Hints for Lovers.
by Arnold Haultain.
PLEA: CONFESSION AND AVOIDANCE
"... aphorism are seldom couched in such terms, that they should be taken as they sound precisely, or according to the widest extent of signification; but do commonly need exposition, and admit exception: otherwise frequently they would not only clash with reason and experience, but interfere, thwart, and supplant one another."
--Issac Barrow
"The very essence of an aphorism is that slight exaggeration which makes it more biting whilst less rigidly accurate."
--Leslie Stephen
I. On Girls
"A Pearl, A Girl."
-Browning
There are of course, girls and girls; yet at heart they are pretty much alike. In age, naturally, they differ wildly. But this is a th.o.r.n.y subject. Suffice it to say that all men love all girls-the maid of sweet sixteen equally with the maid of untold age.
There is something exasperatingly something-or-otherish about girls. And they know it--which makes them more something-or-otherish still:--there is no other word for it.
A girl is a complicated thing. It is made up of clothes, smiles, a pompadour, things of which s.p.a.ce and prudence forbid the enumeration here. These things by themselves do not const.i.tute a girl which is obvious; nor is any one girl without these things which is not too obvious. Where the things end and the girl begins many men have tried to find out.
Many girls would like to be men--except on occasions. At least so they say, but perhaps this is just a part of their something-or-otherishness.
Why they should want to be men, men cannot conceive. Men pale before them, grow hot and cold before them, run before them (and after them), swear by them (and at them), and a bit of a chit of a thing in short skirts and lisle-thread stockings will twist able-bodied males round her little finger.
It is an open secret that girls are fonder of men than they are of one another--which is very lucky for the men.
Girls differ; and the same girl is different at different times. When she is by herself, she is one thing. When she is with other girls she is another thing. When she is with a lot of men, she is a third sort of thing. When she is with a man... But this baffled even Agur the son of Jakeh.
As a rule, a man prefers a girl by herself. This is natural. And yet is said that you cannot have too much of a good thing. If this were true, a bevy of girls would be the height of happiness. Yet some men would sooner face the bulls of Bashan.
Some foolish men--probably poets--have sought for and a.s.serted the existence of the ideal girl. This is sheer nonsense: there is no such thing. And if there were, she could not compare with the real girl, the girl of flesh and blood--which (as some one ought to have said) are excellent things in woman.
Other men, equally foolish, have regarded girls as playthings. I wish these men had tried to play with them. They would have found that they were playing with fire and brimstone. Yet the veriest spit-fire can be wondrous sweet.
Sweet? Yes. On the whole a girl is the sweetest thing known or knowable. On the 6 whole of this terrestrial sphere Nature has produced nothing more adorable than the high-spirited high-bred girl.--Of this she is quite aware--to our cost (I speak as a man). The consequence is, her price has gone up, and man has to pay high and pay all sorts of things--ices, sweets, champagne, drives, church-goings, and sometimes spot-cash.
Men are always wishing they knew all about girls. It is a precious good thing that they don"t.--Not that this is in any way disparaging to the girls. The fact is
A girl is an infinite puzzle, and it is this puzzle, that, among other things, tickles the men, and rouses their curiosity.
What a man doesn"t know about a girl would fill a Saratoga trunk; what her does know about her would go into her work-box.
The littlest girl is a little women. No boy knows this--and precious few grown up men. Thus
Many a grown up man plays with a girl, then finds himself in love with her. As to the girl---
Always the girl knows whether the play is leading: she probably chooses the game.
Very late in life does a man learn the truth (and significance) of that ancient proverb that Kissing goes by Favour. For
The masculine mind is the slave of Law and Justice:
Aphrodite never heard of Law or Justice: she was born at sea. That is to say,
Few are the men who at some time in their lives have not wondered at the vagaries of girlish complaisance: the foolish, the ne"er-do-well, the bully, the careless, the cruel,--it is to these often that a girls"
caress is given. And,
Curiously enough, that is, curiously enough as it seems to purblind law-loving man,--should the favored one be openly convicted, that alters not one whit his statue with the girl; for,
A girl, having given her heart, never recalls it not wholly: she may regret; she never recoils. In other words,
To the man of her own free lawless choice a girl is always loyal; to subsequent and subordinate attachments she is dutiful. So,
Even the renegade, if loved by a girl, will be upheld by that girl through thick and thin--secretly, it may be, for often the girl, nevertheless devotedly, and only under compulsion will he listen to the detractor: he may desert her, or, if he sticks to her, he may beat her; no matter: he holds her heart in the hollow of his hand. But, But,
Few things mystify poor law-abiding man than this, that the central, the profoundest, the most portentous puzzle of the universe--the weal of woe of two high-aspiring, much-enduring, youthful human souls, should be the sport of what seems to him the veriest and merest chance.
The unconscious search of sweet sixteen is for (in mathematical language which will not sophisticate her) the integral of love.--Yet
In the short years between sixteen and twenty a girl"s love will undergo rapid and startling developments.
A girl with lots of brothers has more chances of matrimony than a girl with none: she knows more of men; especially of their weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. And
To know the weaknesses and idiosyncrasies of men is perhaps a wife"s chief task; unless it be to put up with them.
Often enough the freckled and fringrant girl wins over the professional beauty.