107. It is well that a noble heart should await a great love; better still that this heart, all expectant, should cease not from loving; and that, as it loves, it should scarcely be conscious of its desire for more exquisite love. In love as in life, expectation avails us but little; through loving we learn to love; and it is the so-called disillusions of pettier love that will, the most simply and faithfully, feed the immovable flame of the mightier love that shall come, it may be, to illumine the rest of our life.
We treat disillusions often with scantiest justice. We conceive them of sorrowful countenance, pale and discouraged; whereas they are really the very first smiles of truth. Why should disillusion distress you, if you are a man of honest intention, if you strive to be just, and of service; if you seek to be happy and wise? Would you rather live on in the world of your dreams and your errors than in the world that is real? Only too often does many a promising nature waste its most precious hours in the struggle of beautiful dream against inevitable law, whose beauty is only perceived when every vestige of strength has been sapped by the exquisite dream. If love has deceived you, do you think that it would have been better for you all your life to regard love as something it is not, and never can be? Would such an illusion not warp your most significant actions; would it not for many days hide from you some part of the truth that you seek? Or if you imagine that greatness lay in your grasp, and disillusion has taken you back to your place in the second rank; have you the right, for the rest of your life, to curse the envoy of truth? For, after all, was it not truth your illusion was seeking, assuming it to have been sincere? We should try to regard disillusions as mysterious, faithful friends, as councillors none can corrupt, And should there be one more cruel than the rest, that for an instant prostrates you, do not murmur to yourself through your tears that life is less beautiful than you had dreamed it to be, but rather that in your dream there must have been something lacking, since real life has failed to approve. And indeed the much-vaunted strength of the strenuous soul is built up of disillusions only, that this soul has cheerfully welcomed. Every deception and love disappointed, every hope that has crumbled to dust, is possessed of a strength of its own that it adds to the strength of your truth; and the more disillusions there are that fall to the earth at your feet, the more surely and nobly will great reality shine on you—even as the rays of the sun are beheld the more clearly in winter, as they pierce through the leafless branches of the trees of the forest.
108. And if it be a great love that you seek, how can you believe that a soul shall be met with of beauty as great as you dream it to be, if you seek it with nothing but dreams? Have you the right to expect that definite words and positive actions shall offer themselves in exchange for mere formless desire, and yearning, and vision? Yet thus it is most of us act. And if some fortunate chance at last accords our desire, and places us in presence of the being who is all we had dreamed her to be—are we entitled to hope that our idle and wandering cravings shall long be in unison with her vigorous, established reality? Our ideal will never be met with in life unless we have first achieved it within us to the fullest extent in our power. Do you hope to discover and win for yourself a loyal, profound, inexhaustible soul, loving and quick with life, faithful and powerful, unconstrained, free: generous, brave, and benevolent—if you know less well than this soul what all these qualities mean? And how should you know, if you have not loved them and lived in their midst, as this soul has loved and lived? Most exacting of all things, unskilful, thick-sighted, is the moral beauty, perfection, or goodness that is still in the shape of desire. If it be your one hope to meet with an ideal soul, would it not be well that you yourself should endeavour to draw nigh to your own ideal? Be sure that by no other means will you ever obtain your desire. And as you approach this ideal it will dawn on you more and more clearly how fortunate and wisely ordained it has been that the ideal should ever be different from what our vague hopes were expecting. So too when the ideal takes shape, as it comes into contact with life, will it soften, expand, and lose its rigidity, incessantly growing more noble. And then will you readily perceive, in the creature you love, all that which is eternally true in yourself, and solidly righteous, and essentially beautiful; for only the good in our heart can advise us of the goodness that hides by our side. Then, at last, will the imperfections of others no longer seem of importance to you, for they will no longer be able to wound your vanity, selfishness, and ignorance; imperfections, that is, which have ceased to resemble your own; for it is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.
109. Let us have the same confidence in love that we have in life; for confidence is of our essence; and the thought that works the most harm in all things is the one that inclines us to look with mistrust on reality. I have known more than one life that love broke asunder; but if it had not been love, these lives would no doubt have been broken no less by friendship or apathy, by doubt, hesitation, indifference, inaction. For that only which in itself is fragile can be rent in the heart by love; and where all is broken that the heart contains, then must all have been far too frail. There exists not a creature but must more than once have believed that his life was crushed; but they whose life has indeed been shattered, and has fallen to ruin, owe their misfortune often to some strange vanity of the very ruin. Fortunate and unfortunate hazards there must of necessity be in love as in all the rest of our destiny. It may so come about that one whose spirit and heart are abounding with tenderness, energy, and the noblest of human desires, shall meet, on his first setting forth, all unsought, the soul that shall satisfy each single craving of love in the ecstasy of permanent joy; the soul that shall content the loftiest yearning no less than the lowliest: the vastest, the mightiest no less than the daintiest, sweetest: the most eternal no less than the most evanescent. He, it may be, shall instantly find the heart whereto he can give—the heart which will ever receive—all that is best in himself. It may happen that he shall at once have attained the soul that perchance is unique; the soul that is satisfied always, and always filled with desire; the soul that can ever receive many thousand times more than is given, and that never fails to return many thousand times more than it receives. For the love that the years cannot alter is built up of exchanges like these, of sweet inequality; and naught do we ever truly possess but that which we give in our love; and whatever our love bestows, we are no longer alone to enjoy.
110. Destinies sometimes are met with that thus are perfectly happy; and each man, it may be, is entitled to hope that such may one day be his; yet must his hope be never permitted to fasten chains on his life. All he can do is to make preparation one day to deserve such a love; and he will be most patient and tranquil who incessantly strives to this end. It might so have happened that he whom we spoke of just now should, day after day, from youth to old age, have passed by the side of the wall behind which his happiness lay waiting, enwrapped in too secret a silence. But if happiness lie yonder side of the wall, must despair and disaster of necessity dwell on the other? Is not something of happiness to be found in our thus being able to pass by the side of our happiness? Is it not better to feel that a mere slender chance—transparent, one almost might call it—is all that extends between us and the exquisite love that we dream of, than to be divided for ever therefrom by all that is worthless within us, undeserving, inhuman, abnormal? Happy is he who can gather the flower, and bear it away in his bosom; yet have we no cause to pity the other who walks until nightfall, steeped in the glorious perfume of the flower no eyes can behold. Must the life be a failure, useless and valueless, that is not as completely happy as it possibly might have been? It is you yourself would have brought what was best in the love you regret; and if, as we said, the soul at the end possess only what it has given, does not something already belong to us when we are incessantly seeking for chances of giving? Ah yes—I declare that the joy of a perfect, abiding love is the greatest this world contains; and yet, if you find not this love, naught will be lost of all you have done to deserve it, for this will go to deepen the peace of your heart, and render still braver and purer the calm of the rest of your days.
111. And, besides, we always can love. If our own love be admirable, most of the joys of admirable love will be ours. In the most perfect love, the lovers' happiness will not be exactly the same, be their union never so close; for the better of the two needs must love with a love that is deeper; and the one that loves with a deeper love must be surely the happier. Let your task be to render yourself worthy of love—and this even more for your own happiness than for that of another. For be sure that when love is unequal, and the hours come clouded with sorrow, it is not the wiser of the two who will suffer the most—not the one that shows more generosity, justice, more high-minded passion. The one who is better will rarely become the victim deserving our pity. For, indeed, to be truly a victim it must be our own faults, our injustice, wrongdoing, beneath which we suffer. However imperfect you be, you still may suffice for the love of a marvellous being; but for your love, if you are not perfect, that being will never suffice. If fortune one day should lead to your dwelling the woman adorned with each gift of heart and of intellect—such a woman as history tells of, a heroine of glory, happiness, love—you will still be all unaware if you have not learned, yourself, to detect and to love these gifts in actual life; and what is actual life to each man but the life that he lives himself? All that is loyal within you will flower in the loyalty of the woman you love; whatever of truth there abides in your soul will be soothed by the truth that is hers; and her strength of character can be only enjoyed by that which is strong in you. And when a virtue of the being we love finds not, on the threshold of our heart, a virtue that resembles it somewhat, then is it all unaware to whom it shall give the gladness it brings.
112. And whatever the fate your affections may meet with, do you never lose courage; above all, do not think that, love's happiness having passed by you, you will never, right up to the end, know the great joy of human life. For though happiness appear in the form of a torrent, or a river that flows underground, of a whirlpool or tranquil lake, its source still is ever the same that lies deep down in our heart; and the unhappiest man of all men can conceive an idea of great joy. It is true that in love there is ecstasy that he doubtless never will know; but this ecstasy would leave deep melancholy only in the earnest and faithful heart, if there were not in veritable love something more stable than ecstasy, more profound and more steadfast; and all that in love is profoundest, most stable and steadfast, is profoundest in noble lives too—is most stable and steadfast in them. Not to all men is it given to be hero or genius, victorious, admirable always, or even to be simply happy in exterior things; but it lies in the power of the least favoured among us to be loyal, and gentle, and just, to be generous and brotherly; he that has least gifts of all can learn to look on his fellows without envy or hatred, without malice or futile regret; the outcast can take his strange, silent part (which is not always that of least service) in the gladness of those who are near him; he that has barely a talent can still learn to forgive an offence with an ever nobler forgiveness, can find more excuses for error, more admiration for human word and deed; and the man there are none to love can love, and reverence, love. And, acting thus, he too will have drawn near the source whither happy ones flock—oftener far than one thinks, and in the most ardent hours of happiness even—the source over which they bend, to make sure that they truly are happy. Far down, at the root of love's joys—as at the root of the humble life of the upright man from whom fate has withheld her smile—it is confidence, sincerity, generosity, tenderness, that alone are truly fixed and unchangeable. Love throws more lustre still on these points of light, and therefore must love be sought. For the greatest advantage of love is that it reveals to us many a peaceful and gentle truth. The greatest advantage of love is that it gives us occasion to love and admire in one person, sole and unique, what we should have had neither knowledge nor strength to love and admire in the many; and that thus it expands our heart for the time to come, And at the root of the most marvellous love there never is more than the simplest felicity, an adoration, a tenderness within the understanding of all, a security, faith, and fidelity all can acquire an intensely human admiration, devotion—and all these the eager, unfortunate heart could know too, in its sorrowful life, had it only a little less impatience and bitterness, a little more initiative and energy.
THE END