Thanks to the social instinct, our pains are halved, our pleasures
doubled, if we can share them with others. The proverb that misery loves
company expresses only half the truth; happiness, too, loves company.
The late King of Bavaria used to enjoy an opera most if he was the sole
spectator in the house; but most persons would lose half their pleasure
in this way. Nor is this a purely imaginary feeling; for in a successful
performance there are moments when the intensely-silent and universal
absorption seems to raise a magnetic wave, which crosses the house and
makes all nerves vibrate and thrill in unison. Again, if a man whom
constant attendance at places of amusement has rendered _blasé_, happens
to sit next to a young girl who visits the theatre for the first time,
the emotional play of her features, by reviving the memory of his first
experiences, enables him to share her feelings sympathetically, and thus
to enjoy the performance doubly. And is it not a universal experience
that if we witness sublime or beautiful scenes—if we approach the
Niagara Falls in a small boat from below, or if, standing on the top of
the Breithorn near Zermatt, we see almost the whole of Switzerland and
the Tyrol, parts of France and Italy, down to Lago Maggiore, at the same
moment—almost our first thought is, “Oh, if So-and-so could only see me
now and share this wondrous sight with me!”
Nor is this instinctive craving for Sympathy absent in the mind of the
poet who _prefers_ to be alone with Nature; on the contrary, it is even
deeper in his case. For to him Nature is personal; he
“Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones;”
nor does Nature refuse her sympathy; for does she not harmonise with all
his moods, looking gloomy if he is sad, bright if he is cheerful?
From these general manifestations of emotional partnership Lover’s
Sympathy differs in being omnipresent and more exclusively concentrated
on one person. There is an association of emotions as well as of ideas:
and as every idea of excellence recalls _her_ Perfection, so every
emotion inspired by a beautiful object calls up the image of _the_
Beauty _par excellence_. Thus Love gets the benefit of all these
associated emotions—waggon-loads of kindling wood.
_How Love intensifies Emotions._—But is it literally true that in Love,
as Mr. Spencer puts it, “purely personal pleasures are doubled by being
shared with another?” It is true; though the way in which this is done
is difficult to explain. No psychologist, so far as I am aware, has
cracked the nut. I have given considerable thought to the subject, and
venture to offer the following three suggestions as to the method by
which Love doubles our pleasures:—
(1) The lover’s pleasures are increased by the simple process of
_emotional addition_. That is, supposing him to be reading a poem or
story to his beloved, he will experience at one and the same moment not
only the emotions inspired by the poem or novel he is reading, but those
due to the sense of her presence. As the mind does not stop to analyse
its feelings at such moments, all these various pleasurable emotions
will coalesce into one seemingly homogeneous feeling of happiness; just
as two complementary colours, or all the colours of the rainbow, if
mixed, will produce the simple sensation called white.
(2) The second way in which sympathetic companionship intensifies a
lover’s feelings is through what may be called _emotional resonance_. If
you take a violin-string in your hands, stretch it tightly, and then get
some one to pluck it, a very faint sound only will be heard. But put it
in its proper place, over the resonant surface of the instrument, and it
will produce a full, loud, mellow tone. A human countenance is such an
instrument—a sort of emotional sounding-board. Every man feels more or
less pleased with himself if he gets off at table what he considers a
wise or witty remark. If the sounding-boards of his neighbours vibrate
responsively to his jokes, he feels proud and is doubly pleased; but if
they only grin politely, the tone of his self-satisfaction is
immediately lowered an octave and dies away pianissimo. Now between
lovers such a fiasco is absolutely impossible. _They_ never grin at one
another’s sayings for the sake of politeness merely. His most
platitudinous remarks are sure to start a symphony of smiles on her
countenance, where another man’s wittiest epigrams would be barely
rewarded with a slight curl of the lips; and as for him, she may say
anything she pleases, he never knows what she says but hears only the
music of her voice—as if her words were the text, the rising and falling
of her voice the melody, of an Italian opera. No wonder lovers are so
exclusively interesting to each other, and such unmitigated bores to
other people.
Unfortunately lovers’ sympathy is rarely complete or durable. Sooner or
later some difference of taste or opinion is discovered which has the
same effect as a crack in the sounding-board—the resonance is destroyed.
Yet it can be restored by using glue; and violin-builders will tell you
that a glued instrument is often better than one which has never had a
crack.
(3) Thirdly, Love intensifies human feelings by producing a state of
_emotional hyperæsthesia_, or supersensitiveness, which has the effect
of a microphone in multiplying the loudness of every impression. Music
teachers whose acoustic nerves are rendered excessively irritable by
overwork; students whose eyes, from reading late at night, are in the
same condition, are annoyed by sights and sounds which ordinary mortals
barely notice. But Love with its sleepless night daily fevers, and
prolonged fastings is more potent than any other cause in producing such
a state of extreme sensitiveness to every impression. Lovers’ souls may
therefore be aptly compared to Æolian harps. If you leave the strings of
such an instrument in a state of very loose tension, they resemble the
souls of ordinary mortals not in Love: for it takes a very strong breeze
to elicit any sound from them. But raise them to a higher state of
tension, like the souls of lovers, and the faintest breath of air will
cause them to sound in sympathetic unison all their harmonics—which is
another name for _overtones_.
_Development of Sympathy._—Not only does Love thus owe much of its
unique intenseness to Sympathy, but there are weighty reasons for
believing that Love has already played an important _rôle_, and is
destined to play a still more important one, in modifying the meaning of
Sympathy and in extending its influence to society in general.
When the absence of true Romantic Love among savages was being pointed
out more emphasis should have been placed on the fact that they seem to
be utter strangers to sympathy. Far from sharing another’s delights and
sorrows, a savage takes an intense delight in witnessing a man enduring
the agonies of deliberate torture. Cruelty seems to give him the same
thrill of joy that sympathetic assistance gives to a refined person.
How are we to account for this strange delight in another’s sufferings?
By noting the extreme coarseness and callousness of the primitive man’s
nerves. Just as some savages are known to have such hardened hides and
lungs that they can sleep naked in a snowstorm with impunity, where a
white man would be sure to perish of cold or subsequent pneumonia; so
the savage requires the coarsest of stimulants to make any impression on
his sluggish emotions. The sight of an enemy tied to a tree and being
flayed alive tickles his nerves by suggesting his own comfortable
freedom in comparison, and by showing him an enemy absolutely in his
power; while his imagination is not sufficiently vivid to enable him to
put himself in the other’s place to feel his contortions and suppressed
moans re-echoing in his own soul.
And have we not in our very midst thousands of so-called civilised
beings who require stimulants almost as coarse as the savage to amuse
their dull imaginations?—people who would hesitate to pay silver for a
book, a concert, or an art exhibition, but gladly give gold to witness
the execution of a criminal or an exhibition of animals torturing one
another to death. To suppose that such people can ever fall in
Love—Romantic Love—is more than absurd.
Children represent this savage stage of the evolution of sympathy; as
their imagination, like all their mental powers, is still in embryo.
Nothing delights the average boy so much as a chance to torture a
beetle, a cat, or a dog. And Mr. Galton somewhere refers to the sense of
blood-curdling produced on him and other sensitive persons in the London
Zoological Gardens at the sight of snakes devouring living animals.
“Yet,” he adds, “I have often seen people—nurses, for instance, and
children of all ages—looking unconcernedly and amusedly at the scene.”
To substitute Sympathy for this delight in torture—to arouse the
sluggish imagination from its thousand years’ sleep, and quicken its
sense of suffering in man and animals—is one of the greatest problems of
moral culture, and—so far as man is concerned—forms one of the keynotes
of Christianity. St. Paul bids us both to bear one another’s burdens and
to rejoice with one another. The second part of his injunction, however,
has been comparatively neglected, as is best shown by the circumstance
that we have several terms to express the sharing of sorrow (compassion,
pity, sympathy), whereas for the sharing of joy there is no special noun
in the English language. The Germans have a word for it—_Mitfreude_—yet
it rarely occurs out of philosophical treatises. The word Sympathy,
which literally means “suffering with,” has also been most commonly used
in that sense. But it is now frequently being used in the sense of
sharing joy too, and perhaps, despite its etymology, it will, for lack
of another word, be chiefly used in this sense in future. Even at
present, when persons are spoken of as sympathetic or antipathetic, much
less regard is paid to their willingness to bear our burdens or share
our sorrows than to the chances of their sharing in our pleasures by
having similar tastes and opinions.
For this change in the meaning of Sympathy, Romantic Love must, I
believe, be held chiefly responsible. To some extent, no doubt, friends
and relatives shared one another’s joys before the advent of Love. Yet
even the mother—taking the most favourable case—cannot enter into all
her child’s feelings, while to the child most of her mature emotions are
utterly incomprehensible; so that we miss here that reciprocation which
is the very essence of Sympathy; whereas a lover cannot even conceive a
pleasure unless the other shares it—another point in the psychology of
Modern Love to which Shakspere has given the most poetic expression—
“Except I be by Sylvia in the night,
There is no music in the nightingale.”
Thus we see that there are three stages in the evolution of Sympathy:
the first, in which cruelty neutralises it; the second, in which this
universal enjoyment of cruelty, with its attendant lack of imagination
and altruistic feeling, compelled moralists to lay more stress on the
virtue of compassion than on the refining pleasures of mutual enjoyment;
the third, the epoch of Romantic Love, in which the positive side of the
emotional partnership is specially emphasised, so that a lover cannot
pour forth a song of happiness except in the form of a duo.
And this brings us back again to a question left unanswered in the
section on Jealousy. A rejected lover’s deepest anguish is the thought
that “She will now be happy in another’s arms.” To hear that she has
entered a convent and will never enjoy the pleasures of Love denied him
would be his only consolation. Is this an aberration of Sympathy, or
does it mark its climax—its remorseless logical consistency? The answer
lies in the second suggestion. Were Love an altruistic passion, it would
be otherwise. _He_ would delight in _her_ happiness under all
circumstances. But Love is selfish—a double selfishness; and its sense
of justice demands that each side be considered. “If I cannot be happy
without her, how can she without me?” The lover does not consider that
the passion is one-sided—he cannot fathom that mystery—cannot understand
why his flame, which reduces him to ashes, is not strong enough to set
her on fire, and were she a stone image.
_Pity and Love._—According to Darwin, one of the chief mental
differences between man and woman is woman’s greater tenderness. Of this
feminine tenderness the world has been able to judge on a vast scale
during the last two or three years.
According to a statement in _Nature_, 30,000 ruby and topaz
humming-birds were sold in London some years ago in the course of one
afternoon, “and the number of West Indian and Brazilian birds sold by
one auction-room in London during the four months ending April 1885, was
404,464, besides 356,389 Indian birds, without counting thousands of
Impeyan pheasants, birds of paradise,” etc. A writer in _Forest and
Stream_ mentioned a dealer in South Carolina who handled 30,000
bird-skins per annum. “During four months 70,000 birds were supplied to
New York dealers from a single village on Long Island, and an
enterprising woman from New York contracted with a Paris millinery firm
to deliver during this summer 40,000 or more skins of birds at 40 cents
a piece. From Cape Cod, one of the haunts of terns and gulls, 40,000 of
the former birds were killed in a single season, so that at points where
a few years since these beautiful birds filled the air with their
graceful forms and snowy plumage, only a few pairs now remain.” “It is
estimated that not less than 5,000,000 birds of all sorts were killed
last year for purposes of ornamentation,” wrote Mr. E. P. Powell in the
New York _Independent_. A correspondent of the New York _Evening Post_
saw at an art exhibition a young lady, with “nothing in her face to
denote excessive cruelty,” who wore a hat trimmed with “the heads of
_over twenty little birds_”; and the same paper remarked editorially:
“No one can tell how large a bird can be worn on a woman’s head, by
walking in Fifth Avenue. It is necessary to take a ride in a Second
Avenue car to get the full effect of the prevailing fashion. There one
may see on the head-gear of poorer classes, and especially of coloured
women, every species of the feathered kingdom smaller than a prairie
chicken or a canvas-back duck and every colour of the rainbow.”
“Think of women!” exclaims Diderot; “they are miles beyond us in
sensibility.”
It was _Science_, edited by men, that started the agitation against
woman’s cruel and tasteless fashion—a fashion which not one woman in a
hundred apparently refused to conform to. It was Messrs. J. A. Allen, W.
Dutcher, G. B. Sennett, and other ornithologists, who raised their
voices in behalf of the murdered birds, for whom no woman seemed to have
a thought except Mrs. Celia Thaxter—all honour to her—and a small circle
of ladies in England. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote how he felt
“the shame of the wanton destruction of our singing-birds to feed the
demands of a barbaric vanity;” another man, Charles Dudley Warner, who
pertinently suggested that “a dead bird does not help the appearance of
an ugly woman, and a pretty woman needs no such adornment.”
That the average woman’s imagination is not sufficiently refined and
quick to feel for these winged poems of the air is historically proven
by this fashion, which, characteristically enough, was first introduced
by a member of the Paris _demi-monde_.
It has disappeared for the moment, but is almost absolutely certain to
reappear within five years.
But who, after all, is responsible for this sluggish condition of the
feminine imagination, this lack of sympathy for the fate of harmless
happy birds, who in their domestic affections and love-affairs so
closely resemble man? Is it not the men who, till within a few years,
have refused to give their daughters a rational education? It must be
so, for in that sphere where woman has been able to educate herself, and
where she is queen—in the domestic circle, she _does_ possess that
tender sympathy which she withholds from lower beings.
Within the range of human affections woman manifests more pity, is
stirred to nobler needs of self-sacrifice, than man. Is Love included in
this category? Dryden tells us that “pity melts the heart to love,” and
novelists delight to make their heroines first refuse their suitors and
subsequently accept them from real Love born of pity. For my part, I
doubt this assumed relationship between Pity and Love; and I do not
believe that a girl who has refused a lover ordinarily feels any more
pity for him than a cat does for a mouse, or a person who is all right
on a steamer does for another who is sea-sick—though he be his best
friend. There is an instinctive belief in the human mind that
love-sickness and sea-sickness are never fatal.
It does, indeed, very often happen—perhaps in half the cases; it would
be interesting to have approximate statistics on the subject—that a girl
first refuses the man whose second or third offer she accepts; for, as
an anonymous writer remarks, “women are so made (happily for men) that
gratitude, pity, the exquisite pleasure of pleasing, the sweet surprise
at finding themselves necessary to another’s happiness ... altogether
obscure and confuse the judgment.” But in such cases there are other
factors which probably influence the girl much more than Pity does. She
is, in the first place, largely influenced by this “exquisite pleasure
of pleasing”—another name for Pride. Then there is a certain advantage
to a man in having proposed, even unsuccessfully; for whenever
subsequently the girl reads about Love she will involuntarily think of
him; and thus his image will become associated with all the pleasure she
derives from Love stories—which may prove the first step for her—and a
long one—into the romantic passion. Besides, to propose to a girl is the
greatest compliment a man can pay a girl; and this cannot be without
influence.
Thus it is possible that Pity, allied with Pride, association, and
flattery, may work a change of feeling in a feminine mind; but Pity
alone will rarely lead her into the realms of Cupid. A man certainly
would never dream of marrying from Pity, on seeing that she loves him
deeply, a woman for whom he does not otherwise care. Nor should either
man or woman ever marry from Pity, any more than for money or rank. Love
should ever be the sole guide to matrimony.
_Love at First Sight._—La Bruyère gives his opinion that “the love which
arises suddenly takes longest to cure;” and that “love which grows
slowly and by degrees resembles friendship too much to be an ardent
passion.” Schopenhauer, too, asserts that “great passions, as a rule,
arise at first sight.” He refers to Shakspere’s
“Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?”
and then cites Mateo Aleman’s old Spanish romance, _Guzman de
Alfarache_, in which, three centuries ago, the following observation was
made: “To fall in love one does not require much time or reflection and
choice; all that is needed is that in that first and only sight there
should be a mutual suitability and harmony, or what in common life we
call a sympathy of the blood, and which is due to a special influence of
the stars.”
As it is not permissible, in these degenerate days of positive science,
to explain a thing by a vague reference to poetic astrology, an attempt
must be made to account for the possibility of Love at first sight on
more prosaic grounds.
Physiognomy furnishes a simple solution of the problem. In every man’s
face is painted his personal history, as well as his favourite and
customary sphere of thoughts and feelings. As Sir Charles Bell remarks,
“Expression is to passion what language is to thought.” The gift of
reading correctly this facial language of passion is given to different
persons in different degrees, though all have some share of it: and on
their more or less accurate and subtle interpretation of the “lines and
frowns and wrinkles strange” in another’s features depends the art of
reading character and being sympathetically attracted or repulsed, as
the case may be. A young man who has unconsciously associated certain
peculiarities of facial expression in his sisters or female friends with
habitual cheerfulness, amiability, and brightness will, on recognising
similar features in a new acquaintance, take for granted similar charms
of character: this, which is the work of a second, may result in
sympathy at first sight, which very often is the beginning of Romantic
Love.
Love at First Sight may be inspired by this instinctive perception of
beauty of character, _i.e._ amiability; or by the sight of mere physical
beauty; or, thirdly, by Personal Beauty in the highest sense of the
word, uniting intellectual fascination with bodily charms.
Inasmuch as there are not a few men whose æsthetic taste is so weak that
they would rather marry a useful, companionable girl and imagine her
beautiful, than take a beauty and imagine her useful; and inasmuch as
there are a great many more amiable and vivacious girls in the world
than pretty ones, it happens that in a large number of cases Love is
inspired by the physiognomic interpretation of sympathetic traits of
character just referred to. Hence plain girls need never despair of
finding husbands. There is even a current notion that the deepest
passions are commonly inspired by plain women who are otherwise
attractive. But what inspires the Love in these cases is not so much the
woman’s amiability—and certainly not her plainness—as the fact that the
style of her homeliness is of an opposite kind from the faults of the
lover, and promises to neutralise them in the offspring.
Plain and homely, moreover, are terms often applied to women whose faces
only are so, while their figures are sometimes superb. But a fine figure
is quite as essential a part of Personal Beauty as a fine face, and is,
in the opinion of Schopenhauer, even more potent as a love-inspirer. If
the figure is disregarded in favour of the face, Romantic Love is apt to
become hyper-romantic, as in the days of Dante.
Perhaps the largest number of cases of Love at First Sight, so called,
are inspired by mere _beauté du diable_—a female “bud” whose sole charm
apparent is sparkling health and fragrant, dew-bejewelled freshness.
That this kind of Love at sight, which consists in being dazzled for the
moment by a set of regular features and a pair of bright eyes, is often
of brief duration, does not militate against the statement that the
deepest Love is also born of such a flash of æsthetic admiration. An
incipient passion may be crushed by the discovery of some disagreeable
trait in the person who inspired it; but when, owing to want of early
opportunity to discover unsympathetic traits, Love has been allowed to
make some progress, the subsequent discovery of a flaw is not nearly so
serious a matter, for then Master Cupid simply puts a daub of whitewash
on it and calls it a beauty-spot.
_Intellect and Love._—But, after all, the deepest Love at Sight, and
that which gives promise of greatest permanence, is that inspired by a
handsome woman in whose face Intellect has written its autograph.
Goethe, indeed, has remarked that “intellect cannot warm us, or inspire
us with passion;” but the view he takes here of the relations between
intellect and passion is obviously very crude and superficial. No man,
of course, would ever fall in Love with a woman who showed her
intellectuality—as not a few do—by a parrotlike repetition of
encyclopædic reading or magazine epitomes of knowledge. This gives
evidence of only one form of intellect, the lowest, namely, Memory. It
is the higher forms—imagination, wit, clever reasoning, that constitute
the essence of intellectual culture; and though woman may never quite
equal man in this sphere, such cases as Mme. de Staël, George Sand, and
George Eliot show how much she _can_ accomplish by means of application.
Now this higher kind of intellectual culture is able to influence the
amorous feelings in two ways: first, by refining and vivifying the
features; secondly, by enabling a woman to appreciate her lover’s
ambitions and afford him sympathetic assistance, thereby awakening a
responsive echo in his grateful mind.
Look at Miss Marbleface in yonder corner, surrounded by a group of
admirers. Everybody wonders why she, whose features might inspire a
sculptor, remains unmarried at twenty-six. Her friends, indeed, whisper
that she never even got an offer. Yet all the men to whom she is
introduced admire her immensely—the first evening; but strange to say,
after they have seen her a few times, they are not a bit jealous to
leave her to a new group of admirers; who, in turn, cede her to another.
Her beauty, in truth, is but skin-deep, _literally_; the muscles under
the skin are never vivified by an electric flash of wit from the brain;
there is nothing but marble features and a stereotyped smile; no
animation, no change of expression, no Intellect. Were her intellect as
carefully cultivated as her features are chiselled, she would inspire
_Love_, not mere momentary admiration; and she would have been married
six years ago to a man chosen at will from the whole circle of her
acquaintances.
It is easy to explain how the absurd and fatal notion that intellectual
application mars women’s peculiar beauty and lessens the feminine graces
in general must have arisen. The inference seems to follow logically
from the two undeniable premises that pretty girls very often _are_
insipid, and intellectual women commonly _are_ plain. But this is only
another case of putting the cart before the horse. Pretty girls, on the
one hand, are so rare that they are almost sure to be spoiled by
flattery. They receive so much attention that they have no time for
study; and ambitious mothers take them into society prematurely, where
they get married before their intellectual capacities—which sometimes
are excellent—have had time to unfold. Ugly girls, on the other hand,
being neglected by the men, have to while away their time with books,
music, art, etc., and thus they become bright and entertaining.
Therefore it is not the intellect that makes them ugly, but the ugliness
that makes them intellectual.
The culture that can be compressed into a single lifetime unfortunately
does not suffice to modify the bony and cartilaginous parts of the human
face sufficiently to change homeliness into beauty; but the muscles can
be mobilised, the expression quickened and beautified by an individual’s
efforts at culture; hence some of these reputed plain intellectual
women, in moments when they are excited, become more truly fascinating,
with all their badly-chiselled features, than any number of cold marble
faces. If men only knew it!—but they are afraid of them—the average men
are—because they do not constantly wish to be reminded of their own
mental shortcomings in a tournament of wit, pleasantry, or erudition.
Even Schopenhauer, who was convinced that women are too stupid to
appreciate a man’s intellect, if abnormal, held that women, on the
contrary, gain an advantage in Love by cultivating their minds; adding
that it is owing to the appreciation of this fact that mothers teach
their daughters music, languages, etc.; thus artificially padding out
their minds, as on occasion they do parts of the body.
No doubt, as a rule, women are more influenced in love-affairs by a man
who excels in athletic qualities of manly energy than by one of
intellectual supereminence. But the adoration of women for a Liszt, a
Rubinstein, and other men of genius, whose eminence lies in a department
that has been made accessible to women for centuries, shows what might
be if women were trained in other spheres of human activity and
knowledge.
Regarding the mental padding, however, we might continue in the old
pessimist’s vein by saying that it is a trick which has had its day. Men
do not marry girls quite so blindly as in the days when Romantic Love
was a novelty. They keep their eyes open; and when they find that their
girl’s musical “culture” consists in the mechanical drumming of three
pieces, and that her other “accomplishments” are similar shams, they are
apt to take their throbbing hearts and put them into a refrigerator
until the young lady has become a faded, harmless old maid, still
drumming her three pieces on the piano. The fact that so many mothers
persist in thus “padding” their daughters’ minds, instead of educating
them properly, is largely responsible for the ever-increasing number of
self-conscious and disgusted bachelors in the world.
The example of Aspasia illustrates both the physical advantages beauty
derives from intellectual culture—through the refinement of
expression—and the emotional advantages a woman secures by being able to
sympathise intelligently with her lover’s or husband’s enterprises.
Nothing more irresistibly fascinates a man than genuine questioning
interest shown by a woman in his life-work. Or, as Mr. Hamerton puts it,
“the most exquisite pleasure the masculine mind can ever know, is that
of being looked upon by a feminine intelligence with clear sight and
affection at the same time.” But on this topic Mr. Mill has discoursed
so enthusiastically in his _Subjection of Women_ that anything that
might be added here could be little more than a faint echo of his
persuasive eloquence, tinged though it be with true lovers’
exaggeration.
Goethe illustrated his maxim that “intellect cannot warm us or inspire
us with passion” by marrying a pretty, brainless doll of whom he soon
got heartily tired. Heine followed his example by marrying a Parisian
labouring girl who, like Madame Racine, probably never read her
husband’s writings. And in his _Unterwelt_ he laments his “verfehlte
Liebe, verfehltes Leben”—his mistaken love and wasted life.
Why did the ancient Greeks neglect their women? Why did they remain
strangers to Love and seek refuge in Friendship? Their women were
modest, domestic, good mothers and wives; but they lacked one thing, and
that was Intellect.