Hints for Lovers Part 10

Incredulity is favorable to romance.

Love is not exactly a sacrifice; it is an exchange. The lover, indeed, gives his heart; he expects another in return.

Love is like life: no apparatus can manufacture it; kill it, and nothing in the heavens above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will resuscitate it.

How many a forlorn human wight has tried to resuscitate love!

To such heights does love exalt the lover that he or she will live for days in the remembered delights of a look, a word, a gesture. But

One thing is impossible to love: love cannot create love; the intensest and most fervent love is powerless to evoke a scintillation of love.

Love may wors.h.i.+p, it may adore, it may transfigure, it may exalt the object of its devotion to the skies; but it cannot cause that object to emit one ray of love in return.

Hate may be concealed; love never.

The greater the imaginative alt.i.tude of love, the lower the boiling point. But

Love cannot always be kept at high pressure.

The young think love is the winning-post of life, the old know it is a turn in the course. Nevertheless, it is a fateful turn.

In love, the imagination plays a very large part. And this may be variously interpreted. Thus,

By man, love is regarded as a sort of sacred religion; by woman, as her every-day morality. The former is the more exhilarating; but the latter is more serviceable. Indeed,

Love and religion are very near akin: both inspire, and both elevate.

And

If faith, hope, and charity are the basis of religion, there never was such as religion as love. And

Love is the only religion in which there have been no heretics. Why?

Because woman are at once its object and its priesthood.

Love, art, and religion are but different phases of the same emotion: awe, reverence, wors.h.i.+p, and sacrifice in the presence of the supreme ideal.

Love knows no creed. Nay more,

Love acknowledges no deity but itself and accepts no sanctions but its own: it is autonomous. And yet--

And yet, love sometimes feels constrained to offer a liturgical acquiescence to the rubric of Reason. In short,

Between the prelatical domination of Reason and the recusant Protestantism of Love there has ever been strife. Or, in plain language, There are two codes of ethics: one that of the romantic heart; the other that of the practical head. Who shall a.s.similate them?

The heart, in its profoundest depths, feels that something is due to Reason; and Reason, in its highest flights, feels that something is due to the heart.

Is there a divine duplicity in the human soul? And yet, after all,

All love seeks is: love. Yet love little knows that

In seeking love, love enters on an endless search. Since

Love is an endless effort to realize the Ideal. For

Love always beckons over insurmountable barriers to uninhabitable realms; promises insupportable possibilities; lures to an unimaginable goal. Yet

Love has a myriad counterfeits. And

Men and women interpret the word differently. Even

Different women interpret the word love differently. Thus,

To one woman, love is as the rising of the sun: it s.h.i.+nes but once in her whole life-day; it floods everything with its light; it brightens the world; it dazzles her.

To another woman, love is as the rising of a star: a fresh one may appear every hour of her life, and nor she nor her world is one whit affected by its rays. Indeed, one would hardly err if he said that

Many a woman really does not know whether she is "in love" or not. She is sought--that she perceives; but which of her seekers is worthiest, which most zealous, which merely takes her fancy, and which appeals to her heart--on these matters she meditates long--to the exasperation, of course, of the individual seeker. Accordingly,

Men, carried away by their own pa.s.sionate impulse, detest calculation of the part of women:

Since HE stakes his all on impulse in the matter of love, says man, why should woman stay to consider? Foolish man! he forgets that

A woman always weighs a man's declaration of love--and legitimately-- and naturally; perhaps legitimately because naturally; for, once again,

What a woman stays to consider in the matter of love is, not the potency of the impulse of the moment, but the permanent efficacy of the emotion.

Therefore it is that

Woman unwittingly obeys great Nature's laws.

Many imagine that love is a thing like a chemical element: with a fixed symbol 84 and a rigid atomic equivalent. And so it may be; but, like the philosopher's stone, hitherto it has defied detection in its elemental form. The fact is probably that

Love may be compared to a substance that is never found free, and which not only combines in all sorts of relations.h.i.+ps with all sorts of substances, but also, like many another chemical body, takes on the most varied forms, not only in these relations.h.i.+ps, but also under varying pressures and temperatures.--Or perhaps it would be better to say that