Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/163

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
the master passion.
15

direct and oblique, sidewise and "slantindicular," and you may even find some of an unpopular complexion, over whom not a few of those with fairer cuticle lord it strongly and only concede that the dusky ones have brains, after the aforesaid dusky ones have, alone, single-handed, and wholly unhelped, fairly wrung concession from the world. Bah! I hate time-servers, wretches who trim their sails to suit the passing breeze. Give me one real man or woman, who dares be just and true in spite of Mrs. Grundy and unlicensed liars, and you may have the balance; for — faugh! where's the cologne? . . . An overflow of bile, or a stoppage thereof, often results from repressed or over-sanguine love; and in such peculiar chemical states all the world wears a sickly green hue. [For a full amplification of the chemistry of love, see "Love and its Hidden History."] ... I have never seen a valid reason why the passions which God himself has grounded into the very substance of the human soul and body should be decried as unclean, be gotten rid of by austerities as silly and foolish as well can be, or smothered and suffer decay. . . . What can supply the want of a heart? Fashion? Frivolity? No! What then? I think parents are to blame in not teaching their offspring the inner lessons of love, veneration, respect, and friendship. As it is, the world is full of humanesque beings, but who are as void of genuine emotional feeling as Mont Blanc is of gray hair; and undoubtedly in this respect the world has greatly degenerated during these past five and thirty years. But this generation knows a great deal more than any that ever preceded it, if it would but crystallize its knowledge into wisdom. It will do so ere long, and when it does, education will begin, as it ought to, before birth, not forty years after it, more or less, as now. And one of the first things learned will be the great and eternal magnetic law. It is not my purpose herein to elaborately explain this law, excepting as it has a bearing upon woman, love, and the perpetuity of marriage, in the true meaning of the term. I believe in true marriage, but not in free love.

As a rule, women are wholly free from the tides, ebbs, flows, cairns, storms, heats, colds, and tornadoes of love ; but as a general, though not universal rule, men are not thus free ; and it is well for the race that he is as he is. Men love in gusts, because sexual passion enters largely into the account with them; and the woman who