A BIOLOGIC TEST

Writers on evolution have a very simple and convenient way of verifying their inferences, by applying the rule—which seems to hold true universally—that the different stages through which an individual passes in his development—physical and mental—correspond to the periods of development through which the whole race has passed.

This principle, applied to our present problem, fits exactly, and proves that the account given in the preceding pages of the development of Love is correct.

Historically we have seen that of all affections Maternal Love is the earliest and (until after Romantic Love appears) the strongest. Then paternal, filial, and fraternal love are gradually developed, followed by friendship (Greek), and finally by Love proper.

Just so with the individual. The baby’s first love is for its mother, whose tender expression and beaming eyes throw the first reflected smile on its face, and touch the first cord of sympathetic attachment. Then the father comes in for his share of attention, followed by sisters and brothers. At school begins the era of friendship, representing “classical” love, and often as ardent and Love-like as among the ancient Greeks. Finally Romantic Love appears on the scene, eclipsing every other emotion. And, like historic Love, it generally passes through a blind, silly, chivalric stage, known as “calf-love,” which at last is succeeded by real, intense romantic passion, that leads to monogamous marriage, the central pillar of modern civilisation.

Not only have we seen that Romantic Love is the latest and the strongest of all affections, but the causes which retarded its development have been indicated. Chief among these were the negation of Individual Preference, and the absence of opportunities for Courtship, already deplored by Plato. As long as women were captured, or bought, or disposed of by father or mother without any reference to their own will, Sexual Selection on the female’s part was of course out of the question; and on the man’s part it was rendered impossible by the absence of Courtship. Wooing a woman was not winning her favour, but impressing her father with a display of wealth or social power. Thus there were no opportunities on her part for the display of personal charms or the cunning art of Coyness, or for inflaming and feeding his passion through Jealousy by bestowing an occasional mischief-making smile on his rivals; there were no lover’s quarrels followed by sweet reconciliations and an increase of Love; no short absences fanning Love with sighs; no alternate feelings of hope and despair, inspired by his or her fickle or uncertain actions; no chance for displays of Gallantry and mutual Self-sacrifice and assistance; no sympathetic exchange and consequent doubling of pleasures, real or anticipated; none, in fact, of the more subtle traits and emotions which make Romantic Love what it is.

VENUS, PLUTUS, AND MINERVA

It cannot be said that these obstacles to Love have been as radically removed as they ought to be. Oriental chaperonage is still rampant in France, to the extinction of all true romantic sentiment. In other countries Parental Tyranny has considerably abated, but the Goddess of Love still has formidable rivals in Plutus, the god of wealth, and Minerva, the goddess of “wisdom” or expediency. Thus it happens that even in the case of persons who are refined enough to experience Love, it is too often absent when they marry; and, as a German pessimist sneeringly points out, no one has yet dared to tempt bride and bridegroom to perjury, by asking when the knot is tied, “Do you love this woman?” “Do you love this man?”

Nevertheless public sentiment is continually making war on Plutus and Minerva, and siding with Venus. Probably the mercantile element in marriage will not die out till a few weeks before the millennium, although Herbert Spencer is optimistic enough to believe it will sooner. “After wife-stealing,” he says, “came wife-purchase; and then followed the usages which made, and continue to make, considerations of property predominate over considerations of personal preference. Clearly, wife-purchase and husband-purchase (which exists in some semi-civilised societies), though they have lost their original gross form, persist in disguised forms. Already some disapproval of those who marry for money or position is expressed; and this growing stronger may be expected to purify the monogamic union, by making it in all cases real instead of being in some cases nominal.”

It is indeed a most hopeful sign of progress, this strong and growing modern sentiment in favour of Romantic Love as against rival motives matrimonial. Novelists, when the wills of the lovers and the parents clash, invariably and unconsciously side with the lovers; and should a novelist make an exception, many of his readers would close the book, and the others would finish it under protest and disappointedly. Even when we read a newspaper reporter’s thrilling and dramatic narrative of the elopement of a foolish young couple, fresh from the high-school, our hearts throb with sympathetic anxiety lest the irate parent should succeed in capturing the runaway couple.

No doubt this instinctive modern prejudice in favour of Romantic Love will ultimately throw a halo of sacredness around it, which will raise Cupid’s will to the dignity of an Eleventh Commandment—a consummation devoutedly to be wished; for although the conjugal affection which grows out of Romantic Love is not always deeper than that which results from unions not based on Love, the physical and mental qualities of the children commonly show at a glance whether or not the parents were brought together by Sexual Selection.

The psychic elements of Love which thus far have been compared to overtones, might also be regarded from a Wagnerian point of view as Leitmotive or leading motives in the Drama of Historic Love. In the first scenes, where the actors are animals and savages, followed by Egyptians, Hebrews, Hindoos, Greeks, and Romans, and mediÆval clowns and fanatics, these leading motives are heard only as short melodic phrases, and at long intervals, pregnant, indeed, with future possibilities, but isolated and never combined into a symphony of Love. In the last act, however, which we have now reached, all these motives appear in various combinations, in the gorgeous and glowing instrumentation of modern poets, with all possible figurative, harmonic, and dynamic nuances; and at the same time so intertwined and interwoven that no one apparently has ever succeeded in unravelling the poetic woof and distinguishing the separate threads. For us, however, who have followed these motives from the moment when they first appeared in a primitive form, it will be easy to distinguish them and subject each one to a separate analysis. We shall first consider those which, like Coyness and Jealousy, are already familiar and need only be considered in their modern forms, and then pass on to those which are more and more exclusively modern.

MODERN COYNESS

At least five sources or causes of modern female Coyness may be suggested:—

(1) An Echo of Capture.—Why are modern city-folks so fond of picnics? It was Mr. Spencer, I believe, who suggested somewhere that it is because picnics awaken in civilised men and women a vague and agreeable reminiscence of the time when their ancestors habitually took their meals on meadows in the shade of a tree. If it is possible for such experiences to re-echo, as it were, in our nervous system through so many generations, thanks to the conservatism of oft-repeated cerebral impressions, then it does not seem so very fantastic to suggest that one cause of female Coyness may be a similar echo, or reminiscence, of the time when the primitive ancestresses of modern women were “courted” by Capture or Purchase, and so badly treated as wives that in course of time an instinctive impulse was formed in their minds to shrink back and say No to man’s proposals.

(2) Maiden versus Wife.—It is hardly necessary, however, to rely upon such a remote sociological echo, so to speak, for an explanation of a girl’s hesitation to become a wife even if her suitor pleases her. The thought of exchanging her maiden freedom for conjugal restrictions and duties; of giving up the homage and admiration of all men for the possible neglect of one; of probably soon losing her youthful beauty, etc.—such thoughts would make many girls even more coy than they now are, did not the fear of becoming an old maid act as a counterbalancing motive in favour of marriage.

(3) Modesty.—Esquimaux girls, as we have seen, “affect the utmost bashfulness and aversion to any proposal of marriage, lest they should lose their reputation for modesty.” And the greatest analyst of the human heart puts the same philosophy into the mouth of Juliet in a passage which, although everybody knows it by heart, must yet be quoted here—

(4) Cunning to be Strange.—No huntsman (except a monarch) would care to go to an enclosure and shoot the deer confined therein, nor a fisherman to catch trout conveniently placed in a pond. But to wade up a mountain brook all day long, climbing over slippery rocks, and enduring the discomforts of a hot sun and wet clothes, with nothing to eat, and only a few speckled trifles to reward him—that is what he considers “glorious sport.”

The instinctive perception that a thing is valued in proportion to the difficulty of its attainment is what taught women the “cunning to be strange.” Seeing that they could not compete with man in brute force, they acquired the arts of Beauty and of Coyness, as their best weapons against his superior strength—the Beauty to fascinate him, the Coyness to teach him that in Love, as in fishing, the pleasure of pursuit is the main thing.

At first this Coyness was manifested in a very crude manner, as among the primitive maidens who hid in the forest; or among the Roman women celebrated by Ovid, who locked their door and compelled the lover to beg and whine for admission by the hour; or among the mediÆval women who, to gratify their caprices and enjoy the sense of a newly-acquired power, sent their admirers to participate in bloody wars before recognising their addresses. And so coarse-grained were the men that as soon as the women ceased to tease they ceased to woo; as, for instance, in mediÆval France, about the time of the Chansons de Geste, “the man who desires a woman yet does not appear as a wooer; for he knows he is certain of her favour,” as we read in Ploss. Hence Cleopatra’s brief and pointed rejoinder to Charmian when he advises her, in order to win Antony’s love, to give him way in everything, cross him in nothing: “Thou teachest like a fool; the way to lose him.”

(5) Procrastination.—Love at first sight is frequent at the present day, but in ancient Greece and Rome marriage at first sight appears to have been more common. The classical suitor’s wooing was generally comprised in three words: Veni, Vidi, Vici; i.e. I Came, Saw the girl’s father, Conquered his scruples by proving my wealth or social position. Sufficient brevity in this, no doubt: but brevity is not the soul of Love.

“Tant plus le chemin est long dans l’amour, tant plus un esprit dÉlicat sent de plaisir,” says Pascal, announcing a truth of which ancient and mediÆval nations had no conception until female Coyness taught it them. Goethe evidently had the same truth in mind when he mentioned as a phase of ancient love (Roman Elegies)—

That is, in prose, there were no preliminaries in the love-drama, which had only one act, the fifth, in which the marriage is celebrated.

Goldsmith on Love.—In Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World there is a chapter on “Whether Love be a Natural or Fictitious Passion,” in which reference is likewise made to the value of procrastination. As this passage shows Goldsmith to have been the first author who had an approximate conception of the development and psychology of Love, I will quote it almost entire. It is in the form of a dialogue, and one of the speakers remarks: "Whether love be natural or no ... it contributes to the happiness of every society in which it is introduced. All our pleasures are short and can only charm at intervals; love is a method of protracting our greatest pleasure; and surely that gamester who plays the greatest stake to the best advantage will, at the end of life, rise victorious. This was the opinion of Vanini, who affirmed that ‘every hour was lost which was not spent in love.’ His accusers were unable to comprehend his meaning; and the poor advocate for love was burned in flames; alas! no way metaphorical. But whatever advantages the individual may reap from this passion, society will certainly be refined and improved by its introduction; all laws calculated to discourage it tend to embrute the species, and weaken the state. Though it cannot plant morals in the human breast, it cultivates them when there: pity, generosity, and honour receive a brighter polish from its assistance; and a single amour is sufficient entirely to brush off the clown.

“But it is an exotic of the most delicate constitution: it requires the greatest art to introduce it into a state, and the smallest discouragement is sufficient to repress it again. Let us only consider with what ease it was formerly extinguished in Rome, and with what difficulty it was lately revived in Europe: it seemed to sleep for ages, and at last fought its way among us through tilts, tournaments, dragons, and all the dreams of chivalry. The rest of the world, China only excepted, are, and have ever been, utter strangers to its delights and advantages. In other countries, as men find themselves stronger than women, they lay a claim to rigorous superiority: this is natural, and love, which gives up this natural advantage, must certainly be the effect of art—an art calculated to lengthen out our happier moments, and add new graces to society.”

To this conclusion the lady interlocutor in the dialogue objects on the ground that “the effects of love are too violent to be the result of an artificial passion”; and suggests, by way of accounting for the absence of love, that “the same efforts that are used in some places to suppress pity, and other natural passions, may have been employed to extinguish love”; and that “those nations where it is cultivated only make nearer advances to nature.”

Goldsmith thus leaves it in doubt whether he considers Love a natural or an artificial passion. In the three passages which I have italicised, he errs: first, in saying that Love was “extinguished” in Rome, when in fact it never existed there, except incompletely in the poetic intuition of Ovid and possibly one or two other poets; secondly, he errs in remarking that it was lately “revived” in Europe, when in fact it was newly-born; and his excepting China, in speaking of the absence of Love, can only be looked on in the light of a joke in view of the absolute subjection of women to parental dictation, and the fact that, as one writer remarks, “a union prompted solely by love would be a monstrous infraction of the duty of filial obedience, and a predilection on the part of the female as heinous a crime as infidelity.” But his definition of Love as “the effect of art—an art calculated to lengthen out our happier moments and add new graces to society” is exceedingly good. The art in question is known as Courtship: and it is the latest of the fine arts, which even now exists in its perfection in two countries only—England and America. The Italian language has no equivalent for Courtship, as Professor Mantegazza tells us in his Fisiologia dell’ Amore; and a German commentator on this passage in Mantegazza comments dubiously: “Das Eutsprechende deutsche Wort dÜrfte wohl Werbung sein;” “the corresponding German word is presumably Werbung.” “Presumably” is very suggestive. Yet the Germans have another expression of mediÆval origin apparently, namely, “Einem MÄdchen den Hof machen”—"to pay court to a girl," which, though somewhat conversational, has evidently the same historic origin as our word Court-ship; implying that formerly it was the custom at court alone to prolong the agony of Love by gallant attentions to women, which enabled them to exercise the “cunning to be strange.”

Disadvantages of Coyness.—Beneficial as are no doubt the effects which have been brought about by female Coyness in developing the art of Courtship, there are corresponding evils inherent in that mental attitude which make it probable that Coyness will gradually disappear and be succeeded by something more modern, more natural, more refined.

There are four serious objections to Coyness, one from a masculine, three from a feminine point of view.

Men, in the first place, can hardly approve of Coyness; for it certainly indicates a coarse mediÆval fibre in a man if he is obliged to confess that he can love a girl not for her beauty and amiability, but only because she tantalises and maltreats him:

Or, in Heine’s delightful persiflage of this attitude—

In one English sentence: Your amiability repels, your malice attracts me; if you wish to get rid of my attentions, you must fall in love with me.

If a refined man can feel ardent affection for an animal, a friend, a relative, without being “spurned” and consequently “fawning,” why should not the same be true of his love for a beautiful girl? It is true; and hence the cleverest women of the period, feeling this change in the masculine heart, have adopted a different method of fascinating men and bringing them to their feet, as we shall presently see.

Women, in turn, are injured by Coyness; first, because it makes them act foolishly. French and German girls are systematically taught to take immediate alarm at sight of a horrid man (whom they secretly consider a darling creature, with such a moustache) and conceal themselves behind their mamma or chaperon, like spring chickens creeping under the old hen at sight of a hawk. This sort of spring-chicken coyness does infinitely more harm than good; it makes the girls weak and frivolous, and as for the men, if they are systematically treated as birds of prey, how can they avoid falling in with their rÔle? If men are to behave like gentlemen they must be treated as gentlemen, as they are in England and America.

Coyness, again, makes women deceitful and insincere. “Amongst her other feminine qualities,” says Thackeray of one of his characters, “she had that of being a perfect dissembler.” And in another place, “I think women have an instinct of dissimulation; they know by nature how to disguise their emotions far better than the most consummate courtiers can do.” It cannot be said that dissimulation is a virtue, though it may be a useful weapon against coarse and selfish men. If not the same thing as hypocrisy, it is next door to it; and it cannot have a beneficial effect on a woman’s general moral instincts if she is compelled constantly to act a part contrary to her convictions and feelings. Though as deeply in love as her suitor, she is commanded to treat him with indifference, coldness, even cruelty,—in a word, to do constant violence to her and his feelings, and to lacerate her own heart perhaps even more than the unhappy lover’s. Thus instead of mutually enjoying the period of Courtship, and indulging in harmless banter, “they gaze at each other fiercely, though ready to die for love”; or, as Heine puts it—

And why all this perverseness, this unnaturalness, this emotional torture? Simply because—once more be it said—the men of former days, the men who lived on pork and port, who delighted in bear-baiting, cock-fights, and similar Æsthetic amusements, had nerves so coarse and callous that to make any impression on them the women had to play with them as a cat does with a mouse to make it tender and sweet.

Coyness lessens Woman’s Love.—One more charge, the gravest of all, remains to be piled on top, as a last crushing argument against crude Coyness. An emotion, like a plant, requires for its growth sunshine, light, and open air; if kept in a dark cellar and stifled, it soon becomes weak and pale and languishes. Man’s superior strength and selfish exercise of it have compelled women to cultivate Coyness as an art of dissembling, hiding, and repressing their real feelings. But to repress the manifestations of anger, of pity, of Love, is to suppress them; hence Coyness has necessarily had the effect of weakening woman’s Love. It weakens it in the same proportion as it strengthens man’s. And hence, as I have said before, the current notion that women love more ardently, more deeply, than men is an absurd myth. The poets have always shown a predilection for this, as for all other myths; and as it is still served up as a self-evident truth in a thousand books every year, it is worth while to clear away the underbrush and let in some daylight on the subject.

Masculine versus Feminine Love.—One thing may be conceded at the outset: that woman’s Love, when once kindled, is apt to endure longer than man’s. Shakspere’s “’Tis brief, my Lord, as woman’s love” is therefore a libel on the sex. The difficulty is to get it under way. It takes so much of the small kindling wood of courtship (“sparking” it is called) to set a female heart aflame, that many men give it up in despair and remain bachelors; or else, like the young man in Fidelio, they finally tell their girl, “If you will not love me, at least marry me.”

It may also be conceded that Rousseau exaggerates when he says that “Women are a hundred times sooner reasonable than passionate: they are as unable to describe love as to feel it.” This may have been true in his day; but that there have since been some female authors who have correctly described Love, and thousands of women who have been deeply in Love, it would be absurd to deny. All that is here maintained is that Love is of less frequent occurrence in women than in men; and when it does occur in women it is not usually so deep, so passionate, so maddening. The average woman knows little of Romantic Love. She has read about it in novels, in poems, and thinks how delightful it must be. The faintest symptom is taken for an attack, just as in perusing a medical book people commonly fancy they have symptoms of the disease they chance to be reading about. Thus it happens that young girls so easily “fall in love,” as they imagine, and are ready to elope with the first music teacher or circus rider that comes along—

It is quite probable that Coleridge was right when he wrote—

although this does not seem to agree with the opinion of Shakspere and Thackeray regarding the rarity of broken lovers’ hearts. Morselli’s work on Suicide does not contain any definite statistics À propos; but I have seen the statement in a newspaper that in Italy, during 1883, thirty-six men and nine women committed suicide—four to one; and the proportion will appear larger still if it is remembered that girls often commit suicide from an anguish deeper than a refusal.

The myth that woman’s passion is deeper than man’s is commonly expressed in the form given to it by Byron: that in man’s life love is only an episode, whereas to a woman it is all in all. Allowing for poetic exaggeration, it does not at all follow that because a man does not brood all his life over Love, he therefore loves less. The fact that Goethe, the poet, also wrote treatises on botany and physics, and made landscape sketches, did not decrease the depth of his poetic feeling but added to it. For it is a fundamental law of psychology—except in pathologic cases—that continuous brooding over an emotion weakens and exhausts it; but after intervals of rest it emerges more fresh than ever. The various objects and ambitions that occupy man only serve to strengthen his feelings, his capacity for Love. That women are more easily swamped and carried away by emotions does not prove their feelings to be deeper, but themselves to be weaker. One lake may be entirely full, and yet not contain half as much water as a larger lake which is only half-full.

It was evidently with a vague desire to justify or excuse woman’s comparative weakness in Love that Ninon de L’Enclos wrote “Women and flowers are made to be loved for their beauty and sweetness, rather than themselves to love.” And that intelligent observer Mrs. Childs adds the weight of her feminine testimony by confessing her belief “That men more frequently marry for love than women.”

To remove all lingering doubt, consider the “overtones” of Love separately. Is woman ordinarily as absurdly or ferociously Jealous as man, or quite so Proud of her conquest? Is she so deeply absorbed in Admiration of his Personal Beauty? Is she as Gallant, and as ready for Sacrifices? or does she not rather take his devoted services for granted, and consider them rewarded by a smile or some other trifle? Indeed, the only element of Love which in woman is stronger than in man is Coyness; and Coyness, as has been shown, weakens woman’s Love in the same degree as it increases man’s.

Of course it would be unjust to attribute to the effects of Coyness all the difference between man’s and woman’s Love. Much is due to the physiologic law that emotional capacity—amorous included—depends on brain capacity (not on the “heart”); and man’s brain is more powerful than woman’s. But crude mediÆval Coyness must bear a large share of the blame; and it is probable that now, having played its rÔle of bringing men to terms and making them gallant and polite towards women, it will disappear gradually.

“Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit gethan, Der Mohr kann gehen.”

Already, however, there is, especially in America and England, a superior class of women who, despising Coyness as crude, artificial, and silly, have adopted in its place a much more refined method of making men fall in love with them. In one word, they have substituted Flirtation for Coyness. As this statement will to many appear paradoxical, if not absurd, it is necessary first to distinguish between Flirtation and Coquetry before trying to justify it.

Flirtation and Coquetry.—These two words are so constantly confused by careless or ignorant writers that some girls are almost as much offended if accused of Flirtation as of Coquetry. It was bad enough for Winthrop to say that “A woman without coquetry is as insipid as a rose without scent, champagne without sparkle, or corned beef without mustard” (!), but there is no excuse whatever for “Ik Marvel’s” saying that “Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depraves it. Coquetry is the thorn that guards the rose (!), easily trimmed off when once plucked. Flirtation is like the slime on water-plants, making them hard to handle, and when caught only to be cherished in slimy waters.” No excuse, I say, because the dictionaries on our table tell us the very reverse. Flirtation, in Webster, is simply “playing at courtship,” without any cruel intentions; while Coquetry is an attempt “to attract admiration, and gain matrimonial offers, from a desire to gratify vanity, and with the intention to reject the suitor.”

That this is the correct definition is shown beyond question by the adjectives which are commonly coupled with those nouns: a “harmless Flirtation,” a “heartless Coquette.”

A Coquette seeks to fascinate for the sake of fascinating. Like a miser, she mistakes the means for the end, and feeds on one-sided passion and admiration, until one morning she wakes up and finds her beauty gone, and herself the most disappointed and unamiable of old maids. Or again, she might be compared to a bank clerk who refused his salary because he was satisfied with the tinkling of the money which he heard all day long. The Flirt, on the other hand, displays her accomplishments, her wit, and personal charms, for the sake of enlarging the facilities of Courtship, the possibilities of rational Choice.

One reason why Flirtation and Coquetry are so apt to be confounded is because the English peoples alone have the word Flirtation—naturally enough, as they alone allow their young people the blessings of Courtship and rational choice promoted by it. Foreigners, not appreciating exactly what is meant by the word, are apt to translate it as Coquetry. One Frenchman, who has lived long in England, has tried to define Flirtation for his countrymen by saying it consisted of “attentions without intentions.” This definition was widely welcomed as very clever. Clever it may be, but it is a definition of Coquetry not of Flirtation. For Flirtation never excludes possible intentions.

Flirtation versus Coyness.—Flirtation, from the feminine point of view, may be defined as the art of fascinating a man and leaving him in doubt whether he is loved or not. There is no reason why a beautiful and bright girl should not charm, i.e. flirt with, every man who interests her, and to whom she has been properly introduced. No reason why she should not dispense her sweet smiles with complete impartiality, until she has made up her mind whom she wishes to marry. In so far as Coyness simply means reserve and dignity, she will of course still be coy; but she will not run away to conceal herself in the forest, or lock the front door, or hide behind a chaperon’s back, or affect to be cynically indifferent to men, or treat the one she likes best with affected cruelty. With refined men of the period Flirting, i.e. fascinating and leaving in doubt, is quite as effective in kindling adoration to ecstasy as crude Coyness was with the coarse-fibred men of the past. Flirtation, indeed, is much more tantalising than Coyness, and therefore a complete modern substitute for it.

There is a passage in Hume’s Dissertation on the Passions which, though occurring in a different connection, strikes home the truth of the last sentence most forcibly. “Uncertainty,” he says, “has the same effect as opposition. The agitation of the thought, the quick turns which it makes from one view to another, the variety of passions which succeed each other, according to the different views: all these produce an agitation in the mind; and this agitation transfuses itself into the predominant passion. Security, on the other hand, diminishes the passions. The mind, when left to itself, immediately languishes; and in order to preserve its ardour, must be supported every moment by a new flow of passion.”

Of course to those of a girl’s admirers who are for a while left in doubt and finally “get left” altogether, female flirtation may seem a cruel pastime. But there is a sort of historic justice in this torture which, indeed, almost amounts to an excuse for Coquetry; it is a species of feminine revenge for the long centuries of slavery in which muscular man held weak woman. Besides, no man has ever died of a broken heart, except in novels. And, again, who is to blame a pretty girl for having fascinated an unsuccessful lover? A rose yields its fragrance and beauty to all who wish to admire it. If a conceited young man comes along, imagines that all its beauty is for him alone, and tries to pluck it, he has only himself to blame if he feels the thorn of disappointment.

When Lord Chesterfield wrote, “I assisted at the birth of that most significant word ‘flirtation,’ which dropped from the most beautiful mouth in the world,” he perhaps hardly realised how very significant a factor of social life Flirtation was destined to become. Mr. Galton wrote, not long ago, that without female Coyness “there would be no more call for competition among the males for the favour of the females; no more fighting for love in which the strongest male conquers; no more rival display of personal charms in which the best-looking or best-mannered prevails. The drama of courtship, with its prolonged strivings and doubtful success, would be cut quite short, and the race would degenerate through the absence of that sexual selection for which the protracted preliminaries for love-making give opportunity.” When Mr. Galton wrote this, he did not apparently realise the social revolution that is going on, or understand that frank and natural Flirtation, which recognises every man as a gentleman until he has proved the contrary, affords much better opportunity for Sexual Selection and “protracted preliminaries of love-making” than crude, hypocritical, unnatural Coyness, which regards every gentleman as a beast of prey and a libertine.

Flirtation being the modern art of widening the field of amorous competition and prolonging the duration of Courtship, it follows that there cannot be too much of it—quantitatively speaking. Qualitatively it easily degenerates into frivolity, as in the case of those girls who get engaged repeatedly before marriage, which shows a lack of judgment, of tact, and especially of delicacy, because a peach should never be touched on the tree but allowed to retain its first blush for the man who is to eat it.

Refined flirtation, in truth, requires much more wit, more tact and culture, than Coyness, or than Prudery, which is the north-pole of Coyness. Prudery bears much resemblance to the artificial dignity of a certain class of young men who, by means of persistent reticence, gain a reputation for aristocratic and cynical superiority. Coquetry even is preferable to Prudery, for it is at any rate entertaining.

To sum up this matter in one sentence: The coy Prude says No, even when she means Yes; the cold Coquette says Yes and always means No; the modest and refined Flirt says neither Yes nor No, but looks and smiles a sweet “Perhaps—if you can win my Love.”

Modern Courtship.—What a grotesque and topsy-turvy parody of history it is, this modern comedy of Courtship, in which the man is the slave and walks on his knees! And how gracefully the newly-crowned girl-queen plays her rÔle, little suspecting that in the next act the husband will probably throw away his self-assumed mask, and insist again on his historic rights as lord and master of the household!

The shock which follows this transition from the romance of Courtship to the realism of conjugal life is much the greatest in the case of the Prude. The Coquette need not be considered; she was born without a heart, and marriage will not give her one. But the Prude often owes her unnaturalness solely to an absurd educational system, and may be at heart the best of women. Previous to marriage she is taught to rely on passive Coyness to arouse the desires of man. After marriage, when she yields herself up, body and soul, she loses this weapon, the lover recovers his courage and lowers the pitch of his devotional ecstasy. This alarms the girl, who eagerly endeavours to recover the romantic Adoration by trying to please and coax and caress. But pleasing—or active fascination—being an art which she never has practised, she does it in a bungling way—overdoes it, in fact—thus increasing the husband’s indifference. Had she learned the art of refined Flirtation, i.e. active fascination with wit and accomplishments, this domestic tragedy would never have been enacted. Her skill and tact would then have enabled her to preserve her husband’s Gallantry, by supplying a constant variety and novelty in those feminine charms and graces in which a superior woman is as fertile as a man of genius in ideas.

By her extremely reserved and passive attitude during Courtship the Prude not only mars the probabilities of conjugal happiness, she also weakens her own Love directly, through Coyness, and indirectly, by making the man too servile and over-anxious to worship. For if a man immediately yields up his sword and proclaims himself fatally stabbed by a white wench’s black eye, there can be in her mind none of those small obstacles and doubts which, like short absences, increase Love. Love-making should be a duel of wit and mutual fascination. The Flirt does her part of the fencing; the Prude simply hides behind her shield and waits to see if the man can break it, or coax her to throw it away. With a Flirt a man need not be a servile worshipper, but he may be a Flirt likewise: which is a much more desirable attitude, not only because male flirtation will fan the woman’s Love into a brighter flame through the stimulus of uncertainty, but also because it enables the man to preserve his dignity. Hence Beatrix’s pointed advice to Henry Esmond: “Shall I be frank with you, Harry, and say that if you had not been down on your knees, and so humble, you might have fared better with me? A woman of my spirit, cousin, is to be won by gallantry and not by sighs and rueful faces. All the time you are worshipping I know very well I am no goddess, and grow weary of the incense.”

The girl of the period is the girl who flirts, and who expects every eligible man to take up her challenge for a tournament of wit and playing at Courtship. The reason why there is much more Romantic Love in America and England than in other countries is because there is more Flirtation, more opportunity for Courtship. On the Continent young folks are too constantly regarded from the marriage point of view. In Italy and France, when a young lady comes back from boarding-school, she is married as quickly as possible before she has had a chance to fall in love with a man of her choice. Consequence: she falls in love after marriage, and not always with her husband. In Germany a young lady is allowed to see young men and even to walk with them in the street, in the daytime or in the evening, if properly chaperoned; but under no circumstances will she take a young man’s arm, for that would imply an engagement. In America it is otherwise; but even there, in the South, it is taken for granted that if a young man calls on a young lady three or four times he can have no other object than to marry her. His object may be to marry, but not necessarily her. What he wants is to become acquainted, and if acquaintance “by summer’s ripening breath” blossoms into Love, so much the better; if not, it is a thousand times better he should be allowed to depart in peace than that two beings should be mated who do not feel really sympathetic and companionable. How is a young man to find his Juliet if he is not allowed to see a number of women, without being called fickle? And how is Juliet to find her Romeo, if mothers frighten young men into bachelorhood by such absurd customs?

The word Courtship, in fact, should have a wider meaning than it has now. It should be almost synonymous with Flirtation, which provides the means of bringing together, from a wide circle of acquaintances, two beings who are really suited to each other, instead of two whom blind chance, a few “calls,” or the advantages of intimacy resulting from cousinship, have fortuitously mated for a life of probable conjugal misery.

Plato’s advice that opportunity should be given to the sexes to become acquainted before marriage is much more followed to-day than at any previous time in the world’s history; but there is still vast room for improvement.

MODERN JEALOUSY

Jealousy may be defined as a painful emotion on noticing, or imagining, that some one dear to us loves another more than us. Unlike affection in general, and like sympathy, it therefore necessarily refers to a sentient being and a possible reciprocation of affection. It is a form of rivalry, of which there are two kinds: rivalry for the possession of an object or a position; and rivalry for the first place in a person’s affections. The first is not incompatible with friendship, for two rival candidates for a political office or a college fellowship are not necessarily personal enemies. But the second kind, which, when allied with doubt is called Jealousy, is a deadly enemy of good-will; and there is probably no cause that has broken so many friendships as the “green-eyed monster,” among women no less than among men.

Modern psychology agrees with St. Augustine that “he that is not jealous, is not in love.” There can be no love without Jealousy—potential at any rate, for in the absence of provocation it may perhaps never manifest itself. But there can be Jealousy without love, i.e without sexual love; for that passion is often aroused in connection with other kinds of affection—parental, filial, etc. Stories are told of dogs practically committing suicide by disappearing or pining away if displaced by a younger pet in the affection of a family; and those who have seen specimens of canine jealousy find nothing improbable in these stories. Yet as a rule all these general forms of jealousy—as when a husband is jealous of his wife if the children show her special favour, or as when a mother is jealous of a visitor loved by her children—are mere trifles compared with sexual Jealousy, romantic and conjugal. It is in painting this form of Jealousy that poets have exhausted the strength of language. “Of all the passions in the mind thou vilest art,” says Spenser of this “king of torments,” “the injured lover’s hell.” With this, when once the lover’s mind is affected—

In the animal kingdom sexual Jealousy and rivalry play so important a part that Darwin attributes to their agency the superior size and strength (in most classes) of the male over the female. Among savages, as has been pointed out, we see sometimes a curious absence of Jealousy, both as regards brides and wives; whereas in other cases, the passion manifests itself with brutal ferocity. Thus among the American Indians infidelity is sometimes punished by cutting off the nose, sometimes by the shearing of the hair, which is considered a great disgrace. On the Fiji Islands, Waitz tells us, the wives of a polygamist “lead a life of bitter strife and commit ... the most atrocious cruelties against one another from hate and Jealousy; biting or cutting off the nose is quite a common occurrence.” Stanley, in his work on the Congo, remarks that the Langa-Langa women scar their faces and busts in a hideous manner, probably because compelled to do so by the Jealousy of the men. In Hebrew literature the case of Jacob’s two wives urging him of their own accord to become still further polygamous, presents a strange example of this passion being neutralised by other motives. What prompted the ancient Greeks, and what prompts Oriental nations to this day, to keep their women under lock and key, was, and is, of course, simply a perverse and ignorant feeling of Jealousy. In this feeling also, no doubt, originated the Chinese custom compelling women to mutilate their feet to prevent them from going about; as well as the custom indulged in until recently by Japanese ladies of shaving off their eyebrows and blackening their teeth after marriage—a custom which shows how much stronger Jealousy must be than Admiration of Personal Beauty in the affection of these nations. No doubt, however, all these excesses and cruelties of Jealousy are counter-balanced by the good it has done in enforcing the laws of morality.

Civilisation does not weaken sexual Jealousy, but only gives it a less brutal form of manifesting itself. Conjugal Jealousy still produces the greatest number of domestic tragedies, of which Othello is the immortal type. It is already typified in Hera, for, as Zeus says in Homer, “She is always meddling, whatever I may be about.” But then she had good cause to meddle in the affairs of this Olympian Don Juan.

Lovers’ Jealousy.—As for Lovers’ Jealousy proper, there is reason to believe that it will grow stronger and more common as general culture advances. For the men who are most ahead of our century emotionally, the men of genius, are usually very jealous. Heine’s Jealousy went so far that he even poisoned a poor parrot of whom his Mathilde was extravagantly fond; and it is probable that Byron’s savage attack on the Waltz was dictated by a sort of wholesale Jealousy in regard to all pretty girls. For in Love Byron was omnivorous.

The lover’s and the husband’s Jealousy are alike in their extreme sensitiveness—

nor is there probably any difference in the intenseness of their agony.

To the lover Jealousy is not only his greatest torture, but also his deadliest enemy. With this fever in his blood even the man of the world who knows his “Ars Amoris” by heart, is apt to ruin his cause by excess of blind rivalry and clumsy passion: which perhaps explains why so many great men have been refused by their best loves. To endure and ignore a rival is, as Ovid already declared, the highest and most difficult achievement in the Art of Love; as for himself, he frankly admits, he was unequal to it.

There are several ways in which lovers ruin their chances by awkward excess of passion. It makes them appear selfish and unamiable; and the pallor which Jealousy inspires is not that which makes a girl consider a man “interesting,” and leads her through pity to Love. If the lover is not yet accepted, his Jealousy arouses her opposition, because he seems to take it for granted that he has a right to be jealous, and that she will necessarily accept him. Again, his attitude repels her by suggesting that he would indulge in impertinent supervision and tyrannical dictation after marriage. Even if he has successfully proposed, she does not like to have him make his victory and prospective ownership so conspicuous by his jealous glances and manoeuvres. Besides, a fascinating girl likes to preserve her apparent freedom as long as possible, and let others admire her beauty while it lasts.

Most fatal is it for a man to assume a jealous attitude towards a woman before he has been able to inspire her with interest in him. Her indifference will thus be inevitably changed into positive dislike. For, as Madame de Coulanges says, “L’on ne veut de la jalousie que de ceux dont on pourrait Être jalouse”—We do not desire any jealousy except from those for whom we could ourselves feel jealousy. Stendhal, who quotes this aphorism, adds a reason why women may be gratified by a display of Jealousy: “Jealousy may please proud women, as a new way of showing them their power.” And to a woman in love and in doubt, the man’s Jealousy, which is so easily detected, is of course a most welcome symptom of conquest.

For Jealousy is the first sign of Love, as it is also the last. If a man is in doubt whether he is really in Love with a girl or only admires her beauty, let him observe her when talking or dancing with another man: if he then feels “queer”—from a mere uneasiness to a desire to pulverise the other fellow—he may be assured that his emotion has passed the borderline which separates disinterested Æsthetic admiration from the desire for exclusive possession which is popularly known as Love.

Conversely, if a man who has been repeatedly refused, or who for some other reason endeavours to suppress his passion, feels in doubt whether the cure is complete, he need only imagine his former love in the arms of another man, or before the altar with him: if that does not make him turn pale and frown and bite his lips, he is cured. This test, however, is not so certain as the other, for sometimes Jealousy outlives Love; and Longfellow believed that every true passion leaves an eternal scar.

Like Coyness, Jealousy is a discord in the harmony of Love. A little of it is piquant and rouses desire. “Jealousy,” says Hume, “is a painful passion, yet without some share of it the agreeable affection of love has difficulty to subsist in all its force and violence.... Jealousy and absence in love compose the dolce piccante of the Italians, which they suppose so essential to all pleasure.”

Unfortunately, Jealousy is rarely content to remain “agreeably piquant,” but is apt to grow into a tornado of passion which devastates body and soul, and makes it the keenest agony known to mankind. It is often said that the agony inspired by a refusal is the only thing that excuses tears in a man. This agony is a mixed emotion, including wounded Pride and the sense of having lost all that makes life worth living. But its keenest sting comes from the green-eyed monster, who hisses into the lover’s ears that now a rival will enjoy her sweetness and beauty. Dante did not correctly describe the lowest depth of hell: it is this thought in the lover’s mind that “now another will marry her.” It is that thought which drives lovers to lunatic asylums and suicide.

“Some lines I read the other day,” Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne, "are continually ringing a peal in my ears—

“Get thee to a nunnery,” would be every lover’s advice to the girl who rejected him. If she obeyed, his agony would be diminished one-half.

But why, if he cannot have her, should she not make some one else happy? Because Jealousy is the one absolutely selfish trait of Love. The lover who in other respects is the very model of altruism and Self-Sacrifice is in point of jealous rivalry for possession an absolute egotist to whom even her happiness is torture if he cannot share it. Is this an aberration of Lovers’ Sympathy, or does it mark its climax? The answer will be found in the chapter on Sympathy.

Retrospective and Prospective Jealousy.—There are three kinds of modern Jealousy—Retrospective, Present, and Prospective. The rejected lover’s Jealousy is of the third kind; it refers not to what is, but to what will or may be. Another variety of Prospective Jealousy is illustrated by a story told in a Moscow journal of an old peasant who married a young girl of whom he was very jealous. On his deathbed he expressed a desire to give her a last kiss. But hardly had she touched him, when he seized her under lip and fastened his teeth so tightly in it that a knife had to be used to pry them open. With his dying breath he confessed that his object had been to mutilate her, so that no one else might marry her.

Is it not possible that the custom of burning widows in India was at first an outcome of the Jealousy of some influential ruler who set the fashion?

Present Jealousy does not call for any special remarks, but Retrospective Jealousy has some curious features. It is entirely non-existent not only among those savage tribes who scorn virgin brides, but among some semi-civilised peoples in Africa and Asia where the men prefer to marry women with a dowry, no matter how they may have earned it.

In modern love Retrospective Jealousy is often very strong, especially in men who, though they do not hesitate to marry a girl who has been engaged before, would not care to dwell on the details of the previous engagement. Women, too, have been known to indulge in this futile form of Jealousy. Thus Heine relates in one of his letters that at the special request of his Mathilde, he got her a copy of the French edition of his Pictures of Travel. “But hardly had she read a few pages, when she turned deadly pale, trembled in all her limbs, and begged me for heaven’s sake to close the book. She had come upon a love-scene in it, and jealous as she is, she does not even want me to have adored another before her rÉgime; indeed, I had to promise her that in future I would not address any language of love even to the imaginary ideal personages in my books.”

The trouble with Heine is that one never knows exactly when he is relating facts and when indulging in fun and fiction. As a rule, certainly women are not much troubled by Jealousy regarding the past. If the lover promises to be a good boy in future and give them a monopoly of his adoration, they are rarely disquieted by the question, “Has he been in love before?” Indeed, there is a current notion that women admire a man all the more for being a Don Juan or professional lady-killer. Perhaps, however, this is putting the cart before the horse: for, instead of admiring him because he is a lady-killer, is it not possible that he is a lady-killer because they all admire him?

Yet some truth there seems to be in that old notion regarding gay Lotharios; for the average woman’s ideal man still wears a certain mediÆval military cast: he is conceived as a muscular dare-devil, reckless, irresistible, a universal conqueror of female hearts as well as of other fortresses.

Jealousy and Beauty.—As Love becomes more and more idealised, i.e. transferred to the imagination, its overtones combine and produce various new emotional clang-tints—sometimes agreeable, sometimes harsh and dissonant. Among the Japanese and Chinese, as just stated, Jealousy neutralises the Admiration of Personal Beauty to such an extent as to breed indifference to shaved eyebrows, black teeth, deformed feet, and a consequent utter absence of grace in gait. But there is a more subtle way in which Jealousy may cast a cloud on Personal Admiration, even in a refined Western imagination. Once in a while it happens to a sensitive man, a worshipper of Beauty, that he beholds a vision of grace and loveliness—perhaps in a ballroom, perhaps in a theatre or the street. But this sight instead of delighting him, gives him a painful sting in the heart. Partly, this paradoxical sadness of a discoverer may be due to the sudden fancy that this fairylike being perhaps will never again cross his field of vision. Yet it seems more likely that the tinge of pain which o’ercasts the rosy feelings of Admiration is due to Jealousy, especially if she is seen in company with a man. For a moment the Beauty-worshipper fancies himself in that man’s place; the next moment the consciousness of isolation flashes on his mind, and the reaction brings out the painful contrast between what is and what might be. For man, as Mr. Howells has remarked, is still imperfectly monogamous. He has occasional visions of a Mahometan heaven peopled with black-eyed Houris; or envies the knight in Heine’s poem, who lies on the beach and enjoys the caresses of the mermaids, who come and kiss him because they know not that he only pretends to be asleep.

That the Beauty-worshipper’s sadness is due to a vague Jealousy seems the more probable from the fact that the same feeling never tinges his admiration of a living Apollo of masculine perfection. Whether women ever have the same emotions remains for them to tell.

MONOPOLY OR EXCLUSIVENESS

In the case of this trait of Love, PriorityPriority of discovery obviously belongs to the author of these lines—

Monopoly, the imperious desire for exclusive devotion and possession, is the mother of Jealousy. Though less grim and melancholy than her son, she is equally presumptuous and meddlesome, and woe to the man who will so much as breathe or smile upon what she claims as hers. Monopoly, like Jealousy, is one of the selfish elements of Love. All lovers join hands and declaim in unison the words of Jean Paul: “What pleases us is to see her shrink from everybody else, growing hard and frozen to them on our account, handing them nothing but ices and cold pudding, but serving us with the glowing goblet of love.”

Historically, Monopoly is of the utmost significance, since in it is rooted monogamy, which, as previously explained, probably originated in exogamous Capture giving a man the right to exclusive possession of one woman in communities where, as one writer puts it, every man might claim “a thousand miles of wives.”

The desire for exclusiveness, for undivided worship, sometimes enters into non-sexual affections; and an anonymous writer has suggested that the main reason why Byron was so devoted to his dog was because the dog was “a creature exclusively devoted to himself, and hostile to every one else.”

Yet all this is child’s play compared with the imperious form Monopoly assumes in Modern Romantic Love. In the fever-heat of his passion the lover’s chief desire is to be cast on a desert island, and remain there all alone with her. “On ne se soucie plus de ce que dit le monde,” says Pascal; public opinion is scorned; all social feelings annihilated. Relatives and friends exist no longer—what are they to him? his pet occupations bore him; and there is only one thought which fascinates—the picture of a small and cosy house, all his own, a small parlour with one sofa, barely large enough for two, a book of poems in very fine print, compelling two heads to touch in reading from it, and a breakfast-table with only two chairs; all visitors excluded from the unsocial atmosphere, because “three are a crowd.” ’Tis a “double selfishness,” doubly as strong as single selfishness.

Surely Emerson—as the German professor did with the camel—evolved his idea of a lover from his inner consciousness. “All mankind love a lover,” he exclaims. Obviously he had never seen a lover. The fact is that all the world thinks a lover a tremendous and ridiculous bore—a man whose whole mind is monopolised by one unvarying topic—her perfections and his chances of winning her; and who stubbornly insists on monopolising your attention, too, with that everlasting exclusive topic. Like every other lunatic he has one fixed idea; and it’s no wonder the poets always paint him blind, like Cupid; for on the wide, wide ocean of humanity, he sees nothing with his two big eyes but one little solitary transient bubble.

In this matter, it must be admitted, woman’s Love is superior to man’s. “Oh, Arthur,” says Ella, in the Fliegende BlÄtter, “how happy I would be alone with you on a quiet island in the distant ocean!” “Have you any other desire, dearest Ella?” “Oh yes, do get me a season ticket for the opera.”

True Love is transient.—Boswell tells us that Johnson “laughed at the notion that a man can never be really in love but once, and considered it a mere romantic fancy.” And though this romantic fancy is as current as ever in society and literature, Johnson was right in his verdict, as usual.

True Love, indeed, is absolutely exclusive of every other Love while it lasts; but it rarely lasts more than two or three years; and then the heart, freed from one monopoly, is ready for another, perhaps even more tyrannical, while it lasts.

That Love is transient is most fortunate, for it is, in its truest and most ardent form, such a consuming fever, that the strongest man would not be able to endure its mingled ecstasies and anguish more than a few years. The lover’s fancies are his only food; coarser nourishment he scorns; he loses his appetite, and becomes “pale and interesting”—to women, who like to see a powerful man thus wincing under their superior might, and melting away before their radiant beauty.

Yet its transitoriness detracts not in the least from the magic and the charm of Love. It is in the life of man what the flowering period is in the life of a plant. As, for the sake of its fragrant blossoms, a plant is tenderly nursed and watered weeks and months though it flowers but a week; so, even if brief Love were the only flower of life, yet would life be worth living for its sake alone.

How long Love may last depends on individuals and circumstances. Sainte-Beuve, I believe, has said that it never can outlive five years. Favouring circumstances are slight obstacles, rivalries and jealousies, short absences, etc.; while long absences, the distractions of travel, professional occupations, etc., tend to shorten it. In uninterrupted absence, without epistolary encouragement, the most ardent Love would hardly survive a year, unless the lover lived on a desert island, with no other woman to engross his attention. Return, however, is apt to bring on a relapse, as with Henry Esmond, who “went away from his mistress, and was cured a half-dozen times; he came back to her side, and instantly fell ill again of the fever.”

Thus it is the fate of all unrequited Love to die for want of food; or, if successful, to leave the stormy ocean of passion and sail into the more tranquil haven of conjugal affection.

Woman’s Love is less transient than man’s, because there are fewer ambitions to neutralise it.

Is First Love best?—If Love’s Monopoly lasted for life, if passion were not transient, it would follow that most men would marry, or endeavour to marry, the schoolgirls who were the first object of their amorous attentions. But is there one man in a hundred, is there one in three hundred, who marries his first Love? Cases are known of men of genius who fell in love at an age varying from six to nine years; and there are few lads, in America at any rate, and if they have an artistic temperament, who do not have their cases of “calf-love,” beginning with their tenth or twelfth year.

A boy’s first Love is a girl of about his own age, towards whom he shyly makes his way by offering her an apple, a bunch of wild strawberries, or a large hailstone picked up during a storm before her eyes, to impress her with his reckless Gallantry and courage. The second and third loves—for schoolboys are fickle, and schoolgirls more so—are probably not different in character from the first. At fifteen and sixteen, boys scorn girls of their own age, and fall in love with young married women, Troubadour-like. Perhaps the Dulcinea is a Spanish beauty, with large thrilling black eyes, who, seeing the poor cub’s infatuation, teases and tortures him to distraction with her unfathomable wealth of fascination.

And let no one imagine that these cases of early passion are anything short of true Romantic Love. For follow that poor boy enamoured of the Spanish brunette; see him hiding himself in a lonely forest, gazing with rapture on her photograph—perhaps only with his mind’s eye—throwing himself on the ground in an anguish of tears, wishing that either he was dead ... or her husband ... and behaving altogether like a premature Werther.

Such is calf—beg pardon—first Love. And is this first Love best of all? Perhaps, in one respect, and in one only: it believes in its own unchangeableness. Goethe remarks in his autobiography that nothing is so calculated to make us disgusted with life “as a return of Love.... The notion of the eternal and infinite, which forms its basis and support, is destroyed; it appears to us transitory, like everything that recurs.”

Heine on First Love.—Heinrich Heine, whose poetry is next to Shakspere’s the most valuable depository of Modern Love, enlarges on this question in his fragmentary but admirable Analysis of Shakspere’s Female Characters: "Love is a flickering flame between two darknesses ... [the dots are in the original]. Whence comes it?... From sparks incredibly small.... How does it end?... In nothingness equally incredible.... The more raging the flame, the sooner it is burnt out.... Yet that does not prevent it from abandoning itself entirely to its fiery impulses, as if this flame were to burn eternally....

"Alas, when we are seized a second time in life by the grand passion, we lack this faith in its immortality, and painful memories tell us that in the end it will consume itself. Hence the melancholy by which second differs from first love.... In first love we fancy our passion can only end with death; and indeed, if the threatening difficulties in our way cannot be removed in any other manner, we readily make up our mind to accompany our beloved to the grave.... But in second love the thought occurs to us that time will change our wildest and most ecstatic feelings to a tame, apathetic state; that these eyes, these lips, these contours, which now throw us into transports of rapture, will some day be regarded with indifference. This thought, alas! is more melancholy than a presentiment of death.... It is a disconsolate feeling, in the midst of intoxication, to think of the sober, frigid moments that will follow, and to know from experience that these ultra-poetic, heroic passions will have such a lamentably prosaic ending....

“I do not, in the least, presume to find fault with Shakspere, yet cannot but express my surprise that he makes Romeo enamoured of Rosaline before he brings him face to face with Juliet. Though absolutely devoted to his second love, there yet dwells in his soul a certain scepticism, which finds utterance in ironic expressions, and not rarely reminds one of Hamlet. Or is second love the stronger in a man for the very reason that it is paired with lucid self-consciousness? A woman cannot love twice, her nature is too tender to endure a second time the terrific emotional earthquake. Look at Juliet! Would she be able a second time to endure those ecstatic delights and horrors, a second time suppress her fear and empty the dreadful cup? In my opinion once is enough for this poor, blessed creature, this pure martyr to a great passion.”

First Love is not best.—Thus even Heine, while lamenting the transitoriness of Love, cannot help suggesting that in man, at any rate, second Love may be stronger than first. On this point it is curious to note the difference of opinion among thoughtful writers. La BruyÈre declares that “we can love well once only—the first time; the loves which follow are less involuntary.” Another French author, Letourneau, on the contrary, thinks that one love-affair only whets the appetite for more: “on a besoin de vivre fort;” and hence “an expiring passion ordinarily leaves the ground admirably prepared for the germination of another passion.” Stendhal held that a young girl of eighteen, “owing to her inadequate experience of life, is not comprehensive enough in her desires to be able to love with as much passion as a woman of twenty-eight;”twenty-eight;” and a lady-friend having objected to this on the ground that in her first love a girl must love more ardently because her feelings are not distracted by doubt and distrust, as they are subsequently, he replied that this very mÉfiance, in its struggle with love, will make it come out a thousand times more brilliant and substantial than the gay and thoughtless first love.”love.” Mr. P. G. Hamerton seems to cast his vote in the same urn, for he thinks, “it is, indeed, one of the signs of a healthy nature to retain for many years the freshness of the heart which makes one liable to fall in love, as a healthy palate retains the natural early taste for delicious fruits.” And, finally, George Eliot asks: “How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy’s flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.”

So doctors evidently disagree. But the facts that Heine is in doubt, that the greatest authority makes Romeo’s unparalleled passion his second love, and that even Werther’s famous love, notwithstanding Goethe’s theory, is not his first, certainly make the scale incline in favour of a second or later passion.

These last two lines suggest the whole psychology of First Love. Romeo’s first Love was not his best Love. When his soul had reached manly maturity, and looked about for a proper object of affection, he did not at once have the good luck to encounter his Juliet. Rosaline was the nearest approach to his ideal; so he worked himself into a semi-fictitious passion and groaned for her, and would die, until suddenly he saw his real ideal, and found that his first passion was a fragile soap-bubble in comparison to his true Love for Juliet, which no rival could have altered one speck.

In his first Love, in a word, he had fallen in love with the species, rather than with an individual. Sexual Selection, or Individual Preference, had come in more as a matter of chance than of decisive, final choice. And so it is with most cases of first love. Man falls in Love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man or woman. Thus it is that at an early age thousands of impatient youths marry their Rosalines before they have had time or opportunity to meet their Juliets. Doubtless there is a Juliet for every man in the world; but it generally happens that she does not attend the same school, work in the same manufactory, or live in the same village, or belong to the same city-clique as he does; so, being less adventurous than Romeo, who went outside of his clique for a sort of exogamous marriage by Capture, he weds his first Love, i.e. his Rosaline; and this is one of the reasons why so few cases of true Romantic Love are encountered even to-day, outside of novels.

Most marriages, in truth, are brought about through accidental acquaintance or companionship, not through Love. Suppose that a score of young men who have never loved were cast on a desert island with one pretty girl. Though she were as unamiable as Juno, cold and coy as Diana, in less than a month nineteen of the twenty youths would be in love with her and bitter personal enemies. Here the man would fall in love with the woman; the fundamental tone of passion would prevail; whereas if there had been a choice, eighteen of those men perhaps would never have dreamed of proposing to that girl. Now second Love is much more apt to be thus influenced by Individual Preference than first; and the more Love is individualised the deeper it is. Failure to find lasting satisfaction in the first choice makes a man more slow and cautious in his second choice.

At the same time the mind expands and grows, and age strengthens not only the intellect but the emotions as well. For his size, a boy may love as ardently as a man; but the man is bigger.

The history of the race agrees with that of the individual in showing that Love at first is a general passion, only slightly discriminative, but becomes more and more so as time goes on.

Even the objection urged against second Love by Goethe and Heine appears of no special significance when brought face to face with facts. Very few men, if any, who are in Love a second or third time, sit in a corner to muse over the transitoriness of passion till they become “disgusted with life.” On the contrary, they feel convinced that the preceding infatuation was, after all, not real indomitable Love, such as they now experience towards Daisy No. 2; which second infatuation they absolutely know is the genuine article; just as they know that no one ever before loved so deeply and devotedly. This naÏve self-confidence of the lover in the unprecedented ardour and uniqueness of his passion is one of the most sublime and ridiculous aspects of Love.

And here it may be said, for the benefit of timid souls who may possibly fear that harm may result to the cause of Love from exposing its perishableness, that the only persons who could be injured by the destruction of this illusion—those who happen to be in Love—will positively and absolutely refuse to believe that their particular passion is fugitive. They will simply laugh in the face of any one who questions the immortality of their Love; and a year or two later, perhaps, they will laugh again—for a different reason.

Indeed, the notion that true Love never dies and will for ever monopolise the soul, may actually do harm, and sometimes does so. The disappointed lover commits suicide not because his torments seem intolerable for the moment, but because he is convinced they will last for ever, and thus make life not worth living.

A review of the situation brings out the truth that the only apparent advantage which First Love has over later passions is Novelty. Yet even this advantage proves to be illusory; for though the Second Love may not be a novelty, the Girl is; and does not Moore, the modern Anakreon, sing—

One more consideration. There is an adage, not entirely unknown, that practice makes perfect; and psychology teaches that feelings tend to become deeper by repetition. Why should Love be an exception? The channels worn in the brain by the first emotions will be reopened and widened by the new flood of passion; and thus remembered emotion will add its force to that of the present moment.

Has the reader ever heard Wagner’s Nibelung Tetralogy? If so, he will remember with what a thrill of delight he recognised in the later dramas some of the motives and melodies he had heard in the preceding ones. In the later dramas these melodies are appreciated not only for their own intrinsic beauty, but because they come laden with the sad and joyous associations and memories of the preceding scenes which they illustrated.

Wagner was not only a great musician and dramatist, he was also a most subtle psychologist. He doubled the power of music by adding to the enjoyment of the moment the strong current of remembered emotion. And this is precisely what a later passion of manhood adds to the naÏve delights of First Love.

It is remarkable how many analogies there are between Music and Love—the youngest art and the youngest sentiment; and how the love of the divine art enables one to understand and feel more deeply the music of the divine passion.

PRIDE AND VANITY

Jealousy and Monopoly are the two selfish features of Love which urge an enamoured couple to flee society and friends, and take refuge on a desert island. Fortunately there is in the chemistry of Love a third selfish element—the Pride of successful wooing, which commonly is strong enough to neutralise the antisocial tendencies of the other two. If a lover’s passion has not yet risen to fever-heat, nothing (except Jealousy) will so suddenly raise it as the Pride and conceit inspired by noticing that people in general admire his chosen girl; the more of the admirers, the greater his Pride. And if, in addition, sympathising friends directly approve his choice and laud her merits in detail, then his transports of ecstasy become celestial.

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—

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—

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

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—

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.

According to a statement in Nature, 30,000 ruby and topaz humming-birds were sold in London some years ago in the course of one afternoon, “and the number of West Indian and Brazilian birds sold by one auction-room in London during the four months ending April 1885, was 404,464, besides 356,389 Indian birds, without counting thousands of Impeyan pheasants, birds of paradise,” etc. A writer in Forest and Stream mentioned a dealer in South Carolina who handled 30,000 bird-skins per annum. “During four months 70,000 birds were supplied to New York dealers from a single village on Long Island, and an enterprising woman from New York contracted with a Paris millinery firm to deliver during this summer 40,000 or more skins of birds at 40 cents a piece. From Cape Cod, one of the haunts of terns and gulls, 40,000 of the former birds were killed in a single season, so that at points where a few years since these beautiful birds filled the air with their graceful forms and snowy plumage, only a few pairs now remain.” “It is estimated that not less than 5,000,000 birds of all sorts were killed last year for purposes of ornamentation,” wrote Mr. E. P. Powell in the New York Independent. A correspondent of the New York Evening Post saw at an art exhibition a young lady, with “nothing in her face to denote excessive cruelty,” who wore a hat trimmed with “the heads of over twenty little birds”; and the same paper remarked editorially: “No one can tell how large a bird can be worn on a woman’s head, by walking in Fifth Avenue. It is necessary to take a ride in a Second Avenue car to get the full effect of the prevailing fashion. There one may see on the head-gear of poorer classes, and especially of coloured women, every species of the feathered kingdom smaller than a prairie chicken or a canvas-back duck and every colour of the rainbow.”

“Think of women!” exclaims Diderot; “they are miles beyond us in sensibility.”

It was Science, edited by men, that started the agitation against woman’s cruel and tasteless fashion—a fashion which not one woman in a hundred apparently refused to conform to. It was Messrs. J. A. Allen, W. Dutcher, G. B. Sennett, and other ornithologists, who raised their voices in behalf of the murdered birds, for whom no woman seemed to have a thought except Mrs. Celia Thaxter—all honour to her—and a small circle of ladies in England. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote how he felt “the shame of the wanton destruction of our singing-birds to feed the demands of a barbaric vanity;” another man, Charles Dudley Warner, who pertinently suggested that “a dead bird does not help the appearance of an ugly woman, and a pretty woman needs no such adornment.”

That the average woman’s imagination is not sufficiently refined and quick to feel for these winged poems of the air is historically proven by this fashion, which, characteristically enough, was first introduced by a member of the Paris demi-monde.

It has disappeared for the moment, but is almost absolutely certain to reappear within five years.

But who, after all, is responsible for this sluggish condition of the feminine imagination, this lack of sympathy for the fate of harmless happy birds, who in their domestic affections and love-affairs so closely resemble man? Is it not the men who, till within a few years, have refused to give their daughters a rational education? It must be so, for in that sphere where woman has been able to educate herself, and where she is queen—in the domestic circle, she does possess that tender sympathy which she withholds from lower beings.

Within the range of human affections woman manifests more pity, is stirred to nobler needs of self-sacrifice, than man. Is Love included in this category? Dryden tells us that “pity melts the heart to love,” and novelists delight to make their heroines first refuse their suitors and subsequently accept them from real Love born of pity. For my part, I doubt this assumed relationship between Pity and Love; and I do not believe that a girl who has refused a lover ordinarily feels any more pity for him than a cat does for a mouse, or a person who is all right on a steamer does for another who is sea-sick—though he be his best friend. There is an instinctive belief in the human mind that love-sickness and sea-sickness are never fatal.

It does, indeed, very often happen—perhaps in half the cases; it would be interesting to have approximate statistics on the subject—that a girl first refuses the man whose second or third offer she accepts; for, as an anonymous writer remarks, “women are so made (happily for men) that gratitude, pity, the exquisite pleasure of pleasing, the sweet surprise at finding themselves necessary to another’s happiness ... altogether obscure and confuse the judgment.” But in such cases there are other factors which probably influence the girl much more than Pity does. She is, in the first place, largely influenced by this “exquisite pleasure of pleasing”—another name for Pride. Then there is a certain advantage to a man in having proposed, even unsuccessfully; for whenever subsequently the girl reads about Love she will involuntarily think of him; and thus his image will become associated with all the pleasure she derives from Love stories—which may prove the first step for her—and a long one—into the romantic passion. Besides, to propose to a girl is the greatest compliment a man can pay a girl; and this cannot be without influence.

Thus it is possible that Pity, allied with Pride, association, and flattery, may work a change of feeling in a feminine mind; but Pity alone will rarely lead her into the realms of Cupid. A man certainly would never dream of marrying from Pity, on seeing that she loves him deeply, a woman for whom he does not otherwise care. Nor should either man or woman ever marry from Pity, any more than for money or rank. Love should ever be the sole guide to matrimony.

Love at First Sight.—La BruyÈre gives his opinion that “the love which arises suddenly takes longest to cure;” and that “love which grows slowly and by degrees resembles friendship too much to be an ardent passion.” Schopenhauer, too, asserts that “great passions, as a rule, arise at first sight.” He refers to Shakspere’s

and then cites Mateo Aleman’s old Spanish romance, Guzman de Alfarache, in which, three centuries ago, the following observation was made: “To fall in love one does not require much time or reflection and choice; all that is needed is that in that first and only sight there should be a mutual suitability and harmony, or what in common life we call a sympathy of the blood, and which is due to a special influence of the stars.”

As it is not permissible, in these degenerate days of positive science, to explain a thing by a vague reference to poetic astrology, an attempt must be made to account for the possibility of Love at first sight on more prosaic grounds.

Physiognomy furnishes a simple solution of the problem. In every man’s face is painted his personal history, as well as his favourite and customary sphere of thoughts and feelings. As Sir Charles Bell remarks, “Expression is to passion what language is to thought.” The gift of reading correctly this facial language of passion is given to different persons in different degrees, though all have some share of it: and on their more or less accurate and subtle interpretation of the “lines and frowns and wrinkles strange” in another’s features depends the art of reading character and being sympathetically attracted or repulsed, as the case may be. A young man who has unconsciously associated certain peculiarities of facial expression in his sisters or female friends with habitual cheerfulness, amiability, and brightness will, on recognising similar features in a new acquaintance, take for granted similar charms of character: this, which is the work of a second, may result in sympathy at first sight, which very often is the beginning of Romantic Love.

Love at First Sight may be inspired by this instinctive perception of beauty of character, i.e. amiability; or by the sight of mere physical beauty; or, thirdly, by Personal Beauty in the highest sense of the word, uniting intellectual fascination with bodily charms.

Inasmuch as there are not a few men whose Æsthetic taste is so weak that they would rather marry a useful, companionable girl and imagine her beautiful, than take a beauty and imagine her useful; and inasmuch as there are a great many more amiable and vivacious girls in the world than pretty ones, it happens that in a large number of cases Love is inspired by the physiognomic interpretation of sympathetic traits of character just referred to. Hence plain girls need never despair of finding husbands. There is even a current notion that the deepest passions are commonly inspired by plain women who are otherwise attractive. But what inspires the Love in these cases is not so much the woman’s amiability—and certainly not her plainness—as the fact that the style of her homeliness is of an opposite kind from the faults of the lover, and promises to neutralise them in the offspring.

Plain and homely, moreover, are terms often applied to women whose faces only are so, while their figures are sometimes superb. But a fine figure is quite as essential a part of Personal Beauty as a fine face, and is, in the opinion of Schopenhauer, even more potent as a love-inspirer. If the figure is disregarded in favour of the face, Romantic Love is apt to become hyper-romantic, as in the days of Dante.

Perhaps the largest number of cases of Love at First Sight, so called, are inspired by mere beautÉ du diable—a female “bud” whose sole charm apparent is sparkling health and fragrant, dew-bejewelled freshness. That this kind of Love at sight, which consists in being dazzled for the moment by a set of regular features and a pair of bright eyes, is often of brief duration, does not militate against the statement that the deepest Love is also born of such a flash of Æsthetic admiration. An incipient passion may be crushed by the discovery of some disagreeable trait in the person who inspired it; but when, owing to want of early opportunity to discover unsympathetic traits, Love has been allowed to make some progress, the subsequent discovery of a flaw is not nearly so serious a matter, for then Master Cupid simply puts a daub of whitewash on it and calls it a beauty-spot.

Intellect and Love.—But, after all, the deepest Love at Sight, and that which gives promise of greatest permanence, is that inspired by a handsome woman in whose face Intellect has written its autograph. Goethe, indeed, has remarked that “intellect cannot warm us, or inspire us with passion;” but the view he takes here of the relations between intellect and passion is obviously very crude and superficial. No man, of course, would ever fall in Love with a woman who showed her intellectuality—as not a few do—by a parrotlike repetition of encyclopÆdic reading or magazine epitomes of knowledge. This gives evidence of only one form of intellect, the lowest, namely, Memory. It is the higher forms—imagination, wit, clever reasoning, that constitute the essence of intellectual culture; and though woman may never quite equal man in this sphere, such cases as Mme. de StaËl, George Sand, and George Eliot show how much she can accomplish by means of application.

Now this higher kind of intellectual culture is able to influence the amorous feelings in two ways: first, by refining and vivifying the features; secondly, by enabling a woman to appreciate her lover’s ambitions and afford him sympathetic assistance, thereby awakening a responsive echo in his grateful mind.

Look at Miss Marbleface in yonder corner, surrounded by a group of admirers. Everybody wonders why she, whose features might inspire a sculptor, remains unmarried at twenty-six. Her friends, indeed, whisper that she never even got an offer. Yet all the men to whom she is introduced admire her immensely—the first evening; but strange to say, after they have seen her a few times, they are not a bit jealous to leave her to a new group of admirers; who, in turn, cede her to another. Her beauty, in truth, is but skin-deep, literally; the muscles under the skin are never vivified by an electric flash of wit from the brain; there is nothing but marble features and a stereotyped smile; no animation, no change of expression, no Intellect. Were her intellect as carefully cultivated as her features are chiselled, she would inspire Love, not mere momentary admiration; and she would have been married six years ago to a man chosen at will from the whole circle of her acquaintances.

It is easy to explain how the absurd and fatal notion that intellectual application mars women’s peculiar beauty and lessens the feminine graces in general must have arisen. The inference seems to follow logically from the two undeniable premises that pretty girls very often are insipid, and intellectual women commonly are plain. But this is only another case of putting the cart before the horse. Pretty girls, on the one hand, are so rare that they are almost sure to be spoiled by flattery. They receive so much attention that they have no time for study; and ambitious mothers take them into society prematurely, where they get married before their intellectual capacities—which sometimes are excellent—have had time to unfold. Ugly girls, on the other hand, being neglected by the men, have to while away their time with books, music, art, etc., and thus they become bright and entertaining. Therefore it is not the intellect that makes them ugly, but the ugliness that makes them intellectual.

The culture that can be compressed into a single lifetime unfortunately does not suffice to modify the bony and cartilaginous parts of the human face sufficiently to change homeliness into beauty; but the muscles can be mobilised, the expression quickened and beautified by an individual’s efforts at culture; hence some of these reputed plain intellectual women, in moments when they are excited, become more truly fascinating, with all their badly-chiselled features, than any number of cold marble faces. If men only knew it!—but they are afraid of them—the average men are—because they do not constantly wish to be reminded of their own mental shortcomings in a tournament of wit, pleasantry, or erudition.

Even Schopenhauer, who was convinced that women are too stupid to appreciate a man’s intellect, if abnormal, held that women, on the contrary, gain an advantage in Love by cultivating their minds; adding that it is owing to the appreciation of this fact that mothers teach their daughters music, languages, etc.; thus artificially padding out their minds, as on occasion they do parts of the body.

No doubt, as a rule, women are more influenced in love-affairs by a man who excels in athletic qualities of manly energy than by one of intellectual supereminence. But the adoration of women for a Liszt, a Rubinstein, and other men of genius, whose eminence lies in a department that has been made accessible to women for centuries, shows what might be if women were trained in other spheres of human activity and knowledge.

Regarding the mental padding, however, we might continue in the old pessimist’s vein by saying that it is a trick which has had its day. Men do not marry girls quite so blindly as in the days when Romantic Love was a novelty. They keep their eyes open; and when they find that their girl’s musical “culture” consists in the mechanical drumming of three pieces, and that her other “accomplishments” are similar shams, they are apt to take their throbbing hearts and put them into a refrigerator until the young lady has become a faded, harmless old maid, still drumming her three pieces on the piano. The fact that so many mothers persist in thus “padding” their daughters’ minds, instead of educating them properly, is largely responsible for the ever-increasing number of self-conscious and disgusted bachelors in the world.

The example of Aspasia illustrates both the physical advantages beauty derives from intellectual culture—through the refinement of expression—and the emotional advantages a woman secures by being able to sympathise intelligently with her lover’s or husband’s enterprises. Nothing more irresistibly fascinates a man than genuine questioning interest shown by a woman in his life-work. Or, as Mr. Hamerton puts it, “the most exquisite pleasure the masculine mind can ever know, is that of being looked upon by a feminine intelligence with clear sight and affection at the same time.” But on this topic Mr. Mill has discoursed so enthusiastically in his Subjection of Women that anything that might be added here could be little more than a faint echo of his persuasive eloquence, tinged though it be with true lovers’ exaggeration.

Goethe illustrated his maxim that “intellect cannot warm us or inspire us with passion” by marrying a pretty, brainless doll of whom he soon got heartily tired. Heine followed his example by marrying a Parisian labouring girl who, like Madame Racine, probably never read her husband’s writings. And in his Unterwelt he laments his “verfehlte Liebe, verfehltes Leben”—his mistaken love and wasted life.

Why did the ancient Greeks neglect their women? Why did they remain strangers to Love and seek refuge in Friendship? Their women were modest, domestic, good mothers and wives; but they lacked one thing, and that was Intellect.

GALLANTRY AND SELF-SACRIFICE

Primitive tribes have a delightfully simple way of arranging their division of labour. The men do the hunting and carry on wars, the women do everything else. If a warrior on “moving day” should say to his wife and daughters: “See here, this will never do for me to have nothing but my weapons and my pipe, while you carry the babies, the cooking utensils, the remnants of the game, and the tent: let me help you!”—if he should say this, his comrades would consider him crazy, or rather, possessed of a demon, and would burn two or three persons at the stake for having bewitched him.

Gallantry, in other words, is unknown to savages either between lovers, or, in a general sense, towards all women. Nor is it known to semi-civilised peoples. Among the nomadic Arab tribes of the Sahara the wife has to do all the work unless her husband is rich enough to own a slave; and among the poorer Bedouins the husband traverses the desert comfortably seated on his camel, while his wife plods along behind on foot, loaded with her bed, her kitchen utensils, and her child on top.

The ancient Greeks were not so ungallant as these peoples towards their women, as they had slaves to do their hard work; but the constant devoted attention and desire to please which constitute modern Gallantry did not, as we have seen, exist among them. Among the Romans we find traces—but traces only—of this virtue. MediÆval Gallantry reached its extremes in the witches’ fires on the one side, and the grotesque performances of the knight-errants on the other. The intermediate ground apparently remained uncultivated, except during the brief period of chivalrous poetry, and then only in the highest classes. Wherever, in short, Romantic Love was absent, Gallantry, as one of its ingredients, was unknown.

Coming to modern times, we see the same parallelism between general Gallantry and the freedom granted to the young to form Love-matches.

In France, Germany, Italy, the women still have to do the hardest field work, though the men assist. The French, indeed, who systematically suppress Romantic Love, are apparently the most gallant nation in the world. But there is a general agreement among tourists that in real Gallantry, which calls for self-sacrificing actions and not mere polite words and bows, the French are inferior to all other European nations. It is in England and America that true general Gallantry, like true Romantic Love, flourishes most. In America, indeed, owing to the former scarcity of women, Gallantry was for a time carried to a ludicrous excess, almost reminding one of the days of Don Quixote; as in that story of the Western miners who surrounded an emigrant’s waggon and insisted on his “trotting out” his wife; which being done by the trembling man, who feared the worst, the “roughs” passed round the hat and collected a large sum of gold for the woman. Perhaps American women still are, as we read in Daisy Miller, “the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense of indebtedness.” But the constant sight in New York and elsewhere of street-cars in which every man has a seat while every woman is standing, seems to indicate that there is a reaction which may go to the opposite extreme. But after a while the pendulum will doubtless swing back to the middle and remain stationary; and this will be in the new golden age when men will always give up their seats to old and infirm women, to pretty girls, and to all the others who display truly refined instincts and good taste by abjuring crinolines, bustles, high heels, stuffed birds on their hats, and other “ornaments” fatal to Personal Beauty.

From the facts thus hastily sketched we may safely infer that, as we saw in the case of Sympathy with another’s joys, so again with Gallantry, what was born as a trait of Romantic Love was subsequently transferred to the social and domestic relations of men and women in general. Had Romantic Love done nothing more than this, it would deserve to rank among the most refining influences in modern civilisation.

Perhaps the most remarkable existing illustration of the way in which Lovers’ Gallantry may assume a general form, is to be found in Mr. Ruskin’s recent confession regarding girls: “My primary thought is how to serve them and make them happy; or if they could use me for a plank-bridge over a stream, or set me up for a post to tie a swing to, or anything of the sort not requiring me to talk, I should be always quite happy in such a promotion.”

This reads precisely like Heine’s poem in which the lover wishes he were his mistress’s footstool, or again her needle-cushion, that he might experience the delights of pain inflicted by her foot or hand.

Such excess of amorous Gallantry is a favourite theme for poetic hyperbole, and it hardly can be exaggerated; for the lover really does entertain such wishes. With him, romance is realism.

No slave could be so meek and humble, no well-trained dog so obedient as the amorous swain. Again and again will he, without a moment’s hesitation, plunge into a wintry stream and triumphantly snap up and bring back to her the chip she has thrown in to amuse herself.

Active and Passive Desire to Please.—"Love, studious how to please" (Dryden), has two ways of accomplishing its purpose—one passive, one active. Women, owing to their prescribed Coyness, are not allowed to indulge in actions that would imply a desire to please a suitor, except in the later stages of Courtship, when all is settled or understood. Hence their desire to please can only show itself passively in their efforts to make their personal appearance attractive to the lover. Nor are men indifferent to this passive phase of Gallantry. As nothing so fills a man with Pride as the thought that She, a paragon of beauty, adorns herself so carefully all for his delight; so in turn he feels it incumbent on him to follow her example. Even the habitually slovenly become dandies for the moment, brush their hair, buy a new hat and clothes; the lazy become industrious, the cowards assume heroic airs and strut about like tragedians—

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?

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

“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.

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—

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

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

ByronByron really feels that

And every lover would agree with Coleridge that

“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—

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—

Southwell—

Marlowe—

And again—

Or, as Lamb puts it, lovers sometimes

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—

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—

Dryden—

Fletcher—

Middleton—

Drayton—

Constable—

Southwell—

Shakspere—

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—

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.

After all, Schopenhauer was right in saying that when we have no great sorrows the imagination invents small ones which torment us quite as much as the others. When one sees the peculiar delight lovers take in teasing and torturing each other, one feels tempted to believe with Zimmermann that there is “eine Lust am Schmerze”—that pain in itself contains a gratification, an “ecstasy of woe,” distinct from positive pleasure itself.

Yet it is hardly necessary to take refuge in such an emotional paradox in order to account for the value and luxury of Lovers’ Quarrels and all the various mixed moods of Love. A sufficient explanation is afforded by the principles of Contrast and emotional Persistence.

Owing to the fact that feeling seems to have a regular pulsation or rhythm, our hours of anguish are always interrupted by intervals of hope and happy retrospection—as in Chopin’s funeral march, where the gloomy dirge is interrupted for a time by a delicious melody of happy reminiscence, like a heavenly voice of consolation. When the nervous tension has become too great the string breaks and the bow resumes its straightness and elasticity. Hence it is that an uncertain lover actually gloats over the anguish of doubt and jealousy: for he has an instinctive fore-feeling that when the reaction of hope and confidence will come, he will enjoy an ecstasy of the imagination of which an always confident love has no conception.

Uninterrupted enjoyment of lovers’ bliss would soon dull the edge of pleasure, as an unbroken succession of sweet concords in music would cloy the Æsthetic sense. The introduction of discords raises a longing for their resolution which, if gratified, restores to the concords their original charm and freshness, and thus prolongs the pleasures of music. A tourist after spending a month on the top of a Swiss mountain becomes comparatively indifferent to the scene of which he knows every detail by heart; but let his peak be hidden in dense clouds for a few days, and he cannot fail, on emerging again into sunlight, to greet the view with the same thrill of delight as on the day of his arrival.

It is their constant and unexpected changes from joy to sadness, from tears to smiles, that constitute the greatest charm of Heine and Chopin and make them the lyric poet and musician par excellence for lovers. Either a gladsome rainbow suddenly appears to illumine their lurid landscape; or, again, “their plenteous joys, wanton in fulness, seek to hide themselves in drops of sorrow.”

Even the famous

what is it but another way of stating that that Love which has met with no impediments, in which anguish and delight have not warmed one another by mutual friction, has never broken out into a conflagration sufficiently brilliant to be recorded “by tale or history” as a remarkable specimen of “true love.” It is the plot-interest that fascinates the reader as well as the lover himself; it is the impediments and emotional conflicts, the coyness of fate, that constitute the principal charm in a tale of love; and it would take a very clever novelist to attract readers by an account of a courtship of which the happy result was a foregone conclusion at every stage.

Thus the magic effect of contrasted emotions suggests why pleasure alternating with woe in Love is more intense than pleasure uninterrupted. A mountaineer who has been wading through snowfields all day up to his knees enjoys the comforts of his slippers, a bright fire, and a cup of tea in the evening, twice as much as a man who has been all day at home.

On reflection, however, it seems as if Contrast, far from reducing things to their first principles, itself needed an explanation. Why is it that by contrasting two emotions we heighten their colour? A partial explanation was, indeed, suggested in speaking of discords: anguish begets desire, and the more intense desire has been, the more lively is its gratification. A more profound solution of the problem, however, is found in the fact that feelings have their echoes, which continue sometimes long after the original tone has ceased; and if meantime a new tone is sounded, it blends with the echo and produces a mixed feeling.

The sense of Temperature affords a simple illustration of this “echo.” Place two basins before you, one filled with tepid, the other with ice-cold, water. Put your right hand in the ice-water one minute, leaving the left in your pocket. Then put both hands into the tepid water. It will seem still tepid to the left, but quite warm to the right hand.

Some psychologists, however, deny that pleasures and pains ever coalesce into one feeling—that there is such a thing as a mixed feeling. They contend that the attention can be fixed on only one feeling at a time, that the stronger crowds out the weaker, and that it is only their rapid succession that makes two feelings appear simultaneous, just as a firebrand swung around rapidly seems to form a fiery circle.

Now it is quite true that the attention can be fixed on only one feeling at any given moment, and that the stronger crowds out the weaker so far as the attention is concerned: yet this does not prevent the prevailing feeling from being affected by the echo of the one which preceded it. If a man, buried in the labyrinths of a big hotel, is waked up in the night by cries of fire; though it may prove a false alarm, yet the effect of the fright will remain with him and cast a gloom over his whole day’s doings, however pleasant in themselves. And a doubtful lover’s enjoyment of his sweetheart’s sweetest smiles is often galled by the remembrance that on the preceding day she smiled just as sweetly on his odious rival. “For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done,” says Shakspere.

In his admirable Dissertation on the Passions, Hume cleverly makes use of a musical analogy to explain how different emotions may be mixed: “If we consider the human mind, we shall observe that, with regard to the passions, it is not like a wind-instrument of music, which, in running over all the notes, immediately loses the sound when the breath ceases; but rather resembles a string-instrument, where, after each stroke, the vibrations still retain some sound which gradually and insensibly decays. The imagination is extremely quick and agile, but the passions in comparison are slow and restive; for which reason, when any object is presented which affords a variety of views to the one and emotions to the other, though the fancy may change its views with great celerity, each stroke will not produce a clear and distinct note of passion, but the one passion will always be mixt and confounded with the other.”

Lunatic, Lover, and Poet.—A still better analogy of the manner in which one feeling may be modified by another is furnished by the optical phenomenon of after-images. If we gaze very steadily for half a minute at a green wafer and then at a sheet of white paper, we see on it a purple image of the wafer; purple being the complementary colour of green, i.e. the colour which, if mixed with green, produces white. The reason of this phenomenon is that, after looking at the green wafer, the nervous fibres in the eye which perceive that colour have become so fatigued that the fainter green waves in the white paper fail to make any perceptible impression on them; so that purple alone prevails for the moment. So to the infatuated swain who has been tortured by the green-eyed monster, Jealousy, the moment of remission, which would else be one of neutral indifference, assumes the hue of rosy hope and positive delight. Hours which to sober mortals would seem perfect blanks are thus to him full of intense feeling, simply because they are rebounds from a state of extreme tension in the opposite direction. He might be likened to a schoolboy whose sleigh is carried across the frozen river by its downward impetus and even ascends the hill on the other side some distance before it stops. Hence, like the madman and the man of genius, the amorous swain is always either down in a fit of melancholy, or in an exalted ecstasy of joy, rapidly alternating and weirdly intermingled—

Now poets are proverbially melancholy; and madmen, as Professor Krafft-Ebing tells us, are also more commonly tortured by depressing delusions than elated by pleasant ones. Hence, if the poet’s maxim, just quoted, be true, we should expect the lover’s prevailing cast of mind to be melancholy too; and so it is. Though he enjoys moments of delirious rapture, to which sober mortals are utter strangers, yet his misgivings are incessant, even when he is almost certain of success: and it takes but little to poison his cup; for, as Professor Volkmann remarks, “one drop of anguish suffices to gall a whole ocean of joy.” So the lover becomes “pale and interesting,” loses weight and appetite, and sighs away his soul. Were this emotional fermenting process allowed to last too long, his health would suffer seriously: but fortunately it ordinarily ceases in a year or so, yielding a wine which, though less sparkling and ebullient, is more mellow and less intoxicating. Romantic Love, in other words, is metamorphosed into conjugal affection which, among other attributes of Love, strips off its characteristic trait of melancholy, whereby it is easily distinguished from all other forms of affection. Before, however, we can pass on to consider in detail the differences between Romantic and Conjugal Love, the two remaining ingredients of Romantic Love—Individual Preference and Personal Beauty—must be briefly considered.

INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCE

It happens occasionally, in the Western regions of the United States, that an Indian brave casts his eyes on a buxom pale-face girl and desires her in marriage. He offers her parents two ponies for her; he offers three, five, and even seven ponies; and when still refused he is the most mystified man in the world: cannot understand how any man can be so egregiously stupid or avaricious as to refuse his daughter for seven ponies! Ugh!!

It is needless to recapitulate the numerous instances cited in preceding pages, showing that throughout the world, until within a few centuries, Romantic Love could not exist because the girl’s choice, on the one hand, was utterly ignored, while the man, on the other, was equally prevented, by the lack of opportunities for courtship, from basing his choice on a real knowledge of the selected bride. The parents who did the selecting, always for the bride, and sometimes even for the bridegroom, were guided in their choice by money and rank and not by Health and Beauty, which inspire Love and follow as its fruits. The history of Love, till within three or four centuries ago, might, in short, be summed up in six words: No Choice, no Love, no Beauty—except in those rare cases where special hygienic advantages prevailed, or where lucky chance brought together a youth and a maiden who in the ordinary course of events would have fallen in Love with one another.

There is reason to believe, however, that even if in the early ages of the world the young had been allowed greater freedom in choosing a lover, Romantic Love, in its more ardent phases, would not have flourished to any great extent among primitive, ancient, and mediÆval nations: for the reason that Love depends on Individualisation, and our remote ancestors were not so diversely individualised as we are.

Sexual Divergence.—Comparative ethnology, psychology, and biology show that specialisation is a product of higher evolution, i.e. that individual traits are developed in proportion as we proceed higher in the scale of life, physical and intellectual. It is true there are no two flowers in the fields, no two leaves in a forest, exactly alike in every detail: but the differences are infinitesimal, and almost require a microscope to see them. It is also true that the sheep in a flock, which appear almost alike to a casual observer, are individually known to the shepherd. Possibly a sharp-sighted and patient naturalist might live to distinguish himself by distinguishing the individuals in a swarm of bees, or a caravan of ants: but this would be counted little short of a miracle.

Furthermore, ordinary observers find it almost as difficult to distinguish individuals in a crowd of Chinese, Negroes, or Indians, as in a bee-hive. Closer acquaintance does reveal differences: but they are rarely so great as those between individuals in civilised communities. And in these civilised communities themselves we find greater differences, sexual differences pre-eminently, the higher we ascend. Between a peasant and his wife the difference, both physical and mental, is surely not half so great as that between a lawyer and his wife, a physician or professor and his wife. “The lower the state of culture,” says Professor Carl Vogt, “the more similar are the occupations of the two sexes;” and similarity of occupation entails similarity of attitude, expression, and mental habits. Mr. Higginson’s notion that civilisation tends to make the sexes more and more alike is true only as regards legal rights and social privileges; regarding their mental traits and physical appearance exactly the reverse is true. The peasant’s wife may have a tender heart for him and her children, but her domestic drudgery and hard labour in the fields make her features, her voice, and manners harsh and masculine. And who has not read a hundred times that the Indian squaws look quite as stern, stolid, unemotional, and masculine as their husbands?

That the ancient Greeks, though they may have possessed it, had but little regard for Individuality is shown especially in their sculpture, and in the fact that with them even marriage was considered less a private than a social matter. Lycurgus, Solon, and Plato agreed in viewing marriage as “a matter in which the state had a right to interfere;” and for the purpose of providing the state with legitimate citizens, it was therefore regarded as obligatory. The absence of emotional expression in Greek statues equally shows their indifference to Individualisation and their ignorance of Love: for Love is inspired not so much by regularity of features as by fascinating variety of emotional expression.

Thus the absence or disregard of individual traits among ancient nations helps, like the absence of individual Choice, to account for the absence of Romantic Love, the very essence of which—as distinguished from mere sexual passion—is the insistance on individual traits and the mutual adaptation of the lovers.

What sublime—or ridiculous—extremes, this absorption in individual traits reaches in Modern Love, no one need be told. Not only does the lover consider his maiden’s frowns more beautiful than other maidens’ smiles, but he longs to kiss the floor on which she has walked; and every ribbon that has clasped her waist, every jewel that has touched her ear or neck, becomes charged with a subtle and mysterious electric current that would shock him with a thrill of recognition should his fingers come in contact with them on a table, even in a dark room.

Making Women Masculine.—Nothing proves so irrefutably the hopelessness of the task undertaken by a few “strong-minded” women—namely, to equalise the sexes by making women more masculine—than the fact thus revealed by anthropology and history: that the tendency of civilisation has been to make men and women more and more unlike, physically and emotionally. Whatever approximation there may have been has been entirely on the part of the men, who have become less coarse or “manly,” in the old acceptation of that term, and more femininely refined; while women have endeavoured to maintain the old distance by a corresponding increase of refinement on their part. Should the Woman’s Rights viragoes ever succeed in establishing their social ideal, when women will share all the men’s privileges, make stump speeches, and—of course—go back to the harvest fields and to war with them—then good-bye, Romantic Love! But there is no danger that these Amazons will ever carry their point. They might as well try to convince women to wear beards; or men, crinolines.

Were any further proof needed that the sexes have been continually diverging instead of converging, it would be found in the fact that the young of both sexes are more alike than adults: in accordance with the law that the individual goes through the same stages of development as the race. And there are embryological facts which indicate even that there is some truth in the Platonic myth that the sexes at first were not separated; but that such separation took place probably for three reasons: to secure a division of labour; to prevent the full hereditary transmission of injurious qualities; and, thirdly, to secure the benefits of cross-fertilisation,—a result which in the higher spheres of human life is attained through Love, which is based on opposite or complementary qualities, and scorns near relationship.

Love and Culture.—The dependence of Love on Individualisation, and the dependence of Individualisation, in turn, on Culture, help us also to explain an apparent difficulty regarding the non-existence of Love among the lower classes in ancient Greece and elsewhere. For these classes were not subjected to the same chaperonage as the higher circles: and it might be inferred therefore that the possibility of free Choice must have led to real love-matches. Perhaps it did in those rare cases where culture had sent a rootlet down into a lower social stratum. But as a rule one would have looked in vain among the lower classes—as one does to-day, despite poetic fiction—for minds sufficiently refined to comprehend and feel the highly-complex and idealised group of emotions which constitute Romantic Love. Of course it would be absurd to include in this statement people of refinement who through misfortune have been plunged into abject poverty. They do not belong to the “Great Unwashed”—?? p?????.

When Stendhal asserts that in France Love exists only in the lower classes, while Max Nordau states that in Germany it is to be found in the higher classes only, they are probably both right—allowance being made for rare exceptions. What Love does exist in France—and it is preciously scarce—cannot possibly prevail except among the working people; and in Germany among the corresponding class it must be equally scarce, whereas in the middle and higher classes, where chaperonage is not nearly so strict and idiotic as in France, Cupid does contrive to find an occasional target for his arrows.

PERSONAL BEAUTY

Fanny Brawne having complained to Keats that he seemed to ignore all her other qualities and have eyes for her beauty alone, Keats thus justified himself: “Why may I not speak of your beauty, since without that I could never have loved you? I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect, and can admire it in others: but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart.”

Fanny Brawne is not the only girl who has thus complained to her lover about his exclusive emphasising of her Personal Beauty. But all such complaints are useless. In Modern Love the Admiration of Personal Beauty is by far the strongest of all ingredients, and is becoming more so every year: fortunately, for thereby Romantic Love is becoming more and more idealised and converted into a pure Æsthetic sentiment. Goldsmith, indeed, laid stress on the virtue of choosing a wife on the same principle that guided her in choosing a wedding-ring—for qualities that will wear. But Personal Beauty does wear, with proper hygienic care.

Feminine Beauty in Masculine Eyes.—In masculine Love, regard for youthful feminine Beauty has always played a rÔle more or less important. But the effects of this kind of sexual selection in the lower races in increasing the amount of physical beauty in the world, have been commonly neutralised by the crude Æsthetic notions prevailing among men as to what constituted feminine beauty. The weakness of the Æsthetic overtone in Love, moreover, has hitherto prevented it from competing successfully with other marriage-motives. On the continent of Europe, to this day, the ugliest girl with a dowry of a few thousands is sure to find a husband and transmit her bodily and his mental ugliness to her offspring; while girls who could transmit a considerable amount of beauty, physical and mental, to their children, are left to fade away as old maids, because they have no money.

In this respect America sets a noble example to most parts of Europe. Thousands of young Americans marry penniless beauties every year, although they might have rich ugly girls for the asking. This is one of the things Frenchmen and Germans cannot understand, and class as “Americanisms.” And then they wonder why it is that there are so many pretty girls in Canada and the United States. Another “Americanism,” gentlemen. These pretty girls are the issue of Love-matches. Their mothers were selected for their Beauty, not for money or rank.

Not but that there are numerous exceptions to this golden rule of Love. Were there not, ugly women would be scarcer than they are, even in America.

Masculine Beauty in Feminine Eyes.—In woman’s Love the admiration of Personal Beauty has played a much less significant rÔle than in man’s Love. If, nevertheless, the average man in most countries is perhaps a better specimen of masculine Beauty than the average woman of feminine Beauty, this is owing to the facts that sons as well as daughters may inherit their mother’s beauty, and that men, leading a more active and athletic life, are more beautiful than women in proportion as they are more healthy.

In the past barbarous times the constant wars and the unsettled state of social affairs made it important for women to select men not for their beauty, but for their energy,energy, courage, and manly prowess. Desdemona falls in Love with the Moor despite his colour and ugliness; and why? Othello himself tells us—

And it is on beholding Orlando vanquishing the Duke’s wrestler that Rosalind falls in Love with him. As Celia remarks: “Young Orlando, that tripped up the wrestler’s heels and your heart, both in an instant.”

Women are conservative; and in the ludicrous feminine eagerness to make immortal heroes of the ephemeral victors in a boat-race or baseball match, we see an echo, in these peaceful days, of a feminine trait imprinted on them in warlike times.

Intellectual supereminence, in the meantime, was ignored by women. Petrarch’s verses made no impression on Laura, and Dante could not even win Beatrice with such poetic beauties as these lines—

There is, however, already a large class of superior women who have discovered that brains have displaced muscle in the successful struggle for existence, and that strong nerves are the true storage-batteries of courage and vigour in modern life. Hence the homage paid to men of genius.

In regard to masculine Beauty a change likewise has come over the feminine mind. Fashionable young ladies appear, indeed, to be as exacting in the matter of what they consider Personal Beauty as their beaux are. A barber’s pet is their pet, even as the fashionable man’s ideal of femininity is a milliner’s model. There can be hardly any doubt that this is an improvement on the taste of those savages who prefer their women black, with thick lips, flat noses, and tattooed, or smeared with a half-inch coat of paint.

Says a writer in the London Magazine (1823): “The pale poet, whose works enchant us all, is nobody in the park: with his shrunk cheeks and spindle legs, he sneaks along as little noticed as a fly; while a thousand fond eyes are fixed on the gay and handsome apprentice there, with just enough intellect to make the clothes which make him.”

Serves the pale poet quite right. His genius does not give him any right to neglect his health, or to allow the tailor’s apprentice to surpass him in attention to his personal appearance. GÉnie oblige. And whether geniuses or not, men should pay just as much attention to their dress and personal attractiveness as women.

A convincing illustration of my thesis that Personal Beauty is to-day a more important factor in woman’s Love than formerly, is afforded by the circumstance that formerly Love had the effect of making a man neglect his beard, and hands, and clothes, and indulge in general slovenliness, as we see in Rosalind’s summary of the symptoms of masculine Love, as well as in various passages in Cervantes and other authors; whereas to-day it is just the reverse, as noted under the head of Gallantry. It is most amusing to watch a man smitten with sudden passion: how carefully he adjusts his cravat, curls his moustache, brushes his hat and boots, polishes his finger-nails, removes spots from his coat, regards himself in the mirror, and—wishes he were a millionaire.

So much for the general relations between Love and Beauty. It now remains to consider in detail what peculiarities of personal appearance are and have been specially favoured by Love. This involves an Æsthetico-anatomical analysis of every part of the human body from toe to top. To this analysis almost one half of this work will be devoted—showing the preponderating importance of Personal Beauty over the other factors in Modern Love. But before proceeding to this pleasant task it will be well, for the sake of continuity, to discuss the remaining aspects of Modern Love: how it differs from conjugal affection; how men of genius behave when in Love; what are the peculiarities of the physical expression of Love in features and actions; how Love maybe won and cured; and how the leading modern nations differ in their amorous peculiarities. A consideration of Schopenhauer’s theory of Love will then naturally lead us to the second part of this treatise, in which Personal Beauty alone will form our theme.