Jealousy may be defined as a painful emotion on noticing, or imagining,
that some one dear to us loves another more than us. Unlike affection in
general, and like sympathy, it therefore necessarily refers to a
sentient being and a possible reciprocation of affection. It is a form
of rivalry, of which there are two kinds: rivalry for the possession of
an object or a position; and rivalry for the first place in a person’s
affections. The first is not incompatible with friendship, for two rival
candidates for a political office or a college fellowship are not
necessarily personal enemies. But the second kind, which, when allied
with doubt is called Jealousy, is a deadly enemy of good-will; and there
is probably no cause that has broken so many friendships as the
“green-eyed monster,” among women no less than among men.
Modern psychology agrees with St. Augustine that “he that is
not jealous, is not in love.” There can be no love without
Jealousy—potential at any rate, for in the absence of provocation it may
perhaps never manifest itself. But there can be Jealousy without love,
_i.e_ without sexual love; for that passion is often aroused in
connection with other kinds of affection—parental, filial, etc. Stories
are told of dogs practically committing suicide by disappearing or
pining away if displaced by a younger pet in the affection of a family;
and those who have seen specimens of canine jealousy find nothing
improbable in these stories. Yet as a rule all these general forms of
jealousy—as when a husband is jealous of his wife if the children show
her special favour, or as when a mother is jealous of a visitor loved by
her children—are mere trifles compared with sexual Jealousy, romantic
and conjugal. It is in painting this form of Jealousy that poets have
exhausted the strength of language. “Of all the passions in the mind
thou vilest art,” says Spenser of this “king of torments,” “the injured
lover’s hell.” With this, when once the lover’s mind is affected—
“’Tis then delightful misery no more,
But agony unmixt, incessant gall.”
“But, O, what damnéd minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves.”
In the animal kingdom sexual Jealousy and rivalry play so important a
part that Darwin attributes to their agency the superior size and
strength (in most classes) of the male over the female. Among savages,
as has been pointed out, we see sometimes a curious absence of Jealousy,
both as regards brides and wives; whereas in other cases, the passion
manifests itself with brutal ferocity. Thus among the American Indians
infidelity is sometimes punished by cutting off the nose, sometimes by
the shearing of the hair, which is considered a great disgrace. On the
Fiji Islands, Waitz tells us, the wives of a polygamist “lead a life of
bitter strife and commit ... the most atrocious cruelties against one
another from hate and Jealousy; biting or cutting off the nose is quite
a common occurrence.” Stanley, in his work on the Congo, remarks that
the Langa-Langa women scar their faces and busts in a hideous manner,
probably because compelled to do so by the Jealousy of the men. In
Hebrew literature the case of Jacob’s two wives urging him of their own
accord to become still further polygamous, presents a strange example of
this passion being neutralised by other motives. What prompted the
ancient Greeks, and what prompts Oriental nations to this day, to keep
their women under lock and key, was, and is, of course, simply a
perverse and ignorant feeling of Jealousy. In this feeling also, no
doubt, originated the Chinese custom compelling women to mutilate their
feet to prevent them from going about; as well as the custom indulged in
until recently by Japanese ladies of shaving off their eyebrows and
blackening their teeth after marriage—a custom which shows how much
stronger Jealousy must be than Admiration of Personal Beauty in the
affection of these nations. No doubt, however, all these excesses and
cruelties of Jealousy are counter-balanced by the good it has done in
enforcing the laws of morality.
Civilisation does not weaken sexual Jealousy, but only gives it a less
brutal form of manifesting itself. Conjugal Jealousy still produces the
greatest number of domestic tragedies, of which _Othello_ is the
immortal type. It is already typified in Hera, for, as Zeus says in
Homer, “She is always meddling, whatever I may be about.” But then she
had good cause to meddle in the affairs of this Olympian Don Juan.
_Lovers’ Jealousy._—As for Lovers’ Jealousy proper, there is reason to
believe that it will grow stronger and more common as general culture
advances. For the men who are most ahead of our century emotionally, the
men of genius, are usually very jealous. Heine’s Jealousy went so far
that he even poisoned a poor parrot of whom his Mathilde was
extravagantly fond; and it is probable that Byron’s savage attack on the
Waltz was dictated by a sort of wholesale Jealousy in regard to all
pretty girls. For in Love Byron was omnivorous.
The lover’s and the husband’s Jealousy are alike in their extreme
sensitiveness—
“Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ;”
nor is there probably any difference in the intenseness of their agony.
To the lover Jealousy is not only his greatest torture, but also his
deadliest enemy. With this fever in his blood even the man of the world
who knows his “Ars Amoris” by heart, is apt to ruin his cause by excess
of blind rivalry and clumsy passion: which perhaps explains why so many
great men have been refused by their best loves. To endure and ignore a
rival is, as Ovid already declared, the highest and most difficult
achievement in the Art of Love; as for himself, he frankly admits, he
was unequal to it.
There are several ways in which lovers ruin their chances by awkward
excess of passion. It makes them appear selfish and unamiable; and the
pallor which Jealousy inspires is not that which makes a girl consider a
man “interesting,” and leads her through pity to Love. If the lover is
not yet accepted, his Jealousy arouses her opposition, because he seems
to take it for granted that he has a right to be jealous, and that she
will necessarily accept him. Again, his attitude repels her by
suggesting that he would indulge in impertinent supervision and
tyrannical dictation after marriage. Even if he has successfully
proposed, she does not like to have him make his victory and prospective
ownership so conspicuous by his jealous glances and manœuvres.
Besides, a fascinating girl likes to preserve her apparent freedom as
long as possible, and let others admire her beauty while it lasts.
Most fatal is it for a man to assume a jealous attitude towards a woman
before he has been able to inspire her with interest in him. Her
indifference will thus be inevitably changed into positive dislike. For,
as Madame de Coulanges says, “L’on ne veut de la jalousie que de ceux
dont on pourrait être jalouse”—We do not desire any jealousy except from
those for whom we could ourselves feel jealousy. Stendhal, who quotes
this aphorism, adds a reason why women may be gratified by a display of
Jealousy: “Jealousy may please proud women, as a new way of showing them
their power.” And to a woman in love and in doubt, the man’s Jealousy,
which is so easily detected, is of course a most welcome symptom of
conquest.
For Jealousy is the first sign of Love, as it is also the last. If a man
is in doubt whether he is really in Love with a girl or only admires her
beauty, let him observe her when talking or dancing with another man: if
he then feels “queer”—from a mere uneasiness to a desire to pulverise
the other fellow—he may be assured that his emotion has passed the
borderline which separates disinterested æsthetic admiration from the
desire for exclusive possession which is popularly known as Love.
Conversely, if a man who has been repeatedly refused, or who for some
other reason endeavours to suppress his passion, feels in doubt whether
the cure is complete, he need only imagine his former love in the arms
of another man, or before the altar with him: if that does not make him
turn pale and frown and bite his lips, he is cured. This test, however,
is not so certain as the other, for sometimes Jealousy outlives Love;
and Longfellow believed that every true passion leaves an eternal scar.
Like Coyness, Jealousy is a discord in the harmony of Love. A little of
it is piquant and rouses desire. “Jealousy,” says Hume, “is a painful
passion, yet without some share of it the agreeable affection of love
has difficulty to subsist in all its force and violence.... Jealousy and
absence in love compose the _dolce piccante_ of the Italians, which they
suppose so essential to all pleasure.”
Unfortunately, Jealousy is rarely content to remain “agreeably piquant,”
but is apt to grow into a tornado of passion which devastates body and
soul, and makes it the keenest agony known to mankind. It is often said
that the agony inspired by a refusal is the only thing that excuses
tears in a man. This agony is a mixed emotion, including wounded Pride
and the sense of having lost all that makes life worth living. But its
keenest sting comes from the green-eyed monster, who hisses into the
lover’s ears that now a rival will enjoy her sweetness and beauty. Dante
did not correctly describe the lowest depth of hell: it is this thought
in the lover’s mind that “now another will marry her.” It is _that_
thought which drives lovers to lunatic asylums and suicide.
“Some lines I read the other day,” Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne, "are
continually ringing a peal in my ears—
“To see those eyes I prize above mine own
Dart Favours on another—
And those sweet lips (yielding immortal nectar)
Be gently press’d by any but myself—
Think, think, Francesca, what a cursed thing
It were beyond expression.”
“Get thee to a nunnery,” would be every lover’s advice to the girl who
rejected him. If she obeyed, his agony would be diminished one-half.
But why, if he cannot have her, should she not make some one else happy?
Because Jealousy is the one absolutely selfish trait of Love. The lover
who in other respects is the very model of altruism and Self-Sacrifice
is in point of jealous rivalry for possession an absolute egotist to
whom even _her_ happiness is torture if he cannot share it. Is this an
aberration of Lovers’ Sympathy, or does it mark its climax? The answer
will be found in the chapter on Sympathy.
_Retrospective and Prospective Jealousy._—There are three kinds of
modern Jealousy—Retrospective, Present, and Prospective. The rejected
lover’s Jealousy is of the third kind; it refers not to what is, but to
what will or may be. Another variety of Prospective Jealousy is
illustrated by a story told in a Moscow journal of an old peasant who
married a young girl of whom he was very jealous. On his deathbed he
expressed a desire to give her a last kiss. But hardly had she touched
him, when he seized her under lip and fastened his teeth so tightly in
it that a knife had to be used to pry them open. With his dying breath
he confessed that his object had been to mutilate her, so that no one
else might marry her.
Is it not possible that the custom of burning widows in India was at
first an outcome of the Jealousy of some influential ruler who set the
fashion?
Present Jealousy does not call for any special remarks, but
Retrospective Jealousy has some curious features. It is entirely
non-existent not only among those savage tribes who scorn virgin brides,
but among some semi-civilised peoples in Africa and Asia where the men
prefer to marry women with a dowry, no matter how they may have earned
it.
In modern love Retrospective Jealousy is often very strong, especially
in men who, though they do not hesitate to marry a girl who has been
engaged before, would not care to dwell on the details of the previous
engagement. Women, too, have been known to indulge in this futile form
of Jealousy. Thus Heine relates in one of his letters that at the
special request of his Mathilde, he got her a copy of the French edition
of his _Pictures of Travel_. “But hardly had she read a few pages, when
she turned deadly pale, trembled in all her limbs, and begged me for
heaven’s sake to close the book. She had come upon a love-scene in it,
and jealous as she is, she does not even want me to have adored another
_before_ her _régime_; indeed, I had to promise her that in future I
would not address any language of love even to the imaginary ideal
personages in my books.”
The trouble with Heine is that one never knows exactly when he is
relating facts and when indulging in fun and fiction. As a rule,
certainly women are not much troubled by Jealousy regarding the past. If
the lover promises to be a good boy in future and give them a monopoly
of his adoration, they are rarely disquieted by the question, “Has he
been in love before?” Indeed, there is a current notion that women
admire a man all the more for being a Don Juan or professional
lady-killer. Perhaps, however, this is putting the cart before the
horse: for, instead of admiring him because he is a lady-killer, is it
not possible that he is a lady-killer because they all admire him?
Yet some truth there seems to be in that old notion regarding gay
Lotharios; for the average woman’s ideal man still wears a certain
mediæval military cast: he is conceived as a muscular dare-devil,
reckless, irresistible, a universal conqueror of female hearts as well
as of other fortresses.
_Jealousy and Beauty._—As Love becomes more and more idealised, _i.e._
transferred to the imagination, its overtones combine and produce
various new emotional clang-tints—sometimes agreeable, sometimes harsh
and dissonant. Among the Japanese and Chinese, as just stated, Jealousy
neutralises the Admiration of Personal Beauty to such an extent as to
breed indifference to shaved eyebrows, black teeth, deformed feet, and a
consequent utter absence of grace in gait. But there is a more subtle
way in which Jealousy may cast a cloud on Personal Admiration, even in a
refined Western imagination. Once in a while it happens to a sensitive
man, a worshipper of Beauty, that he beholds a vision of grace and
loveliness—perhaps in a ballroom, perhaps in a theatre or the street.
But this sight instead of delighting him, gives him a painful sting in
the heart. Partly, this paradoxical sadness of a discoverer may be due
to the sudden fancy that this fairylike being perhaps will never again
cross his field of vision. Yet it seems more likely that the tinge of
pain which o’ercasts the rosy feelings of Admiration is due to Jealousy,
especially if she is seen in company with a man. For a moment the
Beauty-worshipper fancies himself in that man’s place; the next moment
the consciousness of isolation flashes on his mind, and the reaction
brings out the painful contrast between what is and what might be. For
man, as Mr. Howells has remarked, is still imperfectly monogamous. He
has occasional visions of a Mahometan heaven peopled with black-eyed
Houris; or envies the knight in Heine’s poem, who lies on the beach and
enjoys the caresses of the mermaids, who come and kiss him because they
know not that he only pretends to be asleep.
That the Beauty-worshipper’s sadness is due to a vague Jealousy seems
the more probable from the fact that the same feeling never tinges his
admiration of a living Apollo of masculine perfection. Whether women
ever have the same emotions remains for them to tell.