Nothing is commoner, especially for the woman whose first experience of love is in marriage, than that she is in love with love and not her husband. Sometimes woman is betrayed by her senses, but more often by the morning dew of sensibility, which youth and love spread over even the driest of men’s souls,—a dew which disappears with the morning. Another illusion, which in these days of intercommunication causes many mistakes in love, is the peculiarity of a foreign nationality, which has the effect of a personal originality—until it gradually betrays itself as only another kind of conformity than that one is used to.
In other cases again, the husband is all she sees in him. But a young woman herself often goes through, during the years from twenty to twenty-five, so complete a transformation of feelings and ways of thought, that after a few years of marriage she finds herself in the presence of a man who is a perfect stranger to her.
This period of illusions in first youth is answered by another towards the close of youth. If a woman has not before experienced love, this is the psychological moment at which almost every illusion is possible. Her now universal demands of love, the longing of her mature woman’s nature, have countless times made a noble creature cast these pearls—if not exactly as described in the biblical image—at least into an empty space where they have just as surely been unappreciated.
On man’s side, there are other or corresponding possibilities that early marriage may be founded on self-deception.
But even when love is real and well-founded, there yet arise, from the charm of contradictions already referred to, innumerable occasions of incurable discord.
Thus there are natures so simple that they become crippled, so uncomplex that they are foolish, so homogeneous as to be heavy. These are they who usually love once for all, with complete devotion. But, especially when they are women, Goethe’s words are often true of them: that a woman’s greatest misfortune is not to be charming when she loves. Only complete security gives these natures the calm of equilibrium, the courage of self-confidence, which calls forth the “smile of inward happiness” whereby they also become attractive. But these natures, who of all most deserve happiness, usually meet with some person of constantly changing moods, who reacts with extreme sensitiveness to every impression, but can never love deeply, and therefore is soon unable to bear that simplicity and seriousness in life and death which at first charmed by their contrast.
Such people are often poets or artists, who in love seek only constant stimulation. To them loving means “waking in the morning with new words on one’s lips,” and their erotic fortunes therefore show a rapidity of revolution comparable with that of the moons around Mars. Just as for certain natures, a connection originally frivolous may become permanent, held together by depth of feeling, so for this class of natures—on account of the superficiality of their feelings—no kind of connection is serious.
It is not unfrequently those who give the finest descriptions of their soulful moods and their exquisite feelings, who in their acts of love are narrowly selfish or relentlessly harsh. For it is the impressions of culture stored in their intelligence which determine their conscious utterances, but, on the other hand, it is their subconscious ego that decides their actions. And this ego is often centuries behind their cultured consciousness. He, on the other hand, who is reticent and curt of speech or dull and awkward in manners may at bottom possess a delicacy which he can show only in actions, the others only in words. But unfortunately in our time opportunities for speech are many and for action few—and so women pass over the latter for the former. How many a woman has not afterwards—before some act of the man of words—asked herself how it was possible for her ever to love that man! How many a one, before the actions of the silent, has not sighed, What a pity that I was never able to love him!
But in one case as in the other, through the law of contrasts, she was united to him and feels in this union the death or paralysis of the best possibilities of her being.
The most misleading of illusions are, however, those which are fostered by the actions love produces; for it is not these which determine the quality of a personality. While love is fighting for its happiness it may transform an ordinary person into something higher than himself, as also into something lower. When the tension is relieved, it is seen that in the former case—especially as regards men—love was able to