Hints for Lovers Part 37

Agnes McLehose? and who the heart of Goethe,--Gretchen or Kitty Shonkopf or Frederica Brion or Charlotte Buff or Lily Shonemann or the Countess Augusta or Charlotte van Stein or Bettina Brentano or Mariana von Willemer--or his wife, Christina Vulpius?

However, whether it is a provision of Nature, or whether it is due to the perversity of Man, probably the feminine heart is far more constant than the masculine, and perhaps any one of Goethe's or of Burns his inamoratas would have clung to him had he been faithful to her. And yet,

Would you have had Sh.e.l.ley stick to Harriet Westbrooke? and how shall one interpret his feelings for Amelia Viviani? What would have happened if Keats had lived and married f.a.n.n.y Brawne--she who flirted with somebody else while he was sick and did not even know that he was a poet? Yet she was an inspiration to Keats, as Mary G.o.dwin (and Amelia Viviani) were to Sh.e.l.ley (1). Ought Byron to have said 'No' to Claire or Lady Caroline Lamb or the Countess Guiccioli or any one of the many maids and matrons that besieged his heart? Could anything have kept Rosina Wheeler and Bulwer Lytton side by side,--Rosina Wheeler to whom, before marriage, Lytton could find write, "Oh, my dear Rose! Where shall I find words to express my love for you?" and to whom, after marriage, he wrote, "Madam, The more I consider your conduct and your letter, the more unwarrantable they appear"?

G.o.d in heaven! what a pitiful game it all is! And alas! as George Sand says, "All this, you see, is a game that we are playing, but our heart and life are the stakes, and that has an aspect which is not always pleasing." (2)

(1) See the Dedication of "The Revolt of Islam" (and see the "Epipsychidion").

(2) Letter to Alfred de Musset.

Many a man's heart has been treated as a football. Yes; but many a woman's heart has been treated as a shuttlec.o.c.k.

Human beings there are--both men and women--out of whom, at a mere touch, virtue seems to go: converse with them is stimulating; contact enthralling. And yet,

Powerful as physical or as mental attraction may be, permanently to retain the attracted object requires a profounder force. Perhaps, though,

Beauty and grace and brilliancy may attract; it is only something far more deep-seated that retains. In other words,

Charm of body and mind may appeal to body and mind; only the heart appeals to the heart. Those who know not this, and they are

Many, permit the heart to leak through the senses; with the result that, when demands are made upon the heart, that cistern is found to have run dry. So,

To philanderers and to flirts, when a great and true love comes, they do not comprehend it, and they cannot appreciate it. Wherefore,

Would-be lover, keep thy heart intact until it be required of thee.

You need not imagine that, because you have once been permitted to see some way down into a human heart, that you will necessarily ever again be so permitted.

Hard words break no bones. But they often break hearts.

Drink is too often the refuge of the masculine, and a rich husband the refuge of the feminine, broken heart.

Extreme youth thinks the world is a toyshop--where anything may be had for the asking; old age regards it as a museum--where nothing may be touched.

No heart, under repeated temperings, can remain forever keen. And

As a little body sometimes has a very big pain; so an aching heart wonders that it can bear so much. And

What takes place in the quiet deeps of a troubled heart, who shall know?

The way to the heart is not through the head:

Between heart and heart, there are many channels. But three are in universal use: the eyes, the lips, and the finger-tips. Now the greatest of these is the eyes.

The masculine heart will never wholly understand the feminine, nor the feminine the masculine. (O the pity o' it!) And yet, after all,

The human heart is much more the same, whether it beats under a cuira.s.s or under a corset.

Between the masculine heart and the feminine, perfect frankness is perhaps of questionable import. But why? It is difficult to say.

Perhaps because

The aspirations and desires of the human heart are infinite and unappeasable. To attempt to formulate them is to frustrate them. For

It is as impossible for any two human hearts, as it is impossible for any two material things, to occupy the same s.p.a.ce. Especially when we remember that

Between the masculine heart and the feminine is a great gulf fixed. Nay, rather

From youth to age, each human heart seems unwittingly to build about itself a high and ever higher-growing wall, impenetrable, indelapidable, not to be scaled by the look or speech or gesture.

Never can heart coalesce with heart. And yet

The absolute and intimate coalescence of heart with heart--is not this, after all, the consummation that every lover seeks? To attempt that consummation by mere speech, it is this that is of questionable import.

Since

Between heart and heart, speech is the paltriest of channels.

What a thin--yet what an invisible and impenetrable--film separates those two worlds: the one, that of the visible, audible, and tangible, the world of chatter and laughter, of convention, often of make-believe; and the other, the world of deep and voiceless emotions, of the feelings which know not how to give themselves utterance, of affections which crave so much and are so impotent to say or to seek what they crave! It is like a layer of ice separating the hidden and soundless deeps from the aerial world of noise and motion.--What would not one heart give to break the icy crust and see and know what was really pa.s.sing in another?

--And how often we drown if we do break through!

The isolation of the individual human heart is complete. It is the most pathetic past in the universe, and it is that against which the individual human heart rebels most.

There must be some profound and cosmic problem underlying this fact which no philosophy--and no religion--can solve. That it is pathetic seems to prove it temporary, earthly, a matter of time and s.p.a.ce; but, when will the individual human heart coalesce with the Heart of the Universe-- which, perhaps, is the goal of all Life? For

It may be that these little terrestrial human individuals which we call men and women are after all only tiny and temporary centers of conscious activity in an ocean of infinite consciousness; as atoms are but tiny and temporary centers of energy in an ocean of infinite ether. Could we see the sum total of Supreme and Infinite Consciousness at a glance, perhaps individual men and women would dissolve into a mighty unity, could see and comprehend the whole of the luminiferous ether. Well, perhaps

Love is the only known means by which the individual heart can make any expansion whatsoever beyond its own bounds. Yet, alas!

Nothing seems to break down the barriers of sense. The human heart beats its ineffectual wings in vain against the walls of its fleshly tabernacle. Will nothing unite the Boy and the Girl? Will nothing bring the Man and the Woman really together? Yet the Boy thinks that, were the Girl wholly his, he and she would be happy; and the Man thinks that, were the Woman and he to share every thought and every emotion, he and she would want naught else. Is the amalgamation impossible? Is the coalescence of thought and feeling outside the bounds of human possibility? What, then, impels mankind to crave it, to attempt it, to sacrifice so much for it?--There is a cosmic puzzle here with which nor philosophy nor psychology nor religion has yet attempted to grapple.

After all, pitiful as it may be, lamentable as it may be, it is true, and it must be said, that this human heart of ours goes through life hungry, very hungry and unappeased. For what it hungers, what it has missed, whereto it looks for sustenance, it itself does not know. Thus,

This feminine heart sighs without ceasing for because that other masculine heart upon which it staked all its all, and an all that meant so much, proved callous and indifferent;