Between Reality and Fantasy

Many of the crimes and tragedies that occur among human beings are the responsibility of the wielders of pens and the makers of stories, songs, and films—those who exploit the conditions prevailing in our society and press them into the service of peddling their wares and securing exorbitant gains behind them. Perhaps the subject of sex is the one most exposed to their invasion. They exploit the prohibition and restriction that surround it, and turn to profit the passion of adolescents, young men and girls, for tales that stir the emotions and inflame the imagination.

So they create for them thrilling love stories and paint sexual love for them in loud, strange, seductive colors—claiming that it is the most magnificent of emotions and the most overpowering; that it is a disease that ravages mankind, from which there is no escape; that it is so great and so splendid that everything deserves to be sacrificed for its sake; and that life in its entirety is summed up in the word love—it commands and it forbids, and living without it is emptiness.

Opinions such as these have formed the axis of novels ever since novels and their inventors came into being, and they are still repeated in different shapes and colors. But what share of truth do these claims possess? And what reality is there in stories that repeat one another and feed one upon the other?

When Lamartine composed his love story "Jocelyn," he said in the preface: "All I hope is that it may occupy a place, however small, beside Atala and René." And Chateaubriand, the author of "Atala and René," had drawn his inspiration from "Paul and Virginie" by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. And he in his turn was inspired by Rousseau in "The New Héloïse." And so on and so forth, until the chain joins the imaginative tale of Madame de La Fayette, and then Tristan and Isolde and the rest of the tales of the Middle Ages.

Most of these novelists—indeed, all of them—were not faithful to reality. Not one of them had experienced the events he created. Their concern was rather to inflame the imagination of their readers, to kindle in them the fires of feeling and excitement, and to subject them to the spell of the pen, thereby securing for themselves thousands of addicts of that easy reading which feeds the feelings and stifles thought. Had they drawn upon reality, they would have seen that love does not play, in the life of society, the role they attribute to it.

Love has little influence upon city people absorbed in their work, ruled by the pursuit of money and the desire to secure a life of standing and comfort. For most city people are merchants and men of industry, and commerce dominates all their relationships, including love and marriage. They seek the wealthy woman whose fortune they take as a means of expanding their trade, or the woman of distinguished social position who adds strength and elevation to their own.

Love's influence is weaker still in the villages, whose inhabitants are ruled by the preoccupations of making a living, and whose hours are consumed in the struggle with a land that yields its bounty only through toil, patience, and the sweat of the brow. Woman for them is a companion in the struggle and the source of the numerous offspring desired to strengthen the family and carry out the hard labors of the land.

Utilitarian considerations—as we see—govern every relationship among human beings in both these environments. In them there is no place for the love that blinds its victim to everything but the beloved, casts personal interest to the winds, and makes the lover's life, mind, and heart the property of the other person, whom he can never forget and for whom he will accept no substitute.

Yet love in its romantic sense may take hold of weak souls or abnormal souls, and these are a minority in society—or may be expected to be so in a society whose members have received a measure of culture

• Our writers must be faithful to reality, and not compose thrilling love stories which feed the feelings and stifle thought, and delude the young into believing that life in its entirety is summed up in the word love!

• Is it true that utilitarian considerations govern every relationship among human beings, and that first place does not belong to love?

• Parents and educators must attend to the emotional education of children, lest they be swayed and led into slipping by what they read and see.

and have learned moderation in the affairs of their lives and the curbing of their unruly instincts.

Concentrated, violent love may become, in certain persons, a manifestation of obstinacy and rigidity, to which love clings in answer to the social resistance and the environmental obstacles it meets. Antar, who was overcome by his love for Abla and made by it into a mighty hero, would never have become so had he found the path of love easy and smooth before him. And the Duke of Windsor would not have been humbled by his love for Mrs. Simpson but for the resistance he met from his family.

Love in its morbid, deadly sense may hold violent sway in primitive environments whose people lack the means of culture and are ruled by instinctive passions, after the pattern of what we see in Flaubert's story Salammbô, which presents us with pictures of the wildness of love among the barbarians, and of the savagery of the other passions bound up with it, such as jealousy, envy, greed, and revenge.

Love may also play a deadly role in the circles of the pampered rich, whose children grow up in softness, ease, and idleness, with nothing to distract them from indulging their inclinations and humoring their whims. If they are barred from some of their demands, or kept from a sweetheart they want, they cannot bear the shock, for they have never been accustomed to denial and discipline. Then the symptoms of psychological disturbance appear in them, driving them to violence and harm, or to wasting away and dissolution.

There are those who claim that love is everything in a woman's life, and that she cannot live without it. The truth is that love plays a role in the life of the pampered, idle woman, shut up at home with no activity to divert her from drifting into dreams; she is like the idle man lolling in the lap of luxury. As for the woman of limited means, who looks at life with seriousness and reflection, her position differs in nothing from a man's. She subjects love to practical benefit and sees in marriage nothing but a means to comfort, protection, and cooperation in earning a living. Were she given the choice between love and money, she would not hesitate to prefer the latter.

As for love in its sound, pure form, it does not differ from the pure friendship built upon admiration and mutual trust between two persons in understanding and harmony, each respecting the other and finding in his nearness contentment and peace of mind.

Such a feeling between a man and a woman may end in marriage, or may remain a quiet friendship free of love's storms and turbulence. And it—like friendship pure of self-interest—is rare and precious to obtain. Whoever wins it has won a happiness without equal.

Here I return to the novels that distort the reality of life for young men and women and plant illusions in their minds. Among the responsibilities laid upon the shoulders of parents and educators, I count that of opening the eyes of the rising generation to reality, tending them with a sound emotional education, and guiding them soundly on the basis of knowledge and experience. If this guidance is denied them, there are among them the quickly impressed and the credulous, who surrender to illusions and measure life by the measure of the stories they read, the films they watch, and the songs they hear, and so expose themselves to every manner of error and slipping. Among these are some who turn away from any marriage not founded upon sweeping, fanciful love, and live despairing and tormented—because they fail to find what they seek, or because the love match disappoints their hopes when they discover that emotion is subject to change and passing, and that life does not rest on love alone.

The reading of literature and of the other products of imagination and feeling must be accompanied by a capacity for analysis and criticism, and by experience in judgment, in drawing conclusions, and in telling the true from the false. Failing this, such reading becomes harmful in the extreme.