The Law is for All

72 The Law is for All I will here add one further pillar to my temple. It happens only too often that two people, absolutely fitted in every way to love each other, are totally debarred from expressing themselves by sheer ignorance of the technique of the act. What Nature declares as the climax of the Mass, the manifestation of God in the flesh, when the flesh is begotten, is so gross, clumsy and brutal that it disappoints and disgusts. They are horribly conscious that something is wrong. They do not know how to amend it. They are ashamed to discuss it. They have neither the experience to guide nor the imagination to experiment. Countless thousands of delicate-minded lovers turn against Love and blaspheme Him. Countless millions, not quite so fixed in refinement, accept the fact, acquiesce in the foulness, till Love is degraded to guilty grov­ elling. They are dragged in the dirt of the night-cart which ought to have been their “chariot of fire and the horses thereof.”1 1 [II Kings 2:11, paraphrase.] This whole trouble comes from humanity’s horror of Love. For the last hundred years, every first-rate writer on morals has sent forth his lightnings and thunders, hailstones and coals of fire, to burn up Gomorrah and Sodom where Love is either shameful and secret, or daubed with dung of sentiment in order that the swinish citizens may recognize their ideal therein. We do not tell the artist that his art is so sacred, so disgusting, so splendid and so disgraceful that he must not on any account learn the use of the tools of his trade, and study in school how to see with his eye, and record what he sees with his hand. We do not tell the man who would heal disease that he must not know his subject, from anat­ omy to pathology; or bid him undertake to remove an appendix from a valued Archbishop the first time he takes scalpel in hand. But love is an art no less than Rembrandt’s, a science no less than Lister’s. The mind must make the heart articulate, and the body the temple of the soul. The animal instinct in man is the twin of the ape’s or the bull’s. Yet this is the one thing lawful in the code of the bourgeois. He is right to consider the act, as he knows it, degrading. It is, indeed, for him, an act ridiculous, obscene, gross, beastly; a wallowing unworthy either of the dig­ nity of man or of the majesty of the God within him. So is the