FOCUSSING HER FAULTS
Love being a magic emotional microscope which ignites passion by magnifying the most beautiful features of the beloved, leaving everything else indistinct and blurred, it follows that the simplest way of arresting this flame is to change the focus of this microscope, to fix the attention deliberately on her faults, while throwing her merits and charms into an unfavourable light.
This method is too self-evident and effective not to have occurred to the ingenious Ovid. He advises the lover who wishes to be cured to study the girl’s charms in a hypercritical spirit. Call her stout if she is plump, black if she is dark, lean if slender. Ask her to sing if she has no talent for music, to talk if unskilled in conversation, to dance if awkward, and if her teeth are bad, tell her funny stories to make her laugh.
Her mental faults require no microscope to reveal them. Certainly her taste is execrable, for does she not prefer that vulgar fellow Jones to you, one of the cleverest fellows that ever condescended to be born on this miserable planet?
What folly, indeed, to love such a girl! What fascinates you is simply the mysterious brilliancy of her coal-black eyes—of which you may find ten thousand duplicates in Italy or Spain. Don’t you see that no flashes of wit are ever mirrored in those eyes? that, though beautiful, they are soulless, like a black pansy? that they look at one person as at another, incapable of expressing shades and modulations of tender emotion, because the soul of which they are the windows has never been, and never will be, moved by Love?
She never thinks of anything but her own pleasure; does nothing but visit the dressmaker and the theatre and read novels; never thinks it her duty to provide for her future husband’s comfort and happiness by educating herself in domestic economy and æsthetic accomplishments of real depth—as you have toiled and studied in anticipation of providing for her comfort and happiness. She takes no sympathetic interest in your affairs—how can you expect to be happy with her? If she loves you not, you would be more than a fool to try to get her consent to marriage, for is it not the ecstasy of Love to be loved and worshipped alone and beyond any other mortal?
The beauty of her eyes will not last,—it is nothing, anyway, but sunlight mechanically reflected from a darkly-painted iris—and when its youthful brilliancy vanishes there will be no soul-sparks to take its place. And for this brief honeymoon mirage you are willing to give up your bachelor comforts and pleasures, your freedom to do what you please, go where you please, and travel whenever you please; to exchange your refreshing sleep o’ nights for domestic cares and the pleasure of trotting up and down the room with a bawling baby at two o’clock in the morning? Bah! Are you in your senses?
True, if you are rich some of these disadvantages may be avoided. But if you are rich you will not be refused, for—
“Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair,”
as Byron remarks; and again: “For my own part, I am of the opinion of Pausanias, that success in love depends upon Fortune.”
But of all her shortcomings the most galling and fatal is that she loves you not. This thought alone, says Stendhal, may succeed in curing a man of his passion. You will notice, he says, that she whom you love favours others with little attentions which she withholds from you. They may be mere trifles, such as not giving you a chance to help her into her carriage, her box at the opera. The thought of this, by “associating a sense of humiliation with every thought of her, poisons the source of love and may destroy it.”
Thus wounded Pride is the easiest way out of Love, as gratified Pride is the straightest way in.
REASON VERSUS PASSION
According to Shakspere, though Love does not admit Reason as his counsellor, he does use him as his physician. The most effective way of using Reason to cure Love is by way of comparison. By dwelling on the miseries of married life as just detailed, the disappointed lover may mitigate his pains somewhat, as did that Italian mentioned by Schopenhauer, who resisted the agony of torture by constantly keeping in his mind’s eye the picture of the gallows that would have been the reward of confession.
Again, he may compare his present Love with a former infatuation that seemed at the time equally deep and eternal, though now he wonders how he could have ever loved that girl. History repeats itself.
Compare, moreover, your present idol with her stout and faded mother. In a few years she will perhaps resemble her mother more than her present self.
Compare her charms, feature by feature, with some recognised paragon of beauty. Look at her in the glaring light of the sun, which reveals every spot on the complexion.
LOVE VERSUS LOVE
Longfellow says it is folly to pretend that one ever wholly recovers from a disappointed passion; and Mr. Hamerton believes that “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.”
Occasionally this may be true, in the sense in which psychology teaches that no impression made on the mind is ever completely effaced, but may, though forgotten for years, be revived in moments of great excitement, or in the delirium of fever; as, for example, in the case mentioned by Duval, of a Pole in Germany, who had not used his native language for thirty years, but who, under the influence of anæsthetics, “spoke, prayed, and sang, using only the Polish language.” The persistence of an old passion is the more probable from the fact that in mental disease and age, as Ribot points out, the emotional faculties are effaced much more slowly than the intellectual. Feelings form the self; amnesia of feeling is the destruction of self.
Ordinarily, however, and for the time being, it may be possible to practically obliterate a passion. “All love may be expelled by love, as poisons are by other poisons,” says Dryden. And if the allopathic remedies described in the preceding paragraphs should fail to effect a cure, the lover may find the homœopathic principle of similia similibus more successful.
Heine, in his posthumous Memoirs, thus refers to this principle of curing like with like:—
“In love, as in the Roman Catholic religion, there is a provisional purgatory in which mortals are allowed to get used gradually to being roasted before they get into the real eternal hell.... In all honesty, what a terrible thing is love for a woman. Inoculation is herein of no use.... Very wise and experienced physicians counsel a change of locality in the opinion that removal from the presence of the enchantress will also break the charm. Perhaps the homœopathic principle, by which woman cures us of woman, is the best of all.... It was ordained that I should be visited more severely than other mortals by this malady, the heart-pox.... The most effective antidote to women are women; true, this implies an attempt to expel Satan with Beelzebub; and in such a case the medicine is often more noxious still than the malady. But it is at any rate a change, and in a disconsolate love-affair a change of the inamorata is unquestionably the best policy.”