Now to my definition. Negatively, love is not a disorder of the mind and
body, not a madness, since it arises in the eternally most valuable,
since it is the culmination of high processes, and since it makes for
sanity of vision and strength and happiness. Positively, love is the
awakening of the personality to the beauty and worth of some one being,
caused by the passion for perpetuation and by imagination. It is a
desire to hold to the good everlastingly, and to merge with it.
Aristotle proved to the satisfaction of his time that women have fewer
teeth than men. Aristotle was a great man, and besides being a
philosopher was the foremost scientist of his day. I cannot help
thinking of this prodigious blunder. Perhaps (who knows?) the same
famous fate which a sexual classification of teeth enjoys awaits a
definition calling love a disorder.
I will continue to-morrow. A note has just been given me calling me to
Earl, who is ill, but not seriously. Barbara has prescribed for him a
game of chess. The desire to see you again has got into my blood. I
think I shall be in the new West and with you before long.
Your friend always,
DANE KEMPTON.
XVI
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
LONDON.
Sunday morning.
I must proceed with the three other points of my letter, so I shall stay
here and write, though there is a sharp breeze this morning and a
coquettishly escaping sunlight, and something tugs at me to go out upon
the city streets. It is not restlessness, but the love of the open. I am
fain to leave a walled house, and, better still, to get outside of the
walls within and join the city in friendship and let the city join me. I
never feel greater fellowship than when I walk--
Except when I write to you. Then do I greaten with the pride of life. My
sympathies quicken and I grow young again. I constitute myself advocate
of the world, and enthusiasm does not fail me in this high calling. It
is but natural that in the face of scepticism which I cannot share I
should feel greater faith, that in the face of revilement a sense of the
glory of the thing belittled should settle upon me. I turn zealot and
spend myself in long-drawn praising. I lay myself under a spell of
harmony because I am serving and defending and approving what I hold to
be good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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