I.—LOVE FOR ANIMALS

Over inanimate objects and plants we have this great emotional advantage that we can love them, whereas they cannot love us, nor even one another, though related by marriage, like flowers.

Animals, however, can love both us and one another and be loved; and this establishes a distinction between them and lower beings, and a relationship with us, that warrants us in placing their attachments under the head of Personal Affections.

Calderwood is sufficiently liberal to admit that, to a degree animals may be included in our affections. But Adolf Horwicz who has written the most complete, and, on the whole, most satisfactory analysis of the human feelings in existence, denies this. “Love is and remains a personal feeling,” he asserts; it “can only be referred to persons, not to things. The tenderness of American ladies towards dogs and cats is simply a gross emotional caricature.”

So it is, very often, especially in the case of ladies who neglect their children and make fashionable pets of animals, changing and exchanging them with the fashion. But it is simply absurd to mention this case as a fair instance of human love towards animals. How many of the greatest geniuses the world has produced have become famous for their affectionate devotion to their dogs! “A dog!” says an old English writer, “is the only thing on this earth that loves you more than he loves himself.” And should we be morally inferior to the dog—unable to love him in return? especially when we remember that “histories,” as Pope remarks, “are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”

Vischer, the well-known German writer on Æsthetics, goes so far as to admit that whenever he is in society his only wish is, “Oh, if there was only a dog here!”

There is something much nobler and deeper than sarcasm on humanity in Byron’s famous epitaph on his dog:—

I wonder if Horwicz could read the following exquisite prose poem of Turgenieff without feeling ashamed of himself:—

"We two are sitting in the room: my dog and I. A violent storm is raging without.

"The dog sits close before me—he gazes straight into my eyes.

"And I too gaze straight into his eyes.

"It seems as if he wished to say something to me. He is dumb, has no words, does not understand himself; but I understand him.

"I understand that he and I are at this moment governed by the same feeling, that there is not the slightest difference between us. We are beings of the same kind. In each of us shines and glows the same flame.

"Death approaches, flapping his broad, cold, moist wings....

"And all is ended.

"Who then will establish the difference between the flames which glowed within us two?

"No! We who exchange those glances are not animal and man.

"Created alike are the two pairs of eyes that are fixed on each other.

“And each of these eye-pairs, that of the man as well as that of the animal, expresses clearly and distinctly an anxious craving for mutual caresses.”

It is a vicious trait of the human character that it soon grows callous to caresses, and that the unmasked expression of tender emotion is regarded as undignified and in “bad form.” It is the absence in the dog’s mind of this ugly human trait that makes him such a delightful friend and companion. However much you caress and fondle him, he will always be anxious and grateful for the next gentle pat on the head, the next kind look, and will never despise you for any excess of fond emotion lavished on him.

The greatest flaw in Christian ethics is, that it takes so little account of this capacity of animals for affection, and our duties towards them. The duty of kindness towards animals is indeed, as Mr. Lecky remarks, “the one form of humanity which appears more prominently in the Old Testament than in the New.” “Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn,” is a precept which deprecates even a very modified form of cruelty to animals. Had this precept been given in a more generalised and comprehensive form, what an incalculable amount of suffering might have been saved the animals that had the misfortune to be born in Christian countries, as compared with those in the Oriental countries.

According to Mr. Lecky, Plutarch was the first writer who placed the duty of kindness to animals on purely moral grounds; “and he urges that duty with an emphasis and detail to which no adequate parallel can, I believe, be found in the Christian writings for at least 1700 years.” Some of the earlier Greek philosophers had based this duty on the doctrine of the transmigration of human souls into animal bodies; and it is related that Pythagoras used to buy of fishermen the whole contents of their nets, for the pleasure of letting the fish go again. Leonardo da Vinci, from less superstitious motives, used to buy caged birds for the same purpose; and similar traits are told of other men of genius who were sufficiently refined to recognise the evidences of emotion in animals. In our times, finally, we have a man, Mr. Bergh, who devotes his whole life to the object of establishing the personal rights of animals to kind treatment on legal grounds.

But, after all, the most influential friend animals have ever possessed was Darwin, who, by establishing their relationship to man on grounds which no one who understands the evidence can question, for ever vindicated for them the privilege of personal affection. The very grammar of our language has been affected by Darwinism. Formerly, it was customary to write “the dog which jumped into the water to save a child.” Now we say, “the dog who jumped into the water.” In other words, animals are no longer regarded as “things,” or animated machines, but as persons.

II.—MATERNAL LOVE

Within the range of impersonal emotions and affections, as we have seen, women are vastly inferior to men; but in personal affections—partly owing to their almost exclusive devotion to them—women are commonly superior to men. Not always, however; for, as we shall see later on, the prevalent dogma that woman’s Romantic Love is deeper and more ardent than man’s is an absurd myth. But in conjugal affection—which differs widely from Romantic Love—woman is generally more sincere, devoted, and self-sacrificing than man. In friendship, too, women are more sincere and ardent than men; for friendship is an ancient, rather than a modern sentiment; and as women are more conservative than men, they have preserved this sentiment (at least in early life), while among men it has become nearly extinct:—

But the one affection in which woman stands infinitely above man is the maternal, compared with which paternal love is ordinarily a mere shadow. Romantic Love in man and child-love in woman are the two strongest passions which the human mind entertains.

In depth and strength these two passions are perhaps alike. In point of antiquity, the maternal feeling has an advantage over the Love-passion; for, of all personal affections, the maternal was developed first, and the sentiment of Romantic Love last.

Personal affections are of two kinds: (1) Those based on blood-relationship—maternal, paternal, filial, brotherly, and sisterly love; (2) Those not based on blood-relationship—friendship and Romantic Love. Conjugal affection belongs psychologically to the first class.

That of all relationships the one between mother and child is the most intimate is obvious. The child is part and parcel of the mother: her own flesh and blood and soul; and in loving it the mother practically loves a detached portion of herself—thus uniting the force of selfish with that of altruistic emotion. This is the primitive fountain of maternal affection. A second source of it lies in the resemblance of the child to the father, reviving in the mother’s memory the romantic days of pre-matrimonial Love. It must be an unending source of interest in a mother’s mind to note which of the child’s traits are derived from her, which from the father. If she loves herself, and loves her husband, the child that unites the traits of both must be doubly dear to her. The fact that the child is inseparably associated with all the mother’s joys and sorrows, from the wedding-day to death, constitutes a third source of her attachment; and a fourth is the social regard and honour which an energetic and gifted son, or a beautiful and accomplished daughter, may reflect on her.

The mother herself is of course unconscious of the complex nature of her feeling and its origin; especially in the first days, when the new feeling dawns upon her like a revelation. As in the case of budding Love, the feeling is at first less individual than generic—less the affection of this particular mother for this particular child than the bursting out of the general feeling of motherhood, inherited by her in common with all women.

Natural selection helps us to explain how this general feeling of motherhood was developed. As among animals, so among our savage and semi-civilised ancestors, those mothers who fondly cared for their infants naturally succeeded in rearing a larger and more vigorous progeny than those mothers who neglected their children. And through hereditary transmission this instinct gradually acquired, that marvellous intensity and power which we now admire.

The sublime and almost terrible height to which this emotion can rise is most realistically depicted in Rubens’s famous picture in Munich, representing the murder of the children at Bethlehem; in which mothers grasp the naked daggers, and frantically expose their breasts to receive the blows intended for their little ones. Throughout the animal kingdom, including mankind, the female is less pugnacious than the male, less provided with means of defence, and hence more gentle and timid; yet in the moment of peril the mother’s affection absolutely annihilates fear, and makes her face danger and death with a courage, supernatural strength, and endurance, rarely equalled by man, with all his weapons and natural consciousness of superior muscle.

It is in this blind, impetuous, passionate willingness of self-sacrifice that maternal affection most closely resembles the passion of Romantic Love.

III.—PATERNAL LOVE

For paternal affection Natural Selection has done much less than for maternal; and it is easy to understand why. For, useful as the father’s assistance is in securing various advantages to the growing child, yet even if he should cruelly abandon it altogether, the maternal love would still remain interposed to save and rear it.

Nor is it in the human race alone that paternal is weaker than maternal love. Among mammals, as Horwicz remarks, we even come across a Herr Papa occasionally who shows a great inclination to dine on his progeny. And how irregularly the paternal—sometimes even the maternal—instinct is displayed among savages is graphically shown by this group of cases collected by Herbert Spencer:—

“As among brutes the philoprogenitive instinct is occasionally suppressed by the desire to kill, and even devour, their young ones; so among primitive men this instinct is now and again overridden by impulses temporarily excited. Thus, though attached to their offspring, Australian mothers, when in danger, will sometimes desert them; and if we may believe Angas, men have been known to bait their hooks with the flesh of boys they have killed. Thus, notwithstanding their marked parental affection, Fuegians sell their children for slaves; thus, among the Chonos Indians, a father, though doting on his boy, will kill him in a fit of anger for an accidental offence. Everywhere among the lower races we meet with like incongruities. Falkner, while describing the paternal feelings of Patagonians as very strong, says they often pawn and sell their wives and little ones to the Spaniards for brandy. Speaking of the children of the Sound Indians, Bancroft says they ‘sell or gamble them away.’ According to Simpson, the Pi-Edes ‘barter their children to the Utes proper for a few trinkets or bits of clothing.’ And of the Macusi, Schomburgk writes, ‘the price of a child is the same as an Indian asks for his dog.’ This seemingly heartless conduct to children often arises from the difficulty experienced in rearing them.”

Some light is thrown on the genesis and composition of parental affection by the three reasons named by Spencer, why among savages and semi-civilised peoples in general sons were much more appreciated than daughters. While daughters were little more than an encumbrance to the parents, useless before puberty, and lost to them after marriage, the sons could make themselves useful in warding off the enemy, in avenging personal injuries, and in performing the funeral rites for the benefit of departed ancestors.

In a higher stage of civilisation it is probable that utilitarian considerations of a somewhat different kind still formed a principal ingredient in parental love. A son was valued as an assistant in workshop or field, a daughter as a domestic drudge. Feelings of a tenderer nature were of course sometimes present, but that they were not general is shown by the fact, attested by numerous historic examples, that the aim of our paternal ancestors in centuries past was to make their children fear rather than love them.

A slight element of fear is indeed necessary for the maintenance of filial respect and discipline; but our forefathers were too prone to sacrifice their tender feelings of sympathy with their offspring to the gratification of parental authority, for the obvious reason that the latter feeling was stronger than the former. The frequency with which daughters especially were forced to sacrifice their personal preferences in marriage to the ambitions and whims of their father, affords the most striking instance of the former embryonic state of parental affection.

In modern parental love Pride is perhaps the most conspicuous trait. This Pride has two aspects—one comic, one serious. Nothing is more amusing than the suddenness with which the “pride of authorship” converts a bachelor’s well-known horror of babies into the young father’s fantastic worship. Yet though he feels “like a little tin god on wheels,” he recognises the superior rank of the young prince, spoils his best trousers in kneeling before him, allows him to pull his moustache and whiskers, and, indeed, shows a disposition towards self-sacrifice almost worthy of a lover.

The serious side of the matter reveals one of the greatest differences between paternal and maternal love. A mother’s love is largely influenced by pity; hence she is very apt to lavish her fondest caresses on that child which happens to be imperfect in some way—say a cripple—and therefore unhappy. The father on the other hand, will show most favour to his handsomest daughter, his most talented son; and nothing will so swell a father’s heart and cause it to overflow with affection as the news of some great distinction acquired by this son.

IV.—FILIAL LOVE

Mr. Spencer is doubtless right in asserting that of all family affections filial love is the least developed; and in tracing this weakness especially to the parental harshness and disposition to inspire excessive fear just referred to. In Germany the example of the Prussian king who so unmercifully treated his children was extensively imitated. The condition in France is indicated by the words of Chateaubriand: “My mother, my sister, and myself, transformed into statues by my father’s presence, only recover ourselves after he leaves the room;” and in England, in the fifteenth century, says Wright, “Young ladies, even of great families, were brought up not only strictly, but even tyrannically.” And even two centuries later “children stood or knelt in trembling silence in the presence of their fathers and mothers, and might not sit without permission.”

Among animals filial affection can scarcely be said to exist, except as a very utilitarian craving for protection and sustenance. Among primitive men it is a common practice to abandon aged parents to their fate. The parents do not resent this treatment; and of the Nascopies Heriot even says that the aged father “usually employed as his executioner the son who is most dear to him.” Nor are cases of heartless neglect at all uncommon even among modern civilised communities. But the gradual change of fathers “from masters into friends” has tended to multiply and intensify filial love at the same rate as paternal; and the advance of moral refinement will tend to make the lot of aged parents more and more pleasant, not only because the duty of gratitude for favours received will be more vividly realised and enforced by example, but because the cultivation of the imagination intensifies sympathy, thus making it impossible for a son or daughter to be happy while they know their parents to be unhappy.

Our feelings are curiously complicated and subtly interwoven. Parents feel a natural pride in their children. The best way therefore to repay them for all their troubles is to act in such a way as to justify and intensify that pride. On the other hand, the thought that the parental pride is gratified also gratifies filial vanity, and proves an additional incentive to ambitious effort.

V.—BROTHERLY AND SISTERLY LOVE

Young people of both sexes more frequently make confidants and “bosom friends” of their playmates and classmates than of their brothers and sisters. Why is this so? Novelty perhaps has something to do with it. The domestic experiences and emotions of two brothers or sisters are apt to be so much alike as to become monotonous; whereas a member of another family may initiate them into a fresh and fascinating sphere of emotion and a novel way of looking at things. Moreover, friendship is very capricious in its choice; and as the number of brothers and sisters is limited, the selection is apt to be made in the wider field outside the domestic circle. Again, it is a peculiarity of human nature to appear in great nÉgligÉ at home, and to regard the nearest relatives as the best lightning-rods for disagreeable moods; and this does not tend to deepen the love of brothers and sisters.

It may be doubted whether this form of affection exists among animals or among primitive men; and even among civilised peoples the bond is but a weak one, except in the most refined families. Though brothers feel bound to protect their sisters, they reserve most of their gallantry for some one else’s sister; and though a sister will feel proud if her brother is one of a victorious crew, her heart will beat twice as fast if it is her lover instead of her brother. The English language has not even a collective word for the love of brothers and sisters; and even the partial terms, “sisterly love” and “brotherly love,” have more of an ecclesiastic than a domestic flavour. The German language has a collective word—and a big one too,—Geschwisterliebe; but it would perhaps be misleading to infer from its existence and size that this species of family love is more developed in Germany than in England. The German’s advantage appears to be philological merely, and not sociological. He is less of a traveller and colonist than the Englishman, who is very often separated from his brothers and sisters for years. Yet this sometimes is rather a gain than a loss; for it destroys that excessive familiarity which, as just noted, makes friendship rarer among members of the same hearth than between individuals of different families.

To the wider circles of blood-relationship—up to “forty-second cousins”—the Germans pay much more regard than the English; and the French perhaps go a step beyond the Germans. For in France each family, with its ramifications, forms a sort of clique into which an outsider can rarely enter. Needless to say that this forms a great impediment to Love’s free choice.

VI.—FRIENDSHIP

If we now turn to the two remaining species of personal affection—Friendship and Love—the emotional scenery undergoes a great change. In all the cases so far considered, blood-relationship was a source of affection; whereas in friendship it is commonly a disadvantage, and in Romantic Love it is positively abhorred, except in the more remote degrees. Some savage tribes, it is true, allow, or even prescribe, marriages between brother and sister—especially a younger sister; and cases occur of marriages between father and daughter, mother and son. But civilised society—guided by religious precepts, and possibly also by a vague instinctive recognition of the advantages of cross-fertilisation—condemns such unions as hideous crimes; and the mediÆval theologians, in their extreme zeal, forbade all marriages within the seventh degree of relationship.

In the case of friendship the objection to blood-relationship is not founded on a social or religious precept; but it exists all the same, as already noted. Perhaps Jean Paul’s maxim that friends may have everything in common except their room accounts for its existence. Brothers and sisters are commonly too much alike in their thoughts and tastes to become friends, in the special sense of the word. Hence it is that there is apt to be a deeper attachment between those brothers and sisters who have frequently been separated by school-terms than among those who are always together. For in friendship, as in love, a short absence is advantageous.

Friendship is partly an outgrowth of the social instinct and partly a result of special associations, habit, community of interests and tastes. As a boy I had an opportunity to make some interesting observations on friendship among animals, showing that it differed in degree only, and not in kind or origin, from that of man. Among the animals we kept at our country-house were a dog, a pet sheep, and some pigs. The dog showed his confidence in the sheep’s amiable forbearance by abandoning his cold kennel on winter nights and seeking warmer quarters by the side of his woolly neighbour. For the pigs his friendly regards were shown in a less utilitarian manner, by driving away, unbidden and untaught, any swinish tramps that appeared, uninvited, to share their meals. But the most peculiar relations existed between the sheep and the pigs. In the absence of any other means of satisfying its gregarious or social instincts, the sheep joined the pigs every morning in their foraging expeditions in the woods, returning with them in the evening. And, what was still more remarkable, when after a time a dozen sheep were added to our stock of animals, the old pet remained faithful to the pigs, and paid no attention whatever to the newcomers. Here the friendly attachment, based on habitual association and the memory of mutual pleasures of grazing, was strong enough to overcome the inherited fellow-feeling for members of its own species.

Between this instance and those ordinary cases of companionship among men which are called friendship, there is hardly any difference. In the more intimate cases of special friendship the craving for companionship is strengthened by a community of thoughts and emotions. Bacon gives us in a nut-shell three of the ingredients of friendship which are not to be found in the primitive form just considered. The first is this, that each friend becomes a sort of secular confessor, to whom the other may confide all his hopes and fears, joys and sorrows; the second is this, that “a friend’s wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with another;” so that “he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour’s discourse than by a day’s meditation;” the third is the “aid and bearing a part in all actions and occasions” to be expected of a friend.

Friendship is not a modern sentiment. Cases of it such as existed among the ancient Greeks and Romans, characterised by an ardour that made Friendship resemble the Love passion, are no longer to be met with, although a somewhat less intense form frequently occurs among young men at college or young ladies in high schools: thus illustrating the law that the individual passes through the same stages of development as the race.

“The enthusiasm of friendship,” says Voltaire in his Philosophic Dictionary, “was greater among the Greeks and Arabians than it is among ourselves. The tales which these peoples have imagined on friendship are delightful; we have nothing to match them. We are somewhat dry in everything. I do not see a single grand trait of friendship in our novels, in our histories, on our stage.”

Why is this so? Let another Frenchman, La Rochefoucauld, answer: “The reason why the majority of women are but little touched by friendship, is because it seems insipid after one has experienced love.”

Precisely. The reason why the ancients, in their histories and dramas, made so much of friendship, while modern poets almost ignore it, is that the latter have a subject a thousand times more fascinating than friendship, a subject unknown to the ancients—the inexhaustible subject of Romantic Love.

VII.—ROMANTIC LOVE

That Love is superior to friendship is apparent from the one consideration that it includes all the features of friendship, and adds to them a thousand ecstasies of which friendship never dreams. The lover, no less than the friend, gratifies his social instinct, his desire for companionship, his need of confessing his own and sharing another’s hopes and fears, his craving for stimulating conversation, his sympathetic disposition to give and receive aid in the trials of life. But if modern friendship ever had any moments to compare with the romantic episodes, the tragic agonies and wild delights of love, would it be conceivable that our realistic novelists and poets could neglect it altogether and devote all their attention to Love?

The other personal affections fare no better in comparison with Love. How prosaic even Conjugal Love seems to us as compared with Romantic Love, of which it is the metamorphosis and continuation, is shown by the fact that novelists always end their stories with the marriage of the hero and heroine.

Maternal Love, however, has four traits which occasionally make it resemble Romantic Love in intensity. They are: (1) a disposition toward self-sacrifice; (2) jealousy; (3) an exaggerated adoration; and (4) pride of ownership. But of these the first is the only one that ever quite rises to the giddy heights of rapturous Love. Jealousy is often aroused in mothers if their children display excessive fondness or partiality for their father or a family friend; and they know well in such a case how to make the latter understand that his presence is an impertinence. But this momentary ebullition of feeling is but a storm in a tea-kettle compared to the ferocity of a jealous lover seeking to devour his rival. Nor does a mother’s excessive worship of the self-evident beauty and accomplishments of her offspring ever quite equal the hyperbolic illusion and folly of a lover.

Again, Romantic Love is a monopolist who never shares his treasures of affection with another, whereas a mother, if she has more than one child, is obliged to divide her heart like an apple, so that each may get a slice. Would you infer from this that the mother has a deeper fund of affection than the lover, because she can love several at a time? Impossible. The amount of emotion human nerves can bear is limited. The more you widen it, the shallower does it become. The general love for all mankind is the weakest and shallowest of all, the lover’slover’s concentrated affection for one person the deepest and strongest. See what a terrible strain on his nerves this deep passion is: how he loses flesh, grows pale and feverish, and prone to self-destruction. Could a mother survive if she loved each one of five or ten children with the depth and intensity of a lover? No, we must take back what we said a few pages back. Maternal affection is after all a mere phantom compared with Romantic Love.

And the ace of hearts is yet to be played—in favour of Romantic Love. The mother’s affection is bestowed on what after all is merely a severed portion of her own individuality; whereas the two lovers are individuals utterly unrelated. And herein lies the Miracle of Love: that it can in a few days, ay, a few minutes, ignite between two young persons who have perhaps never before seen each other, a passion more intense than that which in the mother is the growth of months and years.

It follows as a corollary from this that Romantic Love is not only more intense, more concentrated, more immediate and irresistible than parental affection, but also more just, more in accordance with the highest precepts of morality, because more altruistic. For the mother loves only her own flesh and blood, while the lover adores a stranger; like Romeo, he may even adore the daughter of an enemy.

Thousands of fathers and mothers, moreover, love their own ugly, vicious, and stupid children more than the beautiful, well-behaved, and clever children of their neighbours. Who, on the other hand, ever heard of a young man loving his ugly sister more than the beautiful and accomplished daughter of his neighbour?

In consideration of the great importance of the family feelings as a social cement, the parental injustice in question is pardoned and even commended. But from the standpoint of progressive culture, under guidance of the law of Natural Selection, it must be condemned; for it favours demerit in preference to merit, and retards the advent of the time when family and national prejudices will be forgotten and replaced by a loverlike, cosmopolitan admiration of personal excellence wherever and in whomsoever found.

This matter, though it has a semi-humorous aspect, is of the deepest philosophic import. If family affection, so important as the first step in the development of society, were the only form of personal love, close intermarriage between blood-relations would be unduly encouraged. Fortunately the all-powerful instinct of Romantic Love comes in as a corrective of family affection, basing its preferences not on relationship and resemblance, but on differences and complementary qualities, thus securing for the human race the advantages of “cross-fertilisation.” We have already seen that flowers owe their beauty to the cross-fertilisation brought about through the agency of bees and butterflies. In the same way the human race owes its supreme beauty to the cross-fertilisation—the union of complementary qualities—brought about through the agency of Love. Is it perhaps for this reason that Love is so much like a butterfly, and that Cupid has wings?

Instead of being merely a transient malady of youth, as cynics aver, or only an epicurean episode in our emotional life, Love is thus seen to be one of the greatest (if not the greatest) moral, Æsthetic, and hygienic forces that control human life. And in face of this fact the few pages, or lines, commonly devoted to this passion in psychologic text-books, seem wofully inadequate. No apology is therefore needed for our attempt to subject Romantic Love to a thorough chemical analysis, and to discover its ingredients. We shall first enumerate and briefly characterise these ingredients; then proceed to examine how many of them are to be found in the love of animals and savages, of the ancient nations and of our mediÆval ancestors; and finally, we shall attempt to describe these various component parts of the passion, as fully developed in Modern Love.