CHAPTER XI
Crystallisation having once begun, we enjoy with delight each new beauty discovered in that which we love.
But what is beauty? It is the appearance of an aptitude for giving you pleasure.
The pleasures of all individuals are different and often opposed to one another; which explains very well how that, which is beauty for one individual, is ugliness for another. (Conclusive example of Del Rosso and Lisio, 1st January, 1820.)
The right way to discover the nature of beauty is to look for the nature of the pleasures of each individual. Del Rosso, for example, needs a woman who allows a certain boldness of movement, and who by her smiles authorises considerable licence; a woman who at each instant holds physical pleasures before his imagination, and who excites in him the power of pleasing, while giving him at the same time the means of displaying it.
Apparently, by love Del Rosso understands physical love, and Lisio passion-love. Obviously they are not likely to agree about the word beauty.[1]
The beauty then, discovered by you, being the appearance of an aptitude for giving you pleasure, and pleasure being different from pleasure as man from man, the crystallisation formed in the head of each individual must bear the colour of that individual's pleasures.
A man's crystallisation of his mistress, or her beauty, is no other thing than the collection of all the satisfactions of all the desires, which he can have felt successively at her instance.
[1] My Beauty, promise of a character useful to my soul, is above the attraction of the senses; that attraction is only one particular kind of attraction[(7)]. 1815.
CHAPTER XII
FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF CRYSTALLISATION
Why do we enjoy with delight each new beauty, discovered in that which we love?
It is because each new beauty gives the full and entire satisfaction of a desire. You wish your mistress gentle—she is gentle; and then you wish her proud like Emilie in Corneille, and although these qualities are probably incompatible, instantly she appears with the soul of a Roman. That is the moral reason which makes love the strongest of the passions. In all others, desires must accommodate themselves to cold realities; here it is realities which model themselves spontaneously upon desires. Of all the passions, therefore, it is in love that violent desires find the greatest satisfaction.
There are certain general conditions of happiness, whose influence extends over every fulfilment of particular desires:—
1. She seems to belong to you, for you only can make her happy.
2. She is the judge of your worth. This condition was very important at the gallant and chivalrous Courts of Francis I and Henry II, and at the elegant Court of Lewis XV. Under a constitutional and rationalist government women lose this range of influence entirely.
3. For a romantic heart—The loftier her soul, the more sublime will be the pleasures that await her in your arms, and the more purified of the dross of all vulgar considerations.
The majority of young Frenchmen are, at eighteen, disciples of Rousseau; for them this condition of happiness is important.
In the midst of operations so apt to mislead our desire of happiness, there is no keeping cool.
For, the moment he is in love, the steadiest man sees no object such as it is. His own advantages he minimises, and magnifies the smallest favours of the loved one. Fears and hopes take at once a tinge of the romantic. (Wayward.) He no longer attributes anything to chance; he loses the perception of probability; in its effect upon his happiness a thing imagined is a thing existent.[1]
A terrible symptom that you are losing your head:—you think of some little thing which is difficult to make out; you see it white, and interpret that in favour of your love; a moment later you notice that actually it is black, and still you find it conclusively favourable to your love.
Then indeed the soul, a prey to mortal uncertainties, feels keenly the need of a friend. But there is no friend for the lover. The Court knew that; and it is the source of the only kind of indiscretion which a woman of delicacy might forgive.
[1] There is a physical cause—a mad impulse, a rush of blood to the brain, a disorder in the nerves and in the cerebral centre. Observe the transitory courage of stags and the spiritual state of a soprano. Physiology, in 1922, will give us a description of the physical side of this phenomenon. I recommend this to the attention of Dr. Edwards[(8)].
CHAPTER XIII
OF THE FIRST STEP; OF THE FASHIONABLE WORLD; OF MISFORTUNES
That which is most surprising in the passion of love is the first step—the extravagance of the change, which comes over a man's brain.
The fashionable world, with its brilliant parties, is of service to love in favouring this first step.
It begins by changing simple admiration (i) into tender admiration (ii)—what pleasure to kiss her, etc.
In a salon lit by thousands of candles a fast valse throws a fever upon young hearts, eclipses timidity, swells the consciousness of power—in fact, gives them the daring to love. For to see a lovable object is not enough: on the contrary, the fact that it is extremely lovable discourages a gentle soul—he must see it, if not in love with him,[1] at least despoiled of its majesty.
Who takes it into his head to become the paramour of a queen unless the advances are from her?[2]
Thus nothing is more favourable to the birth of love than a life of irksome solitude, broken now and again by a long-desired ball. This is the plan of wise mothers who have daughters.
The real fashionable world, such as was found at the Court of France,[3] and which since 1780,[4] I think, exists no more, was unfavourable to love, because it made the solitude and the leisure, indispensable to the work of crystallisation, almost impossible.
Court life gives the habit of observing and making a great number of subtle distinctions, and the subtlest distinction may be the beginning of an admiration and of a passion.[5]
When the troubles of love are mixed with those of another kind (the troubles of vanity—if your mistress offend your proper pride, your sense of honour or personal dignity—troubles of health, money and political persecution, etc.), it is only in appearance that love is increased by these annoyances. Occupying the imagination otherwise, they prevent crystallisation in love still hopeful, and in happy love the birth of little doubts. When these misfortunes have departed, the sweetness and the folly of love return.
Observe that misfortunes favour the birth of love in light and unsensitive characters, and that, after it is born, misfortunes, which existed before, are favourable to it; in as much as the imagination, recoiling from the gloomy impressions offered by all the other circumstances of life, throws itself wholly into the work of crystallisation.
[1] Hence the possibility of passions of artificial origin—those of Benedict and of Beatrice (Shakespeare).
[2] Cf. the fortunes of Struensee in Brown's Northern Courts, 3 vols., 1819.
[3] See the letters of Madame du Deffant, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, Bezenval, Lauzun, the Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay, the Dictionnaire des Étiquettes of Madame de Genlis, the Memoirs of Danjeau and Horace Walpole.
[4] Unless, perhaps, at the Court of Petersburg.
[5] See Saint-Simon and Werther. However gentle and delicate are the solitary, their soul is distracted, and part of their imagination is busy in foreseeing the world of men. Force of character is one of the charms which most readily seduces the truly feminine heart. Hence the success of serious young officers. Women well know how to make the distinction between force of character and the violence of those movements of passion, the possibility of which they feel strongly in their own hearts. The most distinguished women are sometimes duped by a little charlatanism in this matter. It can be used without fear, as soon as crystallisation is seen to have begun.