverished hearts. We may not covet either our neighbor’s automobile or his wife, but frequently we do covet, in spite of good intentions, the happiness that he derives from that automobile and that wife. Particularly weak are we when we look down love’s highway and see what we believe to be limitless and ideal joy. The little orbit in which we move seems sadly askew, and it takes a book like Mary Austin’s Love and the Soul Maker to make us understand that all the topsy-turviness of the present is but the labor-pain of a saner, truer, happier future.
The author combines science and sentiment in a new way. Her facts show that she has read widely; her conclusions show that she has thought deeply; her sentiments show that she has felt—at least potentially—most, if not all, of the joys and sorrows which the practice and malpractice of love produce. And the one shining truth that she has discovered in all this hidden treasure of sex happiness is that “we’ve a right to as much love as we can work up into the stuff of a superior personality.” This truth is thrown out as independently of conventions, prejudices, religious beliefs or practices as a searchlight is independent of the hinges that hold it in place. It is the ultimate measure of what is good or what is bad in love; it is the standard by which all sex problems must finally be adjusted. She goes on to say that “taking anything over what we can give back in some form or other to the social sum is my notion of sinning”—and an inspired notion of sinning it is, too. We are all searching for the treasure of love happiness, yet no one may justly take more than he can carry away in inspiration and the impulse of creating something within or without that will add to the sum total of human happiness.
Between facts and sentiment Mrs. Austin leans to sentiment—yet why not? She is not writing for the elect body of sex students, but for ordinary men and women. Those who have read little or nothing of sex psychology would find cold, uncompromising facts too difficult a diet. Offering them such an argument would be like comforting a bumped child with the multiplication table. By means of such a book as Love and the Soul Maker it may be possible for even the ossifying brains of dogmatists to catch a glimmer of light on our present sex problems, while such dazzlingly and ruthlessly true books as Havelock Ellis writes may petrify several additional lobes.
Although not openly propagandic, Mrs. Austin has a decided philosophy of life which she sets forth in a dozen different ways and which, without saying so, she hopes her reader will accept. She insists that “the proper end of loving is not personal but racial; it is the Soul Maker’s most precious commodity,” and that love pirates or love grafters commit their most venal sin by believing that love is its own excuse. As Mrs. Austin expresses it, “Love for love’s sake is the shibboleth by which they blunt the unassailable fact that love was not invented for love’s sake but for life’s.” Here, of course, is a radical point of departure which will turn many readers away from her pages; it may, however, induce an equal number to read further.
The flaws in our modern system of marriage are more closely seen and more cleverly pointed out than are the remedies offered. For example, the author shows that modern society asks of marriage “things it was never meant to pay”; yet her remedy is vague. And again: “The initial mistake about marriage is in regarding it as a condition, a state, when it is primarily a relation” and may exist in spite of very unfavorable conditions and quite apart from them. Delightfully, indeed, does she puncture the time-worn fallacy of platonic friendships: “I doubt that there can be any informing intimacy between men and women unless there exists also the potentiality of passionate experience.” Yet many of her views are completely radical. “There never has been a time since man stood up and knew himself for man,” she writes, “that the major process of love has been reproductive,” and later she points out that “chief among the uses of passion is the raising of the percentage of values in those who entertain it.” She cuts off all the frills of convention, ceremony, tradition; strips away all but the essential naked truth germ and declares: “Marriage is an agreement between any pair to practice mate-love toward one another, with intention.”
Marriage, thus simplified, would not, indeed could not, be the failure which modern society so widely accepts with resignation instead of combating with thoughtful dissatisfaction. We have become so racially hypnotized that we do not distinguish between associated facts (such as food, shelter, religious sanction, obedience, etc.) and the essential truth of mate-love. “The primary obligation of lovers is to love,” she says. This done, all will adjust itself; and yet lest any should draw the over-quick conclusion that Mrs. Austin advocates free love, let me also add that she says: “To love and to keep on loving. This is the one way of making marriage do its work in the world.”
As a remedy she begs women to open their eyes to the fact that marriage is not now the only career for them. That marriage does not fill the lives of those who enter it is evidenced by the divorce courts. Tentatively Mrs. Austin suggests that instead of dissolving so many marriages it would be wiser to unload the excessive strain put upon them. Let economics take hold of the problem of the mother, who for the sake of providing bread for herself and her children crucifies her own personality, ignores her own right to happiness upon the racial conception of marriage. Very frankly she explains what marriage should do for us: “First of all to satisfy the hunger of the body for its natural mate ... and finally it must satisfy the need of companionship on the intimate and personal side of life.” She hints that “it is immensely more important that a mating pair should relish kissing together than that they should both be Presbyterian.”
She is hopeful concerning the final abolishing of prostitution if the present marriage customs are changed. She is emphatic in the need of young people being enlightened in regard to marital experiences and problems, but her suggestions are indefinite and inconclusive. However, much may be overlooked for her emphasis of the fact that sex is an active principal and that the best love-life is that which makes the best use of love’s activities. She admonishes us to “play fair alike in loving and unloving,” which means that love is not a light thing of a day, but must be great enough and strong enough to control itself, even to sacrifice itself for the greatest racial good—and never to sell itself from a motive of personal selfishness, or for the bliss of an hour.
The highway that Mrs. Austin lays out for love is rough and stony in spots, and yet its goal of racial betterment through achievement as well as by means of offspring is not to be despised.
Mary Adams Stearns.
Dutch Bourgeoisie
Small Souls, by Louis Couperus. [Dodd, Mead and Company, New York.]
Rain, rain.... It is always raining in Holland; the skies are ever hidden behind muddy clouds, and in the damp, bleak atmosphere straggle grey figures with stony faces. It is painful to follow Couperus through the four hundred odd pages of his gloomy novel, to meet only “small souls,” petty men and women whose sole interest lies in dinner parties and endless gossip. Empty, tedious, stupid “society,” without even the piquant vice that makes attractive the bourgeoisie of Balzac, Maupassant, or Zola. The least boring figure among the asinine menagerie is that of the heroine, Constance, whose sole virtue consists in the fact that she had committed adultery in her early life. The author has not brought in a single positive type of Holland’s artistic or intellectual circles to counteract the general gloom of the picture; he has evidently determined to hold his readers within the frame of a family-epic, to focus their attention on one particular aspect of life in the Hague, the shallowest, the palest. As this novel presents the translation of the first part of the author’s tetralogy, we must be patient and consider the book as a prelude to the developing drama. Already we see at the end of this volume promising symptoms of a new, real life, to be manifested in the growing boy, Adrian—big, healthy, sturdy, who despises his petty relatives with their noisy intrigues, and whose “boyish lips, with their faint shading of dawn, curve into a scornful smile as he says: ‘It’s all about nothing!’” We shall eagerly look forward to the following volumes, for Couperus is an artist, a deep psychologist, a follower of Zola; his method may be old, arch-realistic, but, as I say, he is an artist, hence thrilling.
K.