第6章 ON BEING IN LOVE.(2)

Nobody ever loved as he loves,and so,of course,the rest of the world's experience can be no guide in his case.Alas!alas!ere thirty he has joined the ranks of the sneerers.It is not his fault.

Our passions,both the good and bad,cease with our blushes.We do not hate,nor grieve,nor joy,nor despair in our thirties like we did in our teens.Disappointment does not suggest suicide,and we quaff success without intoxication.

We take all things in a minor key as we grow older.There are few majestic passages in the later acts of life's opera.Ambition takes a less ambitious aim.Honor becomes more reasonable and conveniently adapts itself to circumstances.And love--love dies."Irreverence for the dreams of youth"soon creeps like a killing frost upon our hearts.The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and withered,and of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the world there is left but a sapless stump.

My fair friends will deem all this rank heresy,I know.So far from a man's not loving after he has passed boyhood,it is not till there is a good deal of gray in his hair that they think his protestations at all worthy of attention.Young ladies take their notions of our sex from the novels written by their own,and compared with the monstrosities that masquerade for men in the pages of that nightmare literature,Pythagoras'plucked bird and Frankenstein's demon were fair average specimens of humanity.

In these so-called books,the chief lover,or Greek god,as he is admiringly referred to--by the way,they do not say which "Greek god"it is that the gentleman bears such a striking likeness to;it might be hump-backed Vulcan,or double-faced Janus,or even driveling Silenus,the god of abstruse mysteries.He resembles the whole family of them,however,in being a blackguard,and perhaps this is what is meant.To even the little manliness his classical prototypes possessed,though,he can lay no claim whatever,being a listless effeminate noodle,on the shady side of forty.But oh!the depth and strength of this elderly party's emotion for some bread-and-butter school-girl!Hide your heads,ye young Romeos and Leanders!this blaseold beau loves with an hysterical fervor that requires four adjectives to every noun to properly describe.

It is well,dear ladies,for us old sinners that you study only books.

Did you read mankind,you would know that the lad's shy stammering tells a truer tale than our bold eloquence.A boy's love comes from a full heart;a man's is more often the result of a full stomach.

Indeed,a man's sluggish current may not be called love,compared with the rushing fountain that wells up when a boy's heart is struck with the heavenly rod.If you would taste love,drink of the pure stream that youth pours out at your feet.Do not wait till it has become a muddy river before you stoop to catch its waves.

Or is it that you like its bitter flavor--that the clear,limpid water is insipid to your palate and that the pollution of its after-course gives it a relish to your lips?Must we believe those who tell us that a hand foul with the filth of a shameful life is the only one a young girl cares to be caressed by?

That is the teaching that is bawled out day by day from between those yellow covers.Do they ever pause to think,I wonder,those devil's ladyhelps,what mischief they are doing crawling about God's garden,and telling childish Eves and silly Adams that sin is sweet and that decency is ridiculous and vulgar?How many an innocent girl do they not degrade into an evil-minded woman?To how many a weak lad do they not point out the dirty by-path as the shortest cut to a maiden's heart?It is not as if they wrote of life as it really is.Speak truth,and right will take care of itself.But their pictures are coarse daubs painted from the sickly fancies of their own diseased imagination.