Romantic Love and Personal Beauty / Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities

by Henry T. Finck

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’s[lover’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.