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“The Stage is more beholding to Love than the life of man,” says Bacon. The “Daily Telegraph” is perhaps even more “beholding” to it. The ingenuity with which this great organ raises the cloyless topic every silly season under another name, is beyond all praise. No conclusion will ever be arrived at, of course, because “Love” means a different thing with each correspondent, and it is difficult to lay down general truths about a relation that varies with each of the countless couples that have ever experienced it, or have fancied they experienced it. The set theme of a newspaper correspondence always reminds me of a nervous old lady crossing the roadway: she runs this way and that way, gets splashed by every passing wheel, jumps back, jumps forward again, finds temporary harbour on a crossing-stage under a lamp, darts sideways, and ends by arriving in another street altogether. So that the heading of a correspondence is scant guide as to what is being discussed under it; and no one would be surprised to find a recipe against baldness under the title of “The Age of Love.” But then “The Age of Love” is an absurd and answerless question. Experience shows that all ages fall in love–and out again; so that, to quote the pithy Bacon again, “a man may have a quarrel to marry when he will.” Octogenarians elope, and Mr. Gilbert’s elderly baby died a blase old roue of five.

Romeo’s passion was a second, not a first, love: he had already loved Rosaline. Juliet’s first–and only–love came to her only eleven years after she had been weaned, “come Lammas.” Save that the “Age of Love” may be said to be “Youth”–for Love aye rejuvenates–there is nothing to be said. Wherefore the German gentleman who protested against the cliches of novel-writers in the matter of the eternity of passion was well within the wilderness of the subject. The cliche metaphor, by the way, is itself becoming a cliche, so stereotyped do we grow in protesting against the stereotyped. Germans are, perhaps, not the best authorities on passion: they are too sentimental for love and too domestic for romance. Still, our German is justified in his complaint: the love-scenes in our novels and dramas correspond very little to human nature. In works of pure romance this is no drawback to artistic beauty; but in much modern work purporting to mirror contemporary life, the love-making has neither the beauty that springs from idealisation, nor that which springs from reality. Property-speeches and stock-sentiments still do duty for what really takes place in modern love-making. We have played with the traditional puppets so long that we have come to believe they are alive. They may have been alive once–when life was more elemental; they still exist, perchance, in those primitive conditions which are really the past surviving into the present. But in no field of human life is there greater need of fresh observation than in this of love. The ever-increasing subtlety and complexity of modern love have not yet found adequate registration and interpretation in art. Art always seems to me a magic mirror in which the shapes of the past are held long after they have passed away. The author of to-day looks not into his heart–but into the mirror–and writes. Primitive Love found its poet in Longus the Greek, with his “Daphnis and Chloe”; but who has given us Modern Love? Not Meredith himself, despite his sonnets; though “The Egoist” is a terrible analysis of a modern lover, as saddening as the “Modern Lover” of George Moore. The poets are ill guides to love. Their passions are half-fantastic, if not of imagination all compact. Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” was the expression of a passing mood; Tennyson’s “Come into the Garden, Maud,” a lyric exaltation that must have died down when Maud appeared, and could in any case scarce have survived its fiftieth rewriting; Rossetti’s interpretation of “The House of Life” is as purely individual as Patmore’s “Angel in the House”; Swinburne sings of phantasms; we can no more take our poets for types of modern lovers than we can accept Dante or Petrarch as representatives of the mediaeval lover. These poets used their goddesses as mystic inspirers. Dante was not in love with Beatrice, the daughter of Portinari, but with his own imagination: she married Simone as he Gemma, and thus he was still able to worship her. The devotion of Petrarch to Laura did not prevent his having children by another lady. If we turn to modern prose-writers, we fail to find any really subtle treatment of Modern Love. Henry James himself shrinks from analysing it, even allusively and insinuatingly. Zola’s handling of the love-theme is as primary as Pierre Loti’s, for Zola has the eye for masses, not for individual subtleties. Tolstoi, informed by something of the rage of the old ascetics, is too iconoclast; Maupassant’s stories sometimes suggest a cynicism as profound as Chamfort’s or that old French poet’s who wrote: