The moral and the ethical sentiments of a being thus aroused call into sudden action all the finer energies of the man—­the capacities for effort, for heroism, for high-pressure work of any sort, mental or physical, for all that requires quickness in thought and exactitude in act.  There is for the time being a sense of new power.  Anything that makes strong appeal to the best exercise of one’s faculties is beneficent and, in most cases, worthy of reverence.  Indeed, it is in the short season of which I am speaking that we always discover the best of everything in the character of woman or of man.  In that period the evil qualities, the ungenerous side, is usually kept as much out of sight as possible.

Now for all these suggested reasons, as for many others which might be suggested, the period of illusion in love is really the period which poets and writers of romance are naturally justified in describing.  Can they go beyond it with safety, with propriety?  That depends very much upon whether they go up or down.  By going up I mean keeping within the region of moral idealism.  By going down I mean descending to the level of merely animal realism.  In this realism there is nothing deserving the highest effort of art of any sort.

What is the object of art?  Is it not, or should it not be, to make us imagine better conditions than that which at present exist in the world, and by so imagining to prepare the way for the coming of such conditions?  I think that all great art has done this.  Do you remember the old story about Greek mothers keeping in their rooms the statue of a god or a man, more beautiful than anything real, so that their imagination might be constantly influenced by the sight of beauty, and that they might perhaps be able to bring more beautiful children into the world?  Among the Arabs, mothers also do something of this kind, only, as they have no art of imagery, they go to Nature herself for the living image.  Black luminous eyes are beautiful, and wives keep in their tents a little deer, the gazelle, which is famous for the brilliancy and beauty of its eyes.  By constantly looking at this charming pet the Arab wife hopes to bring into the world some day a child with eyes as beautiful as the eyes of the gazelle.  Well, the highest function of art ought to do for us, or at least for the world, what the statue and the gazelle were expected to do for Grecian and Arab mothers—­to make possible higher conditions than the existing ones.

So much being said, consider again the place and the meaning of the passion of love in any human life.  It is essentially a period of idealism, of imagining better things and conditions than are possible in this world.  For everybody who has been in love has imagined something higher than the possible and the present.  Any idealism is a proper subject for art.  It is not at all the same in the case of realism.  Grant that all this passion, imagination, and fine sentiment is based upon a very simple animal