THE LOVE THAT IS PEACE
Sweet gate of life, sweet type of death—
Come, Sleep!
DORA READ GOODALE.
Many persons lose sleep because of their love for others, as the lover
who sighs and tosses, dreaming, asleep or awake, of the beloved. The
mother loses sleep thinking of the child with its little worries and
problems, its willfulness or its frail health. There is always some
cause that seems to her reasonable ground for worry. The father, too,
plans for the future of his son, and lies awake to map out a life for
another human being, as if that being were a puppet and his father held
the strings by which it could be moved in his hands.
Dickens showed the futility of such planning in “Dombey and Son,” and
we have all seen it in actual life. Yet we go on doing as our fathers
did, and suffering, as we say, “because of our love.” It is really
only because we do not understand what love is.
What we usually call love is largely self-love; that is why we hear so
much of the pangs of love. Love, being the essence of godlikeness,
ought to bring us the joy of the gods, and love would bring only joy if
we could forget ourselves. We understand ourselves so little that we do
not know when our love is self-love. We are always seeking some return
upon our affection, as if it were an investment that must pay dividends
to prove its profitableness. The price of our love is generally the
right to criticise, to influence, to control; or, if we forego these
seeming advantages, we expect at least consideration from those whom
we have blessed with our love. No relation of life seems too sacred to
escape the contamination of the selfish demands of self or narrow love.
The mother loves her child, cares for it in its helpless years, gladly
risks even her life for it, and yet may be unwilling that that child
shall live its own life, follow its own yearnings, think its own
thoughts. The great stumbling-block of the parent is the unconscious
demand for gratitude, the claim made upon the child of a return for the
effort and affection so freely bestowed. It may be that the parent does
not look for material returns, such as money or position, nevertheless
a price is exacted every time that the parent is surprised,
disappointed, or angered by the child pursuing some course contrary to
his teaching. The love that cared for the helpless child becomes the
tyranny that would control its thoughts and action.
We say “This is natural,” but we seldom say, even to ourselves,
“This is selfishness.” We would not desire to compel another to think
as we think, if we were not sure that we could not be mistaken. It is
a conceit of ourselves which makes us quick to thrust upon another
“ready-made” opinions because they are our opinions.
But there is a still more subtle selfishness than this that may be at
the bottom of things. If we have earnestly advocated anything which the
world has been slow to accept, we feel that it is a sort of attack upon
us and our views when our children do not support those views. We say,
“How can we expect others to heed us, if our own children don’t heed
us,” and so we are hurt or angered. We think of their opposition as
disloyalty, and it does not occur to us that it might be no advantage
if others did heed us; that the very opposition of our children may be
the best means of preventing us from doing harm to our fellows.
Besides, if we cared more that men should see the right and love it,
than that they should heed us, it would not hurt or vex us whether
they listened or not. If we have a message, it will find hearers and
followers. “There can never be one lost good,” says Browning, and, if
what we would teach is good, it will find its own. It is self-love,
not love for others, which makes us sore or angry when they will not
listen.
It is a narrow love that makes us fail our friends because they have
not fulfilled the ideal we had of them. We never really loved them. We
loved something that we thought they should be, and were unwilling to
find them something different. We get pain out of our relations with
our fellow-beings because our love is not big enough to exclude self.
We make in our minds a model of what our friends should be, and it
takes up so much room that we cannot accommodate so much as a mental
photograph of what they really are. And just there lies not only the
possibility but the absolute assurance of “disappointment” in them,
and consequent “pain” for ourselves.
If we knew our friends for what they really are, and were willing that
they should be themselves, we could not possibly be disappointed in
them. We really insist upon our friends being in “our own image and
likeness.” Just so the Hebrews, in the efforts to present God to the
world, made of him simply a man like themselves—big and strong, to be
sure, with sentiments of love and pity and justice, but with a lust of
anger and revenge which almost blotted out his tenderness. Many people
still cling to this idea of God, but they are mostly those whose love
is so full of self that even the Supreme Being must conform to their
standard or they cease to believe in him.
The “disappointment” that so often follows marriage, even between
the fondest lovers, is mainly caused by this narrow or self-love. Most
married misery is due to each trying to improve the other instead of
himself. “Because I love him,” says the wife, “he should do as I ask
him, but he refuses. He does not love me as I love him. I am almost
broken-hearted with disappointment.” “Any wife who loved her husband
would find it a pleasure to be and to do what he asks. My wife does not
conform to my wishes, but insists upon doing as she herself prefers.
If a man is not the head of his own house, how is happiness possible?
Marriage is indeed a lottery, and I have drawn a blank,” says he.
But there is one thing certain, if we find ourselves suffering through
our love in any relation of life, whether as husband or wife, mother,
daughter, lover, friend, we may be sure that it is because our love is
not broad enough; because we believe in ownership, or desire gratitude,
or are confident of our wisdom and ability to control the life of
another. In short, that we love self best. “Love suffereth long and
is kind; ... seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no
evil.” The largest love embraces, understands, and forgives everything,
and knows no disappointments and no end.