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Read Ebook: Hints for Lovers by Haultain Arnold
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Ebook has 1449 lines and 36696 words, and 29 pages
A girl thinks she detects flippancy in seriousness. A woman thinks she detects seriousness in flippancy.
What would be conduct decidedly risqu? in a city miss, is often innocent playfulness in a country maid.
Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, girls play with love as if it were a doll; very soon after twenty they discover it is a dynamo. This is why
An early and clandestine engagement often works more havoc than happiness. For
Either, one of the parties to the concealed compact receives or pays attention which perturb the other; or, a subsequent and acknowledged lover looks askance at the previous entanglement. Since even if
A clandestine engagement is merely a flirtation with the emoluments which accompany a promise to marry, those emoluments are not nice things for a subsequent and avowed lover, whether masculine or feminine, to think upon. Lastly,
A laxity with regard to the claims of courtship is apt to breed a laxity with regard to the claims of wedlock. In short,
Flirtations, like clandestine engagements, are an affront to love. Accordingly
To the engagement-ring should be as attached as much importance as to the wedding-ring. Indeed,
A difficult and a delicate path it is that a girl has to tread through life--and often enough a dangerous. Yet with extraordinary deftness she treads it. She must win her a mate, yet has to pretend that the mate wins her. She makes believe to be captured, yet has herself to be intent on the chase. To be wooed and wedded is the law of her being, yet not for one moment dares she to exhibit too great an alacrity to obey that law; for she knows instinctively that an easy victory prognosticates a fickle victor. Is she abundantly endowed with the very attributes that make for wife-and mother-hood, a strong and swaying passion and an affection unbounded, she must hold them in leash with exemplary patience; for, alas! Are they given the rein for a single passing moment, instead of being accounted unto her for righteousness, they work her ruin. She must win her one man, and she must win him for life; but she cannot pick or choose, for she must wait to be asked.
If she make test of many admirers, she is described as a flirt; if, conscientious and demure, she await her fate, a desirable fate is by no means assured.
In truth it seems that too often a girl must dissemble--hateful as dissemblance in men. T'is a hard road indeed that a girl has to travel. To win her a fellow-farer for life, she must go out of her way to accommodate so many travelers: and this one is lured by this, and that one by that, and another by something unnoticed by the throng. But, an she dissembles one iota too much, her fellow-farers look askance, and he who eventually joins her for good upbraids her for that by which she won.
Dissemblance is indeed at once the boon and the bane of a girl: without it, she thinks to be overlooked ; with it, she is looked upon too much. And always,
Always a girl has to pretend that never did she descend to dissemblance. --Which, nevertheless, is sometimes absolutely true, for
Just now and then there happens that miracle of miracles, where their flames up in the man, and their flames up in the maid, in both at once, unaided and unlooked-for, that divine and supra-mundane spark which smolders lambent in every youthful breast: when maid and man take mutual fire at touch of hands and look of eyes,--fire lit at that vestal altar which knows no source and burns for aye.
"Duskolon esti to thremma anthropus." --Plato
For man, the over-grown boy, life has commonly two, and only two, sides: work, and play. Happy he who has for a helpmate one who possesses the faculty of increasing a zeal for the first and of adding a zest to the second. Wherein, O woman, thou mayest happily find the two-fold secret of thy life-work. For
Man is a greedy animal: he wants all or nothing. And fortunately for him,
Women tacitly extol man's greed: they will not be shared any more than they will share.
There is something canine in the masculine nature: like a dog over a bone, it snarls at the very approach of a rival.
It is curious, but it is true, that proud man becomes prouder when weak woman gives him something--a look a smile, a locket, her hair, a kiss, herself.
The greater a man's faith in himself, the greater his mistress hers in him. And perhaps, the greater his mistress her faith in a man, the greater his in himself. For
A woman's faith in a man works wonders.
A man to whom a woman cannot look up, she cannot love. Yet,
It is marvelous how a woman contrives to find something to look up to in a man.
Many men forget the artistic tendency of the feminine temperament, a tendency which shows itself in many ways--their love of pretty things, of pretty ways, and of pretty words. From which three alone we may deduce the rule that
When with the woman he admires and whose admiration he seeks, a man cannot be too careful of his dress, his speech, and his manners.
A believer in Woman is a believer in Good. And vice versa, and mutatis mutandis.
Man's standard of value of a woman is usually determined by the scale of his own emotions. That is to say,
The pedestal upon which a man places a woman is a pedestal erected solely by the effect upon himself of her charms.
A man may boast himself invincible by men; never by woman.
It may perhaps be a thing as unreasonable as certainly it is indisputable, that however much wild oats a man may himself sow, he invariably entertains a very peculiar objection to any woman near or dear to him entering upon this particular branch of agriculture.
He is a fool who does not bear himself before his lady-love as a prince among men.
Some men are so gallant that they will never be outdone by the woman who encourages them. But it often leads to strange embarrassments and entanglements.
Few things terrify a man more than the knowledge of a woman's ability to make her emotions--when, if ever, he arrives at it.
That is a very silly man who thing she can play one woman off against another. For
In matters of emotional finesse the masculine instance is nowhere: it is blinded, befogged, befooled at every turn.
Heaven help the man who is dragged into a quarrel between two wrathful ladies!
Three things there be--nay, four--which man can never be sure, how a greatsoever his acumen, his astuteness, or his zeal: a woman; a race horse; a patent; and the money-market. They defy both faith and fate; they should be the recreations not the resources of life; and he is a fool who stakes more than a portion of his substance on any one of them.
"Ehret die Fanen!" -Schiller
From woman, who e're she be, there seems to emanate a potency ineffable to man,--impalpable, invisible, divine. It lies not in beauty or grace, not even in manner or mein; and it requires neither wiles nor artifice. It is not the growth of long and intimate acquaintance, for often it acts spontaneously and at once; and neither the woman who possesses it nor the man who succumbs to it can give it a name. For to say that it consists in the effluence or influence of personality or temperament, of affinity or passion, of sympathy or charm, is to say nothing save that we know not what it is. All unknown to herself, it wraps its owner round with airs the which to breathe uplifts the spirit, and yet, may be, perturbs the heart, of man. Even its effects are recondite and obscure. It allures; but how it allures now man shall tell. It impels; but to what, does not appear. It rouses all manner of hopes, stirs sleeping ambition, and desires and aspirations unappeasable; but for what purport or to what end, none stays to inquire . It incites; sometimes it enthralls. It innervates; it exhaults. Under its spell, reason is flung to the winds, and matters of great mundane moment are trivial and of no account: for it bewilders the wit and snatches the judgment of sane and rational men. It is most powerful in youth; it is most powerful upon youth; yet some retain it till far on in years, and no age but feels its sway:--a veiled and mysterious force; sometimes daemonical, often divine: at once the delight and the despair of man. After all,
The man who declares he understands women, declares his folly. For,
If woman were not such a mystery, she would not be such an attraction. For again,
What is known is ignored. Besides,
Men may be classified; women never. This is why
Generalizing in the case of women is useless; since
Woman is a species of which every woman is a variety. And every man must make up his mind to this, that
Every woman is a study in herself. However,
If women were comprehensible to men, men and women would be friends, not lovers . The simple fact is that
Womanliness is the supreme attraction, in however fair or however frail a personality it is embodied. And
The sacred function of all womanhood is to kindle in man the divine spark by means 30 of the mystic flame that burns ever in the vestal breast.
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