The Thinking Corner

"The Red Immortal"

Let me say at once that I do not have in mind either Lenin or Stalin. The word "red" here is not a synonym for "Soviet". It connects up with more natural and much older things than the economic system of Communist Russia - things like roses and human blood. To get my meaning you must ask what the red rose symbolises. The extreme beauty of a rose, steeped in crimson, stands, to the poetic eye, for the beauty-thrill between human beings, which we call love. It is the stir of love in our blood that Flecker named

The red immortal riding through the hearts of men.

Poets do not spin merely pretty phrases. They strain to pluck their language from the depths of things. And the term "immortal" is packed with a profound significance. The significance is twofold. Outwardly, love with its act of mating is the means by which the torch of life is handed down to the future by individuals doomed to die and pass. Love begets children and they continue the vitality which the parents give up after a certain length of years on earth. Love is the perpetuator of the race, mankind would perish without its "immortalising" touch. Nor does the touch as of an immortal lie only in the procreative process. Love has an inward lift and luminosity which seem more than human. To the ancient world it was a God, a superhuman Power that entered earthly beings and carried them in emotional and imaginative ecstasy beyond themselves. We have a less pervasive sense of the deific than the ancients; so the Eros of the Greeks and the Kama or Madana of old India is not always to our minds a living figure, a burning Presence. Vividly and fierily enough we are aware of falling in love, but we do not trace our feelings to a metaphysical entity, we stop short with psychological fact. Only our poets keep up the ancient occult sense. Our scientists look askance at the poetic

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approach to psychological fact, yet a little digging below the surface should make us less sceptical about its vision.

Why do we have the imperative instinct to perpetuate the race? Why does the germ-plasm in us seek rapturously the endless future? There is, without doubt, something that refuses to be ended, something that wants to defeat the obstacles barring the assertion of its immortality. That elan runs through the whole of organic Nature and, evolved considerably though we are, it is still forced to find an indirect channel, our children, for expressing outwardly the Immortal in itself. The imperfect conditions of bodily life compel this indirectness, but does not even the compulsion take place because our love-gusto is the leap of a Godhead into the frailties and crudities of earth? We may call this Godhead our own secret Soul, deathless and limitless, trying to put its stamp upon the finite flux of matter. But, whatever the name we choose, a metaphysical entity, a power beyond our ordinary personal being and therefore a superhuman Presence, appears to be at work. Though a good deal of its work is groping and stumbling because of the frail and crude medium at its disposal, a light is there in each true lover, an upward cry, a straining towards beauty, an impulse of worship, an ache for permanence that show the human responding to a divine afflatus.

Paradoxical as it may seem, it is just the Red Immortal's riding through our hearts that renders them superior to the procreative desire. That desire arises from his urge to express outwardly his own undying nature; but in those in whom the inward expression is very strong, the physical act of sex can lose its urgency. So long as the body is subject to death and the individual form has to dissolve, the procreative desire cannot from the beginning drop out of love: almost the whole subconscious has its face turned towards the sex-act. What, however, can happen when the inner being is highly developed and sensitively attuned to the subtleties of Eros is that in the course of time an intense joy, a passionate fulfilment, becomes possible without coitus. One may even

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go so far as to say that even physical nearness is not necessary: men and women have felt their consummation in the mere experience of their love for each other, no matter how many miles lay between them, no matter if a whole lifetime of separation stopped them from contact. This is of course the inner phenomenon at a rare height; a lesser altitude is not out of reach for many deep natures. Pyscho-analysts dwell often on the danger of physical repression, and the danger may be real enough where the normal course of desire is forcibly dammed. But where spontaneity reigns, a different complexion is put on the problem. Some of the most memorable words in the autobiography of that master-psychologist of sex, Havelock Ellis, are: "the greatest of all revelations which my life with Edith brought me was this discovery that not only simple affection but the deepest passion of love can exist and develop continuously even when the relationship of sex in the narrow sense has ceased to exist.... That is a discovery with a significance for life and for the institution of marriage which has not yet been measured."

Both Havelock Ellis and Edith Lees were remarkable persons; their emotional natures were of an unusual fineness and the Red Immortal rode in great beauty through them. Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were perhaps still more subtly attuned to the Godhead. All the same, there is an insistent imperfection in our being, that will not allow Eros to establish his empyrean within us. Perhaps no empyrean is possible until the Red Immortal turns us all to a direct mysticism, a Bhakti Yoga that is enamoured of the supreme Divine, instead of the religion of romance that seeks its beau ideal in human personalities. Havelock Ellis and Edith Lees had terrible tensions in spite of their extraordinary fineness; Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett could not avoid petty unpleasantnesses. We of grosser grain must expect innumerable shortcomings in our love-life.

Love rises and love falls; it is with us a Godhead without his proper heaven. One wishes to say to one's beloved:

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"Love is not merely a matter of the heart. The hands must love, the mouth must love. And they must do this not just by the hands embracing and the mouth giving kisses. Beyond the body of their adoration they must work. Various things the hands must do - things that are sometimes hard and bitter to the doer. And the mouth must use all speech to make the dear one happy. No thoughtless whim, no self-gratifying obstinacy should interrupt the music of love. Even when faults are to be corrected and follies checked, there must be in each word the compulsive sweetness as of a violent kiss. Let nothing take place which does not carry with it the pressure of love. Let not any moment bear the feeling that love has dimmed away into the background. There lies the absolute triumph of the God Eros."

But it is dangerous to stick top fanatically to this vision. Disappointment is the fate of those who forget earth's earthiness. After the first flaming, love becomes divided by many moods, sullied by diverse imperfections. It is not potent enough to change character permanently - all the little flaws of human nature come up to distort the dream one had of the grand passion. Love yields to self-will, to vanity, to a bitter urge of giving hurt: it becomes also one with a strange hate, a resentment of the surface-being at the profound grip one's lover has on one's soul. It grows often a rhythmless routine, a taking for granted of the heart's desire, without any eagerness to greet with welcoming warmth the least sign of its splendour. And yet one feels the splendid presence behind all these blots: in moments of crisis love does not fall, it is deep-rooted and its constancy flares up when abysmal darknesses challenge it. Even when there is no such challenge, it is its nature to rise at intervals to a dazzling richness and by one hour of ecstasy compensate for a hundred doubts and despairs. Behind the innumerable clouds that sweep across its face, it is a sun that never sets. It is fierily true in all fundamentals. But oh those details that look like rust on the great sheen! How they spoil the expectations of each day, blight the hopeful eyes that have not learnt to accept the

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insufficiencies of life! No human being is born who can keep at all times that first flaming of love and let no surface action deny the glory of the depths. It is too much to ask that human love should be a perfection through and through. We must ever combine the philosopher with the poet in us: then alone shall we understand that love in the body is an angel always at war with a demon and that it is a thousand small defeats with a few colossal victories making it the sweetest hell on earth.

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