Human Intercourse

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

The case of Shelley is an apt illustration of this danger. He had at the same time a horror of debauchery and an irresistible natural tendency to the passion of love.

From the worldly point of view both his connections were degrading for a young gentleman of rank. Had he followed the very common course of a real degradation and married a lady of rank after ten years of indiscriminate immorality, is it an unjust or an unlikely supposition that he would have given less dissatisfaction to his friends?

As to the permanence of love, or its transitoriness, the plain and candid answer is that there is no real assurance either way. To predict that it will certainly die after fruition is to shut one’s eyes against the evident fact that men often remain in love with mistresses or wives. On the other hand, to assume that love is fixed and made permanent in a magical way by marriage is to assume what would be desirable rather than what really is. There are no magical incantations by which Love may be retained, yet sometimes he will rest and dwell with astonishing tenacity when there seem to be the strongest reasons for his departure. If there were any ceremony, if any sacrifice could be made at an altar, by which the capricious little deity might be conciliated and won, the wisest might hasten to perform that ceremony and offer that acceptable sacrifice; but he cares not for any of our rites. Sometimes he stays, in spite of cruelty, misery, and wrong; sometimes he takes flight from the hearth where a woman sits and grieves alone, with all the attractions of health, beauty, gentleness, and refinement.

Boys and girls imagine that love in a poor cottage or a bare garret would be more blissful than indifference in a palace, and the notion is thought foolish and romantic by the wise people of the world; but the boys and girls are right in their estimate of Love’s great power of cheering and brightening existence even in the very humblest situations. The possible error against which they ought to be clearly warned is that of supposing that Love would always remain contentedly in the cottage or the garret. Not that he is any more certain to remain in a mansion in Belgrave Square, not that a garret with him is not better than the vast Vatican without him; but when he has taken his flight, and is simply absent, one would rather be left in comfortable than in beggarly desolation.

The poets speak habitually of love as if it were a passion that could be safely indulged, whereas the whole experience of modern existence goes to show that it is of all passions the most perilous to happiness except in those rare cases where it can be followed by marriage; and even then the peril is not ended, for marriage gives no certainty of the duration of love, but constitutes of itself a new danger, as the natures most disposed to passion are at the same time the most impatient of restraint.

There is this peculiarity about love in a well-regulated social state. It is the only passion that is quite strictly limited in its indulgence. Of the intellectual passions a man may indulge several different ones either successively or together; in the ordinary physical enjoyments, such as the love of active sports or the pleasures of the table, he may carry his indulgence very far and vary it without blame; but the master passion of all has to be continually quelled, the satisfactions that it asks for have to be continually refused to it, unless some opportunity occurs when they may be granted without disturbing any one of many different threads in the web of social existence; and these threads, to a lover’s eye, seem entirely unconnected with his hope.

In stating the fact of these restraints I do not dispute their necessity. On the contrary, it is evident that infinite practical evil would result from liberty. Those who have broken through the social restraints and allowed the passion of love to set up its stormy and variable tyranny in their hearts have led unsettled and unhappy lives. Even of love itself they have not enjoyed the best except in those rare cases in which the lovers have taken bonds upon themselves not less durable than those of marriage; and even these unions, which give no more liberty than marriage itself gives, are accompanied by the unsettled feeling that belongs to all irregular situations.

It is easy to distinguish in the conventional manner between the lower and the higher kinds of love, but it is not so easy to establish the real distinction. The conventional difference is simply between the passion in marriage and out of it; the real distinction would be between different feelings; but as these feelings are not ascertainable by one person in the mind or nerves of another, and as in most cases they are probably much blended, the distinction can seldom be accurately made in the cases of real persons, though it is marked trenchantly enough in works of pure imagination.

The passion exists in an infinite variety, and it is so strongly influenced by elements of character which have apparently nothing to do with it, that its effects on conduct are to a great extent controlled by them. For example, suppose the case of a man with strong passions combined with a selfish nature, and that of another with passions equally strong, but a rooted aversion to all personal satisfactions that might end in misery for others. The first would ruin a girl with little hesitation; the second would rather suffer the entire privation of her society by quitting the neighborhood where she lived.

The interference of qualities that lie outside of passion is shown very curiously and remarkably in intellectual persons in this way. They may have a strong temporary passion for somebody without intellect or culture, but they are not likely to be held permanently by such a person; and even when under the influence of the temporary desire they may be clearly aware of the danger there would be in converting it into a permanent relation, and so they may take counsel with themselves and subdue the passion or fly from the temptation, knowing that it would be sweet to yield, but that a transient delight would be paid for by years of weariness in the future.