Hints for Lovers Part 11

Love may be compared to a musical note: to the unthinking it is a simple sound; to the more experienced it is know to consist of endless and complicated harmonical vibrations; harmonizing with some, and making discord with other, notes by regular but unknown laws; differing according to the timbre of the emitter; reverberating under certain conditions; lost to the ear in others; and only responding to resonators vibrating synchronously with itself. Lastly,

There is a whole gamut of love.--Changing that simile, we may say that

Love is not like the sun: a unit, and practically the same wherever seen; it is like light: all-pervading, universally diffused, and reflected and refracted and absorbed in varying degrees and varying manners by various objects. And

Than a great and pure love, can anyone point to anything on earth greater and more purifying?

The lesser luminary perturbs the tide of human pa.s.sion; the greater light draws it upward--none the less veritably because in tinted formless vapor. This is symbolical of love.

It is the nascent thing that evokes the keenest emotions: the bud--the babe--dawn--and the first beginnings of love. So Love, like sun-light, wears its most tender tints at dawn.

It still remains a mystery that, out of a townful of folk, two particular hearts should worry themselves into early graves because this one cannot get that other. Yet

It is almost enough to destroy one's faith in the uniqueness of love to see from how narrow a circle of acquaintances men and women choose their spouses. Were Plato's two half-souls separated by the diameter of the globe--that were lamentable.

The man often argues that esteem will grow into pa.s.sion. The woman knows that the argument is utterly fallacious. Yet Unless pa.s.sion is guarded by esteem,--as the calyx ensheaths the corolla, the former is p.r.o.ne to wither.

In youthful love, as in the enfolded bud, esteem and pa.s.sion--like calyx and corolla---seem one and identical;

It is only the full-blown flower that displays its const.i.tuent parts.

Would that love could remain ever in bud!

To some love comes like a flash; to others as the burning of tinder.

In all, when real love is kindled, it devours all that is combustible.

But

All love, like all fire, needs, not only ventilation but replenishing:

Unless the primal spark is nourished, it will not glow;

Stifle love, and it dies down. So

Even the love of a married pair, unless it retains something of the romance of courtship, is apt to go out.

Love takes no though of surroundings: an empty compartment is as good as a coppice. Give it privacy, it is satisfied.

In love, we would much rather give than take. Yet, if the giving is one-sided, there is trouble. And

Love brooks no half measures. Again,

Trust a woman to calculate the breaking-strain of her lover's heart. But she will never let him off with less than the maximum stress.

When love is dead, it is perhaps best soonest buried.

In astronomy, to determine the motions of three bodies mutually attractive is admittedly difficult. It is easy compared with the same problem in love.

A man's work and a woman's love, though to each the sum-total of life, are often things wholly and totally dissociated.

Man, the egoist, thinks that if the woman loves him, by consequence she will love his work. It may be, but usually, non sequitur; for

Few are the women who can understand a man's work:

For thousands of years man has worked in the hunting-field, in the market-place in the camp; for an equal length of time woman has worked by the cradle, by the hearth. Accordingly,

Man has two sides to his nature, woman but one:

Man wears one aspect when facing the world; he wears quite another aspect when facing women;

At their work, men are rigid, frigid, austere, sever, peremptory, tyrannical, downright;

With women, ... ...Humph!--Wherefore,

O strenuous and high-aspiring man, in thy work, seek not from woman's love what woman's love cannot give; but set thy face 90 as a flint.

Bethink thee of the fate of Anthony. For

Man's chief business in the world is: Work.

Woman's chief business in the world is; Love.

Man's love (perhaps just because it is his play-thing, not his business) is more finely tempered than is woman's, and takes on a finer edge. For this very reason it is the more easily turned, and is the less useful.

--It is the pocket-knife, not the lancet, that is oftener called into requisition. Also,

Man's love is usually a highly ephemeral affair.

With a man, love is like hunger or thirst: he makes a great fuss over it; he forgets when it is appeased. Yet

When "pa.s.sion's trance" is overpast, it is fortunate if affection takes its place. So too,

In love it is the man who protests; and

That man is fortunate, who, after marriage, has not some dubious reflections as to whether he has protested over-much. For