CHAPTER VI
LOVE
In the Symposium of Plato Socrates is made to say that he can profess knowledge of only a single subject, love, but that through acquaintance with this he has a key to unlock all wisdom. And certainly if Socrates understood love he deserves to be reckoned among the wise. Few have looked into it soberly. To those who are not experiencing it, it is a jest; to those who are, a blind passion. Novelists exploit it for cash; poets, on the whole its most serious students, too often for graceful fancies. Saint Paul’s compact sentences give more of its substance than can be had in the same compass elsewhere. In undertaking an analysis of it I believe I can best fix attention on its more important ethical features if I ask a series of simple questions about it and then develop their complicated answers.
(1) How does love differ from liking? Quantitatively. The degree of emotion expressed by love is out of all proportion to that of liking. I love my friends and like their surroundings; I like this gift and love the giver. An exchange of terms in either of these sentences would make moral nonsense. Liking touches only the surface; I like strawberries. Loving goes all through; I love my old servant. Of course, then, loving includes liking, though liking may or may not be accompanied by loving; and equally, of course, loose talkers, who do not know what they mean, will try to be impressive by using the weightier word. I love automobiling, I love the opera, I love ice-cream; these are all forms of silly exaggeration which no one will seriously defend.
But there is a reason for this quantitative difference. An additional factor enters into love and greatly increases its depth. Love always implies the possibility of the loved one’s knowledge and his capacity for response. It is applicable therefore primarily to persons and the higher animals, and only in a metaphoric way suits things. No doubt the response often fails, but it is always desired and sought. Love seeks to establish a personal tie. No one ever loved without wishing to be loved.
Furthermore, between love and liking there is a sharp contrast of mental attitude. In liking, my thoughts are on myself; in loving, on another. I like whatever brings me pleasure or profit. But Browning rightly asks: “How can one love but what he yearns to help?” That is, what we love always seems to us to have such worth as calls on us for protection and the offering up of ourselves. To the lover it appears august, superior, and supplemental to anything possessed by himself. It fills him with awe and a spirit of sacrifice. Spenser addresses his lady as “My dear dread.” There is nothing of this in liking. Our thoughts are there fixed on ourselves, heedless of the condition of whatever furnishes us profit. Oxen we like, because they supply our tables and till our fields. What matter if in doing so they perish? We tend the dog we love and do not let him be harmed in our service. In short, loving is our forthgoing toward one possessing a worth preferred above our own; liking, our feeling toward anything from which we derive benefit, even though inferior in general worth to ourselves.
On account of this difference love cannot be confined to persons. Seeing a little girl tending her rose-bush and asking her if she likes it, I shall probably receive the indignant reply: “No, I love it.” She means: “I think as much about giving to it as of getting from it.” It would be improper to ask a painter, a scholar, if he likes his work. If he follows it for gain he is untrue to it; he can really succeed only when he loves it, i.e., gives himself heartily to it. In many cases, therefore, where profit is abundant, it would be a kind of impiety to speak of liking. I like my mother, I like God. Certainly! None gives ampler ground for liking. But for that very reason my mind should be set on the appropriate outgo in return. However much the patriot may like his country, i.e., recognize the opportunities it affords for life, he loves it more. Perhaps in all these cases where impersonal beings are loved we inwardly attribute personality to them and feel that we receive from them as much love as we give.
For that is an essential in love: it contemplates mutuality. The loved one looks up to the lover as truly as the lover does to the loved. Each counts himself inferior and only through the other capable of possessing worth. “She is my essence and I leave to be, if I be not through her fair influence,” says Shakespeare’s Valentine; and had love reached its completion, Sylvia would have expressed no less. This double action is characteristic of love, while liking has only a single end. If we will speak accurately, then, we shall acknowledge that the real object loved is neither member of the pair but just this mutuality, the “togetherness,” which blots out regard for any separate self and fills each with passion for the conjunct. “To the desire and pursuit of the whole the name of love is given,” says Plato in the Symposium. In his “Clasping of Hands” George Herbert charmingly develops the puzzling reciprocity of love when he tries to comprehend his relation to God:
“Lord, thou art mine, and I am thine
If mine I am; and thine much more
Than I or ought or can be mine.
Yet to be thine doth me restore,
So that again I now am mine,
And with advantage mine the more,
Since this being mine brings with it thine,
And thou with me dost thee restore.
If I without thee would be mine,
I neither should be mine nor thine.
Lord, I am thine, and thou art mine;
So mine thou art that something more
I may presume thee mine than thine.
For thou didst suffer to restore
Not thee, but me, and to be mine,
And with advantage mine the more;
Since thou in death wast none of thine,
Yet then as mine didst me restore.
Oh be mine still! Still make me thine!
Or rather make no thine and mine!”