* * * * *

[Sidenote:  Morley Roberts hopes Love will some day be a pleasing reality]

Ah, my gentle cocksure friends, how well you all know Love, and how ready you are to say what it is, to cut it up, to carve it, to classify it, and generally to spread it out.  We live in a world of lies, and conventions, the dead leavings of an ignorant past, bind us still.  Some day, perhaps, when men and women are free, Love will be a pleasing reality.  It can never be so in the majority of cases so long as we play at make-believe, and teach nothing that we have learned.  The good man won’t teach his sons; he leaves them to learn in the gutter.  The good woman keeps her daughters ignorant.  As it stands it is an evil to love anyone over-much.  And when we love we love over-much, for Love has been repressed till it has got savage in the race.  “La privation radicale d’une chose cree lexees.”  All the trouble comes from this—­that we men have partially created women.  But Nature had something to do with her compounding.  That is, perhaps, a pity from the social point of view.  For Nature can’t be nice and comfortable.  She is only kind when we go her way.  Let us remember that Love is the foundation of the world.  The very protoplasmic cells from which we sprang could love.  The time will come, perhaps, when, having chipped away the lies and faced the truth, we shall find reality a thousand times more pleasing than any fiction.  Love is something real and wonderful, and in a natural world we shall have passed through the blood-splashed gates of Passion and be calm.  Now Love is tortured, for we love ignorantly.  We are like shipwrecked folk on some strange land—­we know not the fruits of the trees of it.  We learn the poisons by experiment, and we let others learn.  This is Love the Fiction.  But some day when we awake we shall know what we now dream, and Love will be always the most precious flower that grows in the garden of the soul.  It has the subtle fragrance of the heaven that is our own if we walk bravely in the world, desiring truth.  Under its influence we discover ourselves.  We build ships for new voyages, and burst into unknown waters with our Viking shields of victory ablaze in the morning sun.  The air is sharp and keen, not foetid with poisonous lies; the waters are blue and beautiful; there are shining shores about us, and marvels of a new nature on every hand.  We who were in the night, and of it, become vivid with the sun.  Our atheism banishes the worshipped gods of evil that are no more extant in our dogmatic creed of joy.  For Truth and Beauty have guided us hand in hand, and all they ask of us is to throw away the Law of Lies and to acknowledge that the two are one.

* * * * *

[Sidenote:  Zangwill reviews the evidence.]