“The enthusiasm of friendship,” says Voltaire in his Philosophic Dictionary, “was greater among the Greeks and Arabians than it is among ourselves. The tales which these peoples have imagined on friendship are delightful; we have nothing to match them. We are somewhat dry in everything. I do not see a single grand trait of friendship in our novels, in our histories, on our stage.”
Why is this so? Let another Frenchman, La Rochefoucauld, answer: “The reason why the majority of women are but little touched by friendship, is because it seems insipid after one has experienced love.”
Precisely. The reason why the ancients, in their histories and dramas, made so much of friendship, while modern poets almost ignore it, is that the latter have a subject a thousand times more fascinating than friendship, a subject unknown to the ancients—the inexhaustible subject of Romantic Love.
VII.—ROMANTIC LOVE
That Love is superior to friendship is apparent from the one consideration that it includes all the features of friendship, and adds to them a thousand ecstasies of which friendship never dreams. The lover, no less than the friend, gratifies his social instinct, his desire for companionship, his need of confessing his own and sharing another’s hopes and fears, his craving for stimulating conversation, his sympathetic disposition to give and receive aid in the trials of life. But if modern friendship ever had any moments to compare with the romantic episodes, the tragic agonies and wild delights of love, would it be conceivable that our realistic novelists and poets could neglect it altogether and devote all their attention to Love?
The other personal affections fare no better in comparison with Love. How prosaic even Conjugal Love seems to us as compared with Romantic Love, of which it is the metamorphosis and continuation, is shown by the fact that novelists always end their stories with the marriage of the hero and heroine.
Maternal Love, however, has four traits which occasionally make it resemble Romantic Love in intensity. They are: (1) a disposition toward self-sacrifice; (2) jealousy; (3) an exaggerated adoration; and (4) pride of ownership. But of these the first is the only one that ever quite rises to the giddy heights of rapturous Love. Jealousy is often aroused in mothers if their children display excessive fondness or partiality for their father or a family friend; and they know well in such a case how to make the latter understand that his presence is an impertinence. But this momentary ebullition of feeling is but a storm in a tea-kettle compared to the ferocity of a jealous lover seeking to devour his rival. Nor does a mother’s excessive worship of the self-evident beauty and accomplishments of her offspring ever quite equal the hyperbolic illusion and folly of a lover.
Again, Romantic Love is a monopolist who never shares his treasures of affection with another, whereas a mother, if she has more than one child, is obliged to divide her heart like an apple, so that each may get a slice. Would you infer from this that the mother has a deeper fund of affection than the lover, because she can love several at a time? Impossible. The amount of emotion human nerves can bear is limited. The more you widen it, the shallower does it become. The general love for all mankind is the weakest and shallowest of all, the lover’s[lover’s] concentrated affection for one person the deepest and strongest. See what a terrible strain on his nerves this deep passion is: how he loses flesh, grows pale and feverish, and prone to self-destruction. Could a mother survive if she loved each one of five or ten children with the depth and intensity of a lover? No, we must take back what we said a few pages back. Maternal affection is after all a mere phantom compared with Romantic Love.
And the ace of hearts is yet to be played—in favour of Romantic Love. The mother’s affection is bestowed on what after all is merely a severed portion of her own individuality; whereas the two lovers are individuals utterly unrelated. And herein lies the Miracle of Love: that it can in a few days, ay, a few minutes, ignite between two young persons who have perhaps never before seen each other, a passion more intense than that which in the mother is the growth of months and years.
It follows as a corollary from this that Romantic Love is not only more intense, more concentrated, more immediate and irresistible than parental affection, but also more just, more in accordance with the highest precepts of morality, because more altruistic. For the mother loves only her own flesh and blood, while the lover adores a stranger; like Romeo, he may even adore the daughter of an enemy.