PAGE [106].—Contracts Preliminary to a Permanent Alliance.
“The custom of hand-fasting, rare now anywhere else, still prevails to some extent in Iceland. A man and woman contract to live together for a year. If at the end of the year the parties agree thereto, they are married; if not, they separate without stigma on either side. The contract may be made conditionally binding from the first. It may bind the parties to marry in the event of issue, or in the event of no issue, as the case may be.”—Prof. Mavor, “Iceland: Some Sociological and Other Notes,” Proceedings Philosophical Society, Glasgow, 1890–91.
PAGE [118].—A Certain Amount of Animalism.
“The Saviors of this, as of every corrupt and stupid generation, must feel the pulse of the adulterer as well as that of his victim, and stand clear-eyed and honest as pioneers of the new sexual renaissance, which will probably combine a healthy temperate animalism with Browning’s vision of that rare mating when soul lies by soul.”—Edith M. Ellis, “A Noviciate for Marriage,” p. 4.
“She gave him comprehension of the meaning of love: a word in many mouths, not often explained. With her, wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in our existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good gross earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction. In sooth, a happy prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more than happiness: the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain nobler races, now very dimly imagined.”—George Meredith’s “Diana of the Cross-ways,” ch. 37.
THE END.
[1]. Though this is of course not true of animal food.
[2]. See “Appendix.”
[3]. See “Appendix.”