A man? Ah, how often when he has grappled sturdily with duty, with honor—how often has the love token, with divine promise, stared him in the face and cried like Clarimonde returned from the grave:
If thou wilt be mine, I shall make thee happier than God himself in His paradise; the angels themselves will be jealous of thee. I am Beauty—I am Youth—I am Life—come to me!—together we shall be Love. Our lives will flow on like a dream—in one eternal kiss.
Has enough been said to cause you to wonder why no one has written the history of the love token? Such a stately and wondrous work it should make! Why has no one honored it with even the rambling lightness of an essay? Elia could have done that much—and Leigh Hunt have done it even better. Lamb, it is true, has talked with quaint airiness of valentines, which are a sort of love token, and has admitted, poor old bachelor! that the postman’s knock on St. Valentine’s Day brings “visions of love, of Cupids, of Hymens!—delightful, eternal commonplaces; which, having been, will always be.”
But this, while, perhaps, the essence of the love token, is not its history, and I shall hazard a guess as to why that is not written. The reason is that it is not only the cherished token of a woman’s love, but is also the irritating reminder of her equality with man. At the altar she unhesitatingly swears to love eternally—an oath sometimes beyond her power to keep; but in increasing numbers she refuses to make the promise of obedience—a promise always possible to fulfill. With the freedom that in this generation is hers, even before marriage, has come a fierce desire for monopoly, and to such a one the token of a single love has lost its tenderness. She keeps such tokens by the score, with all the pride of a Sioux warrior in his array of scalps. The man lovingly cherishes a single one. To her he is an incident in life’s story. To him she is its climax.
With this increased freedom permitted in woman’s conduct, the love tokens she gives have become even more treasured, for the liberty she now possesses has turned her love tokens into fertilizers of a slumbering jealousy. As they were unknown when woman had no choice, was bought or captured, so they became again unknown in the one-time commonplace of domesticity, wherein there was no more room for the preservation of love tokens than there would be in a seraglio under lock and key. Non-possession, or, at least, uncertainty, is for the love token a perfectly safe endowment policy in the insurance company of passion. Thus it is that the liberty to-day given woman in American society has made the love token more treasured than ever it has been in all the history of the world. Yet no one writes its history; not only because of the angering equality it bespeaks, but also, and chiefly, because the men that could write it best are those that mingle something akin to a curse with the kiss they secretly press upon some trifling souvenir, men to whom it has brought suffering, or to whom only a hopeless longing after ideal love is represented by the token—which is rarely the evidence of triumph, but rather of regret, the reminder of something lost or unattained.
But even those that suffer most at sight of some such trifle, those to whom it would be anguish to write its history, would not for a throne part with it. And yet you, perhaps, are one of those that will have no conception of the meaning of all that I have said. Do you know what it is never to have felt the supremity of the love token? Are you so engulfed in the greed for gold that it could not touch you even were it to be slipped into your grasping fingers—so keen for power or so lustful for fame? Or you may be of those that believe romantic love to belong to the abnormal. But, in either case, even to you, like De Maupassant’s horror-stricken youth dragged to the threshold of the priesthood, the day may come when you will shriek:
To never love—to turn from the sight of all beauty—to put out one’s own eyes—to hide forever crouching in the chill shadows of some cloister—to visit none but the dying—to watch by unknown corpses!
For that is what it is to live without touching your lips to a token of love—even of a love that is lost.
