LITTLE ILLUSIONS

Taranaki Daily News, 11 March 1933, Page 11 (Supplement)

LITTLE ILLUSIONS

THE STATE OF LOVE

(By

G.E.O.)

The conclusive proof of man’s divinity is his faculty of falling in love. There may be other things about him as well which set him apart from the grosser animals—the cows, the horses, the footballers and the big business men, whose life, being on a different plane, does not admit the existence of the gentle sentiments. Professional aesthetes with pale periwinkle eyes may be genuinely touched by the wand of the great spirit; they may be, though I doubt it. What is clear is that those who taste the joy of the lord of life and laughter, those whose veins' are filled with, the quintessence of happiness, those who are one with the gods upon Olympus—these are those in love. j Now considering that the proper study of mankind is man, and that a man or woman is a finer, higher, funnier and altogether more grotesque creature when in love, it should be profitable and may be instructive to prdbe this idea further. Draw a deep breath everybody, all eyes skywards, gaze, and let us ask portentiously, “What is this love?” A student’s thesis cannot be constructed in the library or the laboratory. Men, and more particularly women, are his materials, and it is only from an intimate, albeit dispassionate, observation that he can deduce a general formula. Most pupils unfortunately fall by the wayside, in stony or in fertile ground, and get married and thereby automatically becoming incompetent to deliver any rational original opinion. The remainder who seek the light in this matter sometimes die, often shoot themselves, or though they refrain from marriage they fall in lovd or, what is much the same thing, are certified insane, and in any case are lost to the cause in which they had so blithely started out. . But let no one beg the question. This bacillus must be isolated, must be chloroformed and put in a bottle, marked “Not to-be taken rashly,” and placed in company with the castor oil, tincture of iodine and such-like pharmaceutical potions upon the top shelf well out of reach of the children. Mr. Shakespeare, an erudite commentator on matters of this sort, asks the question, defines what love is not, and then to cover up. his state of witless embarrassment issues a rhetorical invitation , to ,an unknown sweet-and-twenty to come kiss him. Probably the closest scientific analogy to the state of him so deplorably love-lorn is that of him happily inebriated. Each is a better and brighter being than his usual ordinary self. One can safety anticipate the unexpected from both- without being disappointed. Just as the homing drunkard may be seen bowing down on the pavement to the waxen-models in the shop windows, fervently embracing the nearest lamp-post, or with the mellifluous innuendoes coaxing a kiss from the vegetable garden scarecrow, in precisely the same manner do we outsiders observe the strange diversions of him who goes a-courting. Puck’s love-juices have done their work. With all his being the man adores a vulgar little nose set in a precious oval section of whitewashed brick-wall, which in turn is held in place by aslen--der scaffolding of skin and bone bn an exact pattern with a couple of thousand million others on the earth to-day. The lady exhibits the same symptoms of nervous derangement. She gives herself into the tender keeping, of a pair of fascinating far-away eyes which are incidentally insolent and pale green. These eyes and a deep vibratory voice fill the world, make the world, lose the world. A -mentality as pellucid and certainly as effective as a pound of butter on a cold day lies behind the mask of the face. The feelings are those of the average tame bear in a cage, well below the sensitive intuition of the normal sheep-dog. We look on agape, flabbergasted, struck dumb with the incongruity of the couple; surely neither deserves such an unkind fate! The potency of the gentle drug«is absolute. It has the double effect of rendering the victims at one and the same time stupid and most ingeniously perverse. They are encased in the ethereal fumes of this fatal vapour and smile inanely with complete self-confidence. They are mad. They are drunk. They are happy. Dr. Johnson, in his History of Rasselas, Prince of. Abyssinia, who travelled the known world in search of the state of happiness, fills his characters with wisdom. The princess delivers a philosophic oration on ' the comparative advantages of marriage, and concludes profoundly: “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.” Rasselas himself has opinions worthy of quotation: “Such,” he says, “is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden, meeting by chance or brought , together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home", and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness before had concealed. They wear out life in altercations and charge nature with cruelty.” Whereupon the Prince announces that if ever he should seek a wife the first question would be, whether she was willing to be led by reason.

“Thus it is,” answers Nekayak, “that philosophers are deceived. Wretched would be the pair above all names of wretchedness, who would be doomed to adjust by reason, every morning, all the minute detail of a domestic day.” This is high authority for the proposition that love is unreason, and, if we look further into the opinions of the greatest thinkers of the world’s history, this impression is encouraged. Love is variously described as a kind of warfare, a malady without cure, a mighty pain, a thing of anxious fear; furthermore it is vain, a boy, a fiend, all in all, a present for a mighty king and a spirit all compact of fire; it is blind, all-seeing, credulous, flowerlike, savage and indestructible; it comes in at the windows and is like the measles. Love is also capable, it seems, of begetting more love, of breaking all locks. It can vanquish death, cannot perish, confounds the sense of right and wrong, is like exactly unto war and is yet curable by no herbs; under' its mystic power a dog will howl and an ass dance. May not we, the 20th century commentators say, in terms of our own alchemy, that love is a moaning monoplane of the monomaniac, an interrupted continuous wave on the broadcast band of an umpteen valve super-het; that it puts the vision in the Baird apparatus and the sin in syncopation. It is the answer to Lord Rutherford’s quantum theory, it is the link between space and time and as easy to understand as Mr. Einstein. Probably it is a bigger contract than bridge. Whatever the definition it is a game to try man’s talents; and so to him to . whom talents have been given the moral ’is apparent. Place them not in the ‘ ground nor the solitude of waste places; i the world is well lost for love.