NOT INDEBTED TO LAW OR CUSTOM.

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of souls, this is neither a desirable nor a respectable position, but only a sham and a shame, which rather casts discredit on the name of marriage than receives any lustre from it. As a temporary expedient concubinage may answer a good purpose, but to call this marriage, and never to pass higher, is a poor account of life.

Mutual affection toward their children, and the ties of habit, will already give to unions a greater permanence than would otherwise be desirable from the fitness of the parties, without the intervention of law and public opinion in these most private affairs.

CHAPTER XIV.

CONSIDERATIONS ON INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER.

I MAY be mistaken, but it has seemed to me that I knew intimately persons remarkably well-poised in their life, sensible, affectionate, perfectly amiable, healthy, wealthy, with considerable experience of persons and things, and one of apparently uniform success, whose life seemed to co-ordinate to an orbit of harmony all who approached them, who have, after numerous rejections, made a decided choice, and who contented themselves in the routine of married life in the isolated household, and made it a beautiful and spiritual fact, to whatever extent it is capable of being so. In other words, I have known cases of organic harmony and contentment, which caused it to appear plainly enough that the main fact in this world of ours is the quality of individual character. I ask myself, why do I not, then, restrict my studies or efforts to the development of such true and beautiful individuals, beginning with myself, or, at least, devote myself to the study of those laws of breeding, and of the generation of characters and organic qualities whence such persons result? I answer, that such characters already exist in sufficient number for pivots of the social struc

174 FOR TRUE LOVERS, TRUE MEN AND women.

ture, for passional chiefs and foci of charm, and that the hierarchical mediation by which such spirits as these can have an opportunity of impressing themselves most effectually on society, or on the largest number of other individuals, is best provided for in the passional series and in the freedom of love relations. Did no such characters as these exist, association would be limited to very vulgar developments, for the pivot is the supreme term in the passional series.

After every consideration of passional affinities, industrial unities, and mediation of nature in our behalf, whether through concordant sympathies in her birds and flowers, stars and animals, or still more charming social arts where genius wears the livery of love, there remains the plain stern fact, that for true love relations we must have true lovers, and for this, true men and women, and for this, well-born and wisely-nurtured children--considerations these, which for humanity, with some few exceptions, adjourn to other generations the triumphs of love. They are not to be cabalized away by any extemporaneous ingenuity, and while they all the more imperiously demand the inauguration of new and superior influences for the formation of character, they put the subject more in the light of a duty we owe to posterity than of a present satisfaction of our own passional demands. A phalansterian order of devoted teachers is the first legitimate step. Love, with such lovers as the personnel or dramatis persona of civilization can now furnish, might certainly gain, and gain immensely, by the adoption of the phalansterian organization, but it would lend itself only sparingly and with suspicion to the high accords of the series, and bastard societies will flounder along full of vices, chasms in attraction, and indirect discords in the major movement, proceeding from the rudimental and falsified state of the minor movement.

To meet one who, in the distribution of characters, contains for us some high accord in love, is doubtless an elevating and spiritualizing fact, which deepens us wonderfully in sane selfknowledge, quickens aspiration, and gives to our life, pro tem, an azure tint of religion; but there is no other permanent ali

TRUE BASIS OF SELF-RESPECT.

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ment for a religious love, either in its more playful and tender or in its profounder phases, than true self-respect, founded in the facts of heroic experience and life victories. The selfknowledge with which love's torch illumines the soul, reveals impartially how little as well as how much ground there is for self-respect, and as love is ever true to the geometrical formula of the ellipse, whose double foci mutually absorb each other's rays, so the truthfulness of the love relation must bear a constant ratio to the integrity of each ark and focus of the human ellipse, i. e., of the personal characters of each two lovers.

Our present race of civilizees is in a frightful proportion diseased, either organically or functionally, and of those who seem to be physically soundest there are more than half too much corrupted by the habitual ascendant granted to their carnal appetites over their spiritual affections, too much the slaves of material interest, of false moralities, or of frivolous etiquettes, to conduct a high love relation with the permanent decency, calm ardor, poetic grandeur and beauty, inherent to this passion, for the panorama of whose experience nature unlocks all her arcana, raising us into conscious sympathy with that interior life which is no other than the dynamics of love, the ancient elder Eros, who has never broken with our frailer human Aprodite, though her altars have long mouldered away in her own sunny Greece, and of her temples no stone lies on the other among us utilitarian monsters, who worship only Mercury and Juno of all the Olympian synod.

Still, to the worshiping lover all is renewed as at the beginning. He is the only real pantheist, and until we have such lovers we shall have only the shell, the sham, and the shame of love, wherever we may place them.

Among the specialities which most powerfully concur to this end are the culture of music, poetry, and the chase. Music refines and harmonizes the emotional sphere, and true poetry the intellectual and imaginative sphere. They impart to these a horror of promiscuity and a fine discrimination; while the noble arts of hunting develop strength and grace, self-reliance, executive force and fertility of expedients, patience and

176

ARDENT SOULS NEED STRONG BODIES.

observation; relating us intimately with the organic facts of our planetary life in their most pleasing, exhilarating, and instructive forms, and subordinating the too prurient ideality of the irreverent though nimble-witted reformer to the superior imagination of nature, too many of whose facts and data he might find it convenient to leave out of his system.

The true hunter or the true farmer, or true co-worker or playmate of the planet in any sense, earns in his labor or his sport that physical integrity, those strong, calm nerves which can alone contain and carry rightly the streams of electric fire which love liberates when it takes the reins of life's chariot, and which melt and oxydate too feeble conductors, scorching the organism through which it passes, and leaving it sometimes but a cinder floating on the waves.

Love of woman reciprocated seems so absolute, so much the realization of all hope and destiny, and the occasional confirmation of this in a well-assorted union so stamps our cherished ideal with the seal of nature's truth, that the mind is overpowered from the heart, our power of analysis is lost, and we confound the harmonic fact of the union with the accessories of the civilized, legal, and moral marriage form; thus these get a false consecration, like the audacious impositions of priests and priestcraft, from the natural sentiment of religion in the soul of the people, and their necessity to give it expression. They blindly adopt the forms, encumbrances, and limitations held out like a lasso by the priest, and henceforth confound these with religion itself. Thus we find the poets, whose ideal is more a necessity of existence, most easily seduced to honor marriage, because it sometimes coincides with reciprocal love.

CHAPTER XV.

THE SAINT SIMONIAN VIEW.

"Man and woman [conjoined] form the social individual,” said M. Enfantin. "The new moral order calls woman to a new life. Woman must reveal to us all that she feels, all that she desires, all that she wishes for the future.

"No man who pretends to impose a law on woman is a Saint Simonian, and the only position of the St. Simonian, in regard to woman, is to declare his incompetence to judge her.

"The mission of the priest is to feel both natures equally, to regulate the development of the spiritual affections and the carnal appetites. His mission, moreover, is to facilitate the union of beings with deep affections, protecting them from the violence of beings with lively affections, and equally to facilitate the union and the life of beings of ardent affections, by protecting them from the contempt of beings with deep affections. He should know all the charm of decency and modesty, but also all the grace of abandonment and voluptuousness."

The Saint Simonians invoked the queen woman, without whom their society could not pass from idea into organic fact. The queen woman appeared not, and the St. Simonian school disbanded, to continue their preparatory labors of private propagandism, to gain power and reputation in the world, and to accumulate capital. In these ends its members have met with a fair share of individual success. Whether they will ever again attempt a collective demonstration of their doctrines remains to be seen. For further details of these doctrines, see works of Enfantin, Michael Chevalier, and others.