relationship among human beings, and that first place does not belong to love?
• Parents and educators must attend to the emotional education of children, lest they be swayed and led into slipping by what they read and see.
and have learned moderation in the affairs of their lives and the curbing of their unruly instincts.
Concentrated, violent love may become, in certain persons, a manifestation of obstinacy and rigidity, to which love clings in answer to the social resistance and the environmental obstacles it meets. Antar, who was overcome by his love for Abla and made by it into a mighty hero, would never have become so had he found the path of love easy and smooth before him. And the Duke of Windsor would not have been humbled by his love for Mrs. Simpson but for the resistance he met from his family.
Love in its morbid, deadly sense may hold violent sway in primitive environments whose people lack the means of culture and are ruled by instinctive passions, after the pattern of what we see in Flaubert's story Salammbô, which presents us with pictures of the wildness of love among the barbarians, and of the savagery of the other passions bound up with it, such as jealousy, envy, greed, and revenge.
Love may also play a deadly role in the circles of the pampered rich, whose children grow up in softness, ease, and idleness, with nothing to distract them from indulging their inclinations and humoring their whims. If they are barred from some of their demands, or kept from a sweetheart they want, they cannot bear the shock, for they have never been accustomed to denial and discipline. Then the symptoms of psychological disturbance appear in them, driving them to violence and harm, or to wasting away and dissolution.
There are those who claim that love is everything in a woman's life, and that she cannot live without it.
The truth is that love plays a role in the life of the pampered, idle woman, shut up at home with no activity to divert her from drifting into dreams; she is like the idle man lolling in the lap of luxury. As for the woman of limited means, who looks at life with seriousness and reflection, her position differs in nothing from a man's. She subjects love to practical benefit and sees in marriage nothing but a means to comfort, protection, and cooperation in earning a living. Were she given the choice between love and money, she would not hesitate to prefer the latter.
As for love in its sound, pure form, it does not differ from the pure friendship built upon admiration and mutual trust between two persons in understanding and harmony, each respecting the other and finding in his nearness contentment and peace of mind.
Such a feeling between a man and a woman may end in marriage, or may remain a quiet friendship free of love's storms and turbulence. And it—like friendship pure of self-interest—is rare and precious to obtain. Whoever wins it has won a happiness without equal.
Here I return to the novels that distort the reality of life for young men and women and plant illusions
in their minds. Among the responsibilities laid upon the shoulders of parents and educators, I count that of opening the eyes of the rising generation to reality, tending them with a sound emotional education, and guiding them soundly on the basis of knowledge and experience. If this guidance is denied them, there are among them the quickly impressed and the credulous, who surrender to illusions and measure life by the measure of the stories they read, the films they watch, and the songs they hear, and so expose themselves to every manner of error and slipping. Among these are some who turn away from any marriage not founded upon sweeping, fanciful love, and live despairing and tormented—because they fail to find what they seek, or because the love match disappoints their hopes when they discover that emotion is subject to change and passing, and that life does not rest on love alone.
The reading of literature and of the other products of imagination and feeling must be accompanied by a capacity for analysis and criticism, and by experience in judgment, in drawing conclusions, and in telling the true from the false. Failing this, such reading becomes harmful in the extreme.