As women are not allowed to make Love actively, they resort to various
cunning arts with which they indirectly reach the hard hearts of men.
Magic is the most potent of these arts, and always has been so
considered by women; for, curiously enough, one finds on looking over
the folklore of various nations, ancient and modern, that in nineteen
cases out of twenty where a Love-charm is spoken of, it is one used by
women to win the affection of men.
Probably the real reason why the vast majority of women are so curiously
indifferent to the hygienic arts of increasing and preserving Personal
Beauty—as shown in their devotion to tight-lacing, their aversion to
fresh air, sunshine, and brisk exercise—is because they know they can
infallibly win a man’s Love by the use of some simple powder or potion.
It is well known that the Roman poet Lucretius took his life in an
amorous fit caused by a love-potion; and Lucullus lost his reason in the
same way. The grandest musical work in existence would never have been
written had not Brangäne given to Tristan and Isolde a love-potion which
was so powerful that it made not only both the victims die of the fever
of Love, but united them even after death: "For from the grave of
Tristan sprang a plant which descended into the grave of Yseult. Cut
down thrice by order of the Cornish king, the irrepressible vegetable
bloomed verdant as ever next morning, and even now casts its shadow over
the tombs of the lovers—
“‘An ay it grew, an ay it threw,
As they would fain be one.’”
In mediæval times Personal Beauty was such a rare thing, and created
such havoc among men, that the unhappy possessors of it were frequently
accused of using forbidden Love-charms, and burnt at the stake as
witches.
To-day, thanks to our superior sanitary and educational arrangements,
Beauty is such a common affair that it has lost all its effect on the
masculine heart; hence girls should carefully note a few of the ways by
which a man may be irresistibly fascinated.
Italian girls practise the following method: A lizard is caught, drowned
in wine, dried in the sun and reduced to powder, some of which is thrown
on the obdurate man, who thenceforth is theirs for evermore.
A favourite Slavonic device is to cut the finger, let a few drops of her
blood run into a glass of beer, and make the adored man drink it
unknowingly. The same method is current in Hesse and Oldenburg,
according to Dr. Ploss. In Bohemia, the girl who is afraid to wound her
finger may substitute a few drops of bat’s blood.
Cases are known where invocations to the moon were followed by the
bestowal of true Love. And if a girl will address the new moon as
follows—
“All hail to thee, moon! All hail to thee!
Prithee, good moon, reveal to me,
This night who my husband shall be,”
she will dream of him that very night.
A four-leaved clover secretly placed in a man’s shoes will make him the
devoted lover of the woman who puts it in.
“Inside a frog is a certain crooked bone, which, when cleaned and dried
over the fire on St. John’s Eve, and then ground fine and given in food
to the lover, will at once win his love for the administerer.”
If a girl sees a man washing his hands—say at a picnic—and lends him her
apron or handkerchief to dry them, he will forthwith declare himself her
amorous slave to eternity.
There _are_ men, however, who, owing to some constitutional defect or
inherited anomaly, remain unaffected by these and similar arts. Should
any woman be so foolish as to crave such a man’s Love, she will do well
to bear in mind that _Vanity is the backdoor by which every man’s heart
may be entered_. Thus Byron says of a Venetian flame of his: “But her
great merit is finding out mine—there is nothing so amiable as
discernment.” “Let her be,” says Thackeray, “if not a clever woman, an
appreciator of cleverness in others, which, perhaps, clever folks like
better.” “Ne’er,” says Scott,
“‘Was flattery lost on poet’s ears:
A simple race! they waste their toil
For the vain tribute of a smile.’”
Rousseau’s last love was inspired by a woman’s admiration of his
writings. Balzac, celibate for many years, was at last captured by a
woman who returned to a hotel room for a volume of his works she had
left there, informing him, without suspecting who he was, that she never
travelled without it and could not live without it.
“The story of the marriage of Lamartine,” says the author of _Salad for
the Solitary_, “is also one of romantic interest. The lady, whose maiden
name was Birch, was possessed of considerable property, and when past
the bloom of youth she became passionately enamoured of the poet from
the perusal of his _Meditations_. For some time she nursed this
sentiment in secret, and, being apprised of the embarrassed state of his
affairs, she wrote him, tendering him the bulk of her fortune. Touched
with this remarkable proof of her generosity, and supposing it could
only be caused by a preference for himself, he at once made an offer of
his hand and heart. He judged rightly, and the poet was promptly
accepted.”
Sympathy, beauty, wit, elegant manners, amiability—these are woman’s
arrows of Love, ever sure of their aim. “She loved me for the dangers I
had passed,” says Othello, “and I loved her that she did pity them.” Or,
as Professor Dowden comments on this passage, “the beautiful Italian
girl is fascinated by the regal strength and grandeur, and tender
protectiveness of the Moor. _He_ is charmed by the sweetness, the
sympathy, the gentle disposition the gracious womanliness of Desdemona.”
“The _gracious womanliness_ of Desdemona.” There lies the secret—the
charm of charms. It is fortunate that the political viragoes of to-day,
who would remove woman from her domestic sphere, have opposed to them
the greatest force in the universe—_the power of man’s Love!_ When they
have overcome that, they will find it easy to dam the current of the
Niagara River, and curb the force of the ocean’s countless breakers.