The story of Romance cannot be written nor interpreted in life without its hill-rock, named Liberty. There is no man-made law for love. The first business of human beings is to find their own on earth. All makeshifts part away; all short-range systems scurry past; all comets and asteroids cease to be considered, when a pair of suns whip into each other's attraction. And so it is with a true-mated pair. Those who have dreamed long and kept themselves pure, realise here below for a time the raptures of the elect. The new generation has a sense of this; and while its eyes look hard and daringly for its own, its finer examples preserve an integrity for the one until he is found.
The New Race realises that promiscuity is only a lack of taste. To draw the fulness and redolence from a book or a friend or a lover, from any episode or fabric of life, one must search for the true, as well as the beautiful, and the beautiful as well as the good.... Perhaps that tells it best—it dares to love Beauty, this New Race. It means to bring back the beauty of the body as well as to breathe forth the Soul. Its devil and its danger is Paganism. It loves Nature so well that it is in danger of forgetting that the old Mother is not complete in herself, but a manifest of her Lord Sun....
As to the liberty of its loves—the New Race realises that one cannot be held, except by vulgar hands, where that one does not want to stay. A mated man and woman turn each other absolutely free, and the first cry of their liberty is toward one immortal nest. Those firmly caught in the pure dream are content to wait for each other. They do not experiment. They realise the long road of romance—a road so long that the three-score and ten is but a caravansary of the night. They build above the flesh if for no other reason than to come into the greater beauty of the flesh. Renouncing nothing, devoted to austerity only for mystical union, carried away in no abandonment, they seek to achieve that command of the body by the mind, and that command of the body and mind by the Soul, which reveals the ultimate truth—that the plan is for Joy; that the best of all things is for men who have mastered themselves; that chastity is the breath and inevitable answer to self-conquest.
The growth of Romance through an ideal mating becomes a fusion at last of all the loves of earth. Connubial blessedness is therefore more reverently to be promoted than procreation, for upon it depends the loveliness of issue. The New Race acts upon the conviction that the love between man and woman is the holiest of earth expressions, rather than the love of mother and child. The first contains the second.
Still no earth love is the end.... Built through austerity and idolatry, through denial and abandon, through madness and martyrdom, through pettiness and chivalry, through pain turning less and less slowly through the years to power, through a little zone of peace at last (the calm before the greater storm) the fervour of man and woman becomes, in the fullness of time, too strong for earth, and in the final and keenest pain, the administry of a higher force begins.... I mean to tell this in a queer way through the next three or four chapters. Straight statements will not contain it quite—for it is still with dream, as yet. Rather I mean to weave the concept for you—fold on fold—so that at the end you will have it, as they do who have listened in Chapel many days.
Flesh is not integrated finely enough to carry the higher ardours of devotion. If the great saints who have learned to pour out their souls in adoration to the Father should turn back to a mere physical expression, they would blast themselves as well as the object of their madness. The awakening of the higher forces of love lifts the eye of the adorer from the breast to the brow of the beloved—from the brow to the Initiatory Star risen at last to meridian.
A new dimension of love is entered upon. All life tells the story. Watch the big birds lift from the sand to the cushion of wings; watch the airplane quicken its speed until it lifts from the monorail.... Machinery of racking power in a falling house, is that great love which has not yet learned to look above the body of the chosen one.