Part 5 (2/2)
He may be happily married, as the world counts happiness, and She may be dead--but never forgotten. No real love or hate is wrought upon by Lethe. The thousand dreams of her will send his blood in pa.s.sionate flow and the thousand memories of her whiten his face with pain. Friends.h.i.+p is intermittent and pa.s.sion forgets, but man's single love is eternal.
Because woman's love is responsive, it never dies. Her love of love is everlasting. Some threads in the fabric she has woven are like s.h.i.+ning silver; others are sombre, broken, and stained with tears. When a man has once taught a woman to believe his love is true, she is already, though unconsciously, won.
All the beauty in woman's life is forever a.s.sociated with her love.
Violets bring the memory of dead days, when the boy-lover brought them to her in fragrant heaps. Some women say man's love is selfish, but there is no one among them who has ever been loved by a boy.
[Sidenote: Some Lost Song]
Broken, hesitant chords set some lost song to singing in her heart. The break in her lover's voice is like another, long ago. Summer days and summer fields, silver streams, and clouds of apple blossoms set against the turquoise sky, bring back the Mays of childhood and all the childish dreams.
This is another thing a man cannot understand--that every little tenderness of his wakes the memory of all past tenderness, and for that very reason is often doubly sweet. This is the explanation of sudden sadness, of the swift succession of moods, and of lips, shut on sobs, that sometimes quiver beneath his own.
Woman keeps alive the old ideals. Were it not for her eager efforts, chivalry would have died long ago. King Arthur's Court is said to be a myth, and Lancelot and Guenevere were only dreams, but the knightly spirit still lives in man's love for woman.
[Sidenote: The Lady of the Court]
The Lady of the Court was wont to send her knight into danger at her sweet, capricious will. Her glove upon his helmet, her scarf upon his arm, her colours on his s.h.i.+eld--were they worth the risk of horse and spear? Yet the little that she gave him, made him invincible in the field.
To-day there is a subtle change. She is loved as dearly as was Guenevere, but she gives him neither scarf nor glove. Her love in his heart is truly his s.h.i.+eld and his colours are the white of her soul.
He needs no gage but her belief, and having that, it is a trust only a coward will betray. The battle is still to the strong, but just as surely her knight comes back with his s.h.i.+eld untarnished, his colours unstained, and his heart aglow with love of her who gave him courage.
The centuries have brought new striving, which the Lady of the Court could never know. The daughter of to-day endeavours to be worthy of the knightly wors.h.i.+p--to be royal in her heart and queenly in her giving; to be the exquisitely womanly woman he sees behind her faulty clay, so that if the veil of illusion he has woven around her should ever fall away, the reality might be even fairer than his dream.
Through the sombre pages of history the knights and ladies move, as though woven in the magic web of the Lady of Shalott. Tournament and s.h.i.+eld and spear, the Round Table and Camelot, have taken on the mystery of fables and dreams.
[Sidenote: By Grace of Magic]
Yet, by the grace of magic, the sweet old story lives to-day, unforgotten, because of its single motive. Elaine still dies for love of Lancelot, Isolde urges Tristram to new proofs of devotion, and Guenevere, the beautiful, still shares King Arthur's throne. For chivalry is not dead--- it only sleeps--and the n.o.bleness and valour of that far-off time are ever at the service of her who has found her knight.
The Lost Art of Courts.h.i.+p
[Ill.u.s.tration]
The Lost Art of Courts.h.i.+p
[Sidenote: Liberty of Choice]
Civilisation is so acutely developed at present that the old meaning of courts.h.i.+p is completely lost. None of the phenomena which precede a proposal would be deemed singular or out of place in a platonic friends.h.i.+p. This state of affairs gives a man every advantage and all possible liberty of choice.
Our grandparents are scandalised at modern methods. ”Girls never did so,” in the distant years when those dear people were young. If a young man called on grandmother once a week, and she approved of him and his prospects, she began on her household linen, without waiting for the momentous question.
Judging by the fiction of the period and by the delightful tales of old New England, which read like fairy stories to this generation, the courts.h.i.+ps of those days were too leisurely to be very interesting.
Ten-year engagements did not seem to be unusual, and it was not considered a social mistake if a man suddenly disappeared for four or five years, without the formality of mentioning his destination to the young woman who expected to marry him.
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