x. Granted
that it is caused by romantic love, romantic love is still exclusively
the best thing in the world. You cannot pay too dearly for the good of
life. I know that the misery of being in the intimacy of wedlock with
one who is not loved is unutterable. It is to become degraded and
unrecognisable, it is to wear the brand of liar before God! The man
whose outer life belies the inner is an enforced suicide. There is
something of majesty on "laying one's self down with a will," and there
is something of strength in cloistering the body for the spirit's
health's sake, but to die when all within is warm and clamorous for life
is terrible. Such a death they die who are held together, not by the
bonds of the spirit, but by those of convention. They who would go from
each other and dare not, die the ignominious death of fear. The suicide
is contemptible, besides being pitiable, when he is hounded out of life
despite himself, when he is a little embezzler of a clerk who rushes
from the music hall to the Thames and thinks of the unfinished glass
with his last breath. No, I do not underestimate the tragedy of the
paradox. Yet I say that if love were accountable for it (which it is
not), it would still be folly to forswear love. Do you ask why? Because
its dangers are the dangers common to all life, and we are so made that
we cannot be frightened away from our portion of experience. We are as
loth to give up our nights as our days. The winters as the summers, all
the seasons and all the climes, the fears as the hopes, all the travail
of deepest, fullest living, we claim as our own forever. We guard
jealously our heritage of feeling. Would you for all the world sleep
rather than wake, forget rather than remember? Then cease the requiem
of your speech about the dangers of disillusion!

Madness and selfishness were the cause of Louisa Naveret's death, and
the man who was mad and selfish was her lover. The poor man had not the
strength to renounce when he thought he found himself face to face with
the necessity of renouncing. But all lovers are not too weak to cope
with love. John Ruskin, if you remember, loved his wife, and he shot
neither himself, nor her, nor Millais. Charles J. Johnson is not a
Ruskin, and Ruskin's love was not a madness.

And, Herbert, to me there is nothing comic in a stress of feeling. Let
the lover pale and flutter and faint; in the presence of his deity it is
an acceptable form of worship. The very self