Such is the account the hero gives of the nature of his love for woman.  Nor does he give this account regretfully, or think that it shows him to be in any diseased condition.  It shows rather a return, on his part, to a health that others have lost.  As he looks round upon the modern world and the purity that George Eliot says in her verses she would die for, ‘Woman,’ he exclaims mournfully, ’is become the symbol of moral and physical beauty.  The real fall of man was on the birthday of the babe of Bethlehem.’[17] It will be instructive to notice further that these views are carried out by him to their full legitimate consequences, even though this, to some degree, is against his will. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ’I try to persuade myself that such passions are abominable, and I say as much to myself in as severe a way as I can.  But the words come only from my lips.  They are arguments that I make.  They are not arguments that I feel.  The thing in question really seems quite natural to me, and anyone else in my place would, it seems to me, do as I do.’[18]

Nor is this conception of love peculiar to the hero only.  The heroine’s conception is its exact counterpart, and exactly fits it.  The heroine as completely as the hero has freed herself from any discernment between good and evil.  She recoils from abnormal impurity no more than from normal, and the climax of the book is her full indulgence in both.

Now here we have a specimen of love raised to intensity, but divested as far as possible of the religious element.  I say divested as far as possible, because even here, as I shall prove hereafter, the process is not complete, and something of religion is still left fermenting.  But it is quite complete enough for our present purpose.  It will remind us in the sharpest and clearest way that love is no force which is naturally constant in its development, or which if left to itself can be in any way a moral director to us.  It will show us that many of its developments are what the moralist calls abominable, and that the very worst of these may perhaps be the most attractive, and be deliberately presented to us as such by men of the most elaborate culture.  We shall thus see that love as a test of conduct, as an aim of life, or as an object of any heroic devotion, is not love in general, but love of a special kind, and that to fulfil this function it must not only be selected from the rest, but also removed from them, and set above them at a quite incalculable distance.  And the kind thus chosen, let me repeat again (for this, though less obvious, is more important still), is not chosen because it is naturally intense, but it becomes intense because it is the chosen one.