Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 16

I dare not ask a kiss, I dare not beg a smile, Lest having that or this I might grow proud the while.

--_Herrick_.

Let fools great Cupid's yoke disdain, Loving their own wild freedom better, Whilst proud of my triumphant chain I sit, and court my beauteous fetter.

--_Beaumont_.

COMIC SIDE OF LOVE

"There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person beloved," said Bacon; "and therefore it is well said that it is impossible to love and be wise."

Like everything else in this world, love has its comic side. Nothing could be more amusing, surely, than the pride some men and women exhibit at having secured for life a mate whom most persons would not care to own a day. The idealizing process just described is responsible for this comedy; and a very useful thing it is, too; for did not the lover's fancy magnify the merits and minify the faults of the beloved, the number of marriages would not be so large as it is.

Pride is a great match-maker. "It was a proud night with me," wrote Walter Scott,

"when I first found that a pretty young woman could think it worth her while to sit and talk with me hour after hour in a corner of the ball-room, while all the world were capering in our view."

Such an experience was enough to attune the heart-strings to love. The youth felt flattered, and flattery is the food of love.

A MYSTERY EXPLAINED

Pride explains some of the greatest mysteries of love. "How _could_ that woman have married such a manikin?" is a question one often hears. Money, rank, opportunity, lack of taste, account for much, but in many instances it was pride that first opened the heart to love; that is, pride was the first of the ingredients of love to capitulate, and the others followed suit. Probably that manikin was the first masculine being who ever showed her any attentions. "He appreciates me!" she mused. "I admire his taste--he is not like other men--I like him--I love him."

The compliment of a proposal touches a girl's pride and may prove the entering-wedge of love; hence the proverbial folly of accepting a girl's first refusal as final. And if she accepts, the thought that she, the most perfect being in the world, prefers him above all men, inflates his pride to the point of exultation; thenceforth he can talk and think only in "three pil'd hyperboles." He wants all the world to know how he has been distinguished. In a j.a.panese poem translated by Lafcadio Hearn (_G.B.F._, 38) a lover exclaims:

I cannot hide in my heart the happy knowledge that fills it; Asking each not to tell, I spread the news all round.

IMPORTANCE OF PRIDE

To realize fully how important an ingredient in love pride is, we need only consider the effect of a refusal. Of all the pangs that make up its agony none is keener than that of wounded pride or vanity. Hence the same lover who, if successful, wants all the world to know how he has been distinguished, is equally anxious, in case of a refusal, to keep it a secret. Schopenhauer went so far as to a.s.sert that both in the pain of unrequited love and the joy of success, vanity is a more important factor than the thwarting of sensual desires, because only a psychic disturbance can stir us so deeply.

Shakspere knew that while there are many kinds of pride, the best and deepest is that which a man feels in his love. Some, he says, glory in their birth, some in their skill, some in their wealth, some in their body's force, or their garments, or horses; but

All these I better in one general best, Thy love is better than high birth to me, Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost, Of more delight than hawks and horses be And having thee, of all men's pride I boast.

--_Sonnet XCI_.

VARIETIES AND GERMS

While amorous pride has also an altruistic aspect in so far as the lover is proud not only of being chosen but also of another's perfections, it nevertheless belongs, in the main, in the egoistic group, and there is therefore no reason why we should not look for it in the lower stages of erotic evolution. Pride and vanity are feelings which characterize all grades of human beings from the highest to the lowest. As regards amorous pride, however, it is obvious that the conditions for its existence are not favorable among such aboriginals, _e.g._, as the Australians. What occasion is there for pride on the part of a man who exchanges his sister or daughter for another man's sister or daughter, or on the part of the female who is thus exchanged? An American Indian's pride consists not in having won the favor of one particular girl, but in having been able to buy or steal as many women as possible, married or unmarried; and the bride's pride is proportionate to her lover's prowess in this direction. I need not add that the pride at being a successful squaw-stealer differs not only in degree but in kind from the exultation of a white American lover at the thought that the most beautiful and perfect girl in the world has chosen him above all men as her sole and exclusive sweetheart.

Gibbs says (I., 197-200) of the Indians of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon that they usually seek their wives among other tribes than their own.

"It seems to be a matter of pride, in fact, to unite the blood of several different ones in their own persons. The expression, I am half Snokwalmu, half Klikatat, or some similar one, is of every-day occurrence. With the chiefs, this is almost always the case."

This feeling, however, is of a tribal kind, lacking the individuality of amorous pride. It would approach the latter if a chief won another chiefs daughter in the face of rivalry and felt elated at this feat.

Such cases doubtless occur among the Indians.

Shooter gives an amusing account of how the African Kaffirs, when a girl is averse to a marriage, attempt to influence her feelings before resorting to compulsion.

"The first step is to speak well of the man in her presence; the Kraal conspire to praise him--her mother praises him--all the admirers of his cattle praise him--he was never so praised before."

If these praises make her feel proud at the thought of marrying such a man, all is well; if not, she has to suffer the consequences. It is not likely that this praising practice would prevail were it not sometimes successful.

If it ever is, we would have here a germ of amorous pride. Others may be found in Hindoo literature, as in _Malati and Madhava_, where the intermediary speaks of having dwelt on the lover's merits and rank in the presence of the heroine, in the hope of influencing her.

"Extolling the lover's merits" is mentioned as one of the ten stages of love in the Hindoo _ars amandi_.

In Oriental countries in general, where it is difficult or impossible for young men and women to see one another before the wedding-day, the praising of candidates by and to intermediaries has been a general custom. Dr. T. Lobel (9-14) relates that before a Turk reaches the age of twenty-two his parents look about for a bride for him. They send out female friends and intermediaries who "praise and exaggerate the accomplishments of the young man" in houses where they suspect the presence of eligible girls. These female intermediaries are called kyz-gorudschu or "girl-seers." Having found a maiden that appears suitable, they exclaim, "What a lovely girl! She resembles an angel!

What beautiful eyes! True gazelle-eyes! And her hair! Her teeth are like pearls." When the young man hears the reports of this beauty, he forthwith falls in love with her, and, although he has never seen her, declares he "will marry her and no other." A sense of humor is not given to every man: Dr. Lobel remarks seriously that this disproves the slanderous a.s.sertion so often made that the Turks are incapable of true love!

In their treatment and estimate of women the ancient Greeks resembled the modern Turks. The poets joined the philosophers in declaring that "nature herself," as Becker sums them up (Ill., 315), "a.s.signed to woman a position far beneath man." As there is little occasion for pride in having won the favor of so inferior a being, the erotic literature of the Greeks is naturally not eloquent on this subject.

Such evidence of amorous pride as we find in it, and in Roman poetry, is usually in connection with mercenary women. The poets, being poor, had only one way of winning the favor of these wantons: they could celebrate their charms in verse. This aroused the pride of the hetairai, and their grateful caresses made the poets proud at having a means of winning favor more powerful even than money. But with genuine love these feelings have nothing to do.

NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL SYMPTOMS OF LOVE

In common with ambition and other strong pa.s.sions, love has the power of changing a man's character for the time being. One of the speakers in Plutarch's dialogue on love ([Greek: Erotikos], 17) declares that every lover becomes generous and magnanimous, though he may have been n.i.g.g.ardly before; but, characteristically enough, it is the love for boys, not for women, that is referred to. A modern lover is affected that way by love for women. He feels proud of being distinguished by the preference of such a girl, and on the principle of _n.o.blesse oblige_, he tries to become worthy of her. This love makes the cowardly brave, the weak strong, the dull witty, the prosy poetic, the slouches tidy. Burton glows eloquent on this subject (Ill., 2), confounding, as usual, love with l.u.s.t. Ovid notes that when Polyphemus courted Galatea the desire to please made him arrange his hair and beard, using the water as a mirror; wherein the Roman poet shows a keener sense of the effect of infatuation than his Greek predecessor, Theocritus, who (Id., XIV.) describes the enamoured Aischines as going about with beard neglected and hair dishevelled; or than Callimachus, concerning whose love-story of Acontius and Cydippe Mahaffy says (_G.

L. and T.,_ 239):

"The pangs of the lover are described just as they are described in the case of his [Shakspere's]

Orlando--dishevelled hair, blackness under the eyes, disordered dress, a desire for solitude, and the habit of writing the girl's name on every tree--symptoms which are perhaps now regarded as natural, and which many romantic personages have no doubt imitated because they found them in literature, and thought them the spontaneous expression of the grief of love, while they were really the artificial invention of Callimachus and his school, who thus fathered them upon human nature."

Professor Mahaffy overlooks, however, an important distinction which Shakspere makes. The witty Rosalind declares to Orlando, in her bantering way, that

"there is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving 'Rosalind' on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind ... _he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him_."

And when Orlando claims that he is that man, she replies, "There is none of my uncle's marks upon you; he taught me to know a man in love."

Orlando: "What were his marks?"

Rosalind:

"A lean cheek, _which you have not_, a blue eye and sunken, _which you have not_ ... a beard neglected, _which you have not_ ... Then your hose _should be_ ungartered, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unb.u.t.toned, your shoe untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation."

Shakspere knew that love makes a man tidy, not untidy, hence Rosalind fails to find the artificial Greek symptoms of love in Orlando, while she admits that he carves her name on trees and hangs poems on them; acts of which lovers are quite capable. In j.a.pan it is a national custom to hang love-poems on trees.

VIII. SYMPATHY

"Egotism," wrote Schopenhauer

"is a colossal thing; it overtops the world. For, if every individual had the choice between his own destruction and that of every other person in the world, I need not say what the decision would be in the vast majority of cases."

"Many a man," he declares on another page,[22] "would be capable of killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." The grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as a hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration after all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he would have been fully justified in this doubt. An Australian has been known to bait his fish-hook with his own child when no other meat was at hand; and murders committed for equally trivial and selfish reasons are every-day affairs among wild tribes.

EGOTISM, NAKED OK MASKED