UNIV. OF

ESSAYS

MISUSE OF WORD "AFFINITY" IN LOVE AFFAIRS

OU may give a dog a bad name and hang him. It's different with ideas. Aye, too, with the words that express them. Thoughts are things, and words that deal with realities are not easily disposed of. "Affinity has been given a bad name and hung," says a disgusted commentator upon the signs of the times. "Soul affinities" are something he had never heard of till reaching our shores, declared the grand old commander of the Salvation Army to Boston interviewers. A fearful invention of modern sinners too dreadful to discuss is about his characterization of it, and who can blame him in the face of the use that has been made of it in these latter days.

Nevertheless, the hanging is wrongly applied, the condemnation misses its object. Affinity is the law that swings the spheres and keeps all life and matter in harmonious relation. Cross it anywhere and life goes wrong, and discord displaces harmony. Every particle of matter seeks its affinity, every plant or organism or germ, from sea ooze up, crawls after it. Chemists, naturalists, scientists in all lines, know the calamities that ensue by the coming together of the uncongenial elements, the nonaffinities, in the physical world. Nature, indeed, wastes little sentiment upon the matter, and makes short shrift of any of her subjects or

forces that would disregard the eternal law of attraction and repulsion that she has set up for their observance.

Destructive explosions, deadly blight, war to the death, wait upph the mixture of the uncongenial elements and creations through all the plant and animal kingdom.

Every flower and shrub knows its affinity and refuses to take up with any other, even to the extent of withering in a night, the gardeners tell us, in many cases if planted beside the unloved alien. Botanists well know the curious tastes of the wild flowers, and the swift answer to its own that brings the fragrant white clover from the scattered wood ashes, the catchfly pink from the blasted ledge, and the dainty dwarf dandelion from the oily refuse dropped by the flying engine. What marvels in the plant world may come from cultivating plant affinities, the California wizard, Burbank, begins to reveal to an astonished world, and that greater wonders must wait upon the same law and principle brought to bear upon the animal world he confidently expects.

Shall man, then, reverse or despise this principle and expect to gain by it? On the contrary, is he not much like the plants, observing it almost unconsciously in the ordering of his life and relation everywhere; from the choice of the companion who shows what he is, to the search for the "woman thou gavest me," though she commonly eludes him. Reverenced or derided, the native affinities, the "marriage of true minds" figure supremely in the weal or woe of the human family. The great and happy ones testify to this, too, however vaguely, and live by it whether they know it or not.

That honored general who never heard of soul affinities till he reached our shores has plainly been living by just

such union to the noble woman who shared his life work and pilgrimage with him till recently.

Nothing but death could have parted him from his wife, he says, and he knows that death is but a temporary separation-the soul union was complete. When it comes to the definition of the real thing he seems equal to putting it in good shape, too. "The couple who have solved the problem of loving their neighbor as themselves and who enjoy the perfect understanding that unites them so closely that differences of opinion do not suggest the divorce court, would, I should think, be near to what you Americans term 'soul affinities,'" he says, and it is well to have a good straightforward Englishman help out American mumblings on the subject like that. It may tend, too, to secure some better name for "a crime against humanity" that cloaks itself under the most sacred truths of life.

Affinity, like marriage, has been made to stand for so many monstrous evils that have no relation to it that its true significance is almost lost in them. Why not call a spade a spade and let the queen of hearts preserve her own colors? Sarah Grand told the wretched truth when she said, "There is more nonsense talked in the abstract about marriage as a failure than is talked about any other branch of the conduct of life." The paragrapher is quite to the mark also who writes: "Marriage is never a failure, but often the contracting parties are. So it is with the subtle laws of attraction that draw two people together. You can not explain them or philosophize about them, but they are never a failure, though their counterfeit always is. "The people who claim to have found their affinity don't, as a rule, look as if they had found much," says one jester. No, but the people who have found their affinity, though they don't

proclaim it to the public, know, like the good Salvation Army general, that they have found everything.

In the midst of all the scoffing and cynicism touching love and marriage, it is a fine thing to come upon such testimonies as some of our great ones bear to the divine beauty and true affinity of the tie that binds.

Not long ago there died in New York the aged and wellknown poet, Richard Henry Stoddard, and one who knew him well writes: "The sweetest story of his life was the love for his wife. Half a century ago he married her and for fifty years he made her happy. They say that true love and real sympathy speak without words; that a man and a woman, their lives in tune, can sit hand in hand and each understand the very heart throbs of the other without one spoken word. That is true sometimes. It means a devotion that is unselfish and holy." Is it too much to expect that poor, selfish humanity should reach that ideal in its marriages? Well, at least to recognize it as the ideal, the real, even on our faulty earth, would be something for honest souls to build on. And as for sorrows and disappointments in marriage, the writer who traces them all to the hour when "the mysterious door which leads to perfect sympathy is shut" knew well her ground.

It is said that one of the recent victims of abused affinity admitted that she "believed in free love with some qualifications." And there is another term that has been done to death by slanderous tongues. True love is always free. It was never bought nor bound by any power nor device of man. It knows no chains, but yields itself in voluntary and joyful service and union on the strength of that very bond of nature and spirit which the blind world makes such abuse of. It is marriage's sure foundation, and besides it there is no other. To understand and abide by this would