In the essay "On the Power of Love," to which I have referred in
another place, Lichtenberg bluntly declared he did not believe that
sentimental love could make a sensible adult person so extravagantly
happy or unhappy as the poets would have us think, whereas he was
ready to concede that the sexual appetite may become irresistible.
Schopenhauer, on the contrary, held that sentimental love is the more
powerful of the two passions. However this may be, either is strong
enough to account for the prevalence of amorous hyperbole in
literature to such an extent that, as Bacon remarked, "speaking in a
perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love." "The major part
of lovers," writes Robert Burton,
"are carried headlong like so many brute beasts, reason
counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace,
danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow;
yet this furious lust precipitates, counterpoiseth, weighs
down on the other."
Professor Bain, discussing all the human emotions in a volume of 600
pages, declares, regarding love (138), that
"the excitement at its highest pitch, in the torrent of
youthful sensations and ungratified desires is probably
the most furious and elated experience of human
nature."
In whatever sense we take this, as referring to sensual or sentimental
love, or a combination of the two, it explains why erotic writers of
all times make such lavish use of superlatives and exaggerations.
Their strong feelings can only be expressed in strong language.
"Beauty inflicts a wound sharper than any arrow," quoth Achilles
Tatius. Meleager declares: "Even the winged Eros in the air became
your prisoner, sweet Timarion, because your eye drew him down;" and in
another place: "the cup is filled with joy because it is allowed to
touch the beautiful lips of Zenophila. Would that she drank my soul in
one draught, pressing firmly her lips on mine" (a passage which
Tennyson imitated in "he once drew with one long kiss my whole soul
through my lips"). "Not stone only, but steel would be melted by
Eros," cried Antipater of Sidon. Burton tells of a cold bath that
suddenly smoked and was very hot when Coelia came into it; and an
anonymous modern poet cries:
Look yonder, where
She washes in the lake!
See while she swims,
The water from her purer limbs
New clearness take!
The Persian poet, Saadi, tells the story of a young enamoured Dervish
who knew the whole Koran by heart, but forgot his very alphabet in
presence of the princess. She tried to encourage him, but he only
found tongue to say, "It is strange that with thee present I should
have speech left me;" and having said that he uttered a loud groan and
surrendered his soul up to God.
To lovers nothing seems impossible. They "vow to weep seas, live in
fire, eat rocks, tame tigers," as Troilus knew. Mephistopheles
exclaims:
So ein verliebter Thor verpufft
Euch Sonne, Mond und alle Sterne
Zum Zeitvertreib dem Liebchen in die Luft.
(Your foolish lover squanders sun and moon and all the stars to
entertain his darling for an hour.) Romantic hyperbole is the realism
of love. The lover is blind as to the beloved's faults, and
color-blind as to her merits, seeing them differently from normal
persons and all in a rosy hue. She really seems to him superior to
every one in the world, and he would be ready any moment to join the
ranks of the mediaeval knights who translated amorous hyperbole into
action, challenging every knight to battle unless he acknowledged the
superior beauty of his lady. A great romancer is the lover; he
retouches the negative of his beloved, in his imagination, removes
freckles, moulds the nose, rounds the cheeks, refines the lips, and
adds lustre to the eyes until his ideal is realized and he sees
Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
... For to be wise and love
Exceeds man's might; that dwells with gods above.