4.2.  The nature of love.

It is well perhaps to look a little into the factors that make up Love.

Love does not seem to me to be a simple elemental thing.  It is, as I have already said, one of the vicious tendencies of the human mind to think that whatever can be given a simple name can be abstracted as a single something in a state of quintessential purity.  I have pointed out that this is not true of Harmony or Beauty, and that these are synthetic things.  You bring together this which is not beautiful and that which is not beautiful, and behold!  Beauty!  So also Love is, I think, a synthetic thing.  One observes this and that, one is interested and stirred; suddenly the metal fuses, the dry bones live!  One loves.

Almost every interest in one’s being may be a factor in the love synthesis.  But apart from the overflowing of the parental instinct that makes all that is fine and delicate and young dear to us and to be cherished, there are two main factors that bring us into love with our fellows.  There is first the emotional elements in our nature that arise out of the tribal necessity, out of a fellowship in battle and hunting, drinking and feasting, out of the needs and excitements and delights of those occupations; and there is next the intenser narrower desirings and gratitudes, satisfactions and expectations that come from sexual intercourse.  Now both these factors originate in physical needs and consummate in material acts, and it is well to remember that this great growth of love in life roots there, and, it may be, dies when its roots are altogether cut away.

At its lowest, love is the mere sharing of, or rather the desire to share, pleasure and excitement, the excitements of conflict or lust or what not.  I think that the desire to partake, the desire to merge one’s individual identity with another’s, remains a necessary element in all personal loves.  It is a way out of ourselves, a breaking down of our individual separation, just as hate is an intensification of that.  Personal love is the narrow and intense form of that breaking down, just as what I call Salvation is its widest, most extensive form.  We cast aside our reserves, our secrecies, our defences; we open ourselves; touches that would be intolerable from common people become a mystery of delight, acts of self-abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with symbolical pleasure.  We cannot tell which of us is me, which you.  Our imprisoned egoism looks out through this window, forgets its walls, and is for those brief moments released and universal.

For most of us the strain of primordial sexual emotion in our loves is very strong.  Many men can love only women, many women only men, and some can scarcely love at all without bodily desire.  But the love of fellowship is a strong one also, and for many, love is most possible and easy when the thought of physical lovemaking has been banished.  Then the lovers will pursue interests together, will work together or journey together.  So we have the warm fellowships of men for men and women for women.  But even then it may happen that men friends together will talk of women, and women friends of men.  Nevertheless we have also the strong and altogether sexless glow of those who have fought well together, or drunk or jested together or hunted a common quarry.