New Grub Street [150]
'And be miserable on--if they no longer love each other.'
'You're such a sentimental fellow!' cried Jasper. 'I believe you seriously think that love--the sort of frenzy you understand by it--ought to endure throughout married life. How has a man come to your age with such primitive ideas?'
'Well, I don't know. Perhaps you err a little in the opposite direction.'
'I haven't much faith in marrying for love, as you know. What's more, I believe it's the very rarest thing for people to be in love with each other. Reardon and his wife perhaps were an instance; perhaps--I'm not quite sure about her. As a rule, marriage is the result of a mild preference, encouraged by circumstances, and deliberately heightened into strong sexual feeling. You, of all men, know well enough that the same kind of feeling could be produced for almost any woman who wasn't repulsive.'
'The same kind of feeling; but there's vast difference of degree.'
'To be sure. I think it's only a matter of degree. When it rises to the point of frenzy people may strictly be said to be in love; and, as I tell you, I think that comes to pass very rarely indeed. For my own part, I have no experience of it, and think I never shall have.'
'I can't say the same.'
They laughed.
'I dare say you have imagined yourself in love--or really been so for aught I know--a dozen times. How the deuce you can attach any importance to such feeling where marriage is concerned I don't understand.'
'Well, now,' said Whelpdale, 'I have never upheld the theory--at least not since I was sixteen--that a man can be in love only once, or that there is one particular woman if he misses whom he can never be happy. There may be thousands of women whom I could love with equal sincerity.'
'I object to the word "love" altogether. It has been vulgarised. Let us talk about compatibility. Now, I should say that, no doubt, and speaking scientifically, there is one particular woman supremely fitted to each man. I put aside consideration of circumstances; we know that circumstances will disturb any degree of abstract fitness. But in the nature of things there must be one woman whose nature is specially well adapted to harmonise with mine, or with yours. If there were any means of discovering this woman in each case, then I have no doubt it would be worth a man's utmost effort to do so, and any amount of erotic jubilation would be reasonable when the discovery was made. But the thing is impossible, and, what's more, we know what ridiculous fallibility people display when they imagine they have found the best substitute for that indiscoverable. This is what makes me impatient with sentimental talk about marriage. An educated man mustn't play so into the hands of ironic destiny. Let him think he wants to marry a woman; but don't let him exaggerate his feelings or idealise their nature.'
'There's a good deal in all that,' admitted Whelpdale, though discontentedly.
'There's more than a good deal; there's the last word on the subject. The days of romantic love are gone by. The scientific spirit has put an end to that kind of self-deception. Romantic love was inextricably blended with all sorts of superstitions-- belief in personal immortality, in superior beings, in--all the rest of it. What we think of now is moral and intellectual and physical compatibility; I mean, if we are reasonable people.'
'And if we are not so unfortunate as to fall in love with an incompatible,' added Whelpdale, laughing.
'Well, that is a form of unreason--a blind desire which science could explain in each case. I rejoice that I am not subject to that form of epilepsy.'
'You positively never were in love!'
'As you understand it, never. But I have felt a very distinct preference.'
'Based on what you think compatibility?'
'Yes. Not strong enough to make me lose sight of prudence and advantage. No, not strong enough for that.'
He seemed to be reassuring himself.
'Then of course that can't be called love,' said Whelpdale.
'Perhaps not. But, as I told you, a preference of