AFFECTION

One of the ways in which our fears have power to wound us most grievously is through our affections, and here we are confronted with a real and crucial difficulty.  Are we to hold ourselves in, to check the impulses of affection, to use self-restraint, not multiply intimacies, not extend sympathies?  One sees every now and then lives which have entwined themselves with every tendril of passion and love and companionship and service round some one personality, and have then been bereaved, with the result that the whole life has been palsied and struck into desolation by the loss.  I am thinking now of two instances which I have known; one was a wife, who was childless, and whose whole nature, every motive and every faculty, became centred upon her husband, a man most worthy of love.  He died suddenly, and his wife lost everything at one blow; not only her lover and comrade, but every occupation as well which might have helped to distract her, because her whole life had been entirely devoted to her husband; and even the hours when he was absent from her had been given to doing anything and everything that might save him trouble or vexation.  She lived on, though she would willingly have died at any moment, and the whole fabric of her life was shattered.  Again, I think of a devoted daughter who had done the same office for an old and not very robust father.  I heard her once say that the sorrow of her mother’s death had been almost nullified for her by finding that she could do everything for and be everything to her father, whom she almost adored.  She had refused an offer of marriage from a man whom she sincerely loved, that she might not leave her father, and she never even told her father of the incident, for fear that he might have felt that he had stood in the way of her happiness.  When he died, she too found herself utterly desolate, without ties and without occupation, an elderly woman almost without friends or companions.

Ought one to feel that this kind of jealous absorption in a single individual affection is a mistake?  It certainly brought both the wife and daughter an intense happiness, but in both cases the relation was so close and so intimate that it tended gradually to seclude them from all other relations.  The husband and the father were both reserved and shy men, and desired no other companionship.  One can see so easily how it all came about, and what the inevitable result was bound to be, and yet it would have been difficult at any point to say what could have been done.  Of course these great absorbed emotions involve large risks; and it may be doubted whether life can be safely lived on these intensive lines.  These are of course extreme instances, but there are many cases in the world, and especially in the case of women whose life is entirely built up on certain emotions like the love and care of children; and when that is so, a nature becomes liable to the sharpest incursions of fear.  It is of little use arguing such cases theoretically, because, as the proverb says, as the land lies the water flows,—­and love makes very light of all prudential considerations.