I Hope I am Not Being Misunderstood.

Those who say “The more I see of men the better I like dogs” — those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship — will be well advised to examine their real reasons. 

I hope I am not being misunderstood. If this chapter leads anyone to doubt that the lack of “natural affection” is an extreme depravity I shall have failed. 

Nor do I question for a moment that Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives. I shall therefore have some sympathy with those whose comment on the last few pages takes the form, 

“Of course. Of course. These things do happen. 

Selfish or neurotic people can twist anything, even love, into some sort of misery or exploitation. 

But why stress these marginal cases? 

A little common sense, a little give and take, prevents their occurrence among decent people.” 

But I think this comment itself needs a commentary. 

Firstly, as to neurotic. I do not think we shall see things more clearly by classifying all these malefical states of Affection as pathological. 

No doubt there are really pathological conditions which make the temptation to these states abnormally hard or even impossible to resist for particular people. Send those people to the doctors by all means. 

But I believe that everyone who is honest with himself will admit that he has felt these temptations. Their occurrence is not a disease; or if it is, the name of that disease is Being a Fallen Man. 

In ordinary people the yielding to them — and who does not sometimes yield? — is not disease, but Sin.

Spiritual direction will here help us more than medical treatment. 

Medicine labours to restore “natural” structure or “normal” function. 

But Greed, Egoism, Self-Deception and Self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. 

For who, in Heaven’s name, would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings were wholly absent? 

“Natural”, if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. 

We have seen only One Such Man. 

And He was not at all like the psychologist’s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. 

You can’t really be very well “adjusted” to Your World if it says you “have a devil” and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood. 

But secondly, the comment in its own language admits the very thing I am trying to say. 

Affection produces happiness if — and only if — there is common sense and give and take and “decency”. 

In other words, only if something more, and other,than Affection is added. The mere feeling is not enough.

You need “common sense”, that is, Reason. You need “give and take”; that is, you need Justice, continually stimulating mere Affection when it fades and restraining it when it forgets or would defy The Art of Love. 

You need “decency”. There is no disguising the fact that this means goodness; patience, self-denial, humility, and the continual intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can ever be.

That is The Whole Point. If we try to live by Affection alone, Affection will “go bad on us”. 

How bad, I believe we seldom recognise. 

Can Mrs. Fidget really have been quite unaware of the countless frustrations and miseries she inflicted on her family? It passes belief. 

She knew — of course she knew — that it spoiled your whole evening to know that when you came home you would find her uselessly, accusingly, “sitting up for you”. 

She continued all these practices because if she had dropped them she would have been faced with the fact she was determined Not to See; would have known that she was not necessary. 

That is the first motive. Then too, the very laboriousness of her life silenced her secret doubts as to the Quality of Her Love. 

The more her feet burned and her back ached, the better, for this pain whispered in her ear “How much I must love them if I do all this!” 

That is the second motive. But I think there is a lower depth. 

The unappreciativeness of the others, those terrible, wounding words — anything will “wound” a Mrs. Fidget — in which they begged her to send the washing out, enabled her to feel ill-used, therefore, to have a continual grievance, to enjoy the pleasures of resentment. 

If anyone says he does not know those pleasures, He is a Liar; or, a Saint. 

It is true that they are pleasures only to those who hate. 

But then a love like Mrs. Fidget’s contains a good deal of hatred. 

It was of erotic love that the Roman poet said, “I love and hate,” but other kinds of Love admit the same mixture. 

They carry in them the seeds of Hatred. If Affection is made the absolute Sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. 

Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.