the human catastrophe. Why did the Creator scatter
his sexual attraction so anomalously that it is so rarely
reciprocated, each lover pursuing so often another who flies him for a
third, as in _Midsummer Night's Dream_, an imbroglio oddly enough
found in a little poem identical in the Greek Moschus and the Hindoo
Bhartrihari? Was it blunder or design? Why could he not have made
action and reaction equal and opposite, as they are in mechanics? For
if affection could not operate at all, unless it was mutual, there
would be no unhappy, because ill-assorted, marriages. What a
difference it would have made! Had mutual gravitation been the law of
the sexes, as it is of the spheres, this Earth would never have stood
in need of a Heaven, since it would have existed already: for the only
earthly heaven is a happy marriage. As it is, even when it is not a
Hell, a marriage is only too often but an everlasting sigh.

* * * * *

And not marriage only, but life. For here lies the solution of a
mystery that has baffled the sages, who have failed to discover it
chiefly because they have blinded themselves by their own theological
and philosophical delusions, idealism and monotheism. Why is it, that
gazing at Nature's inexhaustible beauty, thrown at us with such lavish
profusion in her dawns and her sunsets, her shadows and her moods, in
the roar of her breakers and the silence of her snows, the gloom of
her thunder and the spirit of her hills, the blue of her distance and
the tints of her autumns, the glory of her blossom and the dignity of
her decay, her heights and her abysses, her fury and her peace--why is
it, that as we gaze insatiably at these never ending miracles, we are
haunted by so unaccountable a sadness, which is not in the things
themselves, for Nature never mourns, but in some element that we
ourselves import? For if the Soul be only Nature's mirror, her
looking-glass, whence the melancholy? It is because beneath our
surface consciousness, far away down below, in the dark organic depths
that underlie it, we feel without clearly understanding that, as the
Hindoos put it, we have missed the fruit of our existence, owing to
our never having found our other half. For every one of us, so far
from being a self-sufficient whole, an independent unity, is
incomplete, requiring for its metaphysical satisfaction, its
complement, apart from which it never can attain that peace which
passeth all unde