In quite a different kind of a poem Heine bluntly announces to his “Queen Mary IV.” his declaration of independence, and informs her that not a few who ruled before her have been unceremoniously deposed—
And in his narrative of the sheriff’s daughter he says, “I shall not describe my love for Josepha in detail. This, however, I will confess, that it was after all only a prelude to the great tragedies of my riper years. Thus does Romeo become infatuated with Rosaline before he finds his Juliet.”
Byron’s confession, in speaking of an early love, that he had been “attached fifty times since” has been referred to already; and although Byron loved to exaggerate his foibles, his record in this case does not belie his words. Of Burns, Principal Shairp writes that “There was not a comely girl in Tarbolton on whom he did not compose a song, and then he made one which included them all.” Burns himself confesses, “In my conscience, I believe that my heart has been so often on fire that it has been vitrified.” And Washington Irving remarks on Goldsmith’s first love as “a passion of that transient kind which grows up in idleness and exhales itself in poetry.”
Of this kind were two passions of Lamb, concerning which a biographer says, “A youthful passion, which lasted only a few months, and which he afterwards attempted to regard lightly as a folly past, inspired a few sonnets of very delicate feeling and exquisite music.” And of his second flame, “His stay at Pentonville is remarkable for the fugitive passion conceived by Lamb for a young Quakeress named Hester Savory, which he has enshrined and immortalised in the little poem of Hester.”
Goethe has the reputation of having been of all famous lovers the most fickle. Like Byron, Goethe appears to have endeavoured to make himself appear more frivolous than he was. His amorous Roman Elegies, which have given so much offence, were in reality written in Thuringia, after his return from Italy; and their heroine was no one but the girl who subsequently became his wife.
It remained for a Scotchman to write the best apology for Goethe’s love-affairs. “To Goethe,” says Professor Blackie, “the sight of any beautiful object was like delicate music to the ear of a cunning musician; he was carried away by it, and floated in its element joyously, as a swallow in the summer air, or a sea-mew on the buoyant wave. Hence the rich story of Goethe’s loves, with which scandal, of course, and prudery have made their market, but which, when looked into carefully, were just as much part of his genius as Faust or Iphigenia—a part, indeed, without which neither Faust nor Iphigenia could have been written.... Let no one, therefore, take offence when I say that Goethe was always falling in love, and that I consider this a great virtue in his character.”
One more case: “Beethoven constantly had his love-affairs,” says Wegeler. His first love was a Cologne beauty, who coquetted with him and another man till both discovered she was engaged to a third! Several times Beethoven made up his mind to marry; he made two definite proposals, both of which were refused. One fatal objection was his habit of falling in love with women above him in “rank.” “It is a frightful thing,” he once wrote, “to make the acquaintance of such a sweet creature and to lose her immediately; and nothing is more insupportable than thus to have to confess one’s own foolishness.” One of his flames, an opera singer, gave as a reason why she refused him that he was “so ugly and half-cracked!”
IV.—MULTIPLICITY
Perhaps the most unique trait in the love of men of genius is the apparent occasional absence of the element of Monopoly. It was Ovid who first discussed the question whether a man could love two women at once. His friend Græcinus denied the possibility of such a thing; but in one of his Elegies Ovid refutes him by citing his own case of a double simultaneous infatuation. He hesitates which of the two to choose, chides Venus for torturing him with double love—for adding leaves to the trees, stars to the heavens, water to the ocean.
Of modern authors not a few appear to have followed in Ovid’s footsteps. We have seen how madly Heine was in love for a long time with his cousin Amalie. Yet, as one of his biographers, Robert Proelsz, remarks, this ardent though hopeless infatuation saved him neither at Hamburg nor at Bonn, nor at Hanover or Berlin, from a number of love-affairs, some of which are vaguely commemorated in his writings. Another German poet, Wieland, after various romantic adventures, fell in love with Julia Bondeli, a pupil of Rousseau’s, and asked for her heart and hand; but she mistrusted him, and asked the pertinent question, “Tell me, will you never be able to love another besides me?” “Never!” he replied, “that is impossible.... Yet it might be possible for a moment, if I should chance to see a more beautiful woman than you who is at the same time very unhappy and very virtuous.” “Poor Wieland,” Scherr continues, “who subsequently understood the anatomy of the female heart so well, appears not to have known then that no woman pardons in her lover the thought that he might find another more beautiful than her. Julia knew what she had to do, and with deeply-wounded heart allowed the poet to depart.”
Of Burns his brother Gilbert says, “When he selected any one out of the sovereignty of his good pleasure, to whom he should pay his particular attention, she was instantly invested with a sufficient stock of charms out of the plentiful stores of his own imagination; and there was often a great disparity between his fair captivator and her attributes. One generally reigned paramount in his affections; but as Yorick’s affections flowed out toward Madame de L—— at the remise door, while the eternal vows of Eliza were upon him, so Robert was frequently encountering other attractions, which formed so many under-plots in the drama of his love.”
In Goethe’s life these “under-plots” played a like prominent part. “He always needed a number of feminine hearts of more or less personal interest, in which to mirror himself,” we read; and he himself told his Charlotte (in 1777) that her love was “the thread by which all his other little passions, pastimes, and flirtations hung.”
So that, after all, it seems possible to love two at a time; but it takes genius to do it!
Yet even with men of genius it is only possible in ordinary love-affairs. A supreme love-affair allows but one goddess under any circumstances.
Schumann was one of the most multitudinous lovers on record. Apparently his first love was Nanni, his “guardian angel,” who saved him from the perils of the world, and hovered before his vision like a saint. “I feel that I could kneel before her and adore her like a Madonna,” he says in a letter. But Nanni had a dangerous rival in Liddy. Not long, however, for he found Liddy silly, cold as marble, and—fatal defect! she could not sympathise with him regarding Jean Paul. “The exalted image of my ideal disappears when I think of the remarks she made about Jean Paul. Let the dead rest in peace.” Curiously enough, there are references to both these girls at various dates, showing that, like Ovid, he vacillated between the two. He had a number of other flames, and after his engagement to Clara Wieck gave her warning that he had the “very mischievous habit” of being a great admirer of lovely women. “They make me positively smirk, and I swim in panegyrics on your sex. Consequently, if at some future time we walk along the streets of Vienna and meet a beauty, and I exclaim, ‘Oh Clara! see this heavenly vision!’ or something of the sort, you must not be alarmed nor scold me.”
But the most enterprising lover ever known to the world was Alfieri; for his first Love seems to have embraced a whole female seminary! In his Mémoires, at any rate, he uses the plural in speaking of the object of his first passion. He was indeed only nine years old, which may excuse this amorous anomaly. He had seen in church a number of young novices, and thus describes his feelings (the italics are mine): “My innocent attraction towards these novices became so strong that I thought of them and their doings incessantly. At one moment my imagination painted them holding their candles in their hands, serving mass with an air of angelic submission, and again raising the smoke of incense at the foot of the altar; and, entirely absorbed in these images, I neglected my studies; every occupation and all companionship bored me.”
V.—FICTITIOUSNESS
If Shakspere could identify woman with frailty, one might with equal propriety exclaim, Vanity, thy name is man! Clever men have a habit of paying pretty girls neat compliments, less to please the girls than to show off their wit. And clever women, though they may not accept these remarks literally, still have cause to be gratified with them, in proportion to the excellence of the wit; for ugliness or inferior beauty never inspires a happy thought in a clever man.
Poets represent the climax of masculine vanity. Though their first Love-poems may be the embodiment of real passion, in subsequent efforts the purely literary origin is too often apparent. Since poetic composition is in itself a mingled agony and delight, very like Love itself, nothing so facilitates its progress as exciting Love-memories. Hence poets are for ever urged on to compose Love ditties in which they endeavour to out-Romeo Romeo, to out-hyperbolise one another, as women try to out-dress one another. This is one aspect of their vanity; the other lies in their desire for sympathetic admiration. So, whenever a poet meets a damsel who comes within half a mile of his ideal, he forthwith unfolds before her eyes his gaudy dithyrambs and sonnets, and indulges in various Love-antics, very much like an infatuated peacock.
Even the great Dante is not free from the reproach of having used his true love for mere literary purposes. Beatrice became to him gradually an abstraction, an allegory, a name for woman in general. But it is in his countryman Petrarch that the tendency to use a sweetheart for purely ornamental purposes, as if she were a feather to be stuck in one’s hat, is most vividly illustrated. Petrarch is a conspicuous illustration of the fact that a poetic reputation once established will live on for ever, for the simple reason that very few people ever take the trouble to read and judge for themselves; so that an undeserved reputation, like a disease, is inherited by generation after generation.
No one, of course, can question Petrarch’s learning and his influence on the progress of modern culture. I speak of him only as a love-poet; and as such he occupies a wofully low rank. I have read and reread his sonnets, and have found them one of the dreariest deserts the quest for information has ever driven me into. To say with Mr. Symonds, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, that “he was far from approaching the analysis of emotion with the directness of a Heine or De Musset,” is putting it very mildly indeed. Professor Scherr points out his lack of poetic imagination in these words: “Though he took so much trouble to hand down the beauty of his Laura to posterity, yet (he) never gets beyond a tedious enumeration of her charms. Petrarch never gives us a clear portrait of his lady.” “The poems of her lover,” says Mr. Symonds, “demonstrate that she was a married woman, with whom he enjoyed a respectful and not very intimate friendship.” Moore refers to Petrarch as one “who would not suffer his only daughter to reside beneath his roof, [but] expended thirty-two years of poetry and passion on an idealised love.” Schopenhauer naïvely accepted the reality of Petrarch’s passion, which the poor fellow had to drag through life “like a prisoner’s chain,” because the case suited his argument; but Mr. Macaulay more justly remarks that “to readers of our time, the love of Petrarch seems to have been of that kind which breaks no hearts.” Finally Professor Scherr’s opinion may be cited, which agrees with the view here taken.
In 1327 Petrarch “made the acquaintance of Laura, the wife of Hugo de Sade, who has become famous through him, and whom during twenty-one years he continued to love, or at least to celebrate in song; for one feels somewhat uncertain regarding this love, and is very much tempted to regard it more as a matter of the head than of the heart and the senses—more as a welcome theme for his troubadour art and Provençal amorous subtlety than as a genuine, true passion. Petrarch’s qualities in general, both as a man and as a poet, are tainted by an appearance of hollowness, a want of substance and character. He lacked genuine originality, the power of spontaneous creation.”
Petrarch, it is true, was an extreme case of the poet’s inclination to give Love a fictitious permanence and depth; and he lived, moreover, at a time when the novelty of the spiritual aspect of Love naturally inclined the mind to exaggeration in that direction. In the case of modern poets, much less allowance has to be commonly made for motives of purely poetic or literary origin.
Such being the leading characteristics of Love in men of genius, and such men being emotionally a few centuries ahead of others, the questions arise, “Is it likely that the Love of ordinary mortals will gradually assume those traits? and is it desirable that it should?”
There seems no immediate danger that the world will be peopled largely by geniuses, though there is a rapid and steady advance in culture, which in a thousand years may greatly lessen the difference between men of genius and average men of the future as compared with those of to-day. When that millennium arrives the man of genius may have advanced another step, but not so great, perhaps, as that which now raises him above the common herd. He will not then be so great an anomaly, and will find society less willing than in the past to make allowance for his irregularities, such as his fickleness and multiplicity of Love-affairs.
Yet, after all, these great men are only partly to blame for their fickleness. Beethoven once boasted of having loved one woman for seven months as something unusual. But had Beethoven been so fortunate as to meet and marry a woman having those qualities which Sir Walter Scott says the wife of a genius should have—either “taste enough to relish her husband’s performances, or good nature enough to pardon his infirmities,”—he might have been blessed with a love not of seven months, but of seven times seven years. Of Shelley, Mr. Symonds tells us that, “In his own words, he had loved Antigone before he visited this earth: and no one woman could probably have made him happy, because he was for ever demanding more from love than it can give in the mixed circumstances of mortal life.”
Mr. Galton, who has made such a careful study of the phenomena of genius and marriage (Hereditary Genius), remarks on the “great fact ... that able men take pleasure in the society of intelligent women, and, if they can find such as would in other respects be suitable, they will marry them in preference to mediocrities.” Unfortunately, as before dwelt on, great beauty and great intellect, or amiability, do not always coincide, owing to the fact that pretty girls do not feel the necessity of cultivating their minds. But in men of genius their own store of intellect is so great, and their admiration for Beauty so intense, that they are constantly liable to marry silly girls; or before marriage to flirt with one beauty after another without finding satisfaction. In a few generations, however, there will doubtless be many more women than now or in the past who will be intelligent, amiable, and beautiful at the same time; and such women will be able to fetter even the erratic love of geniuses with adamantine chains, impervious to rust and alteration, and thus cure them of their Fickleness and their constant effort to love more than one at a time.
Poetic Fictitiousness, of course, is a trait which does no one any harm, and often enriches literature with charming fancies. And as for the two remaining characters of genius-Love—Ardour and Precocity—it is evident that there cannot be too much of them in the world. The dawn of Love is always the dawn of so much refinement of the soul, the awakening of so much ambition, that it cannot be too precocious; and the more ardent it is the more thoroughgoing will be its results. Nor need a big fire go out sooner than a small one, provided there is a constant supply of fresh fuel—a point which Balzac has discussed with much eloquence in his Physiologie du Mariage.
Coleridge says “It is the business of virtue to give a feeling and a passion to our purer intellect, and to intellectualise our feelings and passions.” Now this is precisely what is done by Romantic Love, which first originated in the minds of men of genius.
“Sublimes my love.” These three words of Michael Angelo contain the whole philosophy of our subject. And what is it that sublimes Love chiefly? “The might of one fair face”—the magic effect of Personal Beauty. Perhaps, after all, the greatest difference between the Love of a genius and an ordinary mortal is that in the former the æsthetic element—the Admiration of Beauty—is so much stronger, making up two-thirds of the whole passion. And as a taste for the beautiful in art and nature becomes more common, the Love of common mortals, in approaching that of genius, will more and more partake of this æsthetic refinement—this worship of Personal Beauty for the sake of the higher gratifications it yields to the imagination.
INSANITY AND LOVE
ANALOGIES
The poets, who have in all ages insisted on the analogies between genius and insanity, have also long since discovered a general resemblance between Love and Insanity. Indeed, the notion that Love is a sort of madness is as old as Plato. Love, as understood by him—that is, man’s “worship of youthful masculine beauty”—is, he says, mad, irrational, superseding reason and prudence in the individual mind. And the Stoics, who regarded all affections as maladies, looked upon the severest of the passions as a grave mental disease.
Modern poetry is full of allusions to the fatuous folly of Love. Thus Thomson—
Shakspere—
And the mischievous Rosalind informs us that “Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”
All this is mere poetic banter; but there is a substratum of truth which the poets must have dimly felt. Modern alienists do not treat their patients to dark rooms and whips, as their predecessors did. They regard the maladies of their patients as brain diseases, which have been studied and classified, and are treated on general hygienic and therapeutic principles. A comparison of the classifications adopted in psychiatry with the symptoms of Love shows that Insanity and Love resemble each other especially in three common traits,—the presence of Illusions, a sort of Delirium of Persecution, and the Desire for Solitude.
There are two ways in which madmen people the outside world with phantoms of their own imaginations—by means of illusions and of hallucinations.
Hallucinations are pure figments of the imagination, without any object corresponding to them or suggesting them in the outer world. A patient suffering from them will stare into vacancy and see a friend, or perhaps the devil with horns, tail, and hoofs; and he sees him as vividly as if he were really there to be touched; the reason being that in that part of the brain where impressions of sight are localised a diseased action is set up which suggests a picture that is forthwith projected into outward space—as usual with all sense-impressions. In a word, the patient paints the devil in his mind’s eye, and there he is.
Illusions, on the other hand, have real external objects for their cause; but the diseased imagination so falsifies the objects that there is little or no resemblance between the mental vision and the outside reality. A patient suffering from illusions sees a candle and thinks it is the sun, hears a footstep and thinks it thunder.
Is not this precisely what Shakspere chides Cupid for—that he makes our eyes “behold and see not what they see?” or makes them “see Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt?” Concerning Burns we have just read that “there was often a great disparity between his fair captivator and her attributes”—that is, the attributes with which she was invested by her lover.
The lover, like the lunatic, has had moments when, “beholding his maiden, he half-knows she is not that which he worships”; but such intervals are rare. Take a madman who believes his body is made of glass, and throw him downstairs: none the less will he believe in his vitreous constitution. Show a lover the most beautiful woman in the world, still will he believe his own Dulcinea a hundred times more charming.
There is, in the second place, a very common form of insanity, called the Delirium of Persecution. The sufferer imagines that everybody he passes notices him, suspects him of something, or even intends him some harm. Dr. Hammond speaks of a patient of this class “who was sure that all the clergymen had entered into a conspiracy to ‘pray him into hell’! He went to the churches to hear what they had to say, and discovered adroit allusions to himself, and hidden invocations to God for his eternal damnation, in the most harmless and platitudinous expressions. He wrote letters to various pastors of churches, denouncing them for their uncharitable conduct toward him, and threatening them with bodily damage if they persisted in their efforts to secure the destruction of his soul.”
“Quand nous aimons,” says Pascal, “nous nous imaginons que tout le monde s’en aperçoit”—when we are in love we imagine that everybody perceives it. The lover feels so awkward and embarrassed that he thinks every one about him must discover his secret; and this constant apprehension doubles his awkwardness, and in most cases does lead to his detection. And the jealous lover to whom “trifles light as air” are confirmations of infidelity, who sees dangerous rivalry in the most superficial attentions, and inconstancy in the most harmless smile she bestows on another—how does he differ from the man who thought the clergy were trying to pray him into hell, except that in the one case the disordered imagination is more easily restored to its normal functions than in the other?
Thirdly, the lunatic and the lover, in their melancholy stages, have a common fondness for Solitude. For days and weeks a patient will sit motionless, indifferent to everybody and everything in the world except the one idea that has fixed on his brain like a leech, and is sucking its life-blood. Nothing, says an observer, is so noticeable on visiting an asylum where the patients are allowed some liberty, as the way in which each one seeks a solitary place regardless of his fellows.
Are not, in the same way—
But what madman in his wildest flights ever conceived anything quite so sublimely solitary as the flight which Burns projected for himself and Clarinda (in lovers’ arithmetic twice one are one) in the following epistle: "Imagine ... that we were set free from the laws of gravitation which bind us to this globe, and could at pleasure fly, without inconvenience, through all the yet unconjectured bounds of creation, what a life of bliss would we lead, in our mutual pursuit of virtue and knowledge, and our mutual enjoyment of love and friendship!
“I see you laughing at my fairy fancies, and calling me a voluptuous Mahometan; but I am certain I would be a happy creature beyond anything we call bliss here below; nay, it would be a paradise congenial to you too. Don’t you see us, hand in hand, or rather, my arm about your lovely waist, making our remarks on Sirius, the nearest of the fixed stars; or, surveying a comet flaming innoxious by us, as we just now would mark the passing pomp of a travelling monarch; or, in a shady bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love, in mutual converse, relying honour, and revelling endearment, while the most exalted strains of poesy and harmony would be the ready, spontaneous language of our souls.”
Thus we have in the madman’s Illusions an analogy with Love’s Hyperbolising tendency; in the Delirium of Persecution a suggestion of Jealousy; in the Desire for Solitude a reminder of Love’s Exclusiveness, and desire to be cast on a desert island.
Gallantry, again, has in the past frequently assumed an extravagant form bordering on madness. Thus, with reference to a Greek girl to whom Byron made love in Athens, Moore says, “It was, if I recollect right, in making love to one of these girls that he had recourse to an act of courtship often practised in that country—namely, giving himself a wound across the breast with his dagger. The young Athenian, by his own account, looked on very coolly during the operation, considering it a fit tribute to her beauty, but in no wise moved to gratitude.”
In Spain, toward the beginning of the last century, Gallantry appears to have assumed a form of mad extravagance. As Mme. d’Aunoy relates in her Mémoires sur l’Espagne, no man who accompanied a lady was so rude as to give her his hand or to take her arm under his. He only wrapped his cloak around his arm, and then allowed her to rest her arm on the elbow. Nor was even a lover permitted to kiss his love or caress her otherwise than by tenderly grasping her arm with his hands.
Of mediæval lovers’ madness cases have been cited elsewhere, showing to what crazy excess the Knight-errants and Troubadours sometimes carried their gallant devotion. One more amusing illustration may here be added: the oft-cited cases of Peire Vidal, a Troubadour of the twelfth century, who, to please his beloved, whose name was Loba (wolf), had himself sewed up in a wolf’s hide and went about the mountains howling until his manœuvres were brought to a sad end by some shepherd dogs, who, having no sense of humour, gave him such a shaking that he was only too glad to resume his normal attitude.
There is, in fact, hardly a feature of Love which, in its exalted manifestations, does not occasionally suggest a madhouse. The extravagant Pride shown by a commonplace man in his more commonplace bride, is quite as ludicrous as a lunatic’s delusion that he is a millionaire or emperor of the five continents. The sham capture of a bride still practised among many nations when all parties are willing, illustrates a form of Coyness which would appear as pure lunacy to one unfamiliar with the origin of that custom.
EROTOMANIA, OR REAL LOVE-SICKNESS
Besides these general analogies there is a form of mental disease which is genuine love-sickness, the outcome of brain disease, and which often seems, for all the world, like a deliberate caricature of Coquetry.
“It often happens,” says Dr. Hammond, “that the subjects of emotional monomania of the variety under consideration do not restrict their love to any one person. They adore the whole male sex, and will make advances to any man with whom they are brought into even the slightest association. If confined in an asylum they simper and clasp their hands, and roll their eyes to the attendants, especially the physicians, and even the male patients are not below their affections. There is very little constancy in their love. They change from one man to another with the utmost facility and upon the slightest pretext. ‘I am very much in love with Dr. ——,’ said a woman to me in an asylum that I was visiting, ‘but he was late yesterday in coming to the ward, and now I love you. You will come often to see me, won’t you?’ While she was speaking the superintendent entered the ward. ‘Oh, here comes my first and only love!’ she exclaimed. ’Why have you stayed away so long from your Eliza?‘”
Professor von Krafft-Ebing, in his admirable Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, thus characterises Erotomania in general: "The kernel of the whole matter is the delusion of being singled out and loved by a person of the other sex, who regularly belongs to a higher social sphere. And it deserves to be noted that the love felt by the patient towards this person is a romantic, ecstatic, but entirely ‘Platonic’ affection. In this respect these patients remind one of the knight-errants and minstrels of bygone times, whom Cervantes has so incisively lashed in his Don Quixote....
"From the looks and gestures of the beloved individual they draw the inference that they in return are not regarded with indifference. With astonishing rapidity they lose their self-possession. The most harmless incidents are regarded by them as signs of love, and an encouragement to draw near. Even newspaper advertisements relating to others are supposed to come from the person in question. Finally, hallucinations make their appearance, by the aid of which the patients begin to be conversant with the object of their love. Illusions also supervene; in the conversations of others the patient fancies he hears references to his love-affairs. He feels happy, exalted in his estimate of himself....
“At last the patient compromises himself by acting in consonance with his delusion, thus making himself ridiculous and impossible in society, and necessitating his confinement in an asylum.”
THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE
The insane freaks of erotomaniacs, and the analogous, ludicrous exaggerations in the expression and conduct of lovers, may be regarded as the pathologic and the comic sides of Love’s Language.
Normally, Romantic Love has no fewer than three languages:—Words, Facial Expression, and Caresses, including Kisses. It will at once be seen that this classification involves a crescendo <, from the weakest form of expression to its climax in kissing. Kissing, indeed, though it comes under the head of Caresses, is of so much significance that it may be regarded, if not as a separate language of Love, at least as a special dialect—perhaps the long-sought world-language intelligible to all?
I.—WORDS
Though the greatest poets have striven to become virtuosi in the art of expressing Love in written language, yet words are the weakest and least trustworthy mode of expressing the amorous emotions. Least trustworthy, because the male flatterer, as well as the female coquette, constantly use language to conceal their thoughts and real emotions. Weakest, because words are less eloquent even than silence. For—
And
Cordelia’s love was deeper than that of her sisters—too deep to be expressed in formal words. And King Lear scorned her and favoured her sisters; even as shallow maidens constantly look down on silent, awkward adorers of deep affections, and throw themselves away on shallow, fickle, loquacious Lotharios, because they do not understand the real Language of Love, which, according to a stupid old myth, every woman is supposed to know by intuition or instinct.
II.-FACIAL EXPRESSION,
although more trustworthy than written or spoken words, may sometimes prove deceptive too; for the cunning coquette who daily feigns Love to attract poor moths by her brilliant fascinations, becomes in time so perfect an actress that the coldest of cynics may be deceived by her wiles.
In his great work on the Expression of the Emotions, Darwin remarks that although, “when lovers meet, we know that their hearts beat quickly, their breathing is hurried, and their faces flush;” yet “love can hardly be said to have any proper or peculiar means of expression; and this is intelligible, as it has not habitually led to any special line of action. No doubt, as affection is a pleasurable sensation, it generally causes a gentle smile and some brightening of the eyes.”
Inasmuch as a flushed face and transient blushes, a gentle smile and brightening of the eyes, are characteristic of other emotions besides Love, Darwin is right; yet he ignores two peculiarities of expression by which a person in Love may be instantaneously recognised.
“A lover,” says Chamfort, “is a man who endeavours to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be; and this is the reason that almost all lovers appear ridiculous.” Who has not seen this unmistakable, ludicrous expression of masculine Love—head slightly inclined to the left; face as near her face as possible, echoing every expression of hers; a saccharine, beseeching smile on the kiss-hungry lips, producing on the spectator an uneasy sense of unstable equilibrium—as if in one more moment the force of amorous gravitation would draw down his face to hers?
Add to this his embarrassed gestures, the over-sweet falsetto of his voice—an octave higher than when he speaks to others,—and the peculiar lover’s pallor, and the picture is complete—
To women Cupid is kinder. Instead of making them appear ludicrous, Love has the power of transforming even a homely feminine face into a vision of loveliness by throwing a halo of tender expression around it. This wondrous transformation effected by Love is one of its greatest miracles; and to one who has seen the girl previously it immediately betrays her infatuation. It is a kind of emotional calligraphy in which the merest tyro can read, “I love him.”
And this temporary transformation of homely into beautiful faces, this fusing and moulding of the features into forms of voluptuous expression, is of extreme psychologic interest; for it shows that, after all, the exalted, extravagant image of Her perfections in the lover’s mind is not purely imaginary. It is not so much owing to a difference of “taste” that he loves her more than others do, as because she actually does look more beautiful when her eyes are fastened on him than when looking at any other man.
III.—CARESSES
“Tenderness,” says Professor Bain, “is a pleasurable emotion, variously stimulated, whose effort is to draw human beings into mutual embrace.” Darwin finds the peculiarity of love in the same desire for contact; and, as usual, he seeks for the origin of this desire, and endeavours to trace it to analogous peculiarities of the animals most closely related to us.
“With the lower animals,” he says, “we see the same principle of pleasure derived from contact in association with love. Dogs and cats manifestly take pleasure in rubbing against their masters and mistresses, and in being rubbed or patted by them. Many kinds of monkeys, as I am assured by the keepers in the Zoological Gardens, delight in fondling and being fondled by each other, and by persons to whom they are attached. Mr. Bartlett has described to me the behaviour of two Chimpanzees, rather older animals than those generally imported into this country, when they were first brought together. They sat opposite, touching each other with their much-protruded lips, and the one put his hand on the shoulder of the other. Then they mutually folded each other in their arms. Afterwards they stood up, each with one arm on the shoulder of the other, lifted up their heads, opened their mouths and yelled with delight.”
Concerning human beings Darwin remarks: “A strong desire to touch the beloved person is commonly felt; and love is expressed by this means more plainly than by any other. Hence we long to clasp in our arms those we tenderly love. We probably owe this desire to inherited habit, in association with the nursing and tending of our children, and with the mutual caresses of lovers.”
When love first dawns on the mind, the faintest superficial contact flashes along the nerves as a thrill of delicious emotion. To walk along the beach in a stiff breeze, and have her veil accidentally flutter in his face, is a romantic incident on which a youthful lover’s memory feasts for a month. If allowed to carry her shawl on his arm, he would not feel the cold of a Siberian winter. And later, what a variety of tell-tale caresses are there by which mutual Love may be revealed! It is not the voice alone that can say “I love you”; nor the speaking eyes. Confessions of Love, proposals and acceptance—complete dramas of Love—have been enacted by the language of two pairs of feet that have accidentally touched under the table. A slight pressure of the hand in the ballroom has told thousands of lovers, before a word was spoken, that now they may soon put their arms round that lovely waist without the excuse of a waltz or polka.
One form of hand-caress, dear alike to mothers and lovers, is thus described by Professor Mantegazza: “In a caress we give and receive at the same time. The hand which distributes love, as by a magnetic effusion, receives it in return from the skin of the beloved person. Hence it is that one of the most common and most thrilling of the expressions of love consists in passing the hand through the hair. The hand finds, in this labyrinth of supple, living threads, the means of multiplying infinitely the points of amorous contact. It appears as if each hair were an electric wire, putting us into direct connection with the senses, with the heart, and even with the thoughts, of those we love. It is not without reason that woman’s hair has long been given as a token of love.”
What a clumsy thing is language, what an awkward thing a formal proposal stuttered out by a lover more embarrassed than if he were an amateur actor appearing on the stage for the first time, as Romeo before an international audience of actors and critics! How much less natural, less poetic, it is to hear the confession of Love than to feel it—
What poet, and were he a genius in condensation, could compress into a line, a page, a volume, such an ocean of emotion as is contained in a momentary caress of the hand? Not even the moment when the lovers are “imparadised in one another’s arms” surpasses this in ecstasy.
Yet there is a more delicious rapture still in the drama of Courtship. “Love’s sweetest language is,” as Herrick says, “a kiss.” All other caresses are valueless without a kiss; for is not a kiss the very autograph of Love?
But labial contact is a subject of such supreme importance in the philosophy and history of Love that it cannot be disposed of briefly as one form of caressing, but demands a chapter by itself.
KISSING—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
“The lips,” says Sir Charles Bell, “are of all the features the most susceptible of action, and the most direct index of the feelings.” No wonder that Cupid selected them as his private seal, without which no passion can be stamped as genuine.
For the expression of all other emotions, by words or signs, one pair of lips suffices. Love alone requires for its expression two pairs of lips. Could anything more eloquently demonstrate the superiority of the romantic passion over all others?
Steele said of kissing that “Nature was its author, and it began with the first courtship.” Steele evidently evolved this theory out of his “inner consciousness,” for the facts do not agree with it. The art of Kissing has, like Love itself, been gradually developed in connection with the higher stages of culture. Traces of it are found among animals and savages; the ancients often misunderstood its purport and object, as did our mediæval ancestors; and it is only in recent times that Kissing has tended to become what it should be—the special and exclusive language of romantic and conjugal love.
AMONG ANIMALS
Honour to whom honour is due. The Chimpanzee seems to have been the first who discovered the charm of mutual labial contact. In the description by Mr. Bartlett just referred to, the two Chimpanzees “sat opposite, touching each other with their much-protruded lips.” And in some notes on the Chimpanzee in Central Park, New York, by Dr. C. Pitfield Mitchell, published in the Journal of Comparative Medicine and Surgery, January 1885, we find the following: “That tender emotions are experienced may be inferred from the fact that he pressed the kitten to his breast and kissed it, holding it very gently in both hands. In kissing, the lips are pouted and the tongue protruded, and both are pressed upon the object of affection. The act is not accompanied by any sound, thus differing from ordinary human osculation.”
Dogs, especially when young, may be seen occasionally exchanging a sort of tongue-kiss; and who has not seen dogs innumerable times make a sudden sly dash at the lips of master or mistress and try to steal a kiss? The affectionate manner in which a cow and calf eagerly lick one another in succession may be regarded as quite as genuine a kiss as a human kiss on hand, forehead, or cheek; and it is probable that even in the billing of doves the motive is a vague pleasure of contact.
AMONG SAVAGES
we meet once more with the anomalous fact that they seem ignorant, on the whole, of a clever invention known even to some animals. Sir John Lubbock, after referring to Steele’s opinion that kissing is coeval with courtship, remarks: “It was, on the contrary, entirely unknown to the Tahitians, the New Zealanders, the Papuas, and the aborigines of Australia, nor was it in use among the Somals or the Esquimaux.” Jemmy Button, the Fuegian, told Darwin that kissing was unknown in his land; and another writer gives an amusing account of an attempt he made to kiss a young negro girl. She was greatly terrified, probably imagining him a new species of cannibal who had made up his mind to eat her on the spot, raw, and without salt and pepper.
Monteiro, in a passage previously quoted, says that in all the long years he has been in Africa he has “never seen a negro put his arm round a woman’s waist, or give or receive any caress whatever that would indicate the slightest loving regard or affection on either side.”
Considering the general obtuseness of a savage’s nerves, it is no wonder that the subtle thrill of a kiss should be unknown to him. In many cases, moreover, Kissing is rendered physically impossible by the habit indulged in of mutilating and enlarging the lips. For instance, Schweinfurth, in his Heart of Africa, says that among the Bongo women “the lower lip is extended horizontally till it projects far beyond the upper, which is also bored and fitted with a copper plate or nail, and now and then by a little ring, and sometimes by a bit of straw, about as thick as a lucifer match.” Many other similar cases could be cited.
Evidently, under these circumstances, kissing would prove a snare and a delusion.
THE ORIGIN OF KISSING
is a topic on which doctors disagree, the opinions of Darwin and Mr. Spencer in particular differing as widely as their views regarding the origin of music. Mr. Spencer traces the primitive delight in osculation to the gustatory sense, Darwin to contact.
“Obviously,” says Mr. Spencer, "the billing of doves or pigeons, and the like action of love-birds, indicates an affection which is gratified by the gustatory sensation. No act of this kind on the part of an inferior creature, as of a cow licking a calf, can have any other origin than the direct prompting of a desire which gains by the act satisfaction; and in such a case the satisfaction is that which vivid perception of offspring gives to the maternal yearning. In some animals like acts arise from other forms of affection. Licking the hand, or, where it is accessible, the face, is a common display of attachment on a dog’s part; and when we remember how keen must be the olfactory sense by which a dog traces his master, we cannot doubt that to his gustatory sense, too, there is yielded some impression—an impression associated with those pleasures of affection which his master’s presence gives.
“The inference that kissing, as a mark of fondness in the human race, has a kindred origin, is sufficiently probable. Though kissing is not universal—though the negro races do not understand it, and though, as we have seen, there are cases where sniffing replaces it—yet, being common to unlikely and widely-dispersed peoples, we may conclude that it originated in the same manner as the analogous action among lower creatures.... From kissing as a natural sign of affection, there is derived the kissing which, as a means of simulating affection, gratifies those who are kissed; and, by gratifying them, propitiates them. Hence an obvious root for the kissing of feet, hands, garments, as a part of ceremonial.”
Darwin, on the other hand, holds that kissing “is so far innate or natural that it apparently depends on pleasure from close contact with a beloved person; and it is replaced in various parts of the world, by the rubbing of noses, as with the New Zealanders and Laplanders, by the rubbing or patting of the arms, breasts, or stomachs, or by one man striking his own face with the hands or feet of another. Perhaps the practice of blowing, as a mark of affection, on various parts of the body may depend on the same principle.”
Has Mr. Spencer ever kissed a girl? Certainly, to one who has, his theory of the gustatory origin of Kissing would seem like a joke were it not stated with so much scientific pomp and circumstance. The billing of doves and love-birds, in the first place, cannot be regarded as a matter of taste, literally, because in birds the sense of taste is commonly very rudimentary or quite absent, as their habit of swallowing seeds and other food whole and dry would make a sense which can only judge of things in a state of solution quite useless. The sense of touch, on the other hand, is exceedingly delicate in the bill of birds, which is, as it were, their feeler or hand.
That the motive which prompts cows and calves to lick one another is likewise tactile rather than gustatory, I had occasion to observe only a few days ago in a place worthy of so romantic a subject as the experimental study of kissing. Scene: a green mountain-meadow above Mürren, Switzerland. Frame of the picture, a semicircle of snow-giants, including Wetterhorn, Eiger, Mönch, Jungfrau, Breithorn, etc. Cows and calves in the meadow, not in the least disturbed by the avalanches thundering down the side of the Jungfrau every twenty minutes. Cow licks calf, and calf retaliates by licking the cow’s neck. Cow enjoys it immensely, holding her head up as high as possible, with an expression of intense enjoyment, just like a dog when you rub and pat his neck. Ergo, as cow was not licking but being licked, her enjoyment must have been tactile, not gustatory. To the cow her tongue is what the bill is to a bird—her most mobile organ, her feeler, and hand.
Possibly Mr. Spencer was misled into his gustatory theory by a too literal interpretation of a habit poets have always had of calling a kiss sweet. Among the Romans a love-kiss was distinguished from other kisses by being called a suavium or sweet thing; and a modern German poet boldly compares the flavour of kisses to wild strawberries (perhaps she had just been eating some). Yet all this belongs to fancy’s fairyland. Kisses are called sweet for the same reason that we speak of the sweet concords of music, i.e. because the language of æsthetics is so scantily developed that we are constantly compelled to borrow terms from one sense and apply them to another, when their only resemblance is that they are both agreeable or otherwise.
There is a very prevalent impression that the senses of savages are more delicate than ours. In one way they are. A savage can often see an object at a greater distance, and hear a fainter sound, than a white man. But in what may be called æsthetic as distinguished from physical refinement, savages are vastly our inferiors. A savage can hardly tell the difference between two adjacent notes in the musical scale, while a musician can distinguish the sixtieth part of a semitone. And why would the wondrous harmonies of a Chopin nocturne seem a mere chaos of sound to a savage? Because his ears have not been trained through his imagination and intellect to discriminate sounds and sound-combinations, or to follow the plot or development of a musical narrative or “theme.”
Just so with the sense of touch. A sweetheart’s veil fluttering in a Hottentot’s face would only annoy him. A squeeze of the hand would leave him cold; and would he refrain from putting his arm round her waist if that gave him any pleasure? Obviously, then, the reason why the art of kissing is unknown to him is because his senses are too callous, his imagination too sluggish.
Kissing, like every other fine art, has its sensuous and its imaginative or intellectual side. Of all parts of the visible body the lips are the most sensitive to contact. Here the layer in which the nerves and blood-vessels are contained is not covered over, as elsewhere on the skin, by a thick leathery epidermis, but only thinly veiled by a transparent epithelium; so that when lips are applied to lips, the blood-vessels which carry the vital fluid straight from the two loving hearts, and the soul-fibres, called nerves, are brought into almost immediate contact: whence that interchange of soul-magnetism—that electric shock which makes the first mutual kiss of Love the sweetest moment of life—