OF THE VARIOUS WAYS OF GETTING IN LOVE. A CHAPTER CONTAINING SOME
USEFUL OBSERVATIONS, AND SOME BEAUTIFUL POETRY.
Let cavillers know, that as the Lord John answered the Queen in that
Italian Guazzo, an old, a grave discreet man is fittest to discourse
of love-matters; because he hath likely more experience, observed
more, hath a more staid judgement, can better discern, resolve,
discuss, advise, give better cautions and more solid precepts, better
inform his auditors in such a subject, and by reason of his riper
years, sooner divert.
BURTON.
Slips of the tongue are sometimes found very inconvenient by those
persons who, owing to some unlucky want of correspondence between
their wits and their utterance, say one thing when they mean to say
another, or bolt out something which the slightest degree of
forethought would have kept unsaid. But more serious mischief arises
from that misuse of words which occurs in all inaccurate writers. Many
are the men, who merely for want of understanding what they say, have
blundered into heresies and erroneous assertions of every kind, which
they have afterwards passionately and pertinaciously defended, till
they have established themselves in the profession, if not in the
belief, of some pernicious doctrine or opinion, to their own great
injury and that of their deluded followers, and of the commonwealth.
There may be an opposite fault; for indeed upon the agathokakological
globe there are opposite qualities always to be found in parallel
degrees, north and south of the equator.
A man may dwell upon words till he becomes at length a mere precisian
in speech. He may think of their meaning till he loses sight of all
meaning, and they appear as dark and mysterious to him as chaos and
outer night. “Death! Grave!” exclaims Goethe's suicide, “I understand
not the words!” and so he who looks for its quintessence might exclaim
of every word in the dictionary.
They who cannot swim should be contented with wading in the shallows:
they who can may take to the deep water, no matter how deep so it be
clear. But let no one dive in the mud.
I said that Daniel fell in love with the Burgemeester's Daughter, and
I made use of the usual expression because there it was the most
appropriate: for the thing was accidental. He himself could not have
been more surprized if, missing his way in a fog, and supposing
himself to be in the Breedestraat of Leyden where there is no canal,
he had fallen into the water;—nor would he have been more completely
over head and ears at once.
A man falls in love, just as he falls down stairs. It is an
accident,—perhaps, and very probably a misfortune; something which he
neither intended, nor foresaw, nor apprehended. But when he runs in
love it is as when he runs in debt; it is done knowingly and
intentionally; and very often rashly, and foolishly, even if not
ridiculously, miserably and ruinously.
Marriages that are made up at watering-places are mostly of this
running sort; and there may be reason to think that they are even less
likely to lead to—I will not say happiness, but to a very humble
degree of contentment,—than those which are a plain business of
bargain and sale; for into these latter a certain degree of prudence
enters on both sides. But there is a distinction to be made here: the
man who is married for mere worldly motives, without a spark of
affection on the woman's part, may nevertheless get, in every worldly
sense of the word, a good wife; and while English women continue to be
what, thank Heaven they are, he is likely to do so: but when a woman
is married for the sake of her fortune, the case is altered, and the
chances are five hundred to one that she marries a villain, or at best
a scoundrel.
Falling in love, and running in love are both, as every body knows,
common enough; and yet less so than what I shall call catching love.
Where the love itself is imprudent, that is to say where there is some
just prudential cause or impediment why the two parties should not be
joined together in holy matrimony, there is generally some degree of
culpable imprudence in catching it, because the danger is always to be
apprehended, and may in most cases be avoided. But sometimes the
circumstances may be such as leave no room for censure, even when
there may be most cause for compassion; and under such circumstances
our friend, though the remembrance of the Burgemeester's daughter was
too vivid in his imagination for him ever to run in love, or at that
time deliberately to walk into it, as he afterwards did,—under such
circumstances I say, he took a severe affection of this kind. The
story is a melancholy one, and I shall relate not it in this place.
The rarest, and surely the happiest marriages are between those who
have grown in love. Take the description of such a love in its rise
and progress, ye thousands and tens of thousands who have what is
called a taste for poetry,—take it in the sweet words of one of the
sweetest and tenderest of English Poets; and if ye doubt upon the
strength of my opinion whether Daniel deserves such praise, ask Leigh
Hunt, or the Laureate, or Wordsworth, or Charles Lamb.
Ah! I remember well (and how can I
But evermore remember well) when first
Our flame began, when scarce we knew what was
The flame we felt; when as we sat and sighed
And looked upon each other, and conceived
Not what we ailed,—yet something we did ail;
And yet were well, and yet we were not well,
And what was our disease we could not tell.
Then would we kiss, then sigh, then look: and thus
In that first garden of our simpleness
We spent our childhood. But when years began
To reap the fruit of knowledge, ah how then
Would she with graver looks, with sweet stern brow,
Check my presumption and my forwardness;
Yet still would give me flowers, still would me show
What she would have me, yet not have me know.
Take also the passage that presently follows this; it alludes to a
game which has long been obsolete,—but some fair reader I doubt not
will remember the lines when she dances next.
And when in sport with other company
Of nymphs and shepherds we have met abroad,
How would she steal a look, and watch mine eye
Which way it went? And when at Barley-break
It came unto my turn to rescue her,
With what an earnest, swift and nimble pace
Would her affection make her feet to run,
And further run than to my hand! her race
Had no stop but my bosom, where no end.
And when we were to break again, how late
And loth her trembling hand would part with mine;
And with how slow a pace would she set forth
To meet the encountering party who contends
To attain her, scarce affording him her fingers' ends![1]
[Footnote 1: HYMEN'S TRIUMPH.]