Various

“ We learn the poisons by experiment, and we let others learn. This is Love the Fiction. But some day when we awake we shall know what we now dream, and Love will be always the most precious flower that grows in the garden of the soul. It has the subtle fragrance of the heaven that is our own if we walk bravely in the world, desiring truth. Under its influence we discover ourselves. We build ships for new voyages, and burst into unknown waters with our Viking shields of victory ablaze in the morning sun. The air is sharp and keen, not foetid with poisonous lies ”

“ And we marry our human ideal, expecting the unbroken continuance of that harmony. But the discord comes; colours clash; the jarring note spoils the chord; the idol once accepted as of gold and precious stones, proves to be only common clay, thinly gilt. The diamonds are paste; the pearls are beads of glass filled with shining fishes' scales; and the love which we thought would be a practical reality for life, is nothing but a pleasing fiction, good for its day, and now dead and done with. The lover sees nothing as it is. ”

“ To discover the life that completes and contents our own is not given to many of us poor mortals. Here and there some fortunate individuals have made that discovery—but they are rare—and not given to boasting on the subject; yet though worldly wise folk scoff at love as a myth, I question whether they could name any other passion of the heart which has occupied so important a place in the world's history, which has given life to all that is great and divine in art, or inspired such deeds of heroism, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom. ”

“ Life is distorted between jealousy and admiration, and the plain teaching of common-sense is as little understood as the conditions of the fourth dimension or the poetic aspirations of the Simian tongue. The adored is not a real person; the happiness anticipated is not practical nor practicable. Both are on all-fours with the substantiality of a cloud and the serviceable roadway of a rainbow. Custom, familiarity, daily habits are the sole tests by which the reality of the thing beloved can be tried—the reality of the thing beloved and consequent validity of love. ”

“ The unattainable has more in it of pathos than despair. Romance sweetens it, and the romance never dies. The tenderness of "what might have been" gives balm to many a suffering soul! The wife may be unhappy, neglected, heartsick, she may even loathe him whose name she bears, but she is often upholden by the thought that he would have been wholly different! A husband may know that he has married the wrong woman, yet he bears what is, because he cannot have her who would have made life all sunshine. Few pity the one-sided love, helpless, hopeless, and without justification as it is ”

“ Sense and sex cannot wholly explain its mystery, else would there be no friendship left among us; and elective affinity is but a dainty carving on the chancel stalls. The loveliness which makes that special person the veritable Rose of the World to us exists but in our imagination. It is no rose that we adore—only at the best a bedeguar, of which the origin is a disagreeable little insect. We believe in the exquisite harmony of those atoms which have arranged themselves to form the thing we love. ”

“ The worn-out love is the very essence of sadness! It is heart-breaking to watch the efforts of a foolish heart to keep a love dying or already dead, to see love, which would once have made a paradise, poured out at the feet of one who is only bored and not even touched by it. Nothing is so dead as a dead love—yet, even that is real! ”

“ First love is not often last love. He thinks her unreasonable to mind those dances, yet when a great love comes into her life, making her think of him as "just a boy," he suffers all, or nearly all, the pangs of a great passion. Unavailing pain! She has cast the die of her life, and past loves are shadows compared with the absorbing power that now grips her heart like a vice. Much may happen to the great love, but it is very real! ”

“ Irving is simply thrilling. The tones, the glances, the approach, the embrace, lift up the words into new light, keen and tender as the brightness of a summer morning. The words themselves are by no means striking, are, indeed, the merest commonplace, but, uttered with the natural pathos of a consummate actor, they carry the play to its most subduing climax. The humanity and the genius satisfy expectation in its most eager and jealous temper. Failure at that point would have ruined the play. Which was better, Lear or Cordelia, in that critical action? ”

“ Crabbed age and youth could not live together in our case on account of cats. Age, as represented by the mature virgin, adored the brutes; youth, in the shape of a sprouting hobbledehoy, abhorred them altogether, and one evil minded black Tom in particular. My aunt called him Beauty, in happy ignorance that all her household called him a Beast. I admire beauty in the abstract; I also like it in the concrete; and in the concreted form of youthful feminine humanity I love it. But that feline black Beauty was the most outrageous misnomer unhanged. ”

“ I am one of those who prefer the luckless adorers in novels to the conquering heroes; and hold that the quality an ideal lover needs most is ugliness, so that he may honour beauty the more. Once I knew a boy who was uglier than sin, and who wrote a story—in a sprawling hand and on ruled paper—a wonderful story, telling how an unlovely but admirable Knight, worshipping a Princess, rode out to win her by great deeds, and how when he came back triumphant, the sight of her brought his unworthiness home to him so that he dared not claim her. ”

“ And slowly out of this deepening torrent of bewildered impulse and devotion is born a new man—a man with a soul—a man who can dare all things, do all things, endure all things, for the sake of the woman he loves. At the baptism of her touch he becomes whole, and shapes his life to noble ends. Even if he can't marry her, he is the better for his passion. Such a love endures until the leaves of the Judgment Book unroll ”

“ The moment a friend tells me that he or she is desirous of imparting a series of facts—strictly true—as if truth in fiction mattered one jot!—which in his or her opinion would make the ground plan of an admirable, startling, and altogether original three-volume novel, I know in advance that my imagination will never grapple with those startling circumstances—that my thoughts will begin to wander before my friend has got half through the remarkable chain of events, and that if the obliging purveyor of romantic incidents were to examine me at the end of the story, I should be spun ignominiously. ”

“ THE IDLERS CLUB Is Love a Practical Reality or a Pleasing Fiction? Mrs. Lynn Linton thinks there is no doubt as to Love's reality.
Of the desperate reality of the passion there is no doubt; of the intrinsic value of the thing beloved there may be many. The passion for which men and women have died stands like a tower four-square to all the winds of heaven; but how far that tower has been self-created by fancy, and how much is objectively real, who is the wise man that can determine? What is Love? ”

“ To his landlady, worthy Mrs. Seacon, Tom Peters's profession was a little vague, but everybody knew that Roxdal was the manager of the City and Suburban Bank, and it puzzled her to think why a bank manager should live with such a seedy-looking person, who smoked clay pipes and sipped whiskey and water all the evening when he was at home. For Roxdal was as spruce and erect as his fellow-lodger was round-shouldered and shabby; he never smoked, and he confined himself to a small glass of claret at dinner.
It is possible to live with a man and see very little of him. ”

“ Evil days come upon the praiseworthy couple and their dependent brood, among whom I faintly remember the love interest of the story to have lain; and that direful day arrives when the average landlord of juvenile fiction, whose heart is of adamant and brain of brass, distrains for the rent. The rude broker swoops upon the humble dovecot; a cart or hand-barrow waits on the carefully hearth-stoned door-step for the household gods; the family gather round the cherished chair, on which the rude broker has already laid his grimy fingers; they hang over the back and fondle the padded arms ”

“ And the spectacle is mighty taking and commendable; but you'll excuse me for holding that it is not Love. It bears about the same relation to Love that Bumble-puppy bears to good whist. Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day be, in love. As a matter of fact, the capacity to love belongs to one man or woman in ten thousand. Listen to Matthew Arnold:
I go further and believe it rarer even than Genius. ”

“ Gradually she grew ashamed of her early mistrust of Peters; remorse bred esteem, and esteem ultimately ripened into feelings so warm, that when Tom gave freer vent to the love that had been visible to Clara from the first, she did not repulse him.
It is only in books that love lives for ever. Clara, so her father thought, showed herself a sensible girl in plucking out an unworthy affection and casting it from her heart. He invited the new lover to his house, and took to him at once. Roxdal's somewhat supercilious manner had always jarred upon the unsophisticated corn merchant. ”

“ Love is just as real as a rainbow on a wet day; as—as influenza. The first may be a "pleysing payne": the latter must be a very displeasing one. But there is little fiction about either to the victims. Well, suppose love a mere brain-fantasm; an odd survival when sensible folk have swept away beliefs in witchcraft, fairies, and the virtue of fire and faggot for the wicked ones who don't say their prayers the same way we do. ”

“ Could Love be but a pleasing fiction, how comfortable to sit aside and contemplate it—a trifle to talk of, a dainty to dally with, a joy to the juvenescent, a blessing to the book-writer, yet never an inconvenience. But it is a practical reality, and it has great effects. Why, I have seen good, healthy people, quite nice-tempered people, brought to a shadow by it and churned into so many pounds of incompetent irritability ”

“ But to the girl and the youth comes an hour when they are humiliatingly conscious of study wasted on a prettily-bound work of fiction that for all use and purpose in life is quite valueless. The edifice of romance is constructed much on the same plan as a child's castle of cards, and deservedly shares the same fate. That is to say, the topmost card overbalances the whole structure. It is usually the hand of Reason that topples over Love's romantic tenement by crowning it with the card of Common Sense. When we find Love has become a practical reality, the discovery is often very unpleasant. ”

“ Some day, perhaps, when men and women are free, Love will be a pleasing reality. It can never be so in the majority of cases so long as we play at make-believe, and teach nothing that we have learned. The good man won't teach his sons; he leaves them to learn in the gutter. The good woman keeps her daughters ignorant. As it stands it is an evil to love anyone over-much. And when we love we love over-much, for Love has been repressed till it has got savage in the race. "La privation radicale d'une chose crée léxeés." ”

“ In revenge, Tom was usually up first on week-days, sometimes at such unearthly hours that Polly had not yet removed the boots from outside the bedroom door, and would bawl down to the kitchen for his shaving water. For Tom, lazy and indolent as he was, shaved with the unfailing regularity of a man to whom shaving has become an instinct. If he had not kept fairly regular hours, Mrs. Seacon would have set him down as an actor, so clean shaven was he. ”

“ The statistics of crime and insanity testify eloquently to the reality of love, arithmetic teaching the same lesson as history and grammar. Consider, too, the piles of love at Mudie's! A million story-tellers in all periods and at all places cannot have told all stories, though they have all, alas! told the same story. They must have had mole-hills for their mountains, if not straw for their bricks. There are those who, with Bacon, consider love a variety of insanity; but it is more often merely a form of misunderstanding. When the misunderstanding is mutual, it may even lead to marriage. ”

“ I side with those who hold that the Love described by poets and other wordy people is mainly fanciful, a flattering picture, that the best school for such writing is an unhappy affection, and that no man can want better luck than to have his heart broken, and so be made proof against lovesickness. An unrequited love runs no risk of being dulled by the prose of life. A man so fortunate as to be jilted or rejected finds his Beloved remaining beautiful and young to him when her husband sees her an unwieldy and wearisome old woman. ”

“ Indeed, the capacity to love, is a specialised form of genius. You understand that I am not commending it. Its possessors are often disreputable and almost always unhappy. Their recompense is that they, and they only, have seen the splendours of the passion, and vibrated to the shaking inner music of the sheep-boy's pipe. ”