In a rough classification of books on Love one can imagine a large number collected under the heading--"Academic." One looks for something to express that want of plain dealing, of _terre-à-terre_ frankness, which is so deplorable in the literature of Love, and is yet the distinctive mark of so much of it. "Academic" comprehends a wide range of works all based on a more or less set or conventional theory of the passions. It includes the average modern novel, in which convention is supreme and experience negligible--just a traditional, lifeless affair, in which there is not even a pretence of curiosity or love of truth. And, at the same time, "academic" is the label for the kind of book in which convention is rather on the surface, rather in the form than in the matter. Tullia of Aragon, for example, was no tyro in the theory and practice of love, but her _Dialogo d'Amore_ is still distinctly academic. Of course it is easy to be misled by a stiff varnish of old-fashioned phrase; the reader in search of sincerity will look for it in the thought expressed, not in the manner of expression. There is more to be learnt about love from Werther, with all his wordy sorrows, than from the slick tongue of Yorick, who found it a singular blessing of his life "to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with someone." But, then, just because Werther is wordy, all his feelings come out, expressed one way or another. With Tullia, and others like her, one feels that so much is suppressed, because it did not fit the conventional [Pg xii] frame. What she says she felt, but she must have felt so much more or have known that others felt more. This suppression of truth has, of course, nothing to do with the partial treatment of love necessary often in purely imaginative literature. No one goes to poetry for an anatomy of love. Not love, but people in love, are the business of a playwright or a novelist. The difference is very great. The purely imaginative writer is dealing with situations first, and then with the passions that cause them. Here it is interesting to observe that Stendhal, in gathering his evidence, makes use of works of imagination as often as works based upon fact or his own actual experience.[8] Characters from Scott are called in as witnesses, side by side with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse or Mariana Alcaforado.