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
“Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones;”
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—
“Except I be by Sylvia in the night,
There is no music in the nightingale.”
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
“Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?”
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.