on, he too had believed that the final
achievement, the consummation of human life, was this flinging oneself
over the precipice, down the bottomless pit of love. Now he realised
that love, even in its intensest, was only an attribute of the human
soul: one of its incomprehensible gestures. And to fling down the whole
soul in one gesture of finality in love was as much a criminal suicide
as to jump off a church-tower or a mountain-peak. Let a man give himself
as much as he liked in love, to seven thousand extremities, he must
never give himself _away_. The more generous and the more passionate a
soul, the more it _gives_ itself. But the more absolute remains the law,
that it shall never give itself away. Give thyself, but give thyself not
away. That is the lesson written at the end of the long strange lane of
love.

The _idee fixe_ of today is that every individual shall not only give
himself, but shall achieve the last glory of giving himself away. And
since this takes two--you can't even make a present of yourself unless
you've got somebody to receive the present; since this last extra-divine
act takes two people to perform it, you've got to take into count not
only your giver but your receiver. Who is going to be the giver and who
the receiver.

Why, of course, in our long-drawn-out Christian day, man is given and
woman is recipient. Man is the gift, woman the receiver. This is the
sacrament we live by; the holy Communion we live for. That man gives
himself to woman in an utter and sacred abandon, all, all, all himself
given, and taken. Woman, eternal woman, she is the communicant. She
receives the sacramental body and spirit of the man. And when she's got
it, according to her passionate and all-too-sacred desire, completely,
when she possesses her man at last finally and ultimately, without
blemish or reservation in the perfection of the sacrament: then, also,
poor woman, the blood and the body of which she has partaken become
insipid or nauseous to her, she is driven mad by the endless meal of the
marriage sacrament, poisoned by the sacred communion which was her goal
and her soul's ambition.

We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any process is not
the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. Love is a
process of the incomprehensible human soul: love also incomprehensible,
but still only a process. The process should work to a completion, not
to some horror of intensification and ext