God’s own mad lover
Martin Eden“God’s own mad lover” is Martin Eden’s name for an ideal of love in which desire is transformed into spiritual devotion. The expression gives his love for Ruth Morse a measure of absolute meaning: he imagines that he could die gladly upon a kiss, and understands this imagined willingness as the answer to why he was born. Its force lies in the gap between the exalted language Martin gives his desire and the physical, reciprocal attraction that the scene also reveals.
The phrase and Martin’s ideal of love
While visiting Ruth, Martin recognizes a line he had scarcely noticed a week earlier: “God’s own mad lover dying on a kiss.” The words now seem insistently true to him. Gazing at Ruth, he feels that he could die gladly upon a kiss and takes pride in being, in his own imagination, God’s own mad lover. The phrase turns a moment of intense attraction into a revelation about the meaning of his life.
Martin also casts Ruth’s lips as something more than physical: he imagines that kissing them would be like kissing the robe of God. He does not recognize this as a transformation of ordinary desire. The narration makes the contrast sharper: Martin experiences his longing as chaste and transcendent, while the ardent warmth in his gaze affects Ruth bodily, disrupting her thoughts and awakening a kindred warmth she cannot yet name. The phrase therefore expresses Martin’s idealization, not a shared understanding the two have articulated.
A measure of value
The phrase later supplies Martin with a standard by which to judge a life organized around income and self-denial. Hearing about Mr. Butler’s privation and his eventual income of thirty thousand dollars a year, Martin can acknowledge his achievement but finds its motive inadequate. Had Mr. Butler’s sacrifices been made for love or beauty, Martin thinks he could understand them; made for money, they seem paltry beside the lover’s imagined willingness to sacrifice everything for a kiss. Dyspepsia and an inability to be happy, in Martin’s view, deprive the princely income of its value.
This response exposes a conflict between Martin’s aesthetic and romantic ideals and Ruth’s admiration for a man who has risen above his environment through will. Martin tries to explain his dissatisfaction, but it shocks her; she wants to reshape him in the likeness of the people and values of her own social world. The expression thus marks not only the intensity of Martin’s love but also a difference in what he and Ruth consider a life worth pursuing.
The phrase as a motive for writing
On the return voyage to San Francisco, Martin decides to become a writer. He imagines beginning with an account of the treasure-hunters’ voyage, earning enough to continue his studies, and eventually writing work that will bring him fame. Yet he ranks fame below the private purpose of proving himself worthy of Ruth. He describes himself not as a seeker of fame, “but merely one of God’s mad lovers.”
The phrase links the scene of courtship to Martin’s new vocation: the same ideal that makes a kiss seem worth dying for now animates the labor through which he hopes to reach Ruth’s world. It also carries an irony the early scenes establish. Martin treats his love as a spiritual calling, but his own gaze has a physical effect on Ruth; later, he makes authorship serve an ideal of worthiness that Ruth herself does not necessarily share. The expression records the power of his ideal while revealing how much of its meaning belongs to Martin’s imagination.
