Moreover, if we are to make love the sole bond--clearly the waning of love must release from the bondage. Further, when we sift out the purely emotional element in the vast majority of unions, we shall find it but a very slender factor among other more binding reciprocities. Certainly a far more slender thread to trust to in the safeguarding of a contract than is, for example, the factor of commercial honesty. Commercial honesty is not, perhaps, a conspicuous virtue of the times. Nevertheless, the sense of honesty in business is a good deal stronger in most men than is their sense of honour with regard to love. And their sense of honour in love has developed mainly as a direct consequence of those legal compulsions and responsibilities of love which have been exacted and fostered by the legality of marriage.
How many men are there, for example, who, having come to care for some other, hold themselves bound in the least by an illicit tie; howsoever much they may have cared at one time for the woman in the case? Lightly come--lightly go! And if the terms, marriage and love, are by no means necessarily synonymous, it has been, nevertheless, greatly by way of the obstacles and compulsions and the social penalties attaching to violation of the marriage vows that the love-passion has been purified and uplifted out of the barbarism of mere instinct and promiscuity, into the graces of emotion and the virtues of monogamy.
Had any man and woman, reciprocally attracted at their first meeting, been free always to have carried this attraction straightway to its biological conclusion, the sex-relation would be still the merely physiological incident it was in primal forests. The circumstance that such attraction has been debarred from ready consummation by the obligations and the obstacles engendered by a recognised and legalised bond between the sexes, has been debarred, moreover, in innumerable cases, by one of the attracted couple being subject to this bond--all of this has preserved the nascent emotion from straightway relapsing to the basic level whence it sprang, and has fostered the evolution of love in the higher reaches of emotion; of imagination, of controlled and chastened passion.
