"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 for all children 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 the growing sense 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 were in 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.
This is true. But its truth has been misunderstood by teachers like Edward Carpenter. Beauty and strength in human nature as elsewhere depend on harmony, and in such characters as I have cited that harmony is found. For, in fact, there is no instance in nature of a male wholly male or a female entirely female. Even physically the elements are shared. And if we say with confidence that where these elements are most fully shared there is found the fullest humanity, we are not committed to adding that where the body has one predominating character and the spirit another there is something finer still!
For harmony of life and temperament the body should be the perfect instrument and expression of the spirit. When you have the temperament of one sex in the body of another, this cannot be. There is at once a disharmony, a dislocation, a disorder—in fact, a less perfect not a more perfect type. Humanity does, I believe, progress towards a fuller element of the woman in the man, the man in the woman, and the best we have produced so far confirm the truth of this. But it is not an advance to produce a type in which the temperament and the body are at odds. This is not progress but perversion.