In common with ambition and other strong passions, love has the power
of changing a man's character for the time being. One of the speakers
in Plutarch's dialogue on love ([Greek: Erotikos], 17) declares that
every lover becomes generous and magnanimous, though he may have been
niggardly before; but, characteristically enough, it is the love for
boys, not for women, that is referred to. A modern lover is affected
that way by love for women. He feels proud of being distinguished by
the preference of such a girl, and on the principle of _noblesse
oblige_, he tries to become worthy of her. This love makes the
cowardly brave, the weak strong, the dull witty, the prosy poetic, the
slouches tidy. Burton glows eloquent on this subject (Ill., 2),
confounding, as usual, love with lust. Ovid notes that when Polyphemus
courted Galatea the desire to please made him arrange his hair and
beard, using the water as a mirror; wherein the Roman poet shows a
keener sense of the effect of infatuation than his Greek predecessor,
Theocritus, who (Id., XIV.) describes the enamoured Aischines as going
about with beard neglected and hair dishevelled; or than Callimachus,
concerning whose love-story of Acontius and Cydippe Mahaffy says (_G.
L. and T.,_ 239):
"The pangs of the lover are described just as they are
described in the case of his [Shakspere's]
Orlando--dishevelled hair, blackness under the eyes,
disordered dress, a desire for solitude, and the habit
of writing the girl's name on every tree--symptoms
which are perhaps now regarded as natural, and which
many romantic personages have no doubt imitated because
they found them in literature, and thought them the
spontaneous expression of the grief of love, while they
were really the artificial invention of Callimachus and
his school, who thus fathered them upon human nature."
Professor Mahaffy overlooks, however, an important distinction which
Shakspere makes. The witty Rosalind declares to Orlando, in her
bantering way, that
"there is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our
young plants with carving 'Rosalind' on their barks;
hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all,
forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind ... _he seems
to have the quotidian of love upon him_."
And when Orlando claims that he is that man, she replies, "There is
none of my uncle's marks upon you; he taught me to know a man in
love."