Part 20

“I was the laziest creature, The most unprofitable sign of nothing, The veriest drone, and slept away my life Beyond the dormouse, till I was in love! And now I can outwake the nightingale, Outwatch an usurer, and out-walk him too, Stalk like a ghost that haunted ’bout a treasure, And all that fancied treasure, it is love.”—BEN JONSON.

Active Gallantry has been sufficiently characterised in the foregoing pages. It is that form of the Desire to Please which readily merges into Self-Sacrifice. A man who would never dream of exposing himself to the slightest danger in his own behalf will, if his sweetheart expresses admiration of a flower growing near a dangerous precipice, rush to pluck it with an audacity which may cost him his life. A fatal case of this sort occurred not long ago on the Hudson River near New York. A man’s life thrown away for the slight æsthetic gratification to be derived by his love from the sight and fragrance of a flower!

How frequently, again, do lovers sacrifice their family bonds, the love of parents and relatives, as well as rank and fortune, for the sake of the romantic passion!

A mother willingly dies in defence of her offspring’s life. But will she, like Romeo, drink the apothecary’s poisonous draught over the corpse of her dead darling? No, herein again Romantic Love is the deepest of the passions.

_Feminine Devotion._—Self-Sacrifice is one of the traits of Romantic Love which may remain unaltered and unweakened in conjugal affection. “Those who have traced the course of the wives of the poor,” says Mr. Lecky, “and of many who, though in narrowed circumstances, can hardly be called poor, will probably admit that in no other class do we so often find entire lives spent in daily persistent self-denial, in the patient endurance of countless trials, in the ceaseless and deliberate sacrifice of their own enjoyments to the wellbeing or the prospects of others.”

It is in Wagner’s music-dramas that the modern ideal of feminine devotion unto death has found its most stirring embodiment. Elizabeth, having lost her Tannhäuser, thanks to the allurements of Venus, dies of a broken heart; Senta, realising that only by her self-sacrifice can the unhappy Dutchman be released from his terrible doom of eternally sailing the stormy seas until he should find a woman faithful to him unto death, tears herself away from her family and plunges into the ocean. Isolde sings her death-song over the body of Tristan; and Brünnhilde immolates herself on Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Wagner’s theory of the music-drama was a theory of Love in which each lover sacrifices selfish idiosyncrasies in order to produce a happy union in marriage.

Mr. Mill, forgetting the difference between masculine maltreatment of women, and voluntary female self-denial, thought it expedient to sneer at the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character; and those unsexed viragoes who wish to “reform” women by robbing them of all womanly attributes and converting them into caricatures of masculinity, re-echo Mill’s sneer in shrill chorus. Women, they shout, must no longer waste their best years in staying at home, educating their children and taking care of their husbands. These brutes have been caressed and fondled long enough; the time has come for women to be manly and independent. Let them take away from men the employments, of which even now there are not enough for three-fourths of the men; let them thus drive another 20 per cent of men and women into celibacy because the men cannot afford any longer to marry. Let the women strip off their artificial air of domestic refinement by mingling with the foul-mouthed, tobacco-reeking crowds and making political stump speeches; or by visiting the loathsome criminals in prisons, treating them to cakes and flowers and other methods of feminine reform, so that when set free they may be eager to do something which will bring them back to their cakes and flowers! The children meanwhile being left at home in charge of coarse, ignorant, careless servants, copying their manners, and the husband compelled to seek companionship at the club, or much worse.

How the selfish husband will wince under this cold neglect and retaliation—he who never does anything but amuse himself while his wife toils at home; who never risks his life in war for his wife and children; who never toils at his desk from morn to night, to earn the daily bread of all by the sweat of his brow; who never goes to lunatic asylums from overwork and worry! How sly in man to set up his “artificial ideal of woman’s self-abnegation,” while he is having such a good time! But why try to paint in weak prose the hideousness of man’s selfish conduct, when Shakspere has done it in immortal verse?

“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee, And for thy maintenance commits his body To painful labour both by sea and land, To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe; And craves no other tribute at thy hands But love, fair looks and true obedience; Too little payment for so great a debt.”

There is another very curious aspect of Self-Sacrifice which will be fully discussed in the chapter on Schopenhauer’s Theory of Love, but which may be stated here, without comment, that the reader may reflect on the pessimist’s paradox. Schopenhauer held that Love is based on the possession by the lovers of traits which mutually complement each other. In the children these incongruous traits will so neutralise each other as to produce a harmonious result; but in the life of the parents they will produce only discords. True love, therefore, as he claims, rarely results in a happy conjugal life: Love causes the parents to sacrifice their mutual happiness to the welfare of their offspring.

Meanwhile it may be stated that France offers a curious confirmation of Schopenhauer’s theory, not noted by himself. Romantic Love, it is well known, hardly exists in France _as a motive to marriage_, being systematically suppressed and craftily annihilated. Nevertheless, as many observers attest, the French commonly lead a happy family life. But look at the offspring, at the birth-rate, the lowest in Europe; look at the puny men, at the women, among whom there is hardly a single beauty in all the land. In a word, whereas Love sacrifices, according to Schopenhauer, the parents to the children, the French sacrifice the offspring, and Love itself, to the happiness of the individuals, married according to motives of personal expediency.

EMOTIONAL HYPERBOLE

“I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum.”

“It is a strange thing,” says Bacon, “to note the excess of this passion, and how it braves the nature and value of things by this, that the _speaking in a perpetual hyperbole_ is comely in nothing but in love.”

It is the nature of all passions to exaggerate: and Love, being of all passions the most violent, exaggerates the most—more even than Hate, which alone competes with Love in the power to tinge every object with the colour of its own spectacles. The lover’s constant sigh is for something stronger than a superlative; and to the limit between the sublime and the ridiculous he is absolutely blind. Like Schumann, every lover calls his Clara “Clarissima,” and of two superlative facts he is quite certain: That _she_ is the most wonderful being ever created; and that _his_ passion is the deepest ever felt by mortal.

“Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars! One fairer than my love! The all-seeing sun Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun.” SHAKSPERE.

If you try to convince him that others have loved as ardently—and ceased to love, he will smile a cynical smile and then close his eyes and declaim melodramatically—

“And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry— Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.”—BURNS.

In such hyperbolic effusions a lover sees no exaggeration, for they describe his feelings and convictions precisely as they are.

“What we mortals call romantic, And always envy though we deem it frantic” (BYRON)

is to him bare reality, nothing more. Romeo expresses his real wish for the moment when he says—

“O that I were a glove upon that hand That I might touch that cheek;”

Byron really feels that

“O, if the streets were paved with thine eyes Her feet were much too dainty for such tread.”

And every lover would agree with Coleridge that

“Her very frowns are fairer far Than smiles of other maidens are.”

“The air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy,” wrote Keats to his sweetheart; and Burns, in the sketch of his first love, thus describes the emotional hyperæsthesia produced by Love: “I didn’t know myself why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Æolian harp, and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious rattan when I looked and fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles.”

This is the true ecstasy of Love—the most delicious and thrilling emotion of which the human soul is capable. Nor is it necessary to be a poet to feel it. While in Love even a coarser-grained man “feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily in his veins” (Emerson). But if Jealousy rouses him, it is flower-blood no longer that courses in his veins, nor human blood, but vengeful Spanish wine. It is then that Love’s intoxication reaches its climax: delirious ecstasy followed by angry waves of dire despair, rocking and tossing the unhappy victim till he is pale and sick as death.

Like other drunkards, the Love-intoxicated youth sees and feels everything double. His darling seems doubly beautiful, and all his joys and sorrows are doubled in intensity. And, like other drunkards, he imagines that all the world is drunk and reeling; whereas the rapid oscillation of surrounding objects between the rosy hue of hope and the gray cloud of doubt, is all in his own mind.

How this erotic intoxication multiplies the lover’s courage and confidence in his success! The most insignificant smile raises him over all obstacles to the summit of his hopes, as easily as a cloud-shadow climbs a mountain side o’er treetops, rocks, and snowy walls.

How, on her part, it magnifies his heroism, his genius, converting the most insipid commonplace into an immortal epigram, full of wit and wisdom!

That Lovers’ Hyperbole is nothing but Love-intoxication shows itself also in the ludicrous tasks they undertake when under the spell. Who but a lover would ever attempt to gild refined gold, to paint the lily white, the sky blue? Who mix up physiology, astronomy, gastronomy, in such an absurd way as in “sweet-heart,” “honey-moon,” etc.?

And when, during the “honey-moon,” the lover recovers from his intoxication, how surprised he looks, how he rubs his eyes and wonders where the deuce he has been! He remembers Ovid’s caution that after wine every woman seems beautiful; he remembers something about seeing “Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.” And the girl by his side—he thought she _was_ Helen; but now, “really—this is most extraordinary: just look at that large mouth, and that snub-nose—well, I knew she had it, and thought I loved her all the more for this imperfection, which proved her human and not a goddess: yet, by Jove, I almost wish ... in fact, I _quite_ wish, her mouth was smaller and her nose larger.”

Poor deluded youth! He was taken in by Cupid’s favourite trick of dazzling a lover with a pair of brown or blue orbs, till he can see nothing else. For this girl, beyond question, has a pair of eyes which Venus might envy—mid-ocean-blue, with a dewdrop sparkle, and a mischievous expression that is more commonly found in brown eyes; and these deep-blue eyes are framed in with black brows and long black lashes, without which no eyes are ever perfect, whatever their colour. It was these expressive orbs, this visible music of the spheres, that ravished all his senses and made him blind to every other feature of her countenance.

Thus we see how Love comes to be blind. One feature—most commonly the eyes—dazes the victim so completely that all the other features are seen but vaguely as in a dream; while the imagination is ever busy in chiselling them into harmony with the fine eyes. And it is only after marriage, or assured possession, that the other features emerge from their blurred vagueness, and are found less perfect than the fond imagination had painted them.

In this eagerness of Love to see only superlative excellence, and its disposition to imagine a thing perfect if it is not, we get a deep insight into the mission and _raison d’être_ of this passion. If women and men would only try to live up to Love’s exalted ideal of personal perfection—and most persons _could_ be 50 per cent more beautiful, if they attended to the laws of hygiene and cultivated their minds—what a lovely planet this would be!

Why have so many of the greatest men of genius been unhappy in their Love and Marriage? Because they had in their minds the loveliest visions of possible feminine perfection, but did not find them realised in life. For a while their pre-eminently strong imaginations helped them to keep up the illusion; but the truth would out at last; and in the pangs of disappointment they threw themselves upon the poetic device of Hyperbole, and tried to console themselves by painting the images of perfection which did not exist in life.

Love, it is true, is not the only theme which they have embellished with the ornaments of Hyperbole. A wonderful example of non-erotic Hyperbole occurs in Macbeth—

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.”

But as a rule the finest specimens of poetic imagery are to be found in erotic Hyperbole; and it seems most strange that Goldsmith, who had so deep an insight into Love, does not mention this variety at all in his essay on Hyperbole.

Love, says Emerson, is “the deification of persons”; and though the poet, like every other lover, “beholding his maiden, half-knows that she is not verily that which he worships,” this does not prevent him from idealising her portrait, and sketching her as he would like to have her. A few additional specimens of such poetic Hyperbole may fitly close this chapter—

SHAKSPERE—

“She is mine own, And I as rich in having such a jewel As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl, The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.”

SOUTHWELL—

“A honey shower rains from her lips.”

MARLOWE—

“O, thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”

And again—

“Many would praise the sweet smell as she past, When ’twas the odour which her breath forth cast; And there for honey bees have sought in vain, And, beat from thence, have lighted there again.”

Or, as Lamb puts it, lovers sometimes

“borrow language of dislike; And instead of ‘dearest Miss,’ Jewel, honey, sweetheart, bliss, And those forms of old admiring. Call her cockatrice and siren, Basilisk and all that’s evil, Witch, hyena, mermaid, devil, Ethiop, wench, and blackamoor, Monkey, ape, and twenty more; Friendly traitress, loving foe,— Not that she is truly so, But no other way they know A contentment to express, _Borders so upon excess_, That they do not rightly wot, _Whether it be pain or not_.”

MIXED MOODS AND PARADOXES

“That they do not rightly wot, whether it be pain or not.” That is the keynote of Modern Love.

To a superficial Anakreon, who knows but its rapturous phase, Love is all honey and moonshine. The celibate Spinoza, too, ignorant of the agonies of Love, defined it as _lætitia concomitante idea causæ externæ_—a pleasure accompanied by the idea of its external cause. Burton, on the other hand, claims Love as “a species of melancholy”; and Cowley sings—

“A mighty pain to love it is, And ’tis a pain that pain to miss; But of all pains the greatest pain It is to love, but love in vain.”

The poets generally have taken a less one-sided view of the matter by depicting Love under a thousand images, as a mysterious _mixture_ of joy and sadness, of agony and delight.

So Bailey—

“The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.”

DRYDEN—

“Pains of love be sweeter far Than all other pleasures are.”

FLETCHER—

“Thou bitter sweet, easing disease How dost thou by displeasing please?”

MIDDLETON—

“Love is ever sick, and yet is never dying; Love is ever true, and yet is ever lying; Love does doat in liking, and is mad in loathing, Love, indeed, is anything, yet indeed is nothing.”

DRAYTON—

“Amidst an ocean of delight For pleasure to be starved.”

“’Tis nothing to be plagued in hell But thus in heaven tormented.”

CONSTABLE—

“To live in hell, and heaven to behold, To welcome life, and die a living death, To sweat with heat, and yet be freezing cold, To grasp at stars, and lie the earth beneath.”

SOUTHWELL—

“She offereth joy, but bringeth grief; A kiss——where she doth kill.”

“Tears kindle sparks.”

“Her loving looks are murdering darts.”

“Like winter rose and summer ice.”

“May never was the month of love, For May is full of flowers; But rather April, wet by kind, For love is full of showers.”

SHAKSPERE—

“Good-night, good-night, parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.”

“Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes; Being vex’d, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears; What is it else? a madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet.”

Petrarch’s poems, says Shelley, “are as spells which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is the grief of love.” In that part of the _Romance of the Rose_ which was written by Jean de Meung, and translated by Chaucer, occur many similar phrases depicting Love as an _emotional paradox_: “Also a sweet hell it is, and a sorrowful paradise;” “delight right full of heaviness, and drearihood full of gladness;” “a heavy burden light to bear;” “wise madness,” “despairing hope,” etc. Mr. Ruskin, who quotes the whole passage in his _Fors Clavigera_, declares: “I know of no such lovely love-poem as his since Dante.”

As for Dante, he fully realised the “sweet pain” of Love, as he called it. As far back as Plato’s _Timæus_ we find that love, as then understood, was regarded as “a mixture of pleasure and pain.”

“’Tis the pest of love,” sings Keats, “that fairest joys bring most unrest.” Thackeray speaks of “the delights and tortures, the jealousy and wakefulness, the longing and raptures, the frantic despair and elation, attendant upon the passion of love.” But it is superfluous to cite modern authors, for volumes might be filled with quotations attesting that Love is neither a simple “lætitia,” as Spinoza defined it, nor “a species of melancholy,” but a mixture of joy and sadness, of rapture and woe.

Shakspere’s “_violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy_” might be adopted as a general motto for a book on the psychology and history of Love.

Love, it is true, is not the only passion characterised by such a paradoxical mixture of moods. Thus in _Macbeth_ the sentence, “on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy,” does not refer to Love; and John Fletcher, too, sings in a general way—

“There’s naught in this life sweet If man were wise to see’t, But only melancholy, O sweetest Melancholy!”

A German author, Oswald Zimmermann, has even written a volume of almost two hundred pages, wherein he endeavours to analyse various emotions and historic phenomena, in which pleasure and pain are intimately associated. He has chapters on the Beautiful in Art and in Nature, on Death, on Mysticism, on the ancient festivals of Dionysus and Aphrodite, on the mediæval flagellants, on lust and cruelty, on various epochs of modern literature, etc. His book bears the curious title _Die Wonne des Leids_, because he holds that there is in these phenomena an “Ecstasy of Woe,” distinct from pleasure and pain, pure and simple, and superior to them.

Hartmann, the pessimist philosopher, goes a step farther, and claims that “there is _no_ pleasure which does not contain an element of grief; and no pain without a tinge of pleasure.” This is obviously an exaggeration; for what is the element of anguish that enters into the feelings of a successful lover when he imprints the first kiss on the lips of the girl who has just promised to be his wife? or what the element of pleasure in the feelings of a jealous lover the moment he hears that his rival has won the prize?

Yet, if we except a pleasurable or painful climax, like these, Hartmann’s maxim may be accepted as approximating the truth, especially in the case of Love, which, more than any other passion, constantly changes its moods, so that, from their close proximity, each one cannot fail to rub off some of its colour on the others. Who but a lover can experience in one brief second both the thrill of heavenly delight and the sting of deadly anguish—“Himmelhoch jauchzend zum Tode betrübt,” as Schiller puts it? A whole lifetime of emotion is crowded into the one night preceding a lover’s proposal: hope and fear chasing one another across his weary brain like a Witches’ Sabbath on the Brocken.

One would imagine that the moment when an admirer calls on his girl, to be fascinated by her smiles and graceful manners, and to be thrilled by her melodious voice, must be one of unmixed delight and ecstasy. But if the slightest doubt as to her feelings lurks in his mind, he is much more apt to be harassed by a peculiar bitter-sweet feeling. Will he make a good impression on her this time? he will ask himself; has she perhaps changed, or found another more acceptable admirer, and is she going to hint as much by her altered manner? These and a hundred other apprehensions will torture and depress him; so that he will more than probably lose that “easy manner and gay address” which are such mighty weapons in winning a woman’s heart.

Nor is the girl, on her part, free from the anguish of doubt. Though her admirer seems to be truly devoted to her, she has read in the song that “all men are not gay deceivers,” which somehow seems to imply logically that most men _are_ gay deceivers. Perhaps, she will muse, he will only worship me as long as I leave him in absolute doubt as to my feelings; and subsequently, having gratified his vanity and secured my photograph, he will place it in his album to show to all his friends as his latest conquest, and then flit to another flower.