superficial, of deepening the channels and rendering them more profound.

Practically, and as a matter of policy, a too easy consent to another's love is a mistake. The barb only sticks when the bait is withdrawn. Ovid, it will be remembered, advises that "the lover should be admitted by the window, even when the door is quite accessible, and really more convenient"; and most girls (though they have not read Ovid) know instinctively that this is the right policy! Nothing is so hateful to a real lover as an easy, accommodating, altruistic affection—thoroughly Christian in sentiment, and with no more shape of its own than a pillow! Romance flies at the mere mention of Christian altruism; and the essence of love is romance.

Hence not only technical obstacles, but essential differences are necessary to the growth of the passion. Differences of age, differences of sex, differences of class, temperament, hereditary strain, learning, accomplishment, and so forthif not too great-are all necessary and valuable. They all mean romance, and contribute to that exchange of essences which we saw was the primitive protozoic law. It is quite probable that the abiding romance between the sexesso much greater as a rule than that between two of like sex-is due to the fact that the man and the woman never really understand each other; each to the other is a figure in cloudland, sometimes truly divine, sometimes

Ars. Am. iii. 605.

alas! quite the reverse; but never clear and obvious in outline, as a simple mortal may be expected to be.

But to return to the subject of pain and suffering. There is something more in their work than merely to reveal to the lover the extent or the depth of his own love. They have something surely to do with the inner realities of the affair, with the moulding or hammering or welding process whereby union is effected and, in some sense, a new being created. It seems as if when two naked souls approach, or come anywhere near contact with each other, the one inevitably burns or scorches the other. The intense chemistry of the psychic elements produces something like an actual flame. A fresh combination is entered into, profound transformations are effected, strange forces liberated, and a new personality perhaps created; and the accomplishment and evidence of the whole process is by no means only joy, but agony also, even as childbirth is.

All one can reasonably do is to endure. It is no good making a fuss. In affairs of the heart what we call suffering corresponds to what we call labor or effort in affairs of the body. When you put your shoulder to the cart-wheel you feel the pain and pressure of the effort, but that assures you that you are exercising a force, that something is being done; so suffering of the heart assures you that something is being done in that other and less tangible world. To

scold and scowl and blame your loved one is the stupidest thing you can do. And worse than stupid, it is useless. For it can only alienate. Probably that other one is suffering as well as you possibly more than you, possibly a good deal less. What does it matter? The suffering is there and must be borne; the work, whatever it is, is being done; the transformation is being effected. Do you want your beloved to suffer instead of you, or simply because you are suffering? Or is it Pity you desire rather than Love.

On the other hand, these things borne in silence have, I believe, an extraordinary effect. They pull people to you by quite invisible cords. As I have said, the fact of heart-strain and tension shows that there is a pressure or pull being exerted somewhere. Though the cord be invisible, there is someone at the other end (though not perhaps quite the one you supposed) who responds.

Words anyhow, in matters of love, are rather foolish; they are worse than foolish, they are useless; and again they are worse than useless, for they are misleading. Love is an art. "It

1

must be revealed by acts," says a Swiss writer, "and not betrayed by words." And Havelock Ellis, speaking further of the mistake of relying on declarations and asservations, says: "This is scarcely realized by those ill-advised lovers who consider that the first step in courtship-and perhaps even the whole of courtship-is for a 1Psychology of Sex, vol. vi. p. 542.

man to ask a woman to be his wife.

That is so

far from being the case that it constantly happens that the premature exhibition of so large a demand at once and forever damns all the wooer's chances." And in another passage he says: 1 "Love's requests cannot be made in words, nor truthfully answered in words: a fine divination is still needed as long as love lasts."

Love is an art. As no mere talk can convey the meaning of a piece of music or a beautiful poem, so no verbal declaration can come anywhere near expressing what the lover wants to say. And for one very good and sufficient reason (among others)-namely, that he does not know himself! Under these circumstances to say anything is almost certainly to say something misleading or false. And the decent lover knows this and holds his tongue. To talk about your devotion is to kill it-moreover, it is to render it banal and suspect in the eyes of your beloved.

Nevertheless though he cannot describe or explain what he wants to say, the lover can feel it -is feeling it all the time; and this feeling, like other feelings, he can express by indirectionsby symbols, by actions, by the alphabet of deed and gesture, and all the hieroglyphics of Life and Art. Like the animals and the angels and all the blessed creatures who don't talk, he can communicate in the ancient, primeval, universal language of all creation, in the language which is itself creation.

1Ibid., p. 544.

CHAPTER IV

ITS ULTIMATE MEANINGS

"To talk about your devotion is to kill it." Perhaps one ought even to say that to talk at all is to kill it! One often thinks what divine and beautiful creatures-men and women-there are all around, how loving and lovable, how gracious in their charm, how grand in their destiny!— if indeed they could only be persuaded to remain within that magic circle of silence. And then alas! one of these divinities begins to talk-and it is like the fair woman in the fable, out of whose mouth, whenever she opened it, there jumped a mouse! The shock is almost more than one can bear. Not that the shock proceeds from the ignorance displayed-for the animals and even the angels are deliciously ignorant— but from the revelations which speech unconsciously makes of certain states of the soul-from the strange falsity which is too often heard in the words, and in the very tones of the voice.

But Love burns this falsity away. That is why love-even rude and rampant and outrageous love—does more for the moralizing of poor humanity than a hundred thousand Sunday schools. It cleans the little human soul from