TEXT: C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

The Four Loves

by

C. S. LEWIS 

Contents 

I Introduction
II Likings and Loves for the Sub-human
III Affection
IV Friendship
V Eros

VI Charity



                                CHAPTER I
                              Introduction


"God is love," says St. John. When I first tried to write this book I
thought that his maxim would provide me with a very plain highroad
through the whole subject. I thought I should be able to say that human
loves deserved to be called loves at all just in so far as they
resembled that Love which is God. The first distinction I made was
therefore between what I called Gift-love and Need-love. The typical
example of Gift-love would be that love which moves a man to work and
plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die
without sharing or seeing; of the second, that which sends a lonely or
frightened child to its mother's arms.

There was no doubt which was more like Love Himself. Divine Love is
Gift-love. The Father gives all He is and has to the Son. The Son gives
Himself back to the Father, and gives Himself to the world, and for the
world to the Father, and thus gives the world (in Himself) back to the
Father too.

And what, on the other hand, can be less like anything we believe of
God's life than Need-love? He lacks nothing, but our Need-love, as Plato
saw, is "the son of Poverty". It is the accurate reflection in
consciousness of our actual nature. We are born helpless. As soon as we
are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically,
emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything,
even ourselves.

I was looking forward to writing some fairly easy panegyrics on the
first sort of love and disparagements of the second. And much of what I
was going to say still seems to me to be true. I still think that if all
we mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a very
deplorable state. But I would not now say (with my master, MacDonald)
that if we mean only this craving we are mistaking for love something
that is not love at all. I cannot now deny the name love to Need-love.
Every time I have tried to think the thing out along those lines I have
ended in puzzles and contradictions. The reality is more complicated
than I supposed.

First of all, we do violence to most languages, including our own, if we
do not call Need-love "love". Of course language is not an infallible
guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored
insight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of
avenging itself later on. We had better not follow Humpty Dumpty in
making words mean whatever we please.

Secondly, we must be cautious about calling Need-love "mere
selfishness". _Mere_ is always a dangerous word. No doubt Need-love,
like all our impulses, can be selfishly indulged. A tyrannous and
gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in ordinary
life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its
mother; nor an adult who turns to his fellow "for company". Those,
whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most
selfless. Where Need-love is felt there may be reasons for denying or
totally mortifying it; but not to feel it is in general the mark of the
cold egoist. Since we do in reality need one another ("it is not good
for man to be alone"), then the failure of this need to appear as
Need-love in consciousness--in other words, the illusory feeling that it
_is_ good for us to be alone--is a bad spiritual symptom; just as lack of
appetite is a bad medical symptom because men do really need food.

But thirdly, we come to something far more important. Every Christian
would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his
love for God. But man's love for God, from the very nature of the case,
must always be very largely, and must often be entirely, a Need-love.
This is obvious when we implore forgiveness for our sins or support in
our tribulations. But in the long run it is perhaps even more apparent
in our growing--for it ought to be growing--awareness that our whole being
by its very nature is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet
cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted
together and tie up things that are still dangling loose. I do not say
that man can never bring to God anything at all but sheer Need-love.
Exalted souls may tell us of a reach beyond that. But they would also, I
think, be the first to tell us that those heights would cease to be true
Graces, would become Neo-Platonic or finally diabolical illusions, the
moment a man dared to think that he could live on them and henceforth
drop out the element of need. "The highest," says the _Imitation_, "does
not stand without the lowest." It would be a bold and silly creature
that came before its Creator with the boast "I'm no beggar. I love you
disinterestedly". Those who come nearest to a Gift-love for God will
next moment, even at the very same moment, be beating their breasts with
the publican and laying their indigence before the only real Giver. And
God will have it so. He addresses our Need-love: "Come unto me all ye
that travail and are heavy-laden," or, in the Old Testament, "Open your
mouth wide and I will fill it."

Thus one Need-love, the greatest of all, either coincides with or at
least makes a main ingredient in man's highest, healthiest, and most
realistic spiritual condition. A very strange corollary follows. Man
approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For
what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and
humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for
help? This paradox staggered me when I first ran into it; it also
wrecked all my previous attempts to write about love. When we face it,
something like this seems to result.

We must distinguish two things which might both possibly be called
"nearness to God". One is likeness to God. God has impressed some sort
of likeness to Himself, I suppose, in all that He has made. Space and
time, in their own fashion, mirror His greatness; all life, His
fecundity; animal life, His activity. Man has a more important likeness
than these by being rational. Angels, we believe, have likenesses which
Man lacks: immortality and intuitive knowledge. In that way all men,
whether good or bad, all angels including those that fell, are more like
God than the animals are. Their natures are in this sense "nearer" to
the Divine Nature. But, secondly, there is what we may call nearness of
approach. If this is what we mean, the states in which a man is
"nearest" to God are those in which he is most surely and swiftly
approaching his final union with God, vision of God and enjoyment of
God. And as soon as we distinguish nearness-by-likeness and
nearness-of-approach, we see that they do not necessarily coincide. They
may or may not.

Perhaps an analogy may help. Let us suppose that we are doing a mountain
walk to the village which is our home. At mid-day we come to the top of
a cliff where we are, in space, very near it because it is just below
us. We could drop a stone into it. But as we are no cragsmen we can't
get down. We must go a long way round; five miles, maybe. At many points
during that _détour_ we shall, statically, be far further from the
village than we were when we sat above the cliff. But only statically.
In terms of progress we shall be far "nearer" our baths and teas.

Since God is blessed, omnipotent, sovereign and creative, there is
obviously a sense in which happiness, strength, freedom and fertility
(whether of mind or body), wherever they appear in human life,
constitute likenesses, and in that way proximities, to God. But no one
supposes that the possession of these gifts has any necessary connection
with our sanctification. No kind of riches is a passport to the Kingdom
of Heaven.

At the cliff's top we are near the village, but however long we sit
there we shall never be any nearer to our bath and our tea. So here the
likeness, and in that sense nearness, to Himself which God has conferred
upon certain creatures and certain states of those creatures is
something finished, built in. What is near Him by likeness is never, by
that fact alone, going to be any nearer. But nearness of approach is, by
definition, increasing nearness. And whereas the likeness is given to
us--and can be received with or without thanks, can be used or abused--the
approach, however initiated and supported by Grace, is something we must
do. Creatures are made in their varying ways images of God without their
own collaboration or even consent. It is not so that they become sons of
God. And the likeness they receive by sonship is not that of images or
portraits. It is in one way more than likeness, for it is unison or
unity with God in will; but this is consistent with all the differences
we have been considering. Hence, as a better writer has said, our
imitation of God in this life--that is, our willed imitation as distinct
from any of the likenesses which He has impressed upon our natures or
states--must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus,
not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the
clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and
privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we
can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like,
but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.

I must now explain why I have found this distinction necessary to any
treatment of our loves. St. John's saying that God is love has long been
balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author (M. Denis de
Rougemont) that "love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a
god"; which of course can be re-stated in the form "begins to be a demon
the moment he begins to be a god". This balance seems to me an
indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may
slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.

I suppose that everyone who has thought about the matter will see what
M. de Rougemont meant. Every human love, at its height, has a tendency
to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if
it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it
demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other
claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done "for
love's sake" is thereby lawful and even meritorious. That erotic love
and love of one's country may thus attempt to "become gods" is generally
recognised. But family affection may do the same. So, in a different
way, may friendship. I shall not here elaborate the point, for it will
meet us again and again in later chapters.

Now it must be noticed that the natural loves make this blasphemous
claim not when they are in their worst, but when they are in their best,
natural condition; when they are what our grandfathers called "pure" or
"noble". This is especially obvious in the erotic sphere. A faithful and
genuinely self-sacrificing passion will speak to us with what seems the
voice of God. Merely animal or frivolous lust will not. It will corrupt
its addict in a dozen ways, but not in that way; a man may act upon such
feelings but he cannot revere them any more than a man who scratches
reveres the itch. A silly woman's temporary indulgence, which is really
self-indulgence, to a spoiled child--her living doll while the fit
lasts--is much less likely to "become a god" than the deep, narrow
devotion of a woman who (quite really) "lives for her son". And I am
inclined to think that the sort of love for a man's country which is
worked up by beer and brass bands will not lead him to do much harm (or
much good) for her sake. It will probably be fully discharged by
ordering another drink and joining in the chorus.

And this of course is what we ought to expect. Our loves do not make
their claim to divinity until the claim becomes plausible. It does not
become plausible until there is in them a real resemblance to God, to
Love Himself. Let us here make no mistake. Our Gift-loves are really
God-like; and among our Gift-loves those are most God-like which are
most boundless and unwearied in giving. All the things the poets say
about them are true. Their joy, their energy, their patience, their
readiness to forgive, their desire for the good of the beloved--all this
is a real and all but adorable image of the Divine life. In its presence
we are right to thank God "who has given such power to men". We may say,
quite truly and in an intelligible sense, that those who love greatly
are "near" to God. But of course it is "nearness by likeness". It will
not of itself produce "nearness of approach". The likeness has been
given us. It has no necessary connection with that slow and painful
approach which must be our own (though by no means our unaided) task.
Meanwhile, however, the likeness is a splendour. That is why we may
mistake Like for Same. We may give our human loves the unconditional
allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they
become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves.
For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves.
They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of
hatred.

Our Need-loves may be greedy and exacting but they do not set up to be
gods. They are not near enough (by likeness) to God to attempt that.

It follows from what has been said that we must join neither the
idolaters nor the "debunkers" of human love. Idolatry both of erotic
love and of "the domestic affections" was the great error of Nineteenth
Century literature. Browning, Kingsley, and Patmore sometimes talk as if
they thought that falling in love was the same thing as sanctification;
the novelists habitually oppose to "the World" not the Kingdom of Heaven
but the home. We live in the reaction against this. The debunkers
stigmatise as slush and sentimentality a very great deal of what their
fathers said in praise of love. They are always pulling up and exposing
the grubby roots of our natural loves. But I take it we must listen
neither "to the over-wise nor to the over-foolish giant". The highest
does not stand without the lowest. A plant must have roots below as well
as sunlight above and roots must be grubby. Much of the grubbiness is
clean dirt if only you will leave it in the garden and not keep on
sprinkling it over the library table. The human loves can be glorious
images of Divine love. No less than that: but also no more--proximities
of likeness which in one instance may help, and in another may hinder,
proximity of approach. Sometimes perhaps they have not very much to do
with it either way.




                               CHAPTER II
                 Likings and Loves for the Sub-human


Most of my generation were reproved as children for saying that we
"loved" strawberries, and some people take a pride in the fact that
English has the two verbs _love_ and _like_ while French has to get on
with _aimer_ for both. But French has a good many other languages on its
side. Indeed it very often has actual English usage on its side too.
Nearly all speakers, however pedantic or however pious, talk every day
about "loving" a food, a game, or a pursuit. And in fact there is a
continuity between our elementary likings for things and our loves for
people. Since "the highest does not stand without the lowest" we had
better begin at the bottom, with mere likings; and since to "like"
anything means to take some sort of pleasure in it, we must begin with
pleasure.

Now it is a very old discovery that pleasures can be divided into two
classes; those which would not be pleasures at all unless they were
preceded by desire, and those which are pleasures in their own right and
need no such preparation. An example of the first would be a drink of
water. This is a pleasure if you are thirsty and a great one if you are
very thirsty. But probably no one in the world, except in obedience to
thirst or to a doctor's orders, ever poured himself out a glass of water
and drank it just for the fun of the thing. An example of the other
class would be the unsought and unexpected pleasures of smell--the breath
from a bean-field or a row of sweet-peas meeting you on your morning
walk. You were in want of nothing, completely contented, before it; the
pleasure, which may be very great, is an unsolicited, super-added gift.
I am taking very simple instances for clarity's sake, and of course
there are many complications. If you are given coffee or beer where you
expected (and would have been satisfied with) water, then of course you
get a pleasure of the first kind (allaying of thirst) and one of the
second (a nice taste) at the same time. Again, an addiction may turn
what was once a pleasure of the second kind into one of the first. For
the temperate man an occasional glass of wine is a treat--like the smell
of the bean-field. But to the alcoholic, whose palate and digestion have
long since been destroyed, no liquor gives any pleasure except that of
relief from an unbearable craving. So far as he can still discern tastes
at all, he rather dislikes it; but it is better than the misery of
remaining sober. Yet through all their permutations and combinations the
distinction between the two classes remains tolerably clear. We may call
them Need-pleasures and Pleasures of Appreciation.

The resemblance between these Need-pleasures and the "Need-loves" in my
first chapter will occur to everyone. But there, you remember, I
confessed that I had had to resist a tendency to disparage the
Need-loves or even to say they were not loves at all. Here, for most
people, there may be an opposite inclination. It would be very easy to
spread ourselves in laudation of the Need-pleasures and to frown upon
those that are Appreciatives: the one so natural (a word to conjure
with), so necessary, so shielded from excess by their very naturalness,
the other unnecessary and opening the door to every kind of luxury and
vice. If we were short of matter on this theme we could turn on the tap
by opening the works of the Stoics and it would run till we had a
bathful. But throughout this inquiry we must be careful never to adopt
prematurely a moral or evaluating attitude. The human mind is generally
far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It
wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those
fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets
without putting them in an order of preference as if they were
candidates for a prize. We must do nothing of the sort about the
pleasures. The reality is too complicated. We are already warned of this
by the fact that Need-pleasure is the state in which Appreciative
pleasures end up when they go bad (by addiction).

For us at any rate the importance of the two sorts of pleasure lies in
the extent to which they foreshadow characteristics in our "loves"
(properly so called).

The thirsty man who has just drunk off a tumbler of water may say, "By
Jove, I _wanted_ that." So may the alcoholic who has just had his "nip".
The man who passes the sweet-peas in his morning walk is more likely to
say, "How lovely the smell _is_." The connoisseur after his first sip of
the famous claret, may similarly say, "This _is_ a great wine." When
Need-pleasures are in question we tend to make statements about
ourselves in the past tense; when Appreciative pleasures are in question
we tend to make statements about the object in the present tense. It is
easy to see why.

Shakespeare has described the satisfaction of a tyrannous lust as
something

  Past reason hunted and, no sooner had,
  Past reason hated.

But the most innocent and necessary of Need-pleasures have about them
something of the same character--only something, of course. They are not
hated once we have had them, but they certainly "die on us" with
extraordinary abruptness, and completely. The scullery tap and the
tumbler are very attractive indeed when we come in parched from mowing
the grass; six seconds later they are emptied of all interest. The smell
of frying food is very different before and after breakfast. And, if you
will forgive me for citing the most extreme instance of all, have there
not for most of us been moments (in a strange town) when the sight of
the word GENTLEMEN over a door has roused a joy almost worthy of
celebration in verse?

Pleasures of Appreciation are very different. They make us feel that
something has not merely gratified our senses in fact but claimed our
appreciation by right. The connoisseur does not merely enjoy his claret
as he might enjoy warming his feet when they were cold. He feels that
here is a wine that deserves his full attention; that justifies all the
tradition and skill that have gone to its making and all the years of
training that have made his own palate fit to judge it. There is even a
glimmering of unselfishness in his attitude. He wants the wine to be
preserved and kept in good condition, not entirely for his own sake.
Even if he were on his death-bed and was never going to drink wine
again, he would be horrified at the thought of this vintage being
spilled or spoiled or even drunk by clods (like myself) who can't tell a
good claret from a bad. And so with the man who passes the sweet-peas.
He does not simply enjoy, he feels that this fragrance somehow deserves
to be enjoyed. He would blame himself if he went past inattentive and
undelighted. It would be blockish, insensitive. It would be a shame that
so fine a thing should have been wasted on him. He will remember the
delicious moment years hence. He will be sorry when he hears that the
garden past which his walk led him that day has now been swallowed up by
cinemas, garages, and the new by-pass.

Scientifically both sorts of pleasure are, no doubt, relative to our
organisms. But the Need-pleasures loudly proclaim their relativity not
only to the human frame but to its momentary condition, and outside that
relation have no meaning or interest for us at all. The objects which
afford pleasures of appreciation give us the feeling--whether irrational
or not--that we somehow owe it to them to savour, to attend to and praise
it. "It would be a sin to set a wine like that before Lewis," says the
expert in claret. "How can you walk past this garden taking no notice of
the smell?" we ask. But we should never feel this about a Need-pleasure:
never blame ourselves or others for not having been thirsty and
therefore walking past a well without taking a drink of water.

How the Need-pleasures foreshadow our Need-loves is obvious enough. In
the latter the beloved is seen in relation to our own needs, just as the
scullery tap is seen by the thirsty man or the glass of gin by the
alcoholic. And the Need-love, like the Need-pleasure, will not last
longer than the need. This does not, fortunately, mean that all
affections which begin in Need-love are transitory. The need itself may
be permanent or recurrent. Another kind of love may be grafted on the
Need-love. Moral principles (conjugal fidelity, filial piety, gratitude,
and the like) may preserve the relationship for a lifetime. But where
Need-love is left unaided we can hardly expect it not to "die on us"
once the need is no more. That is why the world rings with the
complaints of mothers whose grown-up children neglect them and of
forsaken mistresses whose lovers' love was pure need--which they have
satisfied. Our Need-love for God is in a different position because our
need of Him can never end either in this world or in any other. But our
awareness of it can, and then the Need-love dies too. "The Devil was
sick, the Devil a monk would be." There seems no reason for describing
as hypocritical the short-lived piety of those whose religion fades away
once they have emerged from "danger, necessity, or tribulation". Why
should they not have been sincere? They were desperate and they howled
for help. Who wouldn't?

What Appreciative pleasure foreshadows is not so quickly described.

First of all, it is the starting point for our whole experience of
beauty. It is impossible to draw a line below which such pleasures are
"sensual" and above which they are "aesthetic". The experiences of the
expert in claret already contain elements of concentration, judgment,
and disciplined perceptiveness, which are not sensual; those of the
musician still contain elements which are. There is no frontier--there is
seamless continuity--between the sensuous pleasure of garden smells and
an enjoyment of the countryside (or "beauty") as a whole, or even our
enjoyment of the painters and poets who treat it.

And, as we have seen, there is in these pleasures from the very
beginning a shadow or dawn of, or an invitation to, disinterestedness.
Of course in one way we can be disinterested or unselfish, and far more
heroically so, about the Need-pleasures: it is a cup of water that the
wounded Sidney sacrifices to the dying soldier. But that is not the sort
of disinterestedness I now mean. Sidney loves his neighbour. But in the
Appreciative pleasures, even at their lowest, and more and more as they
grow up into the full appreciation of all beauty, we get something that
we can hardly help calling _love_ and hardly help calling
_disinterested_, towards the object itself. It is the feeling which
would make a man unwilling to deface a great picture even if he were the
last man left alive and himself about to die; which makes us glad of
unspoiled forests that we shall never see; which makes us anxious that
the garden or bean-field should continue to exist. We do not merely like
the things; we pronounce them, in a momentarily God-like sense, "very
good."

And now our principle of starting at the lowest--without which "the
highest does not stand"--begins to pay a dividend. It has revealed to me
a deficiency in our previous classification of the loves into those of
Need and those of Gift. There is a third element in love, no less
important than these, which is foreshadowed by our appreciative
pleasures. This judgment that the object is very good, this attention
(almost homage) offered to it as a kind of debt, this wish that it
should be and should continue being what it is even if we were never to
enjoy it, can go out not only to things but to persons. When it is
offered to a woman we call it admiration; when to a man, hero-worship;
when to God, worship simply.

Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or
even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: "We give thanks to thee
for thy great glory." Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without
her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection--if
possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is
silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him,
will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than
never to have seen her at all.

We murder to dissect. In actual life, thank God, the three elements of
love mix and succeed on another, moment by moment. Perhaps none of them
except Need-love ever exists alone, in "chemical" purity, for more than
a few seconds. And perhaps that is because nothing about us except our
neediness is, in this life, permanent.

Two forms of love for what is not personal demand special treatment.

For some people, perhaps especially for Englishmen and Russians, what we
call "the love of nature" is a permanent and serious sentiment. I mean
here that love of nature which cannot be adequately classified simply as
an instance of our love for beauty. Of course many natural
objects--trees, flowers and animals--are beautiful. But the nature-lovers
whom I have in mind are not very much concerned with individual
beautiful objects of that sort. The man who is distracts them. An
enthusiastic botanist is for them a dreadful companion on a ramble. He
is always stopping to draw their attention to particulars. Nor are they
looking for "views" or landscapes. Wordsworth, their spokesman, strongly
deprecates this. It leads to "a comparison of scene with scene", makes
you "pamper" yourself with "meagre novelties of colour and proportion".
While you are busying yourself with this critical and discriminating
activity you lose what really matters--the "moods of time and season",
the "spirit" of the place. And of course Wordsworth is right. That is
why, if you love nature in his fashion, a landscape painter is (out of
doors) an even worse companion than a botanist.

It is the "moods" or the "spirit" that matter. Nature-lovers want to
receive as fully as possible whatever nature, at each particular time
and place, is, so to speak, saying. The obvious richness, grace, and
harmony of some scenes are no more precious to them than the grimness,
bleakness, terror, monotony, or "visionary dreariness" of others. The
featureless itself gets from them a willing response. It is one more
word uttered by nature. They lay themselves bare to the sheer quality of
every countryside every hour of the day. They want to absorb it into
themselves, to be coloured through and through by it.

This experience, like so many others, after being lauded to the skies in
the Nineteenth Century, has been debunked by the moderns. And one must
certainly concede to the debunkers that Wordsworth, not when he was
communicating it as a poet, but when he was merely talking about it as a
philosopher (or philosophaster), said some very silly things. It is
silly, unless you have found any evidence, to believe that flowers enjoy
the air they breathe, and sillier not to add that, if this were true,
flowers would undoubtedly have pains as well as pleasures. Nor have many
people been taught moral philosophy by an "impulse from a vernal wood".

If they were, it would not necessarily be the sort of moral philosophy
Wordsworth would have approved. It might be that of ruthless
competition. For some moderns I think it is. They love nature in so far
as, for them, she calls to "the dark gods in the blood"; not although,
but because, sex and hunger and sheer power there operate without pity
or shame.

If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons
you had already decided to learn; this is only another way of saying
that nature does not teach. The tendency to take her as a teacher is
obviously very easily grafted on to the experience we call "love of
nature". But it is only a graft. While we are actually subjected to
them, the "moods" and "spirits" of nature point no morals. Overwhelming
gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make
what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that
nature utters is, "Look. Listen. Attend."

The fact that this imperative is so often misinterpreted and sets people
making theologies and pantheologies and antitheologies--all of which can
be debunked--does not really touch the central experience itself. What
nature-lovers--whether they are Wordsworthians or people with "dark gods
in their blood"--get from nature is an iconography, a language of images.
I do not mean simply visual images; it is the "moods" or "spirits"
themselves--the powerful expositions of terror, gloom, jocundity,
cruelty, lust, innocence, purity--that are the images. In them each man
can clothe his own belief. We must learn our theology or philosophy
elsewhere (not surprisingly, we often learn them from theologians and
philosophers).

But when I speak of "clothing" our belief in such images I do not mean
anything like using nature for similes or metaphors in the manner of the
poets. Indeed I might have said "filling" or "incarnating" rather than
clothing. Many people--I am one myself--would never, but for what nature
does to us, have had any content to put into the words we must use in
confessing our faith. Nature never taught me that there exists a God of
glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But
nature gave the word _glory_ a meaning for me. I still do not know where
else I could have found one. I do not see how the "fear" of God could
have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be
safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable
crags. And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge
areas of what I can now mean by the "love" of God would never, so far as
I can see, have existed.

Of course the fact that a Christian can so use nature is not even the
beginning of a proof that Christianity is true. Those suffering from
Dark Gods can equally use her (I suppose) for their creed. That is
precisely the point. Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may
sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature
cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or
metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering);
she will help to show what it means.

And not, on the Christian premises, by accident. The created glory may
be expected to give us hints of the uncreated; for the one is derived
from the other and in some fashion reflects it.

In some fashion. But not perhaps in so direct and simple a fashion as we
at first might suppose. For of course all the facts stressed by
nature-lovers of the other school are facts too; there are worms in the
belly as well as primroses in the wood. Try to reconcile them, or to
show that they don't really need reconciliation, and you are turning
from direct experience of nature--our present subject--to metaphysics or
theodicy or something of that sort. That may be a sensible thing to do;
but I think it should be kept distinct from the love of nature. While we
are on that level, while we are still claiming to speak of what nature
has directly "said" to us, we must stick to it. We have seen an image of
glory. We must not try to find a direct path through it and beyond it to
an increasing knowledge of God. The path peters out almost at once.
Terrors and mysteries, the whole depth of God's counsels and the whole
tangle of the history of the universe, choke it. We can't get through;
not that way. We must make a _détour_--leave the hills and woods and go
back to our studies, to church, to our Bibles, to our knees. Otherwise
the love of nature is beginning to turn into a nature religion. And
then, even if it does not lead us to the Dark Gods, it will lead us to a
great deal of nonsense.

But we need not surrender the love of nature--chastened and limited as I
have suggested--to the debunkers. Nature cannot satisfy the desires she
arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify us. Our real
journey to God involves constantly turning our backs on her; passing
from the dawn-lit fields into some poky little church, or (it might be)
going to work in an East End parish. But the love of her has been a
valuable and, for some people, an indispensable initiation.

I need not say "has been". For in fact those who allow no more than this
to the love of nature seem to be those who retain it. This is what one
should expect. This love, when it sets up as a religion, is beginning to
be a god--therefore to be a demon. And demons never keep their promises.
Nature "dies on" those who try to live for a love of nature. Coleridge
ended by being insensible to her; Wordsworth, by lamenting that the
glory had passed away. Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring
steadfastly the dew, the birds and the flowers, and you will come away
overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be
overwhelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will
happen to you.

I turn now to the love of one's country. Here there is no need to labour
M. de Rougemont's maxim; we all know now that this love becomes a demon
when it becomes a god. Some begin to suspect that it is never anything
but a demon. But then they have to reject half the high poetry and half
the heroic action our race has achieved. We cannot keep even Christ's
lament over Jerusalem. He too exhibits love for His country.

Let us limit our field. There is no need here for an essay on
international ethics. When this love becomes demoniac it will of course
produce wicked acts. But others, more skilled, may say what acts between
nations are wicked. We are only considering the sentiment itself in the
hope of being able to distinguish its innocent from its demoniac
condition. Neither of these is the efficient cause of national
behaviour. For strictly speaking it is rulers, not nations, who behave
internationally. Demoniac patriotism in their subjects--I write only for
subjects--will make it easier for them to act wickedly; healthy
patriotism may make it harder: when they are wicked they may by
propaganda encourage a demoniac condition of our sentiments in order to
secure our acquiescence in their wickedness. If they are good, they
could do the opposite. That is one reason why we private persons should
keep a wary eye on the health or disease of our own love for our
country. And that is what I am writing about.

How ambivalent patriotism is may be gauged by the fact that no two
writers have expressed it more vigorously than Kipling and Chesterton.
If it were one element two such men could not both have praised it. In
reality it contains many ingredients, of which many different blends are
possible.

First, there is love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places,
perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near
these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar
sights, sounds and smells. Note that at its largest this is, for us, a
love of England, Wales, Scotland, or Ulster. Only foreigners and
politicians talk about "Britain". Kipling's "I do not love my empire's
foes" strikes a ludicrously false note. _My_ empire! With this love for
the place there goes a love for the way of life; for beer and tea and
open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force
and all the rest of it; for the local dialect and (a shade less) for our
native language. As Chesterton says, a man's reasons for not wanting his
country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not
wanting his house to be burned down; because he "could not even begin"
to enumerate all the things he would miss.

It would be hard to find any legitimate point of view from which this
feeling could be condemned. As the family offers us the first step
beyond self-love, so this offers us the first step beyond family
selfishness. Of course it is not pure charity; it involves love of our
neighbours in the local, not of our Neighbour, in the Dominical, sense.
But those who do not love the fellow-villagers or fellow-townsmen whom
they have seen are not likely to have got very far towards loving "Man"
whom they have not. All natural affections, including this, can become
rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of
it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace may
later put to a higher service; as women nurse dolls in childhood and
later nurse children. There may come an occasion for renouncing this
love; pluck out your right eye. But you need to have an eye first: a
creature which had none--which had only got so far as a "photo-sensitive"
spot--would be very ill employed in meditation on that severe text.

Of course patriotism of this kind is not in the least aggressive. It
asks only to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it
loves. In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a
good attitude towards foreigners. How can I love my home without coming
to realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? Once you have
realised that the Frenchmen like _café complet_ just as we like bacon
and eggs--why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we
want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be
home unless it were different.

The second ingredient is a particular attitude to our country's past. I
mean to that past as it lives in popular imagination; the great deeds of
our ancestors. Remember Marathon. Remember Waterloo. "We must be free or
die who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke." This past is felt both
to impose an obligation and to hold out an assurance; we must not fall
below the standard our fathers set us, and because we are their sons
there is good hope we shall not.

This feeling has not quite such good credentials as the sheer love of
home. The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even
shameful doings. The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a
false impression of it and are often themselves open to serious
historical criticism. Hence a patriotism based on our glorious past is
fair game for the debunker. As knowledge increases it may snap and be
converted into disillusioned cynicism, or may be maintained by a
voluntary shutting of the eyes. But who can condemn what clearly makes
many people, at many important moments, behave so much better than they
could have done without its help?

I think it is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past
without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes dangerous
in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for
serious and systematic historical study. The stories are best when they
are handed on and accepted as stories. I do not mean by this that they
should be handed on as mere fictions (some of them are after all true).
But the emphasis should be on the tale as such, on the picture which
fires the imagination, the example that strengthens the will. The
schoolboy who hears them should dimly feel--though of course he cannot
put it into words--that he is hearing _saga_. Let him be
thrilled--preferably "out of school"--by the "Deeds that won the Empire";
but the less we mix this up with his "history lessons" or mistake it for
a serious analysis--worse still, a justification--of imperial policy, the
better. When I was a child I had a book full of coloured pictures called
_Our Island Story_. That title has always seemed to me to strike exactly
the right note. The book did not look at all like a text-book either.
What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is
pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult,
is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false
or biased history--the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact.
With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not
equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief--surely it is very bad
biology--that we can literally "inherit" a tradition. And these almost
inevitably lead on to a third thing that is sometimes called patriotism.

This third thing is not a sentiment but a belief: a firm, even prosaic
belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is
markedly superior to all others. I once ventured to say to an old
clergyman who was voicing this sort of patriotism, "But, sir, aren't we
told that _every_ people thinks its own men the bravest and its own
women the fairest in the world?" He replied with total gravity--he could
not have been graver if he had been saying the Creed at the altar--"Yes,
but in England it's true." To be sure, this conviction had not made my
friend (God rest his soul) a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass.
It can however produce asses that kick and bite. On the lunatic fringe
it may shade off into that popular Racialism which Christianity and
science equally forbid.

This brings us to the fourth ingredient. If our nation is really so much
better than others it may be held to have either the duties or the
rights of a superior being towards them. In the Nineteenth Century the
English became very conscious of such duties: the "white man's burden".
What we called _natives_ were our wards and we their self-appointed
guardians. This was not all hypocrisy. We did do them some good. But our
habit of talking as if England's motives for acquiring an empire (or any
youngster's motives for seeking a job in the I.C.S.) had been mainly
altruistic nauseated the world. And yet this showed the sense of
superiority working at its best. Some nations who have also felt it have
stressed the rights not the duties. To them, some foreigners were so bad
that one had the right to exterminate them. Others, fitted only to be
hewers of wood and drawers of water to the chosen people, had better be
made to get on with their hewing and drawing. Dogs, know your betters! I
am far from suggesting that the two attitudes are on the same level. But
both are fatal. Both demand that the area in which they operate should
grow "wider still and wider". And both have about them this sure mark of
evil: only by being terrible do they avoid being comic. If there were no
broken treaties with Redskins, no extermination of the Tasmanians, no
gas-chambers and no Belsen, no Amritsar, Black and Tans or Apartheid,
the pomposity of both would be roaring farce.

Finally we reach the stage where patriotism in its demoniac form
unconsciously denies itself. Chesterton picked on two lines from Kipling
as the perfect example. It was unfair to Kipling, who knew--wonderfully,
for so homeless a man--what the love of home can mean. But the lines, in
isolation, can be taken to sum up the thing. They run:

  If England was what England seems
    'Ow quick we'd drop 'er. But she ain't!

Love never spoke that way. It is like loving your children only "if
they're good", your wife only while she keeps her looks, your husband
only so long as he is famous and successful. "No man," said one of the
Greeks, "loves his city because it is great, but because it is his." A
man who really loves his country will love her in her ruin and
degeneration--"England, with all thy faults, I love thee still." She will
be to him "a poor thing but mine own". He may think her good and great,
when she is not, because he loves her; the delusion is up to a point
pardonable. But Kipling's soldier reverses it; he loves her because he
thinks her good and great--loves her on her merits. She is a fine going
concern and it gratifies his pride to be in it. How if she ceased to be
such? The answer is plainly given: "'Ow quick we'd drop 'er." When the
ship begins to sink he will leave her. Thus that kind of patriotism
which sets off with the greatest swagger of drums and banners actually
sets off on the road that can lead to Vichy. And this is a phenomenon
which will meet us again. When the natural loves become lawless they do
not merely do harm to other loves; they themselves cease to be the loves
they were--to be loves at all.

Patriotism has then, many faces. Those who would reject it entirely do
not seem to have considered what will certainly step--has already begun
to step--into its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever, nations
will live in danger. Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend
them or at least to prepare for their defence. Where the sentiment of
patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every
international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend
neither sweat nor blood for "their country" they must be made to feel
that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity.
This is a step down, not up. Patriotic sentiment did not of course need
to disregard ethics. Good men needed to be convinced that their
country's cause was just; but it was still their country's cause, not
the cause of justice as such. The difference seems to me important. I
may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my
house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I
blacked his eye purely on moral grounds--wholly indifferent to the fact
that the house in question was mine--I become insufferable. The pretence
that when England's cause is just we are on England's side--as some
neutral Don Quixote might be--for that reason alone, is equally spurious.
And nonsense draws evil after it. If our country's cause is the cause of
God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given
to things which are very much of this world.

The glory of the old sentiment was that while it could steel men to the
utmost endeavour, it still knew itself to be a sentiment. Wars could be
heroic without pretending to be Holy Wars. The hero's death was not
confused with the martyr's. And (delightfully) the same sentiment which
could be so serious in a rearguard action, could also in peacetime, take
itself as lightly as all happy loves often do. It could laugh at itself.
Our older patriotic songs cannot be sung without a twinkle in the eye;
later ones sound more like hymns. Give me "The British Grenadiers"
(_with a tow-row-row-row_) any day rather than "Land of Hope and Glory".

It will be noticed that the sort of love I have been describing, and all
its ingredients, can be for something other than a country: for a
school, a regiment, a great family, or a class. All the same criticisms
will still apply. It can also be felt for bodies that claim more than a
natural affection: for a Church or (alas) a party in a Church, or for a
religious order. This terrible subject would require a book to itself.
Here it will be enough to say that the Heavenly Society is also an
earthly society. Our (merely natural) patriotism towards the latter can
very easily borrow the transcendent claims of the former and use them to
justify the most abominable actions. If ever the book which I am not
going to write is written it must be the full confession by Christendom
of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and
treachery. Large areas of "the World" will not hear us till we have
publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the
name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch.

It may be thought that I should not end this chapter without a word
about our love for animals. But that will fit in better in the next.
Whether animals are in fact sub-personal or not, they are never loved as
if they were. The fact or the illusion of personality is always present,
so that love for them is really an instance of that Affection which is
the subject of the following chapter.




                              CHAPTER III
                               Affection


I begin with the humblest and most widely diffused of loves, the love in
which our experience seems to differ least from that of the animals. Let
me add at once that I do not on that account give it a lower value.
Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared with the
beasts. When we blame a man for being "a mere animal", we mean not that
he displays animal characteristics (we all do) but that he displays
these, and only these, on occasions where the specifically human was
demanded. (When we call him "brutal" we usually mean that he commits
cruelties impossible to most real brutes; they're not clever enough.)

The Greeks called this love _storge_ (two syllables and the g is
"hard"). I shall here call it simply Affection. My Greek Lexicon defines
_storge_ as "affection, especially of parents to offspring"; but also of
offspring to parents. And that, I have no doubt, is the original form of
the thing as well as the central meaning of the word. The image we must
start with is that of a mother nursing a baby, a bitch or a cat with a
basketful of puppies or kittens; all in a squeaking, nuzzling heap
together; purrings, lickings, baby-talk, milk, warmth, the smell of
young life.

The importance of this image is that it presents us at the very outset
with a certain paradox. The Need and Need-love of the young is obvious;
so is the Gift-love of the mother. She gives birth, gives suck, gives
protection. On the other hand, she must give birth or die. She must give
suck or suffer. That way, her Affection too is a Need-love. There is the
paradox. It is a Need-love but what it needs is to give. It is a
Gift-love but it needs to be needed. We shall have to return to this
point.

But even in animal life, and still more in our own, Affection extends
far beyond the relation of mother and young. This warm comfortableness,
this satisfaction in being together, takes in all sorts of objects. It
is indeed the least discriminating of loves. There are women for whom we
can predict few wooers and men who are likely to have few friends. They
have nothing to offer. But almost anyone can become an object of
Affection; the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating. There need be no
apparent fitness between those whom it unites. I have seen it felt for
an imbecile not only by his parents but by his brothers. It ignores the
barriers of age, sex, class and education. It can exist between a clever
young man from the university and an old nurse, though their minds
inhabit different worlds. It ignores even the barriers of species. We
see it not only between dog and man but, more surprisingly, between dog
and cat. Gilbert White claims to have discovered it between a horse and
a hen.

Some of the novelists have seized this well. In _Tristram Shandy_ "my
father" and Uncle Toby are so far from being united by any community of
interests or ideas that they cannot converse for ten minutes without
cross-purposes; but we are made to feel their deep mutual affection. So
with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Pickwick and Sam Weller, Dick
Swiveller and the Marchioness. So too, though probably without the
author's conscious intention, in _The Wind in the Willows_; the
quaternion of Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad suggests the amazing
heterogeneity possible between those who are bound by Affection.

But Affection has its own criteria. Its objects have to be familiar. We
can sometimes point to the very day and hour when we fell in love or
began a new friendship. I doubt if we ever catch Affection beginning. To
become aware of it is to become aware that it has already been going on
for some time. The use of "old" or _vieux_ as a term of Affection is
significant. The dog barks at strangers who have never done it any harm
and wags its tail for old acquaintances even if they never did it a good
turn. The child will love a crusty old gardener who has hardly ever
taken any notice of it and shrink from the visitor who is making every
attempt to win its regard. But it must be an _old_ gardener, one who has
"always" been there--the short but seemingly immemorial "always" of
childhood.

Affection, as I have said, is the humblest love. It gives itself no
airs. People can be proud of being "in love", or of friendship.
Affection is modest--even furtive and shame-faced. Once when I had
remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my
friend replied, "Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the
other dogs." That is at least a good caricature of much human Affection.
"Let homely faces stay at home," says Comus. Now Affection has a very
homely face. So have many of those for whom we feel it. It is no proof
of our refinement or perceptiveness that we love them; nor that they
love us. What I have called Appreciative Love is no basic element in
Affection. It usually needs absence or bereavement to set us praising
those to whom only Affection binds us. We take them for granted: and
this taking for granted, which is an outrage in erotic love, is here
right and proper up to a point. It fits the comfortable, quiet nature of
the feeling. Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and
frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your
household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but
it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine. Affection almost
slinks or seeps through our lives. It lives with humble, un-dress,
private things; soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a
sleepy dog's tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing-machine, a
gollywog left on the lawn.

But I must at once correct myself. I am talking of Affection as it is
when it exists apart from the other loves. It often does so exist; often
not. As gin is not only a drink in itself but also a base for many mixed
drinks, so Affection, besides being a love itself, can enter into the
other loves and colour them all through and become the very medium in
which from day to day they operate. They would not perhaps wear very
well without it. To make a friend is not the same as to become
affectionate. But when your friend has become an old friend, all those
things about him which had originally nothing to do with the friendship
become familiar and dear with familiarity. As for erotic love, I can
imagine nothing more disagreeable than to experience it for more than a
very short time without this homespun clothing of affection. That would
be a most uneasy condition, either too angelic or too animal or each by
turn; never quite great enough or little enough for man. There is indeed
a peculiar charm, both in friendship and in Eros, about those moments
when Appreciative Love lies, as it were, curled up asleep, and the mere
ease and ordinariness of the relationship (free as solitude, yet neither
is alone) wraps us round. No need to talk. No need to make love. No
needs at all except perhaps to stir the fire.

This blending and overlapping of the loves is well kept before us by the
fact that at most times and places all three of them had in common, as
their expression, the kiss. In modern England friendship no longer uses
it, but Affection and Eros do. It belongs so fully to both that we
cannot now tell which borrowed it from the other or whether there were
borrowing at all. To be sure, you may say that the kiss of Affection
differs from the kiss of Eros. Yes; but not all kisses between lovers
are lovers' kisses. Again, both these loves tend--and it embarrasses many
moderns--to use a "little language" or "baby talk". And this is not
peculiar to the human species. Professor Lorenz has told us that when
jackdaws are amorous their calls "consist chiefly of infantile sounds
reserved by adult jackdaws for these occasions" (_King Solomon's Ring_,
p. 158). We and the birds have the same excuse. Different sorts of
tenderness are both tenderness and the language of the earliest
tenderness we have ever known is recalled to do duty for the new sort.

One of the most remarkable by-products of Affection has not yet been
mentioned. I have said that is not primarily an Appreciative Love. It is
not discriminating. It can "rub along" with the most unpromising people.
Yet oddly enough this very fact means that it can in the end make
appreciations possible which, but for it might never have existed. We
may say, and not quite untruly, that we have chosen our friends and the
woman we love for their various excellences--for beauty, frankness,
goodness of heart, wit, intelligence, or what not. But it had to be the
particular kind of wit, the particular kind of beauty, the particular
kind of goodness that we like, and we have our personal tastes in these
matters. That is why friends and lovers feel that they were "made for
one another". The especial glory of Affection is that it can unite those
who most emphatically, even comically, are not; people who, if they had
not found themselves put down by fate in the same household or
community, would have had nothing to do with each other. If Affection
grows out of this--of course it often does not--their eyes begin to open.
Growing fond of "old so-and-so", at first simply because he happens to
be there, I presently begin to see that there is "something in him"
after all. The moment when one first says, really meaning it, that
though he is not "my sort of man" he is a very good man "in his own way"
is one of liberation. It does not feel like that; we may feel only
tolerant and indulgent. But really we have crossed a frontier. That "in
his own way" means that we are getting beyond our own idiosyncracies,
that we are learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in
themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavoured and served to
suit our own palate.

"Dogs and cats should always be brought up together," said someone, "it
broadens their minds so." Affection broadens ours; of all natural loves
it is the most catholic, the least finical, the broadest. The people
with whom you are thrown together in the family, the college, the mess,
the ship, the religious house, are from this point of view a wider
circle than the friends, however numerous, whom you have made for
yourself in the outer world. By having a great many friends I do not
prove that I have a wide appreciation of human excellence. You might as
well say I prove the width of my literary taste by being able to enjoy
all the books in my own study. The answer is the same in both cases--"You
chose those books. You chose those friends. Of course they suit you."
The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find
something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand
bookshop. The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something
to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet
every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste,
teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to
enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who "happen to be there".
Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could
have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

And now we are drawing near the point of danger. Affection, I have said,
gives itself no airs; charity, said St. Paul, is not puffed up.
Affection can love the unattractive: God and His saints love the
unlovable. Affection "does not expect too much", turns a blind eye to
faults, revives easily after quarrels; just so charity suffers long and
is kind and forgives. Affection opens our eyes to goodness we could not
have seen, or should not have appreciated without it. So does humble
sanctity. If we dwelled exclusively on these resemblances we might be
led on to believe that this Affection is not simply one of the natural
loves but is Love Himself working in our human hearts and fulfilling the
law. Were the Victorian novelists right after all? Is love (of this
sort) really enough? Are the "domestic affections", when in their best
and fullest development, the same thing as the Christian life? The
answer to all these questions, I submit, is certainly No.

I do not mean simply that those novelists sometimes wrote as if they had
never heard the text about "hating" wife and mother and one's own life
also. That of course is true. The rivalry between all natural loves and
the love of God is something a Christian dare not forget. God is the
great Rival, the ultimate object of human jealousy; that beauty,
terrible as the Gorgon's, which may at any moment steal from me--or it
seems like stealing to me--my wife's or husband's or daughter's heart.
The bitterness of some unbelief, though disguised even from those who
feel it as anti-clericalism or hatred of superstition, is really due to
this. But I am not at present thinking of that rivalry; we shall have to
face it in a later chapter. For the moment our business is more "down to
earth".

How many of these "happy homes" really exist? Worse still; are all the
unhappy ones unhappy because Affection is absent? I believe not. It can
be present, causing the unhappiness. Nearly all the characteristics of
this love are ambivalent. They may work for ill as well as for good. By
itself, left simply to follow its own bent, it can darken and degrade
human life. The debunkers and anti-sentimentalists have not said all the
truth about it, but all they have said is true.

Symptomatic of this, perhaps, is the odiousness of nearly all those
treacly tunes and saccharine poems in which popular art expresses
Affection. They are odious because of their falsity. They represent as a
ready-made recipe for bliss (and even for goodness) what is in fact only
an opportunity. There is no hint that we shall have to do anything: only
let Affection pour over us like a warm shower-bath and all, it is
implied, will be well.

Affection, we have seen, includes both Need-love and Gift-love. I begin
with the Need--our craving for the Affection of others.

Now there is a clear reason why this craving, of all love-cravings,
easily becomes the most unreasonable. I have said that almost anyone may
be the object of Affection. Yes; and almost everyone expects to be. The
egregious Mr. Pontifex in _The Way of all Flesh_ is outraged to discover
that his son does not love him; it is "unnatural" for a boy not to love
his own father. It never occurs to him to ask whether, since the first
day the boy can remember, he has ever done or said anything that could
excite love. Similarly, at the beginning of _King Lear_ the hero is
shown as a very unlovable old man devoured with a ravenous appetite for
Affection. I am driven to literary examples because you, the reader, and
I, do not live in the same neighbourhood; if we did, there would
unfortunately be no difficulty about replacing them with examples from
real life. The thing happens every day. And we can see why. We all know
that we must do something, if not to merit, at least to attract, erotic
love or friendship. But Affection is often assumed to be provided, ready
made, by nature; "built-in", "laid-on", "on the house". We have a right
to expect it. If the others do not give it, they are "unnatural".

This assumption is no doubt the distortion of a truth. Much has been
"built-in". Because we are a mammalian species, instinct will provide at
least some degree, often a high one, of maternal love. Because we are a
social species familiar association provides a _milieu_ in which, if all
goes well, Affection will arise and grow strong without demanding any
very shining qualities in its objects. If it is given us it will not
necessarily be given us on our merits; we may get it with very little
trouble. From a dim perception of the truth (many are loved with
Affection far beyond their deserts) Mr. Pontifex draws the ludicrous
conclusion, "Therefore I, without desert, have a right to it." It is as
if, on a far higher plane, we argued that because no man by merit has a
right to the Grace of God, I, having no merit, am entitled to it. There
is no question or rights in either case. What we have is not "a right to
expect" but a "reasonable expectation" of being loved by our intimates
if we, and they, are more or less ordinary people. But we may not be. We
may be intolerable. If we are, "nature" will work against us. For the
very same conditions of intimacy which make Affection possible also--and
no less naturally--make possible a peculiarly incurable distaste; a
hatred as immemorial, constant, unemphatic, almost at times unconscious,
as the corresponding form of love. Siegfried, in the opera, could not
remember a time before every shuffle, mutter, and fidget of his dwarfish
foster-father had become odious. We never catch this kind of hatred, any
more than Affection, at the moment of its beginning. It was always there
before. Notice that _old_ is a term of wearied loathing as well as of
endearment: "at his old tricks," "in his old way," "the same old thing."

It would be absurd to say that Lear is lacking in Affection. In so far
as Affection is Need-love he is half-crazy with it. Unless, in his own
way, he loved his daughters he would not so desperately desire their
love. The most unlovable parent (or child) may be full of such ravenous
love. But it works to their own misery and everyone else's. The
situation becomes suffocating. If people are already unlovable a
continual demand on their part (as of right) to be loved--their manifest
sense of injury, their reproaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely
implicit in every look and gesture of resentful self-pity--produce in us
a sense of guilt (they are intended to do so) for a fault we could not
have avoided and cannot cease to commit. They seal up the very fountain
for which they are thirsty. If ever, at some favoured moment, any germ
of Affection for them stirs in us, their demand for more and still more,
petrifies us again. And of course such people always desire the same
proof of our love; we are to join their side, to hear and share their
grievance against someone else. If my boy really loved me he would see
how selfish his father is ... if my brother loved me he would make a
party with me against my sister ... if you loved me you wouldn't let
me be treated like this ...

And all the while they remain unaware of the real road. "If you would be
loved, be lovable," said Ovid. That cheery old reprobate only meant, "If
you want to attract the girls you must be attractive," but his maxim has
a wider application. The amorist was wiser in his generation than Mr.
Pontifex and King Lear.

The really surprising thing is not that these insatiable demands made by
the unlovable are sometimes made in vain, but that they are so often
met. Sometimes one sees a woman's girlhood, youth and long years of her
maturity up to the verge of old age all spent in tending, obeying,
caressing, and perhaps supporting, a maternal vampire who can never be
caressed and obeyed enough. The sacrifice--but there are two opinions
about that--may be beautiful; the old woman who exacts it is not.

The "built-in" or unmerited character of Affection thus invites a
hideous misinterpretation. So does its ease and informality.

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am
an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but
in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to
children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the
embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated
their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other
young people, would simply have terminated the acquaintance? Dogmatic
assertions on matters which the children understand and their elders
don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things
the young take seriously--sometimes of their religion--insulting
references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question
"Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their
home?" Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?

If you asked any of these insufferable people--they are not all parents
of course--why they behaved that way at home, they would reply, "Oh, hang
it all, one comes home to relax. A chap can't be always on his best
behaviour. If a man can't be himself in his own house, where can he? Of
course we don't want Company Manners at home. We're a happy family. We
can say _anything_ to one another here. No one minds. We all
understand."

Once again it is so nearly true yet so fatally wrong. Affection is an
affair of old clothes, and ease, of the unguarded moment, of liberties
which would be ill-bred if we took them with strangers. But old clothes
are one thing; to wear the same shirt till it stank would be another.
There are proper clothes for a garden party; but the clothes for home
must be proper too, in their own different way. Similarly there is a
distinction between public and domestic courtesy. The root principle of
both is the same: "that no one give any kind of preference to himself."
But the more public the occasion, the more our obedience to this
principle has been "taped" or formalised. There are "rules" of good
manners. The more intimate the occasion, the less the formalisation; but
not therefore the less need of courtesy. On the contrary, Affection at
its best practises a courtesy which is incomparably more subtle,
sensitive, and deep than the public kind. In public a ritual would do.
At home you must have the reality which that ritual represented, or else
the deafening triumphs of the greatest egoist present. You must really
give no kind of preference to yourself; at a party it is enough to
conceal the preference. Hence the old proverb "come live with me and
you'll know me". Hence a man's familiar manners first reveal the true
value of his (significantly odious phrase!) "Company" or "Party"
manners. Those who leave their manners behind them when they come home
from the dance or the sherry party have no real courtesy even there.
They were merely aping those who had.

"We can say _anything_ to one another." The truth behind this is that
Affection at its best can say whatever Affection at its best wishes to
say, regardless of the rules that govern public courtesy; for Affection
at its best wishes neither to wound nor to humiliate nor to domineer.
You may address the wife of your bosom as "Pig!" when she has
inadvertently drunk your cocktail as well as her own. You may roar down
the story which your father is telling once too often. You may tease and
hoax and banter. You can say "Shut up. I want to read". You can do
anything in the right tone and at the right moment--the tone and moment
which are not intended to, and will not, hurt. The better the Affection
the more unerringly it knows which these are (every love has its _art of
love_). But the domestic Rudesby means something quite different when he
claims liberty to say "anything". Having a very imperfect sort of
Affection himself, or perhaps at that moment none, he arrogates to
himself the beautiful liberties which only the fullest Affection has a
right to or knows how to manage. He then uses them spitefully in
obedience to his resentments; or ruthlessly in obedience to his egoism;
or at best stupidly, lacking the art. And all the time he may have a
clear conscience. He knows that Affection takes liberties. He is taking
liberties. Therefore (he concludes) he is being affectionate. Resent
anything and he will say that the defect of love is on your side. He is
hurt. He has been misunderstood.

He then sometimes avenges himself by getting on his high horse and
becoming elaborately "polite". The implication is of course, "Oh! So we
are not to be intimate? We are to behave like mere acquaintances? I had
hoped--but no matter. Have it your own way." This illustrates prettily
the difference between intimate and formal courtesy. Precisely what
suits the one may be a breach of the other. To be free and easy when you
are presented to some eminent stranger is bad manners; to practice
formal and ceremonial courtesies at home ("public faces in private
places") is--and is always intended to be--bad manners. There is a
delicious illustration of really good domestic manners in _Tristram
Shandy_. At a singularly unsuitable moment Uncle Toby has been holding
forth on his favourite theme of fortification. "My Father," driven for
once beyond endurance, violently interrupts. Then he sees his brother's
face; the utterly unretaliating face of Toby, deeply wounded, not by the
slight to himself--he would never think of that--but by the slight to the
noble art. My Father at once repents. There is an apology, a total
reconciliation. Uncle Toby, to show how complete is his forgiveness, to
show that he is not on his dignity, resumes the lecture on
fortification.

But we have not yet touched on jealousy. I suppose no one now believes
that jealousy is especially connected with erotic love. If anyone does
the behaviour of children, employees, and domestic animals, ought soon
to undeceive him. Every kind of love, almost every kind of association,
is liable to it. The jealousy of Affection is closely connected with its
reliance on what is old and familiar. So also with the total, or
relative, unimportance for Affection of what I call Appreciative love.
We don't want the "old, familiar faces" to become brighter or more
beautiful, the old ways to be changed even for the better, the old jokes
and interests to be replaced by exciting novelties. Change is a threat
to Affection.

A brother and sister, or two brothers--for sex here is not at work--grow
to a certain age sharing everything. They have read the same comics,
climbed the same trees, been pirates or spacemen together, taken up and
abandoned stamp-collecting at the same moment. Then a dreadful thing
happens. One of them flashes ahead--discovers poetry or science or
serious music or perhaps undergoes a religious conversion. His life is
flooded with the new interest. The other cannot share it; he is left
behind. I doubt whether even the infidelity of a wife or husband raises
a more miserable sense of desertion or a fiercer jealousy than this can
sometimes do. It is not yet jealousy of the new friends whom the
deserter will soon be making. That will come; at first it is jealousy of
the thing itself--of this science, this music, of God (always called
"religion" or "all this religion" in such contexts). The jealousy will
probably be expressed by ridicule. The new interest is "all silly
nonsense", contemptibly childish (or contemptibly grown-up), or else the
deserter is not really interested in it at all--he's showing off,
swanking; it's all affectation. Presently the books will be hidden, the
scientific specimens destroyed, the radio forcibly switched off the
classical programmes. For Affection is the most instinctive, in that
sense the most animal, of the loves; its jealousy is proportionately
fierce. It snarls and bares its teeth like a dog whose food has been
snatched away. And why would it not? Something or someone has snatched
away from the child I am picturing his life-long food, his second self.
His world is in ruins.

But it is not only children who react thus. Few things in the ordinary
peacetime life of a civilised country are more nearly fiendish than the
rancour with which a whole unbelieving family will turn on the one
member of it who has become a Christian, or a whole lowbrow family on
the one who shows signs of becoming an intellectual. This is not, as I
once thought, simply the innate and, as it were, disinterested hatred of
darkness for light. A church-going family in which one has gone atheist
will not always behave any better. It is the reaction to a desertion,
even to robbery. Someone or something has stolen "our" boy (or girl). He
who was one of Us has become one of Them. What right had anybody to do
it? He is _ours_. But once change has thus begun, who knows where it
will end? (And we all so happy and comfortable before and doing no harm
to no one!)

Sometimes a curious double jealousy is felt, or rather two inconsistent
jealousies which chase each other round in the sufferer's mind. On the
other hand "This" is "All nonsense, all bloody high-brow nonsense, all
canting humbug". But on the other, "Supposing--it can't be, it mustn't
be, but just supposing--there were something in it?" Supposing there
really were anything in literature, or in Christianity? How if the
deserter has really entered a new world which the rest of us never
suspected? But, if so, how unfair! Why him? Why was it never opened to
us? "A chit of a girl--a whipper-snapper of a boy--being shown things that
are hidden from their elders?" And since that is clearly incredible and
unendurable, jealousy returns to the hypothesis "All nonsense".

Parents in this state are much more comfortably placed than brothers and
sisters. Their past is unknown to their children. Whatever the
deserter's new world is, they can always claim that they have been
through it themselves and come out the other end. "It's a phase," they
say, "It'll blow over." Nothing could be more satisfactory. It cannot be
there and then refuted, for it is a statement about the future. It
stings, yet--so indulgently said--is hard to resent. Better still, the
elders may really believe it. Best of all, it may finally turn out to
have been true. It won't be their fault if it doesn't.

"Boy, boy, these wild courses of yours will break your mother's heart."
That eminently Victorian appeal may often have been true. Affection was
bitterly wounded when one member of the family fell from the homely
_ethos_ into something worse--gambling, drink, keeping an opera girl.
Unfortunately it is almost equally possible to break your mother's heart
by rising above the homely _ethos_. The conservative tenacity of
Affection works both ways. It can be a domestic counterpart to that
nationally suicidal type of education which keeps back the promising
child because the idlers and dunces might be "hurt" if it were
undemocratically moved into a higher class than themselves.

All these perversions of Affection are mainly connected with Affection
as a Need-love. But Affection as a Gift-love has its perversions too.

I am thinking of Mrs. Fidget, who died a few months ago. It is really
astonishing how her family have brightened up. The drawn look has gone
from her husband's face; he begins to be able to laugh. The younger boy,
whom I had always thought an embittered, peevish little creature, turns
out to be quite human. The elder, who was hardly ever at home except
when he was in bed, is nearly always there now and has begun to
reorganise the garden. The girl, who was always supposed to be
"delicate" (though I never found out what exactly the trouble was), now
has the riding lessons which were once out of the question, dances all
night, and plays any amount of tennis. Even the dog who was never
allowed out except on a lead is now a well-known member of the Lamp-post
Club in their road.

Mrs. Fidget very often said that she lived for her family. And it was
not untrue. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew it. "She lives for her
family," they said; "what a wife and mother!" She did all the washing;
true, she did it badly, and they could have afforded to send it out to a
laundry, and they frequently begged her not to do it. But she did. There
was always a hot lunch for anyone who was at home and always a hot meal
at night (even in midsummer). They implored her not to provide this.
They protested almost with tears in their eyes (and with truth) that
they liked cold meals. It made no difference. She was living for her
family. She always sat up to "welcome" you home if you were out late at
night; two or three in the morning, it made no odds; you would always
find the frail, pale, weary face awaiting you, like a silent accusation.
Which meant of course that you couldn't with any decency go out very
often. She was always making things too; being in her own estimation
(I'm no judge myself) an excellent amateur dressmaker and a great
knitter. And of course, unless you were a heartless brute, you had to
wear the things. (The Vicar tells me that, since her death, the
contributions of that family alone to "sales of work" outweigh those of
all his other parishioners put together). And then her care for their
health! She bore the whole burden of that daughter's "delicacy" alone.
The Doctor--an old friend, and it was not being done on National
Health--was never allowed to discuss matters with his patient. After the
briefest examination of her, he was taken into another room by the
mother. The girl was to have no worries, no responsibility for her own
health. Only loving care; caresses, special foods, horrible tonic wines,
and breakfast in bed. For Mrs. Fidget, as she so often said, would "work
her fingers to the bone" for her family. They couldn't stop her. Nor
could they--being decent people--quite sit still and watch her do it. They
had to help. Indeed they were always having to help. That is, they did
things for her to help her to do things for them which they didn't want
done. As for the dear dog, it was to her, she said, "just like one of
the children." It was in fact as like one of them as she could make it.
But since it had no scruples it got on rather better than they, and
though vetted, dieted and guarded within an inch of its life, contrived
sometimes to reach the dustbin or the dog next door.

The Vicar says Mrs. Fidget is now at rest. Let us hope she is. What's
quite certain is that her family are.

It is easy to see how liability to this state is, so to speak,
congenital in the maternal instinct. This, as we saw, is a Gift-love,
but one that needs to give; therefore needs to be needed. But the proper
aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer
needs our gift. We feed children in order that they may soon be able to
feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our
teaching. Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-love. It must work
towards its own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves superfluous.
The hour when we can say "They need me no longer" should be our reward.
But the instinct, simply in its own nature, has no power to fulfil this
law. The instinct desires the good of its object, but not simply; only
the good it can itself give. A much higher love--a love which desires the
good of the object as such, from whatever source that good comes--must
step in and help or tame the instinct before it can make the abdication.
And of course it often does. But where it does not, the ravenous need to
be needed will gratify itself either by keeping its objects needy or by
inventing for them imaginary needs. It will do this all the more
ruthlessly because it thinks (in one sense truly) that it is a Gift-love
and therefore regards itself as "unselfish".

It is not only mothers who can do this. All those other Affections
which, whether by derivation from parental instinct or by similarity of
function, need to be needed may fall into the same pit. The Affection of
patron for _protégé_ is one. In Jane Austen's novel, Emma intends that
Harriet Smith should have a happy life; but only the sort of happy life
which Emma herself has planned for her. My own profession--that of a
university teacher--is in this way dangerous. If we are any good we must
always be working towards the moment at which our pupils are fit to
become our critics and rivals. We should be delighted when it arrives,
as the fencing master is delighted when his pupil can pink and disarm
him. And many are.

But not all. I am old enough to remember the sad case of Dr. Quartz. No
university boasted a more effective or devoted teacher. He spent the
whole of himself on his pupils. He made an indelible impression on
nearly all of them. He was the object of much well merited hero-worship.
Naturally, and delightfully, they continued to visit him after the
tutorial relation had ended--went round to his house of an evening and
had famous discussions. But the curious thing is that this never lasted.
Sooner or later--it might be within a few months or even a few weeks--came
the fatal evening when they knocked on his door and were told that the
Doctor was engaged. After that he would always be engaged. They were
banished from him forever. This was because, at their last meeting, they
had rebelled. They had asserted their independence--differed from the
master and supported their own view, perhaps not without success. Faced
with that very independence which he had laboured to produce and which
it was his duty to produce if he could, Dr. Quartz could not bear it.
Wotan had toiled to create the free Siegfried; presented with the free
Siegfried, he was enraged. Dr. Quartz was an unhappy man.

This terrible need to be needed often finds its outlet in pampering an
animal. To learn that someone is "fond of animals" tells us very little
until we know in what way. For there are two ways. On the one hand the
higher and domesticated animal is, so to speak, a "bridge" between us
and the rest of nature. We all at times feel somewhat painfully our
human isolation from the sub-human world--the atrophy of instinct which
our intelligence entails, our excessive self-consciousness, the
innumerable complexities of our situation, our inability to live in the
present. If only we could shuffle it all off! We must not--and
incidentally we can't--become beasts. But we can be _with_ a beast. It is
personal enough to give the word _with_ a real meaning; yet it remains
very largely an unconscious little bundle of biological impulses. It has
three legs in nature's world and one in ours. It is a link, an
ambassador. Who would not wish, as Bosanquet put it, "to have a
representative at the court of Pan"? Man with dog closes a gap in the
universe. But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If
you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need
you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in
need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to
permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and
compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences
which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very
useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain--you are
too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this
purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more
like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal.
But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better
still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human,
driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals
can't speak.

Those who say "The more I see of men the better I like dogs"--those who
find in animals a _relief_ from the demands of human companionship--will
be well advised to examine their real reasons.

I hope I am not being misunderstood. If this chapter leads anyone to
doubt that the lack of "natural affection" is an extreme depravity I
shall have failed. Nor do I question for a moment that Affection is
responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness
there is in our natural lives. I shall therefore have some sympathy with
those whose comment on the last few pages takes the form "Of course. Of
course. These things do happen. Selfish or neurotic people can twist
anything, even love, into some sort of misery or exploitation. But why
stress these marginal cases? A little common sense, a little give and
take, prevents their occurrence among decent people." But I think this
comment itself needs a commentary.

Firstly, as to _neurotic_. I do not think we shall see things more
clearly by classifying all these malefical states of Affection as
pathological. No doubt there are really pathological conditions which
make the temptation to these states abnormally hard or even impossible
to resist for particular people. Send those people to the doctors by all
means. But I believe that everyone who is honest with himself will admit
that he has felt these temptations. Their occurrence is not a disease;
or if it is, the name of that disease is Being a Fallen Man. In ordinary
people the yielding to them--and who does not sometimes yield?--is not
disease, but sin. Spiritual direction will here help us more than
medical treatment. Medicine labours to restore "natural" structure or
"normal" function. But greed, egoism, self-deception and self-pity are
not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating
kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal
the man from whom these failings were wholly absent? "Natural", if you
like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have seen
only one such Man. And He was not at all like the psychologist's picture
of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed,
popular citizen. You can't really be very well "adjusted" to your world
if it says you "have a devil" and ends by nailing you up naked to a
stake of wood.

But secondly, the comment in its own language admits the very thing I am
trying to say. Affection produces happiness if--and only if--there is
common sense and give and take and "decency". In other words, only if
something more, and other, than Affection is added. The mere feeling is
not enough. You need "common sense", that is, reason. You need "give and
take"; that is, you need justice, continually stimulating mere Affection
when it fades and restraining it when it forgets or would defy the _art_
of love. You need "decency". There is no disguising the fact that this
means goodness; patience, self-denial, humility, and the continual
intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can
ever be. That is the whole point. If we try to live by Affection alone,
Affection will "go bad on us".

How bad, I believe we seldom recognise. Can Mrs. Fidget really have been
quite unaware of the countless frustrations and miseries she inflicted
on her family? It passes belief. She knew--of course she knew--that it
spoiled your whole evening to know that when you came home you would
find her uselessly, accusingly, "sitting up for you". She continued all
these practices because if she had dropped them she would have been
faced with the fact she was determined not to see; would have known that
she was not necessary. That is the first motive. Then too, the very
laboriousness of her life silenced her secret doubts as to the quality
of her love. The more her feet burned and her back ached, the better,
for this pain whispered in her ear "How much I must love them if I do
all this!" That is the second motive. But I think there is a lower
depth. The unappreciativeness of the others, those terrible, wounding
words--anything will "wound" a Mrs. Fidget--in which they begged her to
send the washing out, enabled her to feel ill-used, therefore, to have a
continual grievance, to enjoy the pleasures of resentment. If anyone
says he does not know those pleasures, he is a liar or a saint. It is
true that they are pleasures only to those who hate. But then a love
like Mrs. Fidget's contains a good deal of hatred. It was of erotic love
that the Roman poet said, "I love and hate," but other kinds of love
admit the same mixture. They carry in them the seeds of hatred. If
Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will
germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.




                              CHAPTER IV
                              Friendship


When either Affection or Eros is one's theme, one finds a prepared
audience. The importance and beauty of both have been stressed and
almost exaggerated again and again. Even those who would debunk them are
in conscious reaction against this laudatory tradition and, to that
extent, influenced by it. But very few modern people think Friendship a
love of comparable value or even a love at all. I cannot remember that
any poem since _In Memoriam_, or any novel, has celebrated it. Tristan
and Isolde, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, have innumerable
counterparts in modern literature: David and Jonathan, Pylades and
Orestes, Roland and Oliver, Amis and Amile, have not. To the Ancients,
Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the
crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison,
ignores it. We admit of course that besides a wife and family a man
needs a few "friends". But the very tone of the admission, and the sort
of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as
"friendships", show clearly that what they are talking about has very
little to do with that _Philia_ which Aristotle classified among the
virtues or that _Amicitia_ on which Cicero wrote a book. It is something
quite marginal; not a main course in life's banquet; a diversion;
something that fills up the chinks of one's time. How has this come
about?

The first and most obvious answer is that few value it because few
experience it. And the possibility of going through life without the
experience is rooted in that fact which separates Friendship so sharply
from both the other loves. Friendship is--in a sense not at all
derogatory to it--the least _natural_ of loves; the least instinctive,
organic, biological, gregarious and necessary. It has least commerce
with our nerves; there is nothing throaty about it; nothing that
quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale. It is essentially between
individuals; the moment two men are friends they have in some degree
drawn apart together from the herd. Without Eros none of us would have
been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared;
but we can live and breed without Friendship. The species, biologically
considered, has no need of it. The pack or herd--the community--may even
dislike and distrust it. Its leaders very often do. Headmasters and
Headmistresses and Heads of religious communities, colonels and ships'
captains, can feel uneasy when close and strong friendships arise
between little knots of their subjects.

This (so to call it) "non-natural" quality in Friendship goes far to
explain why it was exalted in ancient and medieval times and has come to
be made light of in our own. The deepest and most permanent thought of
those ages was ascetic and world-renouncing. Nature and emotion and the
body were feared as dangers to our souls, or despised as degradations of
our human status. Inevitably that sort of love was most prized which
seemed most independent, or even defiant, of mere nature. Affection and
Eros were too obviously connected with our nerves, too obviously shared
with the brutes. You could feel these tugging at your guts and
fluttering in your diaphragm. But in Friendship--in that luminous,
tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen--you got away
from all that. This alone, of all the loves, seemed to raise you to the
level of gods or angels.

But then came Romanticism and "tearful comedy" and the "return to
nature" and the exaltation of Sentiment; and in their train all that
great wallow of emotion which, though often criticised, has lasted ever
since. Finally, the exaltation of instinct, the dark gods in the blood;
whose hierophants may be incapable of male friendship. Under this new
dispensation all that had once commended this love now began to work
against it. It had not tearful smiles and keepsakes and baby-talk enough
to please the sentimentalists. There was not blood and guts enough about
it to attract the primitivists. It looked thin and etiolated; a sort of
vegetarian substitute for the more organic loves.

Other causes have contributed. To those--and they are now the
majority--who see human life merely as a development and complication of
animal life all forms of behaviour which cannot produce certificates of
an animal origin and of survival value are suspect. Friendship's
certificates are not very satisfactory. Again, that outlook which values
the collective above the individual necessarily disparages Friendship;
it is a relation between men at their highest level of individuality. It
withdraws men from collective "togetherness" as surely as solitude
itself could do; and more dangerously, for it withdraws them by two's
and three's. Some forms of democratic sentiment are naturally hostile to
it because it is selective and an affair of the few. To say "These are
my friends" implies "Those are not". For all these reasons if a man
believes (as I do) that the old estimate of Friendship was the correct
one, he can hardly write a chapter on it except as a rehabilitation.

This imposes on me at the outset a very tiresome bit of demolition. It
has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every
firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.

The dangerous word _really_ is here important. To say that every
Friendship is consciously and explicitly homosexual would be too
obviously false; the wiseacres take refuge in the less palpable charge
that it is _really_--unconsciously, cryptically, in some Pickwickian
sense--homosexual. And this, though it cannot be proved, can never of
course be refuted. The fact that no positive evidence of homosexuality
can be discovered in the behaviour of two Friends does not disconcert
the wiseacres at all: "That", they say gravely, "is just what we should
expect." The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the
absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden. Yes--if
it exists at all. But we must first prove its existence. Otherwise we
are arguing like a man who should say "If there were an invisible cat in
that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty;
therefore there is an invisible cat in it."

A belief in invisible cats cannot perhaps be logically disproved, but it
tells us a good deal about those who hold it. Those who cannot conceive
Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration
of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of
us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same
person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a
love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love;
Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to
face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some
common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between
two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship,
is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.

Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should
die, then B loses not only A but "A's part in C", while C loses not only
A but "A's part in B". In each of my friends there is something that
only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large
enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my
own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never
again see Ronald's reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from
having more of Ronald, having him "to myself" now that Charles is away,
I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of
loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a
fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They
can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here comes one who
will augment our loves." For in this love "to divide is not to take
away". Of course the scarcity of kindred souls--not to mention practical
considerations about the size of rooms and the audibility of voices--set
limits to the enlargement of the circle; but within those limits we
possess each friend not less but more as the number of those with whom
we share him increases. In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious
"nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the very multitude of
the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each
has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless
communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old
author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy,
Holy" _to one another_ (_Isaiah_ VI, 3). The more we thus share the
Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have.

The homosexual theory therefore seems to me not even plausible. This is
not to say that Friendship and abnormal Eros have never been combined.
Certain cultures at certain periods seem to have tended to the
contamination. In war-like societies it was, I think, especially likely
to creep into the relation between the mature Brave and his young
armour-bearer or squire. The absence of the women while you were on the
warpath had no doubt something to do with it. In deciding, if we think
we need or can decide, where it crept in and where it did not, we must
surely be guided by the evidence (when there is any) and not by an _a
priori_ theory. Kisses, tears and embraces are not in themselves
evidence of homosexuality. The implications would be, if nothing else,
too comic. Hrothgar embracing Beowulf, Johnson embracing Boswell (a
pretty flagrantly heterosexual couple) and all those hairy old toughs of
centurions in Tacitus, clinging to one another and begging for last
kisses when the legion was broken up ... all pansies? If you can
believe that you can believe anything. On a broad historical view it is,
of course, not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our
ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls
for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step.

I have said that Friendship is the least biological of our loves. Both
the individual and the community can survive without it. But there is
something else, often confused with Friendship, which the community does
need; something which, though not Friendship, is the matrix of
Friendship.

In early communities the co-operation of the males as hunters or
fighters was no less necessary than the begetting and rearing of
children. A tribe where there was no taste for the one would die no less
surely than a tribe where there was no taste for the other. Long before
history began we men have got together apart from the women and done
things. We had to. And to like doing what must be done is a
characteristic that has survival value. We not only had to do the
things, we had to talk about them. We had to plan the hunt and the
battle. When they were over we had to hold a _post mortem_ and draw
conclusions for future use. We liked this even better. We ridiculed or
punished the cowards and bunglers, we praised the star-performers. We
revelled in technicalities. ("He might have known he'd never get near
the brute, not with the wind that way" ... "You see, I had a lighter
arrowhead; that's what did it" ... "What I always say is----" ...
"stuck him just like that, see? Just the way I'm holding this stick" ...).
In fact, we talked shop. We enjoyed one another's society greatly:
we Braves, we hunters, all bound together by shared skill, shared
dangers and hardships, esoteric jokes--away from the women and children.
As some wag has said, palaeolithic man may or may not have had a club on
his shoulder but he certainly had a club of the other sort. It was
probably part of his religion; like that sacred smoking-club where the
savages in Melville's _Typee_ were "famously snug" every evening of
their lives.

What were the women doing meanwhile? How should I know? I am a man and
never spied on the mysteries of the Bona Dea. They certainly often had
rituals from which men were excluded. When, as sometimes happened,
agriculture was in their hands, they must, like the men, have had common
skills, toils and triumphs. Yet perhaps their world was never as
emphatically feminine as that of their men-folk was masculine. The
children were with them; perhaps the old men were there too. But I am
only guessing. I can trace the pre-history of Friendship only in the
male line.

This pleasure in co-operation, in talking shop, in the mutual respect
and understanding of men who daily see one another tested, is
biologically valuable. You may, if you like, regard it as a product of
the "gregarious instinct". To me that seems a round-about way of getting
at something which we all understand far better already than anyone has
ever understood the word _instinct_--something which is going on at this
moment in dozens of ward-rooms, bar-rooms, common-rooms, messes and
golf-clubs. I prefer to call it Companionship--or Clubbableness.

This Companionship is, however, only the matrix of Friendship. It is
often called Friendship, and many people when they speak of their
"friends" mean only their companions. But it is not Friendship in the
sense I give to the word. By saying this I do not at all intend to
disparage the merely Clubbable relation. We do not disparage silver by
distinguishing it from gold.

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the
companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or
even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment,
each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical
expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You
too? I thought I was the only one." We can imagine that among those
early hunters and warriors single individuals--one in a century? one in a
thousand years?--saw what others did not; saw that the deer was beautiful
as well as edible, that hunting was fun as well as necessary, dreamed
that his gods might be not only powerful but holy. But as long as each
of these percipient persons dies without finding a kindred soul, nothing
(I suspect) will come of it; art or sport or spiritual religion will not
be born. It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether
with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what
would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their
vision--it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand
together in an immense solitude.

Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this
barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not. They
would be glad to reduce it. The first two would be glad to find a third.

In our own time Friendship arises in the same way. For us of course the
shared activity and therefore the companionship on which Friendship
supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It
may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a
common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or
two or three who share something more will be our Friends. In this kind
of love, as Emerson said, _Do you love me?_ means _Do you see the same
truth?_--Or at least, "Do you _care about_ the same truth?" The man who
agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of
great importance, can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the
answer.

Notice that Friendship thus repeats on a more individual and less
socially necessary level the character of the Companionship which was
its matrix. The Companionship was between people who were doing
something together--hunting, studying, painting or what you will. The
Friends will still be doing something together, but something more
inward, less widely shared and less easily defined; still hunters, but
of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the
world does not, or not yet, take account of; still travelling
companions, but on a different kind of journey. Hence we picture lovers
face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.

That is why those pathetic people who simply "want friends" can never
make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want
something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the
question _Do you see the same truth?_ would be "I see nothing and I
don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend", no Friendship can
arise--though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the
Friendship to be _about_; and Friendship must be about something, even
if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have
nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no
fellow-travellers.

When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret
road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them
will very easily pass--may pass in the first half-hour--into erotic love.
Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one
or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or
later. And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the
lovers. But this, so far from obliterating the distinction between the
two loves, puts it in a clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep
and full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as
also your lover you will certainly not want to share the Beloved's
erotic love with any third. But you will have no jealousy at all about
sharing the Friendship. Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the
discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter
into Friendship with the Friends you already had: to feel that not only
are we two united by erotic love but we three or four or five are all
travellers on the same quest, have all a common vision.

The co-existence of Friendship and Eros may also help some moderns to
realise that Friendship is in reality a love, and even as great a love
as Eros. Suppose you are fortunate enough to have "fallen in love with"
and married your Friend. And now suppose it possible that you were
offered the choice of two futures: "_Either_ you two will cease to be
lovers but remain forever joint seekers of the same God, the same
beauty, the same truth, _or else_, losing all that, you will retain as
long as you live the raptures and ardours, all the wonder and the wild
desire of Eros. Choose which you please." Which should we choose? Which
choice should we not regret after we had made it?

I have stressed the "unnecessary" character of Friendship, and this of
course requires more justification than I have yet given it.

It could be argued that Friendships are of practical value to the
Community. Every civilised religion began in a small group of friends.
Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to
talk about numbers and lines and angles. What is now the Royal Society
was originally a few gentlemen meeting in their spare time to discuss
things which they (and not many others) had a fancy for. What we now
call "the Romantic Movement" once _was_ Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge
talking incessantly (at least Mr. Coleridge was) about a secret vision
of their own. Communism, Tractarianism, Methodism, the movement against
slavery, the Reformation, the Renaissance, might perhaps be said,
without much exaggeration, to have begun in the same way.

There is something in this. But nearly every reader would probably think
some of these movements good for society and some bad. The whole list,
if accepted, would tend to show, at best, that Friendship is both a
possible benefactor and a possible danger to the community. And even as
a benefactor it would have, not so much survival value, as what we may
call "civilisation-value"; would be something (in Aristotelian phrase)
which helps the community not to live but to live well. Survival value
and civilisation value coincide at some periods and in some
circumstances, but not in all. What at any rate seems certain is that
when Friendship bears fruit which the community can use it has to do so
accidentally, as a by-product. Religions devised for a social purpose,
like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to "sell" Christianity as
a means of "saving civilisation", do not come to much. The little knots
of Friends who turn their backs on the "World" are those who really
transform it. Egyptian and Babylonian Mathematics were practical and
social, pursued in the service of Agriculture and Magic. But the free
Greek Mathematics, pursued by Friends as a leisure occupation, have
mattered to us more.

Others again would say that Friendship is extremely useful, perhaps
necessary for survival, to the individual. They could produce plenty of
authority: "bare is back without brother behind it" and "there is a
friend that sticketh closer than a brother". But when we speak thus we
are using _friend_ to mean "ally". In ordinary usage _friend_ means, or
should mean, more than that. A Friend will, to be sure, prove himself to
be also an ally when alliance becomes necessary; will lend or give when
we are in need, nurse us in sickness, stand up for us among our enemies,
do what he can for our widows and orphans. But such good offices are not
the stuff of Friendship. The occasions for them are almost
interruptions. They are in one way relevant to it, in another not.
Relevant, because you would be a false friend if you would not do them
when the need arose; irrelevant, because the role of benefactor always
remains accidental, even a little alien, to that of Friend. It is almost
embarrassing. For Friendship is utterly free from Affection's need to be
needed. We are sorry that any gift or loan or night-watching should have
been necessary--and now, for heaven's sake, let us forget all about it
and go back to the things we really want to do or talk of together. Even
gratitude is no enrichment to this love. The stereotyped "Don't mention
it" here expresses what we really feel. The mark of perfect Friendship
is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will)
but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a
distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too
short, that we had together. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in
which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it has had to be
devoted to _affairs_!

For of course we do not want to know our Friend's affairs at all.
Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You become a man's Friend
without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he
earns his living. What have all these "unconcerning things, matters of
fact" to do with the real question, _Do you see the same truth?_ In a
circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing
but himself. No one cares twopence about any one else's family,
profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will
get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come
out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as
pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness
of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states,
abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love
(essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole
embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At
home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character;
husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not
among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and
irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and
no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of
necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like
the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival
value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

When I spoke of Friends as side by side or shoulder to shoulder I was
pointing a necessary contrast between their posture and that of the
lovers whom we picture face to face. Beyond that contrast I do not want
the image pressed. The common quest or vision which unites Friends does
not absorb them in such a way that they remain ignorant or oblivious of
one another. On the contrary it is the very medium in which their mutual
love and knowledge exist. One knows nobody so well as one's "fellow".
Every step of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests are
tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves.
Hence, as he rings true time after time, our reliance, our respect and
our admiration blossom into an Appreciative Love of a singularly robust
and well-informed kind. If, at the outset, we had attended more to him
and less to the thing our Friendship is "about", we should not have come
to know or love him so well. You will not find the warrior, the poet,
the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes as if he were
your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him,
pray with him.

In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative Love is, I think, often so
great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his
secret heart, humbled before all the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he
is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in
such company. Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing
out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are
the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard day's walking
have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out
towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world,
and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk;
and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all
are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the
same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life--natural
life--has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?

From what has been said it will be clear that in most societies at most
periods Friendships will be between men and men or between women and
women. The sexes will have met one another in Affection and in Eros but
not in this love. For they will seldom have had with each other the
companionship in common activities which is the matrix of Friendship.
Where men are educated and women not, where one sex works and the other
is idle, or where they do totally different work, they will usually have
nothing to be Friends about. But we can easily see that it is this lack,
rather than anything in their natures, which excludes Friendship; for
where they can be companions they can also become Friends. Hence in a
profession (like my own) where men and women work side by side, or in
the mission field, or among authors and artists, such Friendship is
common. To be sure, what is offered as Friendship on one side may be
mistaken for Eros on the other, with painful and embarrassing results.
Or what begins as Friendship in both may become also Eros. But to say
that something can be mistaken for, or turn into, something else is not
to deny the difference between them. Rather it implies it; we should not
otherwise speak of "turning into" or being "mistaken for".

In one respect our own society is unfortunate. A world where men and
women never have common work or a common education can probably get
along comfortably enough. In it men turn to each other, and only to each
other, for Friendship, and they enjoy it very much. I hope the women
enjoy their feminine Friends equally. Again, a world where all men and
women had sufficient common ground for this relationship could also be
comfortable. At present, however, we fall between two stools. The
necessary common ground, the matrix, exists between the sexes in some
groups but not in others. It is notably lacking in many residential
suburbs. In a plutocratic neighbourhood where the men have spent their
whole lives in acquiring money some at least of the women have used
their leisure to develop an intellectual life--have become musical or
literary. In such places the men appear among the women as barbarians
among civilised people. In another neighbourhood you will find the
situation reversed. Both sexes have, indeed, "been to school". But since
then the men have had a much more serious education; they have become
doctors, lawyers, clergymen, architects, engineers, or men of letters.
The women are to them as children to adults. In neither neighbourhood is
real Friendship between the sexes at all probable. But this, though an
impoverishment, would be tolerable if it were admitted and accepted. The
peculiar trouble of our own age is that men and women in this situation,
haunted by rumours and glimpses of happier groups where no such chasm
between the sexes exists, and bedevilled by the egalitarian idea that
what is possible for some ought to be (and therefore is) possible to
all, refuse to acquiesce in it. Hence, on the one hand, we get the wife
as school-marm, the "cultivated" woman who is always trying to bring her
husband "up to her level". She drags him to concerts and would like him
to learn morris-dancing and invites "cultivated" people to the house. It
often does surprisingly little harm. The middle-aged male has great
powers of passive resistance and (if she but knew) of indulgence; "women
will have their fads." Something much more painful happens when it is
the men who are civilised and the women not, and when all the women, and
many of the men too, simply refuse to recognise the fact.

When this happens we get a kind, polite, laborious and pitiful pretence.
The women are "deemed" (as lawyers say) to be full members of the male
circle. The fact--in itself not important--that they now smoke and drink
like the men seems to simple-minded people a proof that they really are.
No stag-parties are allowed. Wherever the men meet, the women must come
too. The men have learned to live among ideas. They know what
discussion, proof and illustration mean. A woman who has had merely
school lessons and has abandoned soon after marriage whatever tinge of
"culture" they gave her--whose reading is the Women's Magazines and whose
general conversation is almost wholly narrative--cannot really enter such
a circle. She can be locally and physically present with it in the same
room. What of that? If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent
through a conversation which means nothing to her. If they are better
bred, of course, they try to bring her in. Things are explained to her:
people try to sublimate her irrelevant and blundering observations into
some kind of sense. But the efforts soon fail and, for manners' sake,
what might have been a real discussion is deliberately diluted and
peters out in gossip, anecdotes, and jokes. Her presence has thus
destroyed the very thing she was brought to share. She can never really
enter the circle because the circle ceases to be itself when she enters
it--as the horizon ceases to be the horizon when you get there. By
learning to drink and smoke and perhaps to tell _risqué_ stories, she
has not, for this purpose, drawn an inch nearer to the men than her
grandmother. But her grandmother was far happier and more realistic. She
was at home talking real women's talk to other women and perhaps doing
so with great charm, sense and even wit. She herself might be able to do
the same. She may be quite as clever as the men whose evening she has
spoiled, or cleverer. But she is not really interested in the same
things, nor mistress of the same methods. (We all appear as dunces when
feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.)

The presence of such women, thousands strong, helps to account for the
modern disparagement of Friendship. They are often completely
victorious. They banish male companionship, and therefore male
Friendship, from whole neighbourhoods. In the only world they know, an
endless prattling "Jolly" replaces the intercourse of minds. All the men
they meet talk like women while women are present.

This victory over Friendship is often unconscious. There is, however, a
more militant type of women who plans it. I have heard one say "Never
let two men sit together or they'll get talking about some _subject_ and
then there'll be no fun". Her point could not have been more accurately
made. Talk, by all means; the more of it the better; unceasing cascades
of the human voice; but not, please, a subject. The talk must not be
about anything.

This gay lady--this lively, accomplished, "charming", unendurable
bore--was seeking only each evening's amusement, making the meeting "go".
But the conscious war against Friendship may be fought on a deeper
level. There are women who regard it with hatred, envy and fear as the
enemy of Eros and, perhaps even more, of Affection. A woman of that sort
has a hundred arts to break up her husband's Friendships. She will
quarrel with his Friends herself or, better still, with their wives. She
will sneer, obstruct and lie. She does not realise that the husband whom
she succeeds in isolating from his own kind will not be very well worth
having; she has emasculated him. She will grow to be ashamed of him
herself. Nor does she remember how much of his life lies in places where
she cannot watch him. New Friendships will break out, but this time they
will be secret. Lucky for her, and lucky beyond her deserts, if there
are not soon other secrets as well.

All these, of course, are silly women. The sensible women who, if they
wanted, would certainly be able to qualify themselves for the world of
discussion and ideas, are precisely those who, if they are not
qualified, never try to enter it or to destroy it. They have other fish
to fry. At a mixed party they gravitate to one end of the room and talk
women's talk to one another. They don't want us, for this sort of
purpose, any more than we want them. It is only the riff-raff of each
sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on the other. Live and let
live. They laugh at us a good deal. That is just as it should be. Where
the sexes, having no real shared activities, can meet only in Affection
and Eros--cannot be Friends--it is healthy that each should have a lively
sense of the other's absurdity. Indeed it is always healthy. No one ever
really appreciated the other sex--just as no one really appreciates
children or animals--without at times feeling them to be funny. For both
sexes are. Humanity is tragi-comical; but the division into sexes
enables each to see in the other the joke that often escapes it in
itself--and the pathos too.

I gave warning that this chapter would be largely a rehabilitation. The
preceding pages have, I hope, made clear why to me at least it seems no
wonder if our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us
almost above humanity. This love, free from instinct, free from all
duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from
jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is
eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between
angels. Have we here found a natural love which is Love itself?

Before we rush to any such conclusion let us beware of the ambiguity in
the word _spiritual_. There are many New Testament contexts in which it
means "pertaining to the (Holy) Spirit", and in such contexts the
spiritual is, by definition, good. But when _spiritual_ is used simply
as the opposite of corporeal, or instinctive, or animal, this is not so.
There is spiritual evil as well as spiritual good. There are unholy, as
well as holy, angels. The worst sins of men are spiritual. We must not
think that in finding Friendship to be _spiritual_ we have found it to
be in itself holy or inerrant. Three significant facts remain to be
taken into account.

The first, already mentioned, is the distrust which Authorities tend to
have of close Friendships among their subjects. It may be unjustified;
or there may be some basis for it.

Secondly, there is the attitude of the majority towards all circles of
close Friends. Every name they give such a circle is more or less
derogatory. It is at best a "set"; lucky if not a _coterie_, a "gang", a
"little senate", or a "mutual admiration society". Those who in their
own lives know only Affection, Companionship and Eros, suspect Friends
to be "stuck-up prigs who think themselves too good for us". Of course
this is the voice of Envy. But Envy always brings the truest charge, or
the charge nearest to the truth, that she can think up; it hurts more.
This charge, therefore, will have to be considered.

Finally, we must notice that Friendship is very rarely the image under
which Scripture represents the love between God and Man. It is not
entirely neglected; but far more often, seeking a symbol for the highest
love of all, Scripture ignores this seemingly almost angelic relation
and plunges into the depth of what is most natural and instinctive.
Affection is taken as the image when God is represented as our Father;
Eros, when Christ is represented as the Bridegroom of the Church.

Let us begin with the suspicions of those in Authority. I think there is
a ground for them and that a consideration of this ground brings
something important to light. Friendship, I have said, is born at the
moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no
one but myself ..." But the common taste or vision or point of view
which is thus discovered need not always be a nice one. From such a
moment art, or philosophy, or an advance in religion or morals might
well take their rise; but why not also torture, cannibalism, or human
sacrifice? Surely most of us have experienced the ambivalent nature of
such moments in our own youth? It was wonderful when we first met
someone who cared for our favourite poet. What we had hardly understood
before now took clear shape. What we had been half ashamed of we now
freely acknowledged. But it was no less delightful when we first met
someone who shared with us a secret evil. This too became far more
palpable and explicit; of this too, we ceased to be ashamed. Even now,
at whatever age, we all know the perilous charm of a shared hatred or
grievance. (It is difficult not to hail as a Friend the only other man
in College who really sees the faults of the Sub-Warden).

Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards
timidly, half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after
all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an hour--in ten
minutes--these same views and standards become once more indisputable.
The opinion of this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of a
thousand outsiders: as Friendship strengthens, it will do this even when
my Friends are far away. For we all wish to be judged by our peers, by
the men "after our own heart". Only they really know our mind and only
they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we
really covet and the blame we really dread. The little pockets of early
Christians survived because they cared exclusively for the love of "the
brethren" and stopped their ears to the opinion of the Pagan society all
round them. But a circle of criminals, cranks, or perverts survives in
just the same way; by becoming deaf to the opinion of the outer world,
by discounting it as the chatter of outsiders who "don't understand", of
the "conventional", "the bourgeois", the "Establishment", of prigs,
prudes and humbugs.

It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every
real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a
rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists
against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or
of charlatans against civilised taste; of good men against the badness
of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will
be unwelcome to Top People. In each knot of Friends there is a sectional
"public opinion" which fortifies its members against the public opinion
of the community in general. Each therefore is a pocket of potential
resistance. Men who have real Friends are less easy to manage or "get
at"; harder for good Authorities to correct or for bad Authorities to
corrupt. Hence if our masters, by force or by propaganda about
"Togetherness" or by unobtrusively making privacy and unplanned leisure
impossible, ever succeed in producing a world where all are Companions
and none are Friends, they will have removed certain dangers, and will
also have taken from us what is almost our strongest safeguard against
complete servitude.

But the dangers are perfectly real. Friendship (as the ancients saw) can
be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice.
It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse. It would
be a waste of time to elaborate the point. What concerns us is not to
expatiate on the badness of bad Friendships but to become aware of the
possible danger in good ones. This love, like the other natural loves,
has its congenital liability to a particular disease.

It will be obvious that the element of secession, of indifference or
deafness (at least on some matters) to the voices of the outer world, is
common to all Friendships, whether good, bad, or merely innocuous. Even
if the common ground of the Friendship is nothing more momentous than
stamp-collecting, the circle rightly and inevitably ignores the views of
the millions who think it a silly occupation and of the thousands who
have merely dabbled in it. The founders of meteorology rightly and
inevitably ignored the views of the millions who still attributed storms
to witchcraft. There is no offence in this. As I know that I should be
an Outsider to a circle of golfers, mathematicians, or motorists, so I
claim the equal right of regarding them as Outsiders to mine. People who
bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another,
often.

The danger is that this partial indifference or deafness to outside
opinion, justified and necessary though it is, may lead to a wholesale
indifference or deafness. The most spectacular instances of this can be
seen not in a circle of friends but in a Theocratic or aristocratic
class. We know what the Priests in Our Lord's time thought of the common
people. The Knights in Froissart's chronicles had neither sympathy nor
mercy for the "outsiders", the churls or peasantry. But this deplorable
indifference was very closely intertwined with a good quality. They
really had, among themselves, a very high standard of valour,
generosity, courtesy and honour. This standard the cautious,
close-fisted churl would have thought merely silly. The Knights, in
maintaining it, were, and had to be, wholly indifferent to his views.
They "didn't give a damn" what he thought. If they had, our own standard
today would be the poorer and the coarser for it. But the habit of "not
giving a damn" grows on a class. To discount the voice of the peasant
where it really ought to be discounted makes it easier to discount his
voice when he cries for justice or mercy. The partial deafness which is
noble and necessary encourages the wholesale deafness which is arrogant
and inhuman.

A circle of friends cannot of course oppress the outer world as a
powerful social class can. But it is subject, on its own scale, to the
same danger. It can come to treat as "outsiders" in a general (and
derogatory) sense those who were quite properly outsiders for a
particular purpose. Thus, like an aristocracy, it can create around it a
vacuum across which no voice will carry. The literary or artistic circle
which began by discounting, perhaps rightly, the plain man's ideas about
literature or art may come to discount equally his idea that they should
pay their bills, cut their nails and behave civilly. Whatever faults the
circle has--and no circle is without them--thus become incurable. But that
is not all. The partial and defensible deafness was based on some kind
of superiority--even if it were only a superior knowledge about stamps.
The sense of superiority will then get itself attached to the total
deafness. The group will disdain as well as ignore those outside it. It
will, in effect, have turned itself into something very like a class. A
_coterie_ is a self-appointed aristocracy.

I said above that in a good Friendship each member often feels humility
towards the rest. He sees that they are splendid and counts himself
lucky to be among them. But unfortunately the _they_ and _them_ are
also, from another point of view _we_ and _us_. Thus the transition from
individual humility to corporate pride is very easy.

I am not thinking of what we should call a social or snobbish pride: a
delight in knowing, and being known to know, distinguished people. That
is quite a different thing. The snob wishes to attach himself to some
group because it is already regarded as an _élite_; friends are in
danger of coming to regard themselves as an _élite_ because they are
already attached. We seek men after our own heart for their own sake and
are then alarmingly or delightfully surprised by the feeling that we
have become an aristocracy. Not that we'd call it that. Every reader who
has known Friendship will probably feel inclined to deny with some heat
that his own circle was ever guilty of such an absurdity. I feel the
same. But in such matters it is best not to begin with ourselves.
However it may be with us, I think we have all recognised some such
tendency in those other circles to which we are the Outsiders.

I was once at some kind of conference where two clergymen, obviously
close friends, began talking about "uncreated energies" other than God.
I asked how there could be any uncreated things except God if the Creed
was right in calling Him the "maker of all things visible and
invisible". Their reply was to glance at one another and laugh. I had no
objection to their laughter, but I wanted an answer in words as well. It
was not at all a sneering or unpleasant laugh. It expressed very much
what Americans would express by saying "Isn't he cute?" It was like the
laughter of jolly grown-ups when an _enfant terrible_ asks the sort of
question that is never asked. You can hardly imagine how inoffensively
it was done, nor how clearly it conveyed the impression that they were
fully aware of living habitually on a higher plane than the rest of us,
that they came among us as Knights among churls or as grown-ups among
children. Very possibly they had an answer to my question and knew that
I was too ignorant to follow it. If they had said in so many words "I'm
afraid it would take too long to explain", I would not be attributing to
them the pride of Friendship. The glance and the laugh are the real
point--the audible and visible embodiment of a corporate superiority
taken for granted and unconcealed. The almost complete inoffensiveness,
the absence of any apparent wish to wound or exult (they were very nice
young men) really underline the Olympian attitude. Here was a sense of
superiority so secure that it could afford to be tolerant, urbane,
unemphatic.

This sense of corporate superiority is not always Olympian; that is,
tranquil and tolerant. It may be Titanic; restive, militant and
embittered. Another time, when I had been addressing an undergraduate
society and some discussion (very properly) followed my paper, a young
man with an expression as tense as that of a rodent so dealt with me
that I had to say, "Look, sir. Twice in the last five minutes you have
as good as called me a liar. If you cannot discuss a question of
criticism without that kind of thing I must leave." I expected he would
do one of two things; lose his temper and redouble his insults, or else
blush and apologise. The startling thing is that he did neither. No new
perturbation was added to the habitual _malaise_ of his expression. He
did not repeat the Lie Direct; but apart from that he went on just as
before. One had come up against an iron curtain. He was forearmed
against the risk of any strictly personal relation, either friendly or
hostile, with such as me. Behind this, almost certainly, there lies a
circle of the Titanic sort--self-dubbed Knights Templars perpetually in
arms to defend a critical Baphomet. We--who are _they_ to them--do not
exist as persons at all. We are specimens; specimens of various Age
Groups, Types, Climates of Opinion, or Interests, to be exterminated.
Deprived of one weapon, they coolly take up another. They are not, in
the ordinary human sense, meeting us at all; they are merely doing a job
of work--spraying (I have heard one use that image) insecticide.

My two nice young clergymen and my not so nice Rodent were on a high
intellectual level. So were that famous set who in Edwardian times
reached the sublime fatuity of calling themselves "the Souls". But the
same feeling of corporate superiority can possess a group of much more
commonplace friends. It will then be flaunted in a cruder way. We have
all seen this done by the "old hands" at school talking in the presence
of a new boy, or two Regulars in the Army talking before a "Temporary";
sometimes by very loud and vulgar friends to impress mere strangers in a
bar or a railway carriage. Such people talk very intimately and
esoterically in order to be overheard. Everyone who is not in the circle
must be shown that he is not in it. Indeed the Friendship may be "about"
almost nothing except the fact that it excludes. In speaking to an
Outsider each member of it delights to mention the others by their
Christian names or nicknames; not although, but because, the Outsider
won't know who he means. A man I once knew was even subtler. He simply
referred to his friends as if we all knew, certainly ought to know, who
they were. "As Richard Button once said to me ...", he would begin. We
were all very young. We never dared to admit that we hadn't heard of
Richard Button. It seemed so obvious that to everyone who was anyone he
must be a household word; "not to know him argued ourselves unknown."
Only much later did we come to realise that no one else had heard of him
either. (Indeed I now have a suspicion that some of these Richard
Buttons, Hezekiah Cromwells, and Eleanor Forsyths had no more existence
than Mrs Harris. But for a year or so we were completely over-awed.)

We can thus detect the pride of Friendship--whether Olympian, Titanic, or
merely vulgar--in many circles of Friends. It would be rash to assume
that our own is safe from its danger; for of course it is in our own
that we should be slowest to recognise it. The danger of such pride is
indeed almost inseparable from Friendly love. Friendship must exclude.
From the innocent and necessary act of excluding to the spirit of
exclusiveness is an easy step; and thence to the degrading pleasure of
exclusiveness. If that is once admitted the downward slope will grow
rapidly steeper. We may never perhaps become Titans or plain cads; we
might--which is in some ways worse--become "Souls". The common vision
which first brought us together may fade quite away. We shall be a
_coterie_ that exists for the sake of being a _coterie_; a little
self-elected (and therefore absurd) aristocracy, basking in the
moonshine of our collective self-approval.

Sometimes a circle in this condition begins to dabble in the world of
practice. Judiciously enlarging itself to admit recruits whose share in
the original common interest is negligible but who are felt to be (in
some undefined sense) "sound men", it becomes a power in the land.
Membership of it comes to have a sort of political importance, though
the politics involved may be only those of a regiment, a college, or a
cathedral close. The manipulation of committees, the capture of jobs
(for sound men) and the united front against the Have-nots now become
its principal occupation, and those who once met to talk about God or
poetry now meet to talk about lectureships or livings. Notice the
justice of their doom. "Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return,"
said God to Adam. In a circle which has thus dwindled into a coven of
wanglers Friendship has sunk back again into the mere practical
Companionship which was its matrix. They are now the same sort of body
as the primitive horde of hunters. Hunters, indeed, is precisely what
they are; and not the kind of hunters I most respect.

The mass of the people, who are never quite right, are never quite
wrong. They are hopelessly mistaken in their belief that every knot of
friends came into existence for the sake of the pleasures of conceit and
superiority. They are, I trust, mistaken in their belief that every
Friendship actually indulges in these pleasures. But they would seem to
be right in diagnosing pride as the danger to which Friendships are
naturally liable. Just because this is the most spiritual of loves the
danger which besets it is spiritual too. Friendship is even, if you
like, angelic. But man needs to be triply protected by humility if he is
to eat the bread of angels without risk.

Perhaps we may now hazard a guess why Scripture uses Friendship so
rarely as an image of the highest love. It is already, in actual fact,
too spiritual to be a good symbol of Spiritual things. The highest does
not stand without the lowest. God can safely represent Himself to us as
Father and Husband because only a lunatic would think that He is
physically our sire or that His marriage with the Church is other than
mystical. But if Friendship were used for this purpose we might mistake
the symbol for the thing symbolised. The danger inherent in it would be
aggravated. We might be further encouraged to mistake that nearness (by
resemblance) to the heavenly life which Friendship certainly displays
for a nearness of approach.

Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save
itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a
subtler enemy, it must, even more whole-heartedly than they, invoke the
divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet. For consider how narrow
its true path is. It must not become what the people call a "mutual
admiration society"; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration, of
Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all. For unless our lives are
to be miserably impoverished it must be for us in our Friendships as it
was for Christiana and her party in _The Pilgrim's Progress_:

  They seemed to be a terror one to the other, for that they could not
  see that glory each one on herself which they could see in each other.
  Now therefore they began to esteem each other better than themselves.
  For you are fairer than I am, said one; and you are more comely than I
  am, said another.

There is in the long run only one way in which we can taste this
illustrious experience with safety. And Bunyan has indicated it in the
same passage. It was in the House of the Interpreter, after they had
been bathed, sealed and freshly clothed in "White Raiment" that the
women saw one another in this light. If we remember the bathing, sealing
and robing, we shall be safe. And the higher the common ground of the
Friendship is, the more necessary the remembrance. In an explicitly
religious Friendship, above all, to forget it would be fatal.

For then it will seem to us that we--we four or five--have chosen one
another, the insight of each finding the intrinsic beauty of the rest,
like to like, a voluntary nobility; that we have ascended above the rest
of mankind by our native powers. The other loves do not invite the same
illusion. Affection obviously requires kinships or at least proximities
which never depended on our own choice. And as for Eros, half the love
songs and half the love poems in the world will tell you that the
Beloved is your fate or destiny, no more your choice than a thunderbolt,
for "it is not in our power to love or hate". Cupid's archery,
genes--anything but ourselves. But in Friendship, being free of all that,
we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years' difference
in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the
choice of one university instead of another, posting to different
regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first
meeting--any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a
Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of
the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples "Ye
have not chosen me, but I have chosen you", can truly say to every group
of Christian friends "You have not chosen one another but I have chosen
you for one another". The Friendship is not a reward for our
discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the
instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.
They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by
Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties,
derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him
through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating
as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the
board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to
hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon
without our Host.

Not that we must always partake of it solemnly. "God who made good
laughter" forbid. It is one of the difficult and delightful subtleties
of life that we must deeply acknowledge certain things to be serious and
yet retain the power and will to treat them often as lightly as a game.
But there will be a time for saying more about this in the next chapter.
For the moment I will only quote Dunbar's beautifully balanced advice:

  Man, please thy Maker, and be merry,
  And give not for this world a cherry.




                               CHAPTER V
                                 Eros


By _Eros_ I mean of course that state which we call "being in love"; or,
if you prefer, that kind of love which lovers are "in". Some readers may
have been surprised when, in an earlier chapter, I described Affection
as the love in which our experience seems to come closest to that of the
animals. Surely, it might be asked, our sexual functions bring us
equally close? This is quite true as regards human sexuality in general.
But I am not going to be concerned with human sexuality simply as such.
Sexuality makes part of our subject only when it becomes an ingredient
in the complex state of "being in love". That sexual experience can
occur without Eros, without being "in love", and that Eros includes
other things besides sexual activity, I take for granted. If you prefer
to put it that way, I am inquiring not into the sexuality which is
common to us and the beasts or even common to all men but into one
uniquely human variation of it which develops within "love"--what I call
Eros. The carnal or animally sexual element within Eros, I intend
(following an old usage) to call Venus. And I mean by Venus what is
sexual not in some cryptic or rarified sense--such as a
depth-psychologist might explore--but in a perfectly obvious sense; what
is known to be sexual by those who experience it; what could be proved
to be sexual by the simplest observations.

Sexuality may operate without Eros or as part of Eros. Let me hasten to
add that I make the distinction simply in order to limit our inquiry and
without any moral implications. I am not at all subscribing to the
popular idea that it is the absence or presence of Eros which makes the
sexual act "impure" or "pure", degraded or fine, unlawful or lawful. If
all who lay together without being in the state of Eros were abominable,
we all come of tainted stock. The times and places in which marriage
depends on Eros are in a small minority. Most of our ancestors were
married off in early youth to partners chosen by their parents on
grounds that had nothing to do with Eros. They went to the act with no
other "fuel", so to speak, than plain animal desire. And they did right;
honest Christian husbands and wives, obeying their fathers and mothers,
discharging to one another their "marriage debt", and bringing up
families in the fear of the Lord. Conversely, this act, done under the
influence of a soaring and iridescent Eros which reduces the role of the
senses to a minor consideration, may yet be plain adultery, may involve
breaking a wife's heart, deceiving a husband, betraying a friend,
polluting hospitality and deserting your children. It has not pleased
God that the distinction between a sin and a duty should turn on fine
feelings. This act, like any other, is justified (or not) by far more
prosaic and definable criteria; by the keeping or breaking of promises,
by justice or injustice, by charity or selfishness, by obedience or
disobedience. My treatment rules out mere sexuality--sexuality without
Eros--on grounds that have nothing to do with morals; because it is
irrelevant to our purpose.

To the evolutionist Eros (the human variation) will be something that
grows out of Venus, a late complication and development of the
immemorial biological impulse. We must not assume, however, that this is
necessarily what happens within the consciousness of the individual.
There may be those who have first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman
and then gone on at a later stage to "fall in love with her". But I
doubt if this is at all common. Very often what comes first is simply a
delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved--a general, unspecified
pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state really
hasn't leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The
fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is
herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned.
If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, "To go
on thinking of her." He is love's contemplative. And when at a later
stage the explicitly sexual element awakes, he will not feel (unless
scientific theories are influencing him) that this had all along been
the root of the whole matter. He is more likely to feel that the
incoming tide of Eros, having demolished many sand-castles and made
islands of many rocks, has now at last with a triumphant seventh wave
flooded this part of his nature also--the little pool of ordinary
sexuality which was there on his beach before the tide came in. Eros
enters him like an invader, taking over and reorganising, one by one,
the institutions of a conquered country. It may have taken over many
others before it reaches the sex in him; and it will reorganise that
too.

No one has indicated the nature of that reorganisation more briefly and
accurately than George Orwell, who disliked it and preferred sexuality
in its native condition, uncontaminated by Eros. In
_Nineteen-Eighty-Four_ his dreadful hero (how much less human than the
four-footed heroes of his excellent _Animal Farm_!), before towsing the
heroine, demands a reassurance, "You like doing this?", he asks, "I
don't mean simply me; I mean the thing in itself." He is not satisfied
till he gets the answer, "I adore it." This little dialogue defines the
reorganisation. Sexual desire, without Eros, wants _it_, the _thing in
itself_; Eros wants the Beloved.

The _thing_ is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within
one's own body. We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a
lustful man prowling the streets, that he "wants a woman". Strictly
speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for
which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much
he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her
five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has
smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman,
but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable
fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can
give. No lover in the world ever sought the embraces of the woman he
loved as the result of a calculation, however unconscious, that they
would be more pleasurable than those of any other woman. If he raised
the question he would, no doubt, expect that this would be so. But to
raise it would be to step outside the world of Eros altogether. The only
man I know of who ever did raise it was Lucretius, and he was certainly
not in love when he did. It is interesting to note his answer. That
austere voluptuary gave it as his opinion that love actually impairs
sexual pleasure. The emotion was a distraction. It spoiled the cool and
critical receptivity of his palate. (A great poet; but "Lord, what
beastly fellows these Romans were!")

The reader will notice that Eros thus wonderfully transforms what is
_par excellence_ a Need-pleasure into the most Appreciative of all
pleasures. It is the nature of a Need-pleasure to show us the object
solely in relation to our need, even our momentary need. But in Eros, a
Need, at its most intense, sees the object most intensely as a thing
admirable in herself, important far beyond her relation to the lover's
need.

If we had not all experienced this, if we were mere logicians, we might
boggle at the conception of desiring a human being, as distinct from
desiring any pleasure, comfort, or service that human being can give.
And it is certainly hard to explain. Lovers themselves are trying to
express part of it (not much) when they say they would like to "eat" one
another. Milton has expressed more when he fancies angelic creatures
with bodies made of light who can achieve total interpenetration instead
of our mere embraces. Charles Williams has said something of it in the
words, "Love you? I _am_ you."

Without Eros sexual desire, like every other desire, is a fact about
ourselves. Within Eros it is rather about the Beloved. It becomes almost
a mode of perception, entirely a mode of expression. It feels objective;
something outside us, in the real world. That is why Eros, though the
king of pleasures, always (at his height) has the air of regarding
pleasure as a by-product. To think about it would plunge us back in
ourselves, in our own nervous system. It would kill Eros, as you can
"kill" the finest mountain prospect by locating it all in your own
retina and optic nerves. Anyway, whose pleasure? For one of the first
things Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and
receiving.

Hitherto I have been trying merely to describe, not to evaluate. But
certain moral questions now inevitably arise, and I must not conceal my
own view of them. It is submitted rather than asserted, and of course
open to correction by better men, better lovers and better Christians.

It has been widely held in the past, and is perhaps held by many
unsophisticated people to-day, that the spiritual danger of Eros arises
almost entirely from the carnal element within it; that Eros is
"noblest" or "purest" when Venus is reduced to the minimum. The older
moral theologians certainly seem to have thought that the danger we
chiefly had to guard against in marriage was that of a soul-destroying
surrender to the senses. It will be noticed, however, that this is not
the Scriptural approach. St. Paul, dissuading his converts from
marriage, says nothing about that side of the matter except to
discourage prolonged abstinence from Venus (_I Cor._ VII, 5). What he
fears is pre-occupation, the need of constantly "pleasing"--that is,
considering--one's partner, the multiple distractions of domesticity. It
is marriage itself, not the marriage bed, that will be likely to hinder
us from waiting uninterruptedly on God. And surely St. Paul is right? If
I may trust my own experience, it is (within marriage as without) the
practical and prudential cares of this world, and even the smallest and
most prosaic of those cares, that are the great distraction. The
gnat-like cloud of petty anxieties and decisions about the conduct of
the next hour have interfered with my prayers more often than any
passion or appetite whatever. The great, permanent temptation of
marriage is not to sensuality but (quite bluntly) to avarice. With all
proper respect to the medieval guides, I cannot help remembering that
they were all celibates, and probably did not know what Eros does to our
sexuality; how, far from aggravating, he reduces the nagging and
addictive character of mere appetite. And that not simply by satisfying
it. Eros, without diminishing desire, makes abstinence easier. He tends,
no doubt, to a pre-occupation with the Beloved which can indeed be an
obstacle to the spiritual life; but not chiefly a sensual
pre-occupation.

The real spiritual danger in Eros as a whole lies, I believe, elsewhere.
I will return to the point. For the moment, I want to speak of the
danger which at present, in my opinion, especially haunts the act of
love. This is a subject on which I disagree, not with the human race
(far from it), but with many of its gravest spokesmen. I believe we are
all being encouraged to take Venus too seriously; at any rate, with a
wrong kind of seriousness. All my life a ludicrous and portentous
solemnisation of sex has been going on.

One author tells us that Venus should recur through the married life in
"a solemn, sacramental rhythm". A young man to whom I had described as
"pornographic" a novel that he much admired, replied with genuine
bewilderment, "Pornographic? But how can it be? It treats the whole
thing so seriously"--as if a long face were a sort of moral disinfectant.
Our friends who harbour Dark Gods, the "pillar of blood" school, attempt
seriously to restore something like the Phallic religion. Our
advertisements, at their sexiest, paint the whole business in terms of
the rapt, the intense, the swoony-devout; seldom a hint of gaiety. And
the psychologists have so bedevilled us with the infinite importance of
complete sexual adjustment and the all but impossibility of achieving
it, that I could believe some young couples now go to it with the
complete works of Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis and Dr. Stopes
spread out on bed-tables all round them. Cheery old Ovid, who never
either ignored a mole-hill or made a mountain of it, would be more to
the point. We have reached the stage at which nothing is more needed
than a roar of old-fashioned laughter.

But, it will be replied, the thing _is_ serious. Yes; quadruply so.
First, theologically, because this is the body's share in marriage
which, by God's choice, is the mystical image of the union between God
and Man. Secondly, as what I will venture to call a sub-Christian, or
Pagan or natural sacrament, our human participation in, and exposition
of, the natural forces of life and fertility--the marriage of Sky-Father
and Earth-Mother. Thirdly, on the moral level, in view of the
obligations involved and the incalculable momentousness of being a
parent and ancestor. Finally it has (sometimes, not always) a great
emotional seriousness in the minds of the participants.

But eating is also serious; theologically, as the vehicle of the Blessed
Sacrament; ethically in view of our duty to feed the hungry; socially,
because the table is from time immemorial the place for talk; medically,
as all dyspeptics know. Yet we do not bring bluebooks to dinner nor
behave there as if we were in church. And it is _gourmets_, not saints,
who come nearest to doing so. Animals are always serious about food.

We must not be totally serious about Venus. Indeed we can't be totally
serious without doing violence to our humanity. It is not for nothing
that every language and literature in the world is full of jokes about
sex. Many of them may be dull or disgusting and nearly all of them are
old. But we must insist that they embody an attitude to Venus which in
the long run endangers the Christian life far less than a reverential
gravity. We must not attempt to find an absolute in the flesh. Banish
play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false
goddess. She will be even falser than the Aphrodite of the Greeks; for
they, even while they worshipped her, knew that she was
"laughter-loving". The mass of the people are perfectly right in their
conviction that Venus is a partly comic spirit. We are under no
obligation at all to sing all our love-duets in the throbbing,
world-without-end, heart-breaking manner of Tristan and Isolde; let us
often sing like Papageno and Papagena instead.

Venus herself will have a terrible revenge if we take her (occasional)
seriousness at its face value. And that in two ways. One is most
comically--though with no comic intention--illustrated by Sir Thomas
Browne when he says that her service is "the foolishest act a wise man
commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his
cool'd imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy
piece of folly he had committed". But if he had gone about that act with
less solemnity in the first place he would not have suffered this
"dejection". If his imagination had not been misled, its cooling would
have brought no such revulsion. But Venus has another and worse revenge.

She herself is a mocking, mischievous spirit, far more elf than deity,
and makes game of us. When all external circumstances are fittest for
her service she will leave one or both the lovers totally indisposed for
it. When every overt act is impossible and even glances cannot be
exchanged--in trains, in shops, and at interminable parties--she will
assail them with all her force. An hour later, when time and place
agree, she will have mysteriously withdrawn; perhaps from only one of
them. What a pother this must raise--what resentments, self-pities,
suspicions, wounded vanities and all the current chatter about
"frustration"--in those who have deified her! But sensible lovers laugh.
It is all part of the game; a game of catch-as-catch-can, and the
escapes and tumbles and head-on collisions are to be treated as a romp.

For I can hardly help regarding it as one of God's jokes that a passion
so soaring, so apparently transcendent, as Eros, should thus be linked
in incongruous symbiosis with a bodily appetite which, like any other
appetite, tactlessly reveals its connections with such mundane factors
as weather, health, diet, circulation, and digestion. In Eros at times
we seem to be flying; Venus gives us the sudden twitch that reminds us
we are really captive balloons. It is a continual demonstration of the
truth that we are composite creatures, rational animals, akin on one
side to the angels, on the other to tom-cats. It is a bad thing not to
be able to take a joke. Worse, not to take a divine joke; made, I grant
you, at our expense, but also (who doubts it?) for our endless benefit.

Man has held three views of his body. First there is that of those
ascetic Pagans who called it the prison or the "tomb" of the soul, and
of Christians like Fisher to whom it was a "sack of dung", food for
worms, filthy, shameful, a source of nothing but temptation to bad men
and humiliation to good ones. Then there are the Neo-Pagans (they seldom
know Greek), the nudists and the sufferers from Dark Gods, to whom the
body is glorious. But thirdly we have the view which St. Francis
expressed by calling his body "Brother Ass". All three may be--I am not
sure--defensible; but give me St. Francis for my money.

_Ass_ is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either
revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate,
patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now
a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. There's
no living with it till we recognise that one of its functions in our
lives is to play the part of buffoon. Until some theory has
sophisticated them, every man, woman and child in the world knows this.
The fact that we have bodies is the oldest joke there is. Eros (like
death, figure-drawing, and the study of medicine) may at moments cause
us to take it with total seriousness. The error consists in concluding
that Eros should always do so and permanently abolish the joke. But this
is not what happens. The very faces of all the happy lovers we know make
it clear. Lovers, unless their love is very short-lived, again and again
feel an element not only of comedy, not only of play, but even of
buffoonery, in the body's expression of Eros. And the body would
frustrate us if this were not so. It would be too clumsy an instrument
to render love's music unless its very clumsiness could be felt as
adding to the total experience its own grotesque charm--a sub-plot or
antimasque miming with its own hearty rough-and-tumble what the soul
enacts in statelier fashion. (Thus in old comedies the lyric loves of
the hero and heroine are at once parodied and corroborated by some much
more earthy affair between a Touchstone and an Audrey or a valet and a
chambermaid). The highest does not stand without the lowest. There is
indeed at certain moments a high poetry in the flesh itself; but also,
by your leave, an irreducible element of obstinate and ludicrous
un-poetry. If it does not make itself felt on one occasion, it will on
another. Far better plant it foresquare within the drama of Eros as
comic relief than pretend you haven't noticed it.

For indeed we require this relief. The poetry is there as well as the
un-poetry; the gravity of Venus as well as her levity, the _gravis
ardor_ or burning weight of desire. Pleasure, pushed to its extreme,
shatters us like pain. The longing for a union which only the flesh can
mediate while the flesh, our mutually excluding bodies, renders it
forever unattainable, can have the grandeur of a metaphysical pursuit.
Amorousness as well as grief can bring tears to the eyes. But Venus does
not always come thus "entire, fastened to her prey", and the fact that
she sometimes does so is the very reason for preserving always a hint of
playfulness in our attitude to her. When natural things look most
divine, the demoniac is just round the corner.

This refusal to be quite immersed--this recollection of the levity even
when, for the moment, only the gravity is displayed--is especially
relevant to a certain attitude which Venus, in her intensity, evokes
from most (I believe, not all) pairs of lovers. This act can invite the
man to an extreme, though short-lived, masterfulness, to the dominance
of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme
abjection and surrender. Hence the roughness, even fierceness, of some
erotic play; the "lover's pinch which hurts and is desired". How should
a sane couple think of this? or a Christian couple permit it?

I think it is harmless and wholesome on one condition. We must recognise
that we have here to do with what I called "the Pagan sacrament" in sex.
In Friendship, as we noticed, each participant stands for precisely
himself--the contingent individual he is. But in the act of love we are
not merely ourselves. We are also representatives. It is here no
impoverishment but an enrichment to be aware that forces older and less
personal than we work through us. In us all the masculinity and
femininity of the world, all that is assailant and responsive, are
momentarily focused. The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the
Earth-Mother; he does play Form, and she Matter. But we must give full
value to the word _play_. Of course neither "plays a part" in the sense
of being a hypocrite. But each plays a part or role in--well, in
something which is comparable to a mystery-play or ritual (at one
extreme) and to a masque or even a charade (at the other).

A woman who accepted as literally her own this extreme self-surrender
would be an idolatress offering to a man what belongs only to God. And a
man would have to be the coxcomb of all coxcombs, and indeed a
blasphemer, if he arrogated to himself, as the mere person he is, the
sort of sovereignty to which Venus for a moment exalts him. But what
cannot lawfully be yielded or claimed can be lawfully enacted. Outside
this ritual or drama he and she are two immortal souls, two free-born
adults, two citizens. We should be much mistaken if we supposed that
those marriages where this mastery is most asserted and acknowledged in
the act of Venus were those where the husband is most likely to be
dominant in the married life as a whole; the reverse is perhaps more
probable. But within the rite or drama they become a god and goddess
between whom there is no equality--whose relations are asymmetrical.

Some will think it strange I should find an element of ritual or
masquerade in that action which is often regarded as the most real, the
most unmasked and sheerly genuine, we ever do. Are we not our true
selves when naked? In a sense, no. The word _naked_ was originally a
past participle; the naked man was the man who had undergone a process
of _naking_, that is, of stripping or peeling (you used the verb of nuts
and fruit). Time out of mind the naked man has seemed to our ancestors
not the natural but the abnormal man; not the man who has abstained from
dressing but the man who has been for some reason undressed. And it is a
simple fact--anyone can observe it at a men's bathing place--that nudity
emphasises common humanity and soft-pedals what is individual. In that
way we are "more ourselves" when clothed. By nudity the lovers cease to
be solely John and Mary; the universal He and She are emphasised. You
could almost say they _put on_ nakedness as a ceremonial robe--or as the
costume for a charade. For we must still beware--and never more than when
we thus partake of the Pagan sacrament in our love-passages--of being
serious in the wrong way. The Sky-Father himself is only a Pagan dream
of One far greater than Zeus and far more masculine than the male. And a
mortal man is not even the Sky-Father, and cannot really wear his crown.
Only a copy of it, done in tinselled paper. I do not call it this in
contempt. I like ritual; I like private theatricals; I even like
charades. Paper crowns have their legitimate, and (in the proper
context) their serious, uses. They are not in the last resort much
flimsier ("if imagination mend them") than all earthly dignities.

But I dare not mention this Pagan sacrament without turning aside to
guard against any danger of confusing it with an incomparably higher
mystery. As nature crowns man in that brief action, so the Christian law
has crowned him in the permanent relationship of marriage, bestowing--or
should I say, inflicting?--a certain "headship" on him. This is a very
different coronation. And as we could easily take the natural mystery
too seriously, so we might take the Christian mystery not seriously
enough. Christian writers (notably Milton) have sometimes spoken of the
husband's headship with a complacency to make the blood run cold. We
must go back to our Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in
so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her
as Christ loved the Church--read on--_and gave his life for her_ (_Eph._
V, 25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband
we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a
crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy
of him, is--in her own mere nature--least lovable. For the Church has no
beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes
her, lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in
the joys of any man's marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and
sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying
(never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not
acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm
Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle,
and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is
Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. He is a
King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl
will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears.

To say this is not to say that there is any virtue or wisdom in making a
marriage that involves such misery. There is no wisdom or virtue in
seeking unnecessary martyrdom or deliberately courting persecution; yet
it is, none the less, the persecuted or martyred Christian in whom the
pattern of the Master is most unambiguously realised. So, in these
terrible marriages, once they have come about, the "headship" of the
husband, if only he can sustain it, is most Christ-like.

The sternest feminist need not grudge my sex the crown offered to it
either in the Pagan or in the Christian mystery. For the one is of paper
and the other of thorns. The real danger is not that husbands may grasp
the latter too eagerly; but that they will allow or compel their wives
to usurp it.

From Venus, the carnal ingredient within Eros, I now turn to Eros as a
whole. Here we shall see the same pattern repeated. As Venus within Eros
does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We
may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves
otherwise. Everyone knows that it is useless to try to separate lovers
by proving to them that their marriage will be an unhappy one. This is
not only because they will disbelieve you. They usually will, no doubt.
But even if they believed, they would not be dissuaded. For it is the
very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness
with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms. Even if the two
lovers are mature and experienced people who know that broken hearts
heal in the end and can clearly foresee that, if they once steeled
themselves to go through the present agony of parting, they would almost
certainly be happier ten years hence than marriage is at all likely to
make them--even then, they would not part. To Eros all these calculations
are irrelevant--just as the coolly brutal judgment of Lucretius is
irrelevant to Venus. Even when it becomes clear beyond all evasion that
marriage with the Beloved cannot possibly lead to happiness--when it
cannot even profess to offer any other life than that of tending an
incurable invalid, of hopeless poverty, of exile, or of disgrace--Eros
never hesitates to say, "Better this than parting. Better to be
miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided
they break together." If the voice within us does not say this, it is
not the voice of Eros.

This is the grandeur and terror of love. But notice, as before, side by
side with this grandeur, the playfulness. Eros, as well as Venus, is the
subject of countless jokes. And even when the circumstances of the two
lovers are so tragic that no bystander could keep back his tears, they
themselves--in want, in hospital wards, on visitors' days in jail--will
sometimes be surprised by a merriment which strikes the onlooker (but
not them) as unbearably pathetic. Nothing is falser than the idea that
mockery is necessarily hostile. Until they have a baby to laugh at,
lovers are always laughing at each other.

It is in the grandeur of Eros that the seeds of danger are concealed. He
has spoken like a god. His total commitment, his reckless disregard of
happiness, his transcendence of self-regard, sound like a message from
the eternal world.

And yet it cannot, just as it stands, be the voice of God Himself. For
Eros, speaking with that very grandeur and displaying that very
transcendence of self, may urge to evil as well as to good. Nothing is
shallower than the belief that a love which leads to sin is always
qualitatively lower--more animal or more trivial--than one which leads to
faithful, fruitful and Christian marriage. The love which leads to cruel
and perjured unions, even to suicide-pacts and murder, is not likely to
be wandering lust or idle sentiment. It may well be Eros in all his
splendour; heartbreakingly sincere; ready for every sacrifice except
renunciation.

There have been schools of thought which accepted the voice of Eros as
something actually transcendent and tried to justify the absoluteness of
his commands. Plato will have it that "falling in love" is the mutual
recognition on earth of souls which have been singled out for one
another in a previous and celestial existence. To meet the Beloved is to
realise "We loved before we were born". As a myth to express what lovers
feel this is admirable. But if one accepted it literally one would be
faced by an embarrassing consequence. We should have to conclude that in
that heavenly and forgotten life affairs were no better managed than
here. For Eros may unite the most unsuitable yokefellows; many unhappy,
and predictably unhappy, marriages were love-matches.

A theory more likely to be accepted in our own day is what we may call
Shavian--Shaw himself might have said "metabiological"--Romanticism.
According to Shavian Romanticism the voice of Eros is the voice of the
_élan vital_ or Life Force, the "evolutionary appetite". In overwhelming
a particular couple it is seeking parents (or ancestors) for the
superman. It is indifferent both to their personal happiness and to the
rules of morality because it aims at something which Shaw thinks very
much more important: the future perfection of our species. But if all
this were true it hardly makes clear whether--and if so, why--we should
obey it. All pictures yet offered us of the superman are so unattractive
that one might well vow celibacy at once to avoid the risk of begetting
him. And secondly, this theory surely leads to the conclusion that the
Life Force does not very well understand its (or her? or his?) own
business. So far as we can see the existence or intensity of Eros
between two people is no warrant that their offspring will be especially
satisfactory, or even that they will have offspring at all. Two good
"strains" (in the stockbreeders' sense), not two good lovers, is the
recipe for fine children. And what on earth was the Life Force doing
through all those countless generations when the begetting of children
depended very little on mutual Eros and very much on arranged marriages,
slavery, and rape? Has it only just thought of this bright idea for
improving the species?

Neither the Platonic nor the Shavian type of erotic transcendentalism
can help a Christian. We are not worshippers of the Life Force and we
know nothing of previous existences. We must not give unconditional
obedience to the voice of Eros when he speaks most like a god. Neither
must we ignore or attempt to deny the god-like quality. This love is
really and truly like Love Himself. In it there is a real nearness to
God (by Resemblance); but not, therefore and necessarily, a nearness of
Approach. Eros, honoured so far as love of God and charity to our
fellows will allow, may become for us a means of Approach. His total
commitment is a paradigm or example, built into our natures, of the love
we ought to exercise towards God and Man. As Nature, for the Nature
lover, gives a content to the word _glory_, so this gives a content to
the word _Charity_. It is as if Christ said to us through Eros,
"Thus--just like this--with this prodigality--not counting the cost--you are
to love me and the least of my brethren." Our conditional honour to Eros
will of course vary with our circumstances. Of some a total renunciation
(but not a contempt) is required. Others, with Eros as their fuel and
also as their model, can embark on the married life. Within which Eros,
of himself, will never be enough--will indeed survive only in so far as
he is continually chastened and corroborated by higher principles.

But Eros, honoured without reservation and obeyed unconditionally,
becomes a demon. And this is just how he claims to be honoured and
obeyed. Divinely indifferent to our selfishness, he is also demoniacally
rebellious to every claim of God or Man that would oppose him. Hence as
the poet says:

  People in love cannot be moved by kindness,
  And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.

_Martyrs_ is exactly right. Years ago when I wrote about medieval
love-poetry and described its strange, half make-believe, "religion of
love," I was blind enough to treat this as an almost purely literary
phenomenon. I know better now. Eros by his nature invites it. Of all
loves he is, at his height, most god-like; therefore most prone to
demand our worship. Of himself he always tends to turn "being in love"
into a sort of religion.

Theologians have often feared, in this love, a danger of idolatry. I
think they meant by this that the lovers might idolise one another. That
does not seem to me to be the real danger; certainly not in marriage.
The deliciously plain prose and business-like intimacy of married life
render it absurd. So does the Affection in which Eros is almost
invariably clothed. Even in courtship I question whether anyone who has
felt the thirst for the Uncreated, or even dreamed of feeling it, ever
supposed that the Beloved could satisfy it. As a fellow-pilgrim pierced
with the very same desire, that is, as a Friend, the Beloved may be
gloriously and helpfully relevant; but as an object for it--well (I would
not be rude), ridiculous. The real danger seems to me not that the
lovers will idolise each other but that they will idolise Eros himself.

I do not of course mean that they will build altars or say prayers to
him. The idolatry I speak of can be seen in the popular
misinterpretation of Our Lord's words "Her sins, which are many, are
forgiven her, for she loved much" (_Luke_ VII, 47). From the context,
and especially from the preceding parable of the debtors, it is clear
that this must mean: "The greatness of her love for Me is evidence of
the greatness of the sins I have forgiven her." (The _for_ here is like
the _for_ in "He can't have gone out, _for_ his hat is still hanging in
the hall"; the presence of the hat is not the cause of his being in the
house but a probable proof that he is). But thousands of people take it
quite differently. They first assume, with no evidence, that her sins
were sins against chastity, though, for all we know, they may have been
usury, dishonest shopkeeping, or cruelty to children. And they then take
Our Lord to be saying, "I forgive her unchastity because she was so much
in love." The implication is that a great Eros extenuates--almost
sanctions--almost sanctifies--any actions it leads to.

When lovers say of some act that we might blame, "Love made us do it,"
notice the tone. A man saying, "I did it because I was frightened," or
"I did it because I was angry", speaks quite differently. He is putting
forward an excuse for what he feels to require excusing. But the lovers
are seldom doing quite that. Notice how tremulously, almost how
devoutly, they say the word _love_, not so much pleading an "extenuating
circumstance" as appealing to an authority. The confession can be almost
a boast. There can be a shade of defiance in it. They "feel like
martyrs." In extreme cases what their words really express is a demure
yet unshakable allegiance to the god of love.

"These reasons in love's law have passed for good," says Milton's
Dalila. That is the point; _in love's law_. "In love," we have our own
"law", a religion of our own, our own god. Where a true Eros is present
resistance to his commands feels like apostasy, and what are really (by
the Christian standard) temptations speak with the voice of
duties--quasi-religious duties, acts of pious zeal to Love. He builds his
own religion round the lovers. Benjamin Constant has noticed how he
creates for them, in a few weeks or months, a joint past which seems to
them immemorial. They recur to it continually with wonder and reverence,
as the Psalmists recur to the history of Israel. It is in fact the Old
Testament of Love's religion; the record of love's judgments and mercies
towards his chosen pair up to the moment when they first knew they were
lovers. After that, its New Testament begins. They are now under a new
law, under what corresponds (in this religion) to Grace. They are new
creatures. The "spirit" of Eros supersedes all laws, and they must not
"grieve" it.

It seems to sanction all sorts of actions they would not otherwise have
dared. I do not mean solely, or chiefly, acts that violate chastity.
They are just as likely to be acts of injustice or uncharity against the
outer world. They will seem like proofs of piety and zeal towards Eros.
The pair can say to one another in an almost sacrificial spirit, "It is
for love's sake that I have neglected my parents--left my
children--cheated my partner--failed my friend at his greatest need."
These reasons in love's law have passed for good. The votaries may even
come to feel a particular merit in such sacrifices; what costlier
offering can be laid on love's altar than one's conscience?

And all the time the grim joke is that this Eros whose voice seems to
speak from the eternal realm is not himself necessarily even permanent.
He is notoriously the most mortal of our loves. The world rings with
complaints of his fickleness. What is baffling is the combination of
this fickleness with his protestations of permanency. To be in love is
both to intend and to promise lifelong fidelity. Love makes vows
unasked; can't be deterred from making them. "I will be ever true," are
almost the first words he utters. Not hypocritically but sincerely. No
experience will cure him of the delusion. We have all heard of people
who are in love again every few years; each time sincerely convinced
that "_this_ time it's the real thing", that their wanderings are over,
that they have found their true love and will themselves be true till
death.

And yet Eros is in a sense right to make this promise. The event of
falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as
intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it
has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite
itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and
planted the interests of another in the centre of our being.
Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one
person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a
foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us
without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that. Simply
to relapse from it, merely to "fall out of" love again, is--if I may coin
the ugly word--a sort of _disredemption_. Eros is driven to promise what
Eros of himself cannot perform.

Can we be in this selfless liberation for a lifetime? Hardly for a week.
Between the best possible lovers this high condition is intermittent.
The old self soon turns out to be not so dead as he pretended--as after a
religious conversion. In either he may be momentarily knocked flat; he
will soon be up again; if not on his feet, at least on his elbow, if not
roaring, at least back to his surly grumbling or his mendicant whine.
And Venus will often slip back into mere sexuality.

But these lapses will not destroy a marriage between two "decent and
sensible" people. The couple whose marriage will certainly be endangered
by them, and possibly ruined, are those who have idolised Eros. They
thought he had the power and truthfulness of a god. They expected that
mere feeling would do for them, and permanently, all that was necessary.
When this expectation is disappointed they throw the blame on Eros or,
more usually, on their partners. In reality, however, Eros, having made
his gigantic promise and shown you in glimpses what its performance
would be like, has "done his stuff". He, like a godparent, makes the
vows; it is we who must keep them. It is we who must labour to bring our
daily life into even closer accordance with what the glimpses have
revealed. We must do the works of Eros when Eros is not present. This
all good lovers know, though those who are not reflective or articulate
will be able to express it only in a few conventional phrases about
"taking the rough along with the smooth", not "expecting too much",
having "a little common sense", and the like. And all good Christian
lovers know that this programme, modest as it sounds, will not be
carried out except by humility, charity and divine grace; that it is
indeed the whole Christian life seen from one particular angle.

Thus Eros, like the other loves, but more strikingly because of his
strength, sweetness, terror and high port, reveals his true status. He
cannot of himself be what, nevertheless, he must be if he is to remain
Eros. He needs help; therefore needs to be ruled. The god dies or
becomes a demon unless he obeys God. It would be well if, in such case,
he always died. But he may live on, mercilessly chaining together two
mutual tormentors, each raw all over with the poison of hate-in-love,
each ravenous to receive and implacably refusing to give, jealous,
suspicious, resentful, struggling for the upper hand, determined to be
free and to allow no freedom, living on "scenes". Read _Anna Karenina_,
and do not fancy that such things happen only in Russia. The lovers' old
hyperbole of "eating" each other can come horribly near to the truth.




                               CHAPTER VI
                                Charity


William Morris wrote a poem called _Love is Enough_ and someone is said
to have reviewed it briefly in the words "It isn't". Such has been the
burden of this book. The natural loves are not self-sufficient.
Something else, at first vaguely described as "decency and common
sense", but later revealed as goodness, and finally as the whole
Christian life in one particular relation, must come to the help of the
mere feeling if the feeling is to be kept sweet.

To say this is not to belittle the natural loves but to indicate where
their real glory lies. It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it
will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll
and cut its own lawns. A garden is a good thing but that is not the sort
of goodness it has. It will remain a garden, as distinct from a
wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it. Its real glory
is of quite a different kind. The very fact that it needs constant
weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory. It teems with life. It
glows with colour and smells like heaven and puts forward at every hour
of a summer day beauties which man could never have created and could
not even, on his own resources, have imagined. If you want to see the
difference between its contribution and the gardener's, put the
commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes, rakes, shears, and
packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy and fecundity beside
dead, sterile things. Just so, our "decency and common sense" show grey
and deathlike beside the geniality of love. And when the garden is in
its full glory the gardener's contributions to that glory will still
have been in a sense paltry compared with those of nature. Without life
springing from the earth, without rain, light and heat descending from
the sky, he could do nothing. When he has done all, he has merely
encouraged here and discouraged there, powers and beauties that have a
different source. But his share, though small, is indispensable and
laborious. When God planted a garden He set a man over it and set the
man under Himself. When He planted the garden of our nature and caused
the flowering, fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will to "dress"
them. Compared with them it is dry and cold. And unless His grace comes
down, like the rain and the sunshine, we shall use this tool to little
purpose. But its laborious--and largely negative--services are
indispensable. If they were needed when the garden was still Paradisal,
how much more now when the soil has gone sour and the worst weeds seem
to thrive on it best? But heaven forbid we should work in the spirit of
prigs and Stoics. While we hack and prune we know very well that what we
are hacking and pruning is big with a splendour and vitality which our
rational will could never of itself have supplied. To liberate that
splendour, to let it become fully what it is trying to be, to have tall
trees instead of scrubby tangles, and sweet apples instead of crabs, is
part of our purpose.

But only part. For now we must face a topic that I have long postponed.
Hitherto hardly anything has been said in this book about our natural
loves as rivals to the love of God. Now the question can no longer be
avoided. There were two reasons for my delay.

One--already hinted--is that this question is not the place at which most
of us need begin. It is seldom, at the outset, "addressed to our
condition." For most of us the true rivalry lies between the self and
the human Other, not yet between the human Other and God. It is
dangerous to press upon a man the duty of getting beyond earthly love
when his real difficulty lies in getting so far. And it is no doubt easy
enough to love the fellow-creature less and to imagine that this is
happening because we are learning to love God more, when the real reason
may be quite different. We may be only "mistaking the decays of nature
for the increase of Grace". Many people do not find it really difficult
to hate their wives or mothers. M. Mauriac, in a fine scene, pictures
the other disciples stunned and bewildered by this strange command, but
not Judas. He laps it up easily.

But to have stressed the rivalry earlier in this book would have been
premature in another way also. The claim to divinity which our loves so
easily make can be refuted without going so far as that. The loves prove
that they are unworthy to take the place of God by the fact that they
cannot even remain themselves and do what they promise to do without
God's help. Why prove that some petty princeling is not the lawful
Emperor when without the Emperor's support he cannot even keep his
subordinate throne and make peace in his little province for half a
year? Even for their own sakes the loves must submit to be second things
if they are to remain the things they want to be. In this yoke lies
their true freedom; they "are taller when they bow". For when God rules
in a human heart, though He may sometimes have to remove certain of its
native authorities altogether, He often continues others in their
offices and, by subjecting their authority to His, gives it for the
first time a firm basis. Emerson has said, "When half-gods go, the gods
arrive." That is a very doubtful maxim. Better say, "When God arrives
(and only then) the half-gods can remain." Left to themselves they
either vanish or become demons. Only in His name can they with beauty
and security "wield their little tridents". The rebellious slogan "All
for love" is really love's death warrant (date of execution, for the
moment, left blank).

But the question of the Rivalry, for these reasons long postponed, must
now be treated. In any earlier period, except the Nineteenth Century, it
would have loomed large throughout a book on this subject. If the
Victorians needed the reminder that love is not enough, older
theologians were always saying very loudly that (natural) love is likely
to be a great deal too much. The danger of loving our fellow creatures
too little was less present to their minds than that of loving them
idolatrously. In every wife, mother, child and friend they saw a
possible rival to God. So of course does Our Lord (_Luke_ XIV, 26).

There is one method of dissuading us from inordinate love of the
fellow-creature which I find myself forced to reject at the very outset.
I do so with trembling, for it met me in the pages of a great saint and
a great thinker to whom my own glad debts are incalculable.

In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine
describes the desolation in which the death of his friend Nebridius
plunged him (_Confessions_ IV, 10). Then he draws a moral. This is what
comes, he says, of giving one's heart to anything but God. All human
beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may
lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only
Beloved who will never pass away.

Of course this is excellent sense. Don't put your goods in a leaky
vessel. Don't spend too much on a house you may be turned out of. And
there is no man alive who responds more naturally than I to such canny
maxims. I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none
makes so strong an appeal to my nature as "Careful! This might lead you
to suffering".

To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond
to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ.
If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to
confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited
liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him
less. And who could conceivably begin to love God on such a prudential
ground--because the security (so to speak) is better? Who could even
include it among the grounds for loving? Would you choose a wife or a
Friend--if it comes to that, would you choose a dog--in this spirit? One
must be outside the world of love, of all loves, before one thus
calculates. Eros, lawless Eros, preferring the Beloved to happiness, is
more like Love Himself than this.

I think that this passage in the _Confessions_ is less a part of St.
Augustine's Christendom than a hangover from the high-minded Pagan
philosophies in which he grew up. It is closer to Stoic "apathy" or
neo-Platonic mysticism than to charity. We follow One who wept over
Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus, and, loving all, yet had one
disciple whom, in a special sense, he "loved". St. Paul has a higher
authority with us than St. Augustine--St. Paul who shows no sign that he
would not have suffered like a man, and no feeling that he ought not so
to have suffered, if Epaphroditus had died. (_Philem._ II, 27).

Even if it were granted that insurances against heartbreak were our
highest wisdom, does God Himself offer them? Apparently not. Christ
comes at last to say "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

There is no escape along the lines St. Augustine suggests. Nor along any
other lines. There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be
vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and
possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you
must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully
round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it
up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that
casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be
broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The
alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is
damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe
from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary
to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It
is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason. "I
knew thee that thou wert a hard man." Christ did not teach and suffer
that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own
happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds
whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom
he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the
sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering
them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to
be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break,
so be it.

It remains certainly true that all natural loves can be inordinate.
_Inordinate_ does not mean "insufficiently cautious". Nor does it mean
"too big". It is not a quantitative term. It is probably impossible to
love any human being simply "too much". We may love him too much _in
proportion to_ our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for
God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the
inordinacy. But even this must be refined upon. Otherwise we shall
trouble some who are very much on the right road but alarmed because
they cannot feel towards God so warm a sensible emotion as they feel for
the earthly Beloved. It is much to be wished--at least I think so--that we
all, at all times, could. We must pray that this gift should be given
us. But the question whether we are loving God or the earthly Beloved
"more" is not, so far as concerns our Christian duty, a question about
the comparative intensity of two feelings. The real question is, which
(when the alternative comes) do you serve, or choose, or put first? To
which claim does your will, in the last resort, yield?

As so often, Our Lord's own words are both far fiercer and far more
tolerable than those of the theologians. He says nothing about guarding
against earthly loves for fear we might be hurt; He says something that
cracks like a whip about trampling them all under foot the moment they
hold us back from following Him. "If any man come to me and hate not his
father and mother and wife ... and his own life also, he cannot be my
disciple" (_Luke_ XIV, 26).

But how are we to understand the word _hate_? That Love Himself should
be commanding what we ordinarily mean by hatred--commanding us to cherish
resentment, to gloat over another's misery, to delight in injuring
him--is almost a contradiction in terms. I think Our Lord, in the sense
here intended, "hated" St. Peter when he said, "Get thee behind me." To
hate is to reject, to set one's face against, to make no concession to,
the Beloved when the Beloved utters, however sweetly and however
pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil. A man, said Jesus, who tries to
serve two masters, will "hate" the one and "love" the other. It is not,
surely, mere feelings of aversion and liking that are here in question.
He will adhere to, consent to, work for, the one and not for the other.
Consider again, "I loved Jacob and I _hated_ Esau" (_Malachi_ I, 2-3).
How is the thing called God's "hatred" of Esau displayed in the actual
story? Not at all as we might expect. There is of course no ground for
assuming that Esau made a bad end and was a lost soul; the Old
Testament, here as elsewhere, has nothing to say about such matters.
And, from all we are told, Esau's earthly life was, in every ordinary
sense, a good deal more blessed than Jacob's. It is Jacob who has all
the disappointments, humiliations, terrors, and bereavements. But he has
something which Esau has not. He is a patriarch. He hands on the Hebraic
tradition, transmits the vocation and the blessing, becomes an ancestor
of Our Lord. The "loving" of Jacob seems to mean the acceptance of Jacob
for a high (and painful) vocation; the "hating" of Esau, his rejection.
He is "turned down", fails to "make the grade", is found useless for the
purpose. So, in the last resort, we must turn down or disqualify our
nearest and dearest when they come between us and our obedience to God.
Heaven knows, it will seem to them sufficiently like hatred. We must not
act on the pity we feel; we must be blind to tears and deaf to
pleadings.

I will not say that this duty is hard; some find it too easy; some, hard
almost beyond endurance. What is hard for all is to know when the
occasion for such "hating" has arisen. Our temperaments deceive us. The
meek and tender--uxorious husbands, submissive wives, doting parents,
dutiful children--will not easily believe that it has ever arrived.
Self-assertive people, with a dash of the bully in them, will believe it
too soon. That is why it is of such extreme importance so to order our
loves that it is unlikely to arrive at all.

How this could come about we may see on a far lower level when the
Cavalier poet, going to the wars, says to his mistress:

  I could not love thee, dear, so much
      Loved I not honour more.

There are women to whom the plea would be meaningless. _Honour_ would be
just one of those silly things that Men talk about; a verbal excuse for,
therefore an aggravation of, the offence against "love's law" which the
poet is about to commit. Lovelace can use it with confidence because his
lady is a Cavalier lady who already admits, as he does, the claims of
Honour. He does not need to "hate" her, to set his face against her,
because he and she acknowledge the same law. They have agreed and
understood each other on this matter long before. The task of converting
her to a belief in Honour is not now--now, when the decision is upon
them--to be undertaken. It is this prior agreement which is so necessary
when a far greater claim than that of Honour is at stake. It is too
late, when the crisis comes, to begin telling a wife or husband or
mother or friend, that your love all along had a secret
reservation--"under God" or "so far as a higher Love permits". They ought
to have been warned; not, to be sure, explicitly, but by the implication
of a thousand talks, by the principle revealed in a hundred decisions
upon small matters. Indeed, a real disagreement on this issue should
make itself felt early enough to prevent a marriage or a Friendship from
existing at all. The best love of either sort is not blind. Oliver
Elton, speaking of Carlyle and Mill, said that they differed about
justice, and that such a difference was naturally fatal "to any
friendship worthy of the name". If "All"--quite seriously all--"for love"
is implicit in the Beloved's attitude, his or her love is not worth
having. It is not related in the right way to Love Himself.

And this brings me to the foot of the last steep ascent this book must
try to make. We must try to relate the human activities called "loves"
to that Love which is God a little more precisely than we have yet done.
The precision can, of course, be only that of a model or a symbol,
certain to fail us in the long run and, even while we use it, requiring
correction from other models. The humblest of us, in a state of Grace,
can have some "knowledge-by-acquaintance" (_connaître_), some "tasting",
of Love Himself; but man even at his highest sanctity and intelligence
has no direct "knowledge about" (_savoir_) the ultimate Being--only
analogies. We cannot see light, though by light we can see things.
Statements about God are extrapolations from the knowledge of other
things which the divine illumination enables us to know. I labour these
deprecations because, in what follows, my efforts to be clear (and not
intolerably lengthy) may suggest a confidence which I by no means feel.
I should be mad if I did. Take it as one man's reverie, almost one man's
myth. If anything in it is useful to you, use it; if anything is not,
never give it a second thought.

God is love. Again, "Herein is love, not that we loved God but that He
loved us" (_I John_ IV, 10). We must not begin with mysticism, with the
creature's love for God, or with the wonderful forestates of the
fruition of God vouchsafed to some in their earthly life. We begin at
the real beginning, with love as the Divine energy. This primal love is
Gift-love. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only
plenteousness that desires to give. The doctrine that God was under no
necessity to create is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation. It is
essential. Without it we can hardly avoid the conception of what I can
only call a "managerial" God; a Being whose function or nature is to
"run" the universe, who stands to it as a headmaster to a school or a
hotelier to a hotel. But to be sovereign of the universe is no great
matter to God, In Himself, at home in "the land of the Trinity", he is
Sovereign of a far greater realm. We must keep always before our eyes
that vision of Lady Julian's in which God carried in His hand a little
object like a nut, and that nut was "all that is made". God, who needs
nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that
He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already
foreseeing--or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God--the
buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against
the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the
repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture
of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched
up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately
creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take
advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself,
the inventor of all loves.

God, as Creator of nature, implants in us both Gift-loves and
Need-loves. The Gift-loves are natural images of Himself; proximities to
Him by resemblance which are not necessarily and in all men proximities
of approach. A devoted mother, a beneficent ruler or teacher, may give
and give, continually exhibiting the likeness, without making the
approach. The Need-loves, so far as I have been able to see, have no
resemblance to the Love which God is. They are rather correlatives,
opposites; not as evil is the opposite of good, of course, but as the
form of the blancmange is an opposite to the form of the mould.

But in addition to these natural loves God can bestow a far better gift;
or rather, since our minds must divide and pigeon-hole, two gifts.

He communicates to men a share of His own Gift-love. This is different
from the Gift-loves He has built into their nature. These never quite
seek simply the good of the loved object for the object's own sake. They
are biased in favour of those goods they can themselves bestow, or those
which they would like best themselves, or those which fit in with a
pre-conceived picture of the life they want the object to lead. But
Divine Gift-love--Love Himself working in a man--is wholly disinterested
and desires what is simply best for the beloved. Again, natural
Gift-love is always directed to objects which the lover finds in some
way intrinsically lovable--objects to which Affection or Eros or a shared
point of view attracts him, or, failing that, to the grateful and the
deserving, or perhaps to those whose helplessness is of a winning and
appealing kind. But Divine Gift-love in the man enables him to love what
is not naturally lovable; lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky,
the superior and the sneering. Finally, by a high paradox, God enables
men to have a Gift-love towards Himself. There is of course a sense in
which no one can give to God anything which is not already His; and if
it is already His, what have you given? But since it is only too obvious
that we can withhold ourselves, our wills and hearts, from God, we can,
in that sense, also give them. What is His by right and would not exist
for a moment if it ceased to be His (as the song is the singer's), He
has nevertheless made ours in such a way that we can freely offer it
back to Him. "Our wills are ours to make them Thine." And as all
Christians know there is another way of giving to God; every stranger
whom we feed or clothe is Christ. And this apparently is Gift-love to
God whether we know it or not. Love Himself can work in those who know
nothing of Him. The "sheep" in the parable had no idea either of the God
hidden in the prisoner whom they visited or of the God hidden in
themselves when they made the visit. (I take the whole parable to be
about the judgment of the heathen. For it begins by saying, in the
Greek, that the Lord will summon all "the nations" before
Him--presumably, the Gentiles, the _Goyim_).

That such a Gift-love comes by Grace and should be called Charity,
everyone will agree. But I have to add something which will not perhaps
be so easily admitted. God, as it seems to me, bestows two other gifts;
a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one
another. By the first I do not mean the Appreciative love of Himself,
the gift of adoration. What little I have to say on that higher--that
highest--subject will come later. I mean a love which does not dream of
disinterestedness, a bottomless indigence. Like a river making its own
channel, like a magic wine which in being poured out should
simultaneously create the glass that was to hold it, God turns our need
of Him into Need-love of Him. What is stranger still is that he creates
in us a more than natural receptivity of Charity from our fellow men.
Need is so near greed and we are so greedy already that it seems a
strange grace. But I cannot get it out of my head that this is what
happens.

Let us consider first this supernatural Need-love of Himself, bestowed
by Grace. Of course the Grace does not create the need. That is there
already; "given" (as the mathematicians say) in the mere fact of our
being creatures, and incalculably increased by our being fallen
creatures. What the Grace gives is the full recognition, the sensible
awareness, the complete acceptance--even, with certain reservations, the
glad acceptance--of this Need. For, without Grace, our wishes and our
necessities are in conflict.

All those expressions of unworthiness which Christian practice puts into
the believer's mouth seem to the outer world like the degraded and
insincere grovellings of a sycophant before a tyrant, or at best a
_façon de parler_ like the self-depreciation of a Chinese gentleman when
he calls himself "this coarse and illiterate person". In reality,
however, they express the continually renewed, because continually
necessary, attempt to negate that misconception of ourselves and of our
relation to God which nature, even while we pray, is always recommending
to us. No sooner do we believe that God loves us than there is an
impulse to believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because
we are intrinsically lovable. The Pagans obeyed this impulse unabashed;
a good man was "dear to the gods" because he was good. We, being better
taught, resort to subterfuge. Far be it from us to think that we have
virtues for which God could love us. But then, how magnificently we have
repented! As Bunyan says, describing his first and illusory conversion,
"I thought there was no man in England that pleased God better than I."
Beaten out of this, we next offer our own humility to God's admiration.
Surely He'll like _that_? Or if not that, our clear-sighted and humble
recognition that we still lack humility. Thus, depth beneath depth and
subtlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own,
our very own, attractiveness. It is easy to acknowledge, but almost
impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if
we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.
Surely we must have a little--however little--native luminosity? Surely we
can't be _quite_ creatures?

For this tangled absurdity of a Need, even a Need-love, which never
fully acknowledges its own neediness, Grace substitutes a full,
childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total
dependence. We become "jolly beggars". The good man is sorry for the
sins which have increased his Need. He is not entirely sorry for the
fresh Need they have produced. And he is not sorry at all for the
innocent Need that is inherent in his creaturely condition. For all the
time this illusion to which nature clings as her last treasure, this
pretence that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain
by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us
from being happy. We have been like bathers who want to keep their
feet--or one foot--or one toe--on the bottom, when to lose that foothold
would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf. The
consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power,
or worth, are real freedom, power and worth, really ours just because
God gives them and because we know them to be (in another sense) not
"ours". Anodos has got rid of his shadow.

But God also transforms our Need-love for one another, and it requires
equal transformation. In reality we all need at times, some of us at
most times, that Charity from others which, being Love Himself in them,
loves the unlovable. But this, though a sort of love we need, is not the
sort we want. We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty,
generosity, fairness, usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering
us the highest love of all is a terrible shock. This is so well
recognised that spiteful people will pretend to be loving us with
Charity precisely because they know that it will wound us. To say to one
who expects a renewal of Affection, Friendship, or Eros, "I forgive you
as a Christian" is merely a way of continuing the quarrel. Those who say
it are of course lying. But the thing would not be falsely said in order
to wound unless, if it were true, it would be wounding.

How difficult it is to receive, and to go on receiving, from others a
love that does not depend on our own attraction, can be seen from an
extreme case. Suppose yourself a man struck down shortly after marriage
by an incurable disease which may not kill you for many years; useless,
impotent, hideous, disgusting; dependent on your wife's earnings;
impoverishing where you hoped to enrich; impaired even in intellect and
shaken by gusts of uncontrollable temper, full of unavoidable demands.
And suppose your wife's care and pity to be inexhaustible. The man who
can take this sweetly, who can receive all and give nothing without
resentment, who can abstain even from those tiresome self-depreciations
which are really only a demand for petting and reassurance, is doing
something which Need-love in its merely natural condition could not
attain. (No doubt such a wife will also be doing something beyond the
reach of a natural Gift-love, but that is not the point at present.) In
such a case to receive is harder and perhaps more blessed than to give.
But what the extreme example illustrates is universal. We are all
receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be
naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it. Only
the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like
the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be
forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other
way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be
sure that at some times--and perhaps at all times in respect of some one
particular trait or habit--they are receiving charity, are loved not
because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love
them.

Thus God, admitted to the human heart, transforms not only Gift-love but
Need-love; not only our Need-love of Him, but our Need-love of one
another. This is of course not the only thing that can happen. He may
come on what seems to us a more dreadful mission and demand that a
natural love be totally renounced. A high and terrible vocation, like
Abraham's, may constrain a man to turn his back on his own people and
his father's house. Eros, directed to a forbidden object, may have to be
sacrificed. In such instances, the process, though hard to endure, is
easy to understand. What we are more likely to overlook is the necessity
for a transformation even when the natural love is allowed to continue.

In such a case the Divine Love does not _substitute_ itself for the
natural--as if we had to throw away our silver to make room for the gold.
The natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity while also
remaining the natural loves they were.

One sees here at once a sort of echo or rhyme or corollary to the
Incarnation itself. And this need not surprise us, for the Author of
both is the same. As Christ is perfect God and perfect Man, the natural
loves are called to become perfect Charity and also perfect natural
loves. As God becomes Man "Not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh,
but by taking of the Manhood into God", so here; Charity does not
dwindle into merely natural love but natural love is taken up into, made
the tuned and obedient instrument of, Love Himself.

How this can happen, most Christians know. All the activities (sins only
excepted) of the natural loves can in a favoured hour become works of
the glad and shameless and grateful Need-love or of the selfless,
unofficious Gift-love, which are both Charity. Nothing is either too
trivial or too animal to be thus transformed. A game, a joke, a drink
together, idle chat, a walk, the act of Venus--all these can be modes in
which we forgive or accept forgiveness, in which we console or are
reconciled, in which we "seek not our own". Thus in our very instincts,
appetites and recreations, Love has prepared for Himself "a body".

But I said "in a favoured hour". Hours soon pass. The total and secure
transformation of a natural love into a mode of Charity is a work so
difficult that perhaps no fallen man has ever come within sight of doing
it perfectly. Yet the law that loves must be so transformed is, I
suppose, inexorable.

One difficulty is that here, as usual, we can take a wrong turn. A
Christian--a somewhat too vocally Christian--circle or family, having
grasped this principle, can make a show, in their overt behaviour and
especially in their words, of having achieved the thing itself--an
elaborate, fussy, embarrassing and intolerable show. Such people make
every trifle a matter of explicitly spiritual importance--out loud and to
one another (to God, on their knees, behind a closed door, it would be
another matter). They are always unnecessarily asking, or insufferably
offering, forgiveness. Who would not rather live with those ordinary
people who get over their tantrums (and ours) unemphatically, letting a
meal, a night's sleep, or a joke mend all? The real work must be, of all
our works, the most secret. Even as far as possible secret from
ourselves. Our right hand must not know what our left is doing. We have
not got far enough if we play a game of cards with the children "merely"
to amuse them or to show that they are forgiven. If this is the best we
can do we are right to do it. But it would be better if a deeper, less
conscious, Charity threw us into a frame of mind in which a little fun
with the children was the thing we should at that moment like best.

We are, however, much helped in this necessary work by that very feature
of our experience at which we most repine. The invitation to turn our
natural loves into Charity is never lacking. It is provided by those
frictions and frustrations that meet us in all of them; unmistakable
evidence that (natural) love is not going to be "enough"--unmistakable,
unless we are blinded by egotism. When we are, we use them absurdly. "If
only I had been more fortunate in my children (that boy gets more like
his father every day) I could have loved them perfectly." But every
child is sometimes infuriating; most children are not infrequently
odious. "If only my husband were more considerate, less lazy, less
extravagant" ... "If only my wife had fewer moods and more sense, and
were less extravagant" ... "If my father wasn't so infernally prosy
and close-fisted." But in everyone, and of course in ourselves, there is
that which requires forbearance, tolerance, forgiveness. The necessity
of practising these virtues first sets us, forces us, upon the attempt
to turn--more strictly, to let God turn--our love into Charity. These
frets and rubs are beneficial. It may even be that where there are
fewest of them the conversion of natural love is most difficult. When
they are plentiful the necessity of rising above it is obvious. To rise
above it when it is as fully satisfied and as little impeded as earthly
conditions allow--to see that we must rise when all seems so well
already--this may require a subtler conversion and a more delicate
insight. In this way also it may be hard for "the rich" to enter the
Kingdom.

And yet, I believe, the necessity for the conversion is inexorable; at
least, if our natural loves are to enter the heavenly life. That they
can enter it most of us in fact believe. We may hope that the
resurrection of the body means also the resurrection of what may be
called our "greater body"; the general fabric of our earthly life with
its affections and relationships. But only on a condition; not a
condition arbitrarily laid down by God, but one necessarily inherent in
the character of Heaven: nothing can enter there which cannot become
heavenly. "Flesh and blood," mere nature, cannot inherit that Kingdom.
Man can ascend to Heaven only because the Christ, who died and ascended
to Heaven, is "formed in him". Must we not suppose that the same is true
of a man's loves? Only those into which Love Himself has entered will
ascend to Love Himself. And these can be raised with Him only if they
have, in some degree and fashion, shared His death; if the natural
element in them has submitted--year after year, or in some sudden
agony--to transmutation. The fashion of this world passes away. The very
name of nature implies the transitory. Natural loves can hope for
eternity only in so far as they have allowed themselves to be taken into
the eternity of Charity; have at least allowed the process to begin here
on earth, before the night comes when no man can work. And the process
will always involve a kind of death. There is no escape. In my love for
wife or friend the only eternal element is the transforming presence of
Love Himself. By that presence, if at all, the other elements may hope,
as our physical bodies hope, to be raised from the dead. For this only
is holy in them, this only is the Lord.

Theologians have sometimes asked whether we shall "know one another" in
Heaven, and whether the particular love-relations worked out on earth
would then continue to have any significance. It seems reasonable to
reply: "It may depend what kind of love it had become, or was becoming,
on earth." For, surely, to meet in the eternal world someone for whom
your love in this, however strong, had been merely natural, would not be
(on that ground) even interesting. Would it not be like meeting in adult
life someone who had seemed to be a great friend at your preparatory
school solely because of common interests and occupations? If there was
nothing more, if he was not a kindred soul, he will now be a total
stranger. Neither of you now plays conkers. You no longer want to swop
your help with his French exercise for his help with your arithmetic. In
Heaven, I suspect, a love that had never embodied Love Himself would be
equally irrelevant. For Nature has passed away. All that is not eternal
is eternally out of date.

But I must not end on this note, I dare not--and all the less because
longings and terrors of my own prompt me to do so--leave any bereaved and
desolate reader confirmed in the widespread illusion that reunion with
the loved dead is the goal of the Christian life. The denial of this may
sound harsh and unreal in the ears of the broken hearted, but it must be
denied.

"Thou hast made us for thyself," said St. Augustine, "and our heart has
no rest till it comes to Thee." This, so easy to believe for a brief
moment before the altar or, perhaps, half-praying, half-meditating in an
April wood, sounds like mockery beside a deathbed. But we shall be far
more truly mocked if, casting this way, we pin our comfort on the
hope--perhaps even with the aid of _séance_ and necromancy--of some day,
this time forever, enjoying the earthly Beloved again, and no more. It
is hard not to imagine that such an endless prolongation of earthly
happiness would be completely satisfying.

But, if I may trust my own experience, we get at once a sharp warning
that there is something wrong. The moment we attempt to use our faith in
the other world for this purpose, that faith weakens. The moments in my
life when it was really strong have all been moments when God Himself
was central in my thoughts. Believing in Him, I could then believe in
Heaven as a corollary. But the reverse process--believing first in
reunion with the Beloved, and then, for the sake of that reunion,
believing in Heaven, and finally, for the sake of Heaven, believing in
God--this will not work. One can of course imagine things. But a
self-critical person will soon be increasingly aware that the
imagination at work is his own; he knows he is only weaving a fantasy.
And simpler souls will find the phantoms they try to feed on void of all
comfort and nourishment, only to be stimulated into some semblance of
reality by pitiful efforts of self-hypnotism, and perhaps by the aid of
ignoble pictures and hymns and (what is worse) witches.

We find thus by experience that there is no good applying to Heaven for
earthly comfort. Heaven can give heavenly comfort; no other kind. And
earth cannot give earthly comfort either. There is no earthly comfort in
the long run.

For the dream of finding our end, the thing we were made for, in a
Heaven of purely human love could not be true unless our whole Faith
were wrong. We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like
Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom
or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is not that we
have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we
were loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so
dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall
know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made,
sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences
of innocent love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far
more His than ours, and ours only because His. In Heaven there will be
no anguish and no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First,
because we shall have turned already; from the portraits to the
Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made
lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we shall find them all in
Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now
do.

But all that is far away in "the land of the Trinity", not here in
exile, in the weeping valley. Down here it is all loss and renunciation.
The very purpose of the bereavement (so far as it affects ourselves) may
have been to force this upon us. We are then compelled to try to
believe, what we cannot yet feel, that God is our true Beloved. That is
why bereavement is in some ways easier for the unbeliever than for us.
He can storm and rage and shake his fist at the universe, and (if he is
a genius) write poems like Housman's or Hardy's. But we, at our lowest
ebb, when the least effort seems too much for us, must begin to attempt
what seem impossibilities.

"Is it easy to love God?" asks an old author. "It is easy," he replies,
"to those who do it." I have included two Graces under the word Charity.
But God can give a third. He can awake in man, towards Himself, a
supernatural Appreciative Love. This is of all gifts the most to be
desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the
true centre of all human and angelic life. With this all things are
possible.

And with this, where a better book would begin, mine must end. I dare
not proceed. God knows, not I, whether I have ever tasted this love.
Perhaps I have only imagined the tasting. Those like myself whose
imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty;
we easily imagine conditions far higher than any we have really reached.
If we describe what we have imagined we may make others, and make
ourselves, believe that we have really been there. And if I have only
imagined it, is it a further delusion that even the imagining has at
some moments made all other objects of desire--yes, even peace, even to
have no more fears--look like broken toys and faded flowers? Perhaps.
Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the
shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough.
It is something. If we cannot "practice the presence of God", it is
something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware
of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great
cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a
mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out
his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that
one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep. But for news of the
fully waking world you must go to my betters.