This is the æsthetic overtone of Love; and so prominent is it that it is
commonly heard before and above all the others. “Beauty provoketh
thieves sooner than gold,” says Shakspere; and if you tell twenty of
your male acquaintances that you have been introduced to a young lady,
nineteen of them will ask immediately, “Is she pretty?” No reporter ever
writes about a girl murdered by a tramp or burnt in a house, without
describing her as a model of beauty, in order to double the reader’s
interest and quintuple his pity. Madame de Staël confessed that she
would have gladly exchanged her literary genius for beauty. With the
Greeks already the words Love and Beauty were inseparably associated;
and even the Chinese, who are not embarrassed by an excess of beauty,
have a proverb, “With one smile she overthrew a city, with another a
kingdom.”
This completes the preliminary analysis of Love. I regret exceedingly
that I have been able to discover only eleven “overtones” in Modern
Love: but inasmuch as at least six of these—Nos. V. to X.—are only about
a thousand years old, there is reason to hope that some fine morning in
May a new one will be born to make up the round dozen. If so, it is to
be hoped it will assume in men the form of an absolute insistance on
feminine health, and an instinctive detestation of the hideous and
love-killing fashions with which women still persist in ruining their
beauty.