The Story of a Lover

by Hutchins Hapgood

I have written something of the art of love and of its difficulty. One aspect of love, what is called the sensual side, is much neglected by almost all men, especially men of our race and civilization. To exploit the possibilities of a physical relation is supposed to be indelicate or indecent. Reticence and unwillingness is confounded with chastity and purity. Our early sex relations are as a rule hasty and unloving, with no subtlety or sensuousness, merely violent, nervous and egotistic. Sexual life seems therefore to most inexperienced women, even when they live with a man they love, incomprehensible and unpleasant. They often pass years without the specific reaction, the complete relaxation and sensuous-spiritual satisfaction without which the sexual embrace has little æsthetic meaning.

So that women often live with a man for many years and have several children and yet know little or nothing of the physical side of love. And if the physical could be separated from the material and the spiritual this would be of little importance. But words represent merely abstractions from experience, which is a complex flux of all things, held in solution. To the sensitively developed human being a merely sensual relation is impossible; it is inextricably connected with emotion, thought and imagination, with what we call the spiritual. And neither relation is possible to the full unless the other is at the full, too.

A beautiful love relation therefore is impossible without a delicate sexual adjustment. It is the basis, the superstructure upon which fine architectural forms are reared. And it is not an easy thing for a civilized man and woman to have an adequate sensual relation. Each human being is a peculiar, irreproducible instrument, different from all other instruments, capable of giving out music of an original quality but needing the right touch, the right player, who understands the particular instrument upon which he is playing. If he plays artistically, beautiful spiritual harmony results, beautiful relations, beautiful children, and a beautiful attitude to Nature and Society.

Art is long, and we do not at once make the best connection with our lovers. When I first met her, I was not at all conscious of any sensual desire. My relations with women had been casual, fragmentary and nervous, and I had not learned to associate physical intercourse with spiritual emotion. So that, at first, our relations were lyrical and light on the sensual side, playful and athletic, smiling, and to her a little foolish and unmeaning. They were not brutal, but to her they did not seem to have any particular appeal. She did not feel the sad, colorful need of full self-and-sex expression and in her eyes was not the longing left by long nights of mutual giving-up. It was in large measure because I had not learned to be patient and quiet, to study her needs and to care more for her pleasure and emotion than for my own, not realizing that the two were inextricably dependent, one upon the other.

It is probable that women instinctively know more than men of the art of love on the physical side. They know that without the quietness of the soul it is nothing. The deep quiet woman with whom I lived unconsciously shaped my sex relation with her. She taught me the subtlety of the approach, the constancy and the continuation of it, and she herself continually grew in sensuous knowledge. After the birth of the first child, when she had recovered her health, how her sensuous beauty and her sensuous knowledge seemed almost more than I could bear! How brilliant and sensual her skin, how wonderful her instinctive art, and yet it was not then the full efflorescence, not yet what she was destined to realize, when our relations grew more complex and more distressful, and when she had become aroused by other men; then the whole rich consciousness developed and I was the gainer as well as the sufferer.

The first child deepened her nature, and each successive child added to the content of her consciousness. Although it is getting ahead of my story I cannot refrain from picturing the singular enhancement, sensual and imaginative, that came after the birth of the third child, a little girl born in wonderful Italy. The light and color of her skin seemed to come from some central sun within and to give her the rich, destructive look of a glorious fallen Magdalene, which corresponded to the deeper knowledge within her, of life, of sensuousness and of human character. Her beauty was then to me no pleasure in the charming, lyrical sense. There was no light, buoyant love in it, but a biting, harassing insistency, a serious, necessary yearning which was as inexorable as the sea and deprived me utterly of all hope of peace and of all desire for peace. I fiercely demanded sensual misery and unutterable impossible longing, and contentment seemed triviality, meant only for superficial souls. And when I saw the look of uncontrollable desire in the faces of other men, and her quick and welcoming consciousness of it, I cannot describe the kind of torturing pleasure it gave me, as if I were permitted glimpses into the terrible truth, which perhaps was destined to shatter me.

How different all this was from those April days of the honeymoon! It seemed as if thousands of years had intervened, and that just because we had been in part successful in the art of love, had mutually given and taken and partly destroyed one another and accepted from and given to others, and loved children and art and literature, and taken as fully as we could what came to us from life, just because of all that richness, our relation had become one that meant the constant possibility and at times the actuality of almost unbearable pain!

It seems to me at times that all I really care for is sensuality and ideas, and to me these are never unmixed—there never come to me ideas without sensuality, nor sensuality without ideas. My mind seems to have the warmth of my senses and to my senses are lent a hue of meaning given by the constructing intelligence. It was this mixed field on which she and I really met. Emotionally we were often far apart, but always was this keen interest together in the coloring of thought and the meaning of the sensual. So that we have been close together without sentimentality and without what is called romance.

And our relation has thus had at least one of the results that is highly desirable. It has helped us to express ourselves impersonally, has helped our writing, our understanding, our culture and our human connections, our appreciation of children and of Nature. It has done more. It has helped us to an understanding of the struggle of mankind, and has given us social sympathy. Indeed it is frequently true of thoughtful human beings capable of the rounded experience that is called culture, that as the youthful passions—which are the slighter passions—subside, as our cruder interest in women, in boon-companionship, in verses and in art-for-art’s sake, falls away or dies, we turn to the deeper personal relation, to social morality, to God. Men of forty who when younger sought women and gold and distinction now try to dig deeper into one relation, fight with insistency for an abstract idea, for a social panacea, or for a religion.