LOVE
Without doubt, the greatest source of happiness, as known to human
beings, is love. Scott voiced the sentiment of all rational and normal
persons when he said:
"Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,
And men below and saints above,
For love is Heaven, and Heaven is love."
It is owing to the fact that we cannot enjoy anything to the fullest
extent alone, since our nature is so constituted that we must have
company in our pleasures, that friends are indispensable. Cicero
realized this over two thousand years ago when he said that, "The
fruit of talent, and worth, and every excellence, is gathered most
fully when it is bestowed upon every one most nearly connected with
us." Appreciating this, nature has given us the love and friendship
of parents in our childhood; of the companions of our youth as we
grow older; of our life-partner at a later period, and last, the love
of our children and grandchildren, so that, by an interest in their
lives, we may become ourselves rejuvenated. In this, as in everything
else of a physical or mental character, we start at the bottom, and,
by a crescendo movement, reach the acme of the condition which with
age diminishes, but in this instance the quality does not deteriorate.
Our likelihood of forming acquaintances and friends in later years
is very much less than in youth, and, certainly, with our habits
and idiosyncrasies established, as they are after middle age, the
possibility of forming intimate friendships is very much decreased.
In childhood and youth, we are more imaginative and less practical,
and, consequently, our inclinations in the line of friendships will be
more natural and less influenced by considerations alien to friendship
itself. Nothing can be more true than the axiom of Cicero, "Friendship
does not follow upon advantage, but advantage upon friendship." Clearly
demonstrated as this is, but few people seem to realize it. For the
fundamental truth at the bottom of this matter is, as he further
states, "the basis of that steadfastness and constancy which we seek in
friendship is sincerity. For nothing is enduring which is insincere."
Of all virtues, sincerity is the greatest, yet, broadly speaking, how
extremely rare! There is almost no trouble and pains which people will
not take to make the world think that they are something other than
they really are, when but a fraction of the cost might make them what
they are trying to seem to be. The reciprocal relation of friendship
demands sincerity, just in proportion as it becomes intimate, and this
applies to all friendships, of whatsoever character.
The love of children is perhaps the greatest of all affections in
the aggregate, because experience has not taught them to doubt and
impugn the motives of others, since everything to them is just what it
superficially appears to be. Our most violent heartaches come through
dissimulation toward others, and nothing tends to make so callous and
blunt our finer sensibilities as this. But just in proportion as we
are sincere, must we be careful as to who arouses an interest of more
than passing moment within us, as after affection is once started and
nurtured into luxuriance, it is not within our power to control it.
While love, when reciprocated, can afford an ecstasy and happiness,
otherwise unknown, it can, also, when not returned by the object of
our affection, become the most potent cause of superlative pain and
anguish. The expression of this truth by the greatest of all English
poets, would, in itself, make his name forever immortal had he never
written another line, and constitutes not only the soundest philosophy,
but the most sublime of all sentiments evolved from the human mind:
"Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth's unknown, altho' his height is taken.
Love's not Time's fool; though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out e'en to the edge of doom."
If all the race thoroughly understood the truth of these words, how
much more happiness there would be in the world! It is our trifling
with our affections, or the reckless manner in which we bestow them
upon others, which causes us our deepest sorrows. In childhood, with
ordinarily kind parents, we have such experiences as afford us pleasant
memories throughout life, simply because we lived in accordance with
nature's law, which she makes easy for us at this age to follow, when
we have no experience or reason by which we may be guided; but as we
grow older, we form those habits of dissimulation which lead us into
all sorts of trouble; simply because we can do certain things without
our friends and acquaintances becoming cognizant of our actions, we
are foolish enough to think that no harm can be done. If we would use
our intelligence at all, we would see at once, that while it may be
possible to deceive others in the matter of our thoughts and actions,
we cannot delude ourselves. We would also realize that our actions and
our thoughts are efficient causes in the making of our own characters.
We would further see that in order to get any real enjoyment out of a
friendship, of even the most Platonic kind, we must be able to play our
part sincerely; in other words, we must be all that we attempt to make
our friends think we are. The old proverb which tells us that we should
go courting in our old clothes, is true in the largest sense in which
we can apply it.
When we consider how much we are dependent upon our after-affections
and their outcome for our happiness, we see that Coleridge resorted to
no hyperbole when he wrote:
"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
Are but the ministers of Love
And feed his sacred flame."
Nor did he overestimate the bearing which each and every act of our
life has upon our ability to either love or to be loved, since it is
only when we are capable of returning affection as pure and unsullied
as is given us, that we achieve the acme of delight. It is on account
of the necessity of the possession of these qualities which we have
found to constitute the only possible basis for really lasting love,
that we are so much interested in those of great affection. Emerson
truly said that "all mankind loves a lover," and equally valid is his
observation that "Love is not for levity, but for the total worth of
man." It is the affection of any human being which constitutes his
life and his friendships, both as living and when coming into his
companionship, and when dead, as forming the memories upon which the
imagination will fondly dwell, and that bring into his life whatever
real satisfaction he may have. As a means of æsthetic development,
nothing is of higher value than the affections, and, as a stimulant
for action along this line, they are without an equal. We have only to
remember the story of Damon and Pythias, to see that the ancients fully
realized the power of affection; or to read what Plato puts into the
mouth of Phoedrus, when he has him say, "Love will make men dare to
die for their beloved, and women as well as men."
What we have noted, heretofore, refers to all affections. Now we come
to the culmination of all affairs of friendship,--that relationship
which is known as marriage. Upon the immensity of the importance of
this ceremony have almost all of the religious ideas of man been built,
and in many cases, if not in all, to the utter profanation of the thing
itself.
In the old tribal civilization which prevailed, the idea of marriage
was ill-defined, and it was only as the desire for the ownership of
children grew that moral ideas in this relation became at all definite.
The fact that men wished to leave to their children property and
chattels, which they might not have the opportunity of disposing of
satisfactorily before their death, brought about a desire for marriage
upon the monogamous and monandrous basis; and the fact that man was
the owner of the property, and that the wife, until recently, had
no inherent right therein, made the matter of the ownership of the
children of primal importance, so that the wishes of the father in
regard to the inheritance might be fulfilled. It was on account of the
supremacy of man in his own home that the family became the unit upon
which the State is built, just as the male individual was the unit upon
which the family was built, and citizenship was primarily evolved and
applicable only to the male portion of the population, inasmuch as they
were necessary to the State both as tax-payers and as warriors. This
idea of the ownership of children enforced upon woman the moral code
under which she lives in Occidental countries to-day; and, at the same
time, and for the reasons above stated, kept man immune from it.
The significance attached to the sexual desire in this relationship
is and has been greatly overestimated, to the greatest disadvantage
of mankind at large. The most distinguishing feature about connubial
affection as compared with Platonic friendship, is that in matrimony
there is the added unification of the parties thereto, owing to the
community of interest between them. Their individualities are merged
into one another; their development must be along similar or parallel
lines. Richter has given us a good account of what a man should select
in the character of his wife "to whom he may be able to give readings
concerning the more essential principles of psychology and astronomy
without her bringing up the subject of his stockings in the middle of
his loftiest and fullest flights of enthusiasm; yet he will be well
content should one possessed of moderate excellencies fall to his
lot--one who shall be capable of accompanying him, side by side, in
his flights so far as they extend--whose eyes and heart may be able to
take in the blooming earth and the shining heavens, in great, grand
masses at a time, and not in mere infinitesimal particles; one for whom
this universe may be something higher than a nursery or ball-room, and
one who, with feelings delicate and tender, both pious and wide, will
be continually making her husband better and holier." Since the time
of Jean Paul Richter, woman has been allowed educational advantages
more nearly equal to those of her brothers than heretofore; and, as a
consequence, in many instances and quite often, do we find the lady not
only the better but the larger half of the home, intellectually.
As Geoffrey Mortimer has well shown, love among cultured people is
largely dependent upon the imagination. In savages and in the human
race, primarily, when at this period of their existence, it took the
form of hedonism, or even the more gross sex-worship, and it was not
until mankind was removed far from the brute that his imagination
developed, and his mind was capable of abstract thought, that his
æsthetic nature began to develop. As his intellect became more
profound, and his mental range wider, his power of abstract thinking
was accordingly augmented, until to-day, with the average human
being, love is only, in a restricted sense, dependent upon physical
gratification. Herbert Spencer has given a very sure test of love,
based upon its dependence upon the imaginative faculty. According to
him, when we are absent from the one we love, the mental picture
which we form of her, and the attributes which we at that time give
her, are all found in her when in her actual presence. Then, we are
really in love with the person whose faults we cannot see. The truth
of the old adage, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," still further
shows the part which the imagination plays in love. There is no human
being who has been so fortunate as to marry the first object upon
which his affections settled, providing, of course, that his previous
life has been spent so that he can enter into this relationship
equitably, who did not find that if his love was reciprocated, life
possessed a transcendent charm which words cannot express. Such an
affection is necessarily based upon a most profound respect, and can
only continue when this deferential regard exists. While feeling a
security in its sense of ownership of the one loved, yet it asks and
demands nothing, and can only bud, blossom, and ripen into its fullness
in the atmosphere of kindness and absolute liberty. While sensual
gratification, in the earlier stages, has been the means of nature
in perpetuating the species, it is also the most powerful factor in
the evolution of that community of interest which is the very soul of
this attachment. The infinite number of little incidents which are
never to be forgotten by any real lover, are all of a purely physical
nature, but, in the aggregate, they form the nucleus of that "amazement
of love and friendship and intimacy" which is like the melodious
harmony of the sweetest sounds, which lead us into an ecstasy in every
way supersensual. It is in the realization of such delight that Gay
remarks, "Not to know love, is not to live."
We can best understand the real potency of sensual gratification in
love, if we consider that those moments which are the subject of
our most pleasant memories, are not those in which our desires were
gratified, but those in which we ourselves practiced the most ascetic
self-denial. Well has Schlegel expressed this sentiment when he says,
in his essay upon the Limits of the Beautiful:--"Those who yield
their souls captive to the brief intoxication of (sensual) love, if
no higher and holier feeling mingle with and consecrate their dreams
of bliss, will shrink tremblingly from the pangs which attend their
awakening." But nature has here so arranged her course, that after
marriage, our children's, or, in their absence, our lovers' affairs,
become a part and parcel of our lives, and thus, what began as selfish
interest, from the pleasure which we obtain from the presence of our
loved one, is transmuted into altruism of the highest type. To those
who love, there is nothing of the spirit of boasting in the words of
"Valentine," when he says:
"She is mine own,
And I as rich in having such a jewel
As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearls,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold";
but rather of a pious appreciation of the being who has brought him
such great happiness. There is something unaccountable about this
passion called love, and anyone who has experienced it does not wonder
at the words of Madame de Stael, "Love is the emblem of eternity; it
confounds all notions of time, effaces all memory of a beginning, all
fear of an end."
In speaking of the happiness which is to be attained by means of love,
we should not fail to note the fact that in order to secure the most
enjoyment from it, we must be able to satisfy the conditions for which
such a close and reciprocal relationship calls. It is here that the
philosophy of living, based upon self-interest, is by far the safest
guide of conduct known, since once the fact that we must be able to
give to the ones whom we love all that we ask of them is instilled in
our minds, we will have a most powerful stimulant to virtuous living.
And in this matter, there is no chance for misunderstanding. If we
would get all the happiness out of love, we must go into it according
to the old injunction given to clients who were both about to try their
case before a court in equity: "You must enter with clean hands." It is
strange, that even in the affairs of a Platonic friendship, a citizen
of morally rotten Rome at the time of the decadence of the consulate,
should realize that "Nothing is more amiable than virtue; nothing
which more strongly allures us to love it," and yet, two thousand years
later, so few people are practicing this truth, and many, who, in their
ignorance, will utterly deny it. This has largely come about from the
fact that, in times past, man has been able to mold the opinions of
his sisters, and, consequently, virtue was not demanded from him. But
if we will teach our children that it is essential to their happiness
that they should be virtuous, so that they may enter into an _affair
d'amour_ with equity, and obtain from it the happiness which it only
can bring, we would sweep from their paths, with one stroke, the
temptations of licentiousness which are to-day proving to be the ruin
of the majority of the young men of this country. We should teach our
boys that they must be able to give to their wives a mind and body as
unpolluted by debauchery as they expect and insist upon receiving,
and that unless they are able to do this, the pleasures of love, as
it affects the marriage relationship, are forever beyond their power
to experience. We should teach our girls that they should demand,
from the man who asks for their hand, as clean and as spotless a past
as they are able to give him, and that, unless they insist upon this,
matrimony will not turn out to be the "grand, sweet song" which they
have been told about, but will be more like an "armed truce." Connubial
love is of such a nature that it will not find happiness in the
contemplation of the possibility of a rival, and of all of the exacting
passions with which humanity has to deal, undoubtedly this of love
is the strongest. The old saying that "familiarity breeds contempt,"
is based upon this fact--that unless we are able to maintain, in the
one we love, the esteem for us, which under a smaller knowledge of
our individuality, we have excited, the sentiment of attraction soon
turns to one of repulsion even more potent than its opposite, and even
as great a source of misery as is the repulsion of hatred; not even
being secondary when compared with jealousy, which "mocks the meat it
feeds upon." What possibility of happiness is there in marriage where
there is constantly running through the mind a comparison of the
partner which you have, and a possibility of what you have given up?
How much happiness is possible when you are always comparing yourself
with some rival, and wondering what your lover sees in him which you
do not possess? It is the strongest argument in favor of monogamy and
monandry, that only under this condition can the marriage relationship
be equitably fulfilled, even more potent than the necessity of parental
guidance in directing the development of the growing mind.
Man is, by nature, socially inclined, and it is only in the society
of his fellow-men that he really matures intellectually and morally.
Under the influence of love, in the most intimate association with a
limited number of others, preferably of his own kin, who will reprove
his faults gently and reasonably laud his courage and achievements--he
finds the perfect element for inspiration and development. Holmes has
expressed this sentiment beautifully in his lines:
"Soft as the breath of a maiden's 'yes';
Not the light gossamer stirs with less;
But never a cable holds so fast
Through all the battles of wave and blast."
The enthusiasm which comes from the struggle of maintaining a home for
your loved ones, where privacy and comfort may be found; a retreat from
the cares and trifling annoyances of the work-a-day world, makes the
place of abode a shrine where all of our interests are centered. Most
truly has Longfellow said:
"Each man's chimney is his golden milestone;
Is the central point from which he measures
Every distance, through the gateways of the world around him."
Without having experienced a real and genuine affection, no man can
realize the highest possibility. Edwin Markham has most truly said that
the love adventure is the episode of every human life, and, without
it, no existence is complete. There is no other earthly possession
with which it can be compared; consequently, we cannot be too careful
in seeing that our lives conform to the necessary demands of the
nature of this passion. The effect of love upon human ethics cannot be
doubted. The finest faculty which we have is that by means of which we
are able to judge right from wrong, and is what we call conscience.
With this truth in mind, we have only to remember a portion of an
incomplete sonnet of Shakespeare's, saying, "Conscience is born of
love."
In this observation, as in many of his others, the bard of Avon has
reached the heart of the matter at once. Without love, we would have,
and could have, no conscience, as we are only considerate of others
when we have much at stake ourselves, and wish this consideration for
reciprocal reasons. Had we no affection, we would have but little
incentive to moral discrimination. In this sense, as well as for its
happy memories,
"It is better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."
In considering the advantages of real love, it is also important that
the disadvantages of its counterfeits should be made clear. In the
first place, many of the noted teachers during the last decade have
called attention to the frightful reduction in our marriage and birth
rates; and this, notwithstanding the fact that we feel that we are
progressing upward in the scale of civilization. Now, while many of our
political economists believe that the increased cost of living has been
largely responsible for this, it seems that we should not, however,
attach too great importance to the claim. There has been a growing of
the moral sense among women of the Western nations, and particularly in
America, during the last few years, which has tremendously influenced
the foundations of our civilization. The Women's Christian Temperance
movement, under the guiding hand of Miss Willard, not only advocated
the prohibition of the sale of alcoholic stimulants, but also became
a tremendous power in the social purity crusade, which began to sweep
over this country some twenty-five years ago. The agitation, which
resulted from this reform movement, developed facts which were
previously unknown to the general public, and in every way caused
people to begin to think about subjects which had previously never
been brought to their attention in a specific way. When the statistics
were published that, in this country of eighty million people, we were
having one divorce for every twelve marriages, and that every year
showed a decrease in the marriage and birth rate, thinking people of
all classes began to seek to find the cause for such facts.
It would seem that one of the primal causes for the decrease in the
marriage rate is the ease with which vice has been allowed to become
organized in this country into a regular system, which is conducted
upon a basis of cold-blooded business calculation. The fact that we
have between six hundred thousand and three-quarters of a million
of prostitutes in America, and that this class of people is being
recruited at the rate of over fifteen thousand per annum from foreign
countries and about seventy-five thousand per annum from our own
country, is certainly highly significant. Furthermore, the fact that
probably three-quarters of the women in America who marry are forced
to undergo major operations within the first five years of their
married life, on account of the moral delinquency of their husbands,
has certainly not given any impetus to marriage in our own country. We
have also to remember that over one-third of all the blindness in this
country is traceable to a like cause, and that this occurs in innocent
children, who usually are less than a week old when their sight is
lost, as the result of venereal infection. Furthermore, in many of the
homes which we all have an opportunity to observe, there is not that
happiness existing which would lead thinking people to rush ruthlessly
into matrimony, and the necessity for making divorce easy and the
marriage relationship hard to enter into was never as imperative as it
is to-day. The majority of the children being born, and in whose hands
the entire welfare of this state in the future will rest, are usually
those of parents who are either unfitted or unable, physically,
intellectually, and morally, to give them such character and education
as will make them good citizens; in other words, vice and crime are
breeding faster by far than moral restraint and virtue. Whenever we
are able to have our young men understand that self-control on their
part is a matter of first importance in the requirements of good
citizenship, and a prime requisite if individual happiness is desired,
then and only then will we begin to find marriage becoming more popular
and divorce less to be desired by those who have entered into this
relationship.