The two emotions have some characteristics in common, and for that reason, sensual love is, as a rule, mistaken for sentimental love, even by the greatest thinkers and best poets. An essential and invariable ingredient in sentimental, as well as in sensual love, is the imperative desire for an absolute monopoly of the beloved person. But while in sensual love this desire springs from an egotistic source, selfish elements are foreign to this desire in sentimental love. The latter knows only devotion and sympathy, which urge the lover to seek the welfare of the one beloved, if need be at the expense of his own.
The only true index of genuine love lies, therefore, in the sacrifice of one’s own happiness for another’s sake. Pure love is always ready to lose its own life in an effort to save another’s. The sentimental lover is, indeed, not less overjoyed to have his affection returned; but if it is not reciprocated, his love is, unlike sensual love that turns into resentment, none the less affectionate. He never slakes his thirst with the blood of his beloved, even if he is rejected. His constant solicitude is how he can make the beloved happy and save the adored person from grief, at whatever cost to his own comfort. He feels the joys and sorrows of his beloved, as if they were his own. He has completely surrendered himself and his own peculiarity to the other and has, in a certain respect, died as something specific and individual.[AG]
True love, therefore, was slow in coming and is a child of a higher civilization, and is, even then, known only to the cultured. Only when humanity has reached that state of civilization when men and women show not only their respective physical but also mental secondary characters, then admiration and respect enter into the relation of the sexes. Love becomes more and more fastidious and more regardful of intellectual worth and moral beauty, and sentimental love is made possible. For true love cannot exist without respect, and genuine affection is chiefly evoked by intellectual, emotional and moral qualities.
The secondary mental characters in the man are strength, hardiness, robustness, courage, aggressiveness, activity, creativeness, stern justice, gallantry, generosity, manly will, manly grace, tenderness, and intelligence. The feminine qualities are gentleness, kindness, patience, tenderness, benevolence, sympathy, self-sacrifice, meekness, sensitiveness, emotionality, modesty, demureness, coyness, and domesticity. The highest phases of genuine love are possible only where the secondary psychic qualities are highly developed. Such persons do not care to possess in the low, coarse way that characterizes sensual love. They are content to love and be silent, to worship even at a distance.
Love, says Horowicz, growing up as a mighty passion from the substratum of sexual life has, under the repressing influences of habits and customs, taken on an entirely new, supersensual, ethereal character, so that to the true lover every thought of naturalia seems indelicate and improper. True love is, therefore, only possible between refined and cultured people, between a man capable of adoration, sympathy and affection and a woman equipped with mental and moral charms. In true love the woman must show the same traits as in her maternal capacity. She has to be a real mother to the man she loves. The man starts life at a woman’s knees, and it is to a woman’s knees that he returns when he marries. Woe to him and her, if the second woman’s love is less selfish and sacrificing than that of the first.
A sympathetic disposition is as essential to the individual who wishes to be loved truly and permanently as all the other secondary psychic qualities. Cruel indifference is not incompatible with sensual love, but it is fatal to love based upon sentiment. Ordinary, sensual infatuation could be strong and unprincipled enough to lead a person to sacrifice honor and self-respect for the caprices of another. But true love would turn into contempt for the one who could wantonly subject it to persistent insults and degradation; and contempt is the death of genuine love, though yet compatible with sensual love.[AH]
True love is, therefore, characterized by patience, kindness, generosity, humility, unselfishness, good temper, and sincerity. This spectrum of true love shows the same elements as does that of genuine friendship. True love, therefore, can only be acquired in the same way as true friendship, namely, after a long probationary interval. Then only will the true love supply the universal need of friendship. Marriage is no barrier to the existence of unselfish and sexless love, which is the essence of the truest and purest friendship. If a husband be truly the friend of his wife, his love for her as a friend would be just as strong, just as tender, just as permanent and unswerving as if she were not his wife, nor ever might be. Nay, it may be said with Tolstoy that unless married people have been united by pure love, without a mixture of animal passion, the time must come when they will become weary of each other.
Duboc had only sensual love in mind when he said: To be adored and admired is, in distinction from friendship, the criterion of love, while the criterion of friendship, in distinction from love, is to be understood and esteemed; the latter is delighted in its illusions, the former harbors an element inimical to all illusions. Sentimental love is also an enemy to illusions. Sentimental love, as distinguished from friendship, is dependent upon sexual differentiation. Pure oxygen would burn the lungs after a very short time, pure nitrogen suffocates every animal, but “both combined maintain life,” says Ellen Key. Mere sensual attraction is not love, nor is friendship love; in combination they are the air of life. When two souls have joys which the senses share, and when the senses have delights which the souls ennoble, then the result is neither desire nor friendship, it is a new feeling. The only distinction between true love and pure friendship is that the most ideal relation between man and man in friendship is transferred to man and woman in love. Hence these two relationships must possess the same qualities. Paternal, filial and fraternal love partake each, in some degree, of instinct and are, to that extent, impulsive and blind. But in true love, instinct and sensuality have no place. “She is sacred to me,” says Goethe’s Werther, “all desire is silent in her presence.” A gleam of such wedded friendship transcends all other kinds of love. Wherever there is a pure and unselfish love for another for that other’s own sake, a love contingent neither on its return nor on its recognition, there is true friendship.
Sentimental love, like its comrade friendship, furthers the display of nobility and native virtues of the human soul. To love one’s soul for its beauty, grace and truth, to be inspired by the charm of its character to an affection which is pure and chaste, is to open the way to appreciate all beautiful and true and gracious souls. It offers the most refined of the pleasures which make life worth living. Joy demands that its joy should be shared.[AI] We need sympathy; hence we crave friendship and love. By the devotion of the other we feel our own power, our own value enhanced. Love tends to make man kinder and better through his complete identification with the existence of another. In the beauty of a loving attachment, man learns to comprehend all his fellowmen and to value and look at all the world by the glorious light of an inner community of emotions.
Such love must be proved and purified by the fire of reasoning. It is only possible after a thorough study of the character. The subtle elective affinity, of which we hear so much praised on the lecture platform, on the stage, in the magazines and in the papers, cannot be relied upon; its thrill is uncertain and needs to be tested and corrected by a long trial, whether it is really spiritual kinship or only emotional impulse. If after the veil of fantasy has been removed, the beloved object is still found worthy of the highest and warmest esteem, the emotion will be far nobler than, and different from, the unconscious fondness which overlooks the exact estimation of the beloved. In all love, considered as a virtue or grace, there must always be the conscious will, which is also the foundation of morality.