All hope abandon ye who enter here. It is a terrible haunt of pessimism, for disappointed lovers only. All others will please pass it by, for the object of this book is to advocate the cause of Love, not to weaken it. Only when all hope of reciprocation is abandoned, should the tender plant ever be crushed underfoot.
An exception must be made in favour of those hopeful lovers who merely wish to cure themselves in order to improve their chances of winning, as explained in the last chapter, under the head of Feigned Indifference.
It is useless to quote to a rejected lover Rosalind’s philosophy: “Our poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love cause.... Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” Useless to tell him, as Emerson does, that it is not a disgrace to love unrequitedly: “It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet.”
To all such efforts at consolation the poor wretch may retort with Shakspere: “Every one may master a grief but he who has it.” Yet he may, at any rate, endeavour to “patch his grief” with the following reflections, based on the experience of centuries.
Two thousand years ago Ovid advised the readers of his Remedia Amoris who wished to cure themselves of an unwelcome attachment to flee the capital, to travel, hunt, or till the soil till all danger of a relapse should he averted. “Out of sight, out of mind,” wrote Thomas à Kempis; and this theme has been varied by a hundred writers in prose and verse. “Love is a local anguish,” exclaims Coleridge; “I am fifty miles away and am not half so miserable.” Carew puts it thus—
Even the unspeakable Turk has a proverb advising a lover to fly to the mountains. The Himalayas are probably meant, for no other chain would be high enough to allay the anguish of a polygamist rejected by a whole harem.
On the other hand, “I find that absence still increases love,” wrote Charles Hopkins in the seventeenth century; and Bayly gave this paradox the familiar form of “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—to which a modern realistic wag has added the coda “of the other man.” “La Rochefoucauld has well remarked,” says Hume, “that absence destroys weak passions, but increases strong ones; as the wind extinguishes a candle but blows up a fire.”
This simile is not very appropriate, nor is the statement unquestionable. It is more correct to say that short absence increases Love, while long absence cures it.
There are two ways in which a short absence favours Love:
Like the thirst of a man who would wean himself of strong liquor, the lovers ardour is at first increased when he is placed where he can no longer drink in the intoxicating sight of her beauty. Time is needed to annihilate the maddening memory of that pleasure.
Secondly, short absence favours the idealising process in the lover’s mind. Removed from the corrective influence of her actual presence, his imagination may abandon itself to the delightful task of painting a gloriously unreal counterfeit of her charms—which is oil in the flames.
This idealising process is facilitated by the strange difficulty which most people—and lovers in particular—experience in recalling the features of those specially dear to them.
Given sufficient time to fix the idealised image of the beloved in the memory, and a cure may be effected through the shock subsequently felt on comparing this image with the greatly inferior reality.
It is safer, however, not to risk a return, but to avoid sight of her altogether for several years. The advantages of travel are twofold, not to mention the security from the danger of an accidental meeting. At home the surrounding world is too familiar to afford distraction, whereas in a strange place every object claims the attention and diverts the mind from its amorous reveries. More important still is the fact that in a foreign country the strangeness of national physiognomy invests all women with a heightened charm, so that it is easier to find an antidote by falling in love anew.
“Great spirits and great business do keep out the weak passion of love,” said Bacon; but long before him Ovid knew that Leisure is Cupid’s chief ally. “If you desire to end your love, employ yourself and you will conquer; for Amor flees business.” He advises military service, agriculture, and hunting as excellent diversions.
Poetry and music, however, as the same poet tells us, and all other occupations tending to stir up the tender feelings, are to be carefully avoided. Novel-reading is particularly bad, for to imagine another’s Love is to revive your own. “Lotte Hartmann played some melodies of Bellini on the piano this evening,” writes Lenau; “I ought to avoid music when I am away from you, for it arouses in me a longing and an anguish of consuming violence. I feel how my heart sadly shrinks within itself, and unwillingly continues to beat.”
Surely the thought that his romantic adoration will cease with marriage ought to cure a rejected wooer. Unquestionably, marriage is the best cure of Love. For though cynics are wrong in claiming that wedlock changes Love to indifference, it does change it to conjugal affection, which is an entirely different group of emotions. To the rejected lover, unfortunately, matrimony is not available as a cure of his Love. But he may give his overheated imagination an ice-bath by reflecting on the dark side of conjugal life, the promised bliss of which has been described as a mirage by so many great minds.
Professor Jowett thus discourses on how a modern Sokrates in a cynical mood might discourse on the seamy side of married life:—
“How the inferior of the two drags the other down to his or her level; how the cares of a family ‘breed meanness in their souls.’... They cannot undertake any noble enterprise, such as makes the names of men and women famous, from domestic considerations. Too late their eyes are opened; they were taken unawares, and desire to part company. Better, he would say, a ‘little love at the beginning,’ for heaven might have increased it; but now their foolish fondness has changed into mutual dislike.... How much nobler, in conclusion he will say, is friendship, which does not receive unmeaning praises from novelists and poets, is not exacting or exclusive, is not impaired by familiarity, is much less expensive, is not so likely to take offence, seldom changes, and may be dissolved from time to time without the assistance of the courts.”
Dr. Johnson, in a letter to Baretti, points out the difference between Love and Marriage:
“In love, as in every other passion of which hope is the essence, we ought always to remember the uncertainty of events. There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman; and if all would happen that a lover fancies, I know not what other terrestrial happiness would deserve pursuit. But love and marriage are different states. Those who are to suffer the evils together, and to suffer often for the sake of one another, soon lose that tenderness of look and that benevolence of mind which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and successive amusement.”
“Lose that tenderness of look!” Have you reflected that it is that exquisite tenderness of look which chiefly fascinated you, and have you not noticed that, as Johnson implies, married people rarely regard one another with that look which constantly intoxicated them during Courtship? For “beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense,” says Addison; or, as Hazlitt puts it, “though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.”
“With most marriages,” says Goethe, “it is not long till things assume a very piteous look.” Raleigh: “If thou marry beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which, perchance, will neither last nor please thee one year.” Seneca: “Beauty is such a fleeting blossom, how can wisdom rely upon its momentary delight?” Howells: “Marian Butler was at that period full of those airs of self-abnegation with which women adorn themselves in the last days of betrothal and the first of marriage, and never afterwards.” Alexander Walker: “It looks as if woman were in possession of most enjoyments, and as if man had only an illusion held out to him to make him labour for her.”
Montaigne: “As soon as women are ours we are no longer theirs.” “The land of marriage has this peculiarity that strangers are desirous of inhabiting it, while its natural inhabitants would willingly be banished thence.” Boucicault: “I wish that Adam had died with all his ribs in his body.” De Finod: “Marriage is the sunset of love.” Goldsmith: “Many of the English marry in order to have one happy month in their lives.” Hood: “You can’t wive and thrive both in the same year.” Southey: “There are three things a wise man will not trust,—the wind, the sunshine of an April day, and a woman’s plighted faith.” Byron: “I remarked in my illness the complete inertion, inaction, and destruction of my chief mental faculties. I tried to rouse them, and yet could not—and this is the Soul!!! I should believe that it was married to the body if they did not sympathise so much with each other.” Colley Cibber: “Oh, how many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding-ring!” Alphonse Karr: “Women for the most part do not love us. They do not choose a man because they love him, but because it pleases them to be loved by him.”
Lady Montagu: “It goes far toward reconciling me to being a woman, when I reflect that I am thus in no immediate danger of ever marrying one.” Schopenhauer: “It is well known that happy marriages are rare.” “The lover, contrary to expectation, finds himself no happier than before.” Byron—
Burton: “Paul commended marriage, yet he preferred a single life.” Buxton: “Juliet was a fool to kill herself, for in three months she’d have married again, and been glad to be quit of Romeo.” Heine: “The music at a marriage procession always reminds me of the music which leads soldiers to battle.” Lessing—
Selden: “Marriage is a desperate thing. The frogs in Æsop were extremely wise; they had a great mind to some water, but they would not leap into the well, because they could not get out again.”
When the Pope heard of Father Hyacinthe’s marriage, says Cheales, he exclaimed: “The saints be praised! the renegade has taken his punishment into his own hands. Truly the ways of Providence are inscrutable!”
Why are women so mysterious, so inscrutable? Cynics say because you cannot calculate what they will do, as they have no fixed compass by which they steer, i.e. no character. But Heine takes up their defence. Far from having no character, he says, they have a new one every day.
The world’s opinion of women is best revealed in the crystallised wisdom, based on experience, called proverbs. It will soothe the wounded lover’s heart to note the unanimity with which woman’s foibles are dwelt on in the proverbs of all nations from ancient Greece to modern China and France. To give only three instances of a thousand that may be found in any collection of proverbs: “Women,” says a French proverb, “have quicksilver in the brain, wax in the heart.” The old Greek poet Xenarchus sang, “Happy the cicadas live, since they all have voiceless wives.” “There is no such poison in the green snake’s mouth or in the hornet’s sting as in a woman’s heart,” says a Chinese maxim.
But it is not necessary to rely on such anonymous collections of wisdom as proverbs to convince a man of the folly of linking himself for life with such a miserable inferior being as a woman. From Plato to Darwin there is a consensus of opinion as to woman’s vast inferiority to man.
According to Plato, says Mr. Grote, “men are superior to women in everything; in one occupation as well as in another.” Cookery and weaving having been named as two apparent exceptions, Plato denies woman’s superiority even in these.
“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes,” says Darwin, “is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison.”
“I found, as a rule,” says Mr. Galton, "that men have more delicate powers of discrimination than women, and the business of life seems to confirm this view. The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so, I understand, are the tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and the like. These latter occupations are well salaried, because it is of the first moment to the merchant that he should be rightly advised on the real value of what he is about to purchase or to sell. If the sensitivity of women were superior to that of men, the self-interest of merchants would lead to their being always employed; but as the reverse is the case, the opposite supposition is likely to be the true one.
“Ladies rarely distinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table, and though custom allows them to preside at the breakfast-table, men think them, on the whole, to be far from successful makers of tea and coffee.”
This disposes of the old myth that women are more sensitive than men. And De Quincy, in his essay on False Distinctions, refutes the equally absurd notion that “women have more imagination than men.” He comes to the conclusion that, “as to poetry in its highest form, I never yet knew a woman, nor yet will believe that any has existed, who could rise to an entire sympathy with what is most excellent in that art.”
One proof of this statement lies in the fact that as a rule men of genius have been refused by the women they loved most deeply.
Regarding the emotional sphere, we have seen that it is only in parental and conjugal feeling that woman surpasses man. In Romantic Love, in all the impersonal feelings for art and nature, she is vastly his inferior. Her superficial education gives her no intellectual interests, and that is the reason why so many married men prefer the club and friendship to home and conjugal devotion—even as did the ancient Greeks.
It is in the seventh book of the Laws, p. 806, that Plato remarks: “The legislator ought not to let the female sex live softly and waste money and have no order of life, while he takes the utmost care of the male sex, and leaves half of life only blest with happiness, when he might have made the whole state happy.”
Is it not humiliating to man, who loves to call himself a “reasoning animal,” to find that, after so many centuries, one of our greatest and most liberal thinkers, Professor Huxley, is obliged to write in this same Platonic tone that “the present system of female education stands self-condemned, as inherently absurd,” because it fosters and exaggerates instead of removing woman’s natural disadvantages? “With few insignificant exceptions,” Professor Huxley continues, “girls have been educated either to be drudges or toys beneath man, or a sort of angels above him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Clärchen and Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in the fair saint nor in the fair sinner; that women are meant neither to be men’s guides nor their playthings, but their comrades, their fellows, and their equals, so far as Nature puts no bar to their equality, does not seem to have entered into the minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls” (Lay Sermons, p. 25).
Woman, in short, is a failure; and let any disappointed lover ask himself, Is it businesslike to begin life with a failure?
Love being a magic emotional microscope which ignites passion by magnifying the most beautiful features of the beloved, leaving everything else indistinct and blurred, it follows that the simplest way of arresting this flame is to change the focus of this microscope, to fix the attention deliberately on her faults, while throwing her merits and charms into an unfavourable light.
This method is too self-evident and effective not to have occurred to the ingenious Ovid. He advises the lover who wishes to be cured to study the girl’s charms in a hypercritical spirit. Call her stout if she is plump, black if she is dark, lean if slender. Ask her to sing if she has no talent for music, to talk if unskilled in conversation, to dance if awkward, and if her teeth are bad, tell her funny stories to make her laugh.
Her mental faults require no microscope to reveal them. Certainly her taste is execrable, for does she not prefer that vulgar fellow Jones to you, one of the cleverest fellows that ever condescended to be born on this miserable planet?
What folly, indeed, to love such a girl! What fascinates you is simply the mysterious brilliancy of her coal-black eyes—of which you may find ten thousand duplicates in Italy or Spain. Don’t you see that no flashes of wit are ever mirrored in those eyes? that, though beautiful, they are soulless, like a black pansy? that they look at one person as at another, incapable of expressing shades and modulations of tender emotion, because the soul of which they are the windows has never been, and never will be, moved by Love?
She never thinks of anything but her own pleasure; does nothing but visit the dressmaker and the theatre and read novels; never thinks it her duty to provide for her future husband’s comfort and happiness by educating herself in domestic economy and æsthetic accomplishments of real depth—as you have toiled and studied in anticipation of providing for her comfort and happiness. She takes no sympathetic interest in your affairs—how can you expect to be happy with her? If she loves you not, you would be more than a fool to try to get her consent to marriage, for is it not the ecstasy of Love to be loved and worshipped alone and beyond any other mortal?
The beauty of her eyes will not last,—it is nothing, anyway, but sunlight mechanically reflected from a darkly-painted iris—and when its youthful brilliancy vanishes there will be no soul-sparks to take its place. And for this brief honeymoon mirage you are willing to give up your bachelor comforts and pleasures, your freedom to do what you please, go where you please, and travel whenever you please; to exchange your refreshing sleep o’ nights for domestic cares and the pleasure of trotting up and down the room with a bawling baby at two o’clock in the morning? Bah! Are you in your senses?
True, if you are rich some of these disadvantages may be avoided. But if you are rich you will not be refused, for—
as Byron remarks; and again: “For my own part, I am of the opinion of Pausanias, that success in love depends upon Fortune.”
But of all her shortcomings the most galling and fatal is that she loves you not. This thought alone, says Stendhal, may succeed in curing a man of his passion. You will notice, he says, that she whom you love favours others with little attentions which she withholds from you. They may be mere trifles, such as not giving you a chance to help her into her carriage, her box at the opera. The thought of this, by “associating a sense of humiliation with every thought of her, poisons the source of love and may destroy it.”
Thus wounded Pride is the easiest way out of Love, as gratified Pride is the straightest way in.
According to Shakspere, though Love does not admit Reason as his counsellor, he does use him as his physician. The most effective way of using Reason to cure Love is by way of comparison. By dwelling on the miseries of married life as just detailed, the disappointed lover may mitigate his pains somewhat, as did that Italian mentioned by Schopenhauer, who resisted the agony of torture by constantly keeping in his mind’s eye the picture of the gallows that would have been the reward of confession.
Again, he may compare his present Love with a former infatuation that seemed at the time equally deep and eternal, though now he wonders how he could have ever loved that girl. History repeats itself.
Compare, moreover, your present idol with her stout and faded mother. In a few years she will perhaps resemble her mother more than her present self.
Compare her charms, feature by feature, with some recognised paragon of beauty. Look at her in the glaring light of the sun, which reveals every spot on the complexion.
Longfellow says it is folly to pretend that one ever wholly recovers from a disappointed passion; and Mr. Hamerton believes that “a wrinkled old maid may still preserve in the depths of her own heart, quite unsuspected by the young and lively people about her, the unextinguished embers of a passion that first made her wretched fifty years before.”
Occasionally this may be true, in the sense in which psychology teaches that no impression made on the mind is ever completely effaced, but may, though forgotten for years, be revived in moments of great excitement, or in the delirium of fever; as, for example, in the case mentioned by Duval, of a Pole in Germany, who had not used his native language for thirty years, but who, under the influence of anæsthetics, “spoke, prayed, and sang, using only the Polish language.” The persistence of an old passion is the more probable from the fact that in mental disease and age, as Ribot points out, the emotional faculties are effaced much more slowly than the intellectual. Feelings form the self; amnesia of feeling is the destruction of self.
Ordinarily, however, and for the time being, it may be possible to practically obliterate a passion. “All love may be expelled by love, as poisons are by other poisons,” says Dryden. And if the allopathic remedies described in the preceding paragraphs should fail to effect a cure, the lover may find the homœopathic principle of similia similibus more successful.
Heine, in his posthumous Memoirs, thus refers to this principle of curing like with like:—
“In love, as in the Roman Catholic religion, there is a provisional purgatory in which mortals are allowed to get used gradually to being roasted before they get into the real eternal hell.... In all honesty, what a terrible thing is love for a woman. Inoculation is herein of no use.... Very wise and experienced physicians counsel a change of locality in the opinion that removal from the presence of the enchantress will also break the charm. Perhaps the homœopathic principle, by which woman cures us of woman, is the best of all.... It was ordained that I should be visited more severely than other mortals by this malady, the heart-pox.... The most effective antidote to women are women; true, this implies an attempt to expel Satan with Beelzebub; and in such a case the medicine is often more noxious still than the malady. But it is at any rate a change, and in a disconsolate love-affair a change of the inamorata is unquestionably the best policy.”
After carefully following all the foregoing rules regarding absence, travel, employment, dwelling on the miseries of marriage, the weaknesses of women in general and one woman in particular, the disappointed lover may boldly return and face her again. The chances are ten to one he will find himself—more in love than ever!
Women are magicians. No wonder they were burned as witches in the Middle Ages.
Romantic love—commonly considered immutable—not only displays countless individual variations in regard to duration and degrees of intensity, but has a sort of “local colour” in each country; or, to keep up our old metaphor, a varying clangtint, depending on the greater or less prominence of certain “overtones.”
To describe all these varieties of Love would require a separate volume. And since all the most interesting forms of the romantic passion are to be met with in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and America, it will suffice to briefly characterise Love in those countries.
As literary luck would have it, the subject of French Love follows naturally upon the subject of the last chapter, the Remedia Amoris.
The French are too clever a nation to leave to individual effort the difficult task of curing the mind of such an obstinate thing as Love. All the papas and mammas in the land have put their heads together and devised two methods of killing Love wholesale, compared with which all the remedies named in the last chapter are mere fly-bites.
These two methods are Chaperonage and Parental Choice, as opposed to Courtship and Individual Sexual Selection.
Paradoxical as it may seem, there is in the midst of modern Europe a nation which, in the treatment of women, Love, and marriage, stands on the same low level of evolution as the ancient, mediæval, and Oriental nations.
This is not a theory, but a fact patent to all, and attested by the best English, German, and French authors.
One of the deepest of French thinkers, whose eyes were opened by travel and comparison, De Stendhal, in 1842, says in his book De l’Amour: “Pour comprendre cette passion, que depuis trente ans la peur du ridicule cache avec tant de soin parmi nous, il faut en parler comme d’une maladie”—"To understand this passion, which during the last thirty years has been concealed among us with so much solicitude, from fear of ridicule, it is necessary to speak of it as a malady."
But Stendhal greatly understates the case. It was not only within thirty years from the time when he wrote, and by means of ridicule, that the French had tried hard to kill Love. They have never really emancipated themselves from mediæval barbarism. Pure Romantic Love between two young unmarried persons has never yet flourished in France—because it has never been allowed to grow. To-day, as in the days of the Troubadours, the only form of Love celebrated in French plays and romances is the form which implies conjugal infidelity.
“Marriage, as treated in the old French epics,” says Ploss, “is rarely based on love;” the woman marries for protection, the man for her wealth or social affiliations. In the eighteenth century girls were compelled from their earliest years to live only for appearance sake: “The most harmless natural enjoyment, every childish ebullition, is interdicted as improper. Her mother denies her the expression of tender emotion as too bourgeois, too common. The little one grows up in a dreary, heartless vacuum; her deeper feelings remain undeveloped.... Real love would be too ordinary a motive of marriage, and therefore extremely ridiculous. It is not offered her, accordingly, nor does she feel any.”
Heine wrote from Paris in 1837 that “girls never fall in love in this country.” "With us in Germany, as also in England and other nations of Germanic origin, young girls are allowed the utmost possible liberty, whereas married women become subjected to the strict and anxious supervision of their husbands.
"Here in France, as already stated, the reverse is the case: young girls remain in the seclusion of a convent until they either marry or are introduced to the world under the strict eye of a relative. In the world, i.e. in the French salon, they always remain silent and little noticed, for it is neither good form here nor wise to make love to an unmarried girl.
“There lies the difference. We Germans, as well as our Germanic neighbours, bestow our love always on unmarried girls, and these only are celebrated by our poets; among the French, on the other hand, married women only are the object of love, in life as well as in literature.”
The difficulty of becoming acquainted with a young lady, Mr. Hamerton tells us, is greatest “in what may be called the ‘respectable’ classes in country-towns and their vicinities. In Parisian society young ladies go out into le monde, and may be seen and even spoken to at evening-parties.”
“And even spoken to” is good, is very good. What a privilege for the young men! The iron bars which formerly separated them from the young ladies have actually been removed, and they are allowed to speak to them—in presence of a heart-chilling, conversation-killing dragon. No wonder Parisian society is so corrupt!
Mr. Hamerton has given in Round My House the most realistic and fascinating account of French courtship and marriage-customs ever written. He is a great admirer of the French, always ready to excuse their foibles, and his testimony is, therefore, doubly valuable as that of an absolutely impartial witness. He had an opportunity for many years of studying French provincial life with an artist’s trained faculties; and here are a few sentences culled from his descriptions:—
“It is not merely difficult, in our neighbourhood, for a young man in the respectable classes to get acquainted with a young lady, but every conceivable arrangement is devised to make it absolutely impossible. Balls and evening-parties are hardly ever given, and when they are given great care is taken to keep young men out of them, and young marriageable girls either dance with each other or with mere children.”
Whereas in England “a young girl may go where she likes, without much risk to her good name,” a French girl “may not cross a street alone, nor open a book which has not been examined, nor have an opinion about anything.” “The French ideal of a well-brought-up young lady is that she should not know anything whatever about love and marriage, that she should be both innocent and ignorant, and both in the supreme degree—both to a degree which no English person can imagine.”
“The young men are not to blame; they would be ready enough, perhaps, to fall in love if they had the chance, like any Englishman or German, but the respectable parents of the young lady take care that they shall not have the chance of falling in love.”
The only opportunity a young man has of seeing a girl is at a distance, at church or in a religious procession. Here he may see her face; her character he can only ascertain through gossip, a lady friend, or the parish priest. It is much more respectable, however, to show no such curiosity, for its absence implies the absence of such a ridiculous thing as Love. “There is nothing which good society in France disapproves of so much as the passion of Love, or anything resembling it.” “When Cœlebs asks for the hand of a girl he has seen for a minute, he may just possibly be in love with her, which is a degrading supposition; but if he has never seen her, you cannot even suspect him of a sentiment so unbecoming.”
There is but one way for the young man to gain admission to a house where there is a marriageable young lady: “He must first, through a third party, ask to marry the young lady, and, if her parents consent, he will then be admitted to see her and speak to her, but not otherwise. The respectable order of affairs is that the offer and acceptance should precede and not follow courtship.”
Would it be possible to conceive a more diabolically ingenious social machinery for massacring Romantic Love en gros?
“Marriages in France are generally arranged by the exercise of reason and prudence, rather than by either passion or affection.” Mr. Hamerton gives an amusing account of how he was asked to be matrimonial ambassador by a young man who had never seen the girl he wanted to marry. Mr. Hamerton obliged the young man, but was told by the mother that if the young man would wait two years he might have a fair chance, provided a richer or nobler suitor did not turn up in the meantime.
Money and Rank versus Love. French mammas have at least one virtue. They are not hypocrites.
The Countess von Bothmer, who lived in France a quarter of a century, says in her French Home Life: “Where we so ordinarily listen to what we understand by love—to the temptations of the young heart in all their forms (however transitory), to our individual impressions and our own opinions—the French consult fitness of relative situation, reciprocities of fortune and position, and harmonies of family intercourse.”
To annihilate the last resource of Love—elopement—the Code Napoléon forbids all marriages without either the consent of the father and mother, or proof that they are both dead. “It is very troublesome to get married in France; the operation is surrounded by difficulties and formalities which would make an Englishman stamp with rage.”
Social life, of course, suffers as much from this idiotic system as Romantic Love. French hospitality “does not extend beyond the family circle,” we are informed by M. Max O’Rell, who also gives this amusing instance of the imbecility or mental slavery (he does not use these words) produced by the French system of education and chaperonage:—
“I remember I was one day sitting in the Champs Elysées with two English ladies. Beside us was a young French girl with her father and mother. The person on the right of papa rose and went away, and we heard the young innocent say to her mother: ‘Mamma, may I go and sit by papa?’ It was a baby of about eighteen or twenty. Those English ladies laugh over the affair to this day.”
Boys suffer as well as girls. As the author of an article on “Parisian Psychology” remarks: “There are no mothers in France; it is a nation of ‘mammas,’ who, in the most unlimited sense of the word, spoil their boys, weaken them in body and soul, dwarf their thought, dry their hearts, and lower them to below even their own level, hoping thereby to rule over them through life, as they too often do. Frenchwomen having been at best but half-wives, regard their children as a sort of compensation for what they have themselves not had; and after the mischievous fashion of weak ‘mammas’ prolong babyhood till far into mature life.”
The French, in fact, are a nation of babies. Their puerile conceit, which prevents them from learning to read any language but their own, and thus finding out what other nations think of them, is responsible in part for the mediæval barbarism of their matrimonial arrangements. The Parisian is the most provincial animal in the world. In any other metropolis—be it London, New York, Vienna, or Berlin—people understand and relish whatever is good in literature, art, and life, be it English, American, French, German, or Italian. But the Parisian understands only what is narrowly and exclusively French. And this is the dictionary definition of Provincialism.
The consequences of this mediævalism and provincialism in modern France are thus eloquently summed up by a writer in the Westminster Review (1877):—
“Such education as girls receive is not only not a preparation for the wedded state, it is a positive disqualification for it. They are not taught to read, they are not taught to reason; they are launched into life without a single intellectual interest. The whole effort of their early training goes to fill their mind with puerilities and superstitions. As regards God, they are instructed to believe in relics and old bones; as regards man, they are instructed to believe in dress, in mannerisms, and coquetry. Their love of appreciation, after being enormously developed, is bottled up and tied down until a husband is found to draw the cork. What else, then, can we look for but an explosion of frivolity? Can we expect that such a provision of coquettishness will be reserved for the husband’s exclusive use? He will be tired of it in three months—unless it is tired of him before; and then the pent-up waters will forsake their narrow bed and overflow the country far and wide.”
No wonder Napoléon remarked that “Love does more harm than good.” And right he was, most emphatically, for the only kind of Love possible in France does infinite harm. It poisons life and literature alike.
We can now understand the fierceness of Dumas’s attacks on mariages de convenance: “The manifest deterioration of the race touches him; it does not touch us. Nor do we at all realise the next to impossibility of a man ever marrying for love in France. There are those who have tried to do it, but they can never get on in life; they are reputed of ‘bad example’” (St. James’s Gazette).
And now we come upon a paradox which has puzzled a great many thinkers. The Countess von Bothmer, while deploring the absence of Love in French courtship, endeavours to show that domestic happiness and conjugal affection are, nevertheless, not rare in France. French husbands “are ordinarily with their wives, accompany them wherever they can, and share their friendships and distractions.” Mr. Hamerton likewise bears witness that French girls “become excellent wives, faithful, orderly, dutiful, contented, and economical. They all either love their husbands, or conduct themselves as if they did so.” He says the notion fostered by novels “that Frenchmen are always occupied in making love to their neighbours’ wives” is nonsense; that there is no more adultery than elsewhere. “There exists in foreign countries, and especially in England, a belief that Frenchwomen are very generally adulteresses. The origin of the belief is this,— the manner in which marriages are generally managed in France leaves no room for interesting love-stories. Novelists and dramatists must find love-stories somewhere, and so they have to seek for them in illicit intrigues.”
This is all very ingenious, but the argument is not conclusive. Even granted for a moment that Mr. Hamerton is right in his defence of French conjugal life, is it not a more than sufficient condemnation of the French system of “courtship” that one-half of the nation are prevented from reading its literature because it is so foul and filthy—because Love has been made synonymous with adultery?
But Mr. Hamerton’s assertion loses its probability when viewed in the light of the following considerations. He himself admits that the French are anxious to read about Love, that the novelists and dramatists must find stories of Love somewhere—mind you, not of conjugal but of Romantic Love—and the Paris Figaro not long ago denounced the French novelists of the period for devoting their stories to Love almost exclusively, whereas Balzac, Dumas, Thackeray, and Scott, at least introduced various other matters of interest. Now French novels have the largest editions of any books published; and if so vast an interest is displayed by the French in reading about Love, is it likely that their interest is purely literary? Certainly not. They will seek it in real life. And in real life it can only be found in one sphere, which elsewhere is protected against such invasions, by the young being allowed to meet one another. “It is to be feared that they who marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marry.’”marry.’” In this respect human nature is the same the world over. The testimony of scores of unprejudiced authors on this head cannot be ignored.
This, however, is only one of the evils following from the French suppression of pre-matrimonial Love. The parents may or may not suffer through conjugal jealousy and infidelity, one thing is certain,—that the children suffer from it, in body and mind. It is leading to the depopulation of France. It was M. Jules Rochard who called attention to the fact that “France, which two centuries ago included one-third of the total population of Europe, now contains but one-tenth”; although the death-rate is smaller in France than in most European countries, and although there has been a gradual increase of wealth throughout the country.
That the suppression of Romantic Love and of all opportunities for courtship is the principal cause of the decline of France, is apparent from the fact that the countries in which population increases most rapidly—as America and Great Britain—are those in which Romantic Love is the chief motive to marriage.
Romantic Love goes by complementary qualities, the defects of the parents neutralising one another in the offspring; so that the children who are the issue of a love-match are commonly more beautiful than their parents. In France there is no selection whatever, except with reference to money and rank. Not even Health is considered, the sine qua non of Love as well as Beauty. Hence the absence of Love in France has led to the almost absolute absence of beauty. And it would be nothing short of a miracle if the offspring of a young maiden, still in her teens, and an old broken-down sinner, chosen by her parents for his wealth or social position, were any different from the puny, hairy men and coarse-featured, vulgar women that make up the bulk of the French nation.
In Paris one does occasionally see a fine figure and a rather pretty face, but they almost always belong to the lower classes. As the lower classes allow the young considerable freedom, it would seem as if beauty in this class ought to be as common an article as in England or the United States. But the incapacity of the young women for feeling and reciprocating Love neutralises these opportunities. For of what use is it for a man to feel Love if the woman invariably bases her choice on money? This matter is most clearly brought out by Mr. Hamerton:—
“Amongst the lower classes, the peasantry and workmen ... girls have as much freedom as they have in England. The great institution of the parlement gives them ample opportunities for becoming acquainted with their lovers; indeed the acquaintance, in many cases, goes further than is altogether desirable. A peasant girl requires no parental help in looking after her own interests. She admits a lover to the happy state of parlement, which means that he has a right to talk with her when they meet, and to call upon her, dance with her, etc. The lover is always eager to fix the wedding-day, the girl is not so eager. She keeps him on indefinitely until a richer one appears, on which No. 1 has the mortification of seeing himself excluded from parlement, whilst another takes his place. In this way a clever girl will go on for several years, amusing herself by torturing amorous swains, until at length a sufficiently big fish nibbles at the bait, when she hooks him at once, and takes good care that he shall not escape. Nothing can be more pathetically ludicrous than the condition of a young peasant who is really in love, especially if he is able to write, for then he pours forth his feelings in innumerable letters full of tenderness and complaint. On her part the girl does not answer the letters, and has not the slightest pity for the unhappy victim of her charms. After seeing a good deal of such love-affairs I have come to the conclusion that in humble life young men do really very often feel