Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 23

While the fondness of savages, which has been so often mistaken for affection, is thus seen to be foolish, unconscious, selfish, shallow, and transient, true affection is rational, conscious, unselfish, deep, and enduring. Being rational, it looks not to the enjoyment or comfort of the moment, but to future and enduring welfare, and therefore does not hesitate to punish folly or misdeeds in order to avert future illness or misfortune. Instead of being a mere instinctive impulse, liable to cease at any moment, like that of the California hen referred to, it is a conscious altruism, never faltering in its ethical sense of duty, utterly incapable of sacrificing another's comfort or well-being to its own. While fondness is found coexisting with cruelty and even with infanticide and cannibalism (as in those Australian mothers, who feed their children well and carry them when tired, but when a real test of altruism comes--during a famine--kill and eat them,[40] just as the men do their wives when they cease to be sensually attractive), affection is horrified at the mere suggestion of such a thing. No man into whose love affection enters as an ingredient would ever injure his beloved merely to gratify himself.

Crabb is utterly wrong when he writes that

"love is more selfish in its nature than friendship; in indulging another it seeks its own, and when this is not to be obtained, it will change into the contrary pa.s.sion of hatred."

This is a definition of l.u.s.t, not of love--a definition of the pa.s.sion as known to the Greek Euripides, of whose lovers Benecke says (53):

"If, or as soon as, they fail in achieving the gratification of their sensual desires, their 'love'

immediately turns to hate. The idea of devotion or self-sacrifice for the good of the beloved person, as distinct from one's own, is absolutely unknown. 'Love is irresistible,' they say, and, in obedience to its commands, they set down to reckon how they can satisfy themselves, at no matter what cost to the objects of their pa.s.sion."

How different this unaffectionate "love" from the love of which our poets sing! Shakspere knew that absorbing affection is an ingredient of love: Beatrice loves Bened.i.c.k "with an enraged affection," which is "past the infinite of the night." Rosalind does not know how many fathom deep she is in love: "It cannot he sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal." Dr. Abel has truly said that

"affection is love tested and purified in the fire of the intellect. It appears when, after the veil of fancy has dropped, a beloved one is seen in the natural beauty with various human limitations, and is still found worthy of the warmest regards. It comes slowly, but it endures; gives more than it takes and has a tinge of tender grat.i.tude for a thousand kind actions and for the bestowal of enduring happiness. According to English ideas, a deep affection, through whose clear mirror the gold of the old love shimmers visibly, should be the fulfilment of marriage."

Of romantic love affection obviously could not become an ingredient till minds were cultured, women esteemed, men made altruistic, and opportunities were given for youths and maidens to become acquainted with each other's minds and characters before marriage; as Dr. Abel says, affection "comes slowly--but it endures." The love of which affection forms an ingredient can never change to hatred, can never have any murderous impulses, as Schure and Goethe believed. It survives time and sensual charms, as Shakspere knew:

Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compa.s.s come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:--

If this be error, and upon me proved; I never writ nor no man ever loved.

XIII. MENTAL PURITY

Romantic love has worked two astounding miracles. We have seen how, with the aid of five of its ingredients--sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice, and affection--it has overthrown the Goliath of selfishness. We shall now see how it has overcome another formidable foe of civilization--sensualism--by means of two other modern ingredients, one of which I will call mental purity (to distinguish it from bodily purity or chast.i.ty) and the other _esthetic_ admiration of personal beauty.

GERMAN TESTIMONY

Modern German literature contains many sincere tributes, in prose and verse, to the purity and n.o.bility of true love and its refining influence. The psychologist Horwicz refers briefly (38) to the way in which

"love, growing up as a mighty pa.s.sion from the substratum of s.e.xual life, has, under the repressing influence of centuries of habits and customs, taken on an entirely new, _supersensual, ethereal_ character, so that to a lover every thought of _naturalia_ seems indelicate and improper." "I feel it deeply that love must enn.o.ble, not crush me,"

wrote the poet Korner; and again,

"Your sweet name was my talisman, which led me undefiled through youth's wild storms, amid the corruption of the times, and protected my inner sanctum." "O G.o.d!" wrote Beethoven, "let me at last find her who is destined to be mine, and who shall strengthen me in virtue."

According to Dr. Abel, while love longs ardently to possess the beloved, to enjoy her presence and sympathy, it has also a more or less prominent mental trait which enn.o.bles the pa.s.sion and places it at the service of the ideal of its fancy. It is accompanied by an enthusiasm for the good and the beautiful in general, which comes to most people only during the brief period of love. "It is a temporary self-exaltation, _purifying the desires_ and urging the lover to generous deeds."

Des hochste Gluck hat keine Lieder, Der Liebe l.u.s.t ist still und mild; Ein Kuss, ein Blicken hin und wieder, Und alle Sehnsucht ist gestillt.

--_Geibel_.

Schiller defined love as an eager "desire for another's happiness."

"Love," he adds, "is the most beautiful phenomenon in all animated nature, the mightiest magnet in the spiritual world, the source of veneration and the sublimest virtues." Even Goethe had moments when he appreciated the purity of love, and he confutes his own coa.r.s.e conception that was referred to in the last section when he makes Werther write: "She is sacred to me. _All desire is silent in her presence."_[41]

The French Edward Schure exclaims, in his _History of German Song_:

"What surprises us foreigners in the poems of this people is the unbounded faith in love, as the supreme power in the world, as the most beautiful and _divine thing_ on earth, ... the first and last word of creation, its only principle of life, because it alone can urge us to complete self-surrender."

Schure's intimation that this respect for love is peculiar to the Germans is, of course, absurd, for it is found in the modern literature of all civilized countries of Europe and America; as for instance in Michael Angelo's

The might of one fair face sublimes my love, For it _hath weaned my heart from low desires_.

ENGLISH TESTIMONY

English literature, particularly, has been saturated with this sentiment for several centuries. Love is "all purity," according to Shakspere's Silvius. Schlegel remarked that by the manner in which Shakspere handled the story of _Romeo and Juliet_, it has become

"a glorious song of praise on that inexpressible feeling which _enn.o.bles the soul_ and gives to it its highest sublimity, and which _elevates even the senses_ themselves into soul;"

--which reminds one of Emerson's expression that the body is "ensouled" through love. Steele declared that "Love is a pa.s.sion of the mind (_perhaps the n.o.blest_), which was planted in it by the same hand that created it;" and of Lady Elizabeth Hastings he wrote that "to love her was a liberal education." In Steel's _Lover_ (No. 5) we read:

"During this emotion I am highly elated in my Being, and my every sentiment improved by the effects of that Pa.s.sion....

I am more and more convinced that this Pa.s.sion is in lowest minds the strongest Incentive that can move the Soul of Man to laudable Accomplishments."

And in No. 29: "Nothing can _mend the Heart_ better than an honorable Love, except Religion." Thomas Otway sang:

O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee To temper man: we had been brutes without you.

There's in you all that we believe of heaven, Amazing brightness, purity, and truth, Eternal joy, and everlasting love.

"Love taught him shame," said Dryden, and Spenser wrote a Hymn in Honor of Love, in which he declared that

Such is the power of that sweet pa.s.sion That it _all sordid baseness doth expel_, And the refined mind doth newly fashion Unto a fairer form, which now doth dwell In his high thought, that would itself excel.

Leigh Hunt wrote: "My love has made me better and more desirous of improvement than I have been."

Love, indeed, is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire, With angels shared, by Allah given, To _lift from earth our low desire_.

Devotion wafts the mind above, But heaven itself descends in love.

--_Byron_.

Why should we kill the _best of pa.s.sions_, love?

It aids the hero, bids ambition rise To n.o.bler heights, inspires immortal deeds, Ev'n _softens brutes_, and adds a grace to virtue.

--_Thomson_.

Dr. Beddoe, author of the _Browning Cyclopaedia_, declares that "the pa.s.sion of love, throughout Mr. Browning's works, is treated as the most _sacred_ thing in the human soul." How Browning himself loved we know from one of his wife's letters, in which she relates how she tried to discourage his advances:

"I showed him how he was throwing away into the ashes his best affections--how the common gifts of youth and cheerfulness were behind me--how I had not strength, even of heart, for the ordinary duties of life--everything I told him and showed him. 'Look at this--and this--and this,' throwing down all my disadvantages. To which he did not answer by a single compliment, but simply that he had not then to choose, and that I might be right or he might be right, he was not there to decide; but that he loved me and should to his last hour. He said that the freshness of youth had pa.s.sed with him also, and that he had studied the world out of books and seen many women, yet had never loved one until he had seen me. That he knew himself, and knew that, if ever so repulsed, he should love me to his last hour--it should be first and last."

No poet understood better than Tennyson that purity is an ingredient of love:

For indeed I know Of no more subtle master under heaven Than is the maiden pa.s.sion for a maid, Not only _to keep down the base in man_, But teach high thoughts and amiable words, And courtliness, and the desire of fame And love of truth, and all that makes a man.

MAIDEN FANCIES

Bryan Waller Proctor fell in love when he was only five years old: "My love," he wrote afterward, "had the fire of pa.s.sion, but not the clay which drags it downward; it partook of the innocence of my years, while it etherealized me."