“Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are.”
“The air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy,” wrote Keats to
his sweetheart; and Burns, in the sketch of his first love, thus
describes the emotional hyperæsthesia produced by Love: “I didn’t know
myself why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an
Æolian harp, and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious rattan
when I looked and fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel
nettle-stings and thistles.”
This is the true ecstasy of Love—the most delicious and thrilling
emotion of which the human soul is capable. Nor is it necessary to be a
poet to feel it. While in Love even a coarser-grained man “feels the
blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily in his veins” (Emerson).
But if Jealousy rouses him, it is flower-blood no longer that courses in
his veins, nor human blood, but vengeful Spanish wine. It is then that
Love’s intoxication reaches its climax: delirious ecstasy followed by
angry waves of dire despair, rocking and tossing the unhappy victim till
he is pale and sick as death.
Like other drunkards, the Love-intoxicated youth sees and feels
everything double. His darling seems doubly beautiful, and all his joys
and sorrows are doubled in intensity. And, like other drunkards, he
imagines that all the world is drunk and reeling; whereas the rapid
oscillation of surrounding objects between the rosy hue of hope and the
gray cloud of doubt, is all in his own mind.
How this erotic intoxication multiplies the lover’s courage and
confidence in his success! The most insignificant smile raises him over
all obstacles to the summit of his hopes, as easily as a cloud-shadow
climbs a mountain side o’er treetops, rocks, and snowy walls.
How, on her part, it magnifies his heroism, his genius, converting the
most insipid commonplace into an immortal epigram, full of wit and
wisdom!
That Lovers’ Hyperbole is nothing but Love-intoxication shows itself
also in the ludicrous tasks they undertake when under the spell. Who but
a lover would ever attempt to gild refined gold, to paint the lily
white, the sky blue? Who mix up physiology, astronomy, gastronomy, in
such an absurd way as in “sweet-heart,” “honey-moon,” etc.?
And when, during the “honey-moon,” the lover recovers from his
intoxication, how surprised he looks, how he rubs his eyes and wonders
where the deuce he has been! He remembers Ovid’s caution that after wine
every woman seems beautiful; he remembers something about seeing
“Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.” And the girl by his side—he thought
she _was_ Helen; but now, “really—this is most extraordinary: just look
at that large mouth, and that snub-nose—well, I knew she had it, and
thought I loved her all the more for this imperfection, which proved her
human and not a goddess: yet, by Jove, I almost wish ... in fact, I
_quite_ wish, her mouth was smaller and her nose larger.”
Poor deluded youth! He was taken in by Cupid’s favourite trick of
dazzling a lover with a pair of brown or blue orbs, till he can see
nothing else. For this girl, beyond question, has a pair of eyes which
Venus might envy—mid-ocean-blue, with a dewdrop sparkle, and a
mischievous expression that is more commonly found in brown eyes; and
these deep-blue eyes are framed in with black brows and long black
lashes, without which no eyes are ever perfect, whatever their colour.
It was these expressive orbs, this visible music of the spheres, that
ravished all his senses and made him blind to every other feature of her
countenance.
Thus we see how Love comes to be blind. One feature—most commonly the
eyes—dazes the victim so completely that all the other features are seen
but vaguely as in a dream; while the imagination is ever busy in
chiselling them into harmony with the fine eyes. And it is only after
marriage, or assured possession, that the other features emerge from
their blurred vagueness, and are found less perfect than the fond
imagination had painted them.
In this eagerness of Love to see only superlative excellence, and its
disposition to imagine a thing perfect if it is not, we get a deep
insight into the mission and _raison d’être_ of this passion. If women
and men would only try to live up to Love’s exalted ideal of personal
perfection—and most persons _could_ be 50 per cent more beautiful, if
they attended to the laws of hygiene and cultivated their minds—what a
lovely planet this would be!
Why have so many of the greatest men of genius been unhappy in their
Love and Marriage? Because they had in their minds the loveliest visions
of possible feminine perfection, but did not find them realised in life.
For a while their pre-eminently strong imaginations helped them to keep
up the illusion; but the truth would out at last; and in the pangs of
disappointment they threw themselves upon the poetic device of
Hyperbole, and tried to console themselves by painting the images of
perfection which did not exist in life.
Love, it is true, is not the only theme which they have embellished with
the ornaments of Hyperbole. A wonderful example of non-erotic Hyperbole
occurs in Macbeth—
“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.”
But as a rule the finest specimens of poetic imagery are to be found in
erotic Hyperbole; and it seems most strange that Goldsmith, who had so
deep an insight into Love, does not mention this variety at all in his
essay on Hyperbole.
Love, says Emerson, is “the deification of persons”; and though the
poet, like every other lover, “beholding his maiden, half-knows that she
is not verily that which he worships,” this does not prevent him from
idealising her portrait, and sketching her as he would like to have her.
A few additional specimens of such poetic Hyperbole may fitly close this
chapter—