MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE
Having distinguished romantic or sentimental love from sentimentality on one side and sensuality on the other, it remains to show how it differs from conjugal affection.
HOW ROMANTIC LOVE IS METAMORPHOSED
On hearing the words "love letters," does anybody ever think of a man's letters to his wife? No more than of his letters to his mother. He may love both his wife and his mother dearly, but when he writes love letters he writes them to his sweetheart. Thus, public opinion and every-day literary usage clearly recognize the difference between romantic love and conjugal affection. Yet when I maintained in my first book that romantic love differs as widely from conjugal affection as maternal love differs from friendship; that romantic love is almost as modern as the telegraph, the railway, and the electric light; and that perhaps the main reasons why no one had anticipated me in an attempt to write a book to prove this, were that no distinction had heretofore been made between conjugal and romantic love, and that the apparent occurrence of noble examples of conjugal attachment among the ancient Greeks had obscured the issue—there was a chorus of dissenting voices. "The distinction drawn by him between romantic and conjugal love," wrote one critic, "seems more fanciful than real." "He will not succeed," wrote another, "in convincing anybody that romantic and conjugal love differ in kind instead of only in degree or place"; while a third even objected to my theory as "essentially immoral!"
Mr. W.D. Howells, on the other hand, accepted my distinction, and in a letter to me declared that he found conjugal affection an even more interesting field of study than romantic love. Why, indeed, should anyone be alarmed at the distinction I made? Is not a man's feeling toward his sweetheart different from his feeling toward his mother or sister? Why then should it be absurd or "immoral" to maintain that it differs from his feeling toward his wife? What I maintain is that romantic love disappears gradually, to be replaced, as a rule, by conjugal affection, which is sometimes a less intense, at other times a more intense, feeling than the emotions aroused during courtship. The process may be compared to a modulation in music, in which some of the tones in a chord are retained while others are displaced by new ones. Such modulations are delightful, and the new harmony may be as beautiful as the old. A visitor to Wordsworth's home wrote:
"I saw the old man walking in the garden with his wife. They were both quite old, and he was almost blind; but they seemed like sweethearts courting, they were so tender to each other and attentive."
A husband may be, and should be, quite as tender, as attentive, as gallant and self-sacrificing, as sympathetic, proud, and devoted as a lover; yet all his emotions will appear in a new orchestration, as it were. In the gallant attentions of a loving husband, the anxious eagerness to please is displaced by a pleasant sense of duty and gentlemanly courtesy. He still prefers his wife to all other women and wants a monopoly of her love; but this feeling has a proprietary tinge that was absent before. Jealousy, too, assumes a new aspect; it may, temporarily, bring back the uncertainty of courtship, but the emotion is colored by entirely different ideas: jealousy in a lover is a green-eyed monster gnawing merely at his hopes, and not, as in a husband, threatening to destroy his property and his family honor—which makes a great difference in the quality of the feeling and its manifestation. The wife, on her part, has no more use for coyness, but can indulge in the luxury of bestowing gallant attentions which before marriage would have seemed indelicate or forward, while after marriage they are a pleasant duty, rising in some cases to heroic self-sacrifice.
If even within the sphere of romantic love no two cases are exactly alike, how could love before marriage be the same as after marriage when so many new experiences, ideas, and associations come into play? Above all, the feelings relating to the children bring an entirely new group of tones into the complex harmony of affection. The intimacies of married life, the revelation of characteristics undiscovered before marriage, the deeper sympathy, the knowledge that theirs is "one glory an' one shame"—these and a hundred other domestic experiences make romantic love undergo a change into something that may be equally rich and strange but is certainly quite different. A wife's charms are different from a girl's and inspire a different kind of love. The husband loves
Those virtues which, before untried,
The wife has added to the bride,
as Samuel Bishop rhymes it. In their predilection for maidens, poets, like novelists, have until recently ignored the wife too much. But Cowper sang: