The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎631r] (152/239)

THE DUEL OF THE SEXES.
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is beyond the power of all earthly prisons : and so when they peered
anxiously into their vessels of clay, lo ! the divine essence had
flow n they knew not whither—and for ever !
I erhaps the most inspiring of the possibilities brought within
the region of hope by the doctrine of evolution is the idea that the
passion of love can undergo a process of beautiful growth—nay,
that it is already doing so in some natures that have outstripped
their fellows. The poet, George Barlow, in one of his striking
essays on this subject, expresses the belief that “ a marvellous
development, unnoticed by most of us, has recently been taking
place in the poetic conception of love.” He claims that not only
is modern romantic love an essentially different thing from the
passion as understood by the ancients—which, presumably, would
not be disputed—but that it has perceptibly altered even since
the time of the Elizabethan poets. The coarseness which Shake
speare himself in his finest love-scenes does not escape, means
something more than a mere difference between his time and ours
in habits of speech and manner. It means a difference in feeling
and in conception that goes very deep indeed.
And this change, this new direction, promises the fulfilment of
some of the noblest and sweetest dreams that have ever entered
the human heart.
“ The Epipsychidion,” says this author, ‘‘is a poem of pas
sionate human love not discrowned of humanness, but with all
its human elements in process of transformation into higher but
not less human elements.” Certainly not less human if higher,
for the ascent of man is precisely in the human direction.
This is not a mere return to the platonic idea, w'hich sets a feud
a relentless vendetta, between sense and soul. It is a dream of
their reconciliation through a great ennoblement, a refining of
tie whole being, till love is capable of actually spiritualising the
body through its own spiritual intensity. And the imagination
refuses to stop here. It whispers of a possible transmuting of
the physical into something subtler yet more complete; some
thing, perhaps, depending on the growth of perceptions which we
have already begun tentatively to name : the intuition, the sub
conscious self, the sixth sense, and so forth. And if these vehicles
of emotion seem at present inadequate, unsatisfying, chill to the
more tremendous passions of the heart, it has to be remembered
t at they are, per assumption, in their infancy, and that, as the
nature of man changes, so may—nay, must—change the’experi-
ences to which he gradually becomes heir.
The scared reason may cry halt for a moment, but only to find
its feet again to admit that since evolution has at last become
conscious, while its velocity incessantly increases with every inch