To bring it back to her, to please, interest and disturb her! To exhibit myself, my mental and imaginative resources, to arouse her admiration, to stimulate her senses, to excite her amorousness, to awaken and challenge her perfection! To contribute to her pregnancy, not only of the body, but of the soul and mind, gave me a deep excitement and a satisfaction that passes understanding.
And her brooding soul, the soul of the artist and the woman, working on forms both physical and spiritual, took what came to her, both pain and pleasure, and wove it insensibly into the harmony of her being. At a later time, it was difficult, perhaps impossible, for her to welcome all I tried to force upon her, but during the first years of our married life, she took it all very much as she breathed, naturally, tolerantly, with quiet understanding, never failing to remain herself, but making room for the foreign things that came to her through me.
I wonder if it is not true that the most difficult art in the world is the art of human relations. What we call art is mere child’s play in comparison. And a human relationship is never finished, as long as it remains alive. There is a never-ceasing, strenuous re-making, re-creating. It tests everything there is in a man to live artistically with a woman, and it calls out all the art of a woman to insist that her relations with a man shall have essential form.
Patience is as necessary to the art of love as it is to any other art. One may throw off fine sketches impulsively, nervously, but there is a wide difference between the sketch and the finished thing. We find painters and writers who have suggestive ideas but who never put enough enduring intensity into their work to give it essential form. So, too, in the art of love. The rule in love as in the minor arts—these minor arts being poetry, painting, sculpture and music—the rule in love is the sketch. Very few lovers go beyond the sketch. Few have the enduring power, the artistic patience to build the relation into an essential form. It is perhaps for this reason that love is not regarded as an art at all. It is too difficult.
Men and women fall in love with one another. They catch glimpses of that most beautiful thing—that unseen thing—the soul of the opposite sex as incarnate in the body—and under the excitement of that perception, they are in love. But a glimpse is a glimpse, and it passes quickly, in a day, in a year. It passes if it remains thus simple: if it remains merely that vision of beauty. For beauty grown familiar is no longer beauty. It is tedium. It no longer enhances; it no longer awakens, beckons, no longer leads one on.
So most lovers tire quickly. They know love’s sad satiety, but if they are real lovers, though not artists in love, they must pass on restlessly from one woman to another, from one man to another, seeking an impossible satisfaction, restlessly, feverishly. They are the sketch-makers. They who have the amorous insight, the love impulse, are usually of this essentially restless kind. They are the minor artists in love, not the great shapers, the patient formers of Life.
But to the artist-lover his Mistress is always unfamiliar. Into her goes all his changing experience. She is remodeled in his eyes from period to period. He sees in the One the incarnation of the Many. Impatient perhaps, superficially, yet deeply he is patient, for he builds his work of art, and is passionately content to build on, if it takes an eternity.
Impatiently I threw at her all the cones I could gather along the Road of Life. I restlessly strove to disturb her, in her ideas, in her feelings; beyond all else I passionately wished to destroy her aloofness, her quiet coolness; even in her pregnancy I would not leave her alone. When I could no longer endure her endurance, when her love of solitude and her almost uncanny quiet, aroused me into a kind of unreasoning indignation, I would, as I have said, rush off and precipitate myself into some sort of restless adventuring; then return and give her the disturbing result of my experiences. But underneath my restlessness and my conventional infidelities, there lay always the deep passionate will for an enduring union, based upon her continuously changing strangeness, the wonderful strangeness, the progressively beautiful strangeness of her nature.
Chapter IV
