Othmar. Ouida
John—the John as he thinks himself to be, and the John as others imagine him: it is never the real John that is loved; always an imaginary one built up out of the fancies of those in love with him.'
'That is fancy, your Majesty; it is not love.'
'And what is love but fancy?—the fancy of attraction, the fancy of selection; the same sort of fancy as allures the bird to the brightest plumaged mate?'
'I do not think any love is likely to last which is not based on intellectual sympathy. When the mind is interested and contented, it does not tire half so fast as the eyes or the passions. In any very great love there is at the commencement a delighted sense of meeting something long sought, some supplement of ourselves long desired in vain. When this pleasure is based on the charm of some mind wholly akin to our own, and filled for us with ever-renewing well-springs of the intellect, there is really hardly any reason why this mutual delight should ever change, especially if circumstances conspire to free it from those more oppressive and irritating forms of contact which the prose of life entails.'
'You mean marriage, only you put it with a great deal of unnecessary euphuism. Tastes differ. Giovanni Dupré's ideal of bliss was to see his wife ironing linen, while his mother-in-law looked on.'
'Dupré was a simple soul, and a true artist, but intellect was not his strong point. If he had chanced to be educated, the good creature with her irons would have become very tiresome to him.'
'What an argument in favour of ignorance!'
'Is it? The savage is content with roots and an earth-baked bird; but it does not follow, therefore, that delicate food does not merit the preference we give to it. I grant, however, that a high culture of taste and intelligence does not result in the adoration of the primitive virtues any more than of the earth-baked bird.'
'Is this a discussion on Love?'
'It is a discussion which grows out of it, like the mistletoe out of the oak. The ideal of Dupré was that of a simple, uneducated, emotional and unimpassioned creature; it was what we call essentially a bourgeois ideal. It would have been suffocation and starvation, torture and death, to Raffaelle, to Phidias, to Shelley, to Goethe. There are men, born peasants, who soar into angels; who hate, loathe, and spurn the bourgeois ideal from their earliest times of wretchedness; but there are others who always remain peasants. Millet did, Dupré did, Wordsworth did.'
The queen tinkled her golden handbell and raised her ivory sceptre.
'These digressions are admirable in their way, but I must recall the Court to the subject before them. Someone is bringing in allusions to cookery, flat-irons, and the bourgeois ideal which I have always understood was M. Thiers. They are certainly, however interesting, wholly irrelevant to the theme which we are met here to discuss. Let us pass on to the question next upon the list. If no one can define Love except as devotion, that definition suits so few cases that we must accept its existence without definition, and proceed to inquire what are its characteristics and its results.'
'The first is exigence and the second is ennui.'
'No, the first is sympathy and the second is happiness.'
'That is very commonplace. Its chief characteristic appears to me to be an extremely rapid transition from a state of imbecile adoration to a state of irritable fatigue. I speak from the masculine point of view.'
'And I, from the feminine, classify it rather as a transition (regretted but inevitable) from amiable illusions and generous concessions to a wounded sense of offence at ingratitude.'
'We are coming to the Italian coltellate! You both only mean that in love, as in everything else which is human, people who expect too much are disappointed; disappointment is always irritation; it may even become malignity if it take a very severe form.'
'You seem all of you to have glided into an apology for inconstancy. Is that inevitable to love?'
'It looks as if it were; or, at all events, its forerunner, fatigue, is so.'
'You treat love as you would treat a man who asked you to paint his portrait, whilst you persisted in painting that of his shadow instead. The shadow which dogs his footsteps is not himself.'
'It is cast by himself, so it is a part of him.'
'No, it is an accompanying ghost sent by Nature which he cannot escape or dismiss.'
'My good people,' said their sovereign impatiently, 'you wander too far afield. You are like the group of physicians who let the patient die while they disputed over the Greek root from which the name of his malady was derived. Love, like all other great monarchs, is ill sometimes; but let us consider him in health, not sickness.'
'For Love in a state of health there is no better definition than one given just now—sympathy.'
'The highest kind of love springs from the highest kind of sympathy. Of that there is no doubt. But then that is only to be found in the highest natures. They are not numerous.'
'No; and even they require to possess a great reserve-fund of interest, and a bottomless deposit of inexhaustible comprehension. Such reserve-funds are rare in human nature, which is usually a mere fretful and foolish chatterbox, tout en dehors, and self-absorbed.'
'We are wandering far from the single-minded passion of Ronsard and Petrarca.'
'And we have arrived at no definition. Were I to give one, I should be tempted to say that Love is, in health and perfection, the sense that another life is absolutely necessary to our own, is lovely despite its faults, and even in its follies is delightful and precious to us, we cannot probably say why, and is to us as the earth to the moon, as the moon to the tides, as the lodestone to the steel, as the dew of night to the flower.'
'Very well said, and applicable to both men and women, as descriptive of their emotions at certain periods of their lives. But——'
'For all their lives, until the ice of age glides into their veins.'
'You are poetical enough for Ronsard. Well, let us pass to another question. Does Love die sooner of starvation or of repletion?'
'Of repletion, unquestionably. Of a fit of indigestion he perishes never to rise again. Starved, he will linger on sometimes for a very long while indeed, and at the first glance of pity revives in full vigour.'
'Why, then, do women usually commit the error of surfeiting him? For I agree with you that a surfeit is fatal.'
'Because most women cannot be brought to understand that too much of themselves may bring about a wayward wish to have none of them. They call this natural and inevitable reaction ingratitude and inconstancy, but it is nothing of the kind; it is only human nature.'
'Male human nature. The wish for pastures new, characteristic of cattle, sheep and man.'
'"La femme est si souvent trompée parce qu'elle prend le désir pour l'amour." Someone wrote that; I forget who did, but it is entirely true. Une bouffée de désir, an hour's caprice, a swift flaming of mere animal passion which flares up and dies down like any shooting star, seems to a woman to be the ideal love of romance and of tragedy. She dreams of Othello, of Anthony, of Stradella, and all the while it is Sir Harry Wildair, or Joseph Surface, or at the best of things Almaviva. She is ready for the tomb in Verona, but he is only ready for the chambre meublée, or at most for the saison aux eaux.'
'Is she always ready for the tomb in Verona?' asked a sceptical voice. 'Does she not sometimes, even very often, marry Paris, and "carry on" with Romeo? If I may be allowed to say so, there are a few impassioned and profound temperaments in the world to many light ones; the bread and the sack are, as usual, unevenly apportioned, but these graver and deeper natures are not all necessarily feminine. It is when you have two great and ardent natures involved (and then alone) that you get passion, high devotion, tragedy; but this conjunction is as rare as the passing of Venus across the sun. Usually Romeo throws himself away on some Lady Frivolous, and Juliet breaks her heart for some fop or some fool.'
'That is only because all human life is a game of