In the case of this trait of Love, Priority of discovery obviously
belongs to the author of these lines—
“Love, well thou knowest, no partnership allows,
Cupid averse rejects divided vows.”
Monopoly, the imperious desire for exclusive devotion and possession, is
the mother of Jealousy. Though less grim and melancholy than her son,
she is equally presumptuous and meddlesome, and woe to the man who will
so much as breathe or smile upon what she claims as hers. Monopoly, like
Jealousy, is one of the selfish elements of Love. All lovers join hands
and declaim in unison the words of Jean Paul: “What pleases us is to see
her shrink from everybody else, growing hard and frozen to them on our
account, handing _them_ nothing but ices and cold pudding, but serving
_us_ with the glowing goblet of love.”
Historically, Monopoly is of the utmost significance, since in it is
rooted monogamy, which, as previously explained, probably originated in
exogamous Capture giving a man the right to exclusive possession of one
woman in communities where, as one writer puts it, every man might claim
“a thousand miles of wives.”
The desire for exclusiveness, for undivided worship, sometimes enters
into non-sexual affections; and an anonymous writer has suggested that
the main reason why Byron was so devoted to his dog was because the dog
was “a creature exclusively devoted to himself, and hostile to every one
else.”
Yet all this is child’s play compared with the imperious form Monopoly
assumes in Modern Romantic Love. In the fever-heat of his passion the
lover’s chief desire is to be cast on a desert island, and remain there
all alone with her. “On ne se soucie plus de ce que dit le monde,” says
Pascal; public opinion is scorned; all social feelings annihilated.
Relatives and friends exist no longer—what are they to him? his pet
occupations bore him; and there is only one thought which fascinates—the
picture of a small and cosy house, all his own, a small parlour with one
sofa, barely large enough for two, a book of poems in very fine print,
compelling two heads to touch in reading from it, and a breakfast-table
with only two chairs; all visitors excluded from the unsocial
atmosphere, because “three are a crowd.” ’Tis a “double selfishness,”
doubly as strong as single selfishness.
Surely Emerson—as the German professor did with the camel—evolved his
idea of a lover from his inner consciousness. “All mankind love a
lover,” he exclaims. Obviously he had never seen a lover. The fact is
that all the world thinks a lover a tremendous and ridiculous bore—a man
whose whole mind is monopolised by one unvarying topic—_her_ perfections
and _his_ chances of winning her; and who stubbornly insists on
monopolising _your_ attention, too, with that everlasting exclusive
topic. Like every other lunatic he has one fixed idea; and it’s no
wonder the poets always paint him blind, like Cupid; for on the wide,
wide ocean of humanity, he sees nothing with his two big eyes but one
little solitary transient bubble.
In this matter, it must be admitted, woman’s Love is superior to man’s.
“Oh, Arthur,” says Ella, in the _Fliegende Blätter_, “how happy I would
be alone with you on a quiet island in the distant ocean!” “Have you any
other desire, dearest Ella?” “Oh yes, do get me a season ticket for the
opera.”
_True Love is transient._—Boswell tells us that Johnson “laughed at the
notion that a man can never be really in love but once, and considered
it a mere romantic fancy.” And though this romantic fancy is as current
as ever in society and literature, Johnson was right in his verdict, as
usual.
True Love, indeed, is absolutely exclusive of every other Love _while it
lasts_; but it rarely lasts more than two or three years; and then the
heart, freed from one monopoly, is ready for another, perhaps even more
tyrannical, _while it lasts_.
That Love is transient is most fortunate, for it is, in its truest and
most ardent form, such a consuming fever, that the strongest man would
not be able to endure its mingled ecstasies and anguish more than a few
years. The lover’s fancies are his only food; coarser nourishment he
scorns; he loses his appetite, and becomes “pale and interesting”—to
women, who like to see a powerful man thus wincing under their superior
might, and melting away before their radiant beauty.
Yet its transitoriness detracts not in the least from the magic and the
charm of Love. It is in the life of man what the flowering period is in
the life of a plant. As, for the sake of its fragrant blossoms, a plant
is tenderly nursed and watered weeks and months though it flowers but a
week; so, even if brief Love were the only flower of life, yet would
life be worth living for its sake alone.
How long Love may last depends on individuals and circumstances.
Sainte-Beuve, I believe, has said that it never can outlive five years.
Favouring circumstances are slight obstacles, rivalries and jealousies,
short absences, etc.; while long absences, the distractions of travel,
professional occupations, etc., tend to shorten it. In uninterrupted
absence, without epistolary encouragement, the most ardent Love would
hardly survive a year, unless the lover lived on a desert island, with
no other woman to engross his attention. Return, however, is apt to
bring on a relapse, as with Henry Esmond, who “went away from his
mistress, and was cured a half-dozen times; he came back to her side,
and instantly fell ill again of the fever.”
Thus it is the fate of all unrequited Love to die for want of food; or,
if successful, to leave the stormy ocean of passion and sail into the
more tranquil haven of conjugal affection.
Woman’s Love is less transient than man’s, because there are fewer
ambitions to neutralise it.
_Is First Love best?_—If Love’s Monopoly lasted for life, if passion
were not transient, it would follow that most men would marry, or
endeavour to marry, the schoolgirls who were the first object of their
amorous attentions. But is there one man in a hundred, is there one in
three hundred, who marries his first Love? Cases are known of men of
genius who fell in love at an age varying from six to nine years; and
there are few lads, in America at any rate, and if they have an artistic
temperament, who do not have their cases of “calf-love,” beginning with
their tenth or twelfth year.
A boy’s first Love is a girl of about his own age, towards whom he shyly
makes his way by offering her an apple, a bunch of wild strawberries, or
a large hailstone picked up during a storm before her eyes, to impress
her with his reckless Gallantry and courage. The second and third
loves—for schoolboys are fickle, and schoolgirls more so—are probably
not different in character from the first. At fifteen and sixteen, boys
scorn girls of their own age, and fall in love with young married women,
Troubadour-like. Perhaps the Dulcinea is a Spanish beauty, with large
thrilling black eyes, who, seeing the poor cub’s infatuation, teases and
tortures him to distraction with her unfathomable wealth of fascination.
And let no one imagine that these cases of early passion are anything
short of true Romantic Love. For follow that poor boy enamoured of the
Spanish brunette; see him hiding himself in a lonely forest, gazing with
rapture on her photograph—perhaps only with his mind’s eye—throwing
himself on the ground in an anguish of tears, wishing that either _he_
was dead ... or her husband ... and behaving altogether like a premature
Werther.
Such is calf—beg pardon—first Love. And is this first Love best of all?
Perhaps, in one respect, and in one only: it believes in its own
unchangeableness. Goethe remarks in his autobiography that nothing is so
calculated to make us disgusted with life “as a return of Love.... The
notion of the eternal and infinite, which forms its basis and support,
is destroyed; it appears to us transitory, like everything that recurs.”
_Heine on First Love._—Heinrich Heine, whose poetry is next to
Shakspere’s the most valuable depository of Modern Love, enlarges on
this question in his fragmentary but admirable Analysis of Shakspere’s
Female Characters: "Love is a flickering flame between two darknesses
... [the dots are in the original]. Whence comes it?... From sparks
incredibly small.... How does it end?... In nothingness equally
incredible.... The more raging the flame, the sooner it is burnt out....
Yet that does not prevent it from abandoning itself entirely to its
fiery impulses, as if this flame were to burn eternally....
"Alas, when we are seized a second time in life by the grand passion, we
lack this faith in its immortality, and painful memories tell us that in
the end it will consume itself. Hence the melancholy by which second
differs from first love.... In first love we fancy our passion can only
end with death; and indeed, if the threatening difficulties in our way
cannot be removed in any other manner, we readily make up our mind to
accompany our beloved to the grave.... But in second love the thought
occurs to us that time will change our wildest and most ecstatic
feelings to a tame, apathetic state; that these eyes, these lips, these
contours, which now throw us into transports of rapture, will some day
be regarded with indifference. This thought, alas! is more melancholy
than a presentiment of death.... It is a disconsolate feeling, in the
midst of intoxication, to think of the sober, frigid moments that will
follow, and to know from experience that these ultra-poetic, heroic
passions will have such a lamentably prosaic ending....
“I do not, in the least, presume to find fault with Shakspere, yet
cannot but express my surprise that he makes Romeo enamoured of Rosaline
before he brings him face to face with Juliet. Though absolutely devoted
to his second love, there yet dwells in his soul a certain scepticism,
which finds utterance in ironic expressions, and not rarely reminds one
of Hamlet. Or is second love the stronger in a man for the very reason
that it is paired with lucid self-consciousness? A woman cannot love
twice, her nature is too tender to endure a second time the terrific
emotional earthquake. Look at Juliet! Would she be able a second time to
endure those ecstatic delights and horrors, a second time suppress her
fear and empty the dreadful cup? In my opinion once is enough for this
poor, blessed creature, this pure martyr to a great passion.”
_First Love is not best._—Thus even Heine, while lamenting the
transitoriness of Love, cannot help suggesting that in man, at any rate,
second Love may be stronger than first. On this point it is curious to
note the difference of opinion among thoughtful writers. La Bruyère
declares that “we can love well once only—the first time; the loves
which follow are less involuntary.” Another French author, Letourneau,
on the contrary, thinks that one love-affair only whets the appetite for
more: “on a besoin de vivre fort;” and hence “an expiring passion
ordinarily leaves the ground admirably prepared for the germination of
another passion.” Stendhal held that a young girl of eighteen, “owing to
her inadequate experience of life, is not comprehensive enough in her
desires to be able to love with as much passion as a woman of
twenty-eight;” and a lady-friend having objected to this on the ground
that in her first love a girl must love more ardently because her
feelings are not distracted by doubt and distrust, as they are
subsequently, he replied that this very _méfiance_, in its struggle with
love, will make it come out a thousand times more brilliant and
substantial than the gay and thoughtless first love.” Mr. P. G. Hamerton
seems to cast his vote in the same urn, for he thinks, “it is, indeed,
one of the signs of a healthy nature to retain for many years the
freshness of the heart which makes one liable to fall in love, as a
healthy palate retains the natural early taste for delicious fruits.”
And, finally, George Eliot asks: “How is it that the poets have said so
many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are
their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from
their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted
affections? The boy’s flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the
man should yield a richer, deeper music.”
So doctors evidently disagree. But the facts that Heine is in doubt,
that the greatest authority makes Romeo’s unparalleled passion his
second love, and that even Werther’s famous love, notwithstanding
Goethe’s theory, is not his first, certainly make the scale incline in
favour of a second or later passion.
“Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie,
And young affection gapes to be his heir;
That fair for which love groaned for, and would die,
With tender Juliet matched, is now not fair.”
These last two lines suggest the whole psychology of First Love. Romeo’s
first Love was not his best Love. When his soul had reached manly
maturity, and looked about for a proper object of affection, he did not
at once have the good luck to encounter his Juliet. Rosaline was the
_nearest approach_ to his ideal; so he worked himself into a
semi-fictitious passion and groaned for her, and would die, until
suddenly he saw his real ideal, and found that his first passion was a
fragile soap-bubble in comparison to his true Love for Juliet, which no
rival could have altered one speck.
In his first Love, in a word, he had _fallen in love with the species_,
rather than with an individual. Sexual Selection, or Individual
Preference, had come in more as a matter of chance than of decisive,
final choice. And so it is with most cases of first love. Man falls in
Love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man or woman.
Thus it is that at an early age thousands of impatient youths marry
their Rosalines before they have had time or opportunity to meet their
Juliets. Doubtless there is a Juliet for every man in the world; but it
generally happens that she does not attend the same school, work in the
same manufactory, or live in the same village, or belong to the same
city-clique as he does; so, being less adventurous than Romeo, who went
outside of his clique for a sort of exogamous marriage by Capture, he
weds his first Love, _i.e._ his Rosaline; and this is one of the reasons
why so few cases of true Romantic Love are encountered even to-day,
outside of novels.
Most marriages, in truth, are brought about through accidental
acquaintance or companionship, not through Love. Suppose that a score of
young men who have never loved were cast on a desert island with one
pretty girl. Though she were as unamiable as Juno, cold and coy as
Diana, in less than a month nineteen of the twenty youths would be in
love with her and bitter personal enemies. Here the man would fall in
love with the woman; the fundamental tone of passion would prevail;
whereas if there had been a choice, eighteen of those men perhaps would
never have dreamed of proposing to that girl. Now second Love is much
more apt to be thus influenced by Individual Preference than first; and
the more Love is individualised the deeper it is. Failure to find
lasting satisfaction in the first choice makes a man more slow and
cautious in his second choice.
At the same time the mind expands and grows, and age strengthens not
only the intellect but the emotions as well. _For his size_, a boy may
love as ardently as a man; but the man is bigger.
The history of the race agrees with that of the individual in showing
that Love at first is a general passion, only slightly discriminative,
but becomes more and more so as time goes on.
Even the objection urged against second Love by Goethe and Heine appears
of no special significance when brought face to face with facts. Very
few men, if any, who are in Love a second or third time, sit in a corner
to muse over the transitoriness of passion till they become “disgusted
with life.” On the contrary, they feel convinced that the preceding
infatuation was, after all, not real indomitable Love, such as they now
experience towards Daisy No. 2; which second infatuation they absolutely
_know_ is the genuine article; just as they _know_ that no one ever
before loved so deeply and devotedly. This naïve self-confidence of the
lover in the unprecedented ardour and uniqueness of his passion is one
of the most sublime _and_ ridiculous aspects of Love.
And here it may be said, for the benefit of timid souls who may possibly
fear that harm may result to the cause of Love from exposing its
perishableness, that the only persons who could be injured by the
destruction of this illusion—those who happen to be in Love—will
positively and absolutely refuse to believe that _their_ particular
passion is fugitive. They will simply laugh in the face of any one who
questions the immortality of their Love; and a year or two later,
perhaps, they will laugh again—for a different reason.
Indeed, the notion that true Love never dies and will for ever
monopolise the soul, may actually do harm, and sometimes does so. The
disappointed lover commits suicide not because his torments seem
intolerable for the moment, but because he is convinced they will last
for ever, and thus make life not worth living.
A review of the situation brings out the truth that the only apparent
advantage which First Love has over later passions is Novelty. Yet even
this advantage proves to be illusory; for though the Second Love may not
be a novelty, the Girl is; and does not Moore, the modern Anakreon,
sing—
“Enough for me that she’s a new one”?
One more consideration. There is an adage, not entirely unknown, that
practice makes perfect; and psychology teaches that feelings tend to
become deeper by repetition. Why should Love be an exception? The
channels worn in the brain by the first emotions will be reopened and
widened by the new flood of passion; and thus _remembered emotion_ will
add its force to that of the present moment.
Has the reader ever heard Wagner’s _Nibelung Tetralogy_? If so, he will
remember with what a thrill of delight he recognised in the later dramas
some of the motives and melodies he had heard in the preceding ones. In
the later dramas these melodies are appreciated not only for their own
intrinsic beauty, but because they come laden with the sad and joyous
associations and memories of the preceding scenes which they
illustrated.
Wagner was not only a great musician and dramatist, he was also a most
subtle psychologist. He _doubled_ the power of music by adding to the
enjoyment of the moment the strong current of _remembered emotion_. And
this is precisely what a later passion of manhood adds to the naïve
delights of First Love.
It is remarkable how many analogies there are between Music and Love—the
youngest art and the youngest sentiment; and how the love of the divine
art enables one to understand and feel more deeply the music of the
divine passion.