Thus Shakspere knew that love is, as Emerson defined it, the
"deification of persons," and that women adore as well as men. Helena,
in _All's Well that Ends Well_, says of her love for Bertram:
Thus, Indian-like
Religious in mine error, I adore
The sun that looks upon his worshipper,
But knows of him no more.
"Shakspere shared with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau,
Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of
humanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within the
last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of
instinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love. The modern
lover is like a sculptor who takes an ordinary block of marble and
carves a goddess out of it. His belief that his idol is a living
goddess is, of course, an illusion, but the _feeling_ is real, however
fantastic and romantic it may seem. He is so thoroughly convinced of
the incomparable superiority of his chosen divinity that "it is
marvellous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is
in a panic when he thinks of it," as Charles Dudley Warner puts it.
Ouida speaks of "the graceful hypocrisies of courtship," and no doubt
there are many such; but in romantic love there is no hypocrisy; its
devotion and adoration are absolutely sincere.
The romantic lover adores not only the girl herself but everything
associated with her. This phase of love is poetically delineated in
Goethe's _Werther_:
"To-day," Werther writes to his friend, "I could not go
to see Lotta, being unavoidably detained by company.
What was there to do? I sent my valet to her, merely in
order to have someone about me who had been near her.
With what impatience I expected him, with what joy I
saw him return! I should have liked to seize him by the
hand and kiss him, had I not been ashamed.
"There is a legend of a Bononian stone which being
placed in the sun absorbs his rays and emits them at
night. In such a light I saw that valet. The knowledge
that her eyes had rested on his face, his cheeks, the
buttons and the collar of his coat, made all these
things valuable, sacred, in my eyes. At that moment I
would not have exchanged that fellow for a thousand
dollars, so happy was I in his presence. God forbid
that you should laugh at this. William, are these
things phantasms if they make us happy?"
Fielding wrote a poem on a half-penny which a young lady had given to
a beggar, and which the poet redeemed for a half-crown. Sir Richard
Steele wrote to Miss Scurlock:
"You must give me either a fan, a mask, or a glove you have
worn, or I cannot live; otherwise you must expect that I'll
kiss your hand, or, when I next sit by you, steal your
handkerchief."
Modern literature is full of such evidences of veneration for the fair
sex. The lover worships the very ground she trod on, and is enraptured
at the thought of breathing the same atmosphere that surrounded her.
To express his adoration he thinks and talks, as we have seen, in
perpetual hyperbole:
It's a year almost that I have not seen her;
Oh! last summer green things were greener,
Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer.
--_C.G. Rossetti_.