It so happened that I began to collect notes for a paper on "How to
Cure Love." It was at first intended merely as a personal experiment
in emotional psychology. Afterward it occurred to me that such a
sketch might be shaped into a readable magazine article. This, again,
suggested a complementary article on "How to Win Love"--a sort of
modern Ovid in prose; and then suddenly came the thought,
"Why not write a book on love? There is none in the English
language--strange anomaly--though love is supposed to be the
most fascinating and influential thing in the world. It will
surely be received with delight, especially if I associate
with it some chapters on personal beauty, the chief inspirer
of love. I shall begin by showing that the ancient Greeks
and Romans and Hebrews loved precisely as we love."
Forthwith I took down from my shelves the classical authors that I had
not touched since leaving college, and eagerly searched for all
references to women, marriage, and love. To my growing surprise and
amazement I found that not only did those ancient authors look upon
women as inferior beings while I worshipped them, but in their
descriptions of the symptoms of love I looked in vain for mention of
those supersensual emotions and self-sacrificing impulses which
overcame me when I was in love. "Can it be," I whispered to myself,
"that, notwithstanding the universal opinion to the contrary, love is,
after all, subject to the laws of development?"
This hypothesis threw me into a fever of excitement, without the
stimulus of which I do not believe I should have had the courage and
patience to collect, classify, and weave into one fabric the enormous
number of facts and opinions contained within the covers of _Romantic
Love and Personal Beauty_. I believed that at last something new under
the sun had been found, and I was so much afraid that the discovery
might leak out prematurely, that for two years I kept the first half
of my title a secret, telling inquisitive friends merely that I was
writing a book on Personal Beauty. And no one but an author who is in
love with his theme and whose theme is love can quite realize what a
supreme delight it was--with occasional moments of anxious
suspense--to go through thousands of books in the libraries of
America, England, France, and Germany and find that all discoverable
facts, properly interpreted, bore out my seemingly paradoxical and
reckless theory.