But speaking of the devil—were any of you ever in love? I'm talking about the sure-enough, old-fashioned complaint that makes a man miss meals and lose sleep, write spring poetry and misplace his appetite for plug tobacco; not of the new-fangled varioloid that yields to matrimonial treatment. There's a great deal of sugar-coated hum- buggery about this thing we call love. It reminds me of the sulphur and molasses my careful Presbyterian parents used to pour into me in the gentle springtime. I don't remember why they gave it to me; but it was probably because they didn't want it themselves. Perhaps they thought foreordination hadn't done much for me, and they had best get me used to sulphur gradually. I remember, however, that, like the average case of matrimony, it usually contained a good deal more sulphur than syrup.
Matches, we are told, are made in heaven; and I think it likely, for Satan himself is said to have originated there. I'll tell you how matches are usually made: By some horrible accident John Henry and Sarah Jane become acquainted. They have no more affinity than a practical politician and pure spring water; but they dance and flirt, fool around the front gate in the dark of the moon, sigh and talk nonsense. John Henry begins to take things for his breath and Sarah Jane for her complexion. The young goslings get wonted to each other, and first thing you know they're tied up until death or divorce doth them part. And, had they missed each other altogether, they would have been just as well—perhaps better—content with other mates and made as enthusiastic a failure of married life.
Most people marry without really knowing whether they're in love or not—mistake the gregarious habit for the mystic fire of Hymen's torch, the pangs of a bad digestion for the barbed arrows from the love-god's bow.
But when a couple's really got what ailed Romeo and Juliet they're in no more doubt about it than was the man after he sat down on the circular saw to see if it was running and found it the sole proprietor of a South American revolution. They don't have to send their feelings to a chemist for analysis and classification, nor take an invoice of their affections to see if any have got away. Love is really a very serious thing. Like sea-sickness, everybody laughs at it but those who have got it. When Cupid lets slip a sure-enough shaft it goes thro' a fellow's heart like a Kansas cyclone thro' a colored camp-meeting, and all the powers of hades can never head it off.
Love is the most sacred word ever framed by celestial lips. It's the law of life, the harmony of heaven, the breath of which the universe was born, the divine essence increate of the ever-living God.
But love is like all other sweet things—unless you get the very best brand it sours awful easy.
. . .
Of all the pitiful Humbugs beneath high heaven commend me to those intellectual doodle-bugs who have become Dame Fashion's devotees and devote all their intellectuality to the science of dress—to the art of being miserable a la mode. Thousands are today sailing about in silk hats who are guiltless of undershirts; bedecked with diamonds while in debt to the butcher for the meat on their bones. Families that can scarce afford calico flaunt Parisian finery, keep costly carriages while there's a chronic hiatus in their cupboards, go hungry to bed six nights in the week that on the seventh they may spread a brave feast for fashionable fools. God have mercy on all such muttonheads. They are the natural breeders of good-for-naughts, for in such an atmosphere children grow up mentally dwarfed and morally debased.
Fashionable mothers commit their children to the care of serving-maids while they sail out to soirees and receptions—put their babes on a bottle while they swing round the social circle. No wonder their sons grow up sapheads, as destitute of backbone as a banana, as deficient in moral force as a firkin of fish. Think of an infant Napoleon nursing a rubber nozzle, of rearing a Brutus on patent baby food, of bringing a Hannibal up by hand! You can't do it.
Why, if I had a woman of that kind to wife—a fashionable butterfly whose heart was in her finery and her feathers; who neglected her home to train with a lot of intellectual tomtits whose glory was small-talk; who saved her sweetest smiles for society and her ill-temper for the family altar—I say were I tied to that kind of a female, do you know what I'd do? Eh? You don't? Well—neither do I.