Mildred Champagne on life and love

Foreword

IN the years that I have been writing on Love, I suppose some quarter of a million souls have confided in me, have told me their troubles and asked my advice. The letters that have come to me have been from people in all walks of life, from the educated and the ignorant, from the young and old, from the rich and poor, from the wise and the foolish, from those on the brink of life and those near the finish. I've advised young girls and old girls, experienced and inexperienced. I've advised young men and old men, college professors and mill hands, wives, mothers, business men and women, club men and women, and politicians of either sex, party and persuasion. I hope my advice has done some good. I believe it has. I've received scores of letters to make me secure in that belief.

Good advice isn't a bad thing, altogether, if you know enough to take it at the psychological moment. The advice that is based on experience, that is unbiased, unprejudiced, that is clear, straight from the shoulder, sympathetic and understanding — that is good advice, good for everybody who

vii viii FOREWORD

needs it, and everybody does need it at some time or other in this vale of tears and tribulations.

Every man in love thinks no case like his was ever heard of. Every unhappy wife thinks no woman in the world was ever so abused. Every boy in college knows just what is wrong with the world and how to correct it. Every girl of eighteen knows that if her beauty and talents were duly recognized she would either marry a handsome young millionaire within the year, or become the greatest movie star in the world. And so it goes.

But of course there is nothing new under the sun, certainly no feeling, experience or adventure in the world of Love. The feelings of -certain people of certain grades of intelligence, age and circumstance might almost be classified under specific headings. The cycle of human feelings and events follows the cycle in nature and the seasons of the year. The springtime of love, the summer of love, the autumn of love, the winter of love ; all are new with each approach, but really old as the hills with the repetition of the ages.

This book contains my reaction to cases, and my reflection upon cases and my experience in cases, all cases that have been submitted to me. For of such I conceive is the true study of human affairs, the understanding of the psychology of Life and Love. M. C.

Contents

PAGE

Love

Love in Genius — Love in Religion — Creeds and Dogmas — The Average Idea of Religion — Religious Differences — Love in Nature — The Ideal of Human Love — Between Man and Woman — Romantic Love — ^Emotional Refinements — When a Woman Loves . . i

CHAPTER I Love

"All thought, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers to Love, And feed his sacred flame."

LOVE is the fairest flower in the bouquet of human experience. I wish I could make every man and woman in the world feel the power of love at least once in their lives. Life is so short and love is the only thing in life that makes it worth living!

Love is the essence of happiness, and to most men and women happiness is the will-o'-the-wisp which they chase throughout their lives all over the world, but which always seems to elude them. Perhaps it is because they don't recognize happiness when they see it. They think wealth, power, fame are happiness, and often trample over love to get them — and find out too late that what they passed over was the substance and what they treasured and hoarded was trash. For love is the only real and lasting thing in a whole world of decay.

Love reveals itself in many forms. It is ""Nature's second sun/* It is the basic strength of all animated and living things. It is life, warmth, aspiration, inspiration, motive power. " 'Tis Love that makes the world go 'round."

Love is essentially the creator of beauty. It raises everything that is ugly and commonplace to the lovely and exalted. It is God in its power and essence, for it creates life and glorifies.it.

We all know the common clay of which the body is made, and to which it is reduced when life's short span has been encompassed. The dear dead is a strange heavy clod in our arms, resembling vaguely what we have loved and what has loved us but a moment before. The eyes are closed, the mouth is quiet, the heart stilled forever. What is it that brought the light of intelligence and recognition to the eyes, the words of reason to the mouth, the palpitation to the heart? The spirit, the soul, the life, the motor that animated that body and made it our Castle of Happiness is Love.

The greatest works of man have been inspired by love. For love the greatest of men died teaching its doctrines for the salvation of men. For love men soar to sublime heights or fall to bottomless pits, but always the aspiration for the divine inspiration is glorified. The achievement is little compared with the achieving. What a man aspires to, not what he accomplishes, make his manhood. He is often crowned by his aspirations and crucified by his achievements.

Love in Genius

Have you ever noticed at the end of a day the crowds of people who are on the streets, in the cars and trains and common carriers of the cities, going their way homeward from the day's work? In the trains they sit, tired, drab, unimaginative. On the streets they push their way aggressively in the various directions where lie their homes. They impress you as a seething mass of scurrying ants, who are, apparently, no more soulful or colorful than ants.

Look in the faces of these crowds of men and women, hundreds and thousands and millions of them! They all look alike. They appear to the casual eye like the incoming and outgoing tides of a drab ocean. They seem to have no more individuality than the sands of the desert. You think one great motor moves the lot of them.

Yet each one of these human beings moves by his own will, his own motive power. Each is an individual more or less individualistic. Each, when taken from the crowds has a face distinct from all other faces, and he has his very own peculiar hopes, ideals and ambitions. Each is possessed of a mind with which to think and a heart with which to love. And so each of these apparentlycolorless human beings is a god unto himself, with the god-like powers to govern the universe. Each is a potential Caesar, an Aristotle, a Shakespeare, or an Abraham Lincoln. For genius is only the power of thinking and loving, highly developed.

Love in Religion

Some call Love, God, and all the human beings of the earth worship this God, the Spirit of Love, though in different ways. Love in religion, which is planted in every human consciousness, is a hope or conviction, as the case may be, that this great Creator of life in every form will not allow that life to perish, but will perpetuate it in constantly higher forms to everlasting glory and a realization of perfect happiness. Various peoples in all the ages and all the degrees of spiritual and cultural development have created gods out of their leaders of men in their passionate desire to worship God in concrete form. They have given the Spirit of Love a human form to worship as a supernatural being. But the Spirit of Love is in all of us. The specialized Gods of all the ages have merely been leaders of men with human bodies and carnal appetites, but v^ith a highly developed genius for thinking and loving.

This mystical, miraculous, inexplicable, infinite power that is given to the finite man — the power to create life, to continue the species, to immortalize himself, to urge the world ever onward and upward, is Love.

To man alone is given the power of thought with love, the mind with the heart, and so he is enabled to control all the other things of life that love only with the body. — The more highly developed the man in spiritual or mental and soul growth, the more he is possessed of thought with love. Indeed one is the complement of the other. The primitive and savage of the human species, hunt and fish and propagate as do the animals, comparing and satisfying the sex hunger with the hunger of the stomach. They have no thought of the higher God-force of the soul with which the cultural life is imbued. Yet every savage still has the instinct to worship God, Love, the Creator of Life in some form or another, and no savage tribe is without its own peculiar religious rites.

I am reminded of a story told me by a fine old army officer who, in his youth, in our old frontier days, was an Indian scout. To him an Indian chief described his religious belief thus. He looked about him disdainfully and said, "You white man, you Baptist, you Methodist, you Catholic, you all the time pray God to do this and to do that. Me look up to the Great White Spirit and say, you do what you damn please!"

Creeds and Dogmas

It seems incredible that today in this advanced world of thought there should still be religious differences and the constant bickerings and bitterness they arouse. All religions have a common Deity, all men worship a Supreme Being. Then must come the different creeds, each claiming a shorter cut to Heaven, and each proceeding to prove it by starting at a given place and going a mile a minute through five million miles of words. At the end of that time they are in Heaven, and they deserve to be there, or elsewhere.

Love is religion. Love, the creator of all living things, is God. God, the creator of light from darkness, order from chaos, beauty from ugliness, is Love. Love makes the birds burst their little throats with song, it makes the tender shrubs of green shoot from a gray earth, it causes the flowers to bud and blossom, it paints the thousands of exquisite colors in sky and earth, and finally and greatest miracle of all, it makes the human clay a divinity.

The worship of Love and the devout contemplation of all its profound beauty, its power of miracle, its boundless mystery, its infinitude, its immortality, these are religion enough for any man. This Love in religion is a part of his soul, and his soul birth and soul growth. It is an inner conviction, a divine inspiration, not something that a mere man can hammer into him from the outside by mere words.

Love was the foundation of all religions in the beginning. All religions had their inception in Love. But man, in making different creeds, merely because his vocabulary expanded, has created of religion a huge battlefield, where each individual to save his own mean little soul is ready to damn the soul of his neighbor; where each man fights for his own hide instead of the great common cause, that '^one divine event toward which the whole creation moves."

The religion of Love does not manifest itself in the orthodox way of going to church regularly to pray for yourself all the time so that you may prosper on this earth and eventually get a reserved seat in Heaven. It is more altruistic than that. In fact, what is a religion if it isn't the very essence of altruism? The religion of Love means loving your neighbor, loving your enemy, loving the unfortunate, the sinner, the poor, the sick; giving yourself to all these with a whole-souledness that is self-realization. The man whose religion is Love, is not only a part of but for the world. He is a blossom on the Tree of Life, out of which he was conceived, where he grows to strength and beauty, where he lives his life of usefulness, where he leaves his seed to procreate through the immortal ages. Without Love as the basis of his religion, he is not a unit of the spiritual world, working in unison with all the mysterious seen and unseen forces of Nature. He is not a part of the Tree of Life.

But Love as a religion can only reveal itself in all its infinite beauty and truth, when man is educated to receive it. Only the intellectual of the soul and the mind can feel and understand all the exquisiteness of Love, the true religion.

The Average Idea of Religion

The average man's idea of religion is something to put on Sundays with his cutaway. Six days of the week he spends on himself, enjoying himself in his own way, no matter who has to suffer for it, mingling with the prosperous and happy, avoiding the poor and unfortunate, running after his creditor and avoiding his debtor, straining every effort to get the best of the other fellow, before the other fellow gets the best of him. On Sunday he puts on his religion and his Sunday clothes and his *'more-holy-than-thou'* attitude, and goes to church with his family, and hears the doctrine of his favorite creed expounded. He hears words and words, in a clear, metallic voice from a three or five thousand dollar a year pulpit. He hears about love and God and charity and self-abnegation, but the mechanical words buzz in his ears like the droning of bees.

Religious Differences

For the happiness of the home it is essential that a man's family be at one with him in his religious convictions and forms of worship. Such creeds and dogmas as he cherishes must be reflected in his wife and family, or there can be no lasting peace there. No home is so divided against itself and so ready to fall, as the one where the husband goes to one church and the wife to another, while each is constantly fighting the other as to where the children shall go.

In the first flush of love, when the chief impulse is to marry, and no obstacle in the way of a union is considered important, differences of religion carry no weight, and are ruthlessly pushed aside. But they crop up again later on, with the gradual lo MILDRED CHAMPAGNE

fading of the rose vision of first love, and the return of common gray realities. Then the obstacles to the marriage are recalled and considered, and chief of these is the difference of religion. This becomes the bed-rock of contention, especially when the children come, and their spiritual education is to be considered. The wife says they must go with her, and the husband is equally positive they must go with him. And there you are. Religion in the home becomes strife, when if it were the true religion. Love, it would be the home's very essence, its staying power. When all creeds gather under the one headlight. Love, when all dogmas resolve themselves in the simple golden rule, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Love each other. Be kind" — then and then only will Religion become a power for good. Such is real and practical Christianity, in the essence of the Founder of the Faith.

The religion of Love is practical. It takes care of a man's stomach first and his soul afterwards. It helps him to live well on earth and lets Heaven take care of itself. It gives to a starving man not a Bible but a square meal. It gives to the laborer shorter hours and more pay. It gives every man the right and the means to enjoy life. It judges a man not by his clothes but by his heart. It doesn't preach charity, but practices justice, equality.

ON LIFE AND LOVE ii

brotherhood. The religion of Love is more than

a rehgion; it is a fraternity. It is the only true

Democracy on earth. And thus far it is but little

known.

Love in Nature

"... Every flower

That to the sun its heaving breast expands Is born of love. And every song of bird That floats mellifluent on the balmy air Is but a love-note."

All things in Nature expand and bloom under Love's genial influence. Out of the earth shoot the delicate sprigs of green from the seed of love, and the sun which is warmth, love's manifestation, draws it out to greater strength and growth, until it bursts into flower and realizes the very fullness of life. Then it returns to seed again and reproduces its kind, and so on through the countless ages, for whatever love touches becomes immortal. Love is perpetual life.

This love in Nature is not always visible, but who cannot feel in the air of a Spring morning the very essence of love? All Winter the fields and meadows are paralyzed, the forests are lifeless under chill gray skies, and all Nature seems deserted and dead. Then comes Spring and kisses the earth with the warm sun kiss of Nature's love. And all Nature awakes from her death-like sleep and glows and responds to the caress of the long desired.

The fields are green, the trees revel in foliage, and flowers and fruit answer the call of the Infinite, all these the children of Nature's love. And proudly does Nature foster the children of her love, to be courted and loved in their turn by the power which engendered them.

This is the demonstration of love in Nature. And to be at one with Nature, this love is felt and reflected by the birds of the air and the beasts of the field and by man, the highest embodiment of life. ' *

The Ideal of Human Love

**And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods makes Heaven drowsy with the harmony."

Shakespeare.

When two human souls are touched with love's devout comprehension, its steady glorification, then indeed is the triumph of love attained. To these two affinities of the spirit, earth is changed to Heaven, the commonest day is a holiday, the hardest toil becomes joyous play, the lavish giving of each for the other becomes a fulfillment of each and a glorification of both, the steady idealizing of the beloved changes the weakness of each into strength, and each is transformed into a Deity by the magic of the other's love.

Between Man and Woman

Thou art my life, my love, my heart,

The very eyes of me, And hast command of every part,

To live and die for thee.

Herrick.

There is nothing so beautiful, so idealistic, so generous, gentle and tender as the love of man and woman for one another. But such love in all its beauty can only come from a union and a unity of beautiful thoughts and ideals. So it is that great love is but for the few chosen children of man, whose very lives, thoughts and deeds are so beautiful as to make them godlike. Only great intellects, great souls, can feel the greatness of love, for love is divine. The rest of mankind can feel it only to a degree corresponding to their perfection, to the purity of their souls and the nobility of their ideals.

As man started in life he was as a god, and love in all its fullness was meant for him to know and understand, but as the world progressed and life became more complex, so his vision of the beautiful was dimmed, and it is only at inspired moments, that a clear understanding flashes through his imagination from the catholic storm which surrounds him.

Romantic Love

When a man really loves a woman with the highest love of which he is capable, he makes her the supreme ruler of his heart and home, and he toils for her early and late to secure her happiness. He denies himself that she may have the more, and his greatest joy is her smile of recognition of his service. Love makes the brute in him exquisitely tender, it changes his selfish nature to one of complete self-abnegation and sacrifice. His ear that never could distinguish between sounds, now becomes attuned to beautiful music, his eyes that never recognized form or color, can now see only glowing harmony everywhere. And the triumph of his love is not blindness that sees only the perfection of his imagery in the beloved, but it is an infinitude of vision that sees everything visible and concealed, a vastness and profundity of comprehension that understands all above and below the surface, and an expansion of his nature that can breathe in the whole blessed reality. A man loves a woman for her faults as well as her virtues, for what she is, as well as for what she might be. The whole-souled giving of self, which is love, means the giving of its wealth of frailties no less than its wealth of power.

Emotional Refinements

^*When Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on

all the chords with might, It smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in

music out of sight."

That is the ideal of human love — self-abnegation which is at the same time self-realization. But as we are all merely human, and one of the fundamentals of humanness is self-preservation, instead of self-sacrifice, so love in all its divinity can come to but a few rarefied souls. It is not for the many, but for the chosen few. It is better to give than to receive, to love than to be loved, but this philosophy can only be absorbed by the cultured of soul and intellect. Just in proportion as men and women grow in soul and intellect do they grow in comprehension and understanding of emotional refinements.

When a Woman Loves

". . . she set herself to man Like perfect music unto noble words."

Tennyson.

And when a woman loves a man, when the recognition of a kindred spirit makes the eternal romance of her life, then is the triumph of her womanhood attained. This love, this triumph, is self-sacrifice — for only in the complete giving of herself does she fulfill her nature. She gives a man her body and soul, to save his life or to give him pleasure. Her glorified vision of him makes him a god, no less than her a goddess.

CHAPTER II The Sex Love

THE sex love — the passions, the instinct for propagation common in humans as it is in the lower animals, is, of course, the most universal human affection, and affliction almost, since it is the most universally mistaken for love. Although without passion there can be no love between the sexes, yet there is so much passion without love (the fundamental reason for the mating of sex always being the instinct for propagation, which is passion) that it is a very wise precaution to analyze or test very carefully the feeling a man or woman has for the other, in order properly to classify it, and govern one's actions accordingly.

It is inevitable that with certain years will come certain longings, absorbing, overpowering, not to be denied. This, the sex love, or passion, • is the natural craving of every living particle of animal and plant life. This is the instinct that makes a man go out hunting for his mate, that in prehistoric times made him emerge, naked and ferocious from his cave, to strike down the first female that crossed his path : — that makes him in our modern times, with his desires smothered in a cotton batting of civilization, go out a-courting. And when his desires are kindled by the right spark, the inevitable conflagration occurs with the cotton batting covering, and the primitive man is revealed.

Savage Love

The coarse, primitive, savage man — and he is to be found, not only in the forest primeval, in the remote South Sea Island, in darkest Africa, but also in every walk of our so-called civilized life — loves with his body only, not with his soul, or the underdeveloped mentality which may be called his soul for the want of a better name. He seeks only to gratify his animal passion, urged on by his animal instinct to reproduce himself. In proportion as a man develops his power of thought, so does he develop his power of sensitized and romantic love.

The most highly developed human love tempers its sex love by thought fulness, consideration, tenderness and devotion to its object. So it is that in the most highly civilized minds, the highest ideal in human society is realized in its sex contacts. In all the primitive and savage lands of the earth men live the lives of animals and degrade their women to animal level by their passions. In romantic love the sex contact becomes the most exalted function of human society, and men and women are raised to the godlike by its observance. Ancient Rome, Athens, Venice, and countless civilizations before them, were destroyed because the soulful sex contact which exalts the State as it does the individual, was allowed to sink to animal contact, seeking only to satisfy its bodily appetite with no thought of the higher godlife for which man was intended. So can a great uplifting virtue become a degrading vice by its improper observance. When man forgets that he has the power of thought and sensitized feeling with love, he reverts to the subjective beast, and no longer has the god power to dominate.

What is Passion?

Passion is the racial call of the blood, the call of the beast in the jungle, of the primeval man for his mate. In itself it is the lowest form of human love, since it is coarse, wild, crude and selfish. It is incapable of either romance or altruism. It is love without thought, without imagination.

Passion is the mating instinct common in all animal life and is entirely a thing of the flesh. In effect it is like fire, hot, fierce, fleeting and consuming. It seeks only its immediate satisfaction and is without soul or abstract thought.

Passion with love, is the natural mingling of body and soul, nature and truth. It is beautiful and constructive. Passion v^ithout love is ugly and destructive. It is over-feeding the body and starving the soul. It is mere animalism, and, therefore, humiliating and ugly to the human who strives to rise above his ancestors who walked on four legs. And since passion is not a thing of the soul but of animal instinct, it is selfish and seeks only the gratification of its own immediate desires. It is regardless of pain, sorrow, death, so long as it gratifies those desires.

Real and Lasting Love

Love, the only kind that is real and lasting is a thing of the soul. Soul is personality, a necessary combination of mind and body, one working upon the other. Passion does not last because the outer attraction of the body, which is its sole sustenance, is fleeting. But that intangible something that is called soul, or personality, is an inner force, and the very essence of life. The feeling it begets is love, which like soul defies time and circumstance.

"True love's the gift which God has given To man alone beneath the heaven : It is not fantasy's hot fire,

Whose wishes soon as granted fly; It liveth not in fierce desire,

With dead desire it does not die;

It is the secret sympathy,

The silver Hnk, the silken tie,

Which heart to heart and mind to mind

In body and in soul can bind."

Scott.

Real Love, just as it subsists on soul, is soulsatisfying, and has in itself the disassociated qualities of the soul as apart from mere body appetites. It seeks not its ov^n desire but the desire of its object. It is supremely self-sacrificing, and will labor unceasingly and disinterestedly for the happiness and elevation of its object. The physical is its last consideration.

CHAPTER III Evolution of Human Love

WE trace by various theories of evolution one form of life merging and developing into another, through all the eons of time. For all we know Creation is without beginning and without end. We prove, or seek to prove, that a certain highly developed form of animal life was evolved by various stages through the countless ages, from the veriest and most insignificant atom. But who created the atom? We shall probably never know. But there was Thought behind it. And we do know that to human beings was given this power of thought in varying degrees as their spiritual growth assimilated it. In this thought-power is man raised above the lower animals and made in the image of the Great Creator.

Human love is just so much higher than animal love in thought and sensitiveness as the human being has developed spiritually from animal life.

"Good shepherd tell this youth what 'tis to Love," says Shakespeare, and he explains,

"It is to be all made of sighs and tears,

It is to be all made of faith and service ;

It is to be all made of fantasy ;

All made of passion and all made of wishes ;

All adoration, duty and observance ;

All humbleness, all patience, all impatience ;

All purity, all trial, all observance."

Adam and Eve

A man can tell by his sex feeling how far he has progressed toward civilized manhood. He can tell it by his instinctive gentleness and chivalry toward women. We are told that Eve, the first woman, was made out of a rib of Adam, the first man. So it is but natural that woman should be necessary to him to make him whole again. But she is as necessary to his mental and spiritual perfection as to the physical, and only so far can either be whole as each merges perfectly into the other. Each is incomplete without the other. Both can realize the fullness of life only as they "draw to each other," and in all ways, mentally, physically and spiritually "flow together in one."