kindness; and indeed it may be best defined as passionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run mad and become importunate and violent.  Vanity in a merely personal sense exists no longer.  The lover takes a perilous pleasure in privately displaying his weak points and having them, one after another, accepted and condoned.  He wishes to be assured that he is not loved for this or that good quality, but for himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive to set forward.  For, although it may have been a very difficult thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of art before every one in this world who cares to set about explaining his own character to others.  Words and acts are easily wrenched from their true significance; and they are all the language we have to come and go upon.  A pitiful job we make of it, as a rule.  For better or worse, people mistake our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation.  And generally we rest pretty content with our failures; we are content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a point of honour to clear such dubieties away.  He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance; and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.

He discovers a great reluctance to return on former periods of his life.  To all that has not been shared with her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes and dispositions, he can look back only by a difficult and repugnant effort of the will.  That he should have wasted some years in ignorance of what alone was really important, that he may have entertained the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is a burthen almost too heavy for his self-respect.  But it is the thought of another past that rankles in his spirit like a poisoned wound.  That he himself made a fashion of being alive in the bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is deplorable enough in all good conscience.  But that She should have permitted herself the same liberty seems inconsistent with a Divine providence.

A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically inconvenient.  This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which it merely attends, like an ill-humoured courtier, is itself artificial in exactly the same sense and to the same degree.  I suppose what is meant by that objection is that jealousy has not always been a character of man; formed no part of that very modest kit of sentiments with which he is supposed to have begun the world; but waited to make its appearance in better days and among richer natures.  And this is equally true of love, and friendship, and love of country, and delight in what they call the beauties of nature, and most other things worth having.  Love, in particular, will not endure any historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it is one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you begin to ask what it was in other periods and countries, in Greece for instance, the strangest doubts begin to spring up, and everything seems so vague and changing that a dream is logical in comparison.  Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the consequences of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure; but there it is.

It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we reflect on the past of those we love.  A bundle of letters found after years of happy union creates no sense of insecurity in the present; and yet it will pain a man sharply.  The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each other: but this pre-existence of both occurs to the mind as something indelicate.  To be altogether right, they should have had twin birth together, at the same moment with the feeling that unites them.  Then indeed it would be simple and perfect and without reserve or afterthought.  Then they would understand each other with a fulness impossible otherwise.  There would be no barrier between them of associations that cannot be imparted.  They would be led into none of those comparisons that send the blood back to the heart.  And they would know that there had been no time lost, and they had been together as much as was possible.  For besides terror for the separation that must follow some time or other in the future, men feel anger, and something like remorse, when they think of that other separation which endured until they met.  Some one has written that love makes people believe in immortality, because there seems not to be room enough in life for so great a tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most masterful of our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of a few years.  Indeed, it seems strange; but if we call to mind analogies, we can hardly regard it as impossible.

“The blind bow-boy,” who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleeting generation.  But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and disappears into eternity from under his falling arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one gesture and give one passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment.  When the generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty years’ panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world, we may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying loves, and the sweet-hearts who despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.

IV.—TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE

Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject which is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie.  I wish heartily it were.  But the truth is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly uttered.  Even with instruments specially contrived for such a purpose—with a foot rule, a level, or a theodolite—it is not easy to be exact; it is easier, alas! to be inexact.  From those who mark the divisions on a scale to those who measure the boundaries of empires or the distance of the heavenly stars, it is by careful method and minute, unwearying attention that men rise even to material exactness or to sure knowledge even of external and constant things.  But it is easier to draw the outline of a mountain than the changing appearance of a face; and truth in human relations is of this more intangible and dubious order: hard to seize, harder to communicate.  Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial sense—not to say that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of fact I was never out of England, not to say that I have read Cervantes in the original when as a matter of fact I know not one syllable of Spanish—this, indeed, is easy and to the same degree unimportant in itself.  Lies of this sort, according to circumstances, may or may not be important; in a certain sense even they may or may not be false.  The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife and friends; while another man who never told a formal falsehood in his life may yet be himself one lie—heart and face, from top to bottom.  This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy.  And, vice versâ, veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion—that is the truth which makes love possible and mankind happy.

L’art de bien dire is but a drawing-room accomplishment unless it be pressed into the service of the truth.  The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but