The Return to Love
by ROLLO WALTER BROWN
1
LONG ago I read a sentence of Maeterlinck’s which began to have meaning for me by the time I was fifty: “Whence comes the timidity of the divine in man?” For by the time I had arrived at fifty I had come to have not only a general interest in the diversity of ways in which man has in fact shied away from the best in himself, but a specific belief that the most tragic of all these “timidities” has been in his perversion or denial of love. Love was only desire—that was the great “realistic” illusion in which anyone who wished could lose himself. If anybody dared to profess faith or even belief in “romantic” love, he was only an underdeveloped or inexperienced being.
Along with the growing disrepute of “romantic” love, other matters were having more and more attention. There was a sharp decline in the permanence of marriage; there was a frightening increase in juvenile delinquency; there was a disintegration of ideals in the Church; there was an exaltation of any kind of human effort that could show obvious material resuits; there was an era of gangsterism that required the best that the Federal representatives of order could give; there was a rise of hatred.
This confusion of life has a closer relation to the fortune of “romantic” love than the proponents of the “realistic” life — that is, the literal life — have ever ventured to call to anybody’s attention. When people have thrown away their belief in a fertile margin of mystery in existence — ever-extending mystery— and profess to see only cold, dead boundaries instead of glowing edges of promise, they are certain to experience outbreaks of disharmony and despair.
In this too literal life, everybody has missed something — the proponents of literalness more than anyone else. Only cast an eye over the world and see. But nobody has seemed ready to go into detail about what it is that is missing, or how it might be reclaimed. There have been all sorts of counterfeiters and side-steppers. Count Keyserling visited this country to talk on such subjects as the philosophy of love, but by the time he had dictated the kind of champagne he must have—even in the days of Prohibition — had specified the kind of beautiful young women he must have entertain him from five o’clock in the afternoon until the hour of the lecture and afterward, and had exacted large fees for a brief appearance, he left many in his crowded audiences of women wondering whether he advocated some newstyle promiscuity of the sexes — or just what?
Certain ministers of the Gospel spoke about the relation of the sexes in the new social order without making clear what relation or what new order. Or they spoke remotely, historically. Love seemed to be only the physical relation of persons of different sex. Or, if not that, then it was some cool theological or metaphysical state, scarcely attainable, and perhaps almost undesirable.
Now just where would a boy and girl of honest youthful aspiration, high devotion to each other, and a fresh and reasonable concern for other mortals like themselves, find in all this jumble the specific assurances on which they would live? The only patent fact to be heard every day was that the divorce courts were more and more crowded — in an age known for its roughshod heartlessness.
It ought to be time, then, for somebody to speak in behalf of love. It ought to be time to declare that since love is a going-out, a giving, and since the human life that is worth mentioning — the only one happily remembered — is the outward-bound life, we must have both if we are to have either in completeness. And inasmuch as the love between man and woman — when it is love, in truth — is love’s basic expression, there ought to be good reason for making it a beginning.
The inclination of the young to magnify qualities in those they love, to feel chivalrously, generously toward their civilized fellows, ought to be kept in unbroken continuity. But the clumsy, disordered world that we have permitted to accumulate around us makes any continuity of emotional experience next to impossible. The young who wish to marry early — early in their twenties, let us say — ought to have full opportunity. But the young man of this age — already as old as many men have been when they have made great contributions to the world — falls inescapably into the hands of the manipulators.
He must proceed in college and medical school and hospital, for instance, in such an unvarying march that he is thirty or thirty-two years old before he can feel at all established and ready to assume the responsibility of a household. Or after college and professional education, the corporation that is sending him to Central Africa or China or South America has it clearly understood that he had better not try to take a wife along. Or in some other fashion his life is manipulated to the destruction of any natural continuity of emotional experience.
Somebody makes it seem inevitable that young men and women, at the very time when they most need this continuity of emotional experience, must float around for years miscellaneously, promiscuously perhaps, before contemplating marriage. In the name of some educational or economic abstraction, we are led to blink the loss of one of the greatest potential strengths in human society: the deep poetry of life for two people who find delight in making each other psychically at ease, and who have a great constantly multiplying body of beliefs and interests in which they can live stimulatingly together.
No one could reside in such a center as Cambridge, Massachusetts, in wartime and see the little families consisting of young naval officer, wife, and a babe or two, snatching any few available minutes to walk together outside the Harvard gates, to sit together more or less in a heap on a bench in the Common, to walk by the Charles River to enjoy the turf under their feet and clear skies overhead, without having a great new reverence for the sanctity of love. These are representative of the countless young men and women who are ready to take all sorts of chances with any halfway decent fate in order to live in a monogamous state where sex and parenthood and permanence of abode are fused by love into a great single reality. The life they dream of living is a very profound life, and altogether invaluable to civilized peoples.
And always, too, it must be remembered that love can increase. Not that it always does. Most men and women that I have known who have turned sixty have either burned out the candle by burning both ends, or yielded up to a complete fatty degeneration of spirit. “As the years come, love goes,” they say. But nothing could be farther from the truth. They only reveal one more of the tragedies of confusing love and desire.
Love stays — when once it is there. Not only that. Its great profundities come late. The emotional life is cumulative. The simplest incident as it has come along through the years has attached to itself all sorts of enriching associations. There is a kind of crossfertilization of experiences, too. Thus it comes to pass that a song familiar to a gray head from the days of his youth does carry for him a meaning that it cannot possibly have for his grandchildren, try as they may to appreciate it. Thus it comes that love in late years is a multiplied experience, an enriched experience that causes the most precious young love to seem undernourished and undeveloped.
2
BUT love cannot by anybody’s narrow definition be restricted to the love between man and woman. Never has enough been said in praise of those who have found their completest love — the going-out to something that one wishes to be in harmony with, the eagerness to give oneself utterly, the readiness to sacrifice oneself, and the resulting warmth of life — in devotion to merciful serving or to an artistic ideal. They have found their own approach to happiness.
Nuns, I am sure, keep their renunciant vows. I have by chance been brought into the presence of a few thousand of them— in the hospital, in institutions of learning, on the street, in audiences, in houses where sorrow has come. Yet I have never looked into the face of one who seemed to be unhappy. If there are human beings who cannot know love unless their devotion is centered in a person of the opposite sex — and there are many such persons — there are also those who can live their devotion in solitude.
But there must be no confusion of loyalties. Nor may there be any assumption that loyalty is of little concern. I have known, for instance, a number of people who have tried a substitute for what they called “restrictive marriage” — a substitute that was a kind of unanchored arrangement which permitted all privileges and required no obligations. But even the most promising instances brought in the end a greater disillusionment than the most commonplace marriage imaginable. It must be an unconfused devotion. Neither the nuns nor the young wives and husbands meeting outside the Harvard Yard got their radiant faces by messing around.
There are workers in the arts too, who are so given to a great distant ideal, who go out to the life they find in their work with such warmth, and who have such a sure feeling of the “divine" in themselves, that they have much the same profound experience of love that those have who find love in a religious perfection. “Every good thing I have been able to do,” said a brilliant poet, “I have done out of love.”
In essence love is life’s going out harmoniously to life. So if one believes that the creative spirit — as we use the expression when we are thinking of the arts — has come straight through to us from the source of all life, the soul of the universe, it is logical, even inevitable, that some sensitive natures, placed in given circumstances, find in the living ideal of creative work the “object” to which their deepest love can turn. Nor can the deftly analytic, who have in most instances become incapable of knowing the creative spirit by experiencing it, explain away all such great love as only some kind of frustration — unless everyone is to be called frustrated who practices a selfdenial in order to enjoy a cherished perfection.
There are great lovers, too, whose lives go out inclusively. So deeply is the sweeping sense of our common destiny ingrained in their lives — “the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate,” which Joseph Conrad found binding men to each other — and so ardent are they in their belief in the potential good in men, that they have in all honesty a love for humankind.
A man of unquestioned austerity confessed to me one day that as he had sat in a streetcar opposite a ten-year-old Negro boy who seemed to fear that somebody was about to pounce upon him, he was moved by an irresistible impulse to go over and put his arm round the boy’s shoulders and assure him that they were very much alike, after all, and had every reason for feeling at home in each other’s presence. Soldiers who have felt the imminent death together have grown to love each other as brothers. Men do have these elemental experiences. And men do go wild with joy when someone like Dostoyevsky is moved to stand up and declare that a sense of brotherhood, of understanding love, will some day encompass the earth.
Whenever we are able to free ourselves from the pseudo-sophisticate mind that results from arrested growth we know the truth: Love transfigures men and women. My memory is full of instances. I have seen a young husband and wife filled with the greatest happiness they had ever known when they discovered that they — they themselves — could unite in forestalling the devastating clashes of will that had disrupted their married life. For them, it was love’s greatest triumph when love made them do love’s bidding.
A woman who declared in her late forties that she had everything the world could give except happiness was led by a chance sight of suffering, and an ardent resolve to get rid of some of it, into such a state of joyous concern that her only regret was that every day was sure to be loo short. I have seen coal miners and woodsmen and all sorts of supposedly commonplace men filled with the capacity of poets to “see the invisible” when in any of a hundred chance ways their lives were touched by love.
And some of the increase of life is enjoyed by those who only come within the presence of those who love. This I know. When I have walked solitary and perhaps travel-weary along the quiet paths of some college campus and have met two students whose love for each other was expressed in mutual respect, intelligent concern, and a sense of the importance of life, I have felt a great assurance for the rest of the day.
And when a sturdy Italian shoemaker volunteered to come to his shop on Sunday to repair my wartime shoes and justified such unusual procedure by saying in a kind of unending sentence, “My three big boys are all right — never got a scratch—and my girl, she’s got a good job with the Army Intelligence Service down at Washington — but my little boy, I have lost him — he was in Germany just a month — and I can’t stay home all day Sunday and think — so I come down here and try to do a good job at something”— when I had heard that, I experienced a great clarity of sight for an indefinite time.
3
BUT is there anything to be done about it all? Is it possible to lift the percentage of favorable instances high enough to cause any change worth mentioning? Well, I think yes. If we can but remember, as Alfred de Vigny once said, that a great life is a thought in youth wrought out in ripening years, then there is something to be done. We can give attention to the “thought in youth.” The young are always the great potential believers in the power of love.
When I had once been left in an Iowa college town for a free day after I had lectured there for a week, the professor of sociology invited me to visit one of his classes. “I believe it will interest you. We are devoting a term to the consideration of marriage.”
I was skeptical. I wondered just how much thirty or forty boys and girls would say, would learn, about marriage in the open of a college course. But the professor was not professorial in his methods. He had been very, very patient. He was considerate of every sensitivity. He was full of the sound implication that most people do not get half so much out of life as is really there. In consequence, he had gained the confidence of his students — and their admiration.
Early in the hour somebody wished to ask the visitor a question: How long had I been married? When I replied, “Thirty-eight years — married early, you see,” a bright girl said, “Well, we want to know how you’ve kept married that long.” And before I knew it, I was trying to do something that I had never done in my life: I was standing up at the professor’s desk trying to tell them. They smoked me out; they demanded definite statements.
When I said in reply to the bright girl that perhaps one reason why we had “kept married” had been that we kept ourselves for each other, another girl asked: “But couldn’t that be boresome?” I tried to explain that it could, conceivably, but that love is an awakening, and when two people who really love each other live together, each life expands in its own way so that there is in each of them every day a new interest for the other. I sketched my wife busy with Mozart, or Brahms while I sit off by myself two rooms away. What she plays is stimulating to me, and my presence back there where I am busy with something of my own seems to mean something to her.
“But how do you manage your women friends?” another girl wished to know. “You don’t want to spend all your time with your wife, do you?” And I explained how a central unshakable love is just what is required to provide one with the true freedom to enjoy the friendship of persons of the other sex. There is something parallel, too, where the love is not between man and woman: a deep central love enables one to go out and be in unconfused relation to all things else.
They kept after me in this fashion. But as always when I deal with the young, I felt sure that I was the one who gained most. They made me know how great is youth’s hungering for a satisfying, growing love — and how shamefully their elders underestimate the readiness of the young to consider love seriously as a power in life, to apply belief in love to a world of hate.
We can take our choice. If we do not believe that the awakening, the generosity, the loyalty, the warmth, expressed in love can transform the world into something more livable than what we now have, then we can take the alternative and believe that husbands and wives who cannot endure each other, neighbors who cannot endure each other, races who cannot endure each other, people who scoff at anybody who would make an improvement, can somehow, added together, constitute one world living in amity. We can wait among our raucous hatreds until somebody somewhere decides to enforce his special hatred with some super-super atomic bomb. That is something definite and “realistic.” But might we not have a more interesting world if we tried love?