CONCERNING LOVE.
IN TWO PARTS.—PART I.
Love is a stupendous paradox. You cannot elaborate a theory with regard to it which shall be at once entirely consistent in itself and all-comprehensive in its application. You may note its manifestations, estimate its force, trace its progress, and speculate upon its potentialities; but how can you hope to reduce to a self-consistent philosophy its thousand-and-one contrarieties and its endless shades of diversity—its glowing triumphs, its merry comedies, its sad irrevocable catastrophes—its sweet reasonableness, its wild infatuation, and its incomprehensible eccentricities? There is perhaps no subject under the sun which has been a more constant theme of poets, essayists, and philosophers; but what is the net result of all that these have told us? It is a long category of heterogeneous and conflicting dicta or speculations, comprising, it is true, many sage reflections, accurate observations, and charming fancies, but, as a whole, presenting rather the aspect of a kaleidoscopic view than that of an intelligible and harmonious picture.
Though the praise of love has been more common than its disparagement, there are not wanting those who have been disposed to treat the subject with irony and ridicule. It was Laurence Sterne who said that the expression ‘fall in love’ evidently showed love to be beneath a man. This was no doubt intended for nothing more than a facetious play upon the words; but there are numerous writers, both before and after Sterne, who have ridiculed the votaries of the tender passion and disparaged the god Cupid. Bacon speaks of love as ‘this weak passion,’ and quotes with approval the remark, that ‘it is impossible to love and be wise.’ Cervantes satirises the extravagances of the amorous passion to the top of his bent in the adventures of his mad hero Don Quixote, in whose fantasy and mock-heroic panegyrics love is a never-absent theme; indeed, it is an essential element of his madness, for he is made to declare that ‘the knight-errant that is loveless resembles a tree that wants leaves and fruit, or a body without a soul.’
Certain of Shakspeare’s creations also join in this detraction, and the lover and the lunatic are placed in the same category, as—with the poet—‘of imagination all compact;’ while one of his characters—the fair Rosalind—declares: ‘Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do.’ The affinity of love and madness has formed the subject of much learned disquisition, and the general testimony would seem to show that there must be numerous instances in which it might be said, adapting Dryden’s couplet on the subject of ‘great wits:’
Great love is sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do the bounds divide.
Carlyle remarks that ‘love is not altogether a delirium; yet it has many points in common therewith.’ From the illustrations that are constantly set before us, it would appear that the chief point in common between love and madness or delirium is that in both cases the victim becomes more or less devoid of the power of self-control, and, in his or her infatuation, indulges in the most serious or ludicrous extravagances.
The evidence would seem to indicate that Reason, in the presence of Love, is obliged to descend from her throne, and pay tribute to what has become the dominating motive. When Love takes possession, it subsidises and controls the judgment, tastes, faculties, and inclinations of the individual, and is not to be argued down, even by the subject himself, much less by others. In the words of Addison:
Love is not to be reasoned down, or lost
In high ambition, or a thirst of greatness;
’Tis second life—it grows into the soul,
Warms every vein, and beats in every pulse.
From whatever point of view we approach this theme, we soon encounter what is, perhaps, after all, the most prominent and least dubitable characteristic of love—namely, its far-reaching, all-pervading potency. Bacon, with all his philosophical acumen, is obviously wrong when he describes love as a ‘weak passion;’ indeed, the phrase itself is a contradiction in terms. Voltaire is much more just in his estimate when he says: ‘Love is the strongest of all the passions, because it attacks at once the head, the heart, and the body.’
What Bacon evidently intended to refer to was the weakness, not of the passion, but of the will which could not repel or subdue it. This view is borne out by the context, which is, that ‘great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion.’ This contention, however, is no more tenable than his characterisation. All the evidence goes to prove that love is not to be conquered by great spirits, or smothered by great business, any more than it is to be reasoned down. As the French proverb says: ‘Close the door in Love’s face, and he will leap in at the window;’ and the aphorism is equally applicable to mental and material obstructions. In the same way Shakspeare teaches that ‘stony limits cannot hold love out;’ that ‘the more thou dam’st it up, the more it burns;’ and that ‘Love is your master, for he masters you.’
There is, indeed, no aspect of this passion regarding which so great unanimity prevails as that expressed in those last quotations. It is Scott who declares that
He who stems a stream with sand,
And fetters flame with flaxen band,
Has yet a harder task to prove,
By firm resolve to conquer Love.
Southey, who is convinced that ‘love is indestructible,’ goes so far as to assert that
They sin who tell us Love can die.
If further evidence of the vitality and power of this passion were required, an appeal might be made to the language of Hebrew Scripture, which teaches that ‘Love is strong as death.... Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.’
In view of testimony like this, one might be pardoned for supposing the point in question satisfactorily established. We shall not, however, have proceeded far in the consideration of other phases of the subject, before we shall come upon views which it is by no means easy to reconcile with the above conclusions. Take, for example, the theory that a man or a woman can truly love but once. This would seem to be the natural corollary of the belief that love is indestructible. The argument, of course, is that the love which departs is not love at all. As the old lines run:
Pray, how comes Love?
It comes unsought, unsent.
Pray, how goes Love?
That was not love that went.
Carlyle homologates this view. In Sartor Resartus, he says: ‘As your Congreve needs a new case or wrappage for every new rocket, so each human heart can properly exhibit but one love, if even one; the “first love which is infinite” can be followed by no second like unto it.’
This is certainly a strong case for the first-and-only-love theory. But let it not be supposed that we shall here miss the inevitable differences of opinion. Among others who raise a strong protest against this view is George Eliot, who believes there is a second love which is greater, because more mature, than the first. ‘How is it,’ she asks, ‘that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, and so few about our later love? Are their first poems the best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deep-rooted affections? The boy’s flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.’ Many other quotations to a similar purport might be given; but the whole argument is a futile one. It is simply reasoning in a circle, because, whatever may be advanced on this side of the question, it is of course perfectly open to those who maintain the opposite to fall back upon the contention that the love which was vanquished was not love at all, and that its subjugation sufficiently proves that it was spurious.
It may be said that this is a somewhat rough-and-ready method of disposing of a profound and delicate psychological problem, and the point may be further raised in connection with the kindred proposition, that love is not incurable. Those who hold that love is indestructible must also, in consistency, maintain that it is likewise incurable, and inconsolable when scorned and rejected. Then, of course, they are met with declarations like that of Shakspeare when he says: ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love;’ or like that of Thackeray, when he remarks that ‘Young ladies have been crossed in love, and have had their sufferings, their frantic moments of grief and tears, their wakeful nights, and so forth; but it is only in very sentimental novels that people occupy themselves perpetually with this passion; and, I believe, what are called broken hearts are very rare articles indeed.’
At the same time, there are not many who agree that
’Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all.
Guarini, in his Faithful Shepherd, expresses a directly opposite opinion, holding that it is far harder to lose his lady-love than never to have seen her or called her his own. Hamlet speaks heavily enough of ‘the pangs of despised love;’ and it would be idle to deny that a large proportion of the tragedies of real life, as well as of fiction, have turned upon love rejected, abused, or betrayed. When Dryden says that
Pains of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are,
he must not be supposed to refer to the love that has been blighted by cold neglect or open disdain. Burns describes the pains of love when parted from its object in very different language—as ‘A woe that no mortal can cure.’ Dryden’s reflection is rather in the same strain as that of the love-sick Hibernian who said it was ‘a moighty recreation to be dying of love. It sets the heart aching so delicately there’s no taking a wink of sleep for the pleasure of the pain.’ Moore gives a less paradoxical and more serious exposition of the case than his love-sick compatriot:
Yes—loving is a painful thrill,
And not to love more painful still;
But surely ’tis the worst of pain
To love and not be loved again.
Various specifics have been prescribed for the cure of love, and among these, matrimony has been suggested as an infallible cure. A grim joke, my masters! but one in which there is only a certain modicum of truth. Whether, because the love is spurious, or because its fire is less unquenchable than the poets would have us believe, it is yet too true, and one of the saddest facts of human experience, that the love which glows so bright and radiant on the wedding morn, may, before many years have flown, be cold and dead as the ashes of a fire that has long gone out.
When the idol is shattered, and love neither dies nor breaks the heart, it sometimes—and here is another enigma—changes its nature; becomes, in fact, the opposite of itself. The operation is not without analogy. The arch-fiend himself was once an angel of light, and so we may find adoring love become venomous hate.
It is a profitless task to apply the why and the wherefore to love-affairs. Byron, who himself knew so much about love, says:
Why did she love him? Curious fool, be still;
Is human love the growth of human will?
To assume that it is, would only remove the problem still further from the point of solution, and would seem, in many instances, to bring the lover and the madman into still closer relationships. It is the infatuation of love, and not the prompting of reason, that causes men and women—but how much more frequently the latter!—to give up, often for a worthless object, friends, happiness, reputation, wealth, and all that life holds dear—even, in some cases, life itself. ‘The hind,’ says Shakspeare, ‘that would be mated with the lion, must die for love;’ yet such unions and such sacrifices are by no means uncommon—not in the lower animal kingdom, but in the more exalted and more tangled scheme of human affairs. Still, despot as he is, with all his huge blunders and strange tyrannies, Love is perhaps the most welcome and beneficent guest that knocks at the door of the human heart. Reason has her own place and her own functions; but it is to Love, after all, that we must look for the most generous impulses, the noblest inspirations. It is Love that redeems our life from cold prosaic dullness, that sweetens and enriches all its springs. There is no more refining and ennobling influence in the life of man than that of a pure unselfish love. From such flows every kind of mutual sympathy, mutual comfort, mutual helpfulness. It is the highest realisation of human bliss.