“I will ask no more,” he said. “Your heart is capable of every emotion—except one. You are deficient in the one passion which, if you had it, would make you divine.”
She laughed scornfully. “Make me divine?” she repeated. “Oh, you talk like a man—not a scholar and a philosopher, but a mere man.” She left the personal side of the question, and began to treat it generally. “The whole of poetry is disfigured with the sham divinity, the counterfeit divinity, of the woman. I do not want that kind of ascribed divinity. Therefore I do not regret the absence of this emotion which you so much desire; I can very well do without it.” She spoke with conviction, and she looked the part she played—cold, loveless, without a touch of Venus. “I was lecturing my class the other day on this very subject. I took Herrick for my text; but, indeed, there are plenty of poets who would do as well. I spoke of this sham divinity. I said that we wanted in poetry, as in human life, a certain sanity, which can only exist in a condition of controlled emotion.”
It was perhaps a proof that neither lover nor maiden really felt the power of the passion called Love that they could thus, at what to some persons would be a supreme moment, drop into a cold philosophic treatment of the subject.
“Perhaps love does not recognise sanity.”
“Then love had better be locked up. I pointed out in my lecture that these conceits and extravagancies may be very pretty set to the music of rhythm and rhyme and phrase, but that in the conduct of life they can have no place except in the brains of men who have now ceased to exist.”
“Ceased to exist?”
“I mean that the ages of ungoverned passion have died out. To dwell perpetually on a mere episode in life, to magnify its importance, to deify the poet’s mistress—that, I told my class, is to present a false view of life and to divert poetry from its proper function.”
“How did your class receive this view?”
“Well—you know—the average girl, I believe, likes to be worshipped. It is very bad for her, because she knows she isn’t worth it and that it cannot last. But she seems to like it. My class looked, on the whole, as if they could not agree with me.”
“You would have no love in poetry?”