true love is never utilitarian. i am well aware that, in novels and in plays, the fair heroine considerately falls in love with the brave man who, at a critical moment, saves her from a watery grave or from the lurid horrors of a burning building. it is very good of the lady in the novel. i admire the gratitude which prompts her romantic affection, and, nine times out of ten, my judgement cordially approves her taste. i know, too, that, in fiction, the sick or wounded hero invariably falls desperately in love with the devoted nurse whose patient and untiring attention ensures his recovery. it is very good of the hero. again i say, i admire his gratitude and almost invariably endorse his choice. but it must be distinctly understood that this sort of thing is strictly confined to novels and theatricals. in real life, men and women do not fall in love out of gratitude. as a matter of fact, i am much more likely to fall in love with somebody for whom i have done something than with somebody who has done something for me.
47i was talking the other day with a nurse in a children’s hospital. it is a heartbreaking business, she told me. ‘you get into the way of nursing them, and comforting them, and playing with them, and mothering them, until you feel that they belong to you. and then, just as you have come to love the little thing as though he were your own, out he goes. and he always goes out with his father or his mother, clapping his hands for very joy at the excitement of going home, and you are left with a big lump in your throat, and perhaps a tear in your eye, at the thought that you will never see him again!’ clearly, therefore, we do not fall in love as a matter of gratitude. the people who cling to us and depend upon us are much more likely to win our hearts than the people who have placed us under an obligation to them. if, instead of telling us that the heroine fell in love with the man who had saved her from drowning, the novelist had told us that the man who risked his life by plunging into the river fell in love with the white and upturned face as he laid it gently on the bank; or if, instead of telling us that the patient fell in love with the nurse, he had told us that the nurse fell in love with the patient upon whom she had lavished such beautiful devotion, he would have been much more true to nature and to real life. it is indisputable, of course, that, the rescuer having 48fallen in love with the rescued, she may soon discover his secret, and, since love begets love, reciprocate his affection. it is equally true that, the nurse having conceived so tender a passion for her patient, he may soon read the meaning of the light in her eye and of the tone in her voice, and feel towards her as she first felt towards him. but that is quite another matter, and is beside our point at present. just now, i am only concerned with challenging the novelist’s unwarrantable assumption that we fall in love out of gratitude. we do nothing of the kind. love, i repeat, is never utilitarian. we may fall hopelessly in love with a thing that is of very little use to us; and we may feel no sentimental attractions at all towards a thing that is almost indispensable. if any man dares to dispute these conclusions, i shall simply produce a roll of linoleum in support of my arguments, and he will be promptly crushed beneath the weight of argument that the linoleum will furnish.
the linoleum is the most conspicuous feature of the domestic establishment. it is impertinent, self-assertive, and loud. if you visit a house in which there is a linoleum, the thing rushes at you, and you see it even before the front door has been opened. every minister who spends his afternoons in knocking at people’s doors knows exactly what i mean. the very sound of the knock tells you a good deal. such 49sounds are of three kinds. there is the echoing and reverberating knock that tells you of bare boards; there is the dead and sombre thud that tells of linoleum on the floor; and there is the softened and muffled tap that tells of a hall well carpeted. and so i say that the linoleum—if there be one—rushes at you, and you seem to see it even before the door has been opened. perhaps it is this immodesty on its part that prevents your liking it. it is always with the coy, shy, modest things that we fall in love most readily.
but however that may be, the fact remains. since this queer old world of ours began, men and women have fallen in love with all sorts of strange things; but there is no record of any man or woman yet having really fallen in love with a roll of linoleum. of everything else about the house you get very fond. i can understand a man shedding tears when his arm-chair has to go to the sale-room or the scrap-heap. robert louis stevenson once told the story of his favourite chair until he moved his schoolboy audience to tears! and everybody knows how dickens makes you laugh and cry at the drollery and pathos with which, in all his books, he invests chairs, tables, clocks, pictures, and every other article of furniture. i fancy i should feel life to be less worth living if i were deprived of some of the household odds and ends with which all my felicity 50seems to be mysteriously associated. but i cannot conceive of myself as yielding to even a momentary sensation of tenderness over the sale, destruction, or exchange of any of the linoleums. i feel perfectly certain that neither stevenson nor dickens would ever have felt an atom of sentiment concerning linoleum. yet why? few things about the house are more serviceable. i could point offhand to a hundred things no one of which has earned its right to a place in the home one-hundredth part as nobly as has the linoleum. yet i am very fond of each of those hundred things, whilst i am not at all fond of the linoleum. i appreciate it, but i do not love it. so there it is! said i not truly that love is never utilitarian? we grow fond of things because we grow fond of things; we never grow fond of things simply because they are of use to us.
but we cannot in decency let the matter rest at that. there must be some reason for the failure of the linoleum to stir my affections. why does it alone, among my household goods and chattels, kindle no warmth within my soul? the linoleum is both pretty and useful; what more can i want? many things pretty, but not useful, have swept me off my feet. many things useful, but not pretty, have captivated my heart. and more than once things neither pretty nor useful have completely enslaved me. yet here is the linoleum, both pretty 51and useful, and i feel for it no fondness whatsoever; i remain as cold as ice, and as hard as adamant. why is it? to begin with, i fancy the pattern has something to do with it. i do not now refer to any particular pattern; but to all the linoleum patterns that were ever designed. those endless squares and circles and diamonds and stars! could anything be more repelling? here, for instance, on the linoleum, i find a star. i know at once that if i look i shall see hundreds of similar stars. they will all be in perfectly straight lines, not one a quarter of an inch out of its place. they will all be mathematically equidistant; they will be of exactly the same size, of identically the same colour, and their angles will all point in precisely the same direction. if the stars in the firmament above us were arranged on the same principle, they would drive us mad. the beauty of it is that, there, one star differeth from another star in glory. but on the linoleum they do nothing of the sort.
or perhaps the pattern is a floral one. it thinks to coax me into a feeling that i am in the garden among the roses, the rhododendrons, or the chrysanthemums. but it is a hopeless failure. whoever saw roses, rhododendrons, or chrysanthemums, all of exactly the same size, of precisely the same colour, and hanging in rows at mathematically identical levels? the beauty of the garden is 52that having looked at this rose, i am the more eager to see that one; having admired this chrysanthemum, i am the more curious to mark the variety presented by the next. no two are precisely the same. and because this infinite diversity is the essential charm both of the heavens above and of the earth beneath, i am shocked and repelled by the monotony of the pattern on the linoleum. in the old days it was customary to plaster the walls, even of sick-rooms, with papers of patterns equally pronounced, and many a poor patient was tortured almost to death by the glaring geometrical abominations. the doctor said that the sufferer was to be kept perfectly quiet; yet the pattern on the wall is allowed to scream at him and shout at him from night until morning, and from morning until night. he has counted those awful stars or roses, perpendicularly, horizontally, diagonally, from right to left, from left to right, from top to bottom, and from bottom to top, until the hideous monstrosities are reproduced in frightful duplicate upon the fevered tissues of his throbbing brain. he may close his eyes, but he sees them still. it was a form of torture worthy of an inquisitor-general. the pattern on the linoleum is happily not quite so bad. when we are ill we do not see it; and when we are well we may to some extent avoid it. not altogether; for even if we do not look at it, we have an uncanny feeling 53that it is there. between the hearthrug and the table i catch sight of the bright flaunting head of a scarlet poppy, or of the tossing petals of a huge chrysanthemum, and my imagination instantly flashes to my mind the horrible impression of tantalizing rows of exactly similar blossoms running off with mathematical precision in every conceivable direction.
for some reason or other we instinctively recoil from these monotonous regularities. i once heard a friend observe that the average woman would rather marry a man whose life was painfully irregular than a man whose life was painfully regular. it may have been an over-statement of the case; but there is something in it. we fall in love with good people, and we fall in love with bad people; but with the man who is ‘too proper,’ and the woman who is ‘too straight-laced,’ we very, very rarely fall in love. it is the problem of tennyson’s ‘maud.’ as a girl maud was irregular—and lovable.
maud, with her venturous climbings and tumbles and childish escapes,
maud, the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the hall,
maud, with her sweet purse-mouth when my father dangled the grapes,
maud, the beloved of my mother, the moon-faced darling of all.
54but later on maud was regular—and as unattractive as linoleum.
... maud, she has neither savour nor salt,
but a cold and clear-cut face, as i found when her carriage passed,
perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her: where is the fault?
all that i saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen)
faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
dead perfection, no more.
shall i be told that this is high doctrine, and hard to bear, this doctrine of the lovableness of irregularity? i think not. towering above all our biographies, as snowclad heights tower above dusty little molehills, there stands the life-story of one who, alone among the sons of men, was altogether good. it is the most charming and the most varied life-story that has ever been written since this little world began. its lovely deeds and graceful speech, its tender pathos and its awful tragedy, have won the hearts of men all over the world, and all down the ages. but find monotony there if you can! it is like a sky full of stars or a field of fairest flowers. the life that repels, as the linoleum repels, by the very severity of its regularity, has something wrong with it somewhere.
55if i have outraged the sensibilities of any well-meaning champion of a geometrical and mathematical and linoleum-like regularity, let me hasten to conciliate him! i know that even regularity—the regularity of the linoleum pattern—may have its advantages. dr. george macdonald, in robert falconer, says that ‘there is a well-authenticated story of a notorious convict who was reformed by entering, in one of the colonies, a church where the matting along the aisle was of the same pattern as that in the church to which he had gone with his mother as a boy.’ bravo! it is pleasant, extremely pleasant, to find that even monotony has its compensations. let me but get to know my ‘too proper’ and ‘straight-laced’ friends a little better, and i shall doubtless discover even there a few redeeming features.
but, for all that, the linoleum is cold; and we do not fall in love with cold things. a volcano is a much more dangerous affair than an iceberg; but it is much more easy to fall in love with the things that make you shudder than with the things that make you shiver. that was the trouble with maud, she was so chilly and chilling; her ‘cold and clear-cut face, faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null!’ and that is precisely the trouble with every system of religion, morality, or philosophy—save one—that has ever been presented to the minds of men. plato and aristotle and marcus 56aurelius were splendid, simply splendid; but they were frigid, frigid as maud, and their counsels of perfection could never have enchained my heart. buddha, confucius, mohammed—the stars of the east—were wonderful, but oh, so cold! i turn from these icy regularities to the lovely life i have already mentioned. and, to use whittier’s expressive word, it is ‘warm.’
yes, warm, sweet, tender, even yet
a present help is he;
and faith has yet its olivet,
and love its galilee.
‘warm’ ... ‘love’ ... here are words that touch my soul to tears. ‘we love him because he first loved us.’ the monotony and frigidity of the linoleum have given way to the beauty and the brightness of flowery fields all bathed in summer sunshine.
