Pray, how goes Love?
That was not love that went.
Carlyle homologates this view. In Sartor Resartus, he says: ‘As your Congreve needs a new case or wrappage for every new rocket, so each human heart can properly exhibit but one love, if even one; the “first love which is infinite” can be followed by no second like unto it.’
This is certainly a strong case for the first-and-only-love theory. But let it not be supposed that we shall here miss the inevitable differences of opinion. Among others who raise a strong protest against this view is George Eliot, who believes there is a second love which is greater, because more mature, than the first. ‘How is it,’ she asks, ‘that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, and so few about our later love? Are their first poems the best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deep-rooted affections? The boy’s flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.’ Many other quotations to a similar purport might be given; but the whole argument is a futile one. It is simply reasoning in a circle, because, whatever may be advanced on this side of the question, it is of course perfectly open to those who maintain the opposite to fall back upon the contention that the love which was vanquished was not love at all, and that its subjugation sufficiently proves that it was spurious.
It may be said that this is a somewhat rough-and-ready method of disposing of a profound and delicate psychological problem, and the point may be further raised in connection with the kindred proposition, that love is not incurable. Those who hold that love is indestructible must also, in consistency, maintain that it is likewise incurable, and inconsolable when scorned and rejected. Then, of course, they are met with declarations like that of Shakspeare when he says: ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love;’ or like that of Thackeray, when he remarks that ‘Young ladies have been crossed in love, and have had their sufferings, their frantic moments of grief and tears, their wakeful nights, and so forth; but it is only in very sentimental novels that people occupy themselves perpetually with this passion; and, I believe, what are called broken hearts are very rare articles indeed.’
At the same time, there are not many who agree that
’Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all.
Guarini, in his Faithful Shepherd, expresses a directly opposite opinion, holding that it is far harder to lose his lady-love than never to have seen her or called her his own. Hamlet speaks heavily enough of ‘the pangs of despised love;’ and it would be idle to deny that a large proportion of the tragedies of real life, as well as of fiction, have turned upon love rejected, abused, or betrayed. When Dryden says that
Pains of love be sweeter far