Love & Passion Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

A sly Victorian eyebrow lifts in that opening: “the world is growing to love a lover.” Le Gallienne isn’t praising romance so much as diagnosing a cultural appetite. The line turns “lover” into a public role, almost a celebrity type, implying that desire has become performative enough to be admired at a distance. Love, here, isn’t private virtue; it’s spectacle with moral clearance.

The newspapers are the tell. By pointing to mass print, he signals a modern shift: intimacy migrating into public narrative, where passion can be packaged as “generous and adventurous” and sold as edifying drama. Those adjectives do quiet ideological work. “Generous” launders appetite into virtue; “adventurous” frames transgression as bravery. He’s noting how the culture learns to root for desire when it’s presented with the right storyline - not sordid scandal, but bold feeling with a faint halo.

Le Gallienne, a fin-de-siecle aesthete with one foot in decadence and the other in a respectable lyric tradition, is reading the moment: late-19th-century constraints still exist, but the public sphere is developing a taste for romantic exception. The subtext is both amused and a little wary. If “the times” are “sympathetic,” it’s because sympathy has become a mood the media can manufacture and distribute. Passion gets a new legitimacy, but also a new audience - and audiences don’t just witness; they reward, punish, and standardize what kinds of love are allowed to look “generous.”