Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth”—
what is it but another way of stating that that Love which has met with no impediments, in which anguish and delight have not warmed one another by mutual friction, has never broken out into a conflagration sufficiently brilliant to be recorded “by tale or history” as a remarkable specimen of “true love.” It is the plot-interest that fascinates the reader as well as the lover himself; it is the impediments and emotional conflicts, the coyness of fate, that constitute the principal charm in a tale of love; and it would take a very clever novelist to attract readers by an account of a courtship of which the happy result was a foregone conclusion at every stage.
Thus the magic effect of contrasted emotions suggests why pleasure alternating with woe in Love is more intense than pleasure uninterrupted. A mountaineer who has been wading through snowfields all day up to his knees enjoys the comforts of his slippers, a bright fire, and a cup of tea in the evening, twice as much as a man who has been all day at home.
On reflection, however, it seems as if Contrast, far from reducing things to their first principles, itself needed an explanation. Why is it that by contrasting two emotions we heighten their colour? A partial explanation was, indeed, suggested in speaking of discords: anguish begets desire, and the more intense desire has been, the more lively is its gratification. A more profound solution of the problem, however, is found in the fact that feelings have their echoes, which continue sometimes long after the original tone has ceased; and if meantime a new tone is sounded, it blends with the echo and produces a mixed feeling.
The sense of Temperature affords a simple illustration of this “echo.” Place two basins before you, one filled with tepid, the other with ice-cold, water. Put your right hand in the ice-water one minute, leaving the left in your pocket. Then put both hands into the tepid water. It will seem still tepid to the left, but quite warm to the right hand.
Some psychologists, however, deny that pleasures and pains ever coalesce into one feeling—that there is such a thing as a mixed feeling. They contend that the attention can be fixed on only one feeling at a time, that the stronger crowds out the weaker, and that it is only their rapid succession that makes two feelings appear simultaneous, just as a firebrand swung around rapidly seems to form a fiery circle.
Now it is quite true that the attention can be fixed on only one feeling at any given moment, and that the stronger crowds out the weaker so far as the attention is concerned: yet this does not prevent the prevailing feeling from being affected by the echo of the one which preceded it. If a man, buried in the labyrinths of a big hotel, is waked up in the night by cries of fire; though it may prove a false alarm, yet the effect of the fright will remain with him and cast a gloom over his whole day’s doings, however pleasant in themselves. And a doubtful lover’s enjoyment of his sweetheart’s sweetest smiles is often galled by the remembrance that on the preceding day she smiled just as sweetly on his odious rival. “For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done,” says Shakspere.
In his admirable Dissertation on the Passions, Hume cleverly makes use of a musical analogy to explain how different emotions may be mixed: “If we consider the human mind, we shall observe that, with regard to the passions, it is not like a wind-instrument of music, which, in running over all the notes, immediately loses the sound when the breath ceases; but rather resembles a string-instrument, where, after each stroke, the vibrations still retain some sound which gradually and insensibly decays. The imagination is extremely quick and agile, but the passions in comparison are slow and restive; for which reason, when any object is presented which affords a variety of views to the one and emotions to the other, though the fancy may change its views with great celerity, each stroke will not produce a clear and distinct note of passion, but the one passion will always be mixt and confounded with the other.”
Lunatic, Lover, and Poet.—A still better analogy of the manner in which one feeling may be modified by another is furnished by the optical phenomenon of after-images. If we gaze very steadily for half a minute at a green wafer and then at a sheet of white paper, we see on it a purple image of the wafer; purple being the complementary colour of green, i.e. the colour which, if mixed with green, produces white. The reason of this phenomenon is that, after looking at the green wafer, the nervous fibres in the eye which perceive that colour have become so fatigued that the fainter green waves in the white paper fail to make any perceptible impression on them; so that purple alone prevails for the moment. So to the infatuated swain who has been tortured by the green-eyed monster, Jealousy, the moment of remission, which would else be one of neutral indifference, assumes the hue of rosy hope and positive delight. Hours which to sober mortals would seem perfect blanks are thus to him full of intense feeling, simply because they are rebounds from a state of extreme tension in the opposite direction. He might be likened to a schoolboy whose sleigh is carried across the frozen river by its downward impetus and even ascends the hill on the other side some distance before it stops. Hence, like the madman and the man of genius, the amorous swain is always either down in a fit of melancholy, or in an exalted ecstasy of joy, rapidly alternating and weirdly intermingled—