What, then, is this Love. It is a sex-conflict; wherein the man "has to make war, to conquer." The woman begs him "to hurt her, to set his imprint upon her"; even when "about to conquer" she must
wear "the slave look." This is precisely the woman he also finds, more crudely phrased, in the "mean streets": "If yer lives alone nothing 'appens . . . stuck in the mud like. But when yer've got a 'usband, things 'as wot they calls zest . . . if 'e do come 'ome . . . p'r'aps 'e'll give yer one in the mouf. Variety, that's wot it is, variety. . . . He may lift his elbow a bit and all that, but anyhow 'e's a man." If he does not come home, love means "waking up in the middle of the night and running about the room like a crazy thing because she'd dreamed he was with some other girl." In the afternoon it meant "feeling all soft and swoony just because he helped you into the 'bus by the elbow."
More thoughtful or intelligent young ladies come "to think there's no such thing as a pure-minded girl." Marriage is "merely evidence that the girl has held out" and "only a dodge for getting rid of being in love."
Mr. Hugh Walpole once very sensibly remarked that "people don't want to know what a young ass thinks about life if he can't tell a story." Perhaps, if such muddled ideas were only expressed by these solemn and very intellectual young men (who, however, can "tell a story"), we might be disposed to
leave the matter in their hands and trust to time for their enlightening.
But, unfortunately, the same false "new love" is about us everywhere. It is a commonplace to boys and girls, and has crept into the great majority of second-rate, easily read, novels published to-day.
What does it really mean? How has it come about?
In the first place, the new thinkers have done precisely what they are always protesting against. They confuse "marriage" with the legal contract. A great part of their abuse, half their plea for the greater sincerity of free love, has no standing against spiritual marriage, founded on true love.
Nevertheless the argument against permanency remains. The demand for continual new adventure in emotion (set out to condone both intimacy without marriage or disloyalty to marriage) does rest on something which has the appearance of truth and reason.
The fiery, swooning passion of mere bodily impulse does not last. But even physical passion, the sex-urge, means more than that. Our new teachers ignore what all experience has proved and science taught—that every physical impulse—whether to eat or drink,