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all the things of a moment.When the generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world, we may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying loves, and the sweet-hearts who despised mortal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 VERSA, 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.
