The Conduct of Life

PROCREATION lies at the base of all reality as the continuous production of the life we call physical or animal but which might more accurately be called individual or practical. And this is why it arouses the intensest desires, the most lurid imagery, in men’s minds; and these desires and images, combining with other desires and images into objects of worship that are variously charming, attractive or perturbing, obsess our lives, particularly during our youthful years, and furnish an inexhaustible occasion to poetry and art.

When, moreover, the Spirit is really active in us, its particular form of activity at any given moment tends to engross our whole being; and so it is that among the conflicts that arise between the various forms of spiritual activity, the most violent, the most painful, the most distracting are those that rage between the sexual impulse and the other necessary forms of our activity—between sex and the moral life, between sex and artistic or mental effort, between sex and our other physical, utilitarian or practical functioning. In poetry and in art we have the whole range of the tragedy of passion from the “love invincible in battle” of Sophocles, to the loves of Francesca and Juliet, of Hermengarde and Emma Bovary. In our youth, I said; but also later on, in our grown manhood and even in the fulness of our years, as everybody knows and as history records in famous cases of white-haired suicides from hopeless love.

Vainly have men striven to bring peace into this tumultuous conflict by moralising physical passion, conserving its status as a natural function but overlaying it with much talk about union of souls, constancy, faithfulness, purity, aspiration. None of these things can truly and fully be given by a love that is merely physical; and it is no discredit to such love that this is so. Our senses know nothing of constancy. Our imaginations are not faithful. Souls, whatever appearances may be, are not made one in love; on the contrary, each soul in such circumstances is intensely concerned with itself—whence that disconcerting feeling of selfishness and hostility that suddenly emerges from the intensest raptures of sexual abandonment. Who of us, considered as a physical creature, is at one even with himself—let alone attaining perfect accord, perfect commingling, with another creature? Two souls can combine only in a third soul. To attain the direct and immediate consensus that is claimed for the erotic emotion is a pure and simple impossibility. There is indeed, in the history of sentiment and of poetry, a record of at least one attempt to unite love and morality, love and the “gentle heart,” woman and the ideal: that of the old Thirteenth Century school of the “sweet new style” from which Dante sprang. But in that case poets got no farther than symbol and allegory—demonstrating thereby that their so-called “union” was an intellectual proposition rather than an actual and concrete working of “souls,” and furnishing one more proof of the insuperable duality of love and morality the moment we try to combine them one with the other instead of subordinating one to the other and transforming one into the other.

Just as futile has been the recourse of eliminating the conflict by striking at its roots—exalting and pretending to impose the “higher life,” the “perfect life,” ascetic virginity, ascetic castigation of the flesh. All such rules of life are founded on some transcendental notion, and they break down from their inner contradictions, leaving lunatics, perverts, and hypocrites behind as their characteristic product.

In these renunciations propter regnum caelorum there is oftentimes a certain grandeur—the grandeur possessed by lunacy in general. But even this saving grace is lacking in another and more perfectly stupid form of asceticism which it has been the fashion of late to describe as “rationalistic,” “positivistic” or “naturalistic” from various schools of philosophy which have successively put it forward. Here is attempted, by a process of “rationalisation”—“illuminism,” we sometimes say—a “scientific reduction” of love by guarding against so-called “exaggerations of sentiment” and eventually arriving at a so-called “solution” of the so-called “problem of sex.” The vulgar or perhaps ingenuous physicians and biologists who take a hand in this business remind me of certain grammarians and professors of rhetoric who come and tell you, as you stand enraptured before a line of poetry, that there is really no occasion for so much excitement; since the verse you have before you is just a string of sounds, syllables, pauses, and accents, for the manufacture of which you can find full directions in any treatise on metrics.

The royal road to the adjustment of the conflict is quite different from any of these, and is already indicated for us in the ethical institution of marriage. Marriage has well been called the “tomb of love.” For if parents saw in their children merely the fruit of sexual passion, would they dare lower their eyes upon the beings they have brought into the world? The tomb of love, indeed, but of savage, wholly physical, wholly natural love! The efficacy of marriage lies in this: that far from opposing native impulses of sex, which are essentials to the continuance of life, but rather favouring those same impulses by preventing their perversion or atrophy, they broaden and ennoble them by associating them with a peculiar social creation of their own: the family. And for this reason it now appears that marriage is not the only possible composition of the struggle; for what marriage does, and does so well, is simply to reinforce love with all the other manifestations of activity and creation—all the forms of moral, political, scientific, artistic productiveness, acting now as substitutes for sex, now as its assistants, all co-operating in works of love, and by that very fact keeping sex in its true perspective in the whole system of life, making it over meantime into something different from what it was when taken by itself as a natural physical impulse.

The sane rule of life should be not a frontal battle with native instincts, a battle which can end only in defeat, but to stimulate in our minds other spiritual interests which will automatically limit, and if need be repress, those instincts.

Sometimes on attaining the life of love that is a harmonious labour of creation—a life that is fully human, that is, we come to feel toward physical love a sense of ironical superiority which may amount to sheer disdain. But it is difficult to persist very long in this direction. The irony easily fails to ring true; and the disdain, however hard it tries, never quite succeeds in developing into a real contempt for mankind and for one’s own individuality to which nothing human is foreign. The truth is that we have won our battle, quieted the conflict—without however destroying the causes of dissension. And fortunately so! For if we removed sex utterly from our lives, art, for example, which is replete with representations of love, would become indifferent and unintelligible to us (as happens in fact in certain dry, wooden, inelastic souls); and this indifference and incomprehension would react on our other faculties, diminishing the energy of our intelligence and the vigour of our will.