III
THE VARIATIONS OF LOVE
We cannot trust ourselves to make a real love-knot unless money or custom forces us to “bear and forbear.” There is always the lurking fear that we shall not be able to keep faith unless we swear upon the Book. This is, of course, not true of young lovers. Every first love is born free of tradition; indeed, not only is first love innocent and valiant, but it sweeps aside all the wise laws it has been taught, and burns away experience in its own light. The revelation is so extraordinary, so unlike anything told by the poets, so absorbing, that it is impossible to believe that the feeling can die out. Sometimes one feels a great pity for the lovers in England, because young English girls are very apt to mistake a feeling of gratified vanity and the emotion of a new sensation for love of some special man who happens to make love to them at the propitious moment. Many faithful women go through life enduring the love of a man whom they care for very moderately, who, on his side, congratulates himself on having found a virtuous wife. It is lucky for these people that probably the wife, in her limited circle of acquaintances, will never meet the man who ought to have been her mate.
I have often talked to the apparently contented mother of a family, when some little word reveals to me that it is possible to be the mother of a man’s children merely by putting up with his caresses while one thinks about some other subject. Is it any wonder that the race becomes more and more anæmic and bored with existence as generation follows generation?
Other wives have loved their husbands with passion, and perhaps for two years their devotion has steadily increased, but the husband meanwhile has known many ecstasies and wearinesses. His love is like the waves, which follow each other as periods of dullness follow moments of rapture. Hers has been like the tide, increasing in devotion and tenderness; but the tide turns at last, and the dancing of the waves can do very little to stay its ebbing. I think men are justified who say that women either love too much for their taste or not at all.
Some women say they could love their husbands better if they did not see so much of the unromantic side of their lives. The holes in a man’s socks are not the most endearing remembrances in the world.
The only permanent relations are founded on mutual contempt. Brothers and sisters have no illusions about each other, and if they feel any affection at all it is a steadfast one. Alas! the close knowledge of weaknesses very seldom permits the affection to show through the contempt. Married lovers have to pass from the state of love, which is so apt to be a state of delusion, to the state of clear-sighted affection. The ordeal is one which very few survive.
Another tragedy of love is jealousy. A man or woman is very often jealous of the partner’s brothers and sisters, or other relations. Those who love wish to be all in all to each other, those who quarrel dislike to have others taking sides in their quarrels. This fundamental jealousy of relations is ever apt to break into a flame, besides jealousy of the more usual kind.