Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  “Not so very different from love, after all,” said Heine. “Woman is an assemblage of objects, such as eyes, nose, hair, lapdogs and gossip, in the contemplation of which we experience—”

  “Woman, sir, has an immortal soul,” said Johnson, sternly.

  “Then that is the only difference,” returned Heine.

  “Nature, as far as we can judge, has no soul — a fact which accounts for her orderly regularity. If nature had a soul we should love her better than any woman — for she has the quality of faithfulness together with the absence of vanity.”

  “I think one should define love before arguing about it,” said Diana, who loved poetry as much as argument, but wished to enjoy them separately.

  “Love,” said Dr. Johnson, “has fourteen meanings. The love of which we are speaking is the passion between the sexes.”

  “Precisely,” said Francis. “That is a very good definition.”

  “I would make it wider,” objected Bayard, speaking for the first time. “Love is the honourable and passionate attachment of man and woman.”

  “That,” replied the doctor, “is the noble form of love. Love is the passion between the sexes; and though we may readily admit that in its highest condition it partakes of the angelic, it is not too much to say that as manifested in ignoble beings it savours of hellishness. But in regard to the objection of the Chevalier Bayard, since love in all cases springs from like or similar causes, and since it can never be agreeable to persons of refined intelligence to speak of that which by its nature lacks all refinement, let us set aside those baser manifestations of love whereby the sensibilities of our fair companions might be offended, and let us choose for the subject of our discussion only that pure and honourable passion, which, as we may not unreasonably believe it to proceed from God, we may without injustice or exaggeration characterise as divine.”

  “By all means,” assented Augustus. “And in that case I should say that we ought to accept the chevalier’s definition. Love is the honourable and passionate affection of man and woman for each other. The definite article ‘the’ presumes that such love is not one of many such affections, but the only one. The word ‘honourable’ implies the quality of disinterestedness and consequently of unquestioning self-devotion, which is the soul of honour. Lastly, the epithet passionate preserves to love its true character as contrasted with the passionless affection a man may feel for his friend.”

  “You put love beyond the reach of ordinary men,” said Francis, dryly.

  “No,” replied Augustus. “There may be many degrees of love below the very highest ideal of what the passion should be, and which are yet far from base.”

  “You do not distinguish between the ideal and the real,” objected Heine.

  “I am sure, when one loves anybody in the best way, one sees one’s ideal realised, more or less,” said Gwendoline.

  “That which is ideal cannot easily be realised,” remarked Dr. Johnson.

  “Exactly,” said Gwendoline. “It is very seldom realised. But when we are in earnest and in love we realise it a little.”

  “Nevertheless,” observed Cæsar, “the hope of realising the ideal is so strong that it practically dominates the whole human race.”

  “You admit that love is a dominant passion, then,” said Lady Brenda.

  “So dominant, madam,” said Francis, “that there is hardly a human being in the world who has not been under its influence at one time or another. And when a man is under the influence of love he is not his own master.”

  “One never recovers from it. It is an illness which disfigures,” remarked Heine. “Besides, when one is ill with it one does not mind being disfigured — when one is convalescent one thinks that the scars would disappear if one could only be ill again.”

  “That is true,” laughed Francis. “You are very witty, Monsieur Heine.”

  “It is one of the disfigurements of the disease,” answered the poet, with his strange, angular smile. “A dog that has not had the distemper is worthless, as your majesty may remember. I was a valuable dog, for I had it when I was young.”

  “You do not agree, then,” said Diana, speaking to Heine, “that love in the end is one of the things we shall have most enjoyed?”

  “To have loved is bad,” he answered. “Not to have loved is worse.”

  “Sir,” said Johnson, “of two evils a man ought to choose the less.”

  “Most people do,” returned Heine.

  “You, too, then, admit that love is a dominant passion,” said Augustus. “I believe Dr. Johnson admits it also.”

  “I do not admit it,” replied the doctor. “I know it already.”

  “It is the most noble of the passions,” said Bayard. “A man should love his country with his whole mind, his king with his whole soul, his wife with his whole heart, and his God with heart and soul and mind.”

  “Sir,” said Johnson, “that is a very good rule for a man’s life; for, if he devote his intelligence to the welfare of his country, his fidelity, enthusiasm and courage to the service of his king, and his purest and warmest affection to the woman he has chosen to love, he shall certainly lead the life of an earnest Christian, in whom all intentions are based upon reasonable and pure precepts and in whose life good intentions find a fitting exposition in good deeds.”

  “That is what a man should be,” answered Bayard, quietly. “But I admit that of the men I have known, the greater number were far more influenced by their love for woman, than by patriotism, loyalty, or religious fervour. Love is indeed the dominating passion of the world.”

  “Of passions, as we understand the word,” said Augustus. “I suppose no one will pretend that hate has more influence on the daily lives of men in general than love. If jealousy be a real passion, it presupposes the existence of love and is one of its consequences. The passion of avarice certainly has great weight in the world, but no one has ever said — there is not even a proverb which says — that all men are avaricious. It is a rare thing to meet a miser. What other passions are there? There are vices indeed, but the reason we call them vices probably is that, as exceptions to the general rule, they offend our sense of social propriety. At all events the idea of vice is recent, since the words which express it are different in the different Aryan languages. Vice is not passion. The great passions in the true sense, are love, hate, jealousy, avarice, pride, ambition. The last two are not worth mentioning in speaking of the mass of humanity; for vanity is common enough, but pride, as a passion, is rare, while ambition is the rarest of all.”

  “It is also the most absorbing, and in its greatest development produces the greatest results,” remarked Cæsar.

  “No,” said Johnson, “not the greatest results. It produces the most astonishing results. For, although, if we could remove ambition from the world, certain changes would immediately take place; yet the effect of extinguishing all love throughout the earth would be far more destructive. It is common to suppose that progress depends upon ambition, whereas there can be no doubt but that the daily wholesome progress of man proceeds from the mere desire to better his condition, and it will generally appear that those nations which are most advanced in the arts of civilisation are those in which the desire for physical comfort is the most felt. Ambition of which the object is mere physical comfort cannot properly be called ambition at all, any more than a reasonable desire for competence can be branded as a sin under the name of avarice, or—”

  “Any more than the rosy, stupid, beer-sausage-Sunday-afternoon affection of the little burgher for his little wife can be dignified by the name of love,” interrupted Heine with a smile.

  “That which is good, sir,” replied the doctor, “can be small without being contemptible; but that which is bad is contemptible when it is small and becomes monstrous when it grows great.”

  “I am glad I remained small,” said Heine.

  “I think,” said Bayard, addressing him directly, “that on the contrary you are not bad, for you are
too great to have any right to call yourself small, and we will all maintain that in your greatness there is nothing which shocks the senses of a gentleman.”

  “As usually happens when a man hears himself praised, I have nothing to say,” replied Heine. But his face grew gentle and his smile less sarcastic.

  “I think that you are right, in one way,” said Cæsar, addressing Johnson. “But the results of ambition may be both astonishing and great at the same time. As regards the great mass of mankind I must admit that of all the passions love plays the most important part. I never was so deeply in love myself as to permit love to influence my plans.”

  “That was one secret of your success,” said Francis.

  “Perhaps,” answered Cæsar, with a peculiar smile. “If I had played a smaller part in the world, I believe that I should have regretted having loved so lightly as I did. But my life was an exceptional one, and I know that, as far as my personal feelings were concerned, it was more satisfactory than most men’s lives are.”

  “I fancy,” observed Augustus, “that your ideality was absorbed and fully occupied by the necessities of your career, leaving nothing but bare reality in your love.”

  “Since we have agreed that love is the dominant passion of the world,” said Bayard, “it would be interesting to ascertain whether most people love the ideal or the reality.”

  “Very interesting indeed,” assented Diana. “I fancy love is largely a question of the imagination. Of course that makes no difference in the way it dominates us; the result is the same.”

  “I should not think it would be the same,” remarked Francis.

  “I suppose,” said Augustus Chard, “that the ideal is the result in each man’s brain of all his intellectual likings and physical tastes. The real in each man’s mind is the result of all his intellectual and physical perceptions. The question ultimately depends upon the balance between the likings and tastes on the one hand, and the perceptions on the other. In some men the wish goes before the thought, and the thought influences the perceptions. In less imaginative people no vivid image is formed in the mind until it has been once perceived by the senses. Cases are known of men blind from their birth who dream of colours and forms frequently and vividly; but many blind persons do not dream that they see. I imagine that those who do are more imaginative than those who do not, and that if they suddenly obtained sight and were able to compare the impressions received in their dreams with the reality, those who dreamed of seeing would without much difficulty recognise their ideal in the real, attributing to the latter many of the qualities their imagination had previously defined, but which would not be perceptible to persons who were accustomed to the sight of the real from their childhood. The blind man who does not dream of sight, on the contrary, would convince himself of the nature of reality by slow experiments, not having any very clearly defined preconceived notions on the subject. By extension a man who has great imagination is likely to form a very clear picture of the woman he would choose for his wife. Unfortunately his imperfect knowledge of the relations between the intelligence, the character and the personal appearance in woman frequently leads him to fix his ideal upon the wrong reality.”

  “Augustus! What a lecture!” exclaimed Diana, laughing. “In other words, people who love ideals are always disappointed.”

  “But in order not “Naturally,” said Heine. to be disappointed a man must have no imagination.”

  “Men are not always disappointed,” said Bayard. “The world is full of good women.”

  “On the other hand it is not full of good men,” answered Heine.

  “Man is a sad dog,” said Dr. Johnson, who had been listening in silence for some time. “And woman is a dear creature,” he added, in a tone of great conviction.

  “Well?” asked Lady Brenda. “Have you decided about the ideal and those things yet?”

  “Madam,” said Francis, turning to her with a smile, “I do not understand a word they are saying. I probably have not much imagination. To me, a woman is a woman.”

  “‘I call a cat a cat,’ as Boileau put it,” remarked Heine. “I would like to know how many men in a hundred are disappointed in the women they marry.”

  “Just as many as have too much imagination,” said Augustus.

  “No,” said Johnson, shaking his head violently and speaking suddenly in an excited tone. “No. Those who are disappointed are such as are possessed of imagination without judgment; but a man whose imagination does not outrun his judgment is seldom deceived in the realisation of his hopes. I suspect that the same thing is true in the art of poetry, of which Herr Heine is at once a master and a judge. For the qualities that constitute genius are invention, imagination and judgment; invention, by which new trains of events are formed, and new scenes of imagery displayed; imagination, which strongly impresses on the writer’s mind, and enables him to convey to the reader the various forms of nature, incidents of life and energies of passion; and judgment, which selects from life or nature what the present purpose requires, and by separating the essence of things from its concomitants, often makes the representation more powerful than the reality. A man who possesses invention and imagination can invent and imagine a thousand beauties, gifts of mind and virtues of character; but unless he have judgment which enables him to discern the bounds of possibility and to detect the real nature of the woman he has chosen as the representative of his self-formed ideal, he runs great risk of being deceived. As a general rule, however, it has pleased Providence to endow man with much more judgment than imagination; and to this cause we may attribute the small number of poets who have flourished in the world, and the great number of happy marriages among civilised mankind.”

  “It appears that I must have possessed imagination after all,” said Francis.

  “If you will allow me to say it,” said Cæsar in his most suave tones, and turning his heavy black eyes upon the king’s face, “you had too much. Had you possessed less imagination and more judgment, you might many times have destroyed the Emperor Charles. To challenge him to fight a duel was a gratuitous and very imaginative piece of civility; to let him escape as you did more than once when you could easily have forced an engagement on terms advantageous to yourself, was unpardonable.”

  “I know it,” said Francis, bitterly. “I was not Cæsar.”

  “No, sir,” said Johnson in loud, harsh tones. “Nor were you happy in your marriages—”

  “I adore learned men,” whispered Francis to Lady Brenda. He had at once recovered his good-humour.

  “A fact that proves what I was saying, that the element of judgment is necessary in the selection of a wife,” continued the doctor.

  “I think it is intuition which makes the right people fall in love with each other,” said Lady Brenda.

  “Intuition, madam,” replied Johnson, “means the mental view; as you use it you mean a very quick and accurate mental view, followed immediately by an unconscious but correct process of deduction. The combination of the two, when they are nicely adjusted, constitutes a kind of judgment which, though it be not always so correct in its conclusions as that exercised by ordinary logic, has nevertheless the advantage of quickness combined with tolerable precision. For, in matters of love, it is necessary to be quick.”

  “Who sups with the devil must have a long spoon,” said Francis, laughing.

  “And he who hopes to entertain an angel must keep his house clean,” returned the doctor.

  “Do you believe that people always fall in love very quickly?” asked Lady Brenda.

  “Frequently, though not always. Love dominates quite as much because its attacks are sudden and unexpected, as because most persons believe that to be in love is a desirable state.”

  “Love,” said Cæsar, “is a great general and a great strategist, for he rarely fails to surprise the enemy if he can, but he never refuses an open engagement when necessary.”

  “I think,” observed Augustus, “that we have proved love to be the chief
ruling passion of the world, and Dr. Johnson has shown that, while all men must submit to it, the man who has the most judgment will find the submission most agreeable — not to say advantageous, because he will intuitively love the best woman of those likely to love him in return.”

  “I suppose that applies to all mankind,” said Diana. “No one would love the wrong person if every one had enough judgment. What a dreary idea, that even love is a matter of calculation.”

  “The calculation is unconscious,” objected Gwendoline. “It only means that when you know exactly what you want, you ought to be able to recognise it when you see it.”

  “Madam,” said Johnson, “that plain statement is worth all of our conversation taken together. You exactly express my idea—”

  “Then you ought to fall in love with me at once,” retorted Gwendoline.

  “O brave we!” shouted the doctor, wagging his head and clapping his enormous hands in delight, and then bursting into peals of laughter, in which the rest joined almost without knowing why.

  “It does me good to see a dead man laugh like that,” said Heine at last. “But out of all this logic what becomes of phenixes, rocs, poets and other mythological beasts who have no judgment at all and love so very truly that they are always crying and thinking how nice it must be to be married and live on the ground floor and eat potato soup and drink coffee and have pinks in the window like good, honest sensible little burghers?”

  “Sir,” said Johnson, “your similes are amazing. The phénix was a single bird, no mate existing of his species. The roc was as remarkable for its conjugal happiness and fidelity as for its monstrous strength. As for the poet, his imagination is so large and yet so refined, that he seldom has an opportunity of meeting such a woman as he imagines he might love. Most men love the real. A certain number love what they easily suppose to be real, are disappointed, and are unhappy with their wives. A very few love the ideal, and although in their own lives the vanity of their aspirations may expose them to the chagrin of disappointment, yet it cannot be denied that by their noble efforts to express the ideal of the good and beautiful, they contribute to the sum of human happiness by inspiring in their fellows a wholesome and elevating admiration for goodness and beauty.”