For,
indeed, the "fervent, not ungovernable, love," which is the ideal
that Protesilaus is sent to teach, is on a great scale the same
affection which we have been considering in domesticity and peace;
it is love considered not as a revolution but as a consummation; as
a self-abandonment not to a laxer but to a sterner law; no longer as
an invasive passion, but as the deliberate habit of the soul. It is
that conception of love which springs into being in the last canto of
Dante's _Purgatory_,--which finds in English chivalry a noble voice,--
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.
[Footnote 5: _Laodamia_ should be read (as it is given in
Mr. Matthew Arnold's admirable volume of selections) with the _earlier_
conclusion: the _second_ form is less satisfactory, and the _third_,
with its sermonizing tone, "thus all in vain exhorted and reproved,"
is worst of all.]
For, indeed, (even as Plato says that Beauty is the splendour of
Truth,) so such a Love as this is the splendour of Virtue; it is the
unexpected spark that flashes from self-forgetful soul to soul, it
is man's standing evidence that he "must lose himself to find himself,"
and that only when the veil of his personality has lifted from around
him can he recognize that he is already in heaven.
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