Love being a magic emotional microscope which ignites passion by
magnifying the most beautiful features of the beloved, leaving
everything else indistinct and blurred, it follows that the simplest way
of arresting this flame is to _change the focus of this microscope_, to
fix the attention deliberately on her faults, while throwing her merits
and charms into an unfavourable light.
This method is too self-evident and effective not to have occurred to
the ingenious Ovid. He advises the lover who wishes to be cured to study
the girl’s charms in a hypercritical spirit. Call her stout if she is
plump, black if she is dark, lean if slender. Ask her to sing if she has
no talent for music, to talk if unskilled in conversation, to dance if
awkward, and if her teeth are bad, tell her funny stories to make her
laugh.
Her mental faults require no microscope to reveal them. Certainly her
taste is execrable, for does she not prefer that vulgar fellow Jones to
you, one of the cleverest fellows that ever condescended to be born on
this miserable planet?
What folly, indeed, to love such a girl! What fascinates you is simply
the mysterious brilliancy of her coal-black eyes—of which you may find
ten thousand duplicates in Italy or Spain. Don’t you see that no flashes
of wit are ever mirrored in those eyes? that, though beautiful, they are
soulless, like a black pansy? that they look at one person as at
another, incapable of expressing shades and modulations of tender
emotion, because the soul of which they are the windows has never been,
and never will be, moved by Love?
She never thinks of anything but her own pleasure; does nothing but
visit the dressmaker and the theatre and read novels; never thinks it
her duty to provide for her future husband’s comfort and happiness by
educating herself in domestic economy and æsthetic accomplishments of
real depth—as you have toiled and studied in anticipation of providing
for her comfort and happiness. She takes no sympathetic interest in your
affairs—how can you expect to be happy with her? If she loves you not,
you would be more than a fool to try to get her consent to marriage, for
is it not the ecstasy of Love to be loved and worshipped alone and
beyond any other mortal?
The beauty of her eyes will not last,—it is nothing, anyway, but
sunlight mechanically reflected from a darkly-painted iris—and when its
youthful brilliancy vanishes there will be no soul-sparks to take its
place. And for this brief honeymoon mirage you are willing to give up
your bachelor comforts and pleasures, your freedom to do what you
please, go where you please, and travel whenever you please; to exchange
your refreshing sleep o’ nights for domestic cares and the pleasure of
trotting up and down the room with a bawling baby at two o’clock in the
morning? Bah! Are you in your senses?
True, if you are rich some of these disadvantages may be avoided. But if
you are rich you will not be refused, for—
“Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair,”
as Byron remarks; and again: “For my own part, I am of the opinion of
Pausanias, that success in love depends upon _Fortune_.”
But of all her shortcomings the most galling and fatal is that she loves
you not. This thought alone, says Stendhal, may succeed in curing a man
of his passion. You will notice, he says, that she whom you love favours
others with little attentions which she withholds from you. They may be
mere trifles, such as not giving you a chance to help her into her
carriage, her box at the opera. The thought of this, by “associating a
sense of humiliation with every thought of her, poisons the source of
love and may destroy it.”
Thus wounded Pride is the easiest way out of Love, as gratified Pride is
the straightest way in.