But the one affection in which woman stands infinitely above man is the maternal, compared with which paternal love is ordinarily a mere shadow. Romantic Love in man and child-love in woman are the two strongest passions which the human mind entertains.
In depth and strength these two passions are perhaps alike. In point of antiquity, the maternal feeling has an advantage over the Love-passion; for, of all personal affections, the maternal was developed first, and the sentiment of Romantic Love last.
Personal affections are of two kinds: (1) Those based on blood-relationship—maternal, paternal, filial, brotherly, and sisterly love; (2) Those not based on blood-relationship—friendship and Romantic Love. Conjugal affection belongs psychologically to the first class.
That of all relationships the one between mother and child is the most intimate is obvious. The child is part and parcel of the mother: her own flesh and blood and soul; and in loving it the mother practically loves a detached portion of herself—thus uniting the force of selfish with that of altruistic emotion. This is the primitive fountain of maternal affection. A second source of it lies in the resemblance of the child to the father, reviving in the mother’s memory the romantic days of pre-matrimonial Love. It must be an unending source of interest in a mother’s mind to note which of the child’s traits are derived from her, which from the father. If she loves herself, and loves her husband, the child that unites the traits of both must be doubly dear to her. The fact that the child is inseparably associated with all the mother’s joys and sorrows, from the wedding-day to death, constitutes a third source of her attachment; and a fourth is the social regard and honour which an energetic and gifted son, or a beautiful and accomplished daughter, may reflect on her.
The mother herself is of course unconscious of the complex nature of her feeling and its origin; especially in the first days, when the new feeling dawns upon her like a revelation. As in the case of budding Love, the feeling is at first less individual than generic—less the affection of this particular mother for this particular child than the bursting out of the general feeling of motherhood, inherited by her in common with all women.
Natural selection helps us to explain how this general feeling of motherhood was developed. As among animals, so among our savage and semi-civilised ancestors, those mothers who fondly cared for their infants naturally succeeded in rearing a larger and more vigorous progeny than those mothers who neglected their children. And through hereditary transmission this instinct gradually acquired, that marvellous intensity and power which we now admire.
The sublime and almost terrible height to which this emotion can rise is most realistically depicted in Rubens’s famous picture in Munich, representing the murder of the children at Bethlehem; in which mothers grasp the naked daggers, and frantically expose their breasts to receive the blows intended for their little ones. Throughout the animal kingdom, including mankind, the female is less pugnacious than the male, less provided with means of defence, and hence more gentle and timid; yet in the moment of peril the mother’s affection absolutely annihilates fear, and makes her face danger and death with a courage, supernatural strength, and endurance, rarely equalled by man, with all his weapons and natural consciousness of superior muscle.
It is in this blind, impetuous, passionate willingness of self-sacrifice that maternal affection most closely resembles the passion of Romantic Love.
For paternal affection Natural Selection has done much less than for maternal; and it is easy to understand why. For, useful as the father’s assistance is in securing various advantages to the growing child, yet even if he should cruelly abandon it altogether, the maternal love would still remain interposed to save and rear it.
Nor is it in the human race alone that paternal is weaker than maternal love. Among mammals, as Horwicz remarks, we even come across a Herr Papa occasionally who shows a great inclination to dine on his progeny. And how irregularly the paternal—sometimes even the maternal—instinct is displayed among savages is graphically shown by this group of cases collected by Herbert Spencer:—
“As among brutes the philoprogenitive instinct is occasionally suppressed by the desire to kill, and even devour, their young ones; so among primitive men this instinct is now and again overridden by impulses temporarily excited. Thus, though attached to their offspring, Australian mothers, when in danger, will sometimes desert them; and if we may believe Angas, men have been known to bait their hooks with the flesh of boys they have killed. Thus, notwithstanding their marked parental affection, Fuegians sell their children for slaves; thus, among the Chonos Indians, a father, though doting on his boy, will kill him in a fit of anger for an accidental offence. Everywhere among the lower races we meet with like incongruities. Falkner, while describing the paternal feelings of Patagonians as very strong, says they often pawn and sell their wives and little ones to the Spaniards for brandy. Speaking of the children of the Sound Indians, Bancroft says they ‘sell or gamble them away.’ According to Simpson, the Pi-Edes ‘barter their children to the Utes proper for a few trinkets or bits of clothing.’ And of the Macusi, Schomburgk writes, ‘the price of a child is the same as an Indian asks for his dog.’ This seemingly heartless conduct to children often arises from the difficulty experienced in rearing them.”
Some light is thrown on the genesis and composition of parental affection by the three reasons named by Spencer, why among savages and semi-civilised peoples in general sons were much more appreciated than daughters. While daughters were little more than an encumbrance to the parents, useless before puberty, and lost to them after marriage, the sons could make themselves useful in warding off the enemy, in avenging personal injuries, and in performing the funeral rites for the benefit of departed ancestors.
In a higher stage of civilisation it is probable that utilitarian considerations of a somewhat different kind still formed a principal ingredient in parental love. A son was valued as an assistant in workshop or field, a daughter as a domestic drudge. Feelings of a tenderer nature were of course sometimes present, but that they were not general is shown by the fact, attested by numerous historic examples, that the aim of our paternal ancestors in centuries past was to make their children fear rather than love them.
A slight element of fear is indeed necessary for the maintenance of filial respect and discipline; but our forefathers were too prone to sacrifice their tender feelings of sympathy with their offspring to the gratification of parental authority, for the obvious reason that the latter feeling was stronger than the former. The frequency with which daughters especially were forced to sacrifice their personal preferences in marriage to the ambitions and whims of their father, affords the most striking instance of the former embryonic state of parental affection.
In modern parental love Pride is perhaps the most conspicuous trait. This Pride has two aspects—one comic, one serious. Nothing is more amusing than the suddenness with which the “pride of authorship” converts a bachelor’s well-known horror of babies into the young father’s fantastic worship. Yet though he feels “like a little tin god on wheels,” he recognises the superior rank of the young prince, spoils his best trousers in kneeling before him, allows him to pull his moustache and whiskers, and, indeed, shows a disposition towards self-sacrifice almost worthy of a lover.
The serious side of the matter reveals one of the greatest differences between paternal and maternal love. A mother’s love is largely influenced by pity; hence she is very apt to lavish her fondest caresses on that child which happens to be imperfect in some way—say a cripple—and therefore unhappy. The father on the other hand, will show most favour to his handsomest daughter, his most talented son; and nothing will so swell a father’s heart and cause it to overflow with affection as the news of some great distinction acquired by this son.
Mr. Spencer is doubtless right in asserting that of all family affections filial love is the least developed; and in tracing this weakness especially to the parental harshness and disposition to inspire excessive fear just referred to. In Germany the example of the Prussian king who so unmercifully treated his children was extensively imitated. The condition in France is indicated by the words of Chateaubriand: “My mother, my sister, and myself, transformed into statues by my father’s presence, only recover ourselves after he leaves the room;” and in England, in the fifteenth century, says Wright, “Young ladies, even of great families, were brought up not only strictly, but even tyrannically.” And even two centuries later “children stood or knelt in trembling silence in the presence of their fathers and mothers, and might not sit without permission.”
Among animals filial affection can scarcely be said to exist, except as a very utilitarian craving for protection and sustenance. Among primitive men it is a common practice to abandon aged parents to their fate. The parents do not resent this treatment; and of the Nascopies Heriot even says that the aged father “usually employed as his executioner the son who is most dear to him.” Nor are cases of heartless neglect at all uncommon even among modern civilised communities. But the gradual change of fathers “from masters into friends” has tended to multiply and intensify filial love at the same rate as paternal; and the advance of moral refinement will tend to make the lot of aged parents more and more pleasant, not only because the duty of gratitude for favours received will be more vividly realised and enforced by example, but because the cultivation of the imagination intensifies sympathy, thus making it impossible for a son or daughter to be happy while they know their parents to be unhappy.
Our feelings are curiously complicated and subtly interwoven. Parents feel a natural pride in their children. The best way therefore to repay them for all their troubles is to act in such a way as to justify and intensify that pride. On the other hand, the thought that the parental pride is gratified also gratifies filial vanity, and proves an additional incentive to ambitious effort.
Young people of both sexes more frequently make confidants and “bosom friends” of their playmates and classmates than of their brothers and sisters. Why is this so? Novelty perhaps has something to do with it. The domestic experiences and emotions of two brothers or sisters are apt to be so much alike as to become monotonous; whereas a member of another family may initiate them into a fresh and fascinating sphere of emotion and a novel way of looking at things. Moreover, friendship is very capricious in its choice; and as the number of brothers and sisters is limited, the selection is apt to be made in the wider field outside the domestic circle. Again, it is a peculiarity of human nature to appear in great négligé at home, and to regard the nearest relatives as the best lightning-rods for disagreeable moods; and this does not tend to deepen the love of brothers and sisters.
It may be doubted whether this form of affection exists among animals or among primitive men; and even among civilised peoples the bond is but a weak one, except in the most refined families. Though brothers feel bound to protect their sisters, they reserve most of their gallantry for some one else’s sister; and though a sister will feel proud if her brother is one of a victorious crew, her heart will beat twice as fast if it is her lover instead of her brother. The English language has not even a collective word for the love of brothers and sisters; and even the partial terms, “sisterly love” and “brotherly love,” have more of an ecclesiastic than a domestic flavour. The German language has a collective word—and a big one too,—Geschwisterliebe; but it would perhaps be misleading to infer from its existence and size that this species of family love is more developed in Germany than in England. The German’s advantage appears to be philological merely, and not sociological. He is less of a traveller and colonist than the Englishman, who is very often separated from his brothers and sisters for years. Yet this sometimes is rather a gain than a loss; for it destroys that excessive familiarity which, as just noted, makes friendship rarer among members of the same hearth than between individuals of different families.
To the wider circles of blood-relationship—up to “forty-second cousins”—the Germans pay much more regard than the English; and the French perhaps go a step beyond the Germans. For in France each family, with its ramifications, forms a sort of clique into which an outsider can rarely enter. Needless to say that this forms a great impediment to Love’s free choice.
If we now turn to the two remaining species of personal affection—Friendship and Love—the emotional scenery undergoes a great change. In all the cases so far considered, blood-relationship was a source of affection; whereas in friendship it is commonly a disadvantage, and in Romantic Love it is positively abhorred, except in the more remote degrees. Some savage tribes, it is true, allow, or even prescribe, marriages between brother and sister—especially a younger sister; and cases occur of marriages between father and daughter, mother and son. But civilised society—guided by religious precepts, and possibly also by a vague instinctive recognition of the advantages of cross-fertilisation—condemns such unions as hideous crimes; and the mediæval theologians, in their extreme zeal, forbade all marriages within the seventh degree of relationship.
In the case of friendship the objection to blood-relationship is not founded on a social or religious precept; but it exists all the same, as already noted. Perhaps Jean Paul’s maxim that friends may have everything in common except their room accounts for its existence. Brothers and sisters are commonly too much alike in their thoughts and tastes to become friends, in the special sense of the word. Hence it is that there is apt to be a deeper attachment between those brothers and sisters who have frequently been separated by school-terms than among those who are always together. For in friendship, as in love, a short absence is advantageous.
Friendship is partly an outgrowth of the social instinct and partly a result of special associations, habit, community of interests and tastes. As a boy I had an opportunity to make some interesting observations on friendship among animals, showing that it differed in degree only, and not in kind or origin, from that of man. Among the animals we kept at our country-house were a dog, a pet sheep, and some pigs. The dog showed his confidence in the sheep’s amiable forbearance by abandoning his cold kennel on winter nights and seeking warmer quarters by the side of his woolly neighbour. For the pigs his friendly regards were shown in a less utilitarian manner, by driving away, unbidden and untaught, any swinish tramps that appeared, uninvited, to share their meals. But the most peculiar relations existed between the sheep and the pigs. In the absence of any other means of satisfying its gregarious or social instincts, the sheep joined the pigs every morning in their foraging expeditions in the woods, returning with them in the evening. And, what was still more remarkable, when after a time a dozen sheep were added to our stock of animals, the old pet remained faithful to the pigs, and paid no attention whatever to the newcomers. Here the friendly attachment, based on habitual association and the memory of mutual pleasures of grazing, was strong enough to overcome the inherited fellow-feeling for members of its own species.
Between this instance and those ordinary cases of companionship among men which are called friendship, there is hardly any difference. In the more intimate cases of special friendship the craving for companionship is strengthened by a community of thoughts and emotions. Bacon gives us in a nut-shell three of the ingredients of friendship which are not to be found in the primitive form just considered. The first is this, that each friend becomes a sort of secular confessor, to whom the other may confide all his hopes and fears, joys and sorrows; the second is this, that “a friend’s wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with another;” so that “he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour’s discourse than by a day’s meditation;” the third is the “aid and bearing a part in all actions and occasions” to be expected of a friend.
Friendship is not a modern sentiment. Cases of it such as existed among the ancient Greeks and Romans, characterised by an ardour that made Friendship resemble the Love passion, are no longer to be met with, although a somewhat less intense form frequently occurs among young men at college or young ladies in high schools: thus illustrating the law that the individual passes through the same stages of development as the race.
“The enthusiasm of friendship,” says Voltaire in his Philosophic Dictionary, “was greater among the Greeks and Arabians than it is among ourselves. The tales which these peoples have imagined on friendship are delightful; we have nothing to match them. We are somewhat dry in everything. I do not see a single grand trait of friendship in our novels, in our histories, on our stage.”
Why is this so? Let another Frenchman, La Rochefoucauld, answer: “The reason why the majority of women are but little touched by friendship, is because it seems insipid after one has experienced love.”
Precisely. The reason why the ancients, in their histories and dramas, made so much of friendship, while modern poets almost ignore it, is that the latter have a subject a thousand times more fascinating than friendship, a subject unknown to the ancients—the inexhaustible subject of Romantic Love.
That Love is superior to friendship is apparent from the one consideration that it includes all the features of friendship, and adds to them a thousand ecstasies of which friendship never dreams. The lover, no less than the friend, gratifies his social instinct, his desire for companionship, his need of confessing his own and sharing another’s hopes and fears, his craving for stimulating conversation, his sympathetic disposition to give and receive aid in the trials of life. But if modern friendship ever had any moments to compare with the romantic episodes, the tragic agonies and wild delights of love, would it be conceivable that our realistic novelists and poets could neglect it altogether and devote all their attention to Love?
The other personal affections fare no better in comparison with Love. How prosaic even Conjugal Love seems to us as compared with Romantic Love, of which it is the metamorphosis and continuation, is shown by the fact that novelists always end their stories with the marriage of the hero and heroine.
Maternal Love, however, has four traits which occasionally make it resemble Romantic Love in intensity. They are: (1) a disposition toward self-sacrifice; (2) jealousy; (3) an exaggerated adoration; and (4) pride of ownership. But of these the first is the only one that ever quite rises to the giddy heights of rapturous Love. Jealousy is often aroused in mothers if their children display excessive fondness or partiality for their father or a family friend; and they know well in such a case how to make the latter understand that his presence is an impertinence. But this momentary ebullition of feeling is but a storm in a tea-kettle compared to the ferocity of a jealous lover seeking to devour his rival. Nor does a mother’s excessive worship of the self-evident beauty and accomplishments of her offspring ever quite equal the hyperbolic illusion and folly of a lover.
Again, Romantic Love is a monopolist who never shares his treasures of affection with another, whereas a mother, if she has more than one child, is obliged to divide her heart like an apple, so that each may get a slice. Would you infer from this that the mother has a deeper fund of affection than the lover, because she can love several at a time? Impossible. The amount of emotion human nerves can bear is limited. The more you widen it, the shallower does it become. The general love for all mankind is the weakest and shallowest of all, the lover’slover’s concentrated affection for one person the deepest and strongest. See what a terrible strain on his nerves this deep passion is: how he loses flesh, grows pale and feverish, and prone to self-destruction. Could a mother survive if she loved each one of five or ten children with the depth and intensity of a lover? No, we must take back what we said a few pages back. Maternal affection is after all a mere phantom compared with Romantic Love.
And the ace of hearts is yet to be played—in favour of Romantic Love. The mother’s affection is bestowed on what after all is merely a severed portion of her own individuality; whereas the two lovers are individuals utterly unrelated. And herein lies the Miracle of Love: that it can in a few days, ay, a few minutes, ignite between two young persons who have perhaps never before seen each other, a passion more intense than that which in the mother is the growth of months and years.
It follows as a corollary from this that Romantic Love is not only more intense, more concentrated, more immediate and irresistible than parental affection, but also more just, more in accordance with the highest precepts of morality, because more altruistic. For the mother loves only her own flesh and blood, while the lover adores a stranger; like Romeo, he may even adore the daughter of an enemy.
Thousands of fathers and mothers, moreover, love their own ugly, vicious, and stupid children more than the beautiful, well-behaved, and clever children of their neighbours. Who, on the other hand, ever heard of a young man loving his ugly sister more than the beautiful and accomplished daughter of his neighbour?
In consideration of the great importance of the family feelings as a social cement, the parental injustice in question is pardoned and even commended. But from the standpoint of progressive culture, under guidance of the law of Natural Selection, it must be condemned; for it favours demerit in preference to merit, and retards the advent of the time when family and national prejudices will be forgotten and replaced by a loverlike, cosmopolitan admiration of personal excellence wherever and in whomsoever found.
This matter, though it has a semi-humorous aspect, is of the deepest philosophic import. If family affection, so important as the first step in the development of society, were the only form of personal love, close intermarriage between blood-relations would be unduly encouraged. Fortunately the all-powerful instinct of Romantic Love comes in as a corrective of family affection, basing its preferences not on relationship and resemblance, but on differences and complementary qualities, thus securing for the human race the advantages of “cross-fertilisation.” We have already seen that flowers owe their beauty to the cross-fertilisation brought about through the agency of bees and butterflies. In the same way the human race owes its supreme beauty to the cross-fertilisation—the union of complementary qualities—brought about through the agency of Love. Is it perhaps for this reason that Love is so much like a butterfly, and that Cupid has wings?
Instead of being merely a transient malady of youth, as cynics aver, or only an epicurean episode in our emotional life, Love is thus seen to be one of the greatest (if not the greatest) moral, æsthetic, and hygienic forces that control human life. And in face of this fact the few pages, or lines, commonly devoted to this passion in psychologic text-books, seem wofully inadequate. No apology is therefore needed for our attempt to subject Romantic Love to a thorough chemical analysis, and to discover its ingredients. We shall first enumerate and briefly characterise these ingredients; then proceed to examine how many of them are to be found in the love of animals and savages, of the ancient nations and of our mediæval ancestors; and finally, we shall attempt to describe these various component parts of the passion, as fully developed in Modern Love.
First of all it is necessary to get rid of the prevalent illusion that Love is a single emotion. It is, on the contrary, a most complex and ever-varying group of emotions. Love is not a diamond which drops from a celestial body, cut and polished, and ready to be set into the human soul. Rather is it the crown of life, composed of various jewels, some of which, mixed with much coarse ore, may be found in the animal kingdom, among primitive men and ancient civilised nations; but of which no complete specimens are to be found till we come to comparatively modern times. Each lover has his own crown, but no two of them are exactly alike. The component jewels vary in size and brilliancy. Some—as Coyness, Adoration, Gallantry, Jealousy—are occasionally missing or lacking in lustre; and in Ancient Love those are habitually absent which in Modern Love are most prominent and cherished.
Perhaps the composite nature of Love can be still better illustrated by a comparison with colours, and with “overtones” in music, between which and the elements of Love there exists a wonderfully close analogy.
Professor Helmholtz has proved that just as white is not a simple colour, but a combination of all the hues of the rainbow, so any single tone produced by the voice or a musical instrument is not simple, as it seems, but contains, besides the fundamental tone which the ordinary listener alone hears, several partial or “overtones,” which blend so closely with the fundamental tone, that it takes a very delicate ear and close attention to distinguish them. Were it not for these overtones, all instruments would sound alike, and music would lose all its charms of “colour.” For the fundamental tones of instruments and voices are identical, and the only thing that enables a musician to tell at a distance whether a given note proceeds from a piano, voice, or violin, is the presence of these overtones, which vary in their number, relative loudness and pitch (or height), thus giving rise to the differences of quality or timbre in instruments.
In Love the fundamental tone is the sexual relation—the fact that one of the lovers is male, the other female. This fundamental tone does not vary throughout Nature. It is the same among animals and savages as among civilised men; and what distinguishes the passion of one of these groups from that of the other is alone the overtones of love, which vary in number, relative prominence, and refinement (“high-toned”).
What are these overtones?
What first ennobles Love and raises it above mere passion, is the stubborn preference for a particular individual. A savage chief ignorant of Love would not hesitate a moment to exchange his bride for two or three other women equally young and tempting; whereas a man under the influence of Love would not give his beloved for the choice among all the beauties of the Caucasus and Andalusia. “If we pass in review the different degrees of love,” says Schopenhauer, “from the most transient attachment to the most violent passion, we shall find that the difference between them springs from their different degrees of individualisation.”
Closely connected with the first overtone is that of exclusiveness. True Love is a monopolist. As in a sun-glass all the solar rays are concentrated into one burning focus, so are the lover’s emotions on his beloved. Not only does he care for her alone of all women, but he voluntarily offers her a monopoly of his thoughts and feelings. In return for this, however, he expects and exacts of her a like monopoly of her affection and favours; and this leads to the next overtone.
This is the salt and pepper of Love. A little of it is piquant, too much of it spoils the soup. The moral mission of Jealousy is, by means of watchfulness and the inspiring of fear, to ensure fidelity and chastity, and thus help to develop the romantic features of Love.
This is a specially feminine trait of Love, which, by retarding the eager lover’s conquest, augments and idealises his passion. In Modern Love, Coyness varies in two directions—towards prudery on one side, coquetry on the other.
If Coyness is a peculiarly feminine ingredient of Love, Gallantry, on the other hand, is a specially masculine attribute. The eager desire to please, it is true, is also present in a woman’s Love; but it shows itself less as an active impulse to do something for the lover, than as a desire to please him by making herself as attractive as possible.
In the most violent cases of Love this overtone may reveal itself in two ways: either as a mere exaggeration of Gallantry—a desire to please even at the risk of life; or as a suicidal impulse in cases of hopeless passion—when the one object which seemed to make life worth living has been placed beyond reach.
“In order to feel with another’s pain it is enough to be a man; to feel with another’s pleasure it is needful to be an angel.” If this be true, then lovers are angels. For not only do they share one another’s pleasures, but it is impossible for the one to be really happy unless the other enjoys the same emotion. “Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud; read the same book, feel the same emotion that now delights me?”—these are, in Emerson’s words, the questions which the lovers, when separated, ask incessantly.
In his suggestive but incomplete analysis of Love, in his Principles of Psychology, Mr. Herbert Spencer names as two of the emotions which enter into it, the Love of Approbation and Self-Esteem, which he thus defines: “To be preferred above all the world, and that by one admired beyond all others, is to have the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing every previous experience: especially as, to this direct gratification of it, there must be added that reflex gratification of it, which results from the preference being witnessed by unconcerned persons. Further, there is the allied emotion of self-esteem. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment from, and sway over, another, is a practical proof of power, of superiority, which cannot fail agreeably to excite the amour propre.”
This is well expressed, but the names are obviously not well chosen. It is hardly correct to intimate that the “love of approbation” and “self-esteem” constitute two of the group of emotions which we call Love. What the lover feels is not a “love of approbation,” etc., but the emotion of Pride at having conquered and gained possession of so desirable a prize.
The lover sees, thinks, and feels only in superlatives. His eyes are no longer mere “windows of the soul,” but microscopes which magnify all the beloved’s merits on the scale of seven square miles to the inch. And the hyberbolic imagery which constitutes the essence of love-poetry is his everyday food—with a special menu on Sundays.
It is in Love that “confusion makes his masterpiece.” The lover is so incessantly tossed on the ocean of turbulent emotion that he soon ceases to know or care which is up and which down, and all that remains is an all-engrossing sense of love-sickness.
This is the æsthetic overtone of Love; and so prominent is it that it is commonly heard before and above all the others. “Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold,” says Shakspere; and if you tell twenty of your male acquaintances that you have been introduced to a young lady, nineteen of them will ask immediately, “Is she pretty?” No reporter ever writes about a girl murdered by a tramp or burnt in a house, without describing her as a model of beauty, in order to double the reader’s interest and quintuple his pity. Madame de Staël confessed that she would have gladly exchanged her literary genius for beauty. With the Greeks already the words Love and Beauty were inseparably associated; and even the Chinese, who are not embarrassed by an excess of beauty, have a proverb, “With one smile she overthrew a city, with another a kingdom.”
This completes the preliminary analysis of Love. I regret exceedingly that I have been able to discover only eleven “overtones” in Modern Love: but inasmuch as at least six of these—Nos. V. to X.—are only about a thousand years old, there is reason to hope that some fine morning in May a new one will be born to make up the round dozen. If so, it is to be hoped it will assume in men the form of an absolute insistance on feminine health, and an instinctive detestation of the hideous and love-killing fashions with which women still persist in ruining their beauty.
For the sake of comparison I may cite Mr. Spencer’s summary of the elements which he thinks compose Love: “Round the physical feeling forming the nucleus of the whole there are gathered the feelings produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation, of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. All these, each excited in the highest degree, and severally tending to reflect their excitement on each other, form the composite psychical state which we call Love. And as each of these feelings is in itself highly complicated, uniting a wide range of states of consciousness, we may say that this passion fuses into an immense aggregation, nearly all the elementary excitations of which we are capable; and that from this results its irresistible power.”
Let us now see how many of the characters of true Romantic Love are to be found in the courtship of animals and savages.
As comparative psychology is the youngest branch of philosophy, there are still among us thousands of excellent but ignorant folks who cling to the old mythologic notion that animals are animated machines or things “which” are devoid of intellect and feeling, and guided by a metaphysical fetish called “instinct.” To such the undertaking of a search for Love—real Romantic Love—among animals, will seem not only absurd, but a sort of high treason against human conceit. To mitigate any possible indignation on the reader’s part, it may be advisable, therefore, to begin by giving a few illustrations demonstrating the existence of various family affections and friendship in the animal world; after which, the possibility of finding traces of Love proper will appear less remote.
Paternal, filial, brotherly, and sisterly love, comparatively weak and undeveloped in man, are indeed almost absent in the lower animals. Birds of the same brood do not recognise each other after they have left their nest; and a dog will not hesitate to attack his own brother as a stranger after a year’s separation. The part which a male bird takes in feeding and protecting the young is, as Horwicz suggests, an element of his conjugal rather than his paternal feeling; and a young animal that would risk its own life in defence of its mother or father is yet to be heard from.
Friendship, however, does exist between animals, as we have already seen; and not only among animals of the same species, but of different species. “Happy families” of animals commonly hostile to each other have been known outside of the showman’s cage. Büchner cites instances of friendship between a robin and a cat; a fox and duck; dog and deer; cat and mouse; and even such absurdly incongruous cases of attachment as between a crow and a bull; a dog and an elephant; a cat and a rattlesnake. But the deepest feeling of friendship which any animal is capable of feeling is undoubtedly the dog’s love of his master. “Professor Braubach,” says Darwin, “goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as on a god.” “It is said,” he adds in a footnote, “that Bacon long ago, and the poet Burns, held the same notion.”
Maternal and conjugal affection, however, are, as in man, so in animals, the two strongest forms of family attachment. A French author, M. Menault, has written a special treatise on L’Amour Maternel chez les Animaux, and Dr. Büchner exclaims, à propos: “If a human mother, with certain destruction staring in her face, dashes into a burning house to save her imperilled child, and thus finds her own death, this sacrifice is no greater, no more heroic, than that of a stork-mother who, after vain efforts to save her brood, is voluntarily burnt up with them in her nest; or of those elephant-mothers who, as Schweinfurth narrates, in the African hunting expeditions, when the bushes along the shore are ignited in order to drive out the elephants, seek to save their young ones by filling their trunks with water and sprinkling it over them, while they themselves are roasting.”
How low down in the scale of animal life traces of conjugal attachment are to be found is shown by the following case cited by Darwin: “An accurate observer, Mr. Lonsdale, informs me that he placed a pair of landsnails, one of which was weakly, into a small and ill-provided garden. After a short time the strong and healthy individual disappeared, and was traced by its track of slime over a wall into an adjoining well-stocked garden. Mr. Lonsdale concluded that it had deserted its sickly mate, but after an absence of twenty-four hours it returned, and apparently communicated the result of its successful exploration, for both then started along the same track and disappeared over the wall.” Again, the naturalist, Mr. Bate, experimented on the conjugal feelings of Gammarus marinus, or the sandskipper common on English shores, by separating a male from its female, and imprisoning both in the same vessel with many individuals of the same species. “The female, when thus divorced, soon joined the others. After a time the male was put again into the same vessel; and he then, after swimming about for a time, dashed into the crowd, and without any fighting at once took away his wife. This fact shows that in the Amphipoda, an order low in the scale, the males and females recognise each other, and are mutually attached.”
Concerning birds, Darwin remarks: “It has often been said that parrots become so deeply attached to each other that when one dies the other pines for a long time; but Mr. Jenner Weir thinks that with most birds the strength of their affection has been much exaggerated. Nevertheless, when one of a pair in a state of nature has been shot, the survivor has been heard for days afterwards uttering a plaintive call; and Mr. St. John gives various facts proving the attachment of mated birds. Mr. Bennett relates that in China after a drake of the beautiful mandarin Teal had been stolen, the duck remained disconsolate, though sedulously courted by another mandarin drake, who displayed before her all his charms. After an interval of three weeks the stolen drake was recovered, and instantly the pair recognised each other with extreme joy.” “Dr. Buller says (Birds of New Zealand) that a male king lory was killed, and the female ‘fretted and moped, refused her food, and died of a broken heart.’”
But there are exceptions to this rule of conjugal attachment and fidelity, as is shown in the following quotation, which completes the curious analogy between human and bird love connubial: “Mr. Harrison Weir has himself observed, and has heard from several breeders, that a female pigeon will occasionally take a strong fancy for a particular male, and will desert her own mate for him. Some females, according to another experienced observer, Riedel, are of a profligate disposition, and prefer almost any stranger to their own mate. Some amorous males, called by our English fanciers ‘gay birds,’ are so successful in their gallantries that, as Mr. H. Weir informs me, they must be shut up on account of the mischief which they cause.”
So there are Don Juans even among pigeons!
Intermarriages or mixed unions also occur among birds. Says Darwin: “It is certain that distinct species of birds occasionally pair in a state of nature and produce hybrids. Many instances could be given: thus Macgillivray relates how a male blackbird and female thrush ‘fell in love with each other,’ and produced offspring. Several years ago eighteen cases had been recorded of the occurrence in Great Britain of hybrids between the black grouse and pheasant.... A male widgeon, living with females of the same species, has been known to pair with a pintail duck. Lloyd describes the remarkable attachment between a shield-drake and a common duck. Many additional instances could be given; and the Rev. E. S. Dixon remarks that ‘those who have kept many different species of geese together, well know what unaccountable attachments they are frequently forming, and that they are quite as likely to pair and rear young with individuals of a race (species) apparently the most alien to themselves, as with their own stock.’”
In their marriages animals have anticipated man in every possible arrangement—promiscuity, polygamy, monogamy, polyandry. According to Darwin, “Many mammals and some few birds are polygamous, but with other animals belonging to the lower classes I have found no evidence of this habit.” He has not “heard of any species in the Orders of Cheiroptera, Edentata, Insectivora, and Rodents being polygamous, excepting that among the Rodents the common rat, according to some rat-catchers, lives with several females.” Among the terrestrial carnivora the lion seems to be the only polygamist, while the marine carnivora are “eminently polygamous.”
Domestication sometimes has the bad effect of converting wild birds to Mormonism. Thus “the wild duck is strictly monogamous, the domestic duck highly polygamous.”
It is among wild birds in general that the most remarkable cases of conjugal attachment in the animal world are found. And since most birds are monogamous, pairing sometimes even for life, we may hence draw the important conclusion that among animals, as among men, monogamy seems to favour the development of conjugal love. Polygamy, on the other hand, everywhere introduces jealousies, rivalries, discords. Among Oriental nations where polygamy prevails, each wife must have her own apartments, and no one would dare to taste food prepared by another, for fear of poison. On some animals polygamy seems to have a similar effect, for we read that “Mr. Bartlett believes that the Lophophorus, like many other gallinaceous birds, is naturally polygamous, but two females cannot be placed in the same cage with a male, as they fight so much together.”
The foregoing illustrations, many of which show the gross injustice lurking in our expression “animal passion,” will have prepared the reader’s mind for the search after the elements of romantic or pre-nuptial Love in animals.
The development of romantic, as distinguished from conjugal love, depends on the existence of a more or less prolonged period of courtship. Where this is absent Love is absent, as among the ancient nations and those of the moderns who lock up their women until they are ready to be sold to a husband, at sight.
Among animals the young females are not locked up or chaperoned. They are free to meet the young males and fall in love with the one that pleases them most.
As a rule the preliminaries to animal marriages are doubtless brief. If a healthy, vigorous male comes across a mature, healthy female, it is usually a case of mutual veni, vidi, vici.
In other cases, however, courtship is a more prolonged affair, owing partly to the coyness of the female, partly to the rivalries among the male suitors.
Animal courtship is carried on either by single pairs in the romantic shades of the forests, or else at special nuptial mass meetings, resembling those held by some primitive tribes whose unmarried young people assemble on certain days in the year to select partners. Of the common magpie, for instance, Darwin relates that “Some years ago these birds abounded in extraordinary numbers, so that a gamekeeper killed in one morning nineteen males, and another killed by a single shot seven birds roosting together. They then had the habit of assembling very early in the spring at particular spots, where they could be seen in flocks, chattering, sometimes fighting, bustling, and flying about the trees. The whole affair was evidently considered by the birds as one of the highest importance. Shortly after the meeting they all separated, and were then observed by Mr. Fox and others to be paired for the season.”
This was known as the “great magpie marriage.” In Germany and Scandinavia similar assemblages of black game are so common that special names have been given to them. “The bowers of the bower-birds are the resort of both sexes during the breeding season; and here the males meet and contend with each other for the favours of the females, and here the latter assemble and coquet with the males.”
Two more cases may be cited: “With one of the vultures (Cathartes aura) of the United States parties of eight, ten, or more males and females assemble on fallen logs, ‘exhibiting the strongest desire to please mutually,’ and after many caresses each male leads off his partner on the wing. Audubon likewise carefully observed the wild flocks of Canada geese, and gives a graphic description of their love-antics; he says that the birds which had been previously mated ‘renewed their courtship as early as the month of January, while the others would be contending or coquetting for hours every day, until all seemed satisfied with the choice they had made, after which, although they remained together, any person could easily perceive that they were careful to keep in pairs. I have observed also that the older the birds the shorter were the preliminaries of their courtship. The bachelors and old maids, whether in regret or not caring to be disturbed by the bustle, quietly moved aside and lay down at some distance from the rest.’”
Separate courtship may be illustrated by the following cases, the first of which is also interesting as showing that it is not among men alone that the female occasionally becomes the wooer; and the second as showing how early in the scale of animal life a primitive sort of courtship may be found. Concerning a wild duck brought up in captivity Mr. Hewitt says that “After breeding a couple of seasons with her own mallard, it at once shook him off on my placing a male pintail on the water. It was evidently a case of love at first sight, for she swam about the newcomer caressingly, though he appeared evidently alarmed and averse to her overtures of affection. From that hour she forgot her old partner. Winter passed by, and the next spring the pintail seemed to have become a convert to her blandishments, for they nested and produced seven or eight young ones.”
The second case relates to the landsnail, concerning which Agassiz says: “Quiconque a eu l’occasion d’observer les amours des limaçons ne saurait mettre en doute la séduction déployée dans les mouvements et les allures qui préparent et accomplissent le double embrassement de ces hermaphrodites.”
The opportunities for prolonged Courtship being thus given, the question arises, “Do animals, while a-wooing, experience the same feelings as a human lover?” In other words, Are any of the overtones of Romantic Love present in the amorous passion of animals?
Several of them no doubt are habitually absent. Animals have not sufficient imagination to meditate consciously on their probable success or failure in Courtship; and this lack of imaginative power excludes those “overtones” which are chiefly dependent on that faculty; notably Sympathy with the beloved’s feelings, Pride of Conquest and Possession, Hyperbolic Adoration, Voluntary Self-Sacrifice for the other, and the Woful Ecstasy of Mixed Moods. That Gallantry, or the Desire to Please, may be present is shown by the words I have italicised in the quotation just made regarding the courtship of vultures, and is further shown by the display of their ornamental plumage by male birds to excite the attention of the female. Exclusiveness of affection is indicated by the occasional indifference of the wooer to every rival; and when we read of the German blackcock’s love-dances, during which, “the more ardent he grows the more lively he becomes, until at last the bird appears like a frantic creature”; and that “at such times the blackcocks are so absorbed that they become almost blind and deaf, but less so than the capercailzie,” so that “bird after bird may be shot on the spot, or even caught by the hand”—when we read this, we feel tempted to credit these birds even with those highest and most specialised forms of lover’s madness which lead to oblivion—Self-Sacrifice and Ecstatic Adoration.
The four traits of Romantic Love which are doubtless present in the passion of animals are Jealousy, Coyness, Individual Preference, and Admiration of Personal Beauty.
(a) Jealousy.—Volumes might be filled with accounts of the tragedies brought about through animal rivalry and jealousy during the season of love. “The courage and the desperate conflicts of stags have often been described,” says Darwin; “their skeletons have been found in various parts of the world, with the horns inextricably locked together, showing how miserably the victor and vanquished had perished.” “Male sperm-whales are very jealous” at the season of love; “and in their battles ‘they often lock their jaws together, and turn on their sides and twist about’; so that their lower jaws often become distorted.”
When birds gaze at themselves in a looking-glass, as they often do, the same authority inclines to the belief that they do it from jealousy of a supposed rival; and Mr. Jenner Weir, he states, “is convinced that birds pay particular attention to the colours of other birds, sometimes out of jealousy, and sometimes as a sign of kinship;” while “many naturalists believe that the singing of birds is almost exclusively ‘the effect of rivalry and emulation,’ and not for the sake of charming their mates.”
Animal Jealousy is apparently dependent on the immediate presence of the rival and the female; while the Jealousy of a human lover is also a matter of the imagination, and smarts even more intensely during Her absence; for his morbid fancy then loves to picture Her in the arms of his victorious rival. He does not, however, except in some southern countries, emulate the jealous lion by seeking to devour his rival, but is contented if he can ward him off by stratagem, or make him appear in a disadvantageous light in Her eyes.
(b) Coyness.—Just as the Jealousy displayed by two animals fighting for a female is a gross, primitive emotion, so the Coyness of female animals is crude and clumsy compared with the delicious subtlety with which a human maiden veils a Yes under an apparent No. Yet it plays a prominent rôle in the courtship of animals.
A human lover would often consider it a special privilege to be eaten up, skin, bones, and all, by his mistress; but it is doubtful whether spiders are ever madly enough in love to relish the conduct of their females, as described by Darwin: “The male is generally much smaller than the female, sometimes to an extraordinary degree, and he is forced to be extremely cautious in making his advances, as the female often carries her coyness to a dangerous pitch. De Geer saw a male that ‘in the midst of his preparatory caresses was seized by the object of his attentions, enveloped by her in a web, and then devoured’; a sight which, as he adds, filled him with indignation and horror. Female fishes also are apt to give a cannibal tinge to their coyness by eating up the smaller males—actions to which remote human analogies may be found in the coyness of mediæval dames, who sent their lovers to wars and into lions’ dens as conditions of enjoying their favours; or, conversely, in the habits of those Australians who eat their wives after they have ceased to be either ornamental or useful.”
Indubitable evidences of Coyness are found as low down as among insects; as, for example, in the species called Smynthurnus luteus, “wingless, dull-coloured, minute insects, with ugly, almost misshapen heads and bodies,” concerning which Sir John Lubbock remarks: “It is very amusing to see these little creatures coquetting together. The male, which is much smaller than the female, runs round her, and they butt one another standing face to face and moving backward and forward like two playful lambs. Then the female pretends to run away, and the male runs after her with a queer appearance of anger, gets in front and stands facing her again; then she turns coyly round, but he, quicker and more active, scuttles round too, and seems to whip her with his antennæ; then for a bit they stand face to face, play with their antennæ, and seem to be all in all to one another.”
The Coyness of birds is illustrated by the following cases cited by Büchner from Brehm and A. and K. Müller: “A genuine coquette is the female cuckoo, who answers the call of the male with a peculiar resonant, tittering or laughing love-call. ‘The call is seducing, promising in advance, and its effect on the male simply enchanting.’ But how long the lovers pursuing the siren have to wait before she accepts one of them! A wild flight begins, among bushes and tree-tops, while the female encourages the pursuers with repeated calls, and finally gets them into a state of erotic excitement bordering on madness. At the same time the female is no less excited than her frantic suitors. Her favourite, no doubt, is the most eager of the lovers, and her apparent resistance simply the desire to excite him still more!... The female of the icebird (Alcedo ispida) often teases her lover half a day at a time, by repeatedly approaching him, screaming at him, and flying away again. At the same time she never loses sight of him, but in her flight casts glances at him backwards and sidewise, moderates the rapidity of her flight, and returns in a wide curve if the male suddenly ceases from his pursuit.”
Could anything be more naïvely, more humanly, more exquisitely feminine? If a lover, says a French philosopher, fails in his suit, let him desist for a moment, and she will presently call him back.
No inquiry has ever been made by naturalists, so far as I am aware, as to the origin of Coyness among animals. Two probable sources of this feeling may therefore be here suggested. The first is a vague instinctive presentiment (based on inherited cerebral impressions) that with mating the labours of life will begin: the painful laying of eggs; the loss of liberty during incubation—an incalculable loss to these most active of all animals; and the care of the young, which, again, is not a trifling matter, inasmuch as a family of starlings, for example, needs for its daily food more than eight hundred snails, caterpillars, etc.; and birds sometimes perish from exhaustion in the attempt to feed their offspring.
The second source of Coyness is probably another instinctive feeling (based on inherited experience) which induces the female to defer her choice until the combats and manœuvres of the males have shown which one is the most energetic, courageous, and persistent: for he will obviously be best able to support her brood, and protect it as well as herself against enemies. Hence, during the combats of rival males, the female is commonly a passive spectator, and at the end quietly marches or flies off with the victor. All of which, by the way, shows that among animals already masculine love is deeper than feminine. Indirectly, it is true, feminine Coyness is the cause of Love—but only of masculine Love; for if the female animal always accepted the first male who asked her—