Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 14

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!

O anything, of nothing first create!

O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes; Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears; What is it else? a madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet.

In commenting on Romeo, who in his love for Rosaline indulges in emotion for emotion's sake, and "stimulates his fancy with the sought-out phrases, the curious ant.i.theses of the amorous dialect of the period," Dowden writes:

"Mrs. Jameson has noticed that in _All's Well that Ends Well_ (I., 180-89), Helena mockingly reproduces this style of amorous ant.i.thesis. Helena, who lives so effectively in the world of fact, is contemptuous toward all unreality and affectation."

Now, it is quite true that expressions like "cold fire" and "sick health" sound unreal and affected to sober minds, and it is also true that many poets have exercised their emulous ingenuity in inventing such ant.i.theses just for the fun of the thing and because it has been the fashion to do so. Nevertheless, with all their artificiality, they were hinting at an emotional phenomenon which actually exists.

Romantic love is in reality a state of mind in which cold and heat may and do alternate so rapidly that "cold fire" seems the only proper expression to apply to such a mixed feeling. It is literally true that, as Bailey sang, "the sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love;"

literally true that "the sweets of love are washed with tears," as Carew wrote, or, as H.K. White expressed it, "'Tis painful, though 'tis sweet to love." A man who has actually experienced the feeling of uncertain love sees nothing unreal or affected in Tennyson's

The cruel madness of love The honey of poisoned flowers,

or in Drayton's

'Tis nothing to be plagued in h.e.l.l But thus in heaven tormented,

or in Dryden's

I feed a flame within, which so torments me That it both pains my heart, and yet enchants me: 'Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it, That I had rather die than once remove it,

or in Juliet's

Good-night! good-night! parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.

This mysterious mixture of moods, constantly maintained through the alternations of hope and doubt, elation and despair,

And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng

as Coleridge puts it; or

Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet; Where pleasures mixed with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear

as Swift rhymes it, is thus seen to be one of the essential and most characteristic ingredients of modern romantic love.

COURTSHIP AND IMAGINATION

Here, again, the question confronts us, How far down among the strata of human life can we find traces of this ingredient of love? Do we find it among the Eskimos, for instance? Nansen relates (II., 317), that

"In the old Greenland days marriage was a simple and speedy affair. If a man took a fancy to a girl, he merely went to her home or tent, caught her by the hair or anything else which offered a hold, and dragged her off to his dwelling without further ado."

Nay, in some cases, even this unceremonious "courtship" was perpetrated by proxy! The details regarding the marriage customs of lower races already cited in this volume, with the hundreds more to be given in the following pages, cannot fail to convince the reader that primitive courtship--where there is any at all--is habitually a "simple and speedy affair"--not always as simple and speedy as with Nansen's Greenlanders, but too much so to allow of the growth and play of those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains. Fancy the difference between the African of Yariba who, as Lander tells us (I., 161), "thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn," and the modern lover who suffers the tortures of the inferno because a certain girl frowns on him, while her smiles may make him so happy that he would not change places with a king, unless his beloved were to be queen. Savages cannot experience such extremes of anguish and rapture, because they have no imagination. It is only when the imagination comes into play that we can look for the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, that help to make up the sum and substance of romantic love.

EFFECTS OF SENSUAL LOVE

At the same time it would be a great mistake to a.s.sume that the manifestation of mixed moods proves the presence of romantic love.

After all, the alternation of hope and despair which produces those bitter-sweet paradoxes of the varying and mixed emotions, is one of the _selfish_ aspects of pa.s.sion: the lover fears or hopes for _himself_, not for the other. There is, therefore, no reason why we should not read of troubled or ecstatic lovers in the poems of the ancient writers, who, while knowing love only as selfish l.u.s.t, nevertheless had sufficient imagination to suffer the agonies of thwarted purpose and the delights of realized hopes. As a boat-load of shipwrecked sailors, hungry and thirsty, may be switched from deadly despair to frantic joy by the approach of a rescuing vessel, so may a man change his moods who is swayed by what is, next to hunger and thirst, the most powerful and imperious of all appet.i.tes. We must not, therefore, make the reckless a.s.sumption that the Greek and Sanscrit writers must have known romantic love, because they describe men and women as being prostrated or elated by strong pa.s.sion. When Euripides speaks of love as being both delectable and painful; when Sappho and Theocritus note the pallor, the loss of sleep, the fears and tears of lovers; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover exclaim, at sight of Leucippe: "I was overwhelmed by conflicting feelings: admiration, astonishment, agitation, shame, a.s.surance;" when King Pururavas, in the Hindoo drama, _Urvasi_ is tormented by doubts as to whether his love is reciprocated by the celestial Bayadere (apsara); when, in _Malati_, a love-glance is said to be "anointed with nectar and poison;" when the arrows of the Hindoo G.o.ds of love are called hard, though made of flowers; burning, though not in contact with the skin; voluptuous, though piercing--when we come across such symptoms and fancies we have no right as yet to infer the existence of romantic love; for all these things also characterize sensual pa.s.sion, which is love only in the sense of _self_-love, whereas, romantic love is affection for _another_--a distinction which will be made more and more manifest as we proceed in our discussion of the ingredients of love, especially the last seven, which are altruistic. It is only when we find these altruistic ingredients a.s.sociated with the hopes and fears and mixed moods that we can speak of romantic love. The symptoms referred to in this paragraph tell us about selfish longings, selfish pleasures and selfish pains, but nothing whatever about affection for the person who is so eagerly coveted.

VI. HYPERBOLE

As long as love was supposed to be an uncompounded emotion and no distinction was made between appet.i.te and sentiment--that is between the selfish desire of eroticism and the self-sacrificing ardor of altruistic affection--it was natural enough that the opinion should have prevailed that love has been always and everywhere the same, inasmuch as several of the traits which characterize the modern pa.s.sion--stubborn preference for an individual, a desire for exclusive possession, jealousy toward rivals, coy resistance and the resulting mixed moods of doubt and hope--were apparently in existence in earlier and lower stages of human development. We have now seen, however, that these indications are deceptive, for the reason that l.u.s.t as well as love can be fastidious in choice, insistent on a monopoly, and jealous of rivals; that coyness may spring from purely mercenary motives, and that the mixed moods of hope and despair may disquiet or delight men and women who know love only as a carnal appet.i.te. We now take up our sixth ingredient--Hyperbole--which has done more than any other to confuse the minds of scholars as regards the antiquity of romantic love, for the reason that it presents the pa.s.sion of the ancients in its most poetic and romantic aspects.

GIRLS AND FLOWERS

Amorous hyperbole may be defined as obvious exaggeration in praising the charms of a beloved girl or youth; Shakspere speaks of "exclamations hyperbolical ... praises sauced with lies." Such "praises sauced with lies" abound in the verse and prose of Greek and Roman as well as Sanscrit and other Oriental writers, and they a.s.sume as diverse forms as in modern erotic literature. The commonest is that in which a girl's complexion is compared to lilies and roses. The Cyclops in Theocritus tells Galatea she is "whiter than milk ...

brighter than a bunch of hard grapes." The mistress of Propertius has a complexion white as lilies; her cheeks remind him of "rose leaves swimming on milk."

Lilia non domina sunt magis alba mea; Ut Moeotica nix minio si certet Eboro, Utque rosae puro lacte natant folia.

(II., 2.)

Achilles Tatius wrote that the beauty of Leucippe's countenance

"might vie with the flowers of the meadow; the narcissus was resplendent in her general complexion, the rose blushed upon her cheek, the dark hue of the violet sparkled in her eyes, her ringlets curled more closely than do the cl.u.s.ters of the ivy--her face, therefore, was a reflex of the meadows."

The Persian Hafiz declares that "the rose lost its color at sight of her cheeks and the jasmines silver bud turned pale." A beauty in the _Arabian Nights_, however, turns the tables on the flowers. "Who dares to liken me to a rose?" she exclaims.

"Who is not ashamed to declare that my bosom is as lovely as the fruit of the pomegranate-tree? By my beauty and grace!

by my eyes and black hair, I swear that any man who repeats such comparison shall be banished from my presence and killed by the separation; for if he finds my figure in the ban-tree and my cheeks in the rose, what then does he seek in me?"

This girl spoke more profoundly than she knew. Flowers are beautiful things, but a spot red as a rose on a cheek would suggest the hectic flush of fever, and if a girl's complexion were as white as a lily she would be shunned as a leper. In hyperbole the step between the sublime and the ridiculous is often a very short one; yet the rose and lily simile is perpetrated by erotic poets to this day.

EYES AND STARS

The eyes are subjected to similar treatment, as in Lodge's lines

Her eyes are sapphires set in snow Resembling heaven by every wink.

Thomas Hood's Ruth had eyes whose "long lashes veiled a light that had else been all too bright." Heine saw in the blue eyes of his beloved the gates of heaven. Shakspere and Fletcher have:

And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn!

When Romeo exclaims:

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return.

... her eyes in heaven Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night,

he excels, both in fancy and in exaggeration, all the ancient poets; but it was they who began the practice of likening eyes to bright lights. Ovid declares (_Met._, I., 499) that Daphne's eyes shone with a fire like that of the stars, and this has been a favorite comparison at all times. Tibullus a.s.sures us (IV., 2) that "when Cupid wishes to inflame the G.o.ds, he lights his torches at Sulpicia's eyes." In the Hindoo drama _Malati and Madhava_, the writer commits the extravagance of making Madhava declare that the white of his mistresses eyes suffuses him as with a bath of milk!