work or play—demands restraint for its fruition. The value of self-control is no less of the body than the soul.
It is the fever-bred passion, born of stimulated sex-consciousness, that must snatch at every chance for expression and demands constant change. This, indeed, does weary and satiate the spirit, weaken bodily vigour, and destroy manhood. Bid us look for, welcome, and artificially develop every first faint stirring of the sex-urge, and you make us slaves indeed. If you consider less fundamental desires and pleasures of the body, you will admit at once that feverish, uncontrolled, and constant straining to put out all your strength at once, can produce no kind of good sportsman. Who more rigorously disciplines himself than the athlete? The power to be passionate, to express the love of the flesh, dies before it has ever been really attained, for those who always at once yield to mere craving. Their "deeply sensual associations" are "always robbed of mystery and delight when long-balked attraction comes to a tardy blooming."
And as Scott told us long ago, "It is no small aggravation of this jaded and uncomfortable state of mind, that the voluptuary cannot
renounce the pursuits with which he is satiated, but must continue, for his character's sake, or from the mere force of habit, to take all the toil, fatigue, and danger of the chase, while he has so little real interest in the termination."
That is, they quickly lose the very pleasures which were their object and their excuse.
I have known, or read of, no more miserable and weak human beings than many of the men and women in modern fiction.
Does it then follow that spiritual love, a true union of souls, for which we claim a higher and a more lasting happiness, is a thing apart, wherein the physical must be kept under, put aside; or, if conceded to our common weakness (the penalty of our earthly existence), should be calmly and occasionally indulged, only under official licence, in secret as a shameful deed? Certainly not. The pure know far more of passion than the loose. But, as other bodily pleasure, i.e., self-expression, gains strength and depth by taking responsibility for itself, "ordering" itself; so, above all, does our strongest, and most ultimate, physical need.
It is the true passion, naturally found in comradeship and love, spontaneously
constant and controlled, which will complete man's vitality, deepen and strengthen, while it steadies, physique. Spiritually the one expresses itself by taking, the other achieves itself by giving.
The biggest adventure in life, the deepest and truest feelings do, actually, involve that emotional abandon, or complete self-forgetting, which modernists exalt. But the giving away of one's whole self, that is, expressing one's whole self in passionate service, is not achieved by sudden, untested intimacy. It can only come, or grow, for those who seek understanding of each other, suffer the first mystery—(stirring the wonder dreams of youth)—to unfold and reveal itself in steady, controlled devotion to the vision of romance. Then, and only then (soon or late, as the individual self prompts), he shall dare, because he knows.