LOVE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 224, 21 September 1929, Page 4 (Supplement)

LOVE.

WHAT IS IT? MESSALINAS OF THE MODERN WORLD. (By HENRIETTE FRAGONARD.)

5 Love Burning words, 1 kisses under which a woman almost f swoons, long, bruising kisses. Plighted ' troths, vows of undying loyalty, eternal 1 devotion, sighs, eyes moist with longing, ' the ecstasy and rapture of a passion. Wonderful —and dangerous! And cap- . able of a thousand-and-one strange ; interpretations. The modern generation ; finds this elasticity of definition useful. ' To-day almost anything masquerades under the name of love. A wife runs off with a false-hearted scoundrel. This, she says, is Love. She is being true to love. A man falls in love with his pretty secretary, treats hie wife in such a way that she commitb suicide —the secret story of that will never be known —and marries the young girl. Love again. He exalts himself. He lov'cs this girl. Everything must give way to his passion. It is, lie argues, not a sin; it is the great, the Divine, thing to do—to yield to Love, sacrifice everything, and incidentally everyone, to this sinister, yet glowing rapture. .Description or Desecration? A boy and a girl meet under a June moon down by the old mill stream. In the Courts later on, in the cold and vulgar atmosphere of a petty suit for the maintenance of a child born "under the rose," the girl stands and tells the facts. Why did she fall? Love —it was love. Of course, now that the youth has shown himself in his true colours, a young male without honour, without even the gentleman's code which compels at_ least looking after the girl and the child, the girl finds it hard to believe that she ever did love. One may well ask, did she? Is this passing surrender to the lure of the flesh Love? Is it a fitting use of the greatest word in any language—or is it a desecration? Through the ages, from the very infancy of man in the cradle of the human species, men have hunted and women have been captured surrendered. Men have beguiled, women have succumbed. The legendary tale of ■mankind begins with Eve tempting Adam with the apple of the Tree of Knowledge. But society has always 'had a name for these transgressions. When the first laws were formed to rescue man from the existence of the animals a moral code' defined love sacred and profane, legitimate and illegitimate. When a man or a woman" walked, outside the straight path of the moral code in some of the early societies he was stoned or/ slain in some other painful way When nothing so drastic happened at least no one got up and excused the transgressor on the plea that he —or she—'had yielded to the Divine promptings of carnal love, and so had done something really fine, noble and uplifting. No one tried to argue that the transgressors had discovered something infinitely more sublime than the moral code. So man rose above the animals and founded great civilisations on the basis of discipline, self-control, and pleasure and happiness sought within the confines of a moral code. And presently the great civilisations, decayed. There are students of social history who believe that this civilisation of ours is in danger of decay. They believe that the race is softening, and they see the symptom of in the progressive disposition of men and women to go outside the moral law which is eternal—which is as essential to the health of societies as the elementary laws of sanitation are essential to the health of individuals. Desire Glorified as Love. They see this word Love becoming cheap. They see it used to excuse any shady adventure off the 'broad and shining highway of real love, true love. And they smile cynically, for, looking down the record of history into the past, tney have seen this happen before . . . in old civilisations where the women, once chaste, disciplined, controlled, loosened up in their code of conduct and excused everything by glorifying desire under the name of Love.

In the great days of Rom& the moral code was strict. The Romans kept iirm hold on their womenfolk. Then they softened, grew luxurious, imported Oriental ideas and fashions and pleasure whims. Respect between the sexes decayed. Men could not be bothered to obey the moral code in a society where the women were "easy." Divorces became almost as popular as they are in America to-day. As the martial character of the inen decayed, their women set the pace; and the barbarians, with their strict moral code, their firm control, massing in the Hunnish forest in the grey northlands, heard tales of the Roman decay and prepared to overwhelm the people who had once been the greatest military empire the world bad ever seen. Messalina was a typical woman of that last phase. Messalina married the Emperor Claudius at 15 and thenceforward settled down to worship at the pagan shrine of Eros, god of love. Siie had a thousand lovers before her career was ended with a sword thrust in the garden of the palace. There are many Messalinas.in the society of to-day. But between the Messalinas of yesterday and those of to-day there is an odd difference. The dissolute women of the pa-st seldom'.attempted ta justify their loose morals. The world knew them for what they were. They set a pace, but they did not' poison minds by sentimentalising their, d'erreneracy. Nor did men and women, of the bygone times tolerantly excuse them on the ground that they "loved greatly." That is the curse of the modern drifting . . . Women are beginning to sentimentalise over these transgressions. In America, where this tendency has reached an acuto stage,- women have ca.ptincd control of the male element so effectively that the reactions even iii a murder ease are feminine.. If a question of feelings is involved, everything is legitimate, everything must be forgiven. No law, no code, 4 must stand in tho way cf the free expression of sex feeling. . '

Consequently divorces are one in every . seven marriages, and the figure is on the increase. Men gratify their unlawful passions and women lightly accept the tempting gesture of some new man, because it doesn't matter. No social cold-shouldering follows. Corespondents marry the lady in the case after the divorce because it's cheap and easy, and anyway they, in their it 1 * a v orce any time they Sim and Sophistry. in the°nj<!li \ ire( * tlle h°me life