But Love burns this falsity away. That is why love—even rude and rampant and outrageous love—does more for the moralizing of poor humanity than a hundred thousand Sunday schools. It cleans the little human soul from the clustered lies in which it has nested itself—from the petty conceits and deceits and cowardices and covert meannesses—and all the things that fly from the tip of the tongue directly the mouth opens. It burns and cleans them away, and leaves the lover speechless—but approximately honest! Love is an art, and the greatest of the Arts—and the truth of it cannot be said in words; that is, in any direct use of words. You may write a sonnet, of course, to your mistress’s eyebrow; but that is work, that is doing something; it is or is trying to be, a work of Art—and anyhow your mistress is not obliged to read it! Or you may take a more decisive line to express your feelings—by slaying your rival, for instance, with a sword. That is allowable. But to bore the lady with protestations, and to demand definite replies (that is, to tell lies yourself, and to compel her to tell lies), is both foolish and wicked. The expression of Love is a great art, and it needs man’s highest ingenuity and capacity to become skilled in it—but in the public mind it is an art utterly neglected and despised, and it is only by a very few (and those not always the most ‘respectable’) that it is really cultivated. It is a great art, for the same reason that the expression of Beauty is a great art—for the reason that Love itself (like Beauty) belongs to another plane of existence than the plane of ordinary life and speech. Speech is man’s great prerogative, which differentiates him from the other creatures, and of which he is, especially during the Civilization period, so proud. The animals do not use it, because they have not arrived at the need of it; the angels do not use it, because they have passed beyond the need. It belongs to the second stage of human consciousness, that which is founded on self-consciousness—on the rooted consciousness of the self as something solitary, apart from others, even antagonistic to them, the centre (strange contradiction in terms!) even among millions of other centres, to which everything has to be referred. The whole of ordinary speech proceeds, and has proceeded, from this kind of self-consciousness—is generated from it, describes it, analyzes it, pictures it forth and expresses it—and in the upshot is just as muddled and illusive and unsatisfactory as the thing it proceeds from. And _Love_, which is _not_ founded on that kind of self-consciousness—which is in fact the denial of self-centration—has no use for it. Love can only say what it wants by the language of life, action, song, sacrifice, ravishment, death, and the great panorama of creation.