Like everything else in this world, love has its comic side.  Nothing could be more amusing, surely, than the pride some men and women exhibit at having secured for life a mate whom most persons would not care to own a day.  The idealizing process just described is responsible for this comedy; and a very useful thing it is, too; for did not the lover’s fancy magnify the merits and minify the faults of the beloved, the number of marriages would not be so large as it is.  Pride is a great match-maker.  “It was a proud night with me,” wrote Walter Scott,

“when I first found that a pretty young woman could think it worth her while to sit and talk with me hour after hour in a corner of the ball-room, while all the world were capering in our view.”

Such an experience was enough to attune the heart-strings to love.  The youth felt flattered, and flattery is the food of love.

A MYSTERY EXPLAINED

Pride explains some of the greatest mysteries of love.  “How could that woman have married such a manikin?” is a question one often hears.  Money, rank, opportunity, lack of taste, account for much, but in many instances it was pride that first opened the heart to love; that is, pride was the first of the ingredients of love to capitulate, and the others followed suit.  Probably that manikin was the first masculine being who ever showed her any attentions.  “He appreciates me!” she mused.  “I admire his taste—­he is not like other men—­I like him—­I love him.”

The compliment of a proposal touches a girl’s pride and may prove the entering-wedge of love; hence the proverbial folly of accepting a girl’s first refusal as final.  And if she accepts, the thought that she, the most perfect being in the world, prefers him above all men, inflates his pride to the point of exultation; thenceforth he can talk and think only in “three pil’d hyperboles.”  He wants all the world to know how he has been distinguished.  In a Japanese poem translated by Lafcadio Hearn (G.B.F., 38) a lover exclaims: 

     I cannot hide in my heart the happy knowledge that fills it;
     Asking each not to tell, I spread the news all round.

IMPORTANCE OF PRIDE

To realize fully how important an ingredient in love pride is, we need only consider the effect of a refusal.  Of all the pangs that make up its agony none is keener than that of wounded pride or vanity.  Hence the same lover who, if successful, wants all the world to know how he has been distinguished, is equally anxious, in case of a refusal, to keep it a secret.  Schopenhauer went so far as to assert that both in the pain of unrequited love and the joy of success, vanity is a more important factor than the thwarting of sensual desires, because only a psychic disturbance can stir us so deeply.

Shakspere knew that while there are many kinds of pride, the best and deepest is that which a man feels in his love.  Some, he says, glory in their birth, some in their skill, some in their wealth, some in their body’s force, or their garments, or horses; but