“Good-night, good-night, parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.”
“Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vex’d, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears;
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.”
Petrarch’s poems, says Shelley, “are as spells which unseal the inmost
enchanted fountains of the delight which is the grief of love.” In that
part of the _Romance of the Rose_ which was written by Jean de Meung,
and translated by Chaucer, occur many similar phrases depicting Love as
an _emotional paradox_: “Also a sweet hell it is, and a sorrowful
paradise;” “delight right full of heaviness, and drearihood full of
gladness;” “a heavy burden light to bear;” “wise madness,” “despairing
hope,” etc. Mr. Ruskin, who quotes the whole passage in his _Fors
Clavigera_, declares: “I know of no such lovely love-poem as his since
Dante.”
As for Dante, he fully realised the “sweet pain” of Love, as he called
it. As far back as Plato’s _Timæus_ we find that love, as then
understood, was regarded as “a mixture of pleasure and pain.”
“’Tis the pest of love,” sings Keats, “that fairest joys bring most
unrest.” Thackeray speaks of “the delights and tortures, the jealousy
and wakefulness, the longing and raptures, the frantic despair and
elation, attendant upon the passion of love.” But it is superfluous to
cite modern authors, for volumes might be filled with quotations
attesting that Love is neither a simple “lætitia,” as Spinoza defined
it, nor “a species of melancholy,” but a mixture of joy and sadness, of
rapture and woe.
Shakspere’s “_violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy_” might be adopted
as a general motto for a book on the psychology and history of Love.
Love, it is true, is not the only passion characterised by such a
paradoxical mixture of moods. Thus in _Macbeth_ the sentence, “on the
torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy,” does not refer to Love;
and John Fletcher, too, sings in a general way—
“There’s naught in this life sweet
If man were wise to see’t,
But only melancholy,
O sweetest Melancholy!”
A German author, Oswald Zimmermann, has even written a volume of almost
two hundred pages, wherein he endeavours to analyse various emotions and
historic phenomena, in which pleasure and pain are intimately
associated. He has chapters on the Beautiful in Art and in Nature, on
Death, on Mysticism, on the ancient festivals of Dionysus and Aphrodite,
on the mediæval flagellants, on lust and cruelty, on various epochs of
modern literature, etc. His book bears the curious title _Die Wonne des
Leids_, because he holds that there is in these phenomena an “Ecstasy of
Woe,” distinct from pleasure and pain, pure and simple, and superior to
them.
Hartmann, the pessimist philosopher, goes a step farther, and claims
that “there is _no_ pleasure which does not contain an element of grief;
and no pain without a tinge of pleasure.” This is obviously an
exaggeration; for what is the element of anguish that enters into the
feelings of a successful lover when he imprints the first kiss on the
lips of the girl who has just promised to be his wife? or what the
element of pleasure in the feelings of a jealous lover the moment he
hears that his rival has won the prize?
Yet, if we except a pleasurable or painful climax, like these,
Hartmann’s maxim may be accepted as approximating the truth, especially
in the case of Love, which, more than any other passion, constantly
changes its moods, so that, from their close proximity, each one cannot
fail to rub off some of its colour on the others. Who but a lover can
experience in one brief second both the thrill of heavenly delight and
the sting of deadly anguish—“Himmelhoch jauchzend zum Tode betrübt,” as
Schiller puts it? A whole lifetime of emotion is crowded into the one
night preceding a lover’s proposal: hope and fear chasing one another
across his weary brain like a Witches’ Sabbath on the Brocken.
One would imagine that the moment when an admirer calls on his girl, to
be fascinated by her smiles and graceful manners, and to be thrilled by
her melodious voice, must be one of unmixed delight and ecstasy. But if
the slightest doubt as to her feelings lurks in his mind, he is much
more apt to be harassed by a peculiar bitter-sweet feeling. Will he make
a good impression on her this time? he will ask himself; has she perhaps
changed, or found another more acceptable admirer, and is she going to
hint as much by her altered manner? These and a hundred other
apprehensions will torture and depress him; so that he will more than
probably lose that “easy manner and gay address” which are such mighty
weapons in winning a woman’s heart.
Nor is the girl, on her part, free from the anguish of doubt. Though her
admirer seems to be truly devoted to her, she has read in the song that
“all men are not gay deceivers,” which somehow seems to imply logically
that most men _are_ gay deceivers. Perhaps, she will muse, he will only
worship me as long as I leave him in absolute doubt as to my feelings;
and subsequently, having gratified his vanity and secured my photograph,
he will place it in his album to show to all his friends as his latest
conquest, and then flit to another flower.
After all, Schopenhauer was right in saying that when we have no great
sorrows the imagination invents small ones which torment us quite as
much as the others. When one sees the peculiar delight lovers take in
teasing and torturing each other, one feels tempted to believe with
Zimmermann that there _is_ “eine Lust am Schmerze”—that pain in itself
contains a gratification, an “ecstasy of woe,” distinct from positive
pleasure itself.
Yet it is hardly necessary to take refuge in such an emotional paradox
in order to account for the value and luxury of Lovers’ Quarrels and all
the various mixed moods of Love. A sufficient explanation is afforded by
the principles of _Contrast_ and emotional _Persistence_.
Owing to the fact that feeling seems to have a regular pulsation or
rhythm, our hours of anguish are always interrupted by intervals of hope
and happy retrospection—as in Chopin’s funeral march, where the gloomy
dirge is interrupted for a time by a delicious melody of happy
reminiscence, like a heavenly voice of consolation. When the nervous
tension has become too great the string breaks and the bow resumes its
straightness and elasticity. Hence it is that an uncertain lover
actually gloats over the anguish of doubt and jealousy: for he has an
instinctive fore-feeling that when the reaction of hope and confidence
will come, he will enjoy an ecstasy of the imagination of which an
always confident love has no conception.
Uninterrupted enjoyment of lovers’ bliss would soon dull the edge of
pleasure, as an unbroken succession of sweet concords in music would
cloy the æsthetic sense. The introduction of discords raises a longing
for their resolution which, if gratified, restores to the concords their
original charm and freshness, and thus prolongs the pleasures of music.
A tourist after spending a month on the top of a Swiss mountain becomes
comparatively indifferent to the scene of which he knows every detail by
heart; but let his peak be hidden in dense clouds for a few days, and he
cannot fail, on emerging again into sunlight, to greet the view with the
same thrill of delight as on the day of his arrival.
It is their constant and unexpected changes from joy to sadness, from
tears to smiles, that constitute the greatest charm of Heine and Chopin
and make them the lyric poet and musician _par excellence_ for lovers.
Either a gladsome rainbow suddenly appears to illumine their lurid
landscape; or, again, “their plenteous joys, wanton in fulness, seek to
hide themselves in drops of sorrow.”