MIXED MOODS AND PARADOXES
“That they do not rightly wot, whether it be pain or not.” That is the keynote of Modern Love.
To a superficial Anakreon, who knows but its rapturous phase, Love is all honey and moonshine. The celibate Spinoza, too, ignorant of the agonies of Love, defined it as lætitia concomitante idea causæ externæ—a pleasure accompanied by the idea of its external cause. Burton, on the other hand, claims Love as “a species of melancholy”; and Cowley sings—
“A mighty pain to love it is,
And ’tis a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.”
The poets generally have taken a less one-sided view of the matter by depicting Love under a thousand images, as a mysterious mixture of joy and sadness, of agony and delight.
So Bailey—
“The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love.”