Without Prejudice

spectacle of the aged spinster languishing for matrimony, as incarnated for the nonce in the person of her niece's lover. Miss Sophie Larkin would play the part, and it would be intended to be a comic one. There is more suggestiveness in the conventional stage figure of the amorous old maid than in all Congreve's comedies. And yet what figure is more certain to please, in the whole gallery of puppets? Scenes and characters of this sort you may have by the dozen; but to build a moral play upon an 'immoral' basis is to court damnation. To construct a noble piece of work on the basis of 'improper' relations between your chief characters is to show the cloven hoof. Once the initial scheme granted, the rest may be as bracing as an Alpine breeze; but the critics will scent brimstone. But to build an immoral play upon a 'moral' basis-that way gladness lies. Critics, who would rage at the delineation of a character remotely resembling a human being's, will pat you on the back with a good-humoured smile, and at most a laughing word of reprobation for your azure audacities. Ladies, who, whether they are married or unmarried, are in England presumed to be agnostics in sexual matters, will roar themselves hoarse over farces whose stories could only be told to the ultramarines. Ibsen may not untie a shoe-latchet in the interest of truth, while English burlesque managers may put an army of girls into tights. One dramatist may steal a horse-laugh by a tawdry vulgarity, while another may not look over an ankle. It is the same with literature. We look askance at 'The Kreutzer Sonata,' but tolerate the vulgar anecdotal indecencies of the sporting journal. The artist's eye may not see life steadily, and see it whole; but it is licensed to wink and ogle at will from behind its blinker. If the artist's 'immorality' is the artistic embodiment of a frank Paganism, or is inspired by an ethical or a scientific purpose, he is a filthy-minded fellow. Seriousness is the unpardonable sin. Coarseness can be condoned, if it is only flippant and frivolous enough. In short, the only excuse for indecency is to have none.

Unfortunately, practical considerations are so involved with artistic that it may be imprudent to accord the artist as wide a charter as he would wish. The ideals of sincerity and honesty may in the present social environment be so potential for harm that it is for the common interest that they should not be gratified. This may be so, though I do not believe it. But whether it be so or not, of one thing I am certain,-and that is that the half-hearted dallying with things sexual is wholly an evil; that the prurient sniffing and sniggering round the subject is more fraught with peril to a community, more debasing to the emotional currency, more blighting to the higher sexual feelings of the race, than the most shameless public repudiation of all moral restraints. Evil cures itself in the sunlight; it grows and flourishes in the darkness. Vice looks fascinating in the gloaming; the morning shows up the tawdriness and the paint.

XX. LOVE IN LIFE AND LITERATURE

Love! Love! Love! The air is full of it as I write, though the autumn leaves are falling. Shakespeare's immortal love-poem is playing amid the cynicism of modern London, like that famous fountain of Dickens's in the Temple gardens. The 'largest circulation' has barely ceased to flutter the middle-class breakfast-table with discussions on 'the Age of Love' and Little Billee and Trilby-America's 'Romeo and Juliet'-loom large at the Haymarket. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, forgetting even Napoleon, his King Charles's head, is ruling high at the libraries with rechauffes of 'Some Old Love Stories,' and the 'way of a man with a maid' is still the unfailing topic of books and plays. One would almost think that Coleridge was to be taken 'at the foot of the letter'-

All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame.

But alas! suffer me to be as sceptical as Stevenson in 'Virginibus Puerisque.' In how many lives does Love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable of a 'grand passion' than of a grand opera. 'Man's love is of man's life a thing apart.' Ay, my Lord Byron, but 'tis not 'woman's whole existence,' neither. Focussed in books or plays to a factitious unity, the rays are sadly scattered in life. Natheless Love remains an interest, an ideal, to all but the hopeless Grad-grinds. Many a sedate citizen's pulse will leap with Romeo's when Forbes-Robertson's eye first lights upon the Southern child 'whose beauty hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear.' Many a fashionable maid, with an eye for an establishment, will shed tears when Mrs. Patrick Campbell, martyr to unchaffering love, makes her quietus with a bare dagger.

For the traces left by Love in life are so numerous and diverse that even the cynic-which is often bad language for the unprejudiced observer-cannot quite doubt it away. There seems to be no other way of accounting for the facts. When you start learning a new language you always find yourself confronted with the verb 'to love'-invariably the normal type of the first conjugation. In every language on earth the student may be heard declaring, with more zeal than discretion, that he and you and they and every other person, singular or plural, have loved, and do love, and will love. 'To love' is the model verb, expressing the archetype of activity. Once you can love grammatically there is a world of things you may do without stumbling. For, strange to say, 'to love,' which in real life is associated with so much that is bizarre and violent, is always 'regular' in grammar. Ancient and modern tongues tell the same tale-from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to the elephantine language that was 'made in Germany.' Not only is 'to love' deficient in no language (as home> is deficient in French, and Geist in English), but it is never even 'defective.' No mood or tense is ever wanting-a proof of how it has been conjugated in every mood and tense of life, in association with every variety of proper and improper noun, and every pronoun at all personal. Not merely have people loved unconditionally in every language, but there is none in which they would not have loved, or might not have loved, had circumstances permitted; none in which they have not been loved, or (for hope springs eternal in the human breast) have been about to be loved. Even woman has an Active Voice in the matter; indeed, 'to love' is so perfect that, compared with it, 'to marry' is quite irregular. For, while 'to love' is sufficient for both sexes, directly you get to marriage you find in some languages that division has crept in, and that there is one word for the use of ladies and another for gentlemen only. Turning from the evidence enshrined in language to the records of history, the same truth meets us at any date we appoint. Everywhere ''Tis love that makes the world go round.' It is dizzying to think what would have happened if Eve had not accepted Adam. What could have attracted her if it was not love? Surely not his money, nor his family. For these she couldn't have cared a fig-leaf. Unfortunately, the daughters of Eve have not always taken after their mother. The statistics of crime and insanity testify eloquently to the reality of love, arithmetic teaching the same lesson as history and grammar. Consider, too, the piles of love at Mudie's! A million story-tellers in all periods and at all places cannot have all told stories, though they have all, alas! told the same story. They must have had mole-hills for their mountains, if not straw for their bricks. There are those who, with Bacon, consider love a variety of insanity; but it is more often merely a form of misunderstanding. When the misunderstanding is mutual, it may even lead to marriage. As a rule Beauty begets man's love, Power woman's. At least, so women tell me. But then, I am not beautiful. It must be said for the man that every lover is a species of Platonist-he identifies the Beautiful with the Good and the True. The woman's admiration has less of the ethical quality; she is dazzled, and too often feels, 'If he be but true to me, what care I how false he be.'

'The Stage is more beholding to Love than the life of man,' says Bacon. The 'Daily Telegraph' is perhaps even more 'beholding' to it. The ingenuity with which this great organ raises the cloyless topic every silly season under another name, is beyond all praise. No conclusion will ever be arrived at, of course, because 'Love' means a different thing with each correspondent, and it is difficult to lay down general truths about a relation that varies with each of the countless couples that have ever experienced it, or have fancied they experienced it. The set theme of a newspaper correspondence always reminds me of a nervous old lady crossing the roadway: she runs this way and that way, gets splashed by every passing wheel, jumps back, jumps forward again, finds temporary harbour on a crossing-stage under a lamp, darts sideways, and ends by arriving in another street altogether. So that the heading of a correspondence is scant guide as to what is being discussed under it; and no one would be surprised to find a recipe against baldness under the title of 'The Age of Love.' But then 'The Age of Love' is an absurd and answerless question. Experience shows that all ages fall in love-and out again; so that, to quote the pithy Bacon again, 'a man may have a quarrel to marry when he will.' Octogenarians elope, and Mr. Gilbert's elderly baby died a blase old roue of five.

Romeo's passion was a second, not a first, love: he had already loved Rosaline. Juliet's first-and only-love came to her only eleven years after she had been weaned, 'come Lammas.' Save that the 'Age of Love' may be said to be 'Youth'-for Love aye rejuvenates-there is nothing to be said. Wherefore the German gentleman who protested against the cliches of novel-writers in the matter of the eternity of passion was well within the wilderness of the subject. The cliche metaphor, by the way, is itself becoming a cliche , so stereotyped do we grow in protesting against the stereotyped. Germans are,