This is plain-speaking and deep shamelessness of soul, such as we find only in the stews; and these are the intoxications, the excesses, the delirium into which the most refined artists fall, when they resign their own noble hand to these soft, voluptuous, and clinging ones. They are higher than princes, and they descend to the lowest depths of sensual passion. Good and evil then lose their names; all things are inverted:
"How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!
That tongue that tells the story of thy days,
Making lascivious comments on thy sport,
Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise;
Naming thy name blesses an ill report."[610]
What are proofs, the will, reason, honor itself, when the passion is so absorbing? What can be said further to a man who answers, "I know all that you are going to say, and what does it all amount to?" Great loves are inundations, which drown all repugnance and all delicacy of soul, all preconceived opinions and all received principles. Thenceforth the heart is dead to all ordinary pleasures: it can only feel and breathe on one side. Shakespeare envies the keys of the instrument over which his mistress's fingers run. If he looks at flowers, it is she whom he pictures beyond them; and the extravagant splendors of dazzling poetry spring up in him repeatedly, as soon as he thinks of those glowing black eyes:
"From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him."[611]
He saw none of it:
"Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose."[612]
All this sweetness of spring was but her perfume and her shade:
"The forward violet thus I did chide:
'Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride,
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells
In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed.'
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stol'n thy hair:
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair:
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;...
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or color it had stol'n from thee."[613]
Passionate archness, delicious affectations, worthy of Heine and the contemporaries of Dante, which tell us of long rapturous dreams concentrated on one subject. Under a sway so imperious and sustained, what sentiment could maintain its ground? That of family? He was married and had children—a family which he went to see "once a year"; and it was probably on his return from one of these journeys that he used the words above quoted. Conscience? "Love is too young to know what conscience is." Jealousy and anger?
"For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body's treason."[614]