simply because, his heart being unmoved, his head remains clear, and he
can, therefore, make the most of his wits and his cleverness in
presenting the counterfeit of a lover.”

“The counterfeit of a lover.” It is he, then, whom women, according to
these French, English, and German witnesses, encourage, instead of the
true lover. So that women are not only less capable of deep Love than
men, but they do not even promote the growth and survival of Love by
favouring the men most deeply affected by it. And the fault, be it said
once more, lies in the superficial education not only of their intellect
but of their emotions, for the heart can only be reached and refined
through the brain. The average woman, being incapable of feeling Love,
is incapable of appreciating it when she finds it in a man. She sees
only its ridiculous side—and ridicule is fatal, even to Love. Ridicule
killed Love in France, which to-day is the most loveless country in the
civilised world, its women the most frivolous and heartless,—and its
population gradually diminishing.

The ridiculous exaggerations of a lover are indeed harmless if the girl
is in love too, for then she does not see them; but to one who has yet
to win Love, as girls are now constituted, they are fatal. Perhaps this
is the reason why the list of men of genius who failed in their truest
Love is so extraordinarily large: for, their Love being more ardent than
that of others, they were unable to restrain its excesses and feign
indifference; while another way in which they “lost power” was through
their extravagant admiration of Beauty, which put their faces “on the
strain” to express it.

However this may be, lovers should keep in mind this paradoxical rule,
which follows as a corollary from the foregoing discussion:

In order to win a woman, first cure yourself of your passion, then,
having won her through feigned indifference (which is easy), fall in
love again and bag her before she has had time to discover your change
of feeling.

The only difficulty herein lies in the cure. Should this be found
impossible, even with the aid of our next chapter, one last resource is
open to the lover. Says La Bruyère: “Quand l’on a assez fait auprès
d’une femme pour devoir l’engager, il y a encore une ressource, qui est
de ne plus rien faire; _c’est alors qu’elle vous rappelle_.” In other
words, if you have failed to win her love, with all your attentions,
change your policy: leave her alone, and she will be sure to recall you.

This trait is not simply the outcome of feminine perverseness or
coquetry. The explanation lies deeper. Every sensible woman, be she ever
so vain and accustomed to flattery, is painfully conscious of certain
defects, physical or mental. “Has he discovered them?” she will
anxiously ask herself when the sly lover suddenly withdraws; “I must
recover his good opinion.” So she sets herself the task of fascinating
and pleasing him; and this desire to please (Gallantry) being one of the
constituent parts of Love, it is apt to be soon joined by the other
symptoms which make up the romantic passion.

                              COMPLIMENTS

             “O flatter me, for love delights in praises,”

exclaims one of Shakspere’s characters; and again—

           “Flatter and praise, commend, extol their graces;
           Tho’ ne’er so black, say they have angels’ faces.”

There is one advantage in writing about the romantic passion. Love is
such a tissue of paradoxes, and exists in such an endless variety of
forms and shades that you may say almost anything about it you please,
and it is likely to be correct. So again here. It is true, no doubt,
that skill in the art of flattery helps a man to win a woman’s goodwill,
but how does this rhyme with the doctrine that Feigned Indifference is
the lover’s sharpest weapon?

Answer: A compliment is not so much an expression of Love as of simple
æsthetic admiration; or else it may spring from the flatterer’s desire
to show off his wit. A man may compliment a woman for whom he does not
feel the slightest Love; and women know it. Therefore even a coquette
does not despise and ignore a man who flatters her, as she invariably
does one whose _actions_ brand him as her captive and slave.

At the same time, since the desire to be considered beautiful is the
strongest passion in a woman’s heart, the avenue to that heart may often
be found by a man who can convince her honestly that she is considered
beautiful by himself and others. For, as every man of ability has
moments when he doubts his genius, so every woman has moments when she
doubts her beauty and longs to see it in the mirror of a masculine eye.

The most common mistake of lovers is to compliment a woman on her most
conspicuous points of beauty. This has very much the same effect on her
as telling Rubinstein he is a wonderful pianist. He knows that better
than you do, and has been told so so many million times that he is sick
and tired of hearing it again. But show him that you have discovered
some special subtle detail of excellence in his performance or
compositions that had escaped general notice, and his heart is yours at
once and for ever. A lover can have no difficulty in discovering such
subtle charms in his sweetheart, for Cupid, while blinding him to her
defects, places her beauties under a microscope.

A man who attends a social gathering comes home pleased, not at having
heard a number of bright things, but in proportion to his own success in
amusing the company. On the same principle, if you give a
girl—especially one who mistrusts her conversational ability—a chance to
say a single bright thing, she will love you more than if you said a
hundred clever things to her.

Sincerity in compliments is essential; else all is lost. It is useless
to try to convince a woman with an ugly mouth or nose that those
features are not ugly. She knows they are ugly, as well as Rubinstein
knows when he strikes a wrong note. “Very ugly or very beautiful women,”
says Chesterfield, “should be flattered on their understanding, and
mediocre ones on their beauty.”

A clever joke is never out of place. You may intimate to a comparatively
plain woman that she is good-looking, and if she retorts with a
sceptical answer, you may snub her and score ten points in Love by
telling her you pity her poor taste.

Indeed, the art of successful flattery, especially with modern
self-conscious girls, consists in the ability of giving “a heartfelt
compliment in the disguise of playful raillery,” as Coleridge puts it.
Conundrums are very useful. For instance, Angelina is patting a dog. “Do
you know why all dogs are so fond of you?” asks Adolphus. Angelina gives
it up. “Because dogs are the most intelligent of all animals.” Angelina
goes to Paris, and Adolphus enjoys his last walk with her. They pass a
weeping willow. “Why are we two like this tree?” She gives it up again.
“A weeping willow is graceful and melancholy; you are graceful, I
melancholy.”

“How old am I?” asks Angelina. “I don’t know. Judging by your
conversation thirty-five, by your looks nineteen.”

Tell a woman—casually, as it were—of the effect of her charms on a third
party, and it will please her more than a bushel of your neatest
compliments. As Lessing remarks, Homer gives us a more vivid sense of
Helen’s beauty by noting its effect even on the Trojan elders, than he
could have done by the most minute enumeration of her charms. Put your
flatteries into actions rather than words—“mettre la flatterie dans les
actions et non en paroles”—is Balzac’s advice. But “flattery in actions”
is simply another name for Gallantry.

There is no danger that the subtlest compliment will ever escape notice.
In the discovery of praise the commonest mind has the quickness of
genius.

                              LOVE-LETTERS

The great trouble with compliments is that they have an annoying habit
of occurring to the mind about ten or twenty minutes after the natural
opportunity for getting them off has passed away. It is here that
Love-letters come to the rescue. They enable a man to excogitate the
most excruciatingly subtle and hyperbolic compliments, and then “lead up
to them” most naturally.

There is an old superstition that Love-letters _must_ be incoherent
trash to be genuine evidences of passion. When Keats’s Love-letters to
Fanny Brawne were sold at auction, a spicy journalist commented as
follows on the occasion:—

“It is open to question whether, like so many of the letter-writers of
the age of which Keats inherited the traditions, the singer of
_Endymion_ had not a shrewd eye to posterity when he wrote the laboured
compositions which the world regards as the record of his wooing. The
manuscript is painfully correct, the punctuation worthy of a printer’s
reader, the capitals much nicer than fiery lovers usually form, and the
periods rounded with painful care. Like so many cultivators of the art
of letter-writing, the sensitive poet, ‘who was snuffed out by a
review,’ seems to have copied the gush, which last week sold for ten
times more than _Endymion_ fetched, before he committed it to the
fourpenny post. Hence the veriest scrawl, the most illegible postcard of
these times is, as an index to the writer’s character, infinitely more
valuable than the ponderous pieces of rhetoric which last century passed
for love-making between Strephon, who quotes the elegant Tully, and
Chloe, who makes free use of the ‘Elegant Extracts.’ Duller fustian than
such priggish love-letters it is hard to conceive. They remind one of
nothing so much as the epistles copied out of _The Complete
Letter-Writer_, and must recall to some middle-aged men certain painful
experiences of those salad days when their young affections suffered a
sudden blight by missives of so severely correct an order that they
suggest the idea of having undergone maternal supervision.”

Yet why, pray, should Keats _not_ have written his Love-letters so
carefully and copied them so neatly? Is it not a fact that when a man is
in love he cares more to make a pleasing impression on one particular
person than on all the rest of the world combined? and that even his
ambition and fame, for which he labours so hard, seem valuable in his
eyes solely as a means of winning Her Love? And if Love is a deeper
passion, even in a poet, than ambition, why should he not go to the
extent even of _taking notes_ and utilising his very best conceits in
his Love-letters? The truth is, in the writing of Love-letters
everything depends on the man’s habits. If he is accustomed to writing
carelessly, his Love-letters will probably be hasty and slovenly enough
to suit orthodox notions on this subject. But if he is a literary
artist, he will probably polish his _billets-doux_ more than anything
else _con amore_, considering the probable effect on her mind of every
sentence. And although the thought of future publication may enter his
mind, it will appear as the veriest trifle compared with the more
important object of winning a woman’s Love by a display of complimentary
wit and passionate protestations of undying affection.

Sir Richard Steele evidently did not believe that Love-letters, to be
genuine, must be slovenly. In one of his letters to Miss Scurlock he
apologises for not having time to revise what he had written. In another
letter he exclaims: “How art thou, oh my soul, stolen from thyself! how
is all my attention broken! my books are blank paper, and my friends
intruders.” Again: “It is the hardest thing in the world to be in love,
and yet attend business. As for me, all that speak to find me out, and I
must lock myself up, or other people will do it for me. A gentleman
asked me this morning, ‘What news from Holland?’ and I answered, ‘She is
exquisitely handsome.’ Another desired to know when I had been last at
Windsor; I replied, ‘She designs to go with me.’” And once more: “It is
to my lovely charmer I owe that many noble ideas are continually affixed
to my words and actions: it is the natural effect of that generous
passion to create in the admirers some similitude of the object admired;
thus, my dear, am I every day to improve from so sweet a companion.”

The first score or so of Keats’s Love-letters have the ring of true
gold. Here are a few specimens in which the thermometer of endearments
rises steadily from My Dearest Lady, through My Sweet Girl, My Dear
Girl, My Dearest Girl, My Sweet Fanny, to My Sweet Love, Dearest Love
and Sweetest Fanny. In the very first letter he writes:—

“Ask yourself, my love, whether you are not very cruel to have so
entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the
letter you must write immediately? and do all you can to console me in
it—make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me—write the
softest words and kiss them, that I may at least touch my lips where
yours have been. For myself, if I do not know how to express my devotion
to so fair a form, I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word
than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies, and lived but three summer
days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty
common years could ever contain.”

“All I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty.”

“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks—your loveliness and the
hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the
same minute.”

“I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and
would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it.
From no others would I take it.”

“At Winchester I shall get your letters more readily; and it being a
cathedral city, I shall have a pleasure, always a great one to me when
near a cathedral, of reading them during the service up and down the
aisle.”

All this is in the true Shaksperian key of Romantic Love, as are the
Love-letters of Burns, Byron, Moore, Heine, Bürger, Lenau, and most
other poets. Room must be made here for a few extracts from Lenau’s
letters to his love, which, in some respects, resemble those of
Keats—equally polished, poetic, deep, and sincere:—

“It makes me melancholy to see how incapable I am of sympathizing with
the pleasures of my friends. My Love goes out afar towards you; it
hearkens and listens and stares in the distance for you, and takes no
note of all the love by which it is surrounded here. I am truly ill. I
constantly think of you alone and death. It often seems to me as if my
time had expired. I cannot write poetry, I cannot rejoice in anything,
cannot hope, can only think of you and death. The other day I wrote to
you to take good care of your health—though I myself feel so little
desire to live.”

“The whole evening I was unable to think of anything but of you and the
possibility of losing you. The large crowd of people seemed to have
assembled on purpose to show me most painfully what a mere nothing the
world would be to me if I had to part from you. I constantly saw but
your face, your lovely, divine eye.”

“Alexander wishes me to go to the baths at Leuk with him. He is quite
ill. But I cannot go. If I have to see Switzerland without you, I prefer
not to see it at all.”

“My poetic composition is in a bad way. Though a thought sprouts in me
here and there, it withers before it has reached maturity. When I go to
see you I shall bring along a dry wreath of prematurely-faded poetic
blossoms, and make them revive in your presence, as there are warm
fountains dipped into which faded flowers blossom again.”

“I have lost all pleasure in other people when you are absent. If you
had only been at Weinsberg! Even the Æolian harps did not produce the
usual impression on me.” It is noticeable how the overtone of Monopoly
is accented in all these plaints.

“I have found in your companionship more evidence of an eternal life
than in all my investigations and studies of nature. Whenever, in a
happy hour, I believed I had reached the climax of Love and the proper
moment for death, since a more delicious moment could never follow: it
was on each occasion an illusion, for another hour followed in which I
loved you still more deeply. These ever new, ever deeper abysses of life
convince me of its immortality. To-day I saw in your eyes the full
measure of the divine. Most distinctly did I perceive to-day that the
swelling and sinking of the eye is the breathing of the soul. In an eye
of such beauty as yours we can see, as in a prophetic hieroglyphic, the
essence of which some day our immortal body will consist. If I die, I
shall depart rich, for I have seen what is most beautiful in the world.”

“The rose you gave me at parting has a most delicious fragrance, as if
it were a Good-Night from you! Sleep well, dearest heart! Preserve the
second rose as a memento. I love you immeasurably.”

No doubt the average Love-letters read in courts of justice in breach of
promise cases, to the intense amusement of the audience, are very
different in character from these poetic effusions. But to say that,
because the average Love-letters are ludicrous, therefore all
Love-letters, to be genuine, must be ludicrous and incoherent, is the
very Bedlam of absurdity. What makes common Love-letters so laughable is
the fact that the writer, previously a paragon of prosiness, suddenly
gets some poetic fancies and tries to put them into language. But as the
writing of poetry—in verse or prose—is a more difficult art than
piano-playing, first attempts cannot be otherwise than harrowing or
amusing. On the other hand, just as a pianist can never improvise so
soulfully as when he is in love, so a poet will write his best prose in
the letters addressed to his love; the only ludicrous feature being that
extravagant and exclusive admiration of one person which is the very
essence of Love.

Surely Hawthorne was neither “insincere” nor “thinking of posterity”
when he finished one of his Love-letters with this poetic conceit,
expressed in his best prose style:—

“When we shall be endowed with spiritual bodies I think they will be so
constituted that we may send thoughts and feelings any distance, in no
time at all, and transfuse them warm and fresh into the consciousness of
those we love. Oh, what happiness it would be, at this moment, if I
could be conscious of some purer feeling, some more delicate sentiment,
some lovelier fantasy than could possibly have had its birth in my own
nature, and therefore be aware that you were thinking through my mind
and feeling through my heart! Perhaps you possess this power already.”

This is true epistolary Love-making—the sublimated essence of
complimentary Gallantry.

                         LOVE-CHARMS FOR WOMEN

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.

                               PROPOSING

Countless as the stars, and only too apposite, are the jokes about
lovers who evolve masterpieces of eloquence wherewith to lay their
hearts at their idol’s feet; but who, when the crucial moment of the
trial arrives, like Beckmesser in Wagner’s comic opera, stutter out the
veriest parody of their song of Love. And no wonder, considering what is
at stake; for the Yes or No decides whether the lover is to
be—literally—the happiest or the unhappiest of all men for weeks or
months to come.

Ovid cautions a man not to select a sweetheart in the twilight or
lamplight, since “spots are invisible at night and every fault is
overlooked; at that time almost every woman is held to be beautiful.”

But proposing is a different matter from selecting. When once the choice
is made, and her choice alone remains to be decided, twilight is the
only proper time to “pop the question.” For a maiden’s independence and
Coyness are inversely related to the degree of light. In the morning, in
broad daylight, she can boldly face even the terrible thought of being
left an old maid; but in the twilight she feels the need of a man’s
protection, and it is at that time that the imagination is least deaf to
the whispered and self-suggested fancies of Romantic Love and wedded
bliss. A man who proposes in the morning deserves, therefore, to be
disappointed.

Nature herself has provided a safeguard against morning proposals. No
woman is so beautiful in the daytime as is in the evening; and the
moon’s romantic associations are largely due to its magic effect of
beautifying the complexion and features of women, and thus urging the
lover’s courage to the point of amorous confession.

There is still another reason why a tender and considerate lover should
propose in the chiaroscuro of subdued light—to spare her blushes—

            “But ’neath yon crimson tree,
            Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
            Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,
            Her blush of maiden shame.”—BRYANT.

Not many years ago a plan was described in the newspapers by which a
number of Southern youths who had not the courage to propose were
happily mated and wedded. An elderly person was selected, vowed to
eternal secrecy, and to him each youth and maiden who was in love
confided in writing the name of the beloved. Those couples that had
chosen one another were informed of the fact, and went away rejoicing,
arm in arm.

A fairy story, on the face of it. A woman would sooner cut off her hand
than write with it the secret of her Love before she knew it was
returned; and that man that hath a tongue is, I say, no man, if he is
afraid to ask for a woman’s hand—or to take it unasked, and let it
respond to the touching question. “Love sought is good, but given
unsought is better,” says Shakspere. The only true proposals are those
where spoken words are dispensed with; where the magnetic thrill of the
hands, the eloquence of the tell-tale eyes, draw the lovers into mutual
embrace, and lips become glued on lips in unpremeditated ecstasy.

                       DIAGNOSIS OR SIGNS OF LOVE

Though women may often feel in doubt concerning the intentions of men
who pay them attentions, they cannot help recognizing deep Love in a man
instantly; for the symptoms, as described in a previous chapter, are
absolutely unmistakable. A woman, too, who loves deeply, can hardly help
betraying herself, by the sly opportunities she finds for meeting her
lover (purely accidental, of course), and by the special pains she takes
to make it clear to her friends that she does not care for _that_ man
certainly; often also by the fact, pointed out by Jean Paul, that “Love
increases man’s delicacy and lessens woman’s”; tempting her occasionally
to throw away all prudence and regard for public opinion, in the wild
intoxication of her passion and her confidence in her lover.

But in cases of doubt—how is a lover to decide whether it is safe and
worth while to proceed? A woman’s Coyness, of course, means nothing, and
may have been brought on by an assumption of excessive confidence and
boldness on the man’s part. Girls are like wild colts. They may be
safely approached to a certain distance, whence one step more will cause
them to stampede; but stand still at that point, and before long they
will cast away fear and meet you half-way.

Trifles are the only safe tests of Love. For they are not so apt as
weighty words and actions to be the outcome of a deliberate coquettish
desire to deceive. To ascertain if you are loved—and this holds true for
both sexes—allude (with a careless assumption of indifference) to some
trifling details of previous conversation or common experience. If she
(or he) remembers them all, especially if of remote occurrence, the
chances are you are loved.

Shakspere evidently had this in mind when he wrote—

              “If thou rememberest not the slightest folly
              That ever love did make thee run into,
              Thou hast not loved.”

                            HOW TO CURE LOVE

All hope abandon ye who enter here. It is a terrible haunt of pessimism,
for disappointed lovers only. All others will please pass it by, for the
object of this book is to advocate the cause of Love, not to weaken it.
Only when all hope of reciprocation is abandoned, should the tender
plant ever be crushed underfoot.

An exception must be made in favour of those hopeful lovers who merely
wish to cure themselves in order to improve their chances of winning, as
explained in the last chapter, under the head of Feigned Indifference.

It is useless to quote to a rejected lover Rosalind’s philosophy: “Our
poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there
was not any man died in his own person, _videlicet_, in a love cause....
Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for
love.” Useless to tell him, as Emerson does, that it is not a disgrace
to love unrequitedly: “It never troubles the sun that some of his rays
fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
reflecting planet.”

To all such efforts at consolation the poor wretch may retort with
Shakspere: “Every one may master a grief but he who has it.” Yet he may,
at any rate, endeavour to “patch his grief” with the following
reflections, based on the experience of centuries.

                                ABSENCE

Two thousand years ago Ovid advised the readers of his _Remedia Amoris_
who wished to cure themselves of an unwelcome attachment to flee the
capital, to travel, hunt, or till the soil till all danger of a relapse
should he averted. “Out of sight, out of mind,” wrote Thomas à Kempis;
and this theme has been varied by a hundred writers in prose and verse.
“Love is a local anguish,” exclaims Coleridge; “I am fifty miles away
and am not half so miserable.” Carew puts it thus—

                    “Then fly betimes, for only they
                    Conquer love, that run away.”

Even the unspeakable Turk has a proverb advising a lover to fly to the
mountains. The Himalayas are probably meant, for no other chain would be
high enough to allay the anguish of a polygamist rejected by a whole
harem.

On the other hand, “I find that absence still increases love,” wrote
Charles Hopkins in the seventeenth century; and Bayly gave this paradox
the familiar form of “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—to which a
modern realistic wag has added the coda “of the other man.” “La
Rochefoucauld has well remarked,” says Hume, “that absence destroys weak
passions, but increases strong ones; as the wind extinguishes a candle
but blows up a fire.”

This simile is not very appropriate, nor is the statement
unquestionable. It is more correct to say that short absence increases
Love, while long absence cures it.

There are two ways in which a short absence favours Love:

Like the thirst of a man who would wean himself of strong liquor, the
lovers ardour is at first increased when he is placed where he can no
longer drink in the intoxicating sight of her beauty. Time is needed to
annihilate the maddening memory of that pleasure.

Secondly, short absence favours the idealising process in the lover’s
mind. Removed from the corrective influence of her actual presence, his
imagination may abandon itself to the delightful task of painting a
gloriously unreal counterfeit of her charms—which is oil in the flames.

This idealising process is facilitated by the strange difficulty which
most people—and lovers in particular—experience in recalling the
features of those specially dear to them.

Given sufficient time to fix the idealised image of the beloved in the
memory, and a cure may be effected through the shock subsequently felt
on comparing this image with the greatly inferior reality.

                                 TRAVEL

It is safer, however, not to risk a return, but to avoid sight of her
altogether for several years. The advantages of travel are twofold, not
to mention the security from the danger of an accidental meeting. At
home the surrounding world is too familiar to afford distraction,
whereas in a strange place every object claims the attention and diverts
the mind from its amorous reveries. More important still is the fact
that in a foreign country the strangeness of national physiognomy
invests all women with a heightened charm, so that it is easier to find
an antidote by falling in love anew.

                               EMPLOYMENT

“Great spirits and great business do keep out the weak passion of love,”
said Bacon; but long before him Ovid knew that Leisure is Cupid’s chief
ally. “If you desire to end your love, employ yourself and you will
conquer; for Amor flees business.” He advises military service,
agriculture, and hunting as excellent diversions.

Poetry and music, however, as the same poet tells us, and all other
occupations tending to stir up the tender feelings, are to be carefully
avoided. Novel-reading is particularly bad, for to imagine another’s
Love is to revive your own. “Lotte Hartmann played some melodies of
Bellini on the piano this evening,” writes Lenau; “I ought to avoid
music when I am away from you, for it arouses in me a longing and an
anguish of consuming violence. I feel how my heart sadly shrinks within
itself, and unwillingly continues to beat.”

                             MARRIED MISERY

Surely the thought that his romantic adoration will cease with marriage
ought to cure a rejected wooer. Unquestionably, marriage is the best
cure of Love. For though cynics are wrong in claiming that wedlock
changes Love to indifference, it does change it to conjugal affection,
which is an entirely different group of emotions. To the rejected lover,
unfortunately, matrimony is not available as a cure of his Love. But he
may give his overheated imagination an ice-bath by reflecting on the
dark side of conjugal life, the promised bliss of which has been
described as a mirage by so many great minds.

Professor Jowett thus discourses on how a modern Sokrates in a cynical
mood might discourse on the seamy side of married life:—

“How the inferior of the two drags the other down to his or her level;
how the cares of a family ‘breed meanness in their souls.’... They
cannot undertake any noble enterprise, such as makes the names of men
and women famous, from domestic considerations. Too late their eyes are
opened; they were taken unawares, and desire to part company. Better, he
would say, a ‘little love at the beginning,’ for heaven might have
increased it; but now their foolish fondness has changed into mutual
dislike.... How much nobler, in conclusion he will say, is friendship,
which does not receive unmeaning praises from novelists and poets, is
not exacting or exclusive, is not impaired by familiarity, is much less
expensive, is not so likely to take offence, seldom changes, and may be
dissolved from time to time without the assistance of the courts.”

Dr. Johnson, in a letter to Baretti, points out the difference between
Love and Marriage:

“In love, as in every other passion of which hope is the essence, we
ought always to remember the uncertainty of events. There is, indeed,
nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance as the thought of
passing life with an amiable woman; and if all would happen that a lover
fancies, I know not what other terrestrial happiness would deserve
pursuit. But love and marriage are different states. Those who are to
suffer the evils together, and to suffer often for the sake of one
another, _soon lose that tenderness of look_ and that benevolence of
mind which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and
successive amusement.”

“Lose that tenderness of look!” Have you reflected that it is that
exquisite tenderness of look which chiefly fascinated you, and have you
not noticed that, as Johnson implies, married people rarely regard one
another with that look which constantly intoxicated them during
Courtship? For “beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, fades in his
eye, and palls upon the sense,” says Addison; or, as Hazlitt puts it,
“though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of
admiration.”

“With most marriages,” says Goethe, “it is not long till things assume a
very piteous look.” Raleigh: “If thou marry beauty, thou bindest thyself
all thy life for that which, perchance, will neither last nor please
thee one year.” Seneca: “Beauty is such a fleeting blossom, how can
wisdom rely upon its momentary delight?” Howells: “Marian Butler was at
that period full of those airs of self-abnegation with which women adorn
themselves in the last days of betrothal and the first of marriage, and
never afterwards.” Alexander Walker: “It looks as if woman were in
possession of most enjoyments, and as if man had only an illusion held
out to him to make him labour for her.”

Montaigne: “As soon as women are ours we are no longer theirs.” “The
land of marriage has this peculiarity that strangers are desirous of
inhabiting it, while its natural inhabitants would willingly be banished
thence.” Boucicault: “I wish that Adam had died with all his ribs in his
body.” De Finod: “Marriage is the sunset of love.” Goldsmith: “Many of
the English marry in order to have one happy month in their lives.”
Hood: “You can’t wive and thrive both in the same year.” Southey: “There
are three things a wise man will not trust,—the wind, the sunshine of an
April day, and a woman’s plighted faith.” Byron: “I remarked in my
illness the complete inertion, inaction, and destruction of my chief
mental faculties. I tried to rouse them, and yet could not—and this is
the _Soul_!!! I should believe that it was married to the body if they
did not sympathise so much with each other.” Colley Cibber: “Oh, how
many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding-ring!” Alphonse Karr:
“Women for the most part do not love us. They do not choose a man
because they love him, but because it pleases them to be loved by him.”

Lady Montagu: “It goes far toward reconciling me to being a woman, when
I reflect that I am thus in no immediate danger of ever marrying one.”
Schopenhauer: “It is well known that happy marriages are rare.” “The
lover, contrary to expectation, finds himself no happier than before.”
Byron—

              “Think you if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife
              He would have written sonnets all his life?”

Burton: “Paul commended marriage, yet he preferred a single life.”
Buxton: “Juliet was a fool to kill herself, for in three months she’d
have married again, and been glad to be quit of Romeo.” Heine: “The
music at a marriage procession always reminds me of the music which
leads soldiers to battle.” Lessing—

          “Ein einzig böses Weib gibt’s höchstens in der Welt,
          Nur schade dass ein jeder es für das seine hält.”

      “Of shrewish women in the world there’s surely only one,
      A pity, though, that every man says she’s the wife he won.”

Selden: “Marriage is a desperate thing. The frogs in Æsop were extremely
wise; they had a great mind to some water, but they would not leap into
the well, because they could not get out again.”

When the Pope heard of Father Hyacinthe’s marriage, says Cheales, he
exclaimed: “The saints be praised! the renegade has taken his punishment
into his own hands. Truly the ways of Providence are inscrutable!”

                          FEMININE INFERIORITY

Why are women so mysterious, so inscrutable? Cynics say because you
cannot calculate what they will do, as they have no fixed compass by
which they steer, _i.e._ no character. But Heine takes up their defence.
Far from having no character, he says, they have a new one every day.

The world’s opinion of women is best revealed in the crystallised
wisdom, based on experience, called proverbs. It will soothe the wounded
lover’s heart to note the unanimity with which woman’s foibles are dwelt
on in the proverbs of all nations from ancient Greece to modern China
and France. To give only three instances of a thousand that may be found
in any collection of proverbs: “Women,” says a French proverb, “have
quicksilver in the brain, wax in the heart.” The old Greek poet
Xenarchus sang, “Happy the cicadas live, since they all have voiceless
wives.” “There is no such poison in the green snake’s mouth or in the
hornet’s sting as in a woman’s heart,” says a Chinese maxim.

But it is not necessary to rely on such anonymous collections of wisdom
as proverbs to convince a man of the folly of linking himself for life
with such a miserable inferior being as a woman. From Plato to Darwin
there is a consensus of opinion as to woman’s vast inferiority to man.

According to Plato, says Mr. Grote, “men are superior to women in
everything; in one occupation as well as in another.” Cookery and
weaving having been named as two apparent exceptions, Plato denies
woman’s superiority even in these.

“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes,”
says Darwin, “is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in
whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought,
reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If
two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry,
painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and
performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names
under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison.”

“I found, as a rule,” says Mr. Galton, "that men have more delicate
powers of discrimination than women, and the business of life seems to
confirm this view. The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so, I
understand, are the tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and
the like. These latter occupations are well salaried, because it is of
the first moment to the merchant that he should be rightly advised on
the real value of what he is about to purchase or to sell. If the
sensitivity of women were superior to that of men, the self-interest of
merchants would lead to their being always employed; but as the reverse
is the case, the opposite supposition is likely to be the true one.

“Ladies rarely distinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table, and
though custom allows them to preside at the breakfast-table, men think
them, on the whole, to be far from successful makers of tea and coffee.”

This disposes of the old myth that women are more sensitive than men.
And De Quincy, in his essay on _False Distinctions_, refutes the equally
absurd notion that “women have more imagination than men.” He comes to
the conclusion that, “as to poetry in its highest form, I never yet knew
a woman, nor yet will believe that any has existed, who could rise to an
entire sympathy with what is most excellent in that art.”

One proof of this statement lies in the fact that as a rule men of
genius have been refused by the women they loved most deeply.

Regarding the emotional sphere, we have seen that it is only in parental
and conjugal feeling that woman surpasses man. In Romantic Love, in all
the impersonal feelings for art and nature, she is vastly his inferior.
Her superficial education gives her no intellectual interests, and that
is the reason why so many married men prefer the club and friendship to
home and conjugal devotion—even as did the ancient Greeks.

It is in the seventh book of the _Laws_, p. 806, that Plato remarks:
“The legislator ought not to let the female sex live softly and waste
money and have no order of life, while he takes the utmost care of the
male sex, and leaves half of life only blest with happiness, when he
might have made the whole state happy.”

Is it not humiliating to man, who loves to call himself a “reasoning
animal,” to find that, after so many centuries, one of our greatest and
most liberal thinkers, Professor Huxley, is obliged to write in this
same Platonic tone that “the present system of female education stands
self-condemned, as inherently absurd,” because it fosters and
exaggerates instead of removing woman’s natural disadvantages? “With few
insignificant exceptions,” Professor Huxley continues, “girls have been
educated either to be drudges or toys beneath man, or a sort of angels
above him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Clärchen and
Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in
the fair saint nor in the fair sinner; that women are meant neither to
be men’s guides nor their playthings, but their comrades, their fellows,
and their equals, so far as Nature puts no bar to their equality, does
not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the
conduct of the education of girls” (_Lay Sermons_, p. 25).

Woman, in short, is a failure; and let any disappointed lover ask
himself, Is it businesslike to begin life with a failure?

                          FOCUSSING HER FAULTS

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.

                        REASON _VERSUS_ PASSION

According to Shakspere, though Love does not admit Reason as his
counsellor, he _does_ use him as his physician. The most effective way
of using Reason to cure Love is by way of comparison. By dwelling on the
miseries of married life as just detailed, the disappointed lover may
mitigate his pains somewhat, as did that Italian mentioned by
Schopenhauer, who resisted the agony of torture by constantly keeping in
his mind’s eye the picture of the gallows that would have been the
reward of confession.

Again, he may compare his present Love with a former infatuation that
seemed at the time equally deep and eternal, though now he wonders how
he could have _ever_ loved that girl. History repeats itself.

Compare, moreover, your present idol with her stout and faded mother. In
a few years she will perhaps resemble her mother more than her present
self.

Compare her charms, feature by feature, with some recognised paragon of
beauty. Look at her in the glaring light of the sun, which reveals every
spot on the complexion.

                           LOVE _VERSUS_ LOVE

Longfellow says it is folly to pretend that one ever wholly recovers
from a disappointed passion; and Mr. Hamerton believes that “a wrinkled
old maid may still preserve in the depths of her own heart, quite
unsuspected by the young and lively people about her, the unextinguished
embers of a passion that first made her wretched fifty years before.”

Occasionally this may be true, in the sense in which psychology teaches
that no impression made on the mind is ever completely effaced, but may,
though forgotten for years, be revived in moments of great excitement,
or in the delirium of fever; as, for example, in the case mentioned by
Duval, of a Pole in Germany, who had not used his native language for
thirty years, but who, under the influence of anæsthetics, “spoke,
prayed, and sang, using only the Polish language.” The persistence of an
old passion is the more probable from the fact that in mental disease
and age, as Ribot points out, the emotional faculties are effaced much
more slowly than the intellectual. Feelings form the self; _amnesia_ of
feeling is the destruction of self.

Ordinarily, however, and for the time being, it may be possible to
practically obliterate a passion. “All love may be expelled by love, as
poisons are by other poisons,” says Dryden. And if the allopathic
remedies described in the preceding paragraphs should fail to effect a
cure, the lover may find the homœopathic principle of _similia
similibus_ more successful.

Heine, in his posthumous Memoirs, thus refers to this principle of
curing like with like:—

“In love, as in the Roman Catholic religion, there is a provisional
purgatory in which mortals are allowed to get used gradually to being
roasted before they get into the real eternal hell.... In all honesty,
what a terrible thing is love for a woman. Inoculation is herein of no
use.... Very wise and experienced physicians counsel a change of
locality in the opinion that removal from the presence of the
enchantress will also break the charm. Perhaps the homœopathic
principle, by which woman cures us of woman, is the best of all.... It
was ordained that I should be visited more severely than other mortals
by this malady, the heart-pox.... The most effective antidote to women
are women; true, this implies an attempt to expel Satan with Beelzebub;
and in such a case the medicine is often more noxious still than the
malady. But it is at any rate a change, and in a disconsolate
love-affair a change of the inamorata is unquestionably the best
policy.”

                    PROGNOSIS OR CHANCES OF RECOVERY

After carefully following all the foregoing rules regarding absence,
travel, employment, dwelling on the miseries of marriage, the weaknesses
of women in general and one woman in particular, the disappointed lover
may boldly return and face her again. The chances are ten to one he will
find himself—more in love than ever!

Women are magicians. No wonder they were burned as witches in the Middle
Ages.

                          NATIONALITY AND LOVE

Romantic love—commonly considered immutable—not only displays countless
individual variations in regard to duration and degrees of intensity,
but has a sort of “local colour” in each country; or, to keep up our old
metaphor, a varying clangtint, depending on the greater or less
prominence of certain “overtones.”

To describe all these varieties of Love would require a separate volume.
And since all the most interesting forms of the romantic passion are to
be met with in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and America, it
will suffice to briefly characterise Love in those countries.

                              FRENCH LOVE

As literary luck would have it, the subject of French Love follows
naturally upon the subject of the last chapter, the _Remedia Amoris_.

The French are too clever a nation to leave to individual effort the
difficult task of curing the mind of such an obstinate thing as Love.
All the papas and mammas in the land have put their heads together and
devised two methods of _killing Love wholesale_, compared with which all
the remedies named in the last chapter are mere fly-bites.

These two methods are Chaperonage and Parental Choice, as opposed to
Courtship and Individual Sexual Selection.

Paradoxical as it may seem, there is in the midst of modern Europe a
nation which, in the treatment of women, Love, and marriage, stands on
the same low level of evolution as the ancient, mediæval, and Oriental
nations.

This is not a theory, but a fact patent to all, and attested by the best
English, German, and French authors.

One of the deepest of French thinkers, whose eyes were opened by travel
and comparison, De Stendhal, in 1842, says in his book _De l’Amour_:
“Pour comprendre cette passion, que depuis trente ans la peur du
ridicule cache avec tant de soin parmi nous, il faut en parler comme
d’une maladie”—"To understand this passion, which during the last thirty
years has been concealed among us with so much solicitude, from fear of
ridicule, it is necessary to speak of it as a malady."

But Stendhal greatly understates the case. It was not only within thirty
years from the time when he wrote, and by means of ridicule, that the
French had tried hard to kill Love. They have never really emancipated
themselves from mediæval barbarism. Pure Romantic Love between two young
unmarried persons has never yet flourished in France—because it has
never been allowed to grow. To-day, as in the days of the Troubadours,
the only form of Love celebrated in French plays and romances is the
form which implies conjugal infidelity.

“Marriage, as treated in the old French epics,” says Ploss, “is rarely
based on love;” the woman marries for protection, the man for her wealth
or social affiliations. In the eighteenth century girls were compelled
from their earliest years to live only for appearance sake: “The most
harmless natural enjoyment, every childish ebullition, is interdicted as
improper. Her mother denies her the expression of tender emotion as too
bourgeois, too common. The little one grows up in a dreary, heartless
vacuum; her deeper feelings remain undeveloped.... Real love would be
too ordinary a motive of marriage, and therefore extremely ridiculous.
It is not offered her, accordingly, nor does she feel any.”

Heine wrote from Paris in 1837 that “girls never fall in love in this
country.” "With us in Germany, as also in England and other nations of
Germanic origin, young girls are allowed the utmost possible liberty,
whereas married women become subjected to the strict and anxious
supervision of their husbands.

"Here in France, as already stated, the reverse is the case: young girls
remain in the seclusion of a convent until they either marry or are
introduced to the world under the strict eye of a relative. In the
world, _i.e._ in the French salon, they always remain silent and little
noticed, for it is neither good form here nor wise to make love to an
unmarried girl.

“There lies the difference. We Germans, as well as our Germanic
neighbours, bestow our love always on unmarried girls, and these only
are celebrated by our poets; among the French, on the other hand,
married women only are the object of love, in life as well as in
literature.”

The difficulty of becoming acquainted with a young lady, Mr. Hamerton
tells us, is greatest “in what may be called the ‘respectable’ classes
in country-towns and their vicinities. In Parisian society young ladies
go out into _le monde_, and may be seen and even spoken to at
evening-parties.”

“And even spoken to” is good, is very good. What a privilege for the
young men! The iron bars which formerly separated them from the young
ladies have actually been removed, and they are allowed to speak to
them—in presence of a heart-chilling, conversation-killing dragon. No
wonder Parisian society is so corrupt!

Mr. Hamerton has given in _Round My House_ the most realistic and
fascinating account of French courtship and marriage-customs ever
written. He is a great admirer of the French, always ready to excuse
their foibles, and his testimony is, therefore, doubly valuable as that
of an absolutely impartial witness. He had an opportunity for many years
of studying French provincial life with an artist’s trained faculties;
and here are a few sentences culled from his descriptions:—

“It is not merely difficult, in our neighbourhood, for a young man in
the respectable classes to get acquainted with a young lady, but _every
conceivable arrangement is devised to make it absolutely impossible_.
Balls and evening-parties are hardly ever given, and when they are given
great care is taken to keep young men out of them, and young
marriageable girls either dance with each other or with mere children.”

Whereas in England “a young girl may go where she likes, without much
risk to her good name,” a French girl “may not cross a street alone, nor
open a book which has not been examined, nor have an opinion about
anything.” “The French ideal of a well-brought-up young lady is that she
should not know anything whatever about love and marriage, that she
should be both innocent and ignorant, and both in the supreme
degree—both to a degree which no English person can imagine.”

“The young men are not to blame; they would be ready enough, perhaps, to
fall in love if they had the chance, like any Englishman or German, but
the respectable parents of the young lady take care that they shall
_not_ have the chance of falling in love.”

The only opportunity a young man has of seeing a girl is at a distance,
at church or in a religious procession. Here he may see her face; her
character he can only ascertain through gossip, a lady friend, or the
parish priest. It is much more respectable, however, to show no such
curiosity, for its absence implies the absence of such a ridiculous
thing as Love. “_There is nothing which good society in France
disapproves of so much as the passion of Love_, or anything resembling
it.” “When Cœlebs asks for the hand of a girl he has seen for a
minute, he may just possibly be in love with her, which is a degrading
supposition; but if he has never seen her, you cannot even suspect him
of a sentiment so unbecoming.”

There is but one way for the young man to gain admission to a house
where there is a marriageable young lady: “He must first, through a
third party, ask to marry the young lady, and, if her _parents_ consent,
he will then be admitted to see her and speak to her, but not otherwise.
_The respectable order of affairs is that the offer and acceptance
should precede and not follow courtship._”

Would it be possible to conceive a more diabolically ingenious social
machinery for massacring Romantic Love _en gros_?

“Marriages in France are generally arranged by the exercise of reason
and prudence, rather than by either passion or affection.” Mr. Hamerton
gives an amusing account of how he was asked to be matrimonial
ambassador by a young man who had never seen the girl he wanted to
marry. Mr. Hamerton obliged the young man, but was told by the mother
that if the young man would wait two years he might have a fair chance,
provided a _richer_ or _nobler_ suitor did not turn up in the meantime.

Money and Rank _versus_ Love. French mammas have at least one virtue.
They are not hypocrites.

The Countess von Bothmer, who lived in France a quarter of a century,
says in her _French Home Life_: “Where we so ordinarily listen to what
we understand by love—to the temptations of the young heart in all their
forms (however transitory), to our individual impressions and our own
opinions—the French consult fitness of relative situation, reciprocities
of fortune and position, and harmonies of family intercourse.”

To annihilate the last resource of Love—elopement—the _Code Napoléon_
forbids all marriages without either the consent of the father and
mother, or proof that they are both dead. “It is very troublesome to get
married in France; the operation is surrounded by difficulties and
formalities which would make an Englishman stamp with rage.”

Social life, of course, suffers as much from this idiotic system as
Romantic Love. French hospitality “does not extend beyond the family
circle,” we are informed by M. Max O’Rell, who also gives this amusing
instance of the imbecility or mental slavery (he does not use these
words) produced by the French system of education and chaperonage:—

“I remember I was one day sitting in the Champs Elysées with two English
ladies. Beside us was a young French girl with her father and mother.
The person on the right of papa rose and went away, and we heard the
young innocent say to her mother: ‘Mamma, may I go and sit by papa?’ It
was a baby of about eighteen or twenty. Those English ladies laugh over
the affair to this day.”

Boys suffer as well as girls. As the author of an article on “Parisian
Psychology” remarks: “There are no mothers in France; it is a nation of
‘mammas,’ who, in the most unlimited sense of the word, spoil their
boys, weaken them in body and soul, dwarf their thought, dry their
hearts, and lower them to below even their own level, hoping thereby to
rule over them through life, as they too often do. Frenchwomen having
been at best but half-wives, regard their children as a sort of
compensation for what they have themselves not had; and after the
mischievous fashion of weak ‘mammas’ prolong babyhood till far into
mature life.”

The French, in fact, are a nation of babies. Their puerile conceit,
which prevents them from learning to read any language but their own,
and thus finding out what other nations think of them, is responsible in
part for the mediæval barbarism of their matrimonial arrangements. The
Parisian is the most provincial animal in the world. In any other
metropolis—be it London, New York, Vienna, or Berlin—people understand
and relish whatever is good in literature, art, and life, be it English,
American, French, German, or Italian. But the Parisian understands only
what is narrowly and exclusively French. And this is the dictionary
definition of Provincialism.

The consequences of this mediævalism and provincialism in modern France
are thus eloquently summed up by a writer in the _Westminster Review_
(1877):—

“Such education as girls receive is not only not a preparation for the
wedded state, it is a positive disqualification for it. They are not
taught to read, they are not taught to reason; they are _launched into
life without a single intellectual interest_. The whole effort of their
early training goes to fill their mind with puerilities and
superstitions. As regards God, they are instructed to believe in relics
and old bones; as regards man, they are instructed to believe in dress,
in mannerisms, and coquetry. Their love of appreciation, after being
enormously developed, is bottled up and tied down until a husband is
found to draw the cork. What else, then, can we look for but an
explosion of frivolity? Can we expect that such a provision of
coquettishness will be reserved for the husband’s exclusive use? He will
be tired of it in three months—unless it is tired of him before; and
then the pent-up waters will forsake their narrow bed and overflow the
country far and wide.”

No wonder Napoléon remarked that “Love does more harm than good.” And
right he was, most emphatically, for the only kind of Love _possible_ in
France does infinite harm. It poisons life and literature alike.

We can now understand the fierceness of Dumas’s attacks on _mariages de
convenance_: “The manifest deterioration of the race touches him; it
does not touch us. Nor do we at all realise the next to impossibility of
a man ever marrying for love in France. There are those who have tried
to do it, but they can never get on in life; they are reputed of ‘bad
example’” (_St. James’s Gazette_).

And now we come upon a paradox which has puzzled a great many thinkers.
The Countess von Bothmer, while deploring the absence of Love in French
courtship, endeavours to show that domestic happiness and conjugal
affection are, nevertheless, not rare in France. French husbands “are
ordinarily with their wives, accompany them wherever they can, and share
their friendships and distractions.” Mr. Hamerton likewise bears witness
that French girls “become excellent wives, faithful, orderly, dutiful,
contented, and economical. They all either love their husbands, _or
conduct themselves as if they did so_.” He says the notion fostered by
novels “that Frenchmen are always occupied in making love to their
neighbours’ wives” is nonsense; that there is no more adultery than
elsewhere. “There exists in foreign countries, and especially in
England, a belief that Frenchwomen are very generally adulteresses. The
origin of the belief is this,— the manner in which marriages are
generally managed in France leaves no room for interesting love-stories.
Novelists and dramatists _must_ find love-stories somewhere, and so they
have to seek for them in illicit intrigues.”

This is all very ingenious, but the argument is not conclusive. Even
granted for a moment that Mr. Hamerton is right in his defence of French
conjugal life, is it not a more than sufficient condemnation of the
French system of “courtship” that one-half of the nation are prevented
from reading its literature because it is so foul and filthy—because
Love has been made synonymous with adultery?

But Mr. Hamerton’s assertion loses its probability when viewed in the
light of the following considerations. He himself admits that the French
are anxious to read about Love, that the novelists and dramatists _must_
find stories of Love somewhere—mind you, not of conjugal but of Romantic
Love—and the Paris _Figaro_ not long ago denounced the French novelists
of the period for devoting their stories to Love almost exclusively,
whereas Balzac, Dumas, Thackeray, and Scott, at least introduced various
other matters of interest. Now French novels have the largest editions
of any books published; and if so vast an interest is displayed by the
French in reading about Love, is it likely that their interest is purely
literary? Certainly not. They will seek it in real life. And in real
life it can only be found in one sphere, which elsewhere is protected
against such invasions, by the young being allowed to meet one another.
“It is to be feared that they who marry where they do not love, will
love where they do not marry.’” In _this_ respect human nature is the
same the world over. The testimony of scores of unprejudiced authors on
this head cannot be ignored.

This, however, is only one of the evils following from the French
suppression of pre-matrimonial Love. The parents may or may not suffer
through conjugal jealousy and infidelity, one thing is certain,—that the
children suffer from it, in body and mind. It is leading to the
depopulation of France. It was M. Jules Rochard who called attention to
the fact that “France, which two centuries ago included one-third of the
total population of Europe, now contains but one-tenth”; although the
death-rate is smaller in France than in most European countries, and
although there has been a gradual increase of wealth throughout the
country.

That the suppression of Romantic Love and of all opportunities for
courtship is the principal cause of the decline of France, is apparent
from the fact that the countries in which population increases most
rapidly—as America and Great Britain—are those in which Romantic Love is
the chief motive to marriage.

Romantic Love goes by complementary qualities, the defects of the
parents neutralising one another in the offspring; so that the children
who are the issue of a love-match are commonly more beautiful than their
parents. In France there is no selection whatever, except with reference
to money and rank. Not even Health is considered, the _sine qua non_ of
Love as well as Beauty. Hence the absence of Love in France has led to
the almost absolute absence of beauty. And it would be nothing short of
a miracle if the offspring of a young maiden, still in her teens, and an
old broken-down sinner, chosen by her parents for his wealth or social
position, were any different from the puny, hairy men and
coarse-featured, vulgar women that make up the bulk of the French
nation.

In Paris one does occasionally see a fine figure and a rather pretty
face, but they almost always belong to the lower classes. As the lower
classes allow the young considerable freedom, it would seem as if beauty
in this class ought to be as common an article as in England or the
United States. But the incapacity of the young women for feeling and
reciprocating Love neutralises these opportunities. For of what use is
it for a man to feel Love if the woman invariably bases her choice on
money? This matter is most clearly brought out by Mr. Hamerton:—

“Amongst the lower classes, the peasantry and workmen ... girls have as
much freedom as they have in England. The great institution of the
_parlement_ gives them ample opportunities for becoming acquainted with
their lovers; indeed the acquaintance, in many cases, goes further than
is altogether desirable. A peasant girl requires no parental help in
looking after her own interests. She admits a lover to the happy state
of _parlement_, which means that he has a right to talk with her when
they meet, and to call upon her, dance with her, etc. The lover is
always eager to fix the wedding-day, the girl is not so eager. She keeps
him on indefinitely until a richer one appears, on which No. 1 has the
mortification of seeing himself excluded from _parlement_, whilst
another takes his place. In this way a clever girl will go on for
several years, amusing herself by torturing amorous swains, until at
length a sufficiently big fish nibbles at the bait, when she hooks him
at once, and takes good care that _he_ shall not escape. Nothing can be
more pathetically ludicrous than the condition of a young peasant who is
really in love, especially if he is able to write, for then he pours
forth his feelings in innumerable letters full of tenderness and
complaint. On her part the girl does not answer the letters, and has not
the slightest pity for the unhappy victim of her charms. After seeing a
good deal of such love-affairs I have come to the conclusion that in
humble life young men do really very often feel

                “‘The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
                The exalted portion of the pain
                And power of love.’”

And they ‘wear the chain’ too. Young women, on the other hand, seem only
to amuse themselves with all this simple-hearted devotion—

        “‘And mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair.’”

Schopenhauer pointed out that the French lack the _Gefühl für das
Innige_—the tenderness and emotional depth which characterise the
Germans and Italians. It is this that accounts for the inability of the
French to appreciate Love, and for the fact that even vice is coarser in
France than elsewhere, as remarked by Mr. Lecky, who, in his _History of
European Morals_, contrasts “the coarse, cynical, ostentatious
sensuality, which forms the most repulsive feature of the French
character,” with “the dreamy, languid, and æsthetical sensuality of the
Spaniard or Italian.” And it remained for the French to attempt to deify
vice as in that over-rated and repulsive story of _Manon Lescaut_.

Mme. de Staël, who suffered so much from the provincialism (_alias_
patriotism) of her countrymen, saw clearly the immorality of the French
system of marrying girls without consulting their choice. Brandes
relates the following anecdote of her: “One day, speaking of the
unnaturalness of marriages arranged by the parents, as distinguished
from those in which the young girls choose for themselves, she
exclaimed, ‘I would _compel_ my daughter to marry the man of her
choice!’”

An attempt is being made at present in Paris to introduce the
Anglo-American feminine spirit into society. The word _flirter_ has been
adopted, and the thing itself experimented with. But the French girl
does not know how to draw the line between coquetry and flirtation. She
needs a better education before she can flirt properly. This education
the Government is trying to give her at present; but it meets with
stubborn resistance from the priests, and from the old notion that
intellectual culture is fatal to feminine charms and the capacity for
affection. If this book should accomplish nothing else than prove that
without intellect there can be no deep Love, it will not have been
written in vain.

                              ITALIAN LOVE

In Italy, in the sixteenth century, women were kept in as strict
seclusion as to-day in France; and with the same results,—conjugal
infidelity and a great lack of Personal Beauty, as noted by Montaigne,
who remarks at the same time that it was regarded as something quite
extraordinary if a young lady was seen in public.

Byron wrote in 1817 that “Jealousy is not the order of the day in
Venice”; and that the Italians “marry for their parents, and love for
themselves.”

In Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s _Life and Times of Titian_ we read that
“Though chroniclers have left us to guess what the state of society may
have been in Venice at the close of the fifteenth century, they give us
reason to believe that it was deeply influenced by Oriental habit. The
separation of men from women in churches, the long seclusion of
unmarried females in convents or in the privacy of palaces, were but the
precursors to marriages in which husbands were first allowed to see
their wives as they came in state to dance round the wedding
supper-table.”

But even at this early period when women were still treated as babies
unable to take care of themselves, we find at least one trace of the
Gallantry which is so essential an element in modern love. It was
customary for the men, on festive occasions, to stand behind their
wives’ chairs at table and serve them.

Extremely ungallant, on the other hand, are some of the Italian proverbs
about women of this and other periods. “A woman is like a
horse-chestnut—beautiful outside, worthless inside.” “Two women and a
goose make a market.” “Married man—bird in cage.” “In buying a horse and
taking a wife shut your eyes and commend your soul to heaven.”

Her exuberant health makes an Italian woman naturally prone to Love; but
though she falls in love most readily, the passion is apt to be fugitive
and superficial. She rarely loves with the passionate ardour of a
Spanish woman. “What we notice especially in Italian women,” says
Schweiger-Lerchenfeld, “is the absence of that alternation between those
extremes of temperament which are so conspicuous in other Southern
women. Energy is almost as unknown to her as the moral power of
resignation and sacrifice. Hence it can hardly surprise us that Italian
history records so few heroic women or pious female martyrs. Italy has
produced neither a Jeanne d’Arc nor an Elizabeth of Thuringia; the
crowns were too oppressive to be borne by these beauties, and life too
enchanting for them to invite to tragic self-sacrifice.”

Probably the most realistic, and certainly the most fascinating, account
of Italian love-making ever given is to be found in Mr. Howells’s
_Venetian Life_. As it is too long to quote, I will attempt to condense
it, though at some sacrifice of that literary “bouquet,” as an epicure
would say, which constitutes the unique charm of Mr. Howells’s style:—

"The Venetians have had a practical and strictly businesslike way of
arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has
always been made for the dower and for the good of the state; private
and public interest being consulted, the small matters of affection have
been left to the chances of association.

"Herodotus relates that the Assyrian Veneti sold their daughters at
auction to the highest bidder; and the fair being thus comfortably
placed in life, the hard-favoured were given to whomsoever would take
them, with such dower as might be considered a reasonable compensation.
The auction was discontinued in Christian times, but marriage contracts
still partook of the form of a public and half-mercantile transaction.

“These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before
they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and
white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her.”

“With the nobility and with the richest commoners marriage is still
greatly a matter of contract, and is arranged without much reference to
the principals, though it is now scarcely probable in any case that they
have not seen each other. But with all other classes, except the
poorest, who cannot or will not seclude the youth of either sex from
each other, and with whom, consequently, romantic contrivance and
subterfuge would be superfluous, love is made to-day in Venice as in the
_Capa y espada_ comedies of the Spaniards, and the business is carried
on with all the cumbrous machinery of confidants, _billets-doux_, and
stolen interviews.”

The “operatic method of courtship” thence resulting commonly assumes
this form:—

“They follow that beautiful blonde, who, marching demurely in front of
the gray-moustached papa and the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice,
is electrically conscious of pursuit. They follow during the whole
evening, and, at a distance, softly follow her home, where the burning
Todaro photographs the number of the house upon the sensitised tablets
of his soul. This is the first step in love: he has seen his adored one,
and she knows that he loves her with an inextinguishable ardour.”

The next step consists in his frequenting the _caffé_, where she goes
with her parents, and feasting his eyes on her beauty. After some time
he may possibly get a chance to speak a few words to her under her
balcony; or, what is more likely, he will bribe her servant-maid to
bring her a love-letter. Or else he goes to church to admire her at a
convenient distance.

“It must be confessed that if the Biondina is not pleased with his
looks, his devotion must assume the character of an intolerable bore to
her; and that to see him everywhere at her heels—to behold him leaning
against the pillar near which she kneels at church, the head of his
stick in his mouth, and his attitude carefully taken with a view to
captivation—to be always in deadly fear lest she shall meet him in
promenade, or turning round at the _caffé_ encounter his pleading
gaze—that all this must drive the Biondina to a state bordering upon
blasphemy and finger-nails. _Ma, come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza?_ This is
the sole course open to ingenuous youth in Venice, where confessed and
unashamed acquaintance between young people is extremely difficult; and
so this blind pursuit must go on till the Biondina’s inclinations are at
last laboriously ascertained.” Then follow the inquiries as to her
dowry, after which nothing remains but “to demand her in marriage of her
father, _and after that to make her acquaintance_.”

Topsy-turvy as this last arrangement may seem to Anglo-American notions,
here at least Love has some chance to bring about real Sexual Selection,
for a Southerner’s passions are momentarily inflamed, and the Italian
Cupid needs but a moment to fix his choice. And what distinguishes Italy
still more favourably from France is that, whereas the French consider
Love ridiculous, and have made the most ingenious contrivances for
annihilating it, the Italians worship it, revel in it, and are inclined
rather to make too many concessions to it than to ignore it.

The result is patent to all eyes. For every attractive Frenchwoman there
are to-day a hundred beautiful Italians. And were Anglo-American methods
of courtship introduced in Italy, beauty would again be doubled in
amount. It must not be forgotten, however, that Love, as a beautifier of
mankind, has in Italy very strong allies in the balmy air and sunshine,
tempting to constant outdoor life, which mellows the complexion,
brightens the eyes, and fills out the figure to those full yet elegant
proportions which instantaneously arouse the romantic passion.

                              SPANISH LOVE

Spanish veins contain more Oriental blood than those of any other
European nation; and to the present day Eastern methods of treating
women cast their shadow on Spanish life. But the shadow is so light, and
so much mitigated by the rosy hue of romance, that the “local colour” of
Love in Spain presents an unusually fascinating spectacle, which
countless literary artists have attempted to depict.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Oriental shadow was
much darker, and kept the women in extreme subjection and ignorance.
“Their life,” says Professor Scherr, speaking even of the queens,
“passed away in a luxurious tedium which dulled the sentiments to the
point of idiocy. They were only crowned slaves. As an instance of their
absolute deprivation of liberty may be cited the case of Elizabeth, wife
of Philip II., who, when in 1565 she went to Bayonne to meet her mother,
had to wait three days before the gates of Burgos before it was possible
to ascertain the king’s decision whether the queen should pass through
the city or around it.”

“Women of rank,” he continues, "lived in a seclusion bordering on that
of a convent, if not surpassing it. For nuns were at least allowed to
speak to male visitors behind bars, whereas married women were strictly
forbidden to receive the visit of a man, except with the special
permission of the husband. And only during the first year of their
wedded life were they allowed to frequent public drives in open
carriages by the side of their husband; subsequently they were only
allowed to go out in closed carriages. Of cosy family life not a
trace.... Even the table did not unite the husband and wife; the master
took his meal alone, while his wife and children sat respectfully on the
floor on carpets, with their legs crossed in Oriental fashion.

“The poor women, excluded from every refined social diversion, were
confined to manual work, gossip with their duennas, mechanical praying,
playing with their rosaries, and—intriguing. For the greater the
subjection of women, the more does their cunning grow, the more
passionate becomes their desire to avenge themselves on their tyrants.
The Spaniards found this out to their cost. The most inexorable spirit
of revenge, all the parade of ‘Spanish honour,’ bordering in its excess
on clownishness, could not prevent the Spanish dames from loving and
being loved.”

In course of time this Oriental despotism, with its fatal consequences
to conjugal fidelity—as in France—has been greatly mitigated in Spain.
In Pepys’s _Diary_, 1667, we read of an informant who told the writer
“of their wooing [in Spain] by serenades at the window, and that their
friends do always make the match; but yet they have opportunities to
meet at masse at church, and there they make love.”

In an interesting book on Spain, written almost two and a quarter
centuries after Pepys’s _Diary_—Mr. Lathrop’s _Spanish Vistas_—we still
read concerning this ecclesiastic Love-making, in the Seville Cathedral:
“Every door was guarded by a squad of the decrepit army, so that
entrance there became a horror. These sanctuary beggars serve a double
purpose, however. The black-garbed Sevillan ladies, who are perpetually
stealing in and out noiselessly under cover of their archly-draped lace
veils—losing themselves in the dark, incense-laden interior, or emerging
from confession into the daylight glare again—are careful to drop some
slight conscience-money into the palms that wait. Occasionally, by
pre-arrangement, one of these beggars will convey into the hand that
passes him a silver piece, a tightly-folded note from some clandestine
lover. It is a convenient underground mail, and I am afraid the
venerable church innocently shelters a good many little transactions of
this kind.”

How greatly the facilities for falling in love and for making love have
been increased in modern Spain is vividly brought out in the following
citation from Schweiger-Lerchenfeld regarding the scenes to be witnessed
every evening on the crowded promenade or Rambla at Barcelona:—

“Are these elegantly-attired ramblers one and all suitors, since they
put no limit nor restraint on their whispered flatteries? No, that is
simply the custom in Barcelona. The women and girls are beautiful, and
though they are well aware of it, they nevertheless allow their charms
to be whispered in their ears hundreds of times every evening—a freedom
of intercourse which is only possible on Spanish soil.... And thus one
of these adored beauties walks up and down in the glare of the lamps,
and sweet music is wafted to her ears: ‘Your beauty dazzles me,’
whispers one voice; and another, ‘Happiness and anguish your eyes are
burning into my soul.’ One compliments the chosen one on her hair,
another on her figure, a third on her graceful gait. Young adorers feel
a thrill running down their whole body if her mantilla only touches
them; while mature lovers are contented with nothing less than a
pressure of the hand. It is a picture that is possible, conceivable only
in Spain.”

The same writer quotes some specimens of Spanish Love-songs, one of
which may be transferred to this page—

                      “Échame, niña bonita,
                      Lágrimas en tu pañuelo,
                      Y los llevaré a Madrid
                      Que los engarce un platero.”

“Show me, my little charmer, the tear in your handkerchief; to Madrid
will I take it and have it set by a jeweller.”

What a contrast between this modern complimentary and poetic form of
Gallantry and the form prevalent in the good old times when lovers
endeavoured to win a maiden’s favour by flagellating themselves under
her window until the blood ran down their backs; and when, as Scherr
adds, “it was regarded as the surest sign of supreme gallantry if some
of the blood bespattered the clothes of the beauty to whom this crazy
act of devotion was addressed!”

Nevertheless, the Spanish still have much to learn from England and
America regarding the proper methods of Courtship; for, according to a
writer in _Macmillan’s Magazine_ (1874), the unmarried maiden of the
higher classes, “like her humbler sister, can never have the privilege
of seeing her lover in private, and very rarely, indeed, if ever, is he
admitted into the _sala_ where she is sitting. He may contrive to get a
few minutes’ chat with her through the barred windows of her _sala_; but
when a Spaniard leads his wife from the altar, he knows no more of her
character, attainments, and disposition than does the parish priest who
married them, and perhaps not so much.”

In one respect Spanish lovers have a great advantage over their
unfortunate colleagues in France. There marriage is impossible without
parental consent, whereas in Spain a law exists concerning which the
writer just quoted says:—

“Should a Spanish lad and lassie become attached to one another, and the
parents absolutely forbid the match, and refuse their daughter liberty
and permission to marry, the lover has his remedy at law. He has but to
make a statement of the facts on paper, and deposit it, signed and
attested, with the alcalde or mayor of the township in which the lady’s
parents dwell. The alcalde then makes an order, giving the young man the
right of free entry into the house in question, within a certain number
of days, for the purpose of wooing and carrying off his idol. The
parents dare not interfere with the office of the alcalde, and the lady
is taken to her lover’s arms. From that moment he, and he alone, is
bound to provide for her: by his own act and deed she has become his
property.” Should he prove false “the law comes upon him with all its
force, and he is bound to maintain her, in every way, as a wife, under
pain of punishment.”

Thus a Spanish girl is protected against perfidious lovers as well as is
an English and American girl through the possibility of suing for breach
of promise. If the short stories told in _Don Quixote_ may be taken as
examples, faithless lovers were very common in Spain at that time;
which, doubtless, accounts for the origin of this law. The girls on
their part erred by yielding too easily to the promises of the men;
though they are partially excused by the great strength of their
passions.

In his work on Suicide, Professor Morselli has statistics showing that
more women take their life in Spain than in any other country; and he
attributes this to the force of their passions, which is greater than in
Italy, where the number of female suicides is considerably lower.

Thus Love has a more favourable ground in Spain than either in Italy or
in France, notwithstanding certain restrictions. And the result shows
itself in this, that all tourists unite in singing the praises of
Spanish Beauty. Spain, indeed, unites in itself all the conditions
favourable to Beauty: a climate tempting to outdoor life; a considerable
amount of intellectual culture and æsthetic refinement; a mixture of
nationalities, fusing _ethnic_ peculiarities into a harmonious whole;
and Love, which fuses _individual_ complementary qualities into a
harmonious ensemble of beautiful features, graceful figure, amiable
disposition, and refined manners.

                              GERMAN LOVE

When Tacitus penned his famous certificate of good moral character for
the Germans of his time, he little suspected how many thousand times it
would be quoted by the grateful and proud descendants of those early
Teutons, and pinned to the lapels of their coats as a sort of prize
medal in the competition for ancestral virtue. The more candid
historians, however, admit that the Roman historian somewhat overdrew
his picture in order to teach his own profligate countrymen a sort of
Sunday school lesson, by the vivid contrast presented by these
inhabitants of the northern virgin forests.

There is no question that women were held in considerable honour among
these early Germans. Many of them served as priestesses, and adultery
was punished with death. Polygamy existed only among the chiefs, and
even among them it was not common. Yet the men did not treat the women
as their equals. “They had more duties than privileges,” says
Schweiger-Lerchenfeld. Their husbands were addicted to excessive
drinking or gambling when not engaged in war or the chase, leaving the
hard domestic and field labour to the women: and all this cannot have
tended to refine the women.

“Marriage in the old Germanic times,” says Ploss, “was mostly an affair
of expediency.... In the choice of a wife beauty was of less moment than
property and good social antecedents. Love _before_ the betrothal rarely
occurs.”

Gustav Freytag, in his _Pictures of German Life_, during the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, remarks: “Marriage was considered
by our ancestors less as a union of two lovers than as an institution
replete with duties and rights, not only of married people towards one
another, but also towards their relatives, as a bond uniting two
corporate bodies.... Therefore in the olden time the choice of husband
and wife was always an affair of importance to the relatives on both
sides, so that a German wooing from the oldest times, _even until the
last century_, had the appearance of a business transaction, which was
carried out with great regard to suitability.”

And a business transaction it is, unfortunately, to the present day, in
the vast majority of cases. A certain amount of dower or property on the
bride’s part is the first and most essential requisite. Second in
importance is the desirability of not descending even a step in the
social ladder, though an extra lump of gold commonly suffices to pull
down social Pride to a lower level. Health, temper, Personal Beauty, and
mutual suitability—these are the trifles which, other things being
equal, come in as a third consideration. And thus is the order of Sexual
Selection, as ordained by Love, commonly reversed.

What would an English or American youth of twenty-two say to his father
if the latter should undertake to write to all his relatives, asking
them to look about for an eligible partner for his son, and capping the
climax by starting himself on a trip in search of a bride for his son?
Would he accept without a murmur the girl thus found, and would an
English or American girl thus allow herself to be given away like a cat
in a bag, not knowing whither she was going? I have seen several such
cases with my own eyes. One of them was most pathetic. For when the
blooming bride, a sweet and refined girl, was introduced to the
bridegroom selected for her by her parents—a repulsive-looking brute,
twice her age—she conceived a perfect loathing for him, and almost wept
out her eyes before the wedding-day. But the man was rich, and that
settled the matter.

What aggravated this outrage was the fact that the bride’s father also
was rich. And herein, in fact, lies the canker of the German system.
Money is such a comfortable thing to have that it is useless to preach
against it. There are money-marriages enough in England and America. But
in these countries it is generally considered sufficient if one party
has the money. Not so in Germany. It is not so much the comfort ensured
by a certain amount of money that is aimed at as the superior social
influence ensured by a large amount of wealth. Hence the rich marry the
rich, regardless of other consequences, and poor Cupid is left shivering
in the cold. So that, after all, the silly pride of social position is a
greater enemy of Romantic Love than money.

And the consequences of such a matrimonial system? They have been most
eloquently set forth by the blind old philosopher, Dr. Dühring:—

“The amalgamation of fortunes, and the resulting enervating luxury of
living, are the ruling matrimonial motives; and the want of mutual
adaptation of the individuals becomes the cause of the degenerate
appearance of the offspring. The loathsome products of such marriages
then walk about as ugly embodiments and witnesses of such a degraded
system of legalised prostitution (_Kuppelwirthschaft_). They bear the
stamp of incongruity on body and mind; for their appearance shows them
to be the offspring of disharmonious parents, blindly associated, or
even, in many cases, of parents who themselves are already products of
this new matrimonial method. This degeneracy necessarily continues from
one generation to another, and in this manner maltreated Nature avenges
herself by leading to personal decrepitude and the formation of a new
sort of idiocy.”

“It is true,” he adds, “that love is not an infallible sign of mutual
suitability; but when it is absent, or even replaced by aversion, it is
certain that it is useless to expect a specially harmonious composition
of the offspring.”

Is this one of the reasons why Personal Beauty is so rare,
comparatively, in Germany?

But Individual Preference is not the only element of Love which thus
suffers in Germany through false Pride and parental tyranny. Gallantry
is another factor which needs mending. German women are sweet and
amiable. In fact, they are _too_ sweet and good-natured. They have
spoiled the men, who in consequence are excessively selfish in their
relations to women—the most selfish men in the world, outside of Turkey
or China. True, the German officer in a ballroom seems to be the very
essence of officious Gallantry. But his motives are too transparently
Ovidian: it is not true Anglo-American politeness of the heart that
inspires his conduct. He is either after forbidden sweets or parading
his uniform and his vanity. Take the same man and watch him at home. His
wife has to get him his chair, move it up to the fire, bring him his
slippers, put the coffee in his hand, and do errands for him. When he
goes out she puts on his overcoat and buttons it up carefully for him as
if he were a helpless big baby. This would be all very well—for why
should not women be gallant too?—if he would only retaliate. But he
never dreams of it. Even if it comes to a task which calls for masculine
muscular power—the carrying of bundles, etc.—he makes the wife do it. He
is, in fact, matrimonially considered, not only a big baby but also a
big brute, the very incarnation of masculine selfishness.

In former centuries it was customary in Germany, as it is now with us,
for women to bow first to men. The modern German has reversed this.
Woman has no right to bow until her lord and superior has invited her to
do so by doffing his hat.

The German girl, says the Countess von Bothmer in _German Home Life_,
“is taught that to be womanly she must be helpless, to be feminine she
must be feeble, to endear herself she must be dependent, to charm she
must cling.” “To keep carefully to the sheep-walk, to applaud in concert
and condemn in chorus, is the only behaviour that can be tolerated.”
“They have one bugbear and one object of idolatry, these monotonous
ladies,—a fetish which they worship under the name of Mode; a monster
between public opinion and Mrs. Grundy. To say a thing is not ‘Mode’
here, is to condemn it as if by all the laws of Media and Persia. It is
not her centre [_sic_], but the system of her social education, that
renders the German woman so hopelessly provincial.”

Of course it is the men who are responsible for this social education
and this feminine ideal of absolute dependence. It suits their selfish
pleasure to be worshipped and obeyed by the women without any efforts at
gallant retaliation on their part.

A native writer tells us that “a true German philosophises occasionally
while he embraces his sweetheart; while kissing even, theories will
sprout in his mind.”

No wonder, therefore, that one of the German metaphysicians, Fichte,
should have made a sophistic attempt to reduce masculine selfishness to
a system. He proves to his own satisfaction that it is woman’s duty to
sacrifice herself in man’s behalf; while man, on his part, has no such
obligations. His reasoning is too elaborate to quote in full; but is too
amusingly naïve to be omitted, so I will translate the summary of it
given by Kuno Fischer in his _History of Philosophy_:—

“What woman’s natural instincts demand is self-abandonment to a man; she
desires this abandonment not for her own sake, but for the man’s sake;
she gives herself to him, for him. Now abandoning oneself for another is
self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice from an instinctive impulse is LOVE.
Therefore love is a kind of instinctive impulse which the sexual
instinct in woman necessarily and involuntarily assumes. She feels the
necessity of loving.... This impulse is peculiar to woman alone; woman
alone loves [!!!]; only through woman does love appear among mankind....
The woman’s life should disappear in the man’s without a remnant, and it
is this relation that is so beautifully and correctly indicated in the
fact that the wife no longer uses her own name, but that of her husband
[!].”

The latest (and it is to be hoped the last) of the German
metaphysicians, the pessimist Hartmann, goes even a step beyond
Fichte in arrogating for man special privileges in Love. If Fichte
makes Love synonymous with Self-Sacrifice—feminine, mind you, not
masculine—Hartmann tries to prove that man may love as often as he
pleases, but woman only once. And what aggravates the offence, he
does it in such a poetic manner. “Though it may be doubtful,” he
says, “whether a man can truly love two women at the same time, it
is beyond all doubt that he can love several in succession with all
the depth of his heart; and the assertion that there is only one
true love is an unwarranted generalisation to all mankind of a maxim
which is true of woman alone.... Woman can learn but once by
experience what love is, and it is painful for the lover not to be
the one who teaches her first. True it is that a tree nipped by a
spring frost brings forth a second crown of leaves, but so rich and
luxuriant as the first it will not be; thus does a maiden-heart
produce a second bloom, if the first had to wither before maturity,
but its full and complete floral glory is unfolded only where love,
aroused for the first time, passes in full vigour through all its
phases.”

Yet it is not ungallant selfishness alone that prompts German men to
bring up their women so that they shall be mere playthings at first and
drudges after marriage, never real soul-mates. They have the same old
stupid continental fear that culture of the intellect weakens the
feelings. This fear is based on slovenly reasoning—on the inference that
because a few blue-stockings have at all ages made themselves ridiculous
by assuming masculine attributes and parading their lack of tenderness
and feminine delicacy, therefore intellectual training must be fatal to
feminine charms. As if there were not plenty of masculine
blue-stockings, or pedants, without disproving the fact that the men of
the greatest intellectual power—men of genius—are also the most
emotional and refined of all men; or the fact proved by this whole
monograph, that Love and general emotional refinement grow with the
general intellectual culture of women.

A typical illustration of German feeling on the subject of female
education is to be found in Schweiger-Lerchenfeld’s _Frauenleben der
Erde_, p. 530. Referring to the attempts now being made in France to
give young girls a rational education, he quotes the opinion of a French
legislator that a girl thus brought up would not love less deeply than
heretofore, while she would love more intelligently; and then comments
as follows: “How far this anticipation may be realised cannot be decided
now or in the near future. At any rate we must leave to the French
themselves the task of getting along with this classical female
generation of the future. Certain it is that their experiment will
hardly be imitated, and that the old Romans and Greeks may eventually
become more dangerous to masculine supremacy (Autorität) than the
pilgrimage stories of Lourdes.”

It is time for German woman to rise in revolt against this mediæval
masculine selfishness. Not in active revolt, for a warlike woman is an
abomination. But in passive revolt. Let them cease to spoil the men, and
these bears will become more gallant. Germany is later in almost every
phase of literary and social culture than England. It was not an
accident that Shakspere came before Heine, the English before the German
poet of Love; for Love is much less advanced in Germany than in England.
It has not even passed the stage where a harsh sort of Coyness is still
in place. German women want to learn the cunning to be strange, They are
too deferential to the men, too easily won. They want to learn to
indulge in harmless flirtation, and they want the education which will
give them wit enough to flirt cleverly and make the men mellow.

It must be admitted, however, notwithstanding all these strictures, that
there is much genuine Romantic Love in Germany, often differing in no
wise from Anglo-American Love. At first sight it seems, indeed, as if
chaperonage were as strict as in France; and no doubt many German girls
are brought up on the spring-chicken-coyness system which regards every
man as a hawk, and a signal for hiding away in a corner. But in general
German girls have much more freedom than French girls. They may walk
alone in the street in the daytime, go alone to the conservatory to
attend a music-lesson. They meet the young men freely at evening
parties, dances, musical entertainments, etc.; and the chaperons are not
nearly so obtrusive and offensive as in France. The mothers appear to
have taken to heart Jean Paul’s saying that “in the mother’s presence it
is impossible to carry on an edifying conversation with the daughter.”
So that there is plenty of opportunity for falling in love; and were it
not for parental dictation, Love-matches would perhaps be as common as
in England. But the girls lack independence of spirit to defy parental
tyranny, which it is their _moral duty_ to defy where money or rank are
pitted against Love. For the health and happiness of the next generation
are at stake.

German girls also enjoy an advantage over the French in having a
literature which is pure and wholesome; and by reading about Romantic
Love they train and deepen their feelings. It is often said that Heine’s
influence has been chiefly negative. The truth is, _Heine is the
greatest emotional educator Germany has ever had_. More young men and
girls have wept over his pathetic lyrics than over any other poetry. His
_Buch der Lieder_ has done more to foster the growth of Romantic Love in
Germany than all other collections of verse combined; not only by their
own unadorned beauty, but through the soulful music wedded to these
poems by Schubert, Schumann, and other magicians of the heart. The fact
that the copyright on Heine’s works was soon to expire, and the country
to be flooded with cheap editions, has long caused Master Cupid to rub
his hands in gleeful anticipation of brisk business; and he has just
given orders in his arsenal for one hundred thousand new golden arrows.

Heine indeed fathomed the secrets of Love much more deeply than Goethe.
Whereas Heine sang of Love in every major and minor key, Goethe appears
to have emphasised chiefly its transitoriness. “Love, as Goethe knows
it,” says Professor Seeley, “is very tender, and has a lyric note as
fresh as that of a song-bird. In his _Autobiography_ one love-passage
succeeds another, but each comes speedily to an end. How far in each
case he was to blame is a matter of controversy. But he seems to betray
a way of thinking about women such as might be natural to an Oriental
sultan. ‘I was in that agreeable phase,’ he writes, ‘when a new passion
had begun to spring up in me before the old one had quite disappeared.’
About Frederika he blames himself without reserve, and uses strong
expressions of contrition; but he forgets the matter strangely soon. In
his distress of mind he says he found riding, and especially skating,
bring much relief. This reminds us of the famous letter to the Frau von
Stein about coffee. He is always ready in a moment to shake off the
deepest impressions and receive new ones; and he never looks back....
Goethe was a man of the old _régime_.... Had he entered into the
reforming movement of his age, he might have striven to elevate
women.... He certainly felt at times that all was not right in the
status of women (‘woman’s fate is pitiable’), and how narrowly confined
was their happiness (wie enggebunden ist des Weibes Glück) ... but he
was not a reformer of institutions.”

A reformer of institutions, however, has apparently just arisen in
Berlin. For we read that at a private female seminary the girls received
the following subject for an essay: “There is from the Ideas of Plato,
the atoms of Democritus, the Substance of Spinoza, the monads of
Leibnitz, and from the subjective mental forms of Kant, the proof to
bring, that the philosophy it never neglected has the to-be-calculated
results of their hypotheses with their into-perception-falling effects
to compare.”

Such subjects, so elegantly expressed, are no doubt eminently calculated
to bring out the latent possibilities of feminine feeling and culture.

To close this chapter with a sweet, soothing concord—major triad, horns
and ’cellos, _smorzando_—it must be admitted that the Germans have one
ingredient of Romantic Love which all other nations must envy them. They
have one more thrill in the drama of Love, in the ascending scale of
familiarities, than we have, namely, the word _Du_, which is something
very different from the stilted _Thou_, because still a part of everyday
language. The second person singular is used in Germany towards pet
animals and children, between students, intimate friends, relatives, and
lovers. French “lovers” do not say _tu_ to each other till after
marriage, and even then they do not use it in public. But the German
lover has the privilege, as soon as he is engaged, of exchanging the
formal _Sie_ for the affectionate _Du_; and the first _Du_ that comes
from her lips can hardly be less sweet than the first kiss.

There is a game of cards, popular among young folks in Germany, during
which you have to address every one with _Du_ whom you otherwise would
have to call _Sie_, and _vice versâ_; cards have to be called spoons,
white black, etc. If there is a young man in the company secretly in
love with a young lady, you can always “spot” him by the eagerness he
shows to speak to her, and the fact that he always gets the _Du_ right
and everything else wrong; while she, strange to say, appears to have
never heard of such a thing at all as a personal pronoun.

                              ENGLISH LOVE

Concerning Romantic Love in England and America, there is less to be
said under the head of National Peculiarities than in case of the
continental nations of Europe, for the simple reason that almost
everything said in the pages on Modern Love refers especially to these
two countries. Anglo-American Love is Romantic Love, pure and simple, as
first depicted by Shakspere, and after him, with more or less accuracy,
by a hundred other poets and novelists. There is no lack of colour in
this Love—colour warm and glowing—but it is no longer a mere local
colour, a national or provincial peculiarity, but Love in its essence,
its cosmopolitan aspect; Love such as will in course of time prevail
throughout the world, when the Anglisation of this planet—which is only
a question of time—shall have been completed.

England has many a bright jewel in the crown of her achievements in
behalf of civilisation, but the brightest of all is this, that she was
the first country in the world—ancient, mediæval, or modern—that removed
the bars from woman’s prison-windows, opened every door to Cupid, and
made him thoroughly welcome and comfortable. And grateful Cupid has
retaliated by setting up English manners and customs as a model which
all other nations are slowly but surely copying. Eighteen million souls
in the United States, or almost two persons in every five, are not of
English origin; yet of these there are not one million who have not
given up their old country methods of courtship as antiquated, and
adopted the Anglo-American style. The Germans in America make love not
after the German but after the English fashion. So do the French, though
somewhat more reluctantly and tardily. In San Francisco and Chicago it
is said that but one name in ten is of English origin; yet who ever
heard of a San Franciscan or Chicagoan making love in foreign style?
During the last hundred years the majority of the immigrants to America
have come from non-English countries; yet, though the parents enter the
country as adults with all their national traditions stamped on their
memories, they invariably allow their sons and daughters to court and be
courted in American style. And now that England is gradually extending
her influence to every one of the five continents, Romantic Love—to
whose sway, quite as much as to their outdoor active life, the English
owe the fact that they are to-day the handsomest and most energetic race
in the world—is also rapidly extending its sphere, and will finally oust
the last vestiges of Oriental despotism, feminine suppression, and
mediæval masculine barbarism.

For some centuries woman has been more favoured by law, and especially
by national custom, in England than in any other European state. It is
true that the Englishman who beats his wife is the most brutal savage on
the face of the globe, but he is to be found only among the lowest
classes. Nor has wife-selling ever been quite such a universal custom in
England as foreigners imagine; although cases are on record as far back
as 1302 and as late as 1884. In an article in _All the Year Round_ (Dec.
20, 1884) more than twenty cases are enumerated with full details, the
price of a wife varying from twenty-five guineas to a pint or half a
pint of beer, or a penny and a dinner; and the _Times_ of July 22, 1797,
remarks sarcastically: “By some mistake or omission, in the report of
the Smithfield market, we have not learned the average price of wives
for the week. The increasing value of the fair sex is esteemed by
several eminent writers the certain criterion of increasing
civilisation. Smithfield has, on this ground, strong pretensions to
refined improvement, as the price of wives has risen in that market from
half a guinea to three guineas and a half.”

That these cases occurred only among the lowest classes is self-evident;
yet even the lowest classes often resented the brutal transaction by
pelting the offenders with stones and mud; whereas, as far as the women
were concerned, the offence was mitigated by the fact that in all cases
on record they appear to have been only too glad to be sold, so as to
get rid of their tyrants.

It cannot be said that English women are all exempt from the hardest
manual labour even to-day; but the tendency to relieve them of tasks
unsuited to feminine muscular development has existed longer in England
than elsewhere. The difference can be best observed with regard to
agricultural labour. Any one who travels through Italy, Switzerland,
France, or Germany in the autumn, gets the impression that most of the
harvesting is done by the women; whereas in England, as shown by
statistics, there are twenty-two men to every woman engaged as
field-labourers. Yet even at that rate there are still 64,840 women in
England engaged in agricultural labour unsuited to their sex.

On the other hand, English women, like American women, are manifesting a
great disposition at present to try their hand or brain at almost every
employment heretofore considered exclusively masculine. The census
enumerates 349 different classes of work, and of these all but about 70
have been invaded by women; including 5 horse-dealers, 14 bicycle makers
and dealers, 16 sculptors, 18 fence makers, 19 fossil diggers, etc.;
whereas there are as yet no female pilots, dentists, police officers,
shepherds, law students, architects, cab-drivers, commercial travellers,
barristers, etc. [Full list in _Pall Mall Gazette_, Oct. 3, 1884.]

Inasmuch as there are almost a million more women than men in England,
it is not surprising that women should thus seek to extend their sphere
of usefulness. We live in an experimental epoch, when it is to be
ascertained what is and what is not becoming to woman regarded as a
labourer. It is therefore of the utmost importance that there should be
some standard by which each employment is to be judged. And this
standard, fortunately, is supplied by Romantic Love.

We have seen that the tendency of civilisation has been to differentiate
the sexes more and more in appearance, character, and emotional
susceptibilities, and that on this differentiation depends the existence
and power of Love, because it _individualises_ man and woman, and Love
is the more intense the more it is individualised.

Hence every employment which tends to make woman masculine in appearance
or habits is to be tabooed by her because antagonistic to Love. If she,
nevertheless, persists in it, Love will have its revenge by eliminating
her through Sexual Selection. No man will marry a masculine woman, or
fall in love with her, so that her unnatural temperament will not be
transmitted to the next generation and multiplied.

But what is to be accepted as the standard of femininity? The answer is
given us by Nature. Throughout the animal world, with a few
insignificant exceptions, the sexes are differentiated distinctly; and
the female is the more tender and gentle of the two, the more devoted to
domestic affection and the care and education of the young, the more
amiable, and, above all, less aggressive, bold, and pugnacious than the
male. “Any education which women undergo,” says the _Spectator_, “should
be an education not for the militant life of war against evil but for
the spiritual life inspiring a persuasive or patient charity.... Even in
a field properly suited to them—the field of charitable institutions, of
poor-law work, of educational representation—women no sooner take up the
cudgels than they lose their appropriate influence, and are either
unsexed or paralysed.”

According to Mr. Ruskin, “woman’s work is—(1) To please people. (2) To
feed them in dainty ways. (3) To clothe them. (4) To keep them orderly.
(5) To teach them.”

Statistics concerning the employments instinctively sought by the
majority of women bear out Mr. Ruskin’s table quite well. Woman’s first
duty is to please people by being beautiful, amiable, and fascinating in
conversation and manners. No man would marry a woman unless she pleased
him in one way or another; hence matrimony is the most successful female
profession, which in England includes 4,437,962 women. But there are
other ways in which women seek to please and prosper; hence there are in
England 2368 actresses as against 2197 actors, and 11,376 women whose
profession is music, as against 14,170 men.

Domestic service, which includes the “feeding in dainty ways” (though
too often the “dainty” must be omitted), employs 1,230,406 women in
England—about 30,000 fewer than industrial employments, which are
somewhat more popular owing to the greater individual liberty they allow
the employed. Yet domestic service is a much better preparation for
married life than labour in a manufactory; so that, other things being
equal, a labouring man looking for a wife would be apt to select one who
has learned how to take care of his home. This thought ought to help to
render domestic service more popular.

“To clothe them.” Dressmaking, staymaking (alas!), and millinery, employ
357,995 women in England.

“To keep them orderly.” Bathing and washing service employ 176,670
women; medicine and nursing, almost 50,000; missions, 1660.

“To teach them.” This, one of woman’s special vocations, eminently
suited to her capacity, employs 123,995 females.

If I have failed in correctly interpreting Mr. Ruskin’s oracle, I stand
subject to correction from that earnest labourer in the task of finding
for woman her proper sphere—a work for which he has not yet received the
recognition and thanks he deserves.

That marriage, and not miscellaneous employment, is woman’s true
destiny, is shown by the way in which Cupid influences statistics. Thus
there are in England about 29,000 school-mistresses aged 15-20, and
28,500 aged 25-45; but the time from 20-25, the period of courtship and
marriage, has only 21,000. In the case of dressmakers this fact is
brought out still more strikingly: 15-20—84,000; 20-25—76,000;
25-45—129,000, in round numbers.

Although, therefore, as Emerson remarks, “the circumstances may be
easily imagined in which woman may speak, vote, argue cases, legislate,
and drive coaches, if only it comes by degrees,” facts show that there
is more philosophy of the future in Mrs. Hawthorne’s remark that “Home,
I think, is the great arena for women, and there, I am sure, she can
wield a power which no king or emperor can cope with.”

A consideration of all the foregoing facts shows that Love may be safely
accepted as a guiding-star in making a proper division of the world’s
labour between men and women. And the reason why England and America
have made so much more progress than other nations in ascertaining
woman’s true capacity and sphere, is because she has been educated to a
point where she can assert her independence, and where she can inspire
as well as feel Love—thus making man humble, gallant, gentle, ready to
make concessions and remove restrictions. It is in England and America
alone that Love plays a more important _rôle_ in marriage than money and
social position; that the young are generally permitted to consult their
own heart instead of parental command; and that the opportunities for
courtship are so liberal and numerous that the young are enabled to fall
in love with one another not only for dazzling qualities of Personal
Beauty, viewed for a moment, but for traits of character, emotional
refinement, and a cultured intellect.

These two nations alone have fully taken to heart and heeded Addison’s
maxim that “Those marriages generally abound most with love and
constancy that are _preceded by a long courtship_. The passion should
strike root and gather strength before marriage be grafted on it. A long
course of hopes and expectations fixes the idea in our minds, and
habituates us to a fondness of the person beloved.”

There is, however, a difference between English and American Love which
shows that we have learned Addison’s lesson even better than his own
countrymen. As Mr. Robert Laird Collier remarks in _English Home Life_:
“The American custom, among the mass of the people, of leaving young men
and young women free to associate together and to keep company with each
other for an indefinite length of time, without declaring their
intentions, is almost unknown in any country of Europe. It is not long
after a young man begins to show the daughter attentions before the
father gives intimation that he wishes to know what it means, and either
the youth declares his intentions or is notified to ‘cut sticks.’”
“Courtships in England are short, and engagements are long.”

The London _Standard_ doubtless exaggerates the difference between
English and American girls and their attitude toward men in the course
of an article, part of which may, nevertheless, be cited: “American
girls offer a bright example to their English sisters of a happy,
unclouded youth, and instances seem to be few of their abusing the
liberty which is accorded to them. Perhaps their immunity from
sentimental troubles arises from the fact that from earliest childhood
they have been comrades of the other sex, and are therefore not disposed
to turn a man into a demi-god because they only see one at rare
intervals under the eagle eye of a mother or aunt. A great revolution in
public opinion would be required ere English girls could be emancipated
to the extent which prevails on the other side of the Atlantic, and even
then it is doubtful whether the system would work well. The daughters of
Albion, with but few exceptions, are single-hearted, earnest, and prone
to look upon everything seriously. They often make the mistake of
imagining that a man is in love because he is decently civil.”

Yet in _German Home Life_, written from an English point of view, we
read that “There is no such thing as country life, as we understand it,
in Germany; no cosy sociability, smiling snugness, pleasant bounties and
hospitalities; and, above all, for the young folk, no freedom,
flirtation, boatings, sketchings, high teas, scamperings, and merriments
generally.” And again: “The sort of frank ‘flirtation,’ beginning openly
in fun and ending in amusement, which is common amongst healthy,
high-spirited boys and girls in England, and has no latent element of
intrigue or vanity in it, but is born of exuberant animal spirits,
youthful frolics, and healthy pastimes shared together, is forbidden to
her” (the German girl).

The _Standard_ itself apparently contradicts itself in another article
on “Flirtation,” concerning which it says: “It is usually so innocent
that it has become part of the education most of our young women pass
through in their training for society. The British matron smiles
contentedly when she sees that her daughter, just entered on her teens,
exhibits a partiality for long walks and soft-toned confabulations with
her cousin Fred or her brother’s favourite schoolmate. Three or four
such juvenile attachments will do the girl no harm, if they are gently
watched over by the parental eye. They serve to evolve the sexually
social instincts in a gradual way. Through them the bashful maiden
learns the nature of man in the same fashion as she takes lessons on the
piano. In a word, she is ‘getting her hand in’ for the real game of
matrimony that is to be played in a few years. Her youthful swains, of
course, derive their own instructions from these innocent amours....