Fashions in Love

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 584, 9 February 1929, Page 22

Fashions in Love

Some of the Grotesque Shapes Into Which Moral Codes Have Modelled the Stubborn Material

Human nature does not change, or, at any rate, history is too short for any changes to be perceptible. The earliest known specimens o£ art and literature are still comprehensible. The fact that we can understand them all and can recognise in some of them an unsurpassed artistic excellence is proof enough that not only men’s feelings and instincts, but also their intellectual and imaginative powers, were in the remotest times precisely what they are now, writes Aldous Huxley in a recent issue of “Vogue.” In the fine arts it is only the convention, the form, the incidentals that change; the fundamentals of passion, of Intellect and imagination remain unaltered.

It. is the same with the arts of life as with the fine arts. Conventions and traditions, prejudices and ideals and: religious beliefs, moral systems and codes of good manners, varying according to the geographical and historical circumstances, mould into different forms the unchanging material of human instinct, passion and desire. It is a stiff, intractable material—Egyptian granite rather than Hindu bronze. The artists who carved the colossal statues of Rameses i i may have wished to represent the Pharaoh standing on one leg and waving two or three pairs of arms over his head, as the Indians still represent the dancing Krishna. But with the best will in the world they could not have imposed such a form upon the granite.

Love—A Compromiser Similarly, those artists in social life whom we call statesmen, moralists, founders of religions, have often wished to mould human nature into forms of superhuman elegance; but the material has proved too stubborn for them and they have had to be content with only a relatively small alteration in the form which their predecessors had given it. At any given historical moment human behaviour is a compromise (enforced from without by law and custom, from within by belief in religious or philosophical myths) between the raw instinct on the one hand and the unattainable ideal on the other—a compromise in our sculptural metaphor between the unshaped block of stone and the many-armed dancing Krishna. Like all the other great human activities, love is the product of unchanging passions, instincts and desires (unchanging, that is to say, in the mass of humanity; for of course they vary greatly in quantity and quality from individual to individual) and of laws and conventions, beliefs and ideals which the circumstances of time and place, or the arbitrary flats of great personalities, have imposed on a more or less willing society. History of Love The history of love, if it were ever written (and doubtless some learned German, unread, alas! by me, has written it, and in several volumes), would be like the current histories of art —a record of succeeding “styles” and "schools,” of “influences,” "revolutions,” “technical discoveries.” Love’s psychological and physiological material remains the same; but every epoch treats it in a different manner, just as every epoch cuts its unvarying cloth and silk and linen into garments of the most diverse fashion. The present fashions in love are not so definite and universal as those in clothes. It is as though our age were dubiously hesitating between crinolines and hobble skirts, trunk hose and Oxford trousers. Two distinct and hostile conceptions of love co-exist in the minds of men and women, two sets of ideals, of conventions, of public opinions struggle for the right to mould the psychological and physiological material of love. The Old and the New One is the conception evolved by the 19th century out of the ideals of Christianity on the one hand and

. romanticism on the.other. The other 1 is that still rather inchoate and negative conception which contemporary youth is in process of forming out of the materials provided by modern psychology. The public opinion, the conventions, ideals and prejudices which gave active force to the first of these conceptions and enabled it, to some extent at least, to modify the actual practice of love, had already lost much of their strength when they were rudely shattered, at any rate in the minds of the young, by the shock ■ of the war. As usually happens, prac- ; tice preceded theory and the new con- , ception of love was called in to justify . existing post-war manners. Having

1 gained a footing, this new conception is now a cause of a particular kind of amorous behaviour among the rising generation instead of being, as it was ' for the generation of the war, an explanation of existing war-time behaviour, discovered after the fact. Let us try to analyse these two coexisting and conflicting conceptions of love. The older conception was, as I have said, the product of Christianity and romanticism —a curious mixture of contradictions, of the ascetic dread of passion and the romantic worship of passion.- Its . ideal was a strict monogamy, such as St. Paul grudgingly conceded to amorous humanity, sanctified and made eternal by one of those terrific exclusive passions which are the favourite theme of poetry and drama. It is an ideal which finds its most characteristic expression in the poetry of that infinitely respectable rebel, that profoundly Anglican worshipper of passion, Robert Browning. Rousseau’s Divine Ecstasy It was Rousseau who first started the cult of passion for passion’s sake. Before his time the great passions, such as that of Paris for Helen, of Dido for Aeneas, of Paolo and Francesca for one another, had been regarded rather as disastrous maladies than as enviable states of soul. Rousseau, followed by all the romantic poets of France and England, transformed the grand passion from what it had be: in the middle ages—a demoniac possession—into a divine ecstasy, and promoted it from the rank of a disease to that of the only true and natural form of love. The 19th-century conception of love was thus doubly mystical with the mysticism of Christian asceticism and sacramentalism and with the romantic mysticism of Nature. It claimed an absolute rightness on the grounds both of its naturalness and of its supernaturaluess.

Now, if there is one thing that the study of history and psychology makes abundantly clear, it is that there are no such things as either “divine” or "natural” forms of love. Innumerable gods have sanctioned and forbidden innumerable kinds of sexual behaviour, and innumerable philosophers and poets have advocated the return to the most diverse kinds o'; “nature.” Every form of amorous behaviour, from chastity and monogamy to promiscuity and the most fantastic “perversions,” is found both among animals and men. In any given human society at any given moment love, as we have seen, is the result of the interaction of the unchanging instinctive and physiological material of sex with the local conventions of morality and religion, the local laws, prejudices and ideals. The degree of permanence of these conventions, religious myths and ideals is proportional to their social utility in the given circumstances of time and place. The Conception The new 20th-century conception of love is realistic. It recognises the diversity of love, not merely in the social mass from age to age, but from individual to contemporary individual, according to the dosage of the different instincts with which each is born

and the upbringing he has received. The new generation knows that there is no such thing as Love with a large L and that what the Christian romantics of the last century regarded as the uniquely natural form of love is in fact only one of the indefinite number of possible amorous fashions, produced by specific circumstances at that particular time. Having contracted the habit of talking freely and more or Jess scientifically about sexual matters, the young no longer regard love with that feeling of rather guilty excitement and thrilling shame which was for an earlier generation the normal reaction to the subject. Love has ceased to be

the rather fearful, mysterious thing it was and become a perfectly normal. : almost commonplace activity—an activity, for many young people especially in America, of the same nature as dancing or tennis, a sport, a recreation, a pastime. For those who hold this conception of love, liberty and toleration are prime necessities: a strenuous offensive against the old taboos and repressions is in progress. Love and Defects Such, then, are the two conceptions of love which oppose one another today. Which is the better? Without presuming to pass judgment, I will content myself with pointing out the defects of each. The older conception was bad in so far as it inflictqd unnecessary and undeserved sufferings on the many human beings whose congenital and acquired modes of lovemaking did not conform to the fashionable Christian-romantic pattern w'hich was regarded as being uniquely entitled to call itself love. The new conception is bad, it seems to me, in so far as it takes love too easily and lightly. On love regarded as an amusement the last word is surely this of Robert Burns: J waive the quantum of the sin, The hazard of concealing ; But ohl it hardens all within A.nd petrifies the feeling . Nothing is more : dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And cold and unimpassioned love infallibly becomes when it is too lightly made. It is not good, as Pascal remarked, to have too much liberty. Love is the product of an instinctive impulsion and a social resistance acting on the individual by means of ethical imperatives justified by philosophical or religious myths. When, with the destruction of the myths, resistance is removed, the impulse wastes itself on emptiness; and love which is only the product of conflicting forces is not -born. The 20th century is reproducing in a new form

the error of the early 19th century romantics. Following Rousseau, the romantics imagined that exclusive passion was the “natural” mode ol love, just as virtue and reasonableness were the “natural” forms of men's social behaviour. Get rid of priests and kings, and men will be for ever good and happy; poor Shelley’s faith in this palpable nonsense remained unshaken to the end. He believed also in the complementary paralogism that you had only to get rid of social restraints and erroneous religious mythology to make the Grand Passion universally chronic. Like the later Mussets and Sands, he failed to see that the Grand Passion was produced by the restraints that opposed themselves to the sexual impulse, just as the deep lake is produced by the dam that bars the passage of the stream, and the flight of the airplane by the air which resists the impulsion given to it by the motor. There would be no air resistance in a vacuum; but precisely for that reason the machine would not leave the ground or even move at all. Where there are no psychological or external restraints, the Grand Passion does not come into existence and must be artificially cultivated, as George Sand and Musset cultivated it —with what painful and grotesque results the episode of Venice made only too ludicrously manifest. A Short-lived Fashion “J’aime et je veux palir; j'aime et je veux souffrir,” says Musset with his usual hysterically masochistic emphasis. Our young contemporaries do not wish to suffer or grow pale; on the contrary, they have a most determined desire to grow pink and enjoy themselves. But too much enjojment “blunts the fine point of seldom pleasure.” Unrestrained indulgence kills not merely passion, but in the end even amusement. Too much liberty is as life-destroying as too much restraint. The present fashion in love-making is likely to be short, because love that is psychologically too easy is not interesting. Such, at any rate, was evidently the opinion of the French who, bored by the sexual licence produced by the Napoleonic upheavals, reverted (so far, at any rate, as the upper and middle classes were concerned) to an almost Anglican strictness under Louis-Philippe. We may anticipate an analogous reaction in the not distant future. What new or -what revived mythology will serve to create those internal restraints without which sexual impulse cannot be transformed into love? Christian morality apd ascetic ideals will doubtless play their part. But there will no less certainly be other moralities and ideals.

Only a new mythology of Nature, such as Blake, Burns and Lawrence have defined it, an untranscendenta! and (relatively speaking) realistic mythology of Energy, Life and Human Personality will provide, it seems to me, the inward resistances necessary to turn sexual impulse into love, and provide them in a form which the critical intelligence of post-Nietzschean youth can respect. By means of such a conception a new fashion in love may be created, a mode more beautiful and convenient, more healthful and elegant than any that have been seen among men since the days of remote and pagan antiquity.