First, is the tragedy of the indifferent heart which neither receives nor gives nor possesses love. Thin and sour natures, frivolous, dry, cynical, or hard and arrogant,—the enchanted charms and mysteries of nature and humanity have no existence for them. They sit aloof and sneer, or plot and struggle and get money and win office, or eat and drink and joke and sleep and perish,—the amazing horrors and the entrancing delights of experience equally sealed books to them. They may attain incidental trifles, but, with their poor, shrivelled, loveless hearts, not attaining that for which man most was made, to the sorrowing gaze of nobler natures their earthly lot is a tragedy.
Secondly, is the pathetic tragedy of being loved without the power to return it. Coquetry, which has strewn its way everywhere with ravaged and trampled prizes, reverses this, and without sympathy or principle seeks to elicit and attract affection merely to pamper vanity and gratify an obscene love of power; and this too is a tragedy, but one of a fiendish import. The other is a sad and painful experience, yet with something of an angelic touch in it. It seems to hint at a great dislocation somewhere in the past of our race, causing this plaintive discord of conjoined but jarring souls, whose incongruous rhythms can never blend though in juxtaposition, like an ill-matched span whose paces will not coincide but still hobble and interfere. To be the recipient of a great absorbing love which one is absolutely unable to reciprocate is to any one of generous sympathies a keen sorrow. Sometimes too it is a sharp and wearing annoyance. And yet it is not infrequent, both out of wedlock and in it. There are limits alike of adaptation and of misadaptation to awaken love; and we can never have any more love than we awaken or give any more than is awakened in us. There are fatalities in these relations wholly beyond the reach of the will. When two persons are married whose characters, culture, and fitnesses place them on such different levels that they can meet only by a laborious ascent on one side or a distasteful descent on the other, where the ideal life of one is constantly hurt and baffled and flung in on itself from every attempt at genial fellowship, any high degree of love is hopeless. The conjunction is a yoke, not a partnership. Respect, gratitude, pity, service, almost every quality except love, may be earned. But love comes, if it come at all, spontaneously, in answer to the native signals which evoke it. In vain do we strive to love one not suited to us nor fitted for us; and a sensitive spirit forced to receive the affectionate manifestations of such a one is often sorely tried when seemingly bound to appear blessed.
The same considerations apply with double weight and poignancy to the third and larger class of tragedies of affection, namely, those who love where they are not acceptable and cannot win a return. Piteous indeed is the lot, touching the sight, of one humbly offering his worship, patiently continuing every tender care and service at a shrine which, despite every effort to change or disguise its insuperable repugnance, must still feel repugnant. And then, furthermore, there is the anguish of the homage welcomed at first and toyed with, but soon betrayed and cast away. The pangs of jilted love are proverbial, and the experience is one of the commonest as it is one of the cruellest in the world. Broken hearts, blasted lives, early deaths, terrible struggles of injured pride and sacred sentiment to conceal themselves and hold bravely up, caused by failures to secure the hand of the one devotedly beloved but idly entreated, are much more numerous than is imagined by the superficial humdrum world. They are in reality so numerous that if they were all known everybody not familiar with the poetic side and shyer recesses of human nature would be astonished. This forms a heavy item in the big statistics of human woe.
The examples contained under the head of the fourth tragedy are the experiences of those who are full of rich affections but find no congenial person on whom to bestow them or from whom to obtain a return. Accordingly, their real passions find only ideal vents in fervent longings and dreams, in music, prayer, and faith, or embodiment in industry and beneficence. Their unfulfilled affection thus either fortifies their being with the culture and good works it prompts, or opens an imaginative world into which they exhale away in romantic desires. A noble woman whose rare wealth and effusiveness of soul had not been happily bestowed, once said, with a sigh, to Thackeray, when they had been conversing of the extremes in the character of the great Swift, “I would gladly have suffered his brutality to have had his tenderness.” The remark pierces us with a keen and wide pain expanding to brood in pity over the vast tragedy of humanity pining unsatisfied in every age. Yes, exhalations of sinless and ardent desire, yearnings of beautiful and baffled passion, are wasted in the air, sufficient, if they were legitimately appropriated, to make the whole world a heaven. Ah, let us trust that they are not wasted after all, but that they enter into the air to make it warmer and sweeter for the breathing of the happier generations to come, when the earth shall be purely peopled with children begotten by pairs all whose rhythms correspond, and who love the individuality of self in one another not less because they love the universality of God in one another more.
The fifth tragedy in the history of human affection consists of the instances of those who have been blessed with an adequate love rounded and fulfilled on both sides, but who have ceased to possess it longer, except in its results. They have in some cases outgrown and wearied of their objects, in others been outgrown and wearied of, in others still been parted by death. These examples likewise are tragic each in its way, but less melancholy on the whole than the others. These have had fruition, have, once at least, lived. The memory is divine. If they are worthy, it enriches and sanctifies their characters, and, in its treasures of influence, remains to be transferred from its exclusive concentration on one and freely poured forth on humanity, nature, and God. It then prepares its possessor for that immortal future of which it is itself an upholding prophecy. And so every deep and tender nature must feel with the poet that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
But the sixth tragedy of love is the most lacerating and merciless of the whole, and that is the tragedy of jealousy. This dire passion played the most ravaging part in the domestic life of Forrest, and his enactment of it in the rôle of Othello held the highest rank in his professional career. It has also exercised a most extensive and awful sway in the entire history of the human race up to this moment. The relative place and function of the dramatic and lyric stage cannot be appreciated without a full appreciation of this hydra passion, the green-eyed monster that makes the meat it feeds on.
Even of its victims few clearly understand the ingredients and essence of jealousy. In the catalogue of the passions it is the impurest, the insanest, and the most murderous. Every composition whose elements blend in harmony is pure. Earth is pure and honey is pure, but a mixture of earth and honey is impure. So in moral subjects. Loyalty is pure, being consonantly composed of reverence and obedience; conscious disloyalty is impure, being inconsonantly composed of a perception of rightful authority and rebellious resistance to it. Now, no other passion is composed of such an intense and incongruous combination of intense opposites as jealousy. In it love and hate, esteem and scorn, trust and suspicion, hope and fear, joy and pain, swiftly alternate or discordantly mix and conflict. It is these meeting shocks of contradictory polarities repulsing or penetrating one another in the soul, rending and exploding in every direction in the consciousness of its victim, that make jealousy the maddest and most slaughterous because it is the most violently impure passion known to man. In every one of its forms, when strong enough, it is a begetter of murders, has been ever since the devil first peered on Adam and Eve embracing in Paradise, and will be until it is abolished by slowly-advancing disinterestedness. It is an appalling fact that the murders of wives by jealous husbands are tenfold greater in number than any other single class of murders. When we add to these the husbands murdered by their wives, and the despatched paramours on both sides, the wild and deadly raging of jealousy may be recognized in something of its frightful fury.
The cause of the greater prevalence of murder between the married is not far to seek. It is the weariness of an over-close and continual intimacy, with the wearing and goading irritations it engenders. It is the tyrannical assertion of the possession of one by the other as something owned and to be governed. This provokes the rebellious and revengeful instincts of a personality aching to be free; and the aggravated and ruminating desire is finally so nourished and stung as to burst into frenzied performance. And those ill-starred couples one of whose members violently destroys the life of the other are insignificant in number when compared with those who are slowly and stealthily murdered without the explicit consciousness of either party, by the gnawing shock and fret of discordant nerves, the steady grinding out of the very springs and sockets of the faculties by repressive contempt and hate and fear. A proud, sensitive woman may go into the presence of her husband an angel, and leave it a fiend, her amour-propre having been wounded in its sacredest part and filled with irrepressible resentment. Persons of genius, of absorbing devotion to an aim, are either more unhappy in wedlock or else more exquisitely blessed and blessing than others. They live largely in an ideal realm, on a ticklish level of self-respect, a height of consciousness vital to them. Socrates, Cicero, Dante, Milton, Chateaubriand, Byron, Bulwer, Kean, Talma, Thackeray, Dickens, are examples. A collision jars the statue off its pedestal. A tone of contempt or a look of indifference cuts like a dagger, tears the spiritual tissues of selfhood,—and the invisible blood of the soul follows, draining faith, love, life itself, away. The one vast secret of pleasing and living happily with high sensitive natures is sympathetic and deferential attention. Where this is not given, and there is sorrow and chafing, an intercourse which is ever a slow moral murder, and often inflamed into a swift physical murder, that liberty of divorce should be granted for which the chaste and noble Milton so long ago made his plea. Society should cease to say, Whom man has joined together let not God put asunder!
Having seen what the constituent elements of jealousy are, it now remains to probe its essence. What is jealousy in its substance and action? It is the appropriation of one person by another as a piece of property, and a spontaneous resentment and resistance to any assertion of its personality on its own part. The jealous man virtually says, “She belongs to me and not to herself. If she dares to alienate herself from me or give anything to anybody besides me, I will kill her.” The jealous woman says, “He is mine, and if he leaves me or smiles on another I will stab him and poison her.” This is the fell passion in its fiercest extreme of selfishness.
Viewed in another light it is less dreadful, though just as narrow and selfish. The lover has assimilated the beloved as a portion of his own being. His life seems bound up in her and dependent on her. Her withdrawal is a loss so impoverishing to his imagination that it threatens death. He feels that the dissolution of their unity will tear him asunder. Then jealousy is his instinct of self-preservation, rising in grief, pain and anger to repel or revenge an attack on the dearest part of his life. Still, in this form as in the previous it implies the subdual and suppression of one personality by another, and is the sure signal of a crude character and an imperfect development. The rich, generous nature, detached from himself, full of free affection, living directly on objects according to their worth, ready to react on every action according to its intrinsic claim, is not jealous. Liberty and magnanimity at home and abroad are the marks of the fully-ripened man. He knows his own personal sovereignty and abundant resources as a child of God and an heir of the universe, and frankly allows the equal personal sovereignty of each of his fellow-creatures. He claims and grants no imposition of will or slavish subserviency, but seeks only spontaneous companionship in affection. Mechanical conformity and hypocrisy can be compelled. Love, veiled in its divinity, comes and goes as it lists, and is everywhere the most authentic envoy of the Creator. Jealousy is mental slavery, spiritual poverty, the ravenous cry of affectional starvation, the blind, fallacious, desperate, murderous struggle of a frightened and famishing selfhood.