Love's Labour's Lost

“ LONGAVILLE.
I am resolved. ’Tis but a three years’ fast.
The mind shall banquet, though the body pine.
Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits
Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.
[He signs.]
DUMAINE.
My loving lord, Dumaine is mortified.
The grosser manner of these world’s delights
He throws upon the gross world’s baser slaves.
To love, to wealth, to pomp, I pine and die,
With all these living in philosophy. ”

“ Do you think, though you should labour, and grieve, and be trodden down in dishonour all your days, at least you can keep that one joy of Love, and that one honour of Home? Had you, indeed, kept that, you had kept all. But no men yet, in the history of the race, have lost it so piteously. In many a country, and many an age, women have been compelled to labour for their husband’s wealth, or bread ”

“ The sudden hand of death close up mine eye!
Hence ever then my heart is in thy breast. 824
Ber. And what to me, my love? and what to me?
Ros. You must be purged too, your sins are rack'd:
You are attaint with faults and perjury;
Therefore, if you my favour mean to get, 828
A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest,
But seek the weary beds of people sick.
Dum. But what to me, my love? but what to me?
Kath. A wife! A beard, fair health, and honesty ”

“ Heaven! but your tears will come from a passing cloud that will leave your future life all clear and bright—not darkened forever by the slavery of a union with one whom you do not—only because you cannot—love. ”

“ Is a sharp wit match'd with too blunt a will,
Whose edge hath power to cut, whose will still wills
It should none spare that come within his power.
PRINCESS OF FRANCE. Some merry mocking lord, belike; is't so?
MARIA. They say so most that most his humours know.
PRINCESS OF FRANCE. Such short-liv'd wits do wither as they
grow.
Who are the rest?
KATHARINE. The young Dumain, a well-accomplish'd youth,
Of all that virtue love for virtue loved;
Most power to do most harm, least knowing ill,
For he hath wit to make an ill shape good,
And shape to win grace though he had no wit. ”

“ Therefore, if we could but comprehend or feel the tragedy in the great Labour struggle, the intrinsic tragedy of having to pass through death to birth, our souls would still know some happiness, the very happiness of creative suffering. Instead of which we pile accident on accident, we tear the fabric of our existence fibre by fibre, we confidently look forward to the time when the whole great structure will come down on our heads. ”

“ And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods Make heaven drowsy with the harmony. Never durst poet touch a pen to write Until his ink were temp'red with Love's sighs; O, then his lines would ravish savage ears, And plant in tyrants mild humility. ”

“ Ah, no, Elizabeth! No life is waste in the great Worker’s hands. If human love wounds and wrongs us, are we not circled by angels as the stars by heaven? Our soul relatives sorrow in our sorrow; and out of the apparent loss bring golden gain. ”

“ Poverty and labour are lightened, difficulties smoothed, trials more easily borne with love for a companion. Suffering is almost forgotten when the tender voice of sympathy is heard and the pillow smoothed by affection's hands. Unrest is easier to endure when kind eyes watch beside the sleepless, and become moist with tears because the power to aid falls so far short of the will. ”

“ He then insisted and demonstrated that all the miseries of life, all the sorrows and mistakes of men, women, and children; and, in particular, all the disasters of Ireland, the bankrupt landlords, the religious dissensions, the fights domestic and political, the rich without thought for the poor, and the poor without food or work, all arose from nothing but the want of love. ”

“ You are poor—you must go back to Oxford—you must take up the work your soul loathes—grow more soured, more embittered—maintain a useless degrading struggle, till her youth is done, her beauty wasted, and till you yourself have lost every shred of decency and dignity, even that decorous [Pg 450] outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from the world! Think of the little house—the children—the money difficulties—she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone,—you incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only of a dull rage with her, yourself, the world! ”

“ First, like a laughing child, love came to labour minutely in the rocks and sands of the heart, opening the first of those roads which lead inwards for ever, and then, the labour of his day being done, love fled away and was forgotten. Following came the fierce winds of hate to work like giants and gnomes among the prodigious debris, quarrying the rocks and levelling the roads which soar inwards; but when that work is completed love will come radiantly again to live for ever in the human heart, which is Eternity. ”

“ She asked me to picture the course of such a love: first working as a fever in the blood, distorting and deflecting everything, making all other interests insipid, all other duties irksome, and then, as the acknowledged claims of life regained their hold, gradually dying—the poor starved passion!—for want of the wholesome necessary food of common living and doing, yet leaving life impoverished by the loss of all it might have been. ”

“ Crying for it and not getting it, seeking for labour as lost treasure and finding it not, until at last, all spirit and vigour worn out in the weary quest, the once willing worker becomes a broken-down drudge, sodden with wretchedness and despairing of all help in this world or in that which is to come. ”

“ For the first three weeks of my life as a factory girl I saw among my companions only one vast class of slaves, miserable drudges, doomed to dirt, ugliness and overwork from birth until death. My own physical sufferings were acute. My heart was torn with pity. I revolted against a society whose material demands were satisfied at the cost of minds and bodies. Labour appeared in the guise of a monster feeding itself on human lives. ”

“ The sons of the family were usually able, as they grew up, to escape and elude it, although they thereby often created an undesirable divorce from the home, and often suffered, as well as inflicted, much pain in tearing themselves loose from the spiritual bonds—especially perhaps in matters of religion—woven by long tradition to bind them to their parents. It was on the daughters that the chief stress fell. For the working class, indeed, there was often the possibility of escape into hard labour, if only that of marriage. ”

“ There will be some graves reeking with blood, watered by the tears of affection. There will be some privation; there will be some loss of luxury; there will be somewhat more need for labor to procure the necessaries of life. ”

“ It is not alone the relinquishment of his position in the world as a patient and industrious worker; his sacrifice of love; the obliteration of his hope for preferment, but the extinction of life itself at an age when all men cherish it most highly. ”

“ To begin with he had had a sunstroke, and then he proposed marrying on subaltern's pay."
"Well, you can't expect the world to give up falling in love because you don't approve."
"Let it fall by all means; only let us call things by their proper names. You and I, Belle, know the trouble which follows on the present confusion. And if we, eminently respectable people, suffered much, many must suffer more. Many! Why the question, 'Is Marriage a Failure?' fills up the interstices of conversation left between the Rights of Labour and Home Rule. ”

“ The loss of much that is fine? Perhaps. There are some who think that it will scourge men's souls clean of pettiness, teach them proportion, give them a larger outlook. But is it petty to labour and love? ”

“ If in the home the husband is still to be regarded as the capitalist and the wife as the labourer, then at all events it has to be recognised that he owes her not only the satisfaction of her physical needs of food and shelter and clothing, but the opportunity to satisfy the personal spontaneous claims of her own individual nature. Just as the readjustment of Labour is really only an approach to the long recognised ideals of Democracy, so the readjustment of the Home, far from being subversive or revolutionary, is merely an approximation to the long recognised ideals of marriage. ”

“ And this is the power possessed by the mighty dead,—men of every time and nation, whose voices death cannot silence, who are waiting even at the poor man's elbow, whose illuminating words may be had for the price of a day's work in the kitchen or the street, for lack of love of whom many a luxurious home is a dull and solitary spot, breeding misery and vice. ”

“ It may seem to some that this new movement of upheaval in the sphere of the Home is merely destructive. Timid souls have felt the like in every period of transition, and with as little reason. Just as we realise that the movement now in progress in the world of Labour for a higher standard of life and for, as it has been termed, a larger “leisure-ration,” represents a wholesome revolt against the crushing conditions of prolonged monotonous work—the most deadening of all work—and a real advance towards those ideals of democracy which are still so remote, so it is with the movement in the Home. ”

“ The time allotted anyone was long since overrun; but no one thought of that, and she went on:
"'With love!' Ah, there is where the iron can burn and scar and open every wound afresh each day, make poverty a curse, a blight, a scourge, a vulture, iron-beaked, with claws of burning steel, that leave no nerve untouched, no drop of blood unshed.
"'With love!' 'Tis there the hand of Poverty can deal the deadliest blows, and show, as nowhere else on earth, the value of that slandered, hoarded thing called wealth." ”

“ And all the oppressed and suffering of mankind;
Herself forgetting, but never those in need;
Her whole, sweet soul lost in her loving work;
Pondering the endless problem of the poor.
⁠In ceaseless labor, swift, unhurriedly,
She sped upon her tireless ministries,
Climbing the stairs of poverty and wrong,
Endeavoring the help that shall not hurt,
Seeking to build in every human heart
A temple of justice—that no brother's burden
Should heavier prove through human selfishness. ”

“ Let us, however, be clear about this further fact—love does not merely lead to enforced labor, it also redeems that labor. Not merely does a man face up to his job because it is in a sense done for love's sake, but love itself supplies the necessary respite and counterbalance to the burden of toil. ”

“ Our neighbours across the Channel call it La Crise when, after years of a quiet, not unhappy, excellent married existence, day succeeding day in unbroken continuity of easy affection and limited experience, the man or the woman, in full middle life, suddenly wearies of the apparent monotony, the uneventful love, the slow encroaching tide of the commonplace, and looks on these as fetters on their freedom, as walls which shut them in from the vivid interests of the outside world, from the gipsy roving of the passions. ”

“ I did indeed entirely comprehend my ‘misfortune,’ or rather the great chance bestowed on me of winning something far higher than all the coffers of Mammon; I read in my loss of world’s cash the working of such a merciful providence and pity as gave me a grander hope than any I had ever known. Clear before me rose the vision of that most divine and beautiful necessity of happiness,—Work!—the grand and too often misprized Angel of Labour, which moulds the mind of man, steadies his hands, controls his brain, purifies his passions, and strengthens his whole mental and physical being. ”

“ Men were to have the deciding voice in this thing, who had no clear conception of how poverty and misery live, no true knowledge of this vast tragedy of labour perpetually acted, in our midst, no rebellion of heart against conditions of life for other men they themselves would die a thousand times rather than accept. ”

“ And, woven and interwoven in her thoughts, was the knowledge that the affection to be invigorated by deprivations and to rise triumphant over poverty was not hers—that the love which in happier surroundings might have shown inviolable, which the great calamities of life might have left unassailed, had grown gray in the round of unsatisfied desires and victorious commonplaces. ”

“ Labour has been so valueless that our houses have been pulled down by hundreds of thousands, and we find ourselves now compelled to separate from each other, husbands abandoning wives, sons abandoning parents, and brothers abandoning sisters. ”

“ At that favored period of existence so little appreciated while it lasts, and which, when it is gone, is the object of bitter lamentation for the rest of life, even hardship gives zest to enjoyment when the heart is buoyed—as what youthful heart is not?—by the sweet potency of woman's love. Fatigue, hunger, thirst, disease, and poverty are only trifles that are laughed at, so long as there is seen in the background of it all the lambent light of tender eyes speaking, as nothing else can, the language of the devoted heart. ”

“ My heart was saddened by the sorrow of living no longer under my beloved grandmother’s wing, and I continued to feel grievous distress of mind in connection with my fears concerning the workmen of the national workshops.
To understand rightly the sum of love contained in the words, “The poor people,” or to comprehend to what a degree those who were sincere socialist-republicans believed themselves its friends, one must go back to quite another epoch.
We socialist-republicans had no longer the courage to play at recreations. ”