Part 18

Inasmuch as in moments of elation over success of any kind a man feels as if nothing were beyond his power, an accepted lover is as proud (I suppose) as if he had conquered not only one girl, but the whole feminine kingdom—or queendom: for surely the one chosen by him is the cleverest and most beautiful of all; whence it follows that all the inferior ones would of course have been only too proud if he had condescended to pay his addresses to them.

Why do great men so often marry women who are not especially attractive as to personal appearance, when often they might have had their choice among a group of beauties? Because the spoiled beauties did not understand the art of flattery, sincere or otherwise. Every man wishes to be considered either a creative genius or a hero. The woman who knows how to touch the sympathetic chord, to make each one’s particular kind of Pride vibrate, has him at her feet in an instant.

In conjugal life the most ludicrous of all sights is the royal self-complacency with which a man accepts the eager worship of his wife.

Conversely, a rejected lover’s heart bleeds from so many wounds that it is difficult to count them; but of all these wounds the one inflicted by the jealous thought that she will now marry another is alone deep as that of his offended Pride. The sense of superiority which every man feels over every other man is crushed, and cannot be laid as a flattering unction to the soul. Hence a girl who refuses a proposal and does not at least keep it a secret, is not only quite as mean, but a thousand times more cruel than a man who will “kiss and tell.”

_Coquetry._—Yet of all secrets the compliment of an offer is the hardest for a woman to keep; so, in strictest confidence, she tells it to only one solitary person, who ditto, who ditto, who ditto, etc. etc. etc. etc. and so on.

There is a class of women whose sole pleasure in life appears to be derived from vanity gratified by offers of Love and Marriage. Of all the elements of Love—and there are at least eleven—her soul is affected by one alone—the overtone of Pride. The Coquette has already been superficially examined, and distinguished from the Flirt. But this is the place where she must be placed under the microscope and more closely examined. A great many distinguished observers have dissected her, and here are a few of their discoveries.

Congreve lets her off easily—

“’Tis not to wound a wanton boy, Or amorous youth, that gives the joy; But ’tis the glory to have pierced the swain For whom inferior beauties sighed in vain.”

Fielding is less lenient: “The life of a coquette is one constant lie.” “The coquette,” says Mr. T. B. Aldrich—"all’s one to her; above her fan she’d make sweet eyes at Caliban." According to Victor Hugo, “God created the coquette as soon as He had made the fool;” and Byron asks, “What careth she for hearts when once possessed?” When Moore wrote—

“More joy it gives to woman’s breast To make ten frigid coxcombs vain, Than one true manly lover blest;”

he had evidently just left the chill atmosphere of a coquette. “A coquette,” says A. Duprey, “is more occupied with the homage we withhold than with that which we bestow upon her.” “Coquettes are the quacks of love,” says Rochefoucauld. “Heartlessness and fascination, in about equal proportions, constitute,” according to Mme. Deluzy, “the receipt for forming the character of a coquette.” And Poincelot caps the climax: “An asp would render its sting more venomous by dipping it into the heart of a coquette.”

There are masculine as well as feminine Coquettes; but there is one striking difference between them. To the female Coquette all is game that gets into her net; she will turn away from a man of genius, an Apollo, already at her feet, to fascinate a rough and freckled country lad at first sight; whereas a male Coquette rarely wastes his powder on a girl who isn’t pretty. And even herein is seen the superiority of man’s Love to woman’s. The male Coquette is actuated by Admiration of Beauty as well as by Pride; the female Coquette by Pride alone.

Cannibals have a quaint old custom of eating certain parts of a formidable enemy’s body, in the belief that they will thus inherit his qualities,—as by eating his tongue, his eloquence; his heart, his courage. What a delicious gastronomic morsel a Coquette’s heart would be to these savages, whose principal amusement is cruelty!

Perhaps the best description ever given of a Coquette is Thackeray’s portraiture of Beatrix—"A woman who has listened to" her admirers, “and played with them and laughed with them,—who, beckoning them with lures and caresses, and with Yes smiling from her eyes, has tricked them on to their knees, and turned her back and left them.”

_Love and Rank._—Not so many years ago the newspapers of a certain European country made a great deal of ado about a forthcoming marriage between a blue-blooded youth and a ditto maiden, for the reason that it was “a real Love-match.” Poor princes! so rarely are they allowed to choose their own Juliet, they who are supposed to be the rulers of the land. Until quite recently, it is true, public opinion on the Continent sanctioned a Love-marriage between an aristocrat and a non-aristocrat _provided it was unlawful_, _i.e._ morganatic, a special royal euphemy for bigamy; but now even this privilege is abolished, and princes can marry one of equal rank only, in pursuance of a custom more tyrannical, more restrictive than the parental command on which marriage-unions depended in ancient and mediæval times.

German novelists have made considerable progress in their art in recent years, but in one respect it seems to be very difficult for them to substitute realism for romance. In every love story, almost, one of the leading characters must be either a prince or a princess. As if it were not the very essence of a prince and a princess that they shall not be allowed to love and marry for Love—unless they are clever enough to fall in Love with the partner singled out for them, which happens once in a hundred times, perhaps.

But it is not only in the highest circles that aristocratic Pride is opposed to free Sexual Selection. It extends through a hundred scales of the social ladder. Germany presents a remarkable example. The metaphysician Eduard von Hartmann credits the government of that country with great astuteness. Not having much money to pay its officials, it has established a legion of distinctions of rank and titles, for the sake of which the officials are quite willing to forego a larger salary. Of the ludicrous conceit inspired by this distinction of having even the slightest kind of a “handle” to their name, I can give an amusing instance from my own experience. Some years ago, desiring to see the Intendant, or Manager, of the Munich Opera-house, I entered a little room, marked Portier, and found that gentleman comfortably seated, _with his cap on_. He took my card, on which there was no “handle” of any sort, and replied sternly, “The Intendant is in; I will send up your card;” adding, more severely still, “And, young man, let me tell you, that when you come into the presence of _a royal official_, it behoves you to remove your hat!”

Harmless as such childish vanity may seem, it is yet one of the reasons why there are fewer good-looking women in Germany than in most European countries—France always excepted. For a girl, whose father wears on his coat the order of the black eagle, to marry a young man whose father only has the order of the green eagle, would be considered an unpardonable _mésalliance_, and would scandalise the whole neighbourhood. Of course it does not make much difference in a woman’s own looks whether she marries a man she loves or one whom she can barely tolerate, and who is forced on her by parental desire and public opinion, but it does make a difference with her children; and even in her own case, is it not self-evident that the smile of pleasure at being happily married is a better preservative of youthful beauty than the constant frown of disappointment, perhaps of disgust?

The highest treason against Cupid, however, is committed by those American women, who, without the excuse of inherited custom, come to Europe with their money to marry a baron. Fortunately such marriages have almost always ended so wretchedly that the fashion has somewhat lost its popularity. What is a baron? Perhaps a man whose great-great-great-grandfather “lent” some duke or king a few thousand gold pieces, in return for which he was allowed to place “von” or “de” before his name. And on the strength of this little word the family Pride has gone on steadily increasing through various generations—or rather, degenerations.

Physiology is not usually considered an ironic science, but it cannot help writing a satire when it teaches that “blue” blood is venous blood, charged with the waste products of the bodily tissues. How much better than this irony would iron be, _i.e._ some fresh, _red_, arterial blood infused in the bodies of the Continental aristocracy. The English aristocracy, on the other hand, presents one of the finest types of manhood and womanhood; and the reason is suggested by Darwin: “Many persons are convinced, as appears to me with justice, that our aristocracy, including under this term all wealthy families in which primogeniture has long prevailed, from having chosen during many generations _from all classes_ the more beautiful women as their wives, have become handsomer, according to the European standard, than the middle classes.”

Vivid as the feeling of pride must be in a man of humble origin who has succeeded in winning the Love of a woman of a higher social grade; and greatly as a Coquette must be tickled in counting off the number of hearts offered to her, on her fingers if she has enough to go round: yet the climax of Lover’s Pride, it seems to me, must be reached by a man of noble birth who, scorning mediæval puerilities, marries the girl who has won his heart, and were she but a plump, rosy-cheeked peasant girl. This vivid feeling was doubtless realised by the Grand Duke of Austria when he married Philippine Welser, by the Duke of Bavaria when he married Maria Pettenbeck.

SPECIAL SYMPATHY

Thanks to the social instinct, our pains are halved, our pleasures doubled, if we can share them with others. The proverb that misery loves company expresses only half the truth; happiness, too, loves company. The late King of Bavaria used to enjoy an opera most if he was the sole spectator in the house; but most persons would lose half their pleasure in this way. Nor is this a purely imaginary feeling; for in a successful performance there are moments when the intensely-silent and universal absorption seems to raise a magnetic wave, which crosses the house and makes all nerves vibrate and thrill in unison. Again, if a man whom constant attendance at places of amusement has rendered _blasé_, happens to sit next to a young girl who visits the theatre for the first time, the emotional play of her features, by reviving the memory of his first experiences, enables him to share her feelings sympathetically, and thus to enjoy the performance doubly. And is it not a universal experience that if we witness sublime or beautiful scenes—if we approach the Niagara Falls in a small boat from below, or if, standing on the top of the Breithorn near Zermatt, we see almost the whole of Switzerland and the Tyrol, parts of France and Italy, down to Lago Maggiore, at the same moment—almost our first thought is, “Oh, if So-and-so could only see me now and share this wondrous sight with me!”

Nor is this instinctive craving for Sympathy absent in the mind of the poet who _prefers_ to be alone with Nature; on the contrary, it is even deeper in his case. For to him Nature is personal; he

“Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones;”

nor does Nature refuse her sympathy; for does she not harmonise with all his moods, looking gloomy if he is sad, bright if he is cheerful?

From these general manifestations of emotional partnership Lover’s Sympathy differs in being omnipresent and more exclusively concentrated on one person. There is an association of emotions as well as of ideas: and as every idea of excellence recalls _her_ Perfection, so every emotion inspired by a beautiful object calls up the image of _the_ Beauty _par excellence_. Thus Love gets the benefit of all these associated emotions—waggon-loads of kindling wood.

_How Love intensifies Emotions._—But is it literally true that in Love, as Mr. Spencer puts it, “purely personal pleasures are doubled by being shared with another?” It is true; though the way in which this is done is difficult to explain. No psychologist, so far as I am aware, has cracked the nut. I have given considerable thought to the subject, and venture to offer the following three suggestions as to the method by which Love doubles our pleasures:—

(1) The lover’s pleasures are increased by the simple process of _emotional addition_. That is, supposing him to be reading a poem or story to his beloved, he will experience at one and the same moment not only the emotions inspired by the poem or novel he is reading, but those due to the sense of her presence. As the mind does not stop to analyse its feelings at such moments, all these various pleasurable emotions will coalesce into one seemingly homogeneous feeling of happiness; just as two complementary colours, or all the colours of the rainbow, if mixed, will produce the simple sensation called white.

(2) The second way in which sympathetic companionship intensifies a lover’s feelings is through what may be called _emotional resonance_. If you take a violin-string in your hands, stretch it tightly, and then get some one to pluck it, a very faint sound only will be heard. But put it in its proper place, over the resonant surface of the instrument, and it will produce a full, loud, mellow tone. A human countenance is such an instrument—a sort of emotional sounding-board. Every man feels more or less pleased with himself if he gets off at table what he considers a wise or witty remark. If the sounding-boards of his neighbours vibrate responsively to his jokes, he feels proud and is doubly pleased; but if they only grin politely, the tone of his self-satisfaction is immediately lowered an octave and dies away pianissimo. Now between lovers such a fiasco is absolutely impossible. _They_ never grin at one another’s sayings for the sake of politeness merely. His most platitudinous remarks are sure to start a symphony of smiles on her countenance, where another man’s wittiest epigrams would be barely rewarded with a slight curl of the lips; and as for him, she may say anything she pleases, he never knows what she says but hears only the music of her voice—as if her words were the text, the rising and falling of her voice the melody, of an Italian opera. No wonder lovers are so exclusively interesting to each other, and such unmitigated bores to other people.

Unfortunately lovers’ sympathy is rarely complete or durable. Sooner or later some difference of taste or opinion is discovered which has the same effect as a crack in the sounding-board—the resonance is destroyed. Yet it can be restored by using glue; and violin-builders will tell you that a glued instrument is often better than one which has never had a crack.

(3) Thirdly, Love intensifies human feelings by producing a state of _emotional hyperæsthesia_, or supersensitiveness, which has the effect of a microphone in multiplying the loudness of every impression. Music teachers whose acoustic nerves are rendered excessively irritable by overwork; students whose eyes, from reading late at night, are in the same condition, are annoyed by sights and sounds which ordinary mortals barely notice. But Love with its sleepless night daily fevers, and prolonged fastings is more potent than any other cause in producing such a state of extreme sensitiveness to every impression. Lovers’ souls may therefore be aptly compared to Æolian harps. If you leave the strings of such an instrument in a state of very loose tension, they resemble the souls of ordinary mortals not in Love: for it takes a very strong breeze to elicit any sound from them. But raise them to a higher state of tension, like the souls of lovers, and the faintest breath of air will cause them to sound in sympathetic unison all their harmonics—which is another name for _overtones_.

_Development of Sympathy._—Not only does Love thus owe much of its unique intenseness to Sympathy, but there are weighty reasons for believing that Love has already played an important _rôle_, and is destined to play a still more important one, in modifying the meaning of Sympathy and in extending its influence to society in general.

When the absence of true Romantic Love among savages was being pointed out more emphasis should have been placed on the fact that they seem to be utter strangers to sympathy. Far from sharing another’s delights and sorrows, a savage takes an intense delight in witnessing a man enduring the agonies of deliberate torture. Cruelty seems to give him the same thrill of joy that sympathetic assistance gives to a refined person.

How are we to account for this strange delight in another’s sufferings? By noting the extreme coarseness and callousness of the primitive man’s nerves. Just as some savages are known to have such hardened hides and lungs that they can sleep naked in a snowstorm with impunity, where a white man would be sure to perish of cold or subsequent pneumonia; so the savage requires the coarsest of stimulants to make any impression on his sluggish emotions. The sight of an enemy tied to a tree and being flayed alive tickles his nerves by suggesting his own comfortable freedom in comparison, and by showing him an enemy absolutely in his power; while his imagination is not sufficiently vivid to enable him to put himself in the other’s place to feel his contortions and suppressed moans re-echoing in his own soul.

And have we not in our very midst thousands of so-called civilised beings who require stimulants almost as coarse as the savage to amuse their dull imaginations?—people who would hesitate to pay silver for a book, a concert, or an art exhibition, but gladly give gold to witness the execution of a criminal or an exhibition of animals torturing one another to death. To suppose that such people can ever fall in Love—Romantic Love—is more than absurd.

Children represent this savage stage of the evolution of sympathy; as their imagination, like all their mental powers, is still in embryo. Nothing delights the average boy so much as a chance to torture a beetle, a cat, or a dog. And Mr. Galton somewhere refers to the sense of blood-curdling produced on him and other sensitive persons in the London Zoological Gardens at the sight of snakes devouring living animals. “Yet,” he adds, “I have often seen people—nurses, for instance, and children of all ages—looking unconcernedly and amusedly at the scene.”

To substitute Sympathy for this delight in torture—to arouse the sluggish imagination from its thousand years’ sleep, and quicken its sense of suffering in man and animals—is one of the greatest problems of moral culture, and—so far as man is concerned—forms one of the keynotes of Christianity. St. Paul bids us both to bear one another’s burdens and to rejoice with one another. The second part of his injunction, however, has been comparatively neglected, as is best shown by the circumstance that we have several terms to express the sharing of sorrow (compassion, pity, sympathy), whereas for the sharing of joy there is no special noun in the English language. The Germans have a word for it—_Mitfreude_—yet it rarely occurs out of philosophical treatises. The word Sympathy, which literally means “suffering with,” has also been most commonly used in that sense. But it is now frequently being used in the sense of sharing joy too, and perhaps, despite its etymology, it will, for lack of another word, be chiefly used in this sense in future. Even at present, when persons are spoken of as sympathetic or antipathetic, much less regard is paid to their willingness to bear our burdens or share our sorrows than to the chances of their sharing in our pleasures by having similar tastes and opinions.

For this change in the meaning of Sympathy, Romantic Love must, I believe, be held chiefly responsible. To some extent, no doubt, friends and relatives shared one another’s joys before the advent of Love. Yet even the mother—taking the most favourable case—cannot enter into all her child’s feelings, while to the child most of her mature emotions are utterly incomprehensible; so that we miss here that reciprocation which is the very essence of Sympathy; whereas a lover cannot even conceive a pleasure unless the other shares it—another point in the psychology of Modern Love to which Shakspere has given the most poetic expression—

“Except I be by Sylvia in the night, There is no music in the nightingale.”

Thus we see that there are three stages in the evolution of Sympathy: the first, in which cruelty neutralises it; the second, in which this universal enjoyment of cruelty, with its attendant lack of imagination and altruistic feeling, compelled moralists to lay more stress on the virtue of compassion than on the refining pleasures of mutual enjoyment; the third, the epoch of Romantic Love, in which the positive side of the emotional partnership is specially emphasised, so that a lover cannot pour forth a song of happiness except in the form of a duo.

And this brings us back again to a question left unanswered in the section on Jealousy. A rejected lover’s deepest anguish is the thought that “She will now be happy in another’s arms.” To hear that she has entered a convent and will never enjoy the pleasures of Love denied him would be his only consolation. Is this an aberration of Sympathy, or does it mark its climax—its remorseless logical consistency? The answer lies in the second suggestion. Were Love an altruistic passion, it would be otherwise. _He_ would delight in _her_ happiness under all circumstances. But Love is selfish—a double selfishness; and its sense of justice demands that each side be considered. “If I cannot be happy without her, how can she without me?” The lover does not consider that the passion is one-sided—he cannot fathom that mystery—cannot understand why his flame, which reduces him to ashes, is not strong enough to set her on fire, and were she a stone image.

_Pity and Love._—According to Darwin, one of the chief mental differences between man and woman is woman’s greater tenderness. Of this feminine tenderness the world has been able to judge on a vast scale during the last two or three years.