Hints for Lovers Part 13

The bachelor and the spinster both sometimes wonder that the bened.i.c.k and the bride are still their rivals; for they know not that

In the amatorial art, matrimony is no handicap. In short,

There is no barrier at which love will balk. Nay more,

Love will forgive anything:

Did love demand it, love, though it might blush, would not blench. And

Often love itself stands amazed at its own divine audacity. Indeed,

Love loves to immolate itself for love. Knowing that

To love, nothing is common or unclean: for

Love, like charity, thinketh no evil. But--remember that

It is only the Uranian Aphrodite (5) that dares essay a divine audacity.

Nevertheless,

Love is the most vulnerable of the emotions, and

A love doubtful of itself would be cautiously accepted: it is not a fact that

To try to feel one's own pulse, is to make the heart beat irregularly?

So,

To try to see in a mirror the love light in one's own eyes, is to be-dim it. So, too,

If pa.s.sion is not linked with affection--woe worth the day when the troth was plighted! But given pa.s.sion linked with affection--ah!

Nothing, nothing is criminal to love; for love knows not conscience. Or rather,

Love upsets all conventional conditions. For

Love creates a world of its own, a world populated by two--and these make their own laws--or make none. So

A woman will imbrue her hands with blood, and a man will fling honor to the winds, and yet the twain regard each other as impeccant and impeccable.--Till Pippa pa.s.ses; then,

Love always awakes to the fact that not even a community of two can live without law; and that

Though human laws may be outraged, those divine may not. And a.s.suredly,

The ideal love is the divine love. And, in ideal love,

Strange, strange, but true, in a great and ardent love, when at last that is offered which was long sought, there supervenes upon the lovers a great tenderness, which hesitates to make their own that for which they yearned. Almost it were as if

A psychic monitor warned the conqueror to be clement, and the captive to be kind. This

Tenderness is the worship of the soul by the soul. And

Of all tests of love tenderness is the truest. But indeed, indeed

In love there are heights above heights, depths beneath depths: who shall scale them, who shall plumb?

(5) See Plato, "Symposium", 180 et seq.

V. On Lovers

"Si vis amari ama."

--Seneca

Lovers think the world was made for them.--And so perhaps it was.

To each other, lovers are the most interesting personages alive; but onlookers regard them partly with amus.e.m.e.nt, partly with pity, partly with compa.s.sion--in the etymological sense of that word.

The first wonder of every accepted lover is that he should be the accepted lover of such a woman. --What the woman thinks ... what the woman thinks, probably not even she herself knows. Probably each woman thinks her own thoughts.

To doubt whether one is in love is to prove oneself out of it.

To impress upon the lover the still-existing necessity of refining gold or painting the lily is out of the question. Yet every woman attempts it.

If there is one proverb more distasteful than another to a hot-headed lover, it is that half a loaf is better than no bread.

Children, dogs, and old people are difficult to deceive. Lovers who have to use circ.u.mspection should remember this.

A doubting lover should mark how, and for whom, his woman dresses.

To die for a woman would perhaps, to a young and ardent lover, not be difficult; to wage incessant warfare with the world for her, that perhaps is not so easy. But it is the better test of love; and perhaps also the better preserver and replenisher of love. For