fellow-travellers in hope and wonder. In such a mood as this does love
grow, not under a brisk battery of slaps for being what, after all, God
seems to have meant us to be. There are many men and women nowadays who
must face the fact that they are not likely to be brought into contact
with transcendental passion. It is for them to decide whether they will
or can accept some lower form of love, some congenial companionship,
some sort of easy commercial union. If they cannot, the last thing that
they should do is to repine; they ought rather to organise their lives
upon the best basis possible. All is not lost if love be missed. They
may prepare themselves to be worthy if the great experience comes; but
the one thing in the world that cannot be done from a sense of duty is
to fall in love; and if love be so mighty and transcendent a thing it
cannot be captured like an insect with a butterfly-net. The more
transcendental it is held to be, the greater should be the compassion
of its interpreters for those who have not seen it. It is not those who
fail to gain it that should be scorned, but only the strong man who
deliberately, for prudence and comfort's sake, refuses it and puts it
aside. It is our great moral failure nowadays that legislation,
education, religion, social reform are all occupied in eradicating the
faults of the weak rather than in attacking the faults of the strong;
and the modern interpreters of love are following in the same poor
groove.

If love were so omnipotent, so divine a thing, we should have love
stories proving the truth and worth of alliances between an Earl and a
kitchen-maid, between a Duchess and a day-labourer; but no attempt is
made to upset conventional traditions which are tamely regarded as
insuperable. "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit
impediment," said Shakespeare; but who experiments in such ways, who
dares to write of them? We are still hopelessly feudal and fastidious.