Part 29

Indeed, the art of successful flattery, especially with modern self-conscious girls, consists in the ability of giving “a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of playful raillery,” as Coleridge puts it. Conundrums are very useful. For instance, Angelina is patting a dog. “Do you know why all dogs are so fond of you?” asks Adolphus. Angelina gives it up. “Because dogs are the most intelligent of all animals.” Angelina goes to Paris, and Adolphus enjoys his last walk with her. They pass a weeping willow. “Why are we two like this tree?” She gives it up again. “A weeping willow is graceful and melancholy; you are graceful, I melancholy.”

“How old am I?” asks Angelina. “I don’t know. Judging by your conversation thirty-five, by your looks nineteen.”

Tell a woman—casually, as it were—of the effect of her charms on a third party, and it will please her more than a bushel of your neatest compliments. As Lessing remarks, Homer gives us a more vivid sense of Helen’s beauty by noting its effect even on the Trojan elders, than he could have done by the most minute enumeration of her charms. Put your flatteries into actions rather than words—“mettre la flatterie dans les actions et non en paroles”—is Balzac’s advice. But “flattery in actions” is simply another name for Gallantry.

There is no danger that the subtlest compliment will ever escape notice. In the discovery of praise the commonest mind has the quickness of genius.

LOVE-LETTERS

The great trouble with compliments is that they have an annoying habit of occurring to the mind about ten or twenty minutes after the natural opportunity for getting them off has passed away. It is here that Love-letters come to the rescue. They enable a man to excogitate the most excruciatingly subtle and hyperbolic compliments, and then “lead up to them” most naturally.

There is an old superstition that Love-letters _must_ be incoherent trash to be genuine evidences of passion. When Keats’s Love-letters to Fanny Brawne were sold at auction, a spicy journalist commented as follows on the occasion:—

“It is open to question whether, like so many of the letter-writers of the age of which Keats inherited the traditions, the singer of _Endymion_ had not a shrewd eye to posterity when he wrote the laboured compositions which the world regards as the record of his wooing. The manuscript is painfully correct, the punctuation worthy of a printer’s reader, the capitals much nicer than fiery lovers usually form, and the periods rounded with painful care. Like so many cultivators of the art of letter-writing, the sensitive poet, ‘who was snuffed out by a review,’ seems to have copied the gush, which last week sold for ten times more than _Endymion_ fetched, before he committed it to the fourpenny post. Hence the veriest scrawl, the most illegible postcard of these times is, as an index to the writer’s character, infinitely more valuable than the ponderous pieces of rhetoric which last century passed for love-making between Strephon, who quotes the elegant Tully, and Chloe, who makes free use of the ‘Elegant Extracts.’ Duller fustian than such priggish love-letters it is hard to conceive. They remind one of nothing so much as the epistles copied out of _The Complete Letter-Writer_, and must recall to some middle-aged men certain painful experiences of those salad days when their young affections suffered a sudden blight by missives of so severely correct an order that they suggest the idea of having undergone maternal supervision.”

Yet why, pray, should Keats _not_ have written his Love-letters so carefully and copied them so neatly? Is it not a fact that when a man is in love he cares more to make a pleasing impression on one particular person than on all the rest of the world combined? and that even his ambition and fame, for which he labours so hard, seem valuable in his eyes solely as a means of winning Her Love? And if Love is a deeper passion, even in a poet, than ambition, why should he not go to the extent even of _taking notes_ and utilising his very best conceits in his Love-letters? The truth is, in the writing of Love-letters everything depends on the man’s habits. If he is accustomed to writing carelessly, his Love-letters will probably be hasty and slovenly enough to suit orthodox notions on this subject. But if he is a literary artist, he will probably polish his _billets-doux_ more than anything else _con amore_, considering the probable effect on her mind of every sentence. And although the thought of future publication may enter his mind, it will appear as the veriest trifle compared with the more important object of winning a woman’s Love by a display of complimentary wit and passionate protestations of undying affection.

Sir Richard Steele evidently did not believe that Love-letters, to be genuine, must be slovenly. In one of his letters to Miss Scurlock he apologises for not having time to revise what he had written. In another letter he exclaims: “How art thou, oh my soul, stolen from thyself! how is all my attention broken! my books are blank paper, and my friends intruders.” Again: “It is the hardest thing in the world to be in love, and yet attend business. As for me, all that speak to find me out, and I must lock myself up, or other people will do it for me. A gentleman asked me this morning, ‘What news from Holland?’ and I answered, ‘She is exquisitely handsome.’ Another desired to know when I had been last at Windsor; I replied, ‘She designs to go with me.’” And once more: “It is to my lovely charmer I owe that many noble ideas are continually affixed to my words and actions: it is the natural effect of that generous passion to create in the admirers some similitude of the object admired; thus, my dear, am I every day to improve from so sweet a companion.”

The first score or so of Keats’s Love-letters have the ring of true gold. Here are a few specimens in which the thermometer of endearments rises steadily from My Dearest Lady, through My Sweet Girl, My Dear Girl, My Dearest Girl, My Sweet Fanny, to My Sweet Love, Dearest Love and Sweetest Fanny. In the very first letter he writes:—

“Ask yourself, my love, whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the letter you must write immediately? and do all you can to console me in it—make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me—write the softest words and kiss them, that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself, if I do not know how to express my devotion to so fair a form, I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies, and lived but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”

“All I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty.”

“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks—your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”

“I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it. From no others would I take it.”

“At Winchester I shall get your letters more readily; and it being a cathedral city, I shall have a pleasure, always a great one to me when near a cathedral, of reading them during the service up and down the aisle.”

All this is in the true Shaksperian key of Romantic Love, as are the Love-letters of Burns, Byron, Moore, Heine, Bürger, Lenau, and most other poets. Room must be made here for a few extracts from Lenau’s letters to his love, which, in some respects, resemble those of Keats—equally polished, poetic, deep, and sincere:—

“It makes me melancholy to see how incapable I am of sympathizing with the pleasures of my friends. My Love goes out afar towards you; it hearkens and listens and stares in the distance for you, and takes no note of all the love by which it is surrounded here. I am truly ill. I constantly think of you alone and death. It often seems to me as if my time had expired. I cannot write poetry, I cannot rejoice in anything, cannot hope, can only think of you and death. The other day I wrote to you to take good care of your health—though I myself feel so little desire to live.”

“The whole evening I was unable to think of anything but of you and the possibility of losing you. The large crowd of people seemed to have assembled on purpose to show me most painfully what a mere nothing the world would be to me if I had to part from you. I constantly saw but your face, your lovely, divine eye.”

“Alexander wishes me to go to the baths at Leuk with him. He is quite ill. But I cannot go. If I have to see Switzerland without you, I prefer not to see it at all.”

“My poetic composition is in a bad way. Though a thought sprouts in me here and there, it withers before it has reached maturity. When I go to see you I shall bring along a dry wreath of prematurely-faded poetic blossoms, and make them revive in your presence, as there are warm fountains dipped into which faded flowers blossom again.”

“I have lost all pleasure in other people when you are absent. If you had only been at Weinsberg! Even the Æolian harps did not produce the usual impression on me.” It is noticeable how the overtone of Monopoly is accented in all these plaints.

“I have found in your companionship more evidence of an eternal life than in all my investigations and studies of nature. Whenever, in a happy hour, I believed I had reached the climax of Love and the proper moment for death, since a more delicious moment could never follow: it was on each occasion an illusion, for another hour followed in which I loved you still more deeply. These ever new, ever deeper abysses of life convince me of its immortality. To-day I saw in your eyes the full measure of the divine. Most distinctly did I perceive to-day that the swelling and sinking of the eye is the breathing of the soul. In an eye of such beauty as yours we can see, as in a prophetic hieroglyphic, the essence of which some day our immortal body will consist. If I die, I shall depart rich, for I have seen what is most beautiful in the world.”

“The rose you gave me at parting has a most delicious fragrance, as if it were a Good-Night from you! Sleep well, dearest heart! Preserve the second rose as a memento. I love you immeasurably.”

No doubt the average Love-letters read in courts of justice in breach of promise cases, to the intense amusement of the audience, are very different in character from these poetic effusions. But to say that, because the average Love-letters are ludicrous, therefore all Love-letters, to be genuine, must be ludicrous and incoherent, is the very Bedlam of absurdity. What makes common Love-letters so laughable is the fact that the writer, previously a paragon of prosiness, suddenly gets some poetic fancies and tries to put them into language. But as the writing of poetry—in verse or prose—is a more difficult art than piano-playing, first attempts cannot be otherwise than harrowing or amusing. On the other hand, just as a pianist can never improvise so soulfully as when he is in love, so a poet will write his best prose in the letters addressed to his love; the only ludicrous feature being that extravagant and exclusive admiration of one person which is the very essence of Love.

Surely Hawthorne was neither “insincere” nor “thinking of posterity” when he finished one of his Love-letters with this poetic conceit, expressed in his best prose style:—

“When we shall be endowed with spiritual bodies I think they will be so constituted that we may send thoughts and feelings any distance, in no time at all, and transfuse them warm and fresh into the consciousness of those we love. Oh, what happiness it would be, at this moment, if I could be conscious of some purer feeling, some more delicate sentiment, some lovelier fantasy than could possibly have had its birth in my own nature, and therefore be aware that you were thinking through my mind and feeling through my heart! Perhaps you possess this power already.”

This is true epistolary Love-making—the sublimated essence of complimentary Gallantry.

LOVE-CHARMS FOR WOMEN

As women are not allowed to make Love actively, they resort to various cunning arts with which they indirectly reach the hard hearts of men. Magic is the most potent of these arts, and always has been so considered by women; for, curiously enough, one finds on looking over the folklore of various nations, ancient and modern, that in nineteen cases out of twenty where a Love-charm is spoken of, it is one used by women to win the affection of men.

Probably the real reason why the vast majority of women are so curiously indifferent to the hygienic arts of increasing and preserving Personal Beauty—as shown in their devotion to tight-lacing, their aversion to fresh air, sunshine, and brisk exercise—is because they know they can infallibly win a man’s Love by the use of some simple powder or potion. It is well known that the Roman poet Lucretius took his life in an amorous fit caused by a love-potion; and Lucullus lost his reason in the same way. The grandest musical work in existence would never have been written had not Brangäne given to Tristan and Isolde a love-potion which was so powerful that it made not only both the victims die of the fever of Love, but united them even after death: "For from the grave of Tristan sprang a plant which descended into the grave of Yseult. Cut down thrice by order of the Cornish king, the irrepressible vegetable bloomed verdant as ever next morning, and even now casts its shadow over the tombs of the lovers—

“‘An ay it grew, an ay it threw, As they would fain be one.’”

In mediæval times Personal Beauty was such a rare thing, and created such havoc among men, that the unhappy possessors of it were frequently accused of using forbidden Love-charms, and burnt at the stake as witches.

To-day, thanks to our superior sanitary and educational arrangements, Beauty is such a common affair that it has lost all its effect on the masculine heart; hence girls should carefully note a few of the ways by which a man may be irresistibly fascinated.

Italian girls practise the following method: A lizard is caught, drowned in wine, dried in the sun and reduced to powder, some of which is thrown on the obdurate man, who thenceforth is theirs for evermore.

A favourite Slavonic device is to cut the finger, let a few drops of her blood run into a glass of beer, and make the adored man drink it unknowingly. The same method is current in Hesse and Oldenburg, according to Dr. Ploss. In Bohemia, the girl who is afraid to wound her finger may substitute a few drops of bat’s blood.

Cases are known where invocations to the moon were followed by the bestowal of true Love. And if a girl will address the new moon as follows—

“All hail to thee, moon! All hail to thee! Prithee, good moon, reveal to me, This night who my husband shall be,”

she will dream of him that very night.

A four-leaved clover secretly placed in a man’s shoes will make him the devoted lover of the woman who puts it in.

“Inside a frog is a certain crooked bone, which, when cleaned and dried over the fire on St. John’s Eve, and then ground fine and given in food to the lover, will at once win his love for the administerer.”

If a girl sees a man washing his hands—say at a picnic—and lends him her apron or handkerchief to dry them, he will forthwith declare himself her amorous slave to eternity.

There _are_ men, however, who, owing to some constitutional defect or inherited anomaly, remain unaffected by these and similar arts. Should any woman be so foolish as to crave such a man’s Love, she will do well to bear in mind that _Vanity is the backdoor by which every man’s heart may be entered_. Thus Byron says of a Venetian flame of his: “But her great merit is finding out mine—there is nothing so amiable as discernment.” “Let her be,” says Thackeray, “if not a clever woman, an appreciator of cleverness in others, which, perhaps, clever folks like better.” “Ne’er,” says Scott,

“‘Was flattery lost on poet’s ears: A simple race! they waste their toil For the vain tribute of a smile.’”

Rousseau’s last love was inspired by a woman’s admiration of his writings. Balzac, celibate for many years, was at last captured by a woman who returned to a hotel room for a volume of his works she had left there, informing him, without suspecting who he was, that she never travelled without it and could not live without it.

“The story of the marriage of Lamartine,” says the author of _Salad for the Solitary_, “is also one of romantic interest. The lady, whose maiden name was Birch, was possessed of considerable property, and when past the bloom of youth she became passionately enamoured of the poet from the perusal of his _Meditations_. For some time she nursed this sentiment in secret, and, being apprised of the embarrassed state of his affairs, she wrote him, tendering him the bulk of her fortune. Touched with this remarkable proof of her generosity, and supposing it could only be caused by a preference for himself, he at once made an offer of his hand and heart. He judged rightly, and the poet was promptly accepted.”

Sympathy, beauty, wit, elegant manners, amiability—these are woman’s arrows of Love, ever sure of their aim. “She loved me for the dangers I had passed,” says Othello, “and I loved her that she did pity them.” Or, as Professor Dowden comments on this passage, “the beautiful Italian girl is fascinated by the regal strength and grandeur, and tender protectiveness of the Moor. _He_ is charmed by the sweetness, the sympathy, the gentle disposition the gracious womanliness of Desdemona.”

“The _gracious womanliness_ of Desdemona.” There lies the secret—the charm of charms. It is fortunate that the political viragoes of to-day, who would remove woman from her domestic sphere, have opposed to them the greatest force in the universe—_the power of man’s Love!_ When they have overcome that, they will find it easy to dam the current of the Niagara River, and curb the force of the ocean’s countless breakers.

PROPOSING

Countless as the stars, and only too apposite, are the jokes about lovers who evolve masterpieces of eloquence wherewith to lay their hearts at their idol’s feet; but who, when the crucial moment of the trial arrives, like Beckmesser in Wagner’s comic opera, stutter out the veriest parody of their song of Love. And no wonder, considering what is at stake; for the Yes or No decides whether the lover is to be—literally—the happiest or the unhappiest of all men for weeks or months to come.

Ovid cautions a man not to select a sweetheart in the twilight or lamplight, since “spots are invisible at night and every fault is overlooked; at that time almost every woman is held to be beautiful.”

But proposing is a different matter from selecting. When once the choice is made, and her choice alone remains to be decided, twilight is the only proper time to “pop the question.” For a maiden’s independence and Coyness are inversely related to the degree of light. In the morning, in broad daylight, she can boldly face even the terrible thought of being left an old maid; but in the twilight she feels the need of a man’s protection, and it is at that time that the imagination is least deaf to the whispered and self-suggested fancies of Romantic Love and wedded bliss. A man who proposes in the morning deserves, therefore, to be disappointed.

Nature herself has provided a safeguard against morning proposals. No woman is so beautiful in the daytime as is in the evening; and the moon’s romantic associations are largely due to its magic effect of beautifying the complexion and features of women, and thus urging the lover’s courage to the point of amorous confession.

There is still another reason why a tender and considerate lover should propose in the chiaroscuro of subdued light—to spare her blushes—

“But ’neath yon crimson tree, Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame, Nor mark, within its roseate canopy, Her blush of maiden shame.”—BRYANT.

Not many years ago a plan was described in the newspapers by which a number of Southern youths who had not the courage to propose were happily mated and wedded. An elderly person was selected, vowed to eternal secrecy, and to him each youth and maiden who was in love confided in writing the name of the beloved. Those couples that had chosen one another were informed of the fact, and went away rejoicing, arm in arm.

A fairy story, on the face of it. A woman would sooner cut off her hand than write with it the secret of her Love before she knew it was returned; and that man that hath a tongue is, I say, no man, if he is afraid to ask for a woman’s hand—or to take it unasked, and let it respond to the touching question. “Love sought is good, but given unsought is better,” says Shakspere. The only true proposals are those where spoken words are dispensed with; where the magnetic thrill of the hands, the eloquence of the tell-tale eyes, draw the lovers into mutual embrace, and lips become glued on lips in unpremeditated ecstasy.

DIAGNOSIS OR SIGNS OF LOVE

Though women may often feel in doubt concerning the intentions of men who pay them attentions, they cannot help recognizing deep Love in a man instantly; for the symptoms, as described in a previous chapter, are absolutely unmistakable. A woman, too, who loves deeply, can hardly help betraying herself, by the sly opportunities she finds for meeting her lover (purely accidental, of course), and by the special pains she takes to make it clear to her friends that she does not care for _that_ man certainly; often also by the fact, pointed out by Jean Paul, that “Love increases man’s delicacy and lessens woman’s”; tempting her occasionally to throw away all prudence and regard for public opinion, in the wild intoxication of her passion and her confidence in her lover.

But in cases of doubt—how is a lover to decide whether it is safe and worth while to proceed? A woman’s Coyness, of course, means nothing, and may have been brought on by an assumption of excessive confidence and boldness on the man’s part. Girls are like wild colts. They may be safely approached to a certain distance, whence one step more will cause them to stampede; but stand still at that point, and before long they will cast away fear and meet you half-way.

Trifles are the only safe tests of Love. For they are not so apt as weighty words and actions to be the outcome of a deliberate coquettish desire to deceive. To ascertain if you are loved—and this holds true for both sexes—allude (with a careless assumption of indifference) to some trifling details of previous conversation or common experience. If she (or he) remembers them all, especially if of remote occurrence, the chances are you are loved.

Shakspere evidently had this in mind when he wrote—

“If thou rememberest not the slightest folly That ever love did make thee run into, Thou hast not loved.”

HOW TO CURE LOVE

All hope abandon ye who enter here. It is a terrible haunt of pessimism, for disappointed lovers only. All others will please pass it by, for the object of this book is to advocate the cause of Love, not to weaken it. Only when all hope of reciprocation is abandoned, should the tender plant ever be crushed underfoot.

An exception must be made in favour of those hopeful lovers who merely wish to cure themselves in order to improve their chances of winning, as explained in the last chapter, under the head of Feigned Indifference.