“For ought that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth”—
what is it but another way of stating that that Love which has met with
no impediments, in which anguish and delight have not warmed one another
by mutual friction, has never broken out into a conflagration
sufficiently brilliant to be recorded “by tale or history” as a
remarkable specimen of “true love.” It is the plot-interest that
fascinates the reader as well as the lover himself; it is the
impediments and emotional conflicts, the _coyness of fate_, that
constitute the principal charm in a tale of love; and it would take a
very clever novelist to attract readers by an account of a courtship of
which the happy result was a foregone conclusion at every stage.
Thus the magic effect of contrasted emotions suggests why pleasure
alternating with woe in Love is more intense than pleasure
uninterrupted. A mountaineer who has been wading through snowfields all
day up to his knees enjoys the comforts of his slippers, a bright fire,
and a cup of tea in the evening, twice as much as a man who has been all
day at home.
On reflection, however, it seems as if Contrast, far from reducing
things to their first principles, itself needed an explanation. _Why_ is
it that by contrasting two emotions we heighten their colour? A partial
explanation was, indeed, suggested in speaking of discords: anguish
begets desire, and the more intense desire has been, the more lively is
its gratification. A more profound solution of the problem, however, is
found in the fact that feelings have their _echoes_, which continue
sometimes long after the original tone has ceased; and if meantime a new
tone is sounded, it blends with the echo and produces a mixed feeling.
The sense of Temperature affords a simple illustration of this “echo.”
Place two basins before you, one filled with tepid, the other with
ice-cold, water. Put your right hand in the ice-water one minute,
leaving the left in your pocket. Then put both hands into the tepid
water. It will seem still tepid to the left, but quite warm to the right
hand.
Some psychologists, however, deny that pleasures and pains ever coalesce
into one feeling—that there is such a thing as a mixed feeling. They
contend that the attention can be fixed on only one feeling at a time,
that the stronger crowds out the weaker, and that it is only their rapid
succession that makes two feelings appear simultaneous, just as a
firebrand swung around rapidly _seems_ to form a fiery circle.
Now it is quite true that the _attention_ can be fixed on only one
feeling at any given moment, and that the stronger crowds out the weaker
so far as the attention is concerned: yet this does not prevent the
prevailing feeling from being affected by the echo of the one which
preceded it. If a man, buried in the labyrinths of a big hotel, is waked
up in the night by cries of fire; though it may prove a false alarm, yet
the effect of the fright will remain with him and cast a gloom over his
whole day’s doings, however pleasant in themselves. And a doubtful
lover’s enjoyment of his sweetheart’s sweetest smiles is often galled by
the remembrance that on the preceding day she smiled just as sweetly on
his odious rival. “For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done,” says
Shakspere.
In his admirable _Dissertation on the Passions_, Hume cleverly makes use
of a musical analogy to explain how different emotions may be mixed: “If
we consider the human mind, we shall observe that, with regard to the
passions, it is not like a wind-instrument of music, which, in running
over all the notes, immediately loses the sound when the breath ceases;
but rather resembles a string-instrument, where, after each stroke, the
vibrations still retain some sound which gradually and insensibly
decays. The imagination is extremely quick and agile, but the passions
in comparison are slow and restive; for which reason, when any object is
presented which affords a variety of views to the one and emotions to
the other, though the fancy may change its views with great celerity,
each stroke will not produce a clear and distinct note of passion, but
the one passion will always be mixt and confounded with the other.”
_Lunatic, Lover, and Poet._—A still better analogy of the manner in
which one feeling may be modified by another is furnished by the optical
phenomenon of after-images. If we gaze very steadily for half a minute
at a green wafer and then at a sheet of white paper, we see on it a
_purple_ image of the wafer; purple being the complementary colour of
green, _i.e._ the colour which, if mixed with green, produces white. The
reason of this phenomenon is that, after looking at the green wafer, the
nervous fibres in the eye which perceive that colour have become so
fatigued that the fainter green waves in the white paper fail to make
any perceptible impression on them; so that purple alone prevails for
the moment. So to the infatuated swain who has been tortured by the
green-eyed monster, Jealousy, the moment of remission, which would else
be one of neutral indifference, assumes the hue of rosy hope and
positive delight. Hours which to sober mortals would seem perfect blanks
are thus to him full of intense feeling, simply because they are
rebounds from a state of extreme tension in the opposite direction. He
might be likened to a schoolboy whose sleigh is carried across the
frozen river by its downward impetus and even ascends the hill on the
other side some distance before it stops. Hence, like the madman and the
man of genius, the amorous swain is always either down in a fit of
melancholy, or in an exalted ecstasy of joy, rapidly alternating and
weirdly intermingled—
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.”
Now poets are proverbially melancholy; and madmen, as Professor
Krafft-Ebing tells us, are also more commonly tortured by depressing
delusions than elated by pleasant ones. Hence, if the poet’s maxim, just
quoted, be true, we should expect the lover’s prevailing cast of mind to
be melancholy too; and so it is. Though he enjoys moments of delirious
rapture, to which sober mortals are utter strangers, yet his misgivings
are incessant, even when he is almost certain of success: and it takes
but little to poison his cup; for, as Professor Volkmann remarks, “one
drop of anguish suffices to gall a whole ocean of joy.” So the lover
becomes “pale and interesting,” loses weight and appetite, and sighs
away his soul. Were this emotional fermenting process allowed to last
too long, his health would suffer seriously: but fortunately it
ordinarily ceases in a year or so, yielding a wine which, though less
sparkling and ebullient, is more mellow and less intoxicating. Romantic
Love, in other words, is metamorphosed into conjugal affection which,
among other attributes of Love, strips off its characteristic trait of
melancholy, whereby it is easily distinguished from all other forms of
affection. Before, however, we can pass on to consider in detail the
differences between Romantic and Conjugal Love, the two remaining
ingredients of Romantic Love—Individual Preference and Personal
Beauty—must be briefly considered.