第11章 "VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"(11)

Nor is it quite a baseless superstition after all.Other lovers are hugely interested.They strike the nicest balance between pity and approval, when they see people aping the greatness of their own sentiments.It is an understood thing in the play, that while the young gentlefolk are courting on the terrace, a rough flirtation is being carried on, and a light, trivial sort of love is growing up, between the footman and the singing chambermaid.As people are generally cast for the leading parts in their own imaginations, the reader can apply the parallel to real life without much chance of going wrong.In short, they are quite sure this other love-affair is not so deep seated as their own, but they like dearly to see it going forward.And love, considered as a spectacle, must have attractions for many who are not of the confraternity.The sentimental old maid is a commonplace of the novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human being, to be sure, who can look on at this pretty madness without indulgence and sympathy.For nature commends itself to people with a most insinuating art; the busiest is now and again arrested by a great sunset; and you may be as pacific or as cold-blooded as you will, but you cannot help some emotion when you read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of lovers in the lane.

Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between the sweethearts.To do good and communicate is the lover's grand intention.It is the happiness of the other that makes his own most intense gratification.It is not possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride, humility, pity and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an unexpected caress.To make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do anything and all things that puff out the character and attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only to magnify one's self, but to offer the most delicate homage at the same time.And it is in this latter intention that they are done by lovers; for the essence of love is kindness; and indeed it may be best defined as passionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run mad and become importunate and violent.Vanity in a merely personal sense exists no longer.The lover takes a perilous pleasure in privately displaying his weak points and having them, one after another, accepted and condoned.He wishes to be assured that he is not loved for this or that good quality, but for himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive to set forward.For, although it may have been a very difficult thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of art before every one in this world who cares to set about explaining his own character to others.Words and acts are easily wrenched from their true significance; and they are all the language we have to come and go upon.A pitiful job we make of it, as a rule.For better or worse, people mistake our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation.And generally we rest pretty content with our failures; we are content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a point of honour to clear such dubieties away.He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance;and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.

He discovers a great reluctance to return on former periods of his life.To all that has not been shared with her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes and dispositions, he can look back only by a difficult and repugnant effort of the will.That he should have wasted some years in ignorance of what alone was really important, that he may have entertained the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is a burthen almost too heavy for his self-respect.But it is the thought of another past that rankles in his spirit like a poisoned wound.That he himself made a fashion of being alive in the bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is deplorable enough in all good conscience.But that She should have permitted herself the same liberty seems inconsistent with a Divine providence.

A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically inconvenient.This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which it merely attends, like an ill-humoured courtier, is itself artificial in exactly the same sense and to the same degree.

I suppose what is meant by that objection is that jealousy has not always been a character of man; formed no part of that very modest kit of sentiments with which he is supposed to have begun the world: but waited to make its appearance in better days and among richer natures.And this is equally true of love, and friendship, and love of country, and delight in what they call the beauties of nature, and most other things worth having.Love, in particular, will not endure any historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it is one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you begin to ask what it was in other periods and countries, in Greece for instance, the strangest doubts begin to spring up, and everything seems so vague and changing that a dream is logical in comparison.Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the consequences of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure; but there it is.

It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we reflect on the past of those we love.A bundle of letters found after years of happy union creates no sense of insecurity in the present; and yet it will pain a man sharply.