In other words, the physical passion, in which to-day men find the birth of love, belongs in nature to maturity and completion, when man has gained the courage to be himself and express himself. It is the harvest of pure romance, only possible to those who have earned full knowledge of themselves and of each other.
The humdrum pictures of insincere marriage, with which fiction is crowded to-day, come from mistakes or spiritual failure to be one's best self, not from constancy and faith. The need to perpetually revive intense emotion with a new mistress can never be felt in a true marriage. It is inevitable for so-called "free" love, the bitterest slavery of man.
For wedded love—that is, the permanent union of body and soul—there is ever a new and wonderful adventure, the deepening mystery of the closer bond. And the highest happiness, which is intense emotion, has the gravest responsibilities, demanding the greatest courage and hope. As Mr. Middleton Murray has written in The Things We Are: "The taking of a wife or the taking of a friend is an eternal act; if it be less, it is a treachery, a degradation."
It is true, certainly, that the nature of love and passion may change with time and the comradeship of daily life; but the change is not a weakening, not even a lowering of the pulse. Its ardour does not diminish but conquers life more completely. It is, actually, the constant and faithful heart, which has most strength to bear with, or to ennoble, the deadening trivialities of existence (that no
free lover can escape), to make small things great; which finds most courage to face Fate.
The deadening influence of constant "experiments" in passion ("walking round and round the thing you want, gloating over it with your eyes"); the bitter tragedy of a life that is "one long series of eager conquests turned to listless ones," has been dramatically exposed, with unflinching realism, by Miss Olive Mary Salter in her God's Wages; which also reveals "that love beyond self which is human companionship."
For Anne Verity, we read, "marriage" had been "the finger-post to Death." In "making man her own she made him stale. . . . There was no end to those upon whom she had lived and left them to pay the bill." Always "life must be savoured anew by fresh interests, hashed up aspects of the same old facts served up over and over again to one's easily deceived palate." It was "her vanity that must be ministered to afresh, its staleness and satiation relieved by the sacrifice of someone else's young virility."
She found that "love doesn't stay with this generation, it touches us and flies again. . . . It's this awful quality of inconstancy in me, as if my heart had got a hole in it. . . . We've
lost the art of looking on at anybody but ourselves."
But, at long last, when a man explained to her: "I want you to love my mind, that lives, instead of my body, that will die," she awoke.