Falling in love is an eminently impractical piece of business, and yet Nature—who is 39 no blunderer—generally introduces the boy and girl into active adult life by this very door. In the depths of this delicious foolishness the boyish heart grows to the measure of manhood; bats and boats and “fellows” are forever deposed, and lovely woman reigns in their stead. To boys, first love is, perhaps, more of an event than to girls, for the latter have become familiar with the routine of love-making long before they are seriously in love. They sing about it in connection with flowers and angels and the moon; they read Moore and Tennyson; they have perhaps been the confidants of elder sisters. They are waiting for their lover, and even inclined to be critical; but the first love of a boy is generally a surprise—he is taken unawares, and surrenders at discretion.
Perhaps it is a good stimulant to faith in general, that in the very outset of it we should believe in such an unreasonable and wonderful thing as first love. Tertullian held some portions of his faith simply “because they were impossible.” It is no bad thing for a man to begin life with a grand passion,—to imagine that no one ever loved 40 before him, and that no one who comes after him will ever love to the same degree that he does.
This absolute passion, however, is not nearly so common as it might well be; and Rochefoucauld was not far wrong when he compared it to the ghosts that every one talks about, but very few see. It generally arises out of extreme conditions of circumstances or feelings; its food is contradiction and despair. It is doubtful if Romeo and Juliet would have cared much for each other if the Montagues and Capulets had been friends and allies, and the marriage of their children a necessary State arrangement; and Byron is supported by all reasonable evidence when he doubtfully inquires:
“If Laura, think you, had been Petrarch’s wife,
Would he have written sonnets all his life?”
This excessive passion does not thrive well either in a high state of civilization. “King Cophetua and the Beggar-maid” is the ballad of an age when love really “ruled the court, the camp, the grove.” The nineteenth century is not such an age. At the very 41 best, King Cophetua would now do pretty much as the judge did with regard to Maud Muller. Still no one durst say that even in such a case it was not better to have loved and relinquished than never to have loved at all.
“Better for all that some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes.”
How can love be the be-all and the end-all of life with us, when steam-looms and litigation, railway shares and big bonanzas, cotton and corn, literature and art, politics and dry goods, and a thousand other interests share our affections and attentions? It is impossible that our life should be the mere machinery of a love plot; it is rather a drama in which love is simply one of the dramatis personæ.
This fact is well understood, even if not acknowledged in words; the sighs and the fevers, the hoarding of flowers and gloves, the broken hearts and shattered lives, all for the sake of one sweet face, still exist in literature, but not much in life. Lovers of to-day are more given to considering how to 42 make housekeeping as easy as matrimony than to writing sonnets to their mistresses’ eyebrows. The very devotion of ancient times would now be tedious, its long protestations a bore, and we lovers of the nineteenth century would be very apt to yawn in the very face of a sixteenth-century Cupid. Let the modern lover try one of Amadis’ long speeches to his lady, and she would likely answer, “Don’t be tiresome, Jack; let us go to Thomas’ and hear the music and eat an ice-cream.”