132 SEX 



spirit. We do not speak indeed of love that 

 does not rise off the ground, but of the normal 

 love of free men and women, who are neither 

 ashamed to be fond in due season, nor to look 

 forward, around, or back upon their children. 



The danger is in thinking of these things 

 too simply, for human love has in the course 

 of its evolution become a very complex 

 relationship. The sexual attraction, at first 

 comparatively simple, becomes more subtle, 

 yet also more vividly impassioned; and so 

 it intensifies into " love at first sight," at 

 its best at once instinctive and poetic. To 

 this there has also been added the deliberate 

 desire for children (specific children, so to 

 speak sometimes even " dream-children ") 

 to continue the dual yet united line. This, 

 again, may be at all levels, from mere whole- 

 some breeding up to the Messianic hope of 

 Israel of old, or again towards the renewing 

 of old idealisms for to-morrow. So, again, 

 from the simplest pairing to the recognition 

 of love as a supreme mingling of self-expression 

 and self-surrender, a mode of mutual evoca- 

 tion, and thus of developing fellowship and 

 joy, long surviving the period of racial 

 significance. Here, then, is the place for 

 clear protest against that false (because life- 

 embittered) asceticism which Tolstoi so fiercely 

 revived : purer and nobler, as well as truer 

 far to the normal idealism and companionship 

 of wedded life in its continuance and evolution, 

 is such poetry as that of Coventry Patmore, 

 is such sex-ethics as that of James Hinton. 



MARRIED LIFE AND PARENTAL AFFECTION. 

 In the Animal Kingdom we find an early 



