The whole of Diotima's theory of the ascent to ideal beauty is here implicit in three lines. In the same spirit Christina Rossetti identifies her lover with her Christian faith:
Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such
I cannot love you if I love not Him,
I cannot love Him if I love not you.
[Footnote: Monna Innominata, VI. See also Robert Bridges, The of
Love (a sonnet sequence).]
It is obvious that, from the standpoint of the beloved at least, there is danger in this identification of all beauties as manifestations of the ideal. It is unpropitious to lifelong affection for one person. As a matter of fact, though the English taste for decorous fidelity has affected some poets, on the whole they have not hesitated to picture their race as fickle. Plato's account of the second step in the ascent of the lover, "Soon he will himself perceive that the beauty of one form is truly related to the beauty of another; and then if beauty in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same," [Footnote: Symposium, Jowett translation, §210.] is made by Shelley the justification of his shifting enthusiasms, which the world so harshly censured. In Epipsychidion Shelley declares,
I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion….
True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright
Gazing on many truths….
Narrow the heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.
These last lines suggest, what many poets have asserted, that the goddess of beauty is apt to change her habitation from one clay to another, and that the poet who clings to the fair form after she has departed, is nauseated by the dead bones which he clasps. [Footnote: See Thomas Hardy's novel, The Well Beloved.] This theme Rupert Brooke is constantly harping upon, notably in Dead Men's Love, which begins,
There was a damned successful poet,
There was a woman like the Sun.
And they were dead. They did not know it.
They did not know his hymns
Were silence; and her limbs
That had served love so well,
Dust, and a filthy smell.
The feeling that Aphrodite is leading them a merry chase through manyforms is characteristic of our ultra-modern poets, who anticipate at least one new love affair a year. Most elegantly Ezra Pound expresses his feeling that it is time to move on to a fresh inspiration:
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,—
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
My much praised, but not altogether satisfactory lady.