THERE is a subject which has an abiding interest for all men and women who are not too old to love; it is Constancy. I suppose there are few questions on which any half-dozen intelligent people will express such different opinions, and it is doubtful whether any of the six (unless there be amongst them one who is very young and inexperienced) will divulge his, or her, true thoughts thereanent. Almost all women, and most men, seem to think they are morally bound to declare themselves to be very mirrors of constancy, and each is prepared to shower scorn and indignation on the erring mortal convicted of change of feeling. The only feeling I here refer to is the declared love of man for woman, of woman for man.

The other day a friend, writing to me, said, with admirable candour, “Do not think my heart is so small that it can only contain love for one man,” and I know that she means one man at a time. The maze surrounding this suggestion is attractive; let us wander in it for awhile, and if we become bewildered in its devious turns, if we lose ourselves in the intricacies of vague phrases, we may yet win our way back to reason by the road of hard, practical fact.

In the spring of life, when the fancies of the young man and the girl “lightly turn to thoughts of love,” I suppose the average lover honestly believes in the doctrine of eternal constancy, for himself and the object of his affections, and words will almost fail him and her to describe their contempt for the frail creature who has admitted a change of mind; worse still, if the change includes a confession of love for a new object. Coquette, jilt, faithless deceiver, breaker of hearts, ruthless destroyer of peace of mind,—words of opprobrium are not sufficient in quantity, or poisonous enough in quality, to satisfy those from whose lips they flow with the violence and destructive force of a river in flood.

Now, suppose this heaven-mated couple proceeds to extremities—that is, to marriage. And suppose that, after quite a short time, so short that no false note has ever been heard to mar the perfect harmony of their duet of mutual praise and rapture, one of them dies, or goes mad, or gets lost, or is put into prison for a long term of years;—will not the other find a new affinity? It happens so often that I think it must be admitted as a very likely possibility. When convention permits of an outward and visible application, and plaster is put over the wound, most of the very virtuous say, “and an excellent thing, too.”

There, then, we arrive at once at the possibility of change; the possibility of A, who once swore deathless love and fealty to B, swearing the same deathless love and fealty to X. It happens, and it has high approval.

Now go a little step further, and suppose that the excellent couple of whom I first spoke perpetrate matrimony, and neither of them dies, or goes mad, or gets into prison. Only, after a longer or shorter time, they become utterly bored with each other; or one finds the other out; or, what is most common, one, and that one usually the woman, for divers reasons, comes to loathe the married state, all it implies and all it exacts. Just then Satan supplies another and a quite different man, who falls naturally into his place in the situation, and the play runs merrily along. B’s deathless love and fealty for A are thrown out of the window, and what remains is pledged, up to the very hilt, to that spawn of the Evil One, the wrecker of happy homes, Z. It can hardly be denied that this also happens.

I come, then, to the case of the affianced but unmarried lovers, where one, or both, perceives in time that the other is not quite all that fancy painted; realises that there is a lover, “for showy,” and a disagreeable companion and master “for blowy”: a helpful daughter, a charming sweetheart one day, and a very selfish, not to say grasping, spit-fire on another. Or, across the distant horizon, there sails into the quiet waters of this love-locked sea a privateer, with attractions not possessed by the ordinary merchant vessel, and, when the privateer spreads its sails again, it carries with it a willing prize, leaving behind a possibly better-found and more seaworthy craft to indulge its wooden frame with a burst of impotent fury and despair. B’s deathless love has been transplanted to a more congenial soil, and, after a space, A will find another and a better helpmate, and both will be satisfied,—for a time.

If one may love, and marry, and lose, and love again; if one may love, and promise to marry, but, seeing the promise means disaster, withdraw it, to love elsewhere; if one may love and the love be choked to death, or frozen to entire absence of feeling, and then revive under the warmth of new sympathy to live and feel again—if all these things may be, and those to whom the experience comes are held to be no more criminal than their fellows, surely there may be love, real love, honestly given with both hands, as honestly clasped and held, and yet—and yet—a time may come when, for one of a thousand reasons, or for two or three, that love will wane and wane until, from illumining the whole firmament of those within its radiance, it disappears and leaves nothing but black, moonless night. But, by-and-by, a new moon of love may rise, may wax to equal splendour, making as glorious as before everything on which it shines; and the heart, forgetting none of the past, rejoices again in the present, and says, “Life is good; let me live it as it comes.” If that be possible, the alternate day and night of love and loss may succeed each other more than twice or thrice, and yet no charge, even of fickleness, may fairly lie at the door of him or her to whom this fate may come unsought.

To love, as some can love, and be loved as well in return; to trust in the unswerving faith, the unassailable loyalty, the unbounded devotion of another, as one trusts in God, in the simple laws of nature, in anything that is absolutely certain; and then to find that our deity has feet of clay, that our perfect gem has, after all, a flaw, is a very bad experience. Worse than all, to lose, absolutely and for ever, and yet without death, a love that seemed more firmly rooted and grounded in us than any sacred principle, more surely ours than any possession secured by bolt and bar—that is a pain that passeth the understanding of those who have not felt it. Add to this the knowledge that this curse has come upon us as the result of our own work—folly, blind, senseless, reckless confidence, or worse—that is the very acme of human suffering. It is not a thing to dwell upon. On the grave of a love that has surpassed, in the perfection of its reality, all the dreams of imagination, and every ideal conjured out of depths of passionate romance, grow weeds which poison the air and madden the brain with grisly spectres. It is well to “let the dead bury their dead”—if we only can.

There, I am at the end; or is it only the close of a chapter? I suppose it must be the latter, for I have but now come to my friend’s proposition, namely, that of love distributed amongst a number of objects; all perhaps different, yet all in their way, let us hope, equally worthy. I know how she explains it. She says she loves one man because he appeals to her in one way, another in another; and as there are many means of approach to her heart, so there are many who, by one road or another, find their way to it. After all, she is probably more candid than singular in the distribution of her affection. How many worldlings who have reached the age of thirty can say that they have not had a varied experience in the elasticity of their affections, in the variety of shrines at which they have worshipped? Aphrodite and Athene and Artemis for the men; Phoebus and Ares and Hermes for the women; and a host of minor deities for either. Minor chords, delicate harmonies, charming pages of melody between the tragic scenes, the carefully scored numbers, the studied effects, which introduce the distinguishing motifs of the leading characters, in that strange conception wherein is written all the music of their lives.

We are told that the sons of God took unto themselves wives from the daughters of men. Do you believe they left no wives, no broken faith, in heaven, before they came to earth to seek what they could not find above the spheres? What form of marriage ceremony do you suppose they went through with those daughters of men? Was it binding until death, and did that last trifling incident only open the door to an eternity of wedded bliss in the heaven from which earthly love had been able to seduce these sons of God? I fear there is proof of inconstancy somewhere. There is clear evidence of a desire for change, and that is usually taken to be a synonym for inconstancy, as between the sexes. The daughters of men have something to answer for, much to be proud of; but I hardly see why either they, or their menkind, who never drew any loving souls down from the safe heights of heaven to be wives to them, should be expected to make a choice of a partner early in life and never waver in devotion to that one, until death has put them beyond the possibility of temptation. It does happen sometimes; it is beautiful, enviable, and worthy of all praise. But when the heart of man or woman, following that most universal law of nature, change, goes through the whole gamut of feeling, from indifference to passionate love, and later retraces its steps, going back over only a few of them, or to a place, beyond indifference, where dislike is reached, there seems no good reason why that disappointed, disillusioned soul should be made the object of reproach, or the mark for stones, cast by others who have already gone through the same experience or have yet to learn it.

If we claim immortality, I think we must admit our mutability. Perhaps the fault is not all ours. It is written:—

I do not seek to persuade you; it is a subject we often discuss, on which we never agree. I only state the facts as I know them, and I am for the truth!—even though I wish it were not true—rather than for a well-sounding pretence, which usually covers a lie. I have believed; I have seen what, with my life, I would have maintained was perfect, changeless love; and I have seen that love bestowed, in apparently equal measure, on another; while, sometimes, the first affection has died utterly, or, at others, it has never died at all, and the wavering heart, divided in allegiance, has suffered agonies of remorse, and at last begged one object of its devotion to shun it for ever, and so help it “to be true to some one.”

There you find a result almost the same as that so candidly confessed by my friend; but the phases through which either will pass to arrive at it are utterly different. Fate and circumstances, the prolonged absence of the lover, misunderstandings, silence, and the ceaseless, wearing efforts of another to take the place of the absent—the absent, who is always wrong;—these things will loosen the tightest bond, when once the enemy at the gate has established a feeling of sympathy between himself and the beleaguered city. If at last there is a capitulation, it is only when the besieged is au bout de ressources; only made in extreme distress, only perhaps under a belief of abandonment by one on whom the city relied for assistance in its dire need.

My candid friend has no regrets, passes through no phases of feeling, sees no harm, means none, and for herself is probably safe. Only her heart is large and warm; she desires sympathy, intellectual companionship, amusement, passionate adoration. She gets these things, but not all from the same man, and she is prepared to give love in return for each, but it is love with a wise reservation. Sometimes she cannot understand why the objects of her catholic affections are not equally satisfied with the arrangement, and she thinks their discontent is unreasonable. She will learn. Possibly, as she acquires knowledge, she may change. Nothing is more certain than that there is, if not always, very very often, the widest difference in the world between the girl of twenty and the woman of thirty. It is a development, an evolution,—often a startling one,—and if men more often realised what is likely to come, waited for it, and understood it when it arrived, there would be a deal less unhappiness in the world.

That, however, is another question, about which I should like to talk to you on another day, for it has interest.

Of love, and change in the object of love, I think you will not deny the possibility. If you have never known such change, you are the exception, and out of your strength you can afford to deal gently with those weaker vessels whose feelings have gone through several experiences. But has your faith never wavered? Have your affections been set on one man, and one only; and are they there to-day, as strong, as single-hearted, as true and as contented as ever? I wonder; pardon me if I also doubt!

I have spoken only of those cases where the love that was has ceased to be; ceased altogether and gone elsewhere, or so changed from what it was, that it no longer knits together those it once held to the exclusion of all others. But I might remind you that there are many other phases, all of which imply change, or at least such difference as must be counted faithlessness. Your quick intelligence can supply a multitude of instances from the unfortunate experiences of your friends, and I will only cite one that is not altogether unheard of. It is this; when two people are bound by the ties of mutual love, and fate divides them by time and distance, it sometimes happens that one will prove faithless in heart, while remaining firmly constant in deed. That is usually the woman. The other may be faithless in deed; but he says to himself (and, if he has to confess his backsliding, he will swear the same to his lady) that his affections have never wavered. He often does not realise that this statement, the truth of which he takes such trouble to impress upon his outraged goddess, adds to the baseness of his deed. It is curious, but it is true, that the woman, if she believes, will pardon that offence, while she would not forgive the heart-faithlessness of which she is herself guilty. He is not likely to learn that her fealty has wandered; he takes a good deal for granted, and he does not easily believe that such things are possible where he is concerned; but, should he suspect it, should she even admit that another has aroused in her feelings akin to those she had hitherto only felt for him, he will hold that aberration from the path of faith rather lightly, though neither tears nor blood could atone for a faithless deed, such as that of which he stands convicted.

Woman realises that if man’s lower nature takes him into the gutter, or even less unclean places, he will not hanker after whatever it was that attracted him when once his temptation is out of sight. She despises, but she estimates the disloyalty at its right value in a creature for whose want of refinement she learns to feel a certain contempt. Man, busy about many other things, treats as trivial a lapse which implies no smirch on his honour; and he, knowing himself and judging thereby, says, “Out of sight, out of mind.” It seldom occurs to him that, where the woman’s heart has been given away from him, he has already lost at least as much as his utmost dread; and even that is more likely to follow, than he to return to one who has never aroused in him any feeling of which he cares to think. Therefore, he is inclined rather to be amused than distressed; and, still mindful of his own experiences, he dismisses the matter from his thoughts with almost a sense of satisfaction. But he is wrong: is he not?

Of course I am not thinking of the jealous men. They are impossible people whom no one pities. They never see that, while they make themselves hateful to every one who is unhappily thrown into contact with them, they only secure their own misery. I believe there are men who are jealous of the door-mat. These are beyond the help of prayer.