R. Brimley Johnson

“ The biggest adventure in life, the deepest and truest feelings do, actually, involve that emotional abandon, or complete self-forgetting, which modernists exalt. But the giving away of one's whole self, that is, expressing one's whole self in passionate service, is not achieved by sudden, untested intimacy. It can only come, or grow, for those who seek understanding of each other, suffer the first mystery— (stirring the wonder dreams of youth) —to unfold and reveal itself in steady, controlled devotion to the vision of romance. ”

“ And the highest happiness, which is intense emotion, has the gravest responsibilities, demanding the greatest courage and hope. As Mr. Middleton Murray has written in The Things We Are: "The taking of a wife or the taking of a friend is an eternal act; if it be less, it is a treachery, a degradation."
It is true, certainly, that the nature of love and passion may change with time and the comradeship of daily life; but the change is not a weakening, not even a lowering of the pulse. Its ardour does not diminish but conquers life more completely. ”

“ Glittering and hot in the first flush of adventure, we see youth's brave curiosity endlessly awake. Yet it was cold, hard, and "strange" at the core: always, everywhere, a "stranger" upon the earth. Sylvia "was always running away"—from men and from herself; so weary, so hurt, and so afraid. For there was none to share the burden and the joy, no footing for her; nothing to hold on to and steady life, no future to build: weary and restless and alone. She could never stay anywhere, with anyone; searching for ever, for she knows not what. ”

“ They have played their part in his drama, and may shuffle off to the wings. They are human beings in real life. And for the truth about them, we could tell such a dreary, monotonous, bitter and tragic sheaf of "Lonely Lives." We should show them to you, wandering round and round, in and out, under bright lights or behind dark corners; every year more weak and frightened, till strength fails them even for movement without hope, and they slip away into some silent pond.
And finally, from the first, if all love means constant change to revive passion, a life of continual experiment in emotion ”

“ Nobility shone out among us in those days, miracles beyond belief of what woman can do and suffer for big, or small, men: a new vision of the mothering of humanity that brought God to our side. Also, alas, terrible shattering of English girlhood, ugly staining of the pure in heart, feverish unrest, a fury of overdoing, a hard glitter of cold joy. Always haste, never growth. Wherefore to-day our morality is an ash-heap, which some weep over, others kick up.
Dare we refuse to face the black awakening to disillusion? ”

“ Bid us look for, welcome, and artificially develop every first faint stirring of the sex-urge, and you make us slaves indeed. If you consider less fundamental desires and pleasures of the body, you will admit at once that feverish, uncontrolled, and constant straining to put out all your strength at once, can produce no kind of good sportsman. Who more rigorously disciplines himself than the athlete? The power to be passionate, to express the love of the flesh, dies before it has ever been really attained, for those who always at once yield to mere craving. ”

“ All that is finest and noblest in human nature has been built upon a pure and constant loyalty; of which the eternal symbol (however smirched and stained by folly or sin) is marriage and the home. Character, which ultimately rules the world, grows straight amidst the influence of family life. The permanent ideal for man and woman; creating [82] new life, bearing and cherishing each new generation, is a complete union of the whole nature, spiritual and physical, whereof the spiritual bond must be supreme.
Self-control, restraint, and, if needs be, Sacrifice, are the highest expression of Self. ”

“ There will, moreover, be a thousand times more occasion for incompatibility, the jar of nerves; where there is no steady, devoted endeavour towards mutual forbearance and understanding, no spur to forgive—in courageous hope. Life in hotels may, superficially, expose less friction; but it quickly destroys any reality in comradeship. Only daily service can build up Love.
The mistress, in fact, remains an enervating luxury, a habit of living beyond our emotional means, a sparkling drug.
We have not found the Ideal, because it does not exist. ”

“ We saw children cramped and losing themselves in their fathers' fetters; we saw injustice, misery, and wasted lives; many a marriage that proved a prison or a doll's house. We learned honestly to face, almost for the first time, the terrible abuse of sex behind drawn blinds that, seeming an integral part of civilization, was eating away the very heart of humanity and condemning, with grim cynicism, the complacency of the old code. ”

“ But, if we laid too great stress on restraint, control, sacrifice, and mere orderliness; the new thinkers have, here again, missed the truth by their fiery haste. As the clear-sighted heroine of a recent novel has remarked, "It was a great and fine act to let yourself go—only no one said precisely where you went to."
Their Self is not a complete purposeful human being, of strong character and sustained courage, clear faith, and reasonable hope: certainly not of any charity whatsoever. The ego they would exalt is a mere riot of moods. ”

“ Woman, indeed, he is annoyed to find, is still unable to "understand love in its neurotic moods; she cannot yet understand that a greater intensity might creep into passion if one knew it to be transient, that one might love more urgently, with greater fierceness, if one knew that soon the body, temple of that love, would fade, wither, die, then decay . . . that haste to live made living more intense."
What, then, is this Love. It is a sex-conflict; wherein the man "has to make war, to conquer." The woman begs him "to hurt her, to set his imprint upon her" ”

“ Under the conventional "wild oats" scheme of life, we can place the whole burden upon the wife: and so find elsewhere "The Woman"—passionately and emotionally our ideal.
But no theory of free love was ever based upon two establishments. The whole weight of the new thought cries out for open, frank leaving one woman and going to the other; where possible by mutual consent. The secrecy, the misunderstanding, the divided allegiance, of the old world, is the very evil they are clamouring to wipe out. ”

“ If we may not refuse new light, we can never forget old truth. The foundations of morality have been established by our gradual emergence from that state of savagery, into which we were again for a few years submerged by war.
Those who blot out the Vision attained by centuries of man's upward fight, thereby confounding the ultimate issues of right and wrong, setting the body above the soul, are intoxicating and poisoning humanity as with a deadly drug. ”

“ They snatch at a moment's joy, utter a moment's emotion, act on a moment's thought. There is no idea of "finding" oneself before expressing oneself. Every passing fancy, feverish excitement, sudden hate, is to be flung [41] out upon a bewildered world; above all to the confounding and wounding of steadier souls—the old, the middle-aged, or any that bear another's burden. ”

“ Can we honestly say that the increasing undress on stage or in daily life provokes more deep, true and sincere feeling, reveals more of a girl's or a woman's real and best [31] self? We know it does not. It distracts our thoughts from the woman herself to memories of purely animal and gross experience, tempts us to lower depths. It matters not, in the book or in the play, that innocence prevail. ”

“ This was the truth for her. It is not offered as an argument for or against a dogmatic rule that no woman may ever be justified in leaving her husband.
What this thoroughly modern and sincere novel does establish, is the equal folly, and almost greater moral danger, of the opposite dogma: that self-expression for its own sake, the mere putting a moment's apparent happiness above all other claims or aims, without considering the future, or seeking to find one's real self, is a false and evil ideal. ”

“ In particular, the glorification of [23] burning passion which (as a physical fact) cannot be continuous, is revealed to justify the lie that, as the nature of love changes or grows, it also turns cold and dies. Therefore, they seek to show that the noblest love does not last, that men and women alike need constant change in emotion, that marriage is not a bond but bondage.
Everywhere, they confound the abuses of truth with truth itself; proclaim an ideal false simply because it has been degraded and misunderstood. They condemn because we cannot attain. ”

“ Under such influences, she acquires a good husband. He, alas, dictates her conscience, assumes that so sweet a woman will conform to type. It seems almost a brutal sin for her to act, think, or even feel, for herself. Steadily she grows more hidden, secret, and hypocritical.
This careful preparation for modern self-passion is admirably drawn. We can scarcely deny that any sudden outburst of even cruel selfishness or revolt might be excused, if not absolutely justified, for her.
Inevitably the occasion comes. The expected lover appears, young, ardent, understanding ”

“ It is now taught, not only that physical passion stands for, or rather is, the Love of which it forms only a part; but that the fire of sudden desire is the only true, or natural, expression of love itself. ”

“ IT IS SEX-CONFLICT.
The most obvious, and the most sincere, form of self-expression rests on pure emotion—a natural and healthy impulse. The right thus to express oneself belongs, as we acknowledge to-day, to women no less than men.
But, largely misled by their over-insistence upon the physical in human nature, too many modern thinkers confuse fierce excitement with deep emotion. Also seeing, and wisely exalting, the glory of youth's dream, they sanction, and even advise, thoughtless haste and action on every impulse. ”

“ Now that popular novelists casually produce drama and crude excitement by smart tales of such over-sexed human beings, an immense body of readers, without knowledge or experience to combat the falseness of the picture, have come to accept it as a normal record of real life. They are adapting themselves to its alluring thrills, modelling their lives to its pattern, and acting upon its teaching. From men and women, they may too soon become mere male and female, as God did not create them. ”

“ Without denying in some the honest seeking of truth, we have sought to make clear where the teaching around us to-day is untrue, destructive of reality, and poisonous in its effect.
As now proclaimed, this teaching cannot escape its responsibility for much evil talk, thought, and emotion, for many black deeds. Under its influence, thoughtless humanity is fast coming to believe and say that all love, or even comradeship, between the sexes without immediate physical satisfaction is hypocritical and unreal ”

“ The fiery, swooning passion of mere bodily impulse does not last. But even physical passion, the sex-urge, means more than that. Our new teachers ignore what all experience has proved and science taught—that every physical impulse—whether to eat or drink, [58] work or play—demands restraint for its fruition. The value of self-control is no less of the body than the soul.
It is the fever-bred passion, born of stimulated sex-consciousness, that must snatch at every chance for expression and demands constant change. ”

“ They jest at sin, sneer at restraint, and spare no thought for purity. Kindness, courtesy, thought for others, are cast to the winds. At all costs, they must be themselves, and snatch the hour's joy.
Such feverish disorder of emotion—the swooning delirium, sudden fires, and complete abandon of balance—is not natural to wholesome humanity ”

“ As in life, we saw that the best feelings of an ordinary decent sort of man are expressed, as his ultimate happiness is secured, by 'putting up with his wife's tantrums for love of her dear self.' That is, by some kind of self-control about the small things of life for the sake of the big; an instinctive knowledge of values or sense of proportion; mutual accommodation, and self-expression in self-sacrifice. ”