OF PASSIONATE LOVE.

The wonder of love is that, for the time being, it makes us ardently desire the presence of one person and feel indifferent to all others of her sex. It is commonly spoken of as a delusion, but I do not see any delusion here, for if the presence of the beloved person satisfies his craving, the lover gets what he desires and is not more the victim of a deception than one who succeeds in satisfying any other want.

Again, it is often said that men are blinded by love, but the fact that one sees certain qualities in a beloved person need not imply blindness. If you are in love with a little woman it is not a reason for supposing her to be tall. I will even venture to affirm that you may love a woman passionately and still be quite clearly aware that her beauty is far inferior to that of another whose coming thrills you with no emotion, whose departure leaves with you no regret.

The true nature of a profound passion is not to attribute every physical and mental quality to its object, but rather to think, “Such as she is, with the endowments that are really her own, I love her above all women, though I know that she is not so beautiful as some are, nor so learned as some others.” The only real deception to which a lover is exposed is that he may overestimate the strength of his own passion. If he has not made this mistake he is not likely to make any other, since, whatever the indifferent may see, or fail to see, in the woman of his choice, he surely finds in her the adequate reason for her attraction.

Love is commonly treated as if it belonged only to the flowering of the spring-time of life, but strong and healthy natures remain capable of feeling the passion in great force long after they are supposed to have left it far behind them. 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.

This freshness of the heart is lost far more surely by debauchery than by years; and for this reason worldly parents are not altogether dissatisfied that their sons should “sow their wild oats” in youth, as they believe that this kind of sowing is a preservative against the dangers of pure love and an imprudent or unequal marriage. The calculation is well founded. After a few years of indiscriminate debauchery a young man is likely to be deadened to the sweet influences of love and therefore able to conduct himself with steady worldliness, either remaining in celibacy or marrying for position, exactly as his interests may dictate.

The case of Shelley is an apt illustration of this danger. He had at the same time a horror of debauchery and an irresistible natural tendency to the passion of love.

From the worldly point of view both his connections were degrading for a young gentleman of rank. Had he followed the very common course of a real degradation and married a lady of rank after ten years of indiscriminate immorality, is it an unjust or an unlikely supposition that he would have given less dissatisfaction to his friends?

As to the permanence of love, or its transitoriness, the plain and candid answer is that there is no real assurance either way. To predict that it will certainly die after fruition is to shut one’s eyes against the evident fact that men often remain in love with mistresses or wives. On the other hand, to assume that love is fixed and made permanent in a magical way by marriage is to assume what would be desirable rather than what really is. There are no magical incantations by which Love may be retained, yet sometimes he will rest and dwell with astonishing tenacity when there seem to be the strongest reasons for his departure. If there were any ceremony, if any sacrifice could be made at an altar, by which the capricious little deity might be conciliated and won, the wisest might hasten to perform that ceremony and offer that acceptable sacrifice; but he cares not for any of our rites. Sometimes he stays, in spite of cruelty, misery, and wrong; sometimes he takes flight from the hearth where a woman sits and grieves alone, with all the attractions of health, beauty, gentleness, and refinement.

Boys and girls imagine that love in a poor cottage or a bare garret would be more blissful than indifference in a palace, and the notion is thought foolish and romantic by the wise people of the world; but the boys and girls are right in their estimate of Love’s great power of cheering and brightening existence even in the very humblest situations. The possible error against which they ought to be clearly warned is that of supposing that Love would always remain contentedly in the cottage or the garret. Not that he is any more certain to remain in a mansion in Belgrave Square, not that a garret with him is not better than the vast Vatican without him; but when he has taken his flight, and is simply absent, one would rather be left in comfortable than in beggarly desolation.

The poets speak habitually of love as if it were a passion that could be safely indulged, whereas the whole experience of modern existence goes to show that it is of all passions the most perilous to happiness except in those rare cases where it can be followed by marriage; and even then the peril is not ended, for marriage gives no certainty of the duration of love, but constitutes of itself a new danger, as the natures most disposed to passion are at the same time the most impatient of restraint.

There is this peculiarity about love in a well-regulated social state. It is the only passion that is quite strictly limited in its indulgence. Of the intellectual passions a man may indulge several different ones either successively or together; in the ordinary physical enjoyments, such as the love of active sports or the pleasures of the table, he may carry his indulgence very far and vary it without blame; but the master passion of all has to be continually quelled, the satisfactions that it asks for have to be continually refused to it, unless some opportunity occurs when they may be granted without disturbing any one of many different threads in the web of social existence; and these threads, to a lover’s eye, seem entirely unconnected with his hope.

In stating the fact of these restraints I do not dispute their necessity. On the contrary, it is evident that infinite practical evil would result from liberty. Those who have broken through the social restraints and allowed the passion of love to set up its stormy and variable tyranny in their hearts have led unsettled and unhappy lives. Even of love itself they have not enjoyed the best except in those rare cases in which the lovers have taken bonds upon themselves not less durable than those of marriage; and even these unions, which give no more liberty than marriage itself gives, are accompanied by the unsettled feeling that belongs to all irregular situations.

It is easy to distinguish in the conventional manner between the lower and the higher kinds of love, but it is not so easy to establish the real distinction. The conventional difference is simply between the passion in marriage and out of it; the real distinction would be between different feelings; but as these feelings are not ascertainable by one person in the mind or nerves of another, and as in most cases they are probably much blended, the distinction can seldom be accurately made in the cases of real persons, though it is marked trenchantly enough in works of pure imagination.

The passion exists in an infinite variety, and it is so strongly influenced by elements of character which have apparently nothing to do with it, that its effects on conduct are to a great extent controlled by them. For example, suppose the case of a man with strong passions combined with a selfish nature, and that of another with passions equally strong, but a rooted aversion to all personal satisfactions that might end in misery for others. The first would ruin a girl with little hesitation; the second would rather suffer the entire privation of her society by quitting the neighborhood where she lived.

The interference of qualities that lie outside of passion is shown very curiously and remarkably in intellectual persons in this way. They may have a strong temporary passion for somebody without intellect or culture, but they are not likely to be held permanently by such a person; and even when under the influence of the temporary desire they may be clearly aware of the danger there would be in converting it into a permanent relation, and so they may take counsel with themselves and subdue the passion or fly from the temptation, knowing that it would be sweet to yield, but that a transient delight would be paid for by years of weariness in the future.

Those men of superior abilities who have bound themselves for life to some woman who could not possibly understand them, have generally either broken their bonds afterwards or else avoided as much as possible the tiresomeness of a tÊte-À-tÊte, and found in general society the means of occasionally enduring the dulness of their home. For short and transient relations the principal charm in a woman is either beauty or a certain sweetness, but for any permanent relation the first necessity of all is that she be companionable.

Passionate love is the principal subject of poets and novelists, who usually avoid its greatest difficulties by well-known means of escape. Either the passion finishes tragically by the death of one of the parties, or else it comes to a natural culmination in their union, whether according to social order or through a breach of it. In real life the story is not always rounded off so conveniently. It may happen, it probably often does happen, that a passion establishes itself where it has no possible chance of satisfaction, and where, instead of being cut short by death, it persists through a considerable part of life and embitters it. These cases are the more unfortunate that hopeless desire gives an imaginary glory to its own object, and that, from the circumstances of the case, this halo is not dissipated.

It is common amongst hard and narrow people, who judge the feelings of others by their own want of them, to treat all the painful side of passion with contemptuous levity. They say that people never die for love, and that such fancies may easily be chased away by the exercise of a little resolution. The profounder students of human nature take the subject more seriously. Each of the great poets (including, of course, the author of the “Bride of Lammermoor,” in which the poetical elements are so abundant) has treated the aching pain of love and the tragedy to which it may lead, as in the deaths of HaidÉe, of Lucy Ashton, of Juliet, of Margaret. In real life the powers of evil do not perceive any necessity for an artistic conclusion of their work. A wrinkled old maid may still preserve in the depths of her own heart, quite unsuspected by the young and lively people about her, the unextinguished embers of a passion that first made her wretched fifty years before; and in the long, solitary hours of a dull old age she may live over and over again in memory the brief delirium of that wild and foolish hope which was followed by years of self-repression.

Of all the painful situations occasioned by passionate love, I know of none more lamentable than that of an innocent and honorable woman who has been married to an unsuitable husband and who afterwards makes the discovery that she involuntarily loves another. In well-regulated, moral societies such passions are repressed, but they cannot be repressed without suffering which has to be endured in silence. The victim is punished for no fault when none is committed; but she may suffer from the forces of nature like one who hungers and thirsts and sees a fair banquet provided, yet is forbidden to eat or drink. It is difficult to suppress the heart’s regret, “Ah, if we had known each other earlier, in the days when I was free, and it was not wrong to love!” Then there is the haunting fear that the woful secret may one day reveal itself to others. Might it not be suddenly and unexpectedly betrayed by a momentary absence of self-control? This has sometimes happened, and then there is no safety but in separation, immediate and decided. Suppose a case like the following, which is said to have really occurred. A perfectly honorable man goes to visit an intimate friend, walks quietly in the garden one afternoon with his friend’s wife, and suddenly discovers that he is the object of a passion which, until that moment, she has steadily controlled. One outburst of shameful tears, one pitiful confession of a life’s unhappiness, and they part forever! This is what happens when the friend respects his friend and the wife her husband. What happens when both are capable of treachery is known to the readers of English newspaper reports and French fictions.

It seems as if, with regard to this passion, civilized man were placed in a false position between Nature on the one hand and civilization on the other. Nature makes us capable of feeling it in very great strength and intensity, at an age when marriage is not to be thought of, and when there is not much self-control. The tendency of high civilization is to retard the time of marriage for men, but there is not any corresponding postponement in the awakening of the passions. The least civilized classes marry early, the more civilized later and later, and not often from passionate love, but from a cool and prudent calculation about general chances of happiness, a calculation embracing very various elements, and in itself as remote from passion as the Proverbs of Solomon from the Song of Songs. It consequently happens that the great majority of young gentlemen discover early in life that passionate love is a danger to be avoided, and so indeed it is; but it seems a peculiar misfortune for civilized man that so natural an excitement, which is capable of giving such a glow to all his faculties as nothing else can give, an excitement which exalts the imagination to poetry and increases courage till it becomes heroic devotion, whilst it gives a glamour of romance to the poorest and most prosaic existence,—it seems, I say, a misfortune that a passion with such unequalled powers as these should have to be eliminated from wise and prudent life. The explanation of its early and inconvenient appearance may be that before the human race had attained a position of any tranquillity or comfort, the average life was very short, and it was of the utmost importance that the flame of existence should be passed on to another generation without delay. We inherit the rapid development which saved the race in its perilous past, but we are embarrassed by it, and instead of elevating us to a more exalted life it often avenges itself for the refusal of natural activity by its own corruption, the corruption of the best into the worst, of the fire from heaven into the filth of immorality. The more this great passion is repressed and expelled, the more frequent does immorality become.

Another very remarkable result of the exclusion of passionate love from ordinary existence is that the idea of it takes possession of the imagination. The most melodious poetry, the most absorbing fiction, are alike celebrations of its mysteries. Even the wordless voice of music wails or languishes for love, and the audience that seems only to hear flutes and violins is in reality listening to that endless song of love which thrills through the passionate universe. Well may the rebels against Nature revolt against the influence of Art! It is everywhere permeated by passion. The cold marble warms with it, the opaque pigments palpitate with it, the dull actor has the tones of genius when he wins access to its perennial inspiration. Even those forms of art which seem remote from it do yet confess its presence. You see a picture of solitude, and think that passion cannot enter there, but everything suggests it. The tree bends down to the calm water, the gentle breeze caresses every leaf, the white-pated old mountain is visited by the short-lived summer clouds. If, in the opening glade, the artist has sketched a pair of lovers, you think they naturally complete the scene; if he has omitted them, it is still a place for lovers, or has been, or will be on some sweet eve like this. What have stars and winds and odors to do with love? The poets know all about it, and so let Shelley tell us:—

“I arise from dreams of Thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low
And the stars are shining bright:
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Has led me—who knows how?—
To thy chamber-window, Sweet!
The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream;
The champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine
O belovÈd as thou art!”