OOKING back on that honeymoon now, after a lapse of fifteen years, it seems so simple, so naïve and so lyrical! It was before the beginning of what seemed to me later the complexities of life, the intricacies of human relations, those many-hued and contradictory threads which render dangerous the love relation and threaten its duration, but at the same time prevent its atrophy. And in spite of the danger there is something that urges on every strenuous lover to dig deeper down into the wonderful being he is living with. It is a sound instinct which tells us that unless there is development there is death. We see in all Nature the law that to keep the life we must build up the body, whether it be the individual body or the body of a relationship.
And yet we, poet-lovers, struggle against the passing of the simple into the complex! The lover passionately wills the continuing of the same, but deeper than his will is his unconscious instinct which is preparing the unknown addition, the fascinating new danger. I remember, as if it were yesterday, her despair when she first knew she was to have a child. It was not so much because she felt the impending change in our relation—for, as I have written, I was not then and am not now sure that she ever fully accepted that relation—as it was the intrusion into her nature and life of something unknown and seemingly foreign. She rebelled consciously against the breaking up of her integrity, of that breathing wholeness of her being which made life, work and love seem mere aspects of the same simple thing.
This child was thrust upon her as my love had been thrust upon her. It was something she did not consciously welcome. And yet deeper than her consciousness—and of this she was well aware at a later time—was the need of that disturbing change. I know she wanted the child with a want deeper than her will, and this conviction has often made me feel that she wanted my love more than she knew. My love and the children that resulted were the tools that Nature used whereby she might continue to live, through change and development.
What obscure joy this pregnancy was to me! One early morning I awoke and saw her lying asleep by my side, and on her belly were traced the first lines of the new Life. As she lay there, with this plastic sign of the coming child incarnate on her lovely body, I was filled with a wild exultation, and I clasped her passionately in my arms.
How can I account for the intense joy I felt in what was to her at the time a conscious burden? I did not reason about it. I could not have explained it satisfactorily to myself. Why should I rejoice in the discomfiture of the creature I loved? It was perhaps the unconscious knowledge, the instinct for life which made me ecstatic—I knew without thought that greater life had been meted out to her, to me, to all. I was glad that she was to be destroyed, so that she might rise again from the ashes of her old unconscious conservatism. “Each man kills the thing he loves,” wrote the poet, but he also renders possible for the beloved another and a larger life. Thus destruction and rebirth go hand in hand, and so I could not find it in my heart to regret, as she lay weeping in my arms.
Life is spiritual. The simple things are the great mysteries. What must happen is the only beautiful. The accidental is never lovely. Her first pregnancy was to me a source of never-ending wonder and delight. The richness, the color, the quiet of it! The sensitive calmness that pervaded her whole being! The lovely adjustment of what she had been to what she was about to be. What poise at each step, what breathing, expanding life! How she seemed in deep unconsciousness to brood like a spirit over her wonderful body—the body that was as much a part of her as her spirit. It was her spirit, as her spirit was her body,—both were different aspects of the same.
It was a time of weeping sensibility. A slight intrusion of anything not a part of her enlarging nature brought quick tears and seemed to cast a shadow over the pervading sunlight of her condition. I remember, as we sat one day under a pine tree, I threw at her in play a light little cone which barely touched her life-breathing skin. But it was enough to disturb the powers that were intent on their wonderful purpose. And the tears that followed were a silent and unconscious rebuke. I who should have guarded her against any unfriendly intrusion was guilty of a deep offense. She did not say so, perhaps did not think so, but her whole being knew so. The sin was greater because not intended. I and the rest of external Nature were in duty bound to be more sensitive. And, of course, she was profoundly right. The great sins are unconscious and inevitable, due to the coarseness of the Universe.
The throwing of the cone was symbolic of much of my relation to the woman I loved. In moments of intensity I felt the spiritual meaning of all Life, and at such times I could understand, at least, how to act with sensibility towards her. But much of the time I was carelessly throwing figurative cones, projecting acts and thoughts which were intruders, which did not make a sweet part of the complex, the total content of her nature, but were hostile to it. Perhaps it was this which made our relation so often a troubled one, and which has left in me a deep, lingering sense of doubt of her love for me. She has never accepted my Form, my essential Self, as beautiful. Flashes in my acts, thoughts and feelings have some approach to what is friendly to her spirit, but the whole thing is not sensitized and intensified enough to form the blue flame of perfection which her soul desires.
And my coarse conceptions and brutal acts were of far greater dimensions than those of the cone. I demanded a continuity of emotion and a constantly repeated experience. For me there must needs be something significantly active; in me always was a restless reaching out, a striving to connect myself with something foreign; in a vain, unconscious hope of finding the rich peace that did not exist in my own soul, I went out to every passing thing, seeking an unattainable equilibrium. Only restlessly man realizes himself, wrote Goethe. Only by connection with outside things does the male come to the consciousness of himself, if he be a pure male, which is an ugly misfortune. And the only way he rids himself of this undesirable purity is by the disillusion bound up in his nameless, continuous superficial acts. He ever approaches but never attains the brooding dignity and sensitive peace of the pregnant woman.
The soul of every beautiful thing is quiet. Much of the time she was so quiet and so unresponsive that there was no place for me in her presence. Often I went away from her, irritated by her very perfection; by her self-sufficiency and calm; went away from what I loved and what I prized, to occupy myself with transient things, experiences and strangers—with work, with women, and with boon companions!
These were the cones of more serious character that I threw into the face of this womanly woman! And it is what many a man has done before and since. In him it is the love of life and of play. In play, he throws his cones, as the child gleefully tears from the butterfly its gorgeous wings. In cruel play he seeks and seeks, seeking self-realization wherever he can find it; going through his Pilgrim’s Progress, hoping for the Impossible, finding the Illusion. And in this play he is able to continue, to appear to go further, through the unconscious help of the woman he loves! To live intimately with a woman is to learn an instinctive subtlety of approach to all of life, to work, to the understanding of art and of the problems of society, to the more complete friendship with men and with other women.
Yes, with other women! This is not the truth as written down in the sentimental storybooks of life. It is not what we teach our young men, nor, for some obscure reason, is it what we desire to believe. It is contrary to the fictions of Romance. If it has beauty, it is the beauty of a grimmer Realism. It possesses the quality of deep irony, that she should help her lover to Others! And that thereby Others should receive more! But the real romance lies in the return to the Beloved. Her errant Lover is a Retriever who brings rich gifts from the world to lay at the feet of his Mistress.
As I went in and out of the unformed places of the world, in the obscurities and half-lights of the cities of men and women, I gathered up stray flashes and suggestions and carried them piously home to her, as the child on the beach rushes to his mother with his latest find, some delicately traced shell perhaps, for her to admire. If I went away from her, irritated by her inexpressive calm, by the far-away brooding of her soul, and feverishly sought a café-companion, whose abrupt and fragmentary experiences combined into form through my eager sympathy, a part of the pleasure and the impulse that drove me to it was to bring it back to her.
To bring it back to her, to please, interest and disturb her! To exhibit myself, my mental and imaginative resources, to arouse her admiration, to stimulate her senses, to excite her amorousness, to awaken and challenge her perfection! To contribute to her pregnancy, not only of the body, but of the soul and mind, gave me a deep excitement and a satisfaction that passes understanding.
And her brooding soul, the soul of the artist and the woman, working on forms both physical and spiritual, took what came to her, both pain and pleasure, and wove it insensibly into the harmony of her being. At a later time, it was difficult, perhaps impossible, for her to welcome all I tried to force upon her, but during the first years of our married life, she took it all very much as she breathed, naturally, tolerantly, with quiet understanding, never failing to remain herself, but making room for the foreign things that came to her through me.
I wonder if it is not true that the most difficult art in the world is the art of human relations. What we call art is mere child’s play in comparison. And a human relationship is never finished, as long as it remains alive. There is a never-ceasing, strenuous re-making, re-creating. It tests everything there is in a man to live artistically with a woman, and it calls out all the art of a woman to insist that her relations with a man shall have essential form.
Patience is as necessary to the art of love as it is to any other art. One may throw off fine sketches impulsively, nervously, but there is a wide difference between the sketch and the finished thing. We find painters and writers who have suggestive ideas but who never put enough enduring intensity into their work to give it essential form. So, too, in the art of love. The rule in love as in the minor arts—these minor arts being poetry, painting, sculpture and music—the rule in love is the sketch. Very few lovers go beyond the sketch. Few have the enduring power, the artistic patience to build the relation into an essential form. It is perhaps for this reason that love is not regarded as an art at all. It is too difficult.
Men and women fall in love with one another. They catch glimpses of that most beautiful thing—that unseen thing—the soul of the opposite sex as incarnate in the body—and under the excitement of that perception, they are in love. But a glimpse is a glimpse, and it passes quickly, in a day, in a year. It passes if it remains thus simple: if it remains merely that vision of beauty. For beauty grown familiar is no longer beauty. It is tedium. It no longer enhances; it no longer awakens, beckons, no longer leads one on.
So most lovers tire quickly. They know love’s sad satiety, but if they are real lovers, though not artists in love, they must pass on restlessly from one woman to another, from one man to another, seeking an impossible satisfaction, restlessly, feverishly. They are the sketch-makers. They who have the amorous insight, the love impulse, are usually of this essentially restless kind. They are the minor artists in love, not the great shapers, the patient formers of Life.
But to the artist-lover his Mistress is always unfamiliar. Into her goes all his changing experience. She is remodeled in his eyes from period to period. He sees in the One the incarnation of the Many. Impatient perhaps, superficially, yet deeply he is patient, for he builds his work of art, and is passionately content to build on, if it takes an eternity.
Impatiently I threw at her all the cones I could gather along the Road of Life. I restlessly strove to disturb her, in her ideas, in her feelings; beyond all else I passionately wished to destroy her aloofness, her quiet coolness; even in her pregnancy I would not leave her alone. When I could no longer endure her endurance, when her love of solitude and her almost uncanny quiet, aroused me into a kind of unreasoning indignation, I would, as I have said, rush off and precipitate myself into some sort of restless adventuring; then return and give her the disturbing result of my experiences. But underneath my restlessness and my conventional infidelities, there lay always the deep passionate will for an enduring union, based upon her continuously changing strangeness, the wonderful strangeness, the progressively beautiful strangeness of her nature.