“A blockhead with melodious voice
In boarding-school may have his choice,
And oft the dancing-master’s art
Climbs from the toe to touch the heart.”—Swift.
It is quite probable that Coleridge was right when he wrote—
“For maids as well as youths have perished
From fruitless love too fondly cherished;”
although this does not seem to agree with the opinion of Shakspere and Thackeray regarding the rarity of broken lovers’ hearts. Morselli’s work on Suicide does not contain any definite statistics à propos; but I have seen the statement in a newspaper that in Italy, during 1883, thirty-six men and nine women committed suicide—four to one; and the proportion will appear larger still if it is remembered that girls often commit suicide from an anguish deeper than a refusal.
The myth that woman’s passion is deeper than man’s is commonly expressed in the form given to it by Byron: that in man’s life love is only an episode, whereas to a woman it is all in all. Allowing for poetic exaggeration, it does not at all follow that because a man does not brood all his life over Love, he therefore loves less. The fact that Goethe, the poet, also wrote treatises on botany and physics, and made landscape sketches, did not decrease the depth of his poetic feeling but added to it. For it is a fundamental law of psychology—except in pathologic cases—that continuous brooding over an emotion weakens and exhausts it; but after intervals of rest it emerges more fresh than ever. The various objects and ambitions that occupy man only serve to strengthen his feelings, his capacity for Love. That women are more easily swamped and carried away by emotions does not prove their feelings to be deeper, but themselves to be weaker. One lake may be entirely full, and yet not contain half as much water as a larger lake which is only half-full.
It was evidently with a vague desire to justify or excuse woman’s comparative weakness in Love that Ninon de L’Enclos wrote “Women and flowers are made to be loved for their beauty and sweetness, rather than themselves to love.” And that intelligent observer Mrs. Childs adds the weight of her feminine testimony by confessing her belief “That men more frequently marry for love than women.”