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HOW ROMANTIC LOVE IS METAMORPHOSED

On hearing the words "love letters," does anybody ever think of a
man's letters to his wife? No more than of his letters to his mother.
He may love both his wife and his mother dearly, but when he writes
love letters he writes them to his sweetheart. Thus, public opinion
and every-day literary usage clearly recognize the difference between
romantic love and conjugal affection. Yet when I maintained in my
first book that romantic love differs as widely from conjugal
affection as maternal love differs from friendship; that romantic love
is almost as modern as the telegraph, the railway, and the electric
light; and that perhaps the main reasons why no one had anticipated me
in an attempt to write a book to prove this, were that no distinction
had heretofore been made between conjugal and romantic love, and that
the apparent occurrence of noble examples of conjugal attachment among
the ancient Greeks had obscured the issue--there was a chorus of
dissenting voices. "The distinction drawn by him between romantic and
conjugal love," wrote one critic, "seems more fanciful than real." "He
will not succeed," wrote another, "in convincing anybody that romantic
and conjugal love differ in kind instead of only in degree or place";
while a third even objected to my theory as "essentially immoral!"

Mr. W.D. Howells, on the other hand, accepted my distinction, and in a
letter to me declared that he found conjugal affection an even more
interesting field of study than romantic love. Why, indeed, should
anyone be alarmed at the distinction I made? Is not a man's feeling
toward his sweetheart different from his feeling toward his mother or
sister? Why then should it be absurd or "immoral" to maintain that it
differs from his feeling toward his wife? What I maintain is that
romantic love disappears gradually, to be replaced, as a rule, by
conjugal affection, which is sometimes a less intense, at other times
a more intense, feeling than the emotions aroused during courtship.
The process may be compared to a modulation in music, in which some of
the tones in a chord are retained while others are displaced by new
ones. Such modulations are delightful, and the new harmony may be as
beautiful as the old. A visitor to Wordsworth's home wrote:

"I saw the old man walking in the garden with his wife. They
were both quite old, and he was almost blind; but they
seemed like sweethearts cour