EN OF LOVE'

A PAINTING BY RUBENS, IN THE PRADO

Here they are met.

Here, by the balustrade, these lords and lusty ladies are met to romp
and wanton in the fulness of love, under the solstice of a noon in
midsummer. Water gushes in fantastic arcs from the grotto, making a
cold music to the emblazoned air, while a breeze swells the sun-shot
satin of every lady's skirt, and tosses the ringlets that hang like
bunches of yellow grapes on either side of her brow, and stirs the
plumes of her gallant. But the very breeze is laden with heat, and the
fountain's noise does but whet the thirst of the grass, the flowers,
the trees. The earth sulks under the burden of the unmerciful sun. Love
itself, one had said, would be languid here, pale and supine, and,
faintly sighing for things past or for future things, would sink into
siesta. But behold! these are no ordinary lovers. The gushing fountains
are likelier to run dry there in the grotto than they to falter in
their redundant energy. These sanguine lords and ladies crave not an
instant's surcease. They are tyrants and termagants of love.

If they are thus at noon, here under the sun's rays, what, one wonders,
must be their manner in the banqueting hall, when the tapers gleam
adown the long tables, and the fruits are stripped of their rinds, and
the wine brims over the goblets, all to the music of the viols?
Somehow, one cannot imagine them anywhere but in this sunlight. To it
they belong. They are creatures of Nature, pagans untamed, lawless and
unabashed. For all they are robed in crimson and saffron, and are with
such fine pearls necklaced, these dames do exhale from their exuberant
bodies the essence of a quite primitive and simple era; but for the
ease of their deportment in their frippery, they might be Maenads in
masquerade. They have nothing of the coyness that civilisation fosters
in women, are as fearless and unsophisticated as men. A 'wooing' were
wasted on them, for they have no sense of antagonism, and seek not by
any means to elude men. They meet men even as rivers meet the sea. Even
as, when fresh water meets salt water in the estuary, the two tides
revolve in eddies and leap up in foam, so do these men and women laugh
and wrestle in the rapture of concurrence. How different from the first
embrace which marks the close of a wooing! that moment when the man
seeks to conceal his triumph under a semblance of humility, and the
woman her humiliation under a pretty