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Show ; Is Thirty ! : tlie Lovep : I Deadline . 'J ; Will Durant was born in North. Adams, Mass., in 2555, and was educated in the Catholic Cath-olic faith by the Jesuits, receiving re-ceiving from Ihem a degree of B. A. in 1007. After a period of newspaper work as a reporter repor-ter for the New York Eve-nine; Eve-nine; Journal, he became a professor pro-fessor of Latin, Greek, and French at Selon flail. For the next ten years he devoted himself him-self exclusively to scholastic pursuits which included a trip la F.urnpe and extensive study at Columbia in 1017. "The Slory of Philosophy," written several years ago has now totaled 200,000 sales and the publishers figure that at least 1.000,000 people have read it. At the present time when not engaged m lecturing through the country, Doctor Durant lives in New York Cilii and wvi'es for the magazines. He is r, arried. By WILL DUR.iNI A ml nmv vhnt If 1 neve said it at nil? Whiil II this report, of uiy tlc-ny-Ing the. possibility of Love lifter thirty. Is ns fictitious as the famous philosophical philo-sophical remark that all men should shoot themselves at thirty-live? Slow ly I am learning my lesson: I must never Joke with reporters, they will quote me without the smile, and th"y will he certain to Ignore modltications. ISut It would be a shame, now that this learned discussion has gone so fur, to say that the commotion has a purely Imaginary source. Perhaps the best tiling to do In the premises is to set down what really was said (with sundry Improvements that come as afterthoughts), and to Indicate what basic problems lie at the root of our rather frivolous debate. The original query was Intelligent ond fundamental. Can we restore the old moral code? It Is a fcood question because It suggests the possibility that the old code Is permanently gone, and thnt our current "immorality" lr but a groping trial-and-error transition transi-tion to a new code of honor and decency. de-cency. For the old code was developed with an agricultural society In view; It assumed a brief adolescence, and a rapid arrival of the male at economic self-sutliclency ; It assumed that mar riage would come early, and that children would come early and often. On the farm It was cheaper to marry; the wife was an asset, not an ornament; orna-ment; the children soon earned their lieepT and became profitable Investments Invest-ments of one's energy; therefore marriage mar-riage came young, motherhood was sacred, and birth-control was Immoral. And In the complex Industrial life of the city men attain self-sutliciency late, and In the middle class latest of nil; a wife Is so expensive a luxury th.it only the poor can afford to marry mar-ry ; children are frowned upon by landlords, and cannot earn money for us till they are fourteen or sixteen; Immigration, and the suction of the city upon the country, replenish the population very well ; the streets are littered with children. Above all, the advance of medicine, sanitation and parental care has reduced re-duced the death rate to a fraction of what It was; the birth rate had to come down, or else Ecclesiastes and Malthus would have been right in believing be-lieving that when goods are Increased, they are increased that consume them, and the last condition Is as bad as the first. So the commandment to breed and multiply loses Its urgency In the city ; marriage comes late, and children are an oversight of love. Social So-cial necessity, which mnl;es all sound morality no longer requires large families: early marriage Is not Indispensable Indis-pensable for the maintenance of the r.:ce, and birth control, which the t:ed and virtuous Tolstoi condemned a a great sin. Is taken up hy the nVest ladies In the land. All things change. Consequently there Is no necessary Ic-rmanence, nor any inherent hull-I---SS. iu the moral code which came ti .wo to us with our religion arid i. r polities. "Immorality' is mostly i. ler people's morals, or the morals oi other days. As the industrial rev nation altered -our lives, destroyed ii :r homes, packed us Into apartment I Imses, replaced the family with the J: Mvi.lual n.id the state, subjected re-I'uimi re-I'uimi to science, and art to industry, i it is rapidly dissolving t lie moral i le developed In and for an agrlcul-i agrlcul-i ;il age. Invention, which is the I . other of urogress. Is transiently the nurse and instrument of our "im Morality." Adolescence lengthens, ti nil maturity of mind and character, like maturity of means, comes nearer thirty than twenty. A man of thirty l.-i young now, In body and soul ; worn ii n. who in the past was old. decrepit and trustworthy at forty, now retains her beauty into the "dangerous age"; mid if I'.alznc were alive he would write with admiration of la femme de iiuai'iinte ans the woman of forty j ea rs. Tcrhaps In the end. sexual development develop-ment will ul30 be delayed; and then aow sdjustaient of aature and In dustry may come, with later puberty, a longer period of growth and education, educa-tion, later marriage, later climacteric, and a lengthened life. When that new adjustment comes, man will be on a higher level of health, power and thought tiian ever before. The prolongation pro-longation of adolescence lifted man from brutality to civilization; which of us can tell the fruits of that further prolongation of adolescence which goes on today under our very eyes? Is Dulwer's "Coming Race" about ti arrive? Meanwhile, however, the Interlude Is chaos. Many of our people are of south-European origin, and will carry with them, for several generations, a racial habit of sexual precocity. The city will continue to stimulate desire, , and to discourage marriage; everything every-thing will hinge upon that. Promiscuity Promiscu-ity will increase, and women will achieve the "single standard" by Imitating that of men. Men will have many loves, and live through them; and then, at thirty or so, they may marry. An increasing number of them will never marry at all. Here at last we touch our original question: can marriage, postponed until un-til thirty, be ever a real love-marriage, ever anything more than a "marlage de convenunce," with the hanker playing the. role of the father? Can a man love at thirty? Doubtless he can lose his head in the heat of desire; there is no age that is safe from Infatuation, Infatua-tion, and Goethe at seventy could propose pro-pose to a girl of sixteen, lint could he have fallen at her feet in a dura tion? Could lie have surrendered to her his Olympian egotism, and lost all thought of self in devotion to her? Could his love be no mere itching of the llesh, but a hunger and thirst to do services to the loved one, to he near her and feel the warmth of her presence and her comradeship? Perhaps this full flush of love, more spirit than body, more devotion than desire, conies only to the young ; and middle age seldom knows it except for one who has been loved from early years through all the fluctuations of desire and through all the vicissil tides of fortune. (Our question is not whether love dies at thirty, but only whether love in its full, flower can come to a man of thirty for a woman whom he has not loved before.) It is a pity that when such complete love comes it is not permitted, In our cautious cau-tious days, to weld the lovers into a marriage that shall be a vow burned in with, the unstinted emotion of youth, rather than a physiological partnership entered upon with the cold rationality of middle age, under the inspiring supervision of an alderman. alder-man. The tragedy remains, In tills melting melt-ing time, that we love profoundly and i liniitlessly, and do not marry; that later we love again, less profoundly and intensely, and do not marry (the banker still frowning upon It) ; and that later we love once more, very moderately and reasonably, with an eye on the ledger and marry. How can a man feel all the delightful sentimentality sen-timentality of love after ten years of adventures in erotica? We are then, in Balzac's phrase, gorillas trying to play on a violin. It Is true that youth is not wise enough to make vows forever, that love-marriages, like other marriages, fall upon 'many rocks, but who has proved that middle age, in these matters, mat-ters, Is wiser than youth? Youth Is never so foolish in adoration as middle mid-dle age is In desire. And what if love must end, never having been dowered by nature or instinct with an easy permanence; is it not better to know it in Its divine completeness, to open every door of the soul to it when it comes? The pessimist broods ovei the brevity of all good things; the optimist resolves to enjoy them while they last. The last word should be one of philosophic phil-osophic doubt: there Is always a slight possibility that we are wrong and that time will smile at or ignore our analysis. Who knows hut that our generosity of necks and knees, our replacement of professional with amateur ama-teur promiscuity, our reduction of women to appetizers and desserts, short-term investments, and show-windows show-windows of our male prosperity, may he but an interlude between two ages of control? . As one mingles for a stilted mo uient in Broadway's big parade, and observes the riotous emancipation of an Instinct once subservient to reproduction re-production nnd the race, the triumph of liberalism leaps to the eye and the mind; and one wonders if this Immoderation, Im-moderation, too. like bitter Puritan ism. may nol bring a reaction that will swing us back helplessly to an extreme of suppression and restraint? Many rimes in the past men have experimented with marriage ami the family; among the tJreeks love cou.d not claim even the uu rul slat is of Broadway. But we experimental variants vari-ants are ut a small minority; let us step out from the centei of our great er cities, anil we are at once In another an-other world, a world In which there still are homes. Possibly our world will conquer and absorb that one drawing all the country magnetically into cities, and all the cities Into rue new life and the novel code. But perhaps per-haps the family and the countryside will win; perhaps we of the cities are ultimately sterile, and flourish uow only because of the health ami vigor that tlow to us In every generation from the village and the town. Let that stream run dry. and we shall face again the problems of reproduction and continuance; the species will us sert itself anew against the Individual; Individ-ual; love may once more mean mar riage, and marriage children. We are sports nnd freaks, and the race nitf pass us by. . 1D28. by Bell Syndlca'.a Inc.) |