We can best understand the real potency of sensual gratification in love, if we consider that those moments which are the subject of our most pleasant memories, are not those in which our desires were gratified, but those in which we ourselves practiced the most ascetic self-denial. Well has Schlegel expressed this sentiment when he says, in his essay upon the Limits of the Beautiful:—“Those who yield their souls captive to the brief intoxication of (sensual) love, if no higher and holier feeling mingle with and consecrate their dreams of bliss, will shrink tremblingly from the pangs which attend their awakening.” But nature has here so arranged her course, that after marriage, our children’s, or, in their absence, our lovers’ affairs, become a part and parcel of our lives, and thus, what began as selfish interest, from the pleasure which we obtain from the presence of our loved one, is transmuted into altruism of the highest type. To those who love, there is nothing of the spirit of boasting in the words of “Valentine,” when he says:
“She is mine own,
And I as rich in having such a jewel
As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearls,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold”;
but rather of a pious appreciation of the being who has brought him such great happiness. There is something unaccountable about this passion called love, and anyone who has experienced it does not wonder at the words of Madame de Stael, “Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notions of time, effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.”
In speaking of the happiness which is to be attained by means of love, we should not fail to note the fact that in order to secure the most enjoyment from it, we must be able to satisfy the conditions for which such a close and reciprocal relationship calls. It is here that the philosophy of living, based upon self-interest, is by far the safest guide of conduct known, since once the fact that we must be able to give to the ones whom we love all that we ask of them is instilled in our minds, we will have a most powerful stimulant to virtuous living. And in this matter, there is no chance for misunderstanding. If we would get all the happiness out of love, we must go into it according to the old injunction given to clients who were both about to try their case before a court in equity: “You must enter with clean hands.” It is strange, that even in the affairs of a Platonic friendship, a citizen of morally rotten Rome at the time of the decadence of the consulate, should realize that “Nothing is more amiable than virtue; nothing which more strongly allures us to love it,” and yet, two thousand years later, so few people are practicing this truth, and many, who, in their ignorance, will utterly deny it. This has largely come about from the fact that, in times past, man has been able to mold the opinions of his sisters, and, consequently, virtue was not demanded from him. But if we will teach our children that it is essential to their happiness that they should be virtuous, so that they may enter into an affair d’amour with equity, and obtain from it the happiness which it only can bring, we would sweep from their paths, with one stroke, the temptations of licentiousness which are to-day proving to be the ruin of the majority of the young men of this country. We should teach our boys that they must be able to give to their wives a mind and body as unpolluted by debauchery as they expect and insist upon receiving, and that unless they are able to do this, the pleasures of love, as it affects the marriage relationship, are forever beyond their power to experience. We should teach our girls that they should demand, from the man who asks for their hand, as clean and as spotless a past as they are able to give him, and that, unless they insist upon this, matrimony will not turn out to be the “grand, sweet song” which they have been told about, but will be more like an “armed truce.” Connubial love is of such a nature that it will not find happiness in the contemplation of the possibility of a rival, and of all of the exacting passions with which humanity has to deal, undoubtedly this of love is the strongest. The old saying that “familiarity breeds contempt,” is based upon this fact—that unless we are able to maintain, in the one we love, the esteem for us, which under a smaller knowledge of our individuality, we have excited, the sentiment of attraction soon turns to one of repulsion even more potent than its opposite, and even as great a source of misery as is the repulsion of hatred; not even being secondary when compared with jealousy, which “mocks the meat it feeds upon.” What possibility of happiness is there in marriage where there is constantly running through the mind a comparison of the partner which you have, and a possibility of what you have given up? How much happiness is possible when you are always comparing yourself with some rival, and wondering what your lover sees in him which you do not possess? It is the strongest argument in favor of monogamy and monandry, that only under this condition can the marriage relationship be equitably fulfilled, even more potent than the necessity of parental guidance in directing the development of the growing mind.
Man is, by nature, socially inclined, and it is only in the society of his fellow-men that he really matures intellectually and morally. Under the influence of love, in the most intimate association with a limited number of others, preferably of his own kin, who will reprove his faults gently and reasonably laud his courage and achievements—he finds the perfect element for inspiration and development. Holmes has expressed this sentiment beautifully in his lines:
“Soft as the breath of a maiden’s ‘yes’;
Not the light gossamer stirs with less;
But never a cable holds so fast
Through all the battles of wave and blast.”
The enthusiasm which comes from the struggle of maintaining a home for your loved ones, where privacy and comfort may be found; a retreat from the cares and trifling annoyances of the work-a-day world, makes the place of abode a shrine where all of our interests are centered. Most truly has Longfellow said:
“Each man’s chimney is his golden milestone;
Is the central point from which he measures
Every distance, through the gateways of the world around him.”
Without having experienced a real and genuine affection, no man can realize the highest possibility. Edwin Markham has most truly said that the love adventure is the episode of every human life, and, without it, no existence is complete. There is no other earthly possession with which it can be compared; consequently, we cannot be too careful in seeing that our lives conform to the necessary demands of the nature of this passion. The effect of love upon human ethics cannot be doubted. The finest faculty which we have is that by means of which we are able to judge right from wrong, and is what we call conscience. With this truth in mind, we have only to remember a portion of an incomplete sonnet of Shakespeare’s, saying, “Conscience is born of love.”