fact is that nothing
is so easy as falling in love and staying there. It is a very common
experience, so common that it attracts little attention. The course of
true love usually runs so smoothly that there is nothing that causes
remark. It is not an occasion of gossip. Two good-tempered and healthy
persons are obviously made for each other. They know it, and everybody
else knows it, and they keep on knowing it, and act, as Joe Gargery
would say, "similar, according."

The trouble is that the literary man finds that this does not afford
exciting material for a best seller. So he must invent hazards to make
the game interesting to the spectators. In a story the course of true
love must not run smooth or no one would read it. The old-time romancer
brought his young people through all sorts of misadventures. When all
the troubles he could think of were over, he left them abruptly at the
church door, murmuring feebly to the gentle reader, "they were happy
ever after."

The present-day novelist is offended at this ending. "How absurd!" he
says. "They are still in the early twenties. The world is all before
them, and they have time to fall into all sorts of troubles which the
romanticist has not thought of. Middle age is just as dangerous a period
as youth, and matrimony has its pitfalls. Let me take up the story and
tell you how they didn't live happily ever afterwards, but, on the
contrary, had a cat-and-dog life of it."

Now I would pardon the novelist if he were perfectly honest and were to
say, "Ladies and gentlemen, I am trying to interest you. I have not the
skill to make a story of placid happiness interesting. So I will do the
next best thing. I will tell you a story of a different kind. It is the
picture of a kind of life that is easier to make readable."

In making such a confession he would be in good company. Even
Shakespeare, with all his dramatic genius, confessed that he could not
avoid monotony in his praise of true love. Its ways were ways of
pleasantness, but did not afford much incentive to originality.

"Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
'Fair, kind, and true' is all my argument,
'Fair, kind, and true' varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent."