Englishman speaks of “true love,” he usually means something that has no passion at all; he means a perfect friendship which grows up between man and wife and which has nothing to do with the passion which brought the pair together.  But when the English poet speaks of love, he generally means passion, not friendship.  I am only stating very general rules.  You see how confusing the subject is, how difficult to define the matter.  Let us leave the definition alone for a moment, and consider the matter philosophically.

Some very foolish persons have attempted even within recent years to make a classification of different kinds of love—­love between the sexes.  They talk about romantic love, and other such things.  All that is utter nonsense.  In the meaning of sexual affection there is only one kind of love, the natural attraction of one sex for them other; and the only difference in the highest for of this attraction and the lowest is this, that in the nobler nature a vast number of moral, aesthetic, and ethical sentiments are related to the passion, and that in lower natures those sentiments are absent.  Therefore we may say that even in the highest forms of the sentiment there is only one dominant feeling, complex though it be, the desire for possession.  What follows the possession we may call love if we please; but it might better be called perfect friendship and sympathy.  It is altogether a different thing.  The love that is the theme of poets in all countries is really love, not the friendship that grows out of it.

I suppose you know that the etymological meaning of “passion” is “a state of suffering.”  In regard to love, the word has particular significance to the Western mind, for it refers to the time of struggle and doubt and longing before the object is attained.  Now how much of this passion is a legitimate subject of literary art?

The difficulty may, I think, be met by remembering the extraordinary character of the mental phenomena which manifest themselves in the time of passion.  There is during that time a strange illusion, an illusion so wonderful that it has engaged the attention of great philosophers for thousands of years; Plato, you know, tried to explain it in a very famous theory.  I mean the illusion that seems to charm, or rather, actually does charm the senses of a man at a certain time.  To his eye a certain face has suddenly become the most beautiful object in the world.  To his ears the accents of one voice become the sweetest of all music.  Reason has nothing to do with this, and reason has no power against the enchantment.  Out of Nature’s mystery, somehow or other, this strange magic suddenly illuminates the senses of a man; then vanishes again, as noiselessly as it came.  It is a very ghostly thing, and can not be explained by any theory not of a very ghostly kind.  Even Herbert Spencer has devoted his reasoning to a new theory about it.  I need not go further in this particular than to tell you that in a certain way