FATAL LOVE 139
capable of sacrificing itself to the honour and peace of the loved one, it is an immortal and sublime sentiment; lut if it breaks the courage, enervates the will, lowers the aspirations, arid perverts duty, then it is a fatal passion and one must conquer it or perish.
When love is pure, absolute, divine and sublime, it is in itself the most sacred of all obligations. We admire Romeo and Juliet in spite of all the prejudices and passions of the Capulets nd Montagues, and do not think that Piramus and Thisbe should be separated for ever by their family feud. Yet we also admire Chiméne asking for the death of Le Cid to avenge that of her father, because Chiméne, by sacrificing love, made herself worthy of love; she felt sure that if she failed in her duty, Roderick would no longer esteem her. The heroine did not hesitate for a moment between the death of her lover and the devaluation of his love, and she justified that great saying of Solomon that love is more unyielding than Hell.
True love is a dazzling revelation of the immortality of the soul; for a man, its ideal is unstained purity and for a woman, unfailing generosity; it is jealous of the integrity of these ideals and one might term this noble jealousy ‘Zelatype’ or the standard of zeal. The eternal dream of love is the immaculate mother, and the dogma recently enunciated by the Church and borrowed from the Song of Solomon was revealed by love itself.
Impurity is promiscuity in one’s desires. The man who lusts after all women, the woman who wants the desires of all men, do not know love and are not worthy to know it. Coquetry is the debasement of feminine vanity; even its name has an animal derivation and recalls the provocative strutting of the hens who want to attract the cock’s attention. It is permissible for a woman to look beautiful, but she should only wish to gratify the one she loves or hopes to love one day.
The integrity of his wife’s modesty is a man’s especial ideal and is the subject of his legitimate jealousy. Refinement and magnaminity in her husband is the special dream of a woman and it is in this ideal that she finds the stimulus or failure of her love.
Marriage is legitimate love. A marriage of convenience is a marriage of despair. A male and female of the human species agree to propagate children under the protection of the law; if neither of them has yet come to love the other, one can but hope that love will develop in the intimacy of the family circle, but
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