Within the range of impersonal emotions and affections, as we have seen,
women are vastly inferior to men; but in personal affections—partly
owing to their almost exclusive devotion to them—women are commonly
superior to men. Not always, however; for, as we shall see later on, the
prevalent dogma that woman’s Romantic Love is deeper and more ardent
than man’s is an absurd myth. But in conjugal affection—which differs
widely from Romantic Love—woman is generally more sincere, devoted, and
self-sacrificing than man. In friendship, too, women are more sincere
and ardent than men; for friendship is an ancient, rather than a modern
sentiment; and as women are more conservative than men, they have
preserved this sentiment (at least in early life), while among men it
has become nearly extinct:—
“All friendship is feigning, all loving mere folly.”—SHAKSPERE.
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.