It is now taught, not only that physical passion stands for, or rather is, the Love of which it forms only a part; but that the fire of sudden desire is the only true, or natural, expression of love itself.
Such a view has been, again and again, formally stated with quite serious, honest
intent by our leading novelists. It is assumed, without argument or justification, in most second-rate popular fiction; thereby reaching and poisoning the very readers least qualified to resist evil influence and, as we have shown, particularly ill-equipped to-day.
For Mr. Cannan's Matilda love is a "kiss of the lips, a surrender to the flood of perilous feeling, a tampering with forces that might or might not sweep you to ruin; a matter of fancy, dalliance, and risk." His Cora, the "natural light of love," "kissed" her lover's "eyes, his lips, his ears, and bit the tip of his nose until it was bruised and swollen."
He may well ask: "Does any man want any woman, or any woman any man? Are these wild flashes more than things of a moment? . . . Is not every woman any man's woman? Is not every man any woman's man? Why property? Why impossible pledges? Why pretend so much that is obviously false? Why build upon a lie and call it sacred? . . . Why do men and women live hideously together? . . . Why, and why again?"
With a cynic's frankness Mr. W. L. George answers why:
"Men may have us," said his Victoria, "as
breeders and housekeepers, but the mistress is the root of all." This is not, as one might suppose, a confession of sin; for "Love is outside marriage, because love's too big to stay inside . . . don't you see that of itself it carries the one sanctity that may exist between men and women? That it cannot be bound because it is as light airs, imponderable; so fierce that all things it touches it burns, so sweet that whosoever has drunk shall ever more be thirsty."
Because a man soon tires of such burning sweetness, he must satisfy his thirst elsewhere.
Woman, indeed, he is annoyed to find, is still unable to "understand love in its neurotic moods; she cannot yet understand that a greater intensity might creep into passion if one knew it to be transient, that one might love more urgently, with greater fierceness, if one knew that soon the body, temple of that love, would fade, wither, die, then decay . . . that haste to live made living more intense."