Is First Love the Best Love?

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19010, 10 May 1924, Page 11

Is First Love the Best Love?

GRAND PASSION MAY OCCUR ANY TIME IN LIFE

By

FRANCIS GRIBBLE,

Who discusses the vexed question whether the first experience of love produces the most profound impression. Which is the more precious and compelling emotion: a first love or a second love? Somebody has just revived that ancient question; but, in truth, it needed no reviving. It is always with us, raised implicitly by every divorce suit and every breach of promise action. At any given moment there must always be someone to whom it seems the most important question in the world. Every one, too, who has any sentimental experience whatever behind him, flatters himseif that he can answer it; but he certainly cannot. Often as the question has been asked, it has nexer yet been answered so satisfactorily that no one would ever think of asking it again. Nearly all the familiar quotations relating to love are superficial and misleading. “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” asks Shakespeare with a triumphant air of finality. But the triumph is premature. Many Idvers—probably the preponderating majority—have done so; love being, in many cases, a sentiment akin to those disorders which display their symptoms only after an uncertain but variable period of incubation. Equally fallacious—perhaps even more fallacious—is the famous exclamation of the French poet: “One always comes back to one’s first love.” It is not only an untrue saying, but one diametrically opposed ,to the truth. Evidently, therefore, we must not look for light on this matter from either poetry or proverbial philosophy. What, then? Where shall we find firm ground from which to set forth on our voyage of inquiry ? A certain cynic, who perhaps was not as cynical as he seemed to be, but was really a man of sentiment and no little experience, once carefully summed up the matter in this aphorism:, “When we are- in love, we always feel quite sure that our last love is our first, and that our first love will be our last.” As a rule we do. Indeed, it may justly be said that, if we do not, we

are not in love to any extent worth speaking of, and are probably incap able of what used, in the old days when women as well as men were still romantic, to be called “grand passions.’’ The fact that we are almost invariably wrong in entertaining that belief does not detract tn any way from the wisdom of the saying. The essential thing is that we do entertain it—perhaps several times in the course of our lives and that our liability to this human and almost universal error robs our judgment of any value until we have reached an age at which our aentimenta memories are no longer mueh disturbed by our sentimental expectations. At that age, no doubt, the young wiU tell us-some of them speaking in derision and some in pity-that we know nothing about the subject; but though wisdom after the event is a poor .ore Of wisdom for one’s own use, it does sometimes come neaier to hitting the mark in an argument than the prejudices of those who speak with heat under the influence of emotion. One fact which middle-age, taught by Observation a. weU as experience, feels pretty sure about, i. thin; that the lives in which there has been only one love affair are even less numerous than those in which there has been none at all. Whether a man ceases to love, or ceases to be loved, or is separated from His love by some accident or circumstance beyond his control, it' is practically certain that the time will como—sooner more probably than later when he will love again, his heart being, as women like to put it, with their practical common-sense, “caught on the rebound.” Moreover, as life is such that these catastrophic interruptions of our love affairs are altogether escaped by very few of us, a middle-aged man is generally able to review and compare sev- ■ eral loves. One of them, he will then find, iias made a deeper and more abiding im- ' pression on his memory than any of ( the others; and the main conditions of . its ineffaceable pre-eminence will be , these: } That it lasted long enough to ■ create . a habit of intoxicating happiness, and . either still endures or else wag vio-

lently ended by untoward circumstances, before the habit had hod the chance of becoming irksome. It may be the first love which has thus burnt its permanent'image on |his heart, or it may be the second; but it is just as likely to be the third or the fourth—or it may as easily be the Cf teenth.