“Great spirits and great business do keep out the weak passion of love,” said Bacon; but long before him Ovid knew that Leisure is Cupid’s chief ally. “If you desire to end your love, employ yourself and you will conquer; for Amor flees business.” He advises military service, agriculture, and hunting as excellent diversions.
Poetry and music, however, as the same poet tells us, and all other occupations tending to stir up the tender feelings, are to be carefully avoided. Novel-reading is particularly bad, for to imagine another’s Love is to revive your own. “Lotte Hartmann played some melodies of Bellini on the piano this evening,” writes Lenau; “I ought to avoid music when I am away from you, for it arouses in me a longing and an anguish of consuming violence. I feel how my heart sadly shrinks within itself, and unwillingly continues to beat.”
MARRIED MISERY
Surely the thought that his romantic adoration will cease with marriage ought to cure a rejected wooer. Unquestionably, marriage is the best cure of Love. For though cynics are wrong in claiming that wedlock changes Love to indifference, it does change it to conjugal affection, which is an entirely different group of emotions. To the rejected lover, unfortunately, matrimony is not available as a cure of his Love. But he may give his overheated imagination an ice-bath by reflecting on the dark side of conjugal life, the promised bliss of which has been described as a mirage by so many great minds.
Professor Jowett thus discourses on how a modern Sokrates in a cynical mood might discourse on the seamy side of married life:—
“How the inferior of the two drags the other down to his or her level; how the cares of a family ‘breed meanness in their souls.’... They cannot undertake any noble enterprise, such as makes the names of men and women famous, from domestic considerations. Too late their eyes are opened; they were taken unawares, and desire to part company. Better, he would say, a ‘little love at the beginning,’ for heaven might have increased it; but now their foolish fondness has changed into mutual dislike.... How much nobler, in conclusion he will say, is friendship, which does not receive unmeaning praises from novelists and poets, is not exacting or exclusive, is not impaired by familiarity, is much less expensive, is not so likely to take offence, seldom changes, and may be dissolved from time to time without the assistance of the courts.”
Dr. Johnson, in a letter to Baretti, points out the difference between Love and Marriage:
“In love, as in every other passion of which hope is the essence, we ought always to remember the uncertainty of events. There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman; and if all would happen that a lover fancies, I know not what other terrestrial happiness would deserve pursuit. But love and marriage are different states. Those who are to suffer the evils together, and to suffer often for the sake of one another, soon lose that tenderness of look and that benevolence of mind which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and successive amusement.”
“Lose that tenderness of look!” Have you reflected that it is that exquisite tenderness of look which chiefly fascinated you, and have you not noticed that, as Johnson implies, married people rarely regard one another with that look which constantly intoxicated them during Courtship? For “beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense,” says Addison; or, as Hazlitt puts it, “though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.”
“With most marriages,” says Goethe, “it is not long till things assume a very piteous look.” Raleigh: “If thou marry beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which, perchance, will neither last nor please thee one year.” Seneca: “Beauty is such a fleeting blossom, how can wisdom rely upon its momentary delight?” Howells: “Marian Butler was at that period full of those airs of self-abnegation with which women adorn themselves in the last days of betrothal and the first of marriage, and never afterwards.” Alexander Walker: “It looks as if woman were in possession of most enjoyments, and as if man had only an illusion held out to him to make him labour for her.”