OCR Text |
Show j Is Thirty ; : tlie Love,p : Irvin S. Cobb was born in Paducah, Ky., In 1876. At nineteen years of age Mr. Cobb wa editor of the Paducah Daily News and later conducted a column in the Louisville Evening Post. Still later he was managing editor of the Paducah News-Democrat. After he made his debut in New York, he worked on the New York Evening Sun, New York Evening World and the Sunday World. For a long I time be was a staff contributor to the Satur- day Evening Post and represented this publication publi-cation in Europe during the World war. He was a major in the Officers' Reserve Corps ui the United States army. Mr. Cobb is married. mar-ried. By IRVIN S. COBB The trouble with a professional alienist is that he never meets' persons. per-sons. He only meets subjects. And the trouble with a professional philosopher is that he tries to measure meas-ure the Infinity of human nature bj the little tape-measure of his own experiences, ex-periences, his own limited observations, observa-tions, his own faulty powers of d-duction. d-duction. The alienist doesn't say: "Here is a seemingly attractive individual. I shall cultivate him. He might make a good friend, a sprightly companion." Not at all. What inwardly he says is: "Here is a case. I shall study its Inhibitions. It may constitute a new type. I might even be able to put it into an article or a lecture." He has a perfectly rotten time, going along through life. He's bound to have. Existence for him is a card-index system, sys-tem, a filing-cabinet full of neatly-labeled specimens, an orderly collection of disordered curios, and this world Is a giddy cosmos wherein all creation is askew and each living creature with the exception of himself and possibly a few of his brother-alienists is mentally men-tally out of focus. On the other hand, the philosopher says: "Ah, here now we have a condition. con-dition. I shall apply to It the processes proc-esses of my own peeu'iar and personal per-sonal Sfhool of philosophy, and hav ing arrived ata conclusion, will broadcast broad-cast It forth as being positively the last word on that particular topic." He has a lovely time of it. Anybody who thinks he's infallible always does have a lovely time of It while he lasts. To be sure, the philosopher Is like the run of us except that we apply to a concrete example our own little separate philosophies, whereas he. In an effort to take in the entire race, the whole universe, spreads himself out so thin that you can look right through him and see his back suspender-buttons. A friend conies to us with a harassing haras-sing private problem. He has reached that deplorable stage where he seeks advice for solving a riddle which, In the final analysis1, only he can solve or should try to solve. He follows an ancient formula. He pays to us: "It you were in my place what would you do about it?" And glibly we answer: "Well, old man, if 1 were you I'd do thus-and-so about It." Now, what we should say, reversing the ritual, Is this: "Well, if you were 1, you meaning 1 probably would do this or that about It. But inasmuch as I am I and you are you, and I am what I am and you are what you are, with different impulses from mine, different dif-ferent heritages, different temperament, tempera-ment, different viewpoint, you'll have to handle this job your own way and, may the Lord have mercy on your 60U1." Now, Dr. Will G. Durant Is a professional pro-fessional philosopher God help him 1 and Doctor Durant Is credited with having said that a man past thirty Is Incapable of love; and 1, as one of a selected group, am asked to answer him, not according to his own folly if he be correctly quoted but according accord-ing to mine own. So far as I am concerned, the task is a very simple one. But before I tackle It, permit me to repeat what the expert and scholarly scholar-ly Doctor Durant wrote in amplification amplifica-tion of his large, bald, bold original premise. He added this: "A man above thirty thir-ty may go wild over a blonde 'chorine.' That is not love. Love is absolute devotion de-votion the des'ire to give full service to another." To which I would reply as follows: I don't know a blamed thing about It. I don't profess to know. I don't believe Doctor Durant knows a blamed thing about it either. I think he makes a mistake but one common to philosophers in setting up to know anything about it. As I looU at It, a man past thirty or a man of any age between the latter lat-ter stages of adolescence anil the early stages of senility, may be capable of love, or then again he may be Incapable Inca-pable of love. Everything depends on what particular man you have In mind. It's like this: You mention, say, a bird and instinctively each one of us thinks of a bird. One thinks of u wren, another of a robin, another of a parrot, a fourth of an ostrich. Each one of us Is thinking of his own bird the Image of a bird which the mention of the word creates In his brain not of the next fellow's bird. l'ou mention love, and to this one love means this tiling and to that one love means another thing. And so on and so forth. I claim that If you think you are in love and think It hard enough, why tiipn you nre In love-only, love-only, it's your own special port of love, which Is not to be confused with any of the billions of other brands of love. And should you go wild over a blonde chorine or a brunette chorine or even a piebald or pinto chorine, and get sufficiently wild over her and stay wild, and she likes 'em wild as so many chorines are reported to do and if further she interprets your emotion emo-tion as love and accepts It as such and repays it in kind, and you for youf own part nre sure it is love, who am I, or for that matter who Is Dr. Will O. Durant, to say that the above article isn't real love, isn't absolute devotion, isn't the desire to give full service? I take it that neither biology nor philosophy nor any other set of rules enter into the equation at all. About loving, as between the sexes, there's nothing rational any more than there is about any other natural phenomenon. It is not bound by precedents nor guided by traditions. It just happens as earthquakes do and colds In the head and changes in the weather. You can't define it by laws; no more can you nail it down with a brass-headed axiom. Who was it said: "All generalities are wrong, including this one"? Whoever Who-ever it was, he spoke quite a chunk. In the very young we call it "puppy love," forgetting that the only period of a normal and healthy dog's life when he shows no amorous interest in the female of the species, is while he still Is a puppy. In the aging we call it an evidence of oncoming dotage manifesting itself in morbidly affectionate affec-tionate behavior, and again we may be wrong and probably are. If we, are so unfortunate as to live long enough, doesn't every one of us sooner or later trade his birthright for a mess of dotage? But some of the philosophers get an early start. So much for broad, all-enveloping conclusions. But if you're asking me to cite my own observations I would say this: I have seen men this side of thirty who, by reason of their selfishness or something, seemed to me incapable of giving to any woman the sort of love which again using Doctor Durant's qualifying definition amounted to absolute ab-solute devotion. I've seen men twice thirty who, as I viewed them from the outside looking in or tried to seemed capable of falling in love with all their hearts and all their souls and all their physical beings. Mind you. I say they seemed to be thus constituted. I don't say they were. I had no way of knowing. Moreover, If it appeared to me logical log-ical that I should take sides and write a brief for one wing of the contention as against the other wing, I would state that when I come to look over the field it strikes me that a good many of the outstanding lovers of the world have been men and women who were past thirty. I'm not exploring Into history for illustrations, although heaven knows the pages of romantic history are studded thick with such illustrations. I'm not going to fall, as It were, back on that distinguished lady go-getter of ancient days, the Empress Cleopatra. I'm not calling up King Solomon or Brigham Young or any of those old heavy sugar-daddies to help me prove my case. Look at the present. Look at Peggy Joyce, the leading bridegroom-fancier of our times. Look at DeWolf Hopper, Hop-per, the Husband of His Country. Look for all I know to the contrary at the average established philosophizing philos-ophizing gent of 1928. I have an elderly friend and a true philosopher although he doesn't know it and vehemently would deny It did you accuse him of being such a thing who, to my way of thinking, summed up the whole matter In a paragraph. That is to say, he summed it up by leaving it open for discussion at both ends, which Is the proper way for leaving all discussions. He was speaking, by Indirection, of his sons-in-law. He was very fond of one of them and not in the least fond of the other. "This here loving business is a funny thing," he said musingly. "Take my two daughters two as sweet girls as you'd find anywheres on this earth. Take it the way it was with them : It was like as if two lovely butterflies come sailing along on a summer's day and one of 'em lit on a tuberose and the other one lit on a manure pile. How're you going to figure out this tiling of falling in love, anyway?" I leave his final question for Doctor Durant and the rest of the world to ponder over. (( 1928. by the Bell Syndicate. Inc.) |