“Fountain-heads and pathless groves
Places which pale passion loves?”—FLETCHER.
But what madman in his wildest flights ever conceived anything quite so
sublimely solitary as the flight which Burns projected for himself and
Clarinda (in lovers’ arithmetic twice one are one) in the following
epistle: "Imagine ... that we were set free from the laws of gravitation
which bind us to this globe, and could at pleasure fly, without
inconvenience, through all the yet unconjectured bounds of creation,
what a life of bliss would we lead, in our mutual pursuit of virtue and
knowledge, and our mutual enjoyment of love and friendship!
“I see you laughing at my fairy fancies, and calling me a voluptuous
Mahometan; but I am certain I would be a happy creature beyond anything
we call bliss here below; nay, it would be a paradise congenial to you
too. Don’t you see us, hand in hand, or rather, my arm about your lovely
waist, making our remarks on Sirius, the nearest of the fixed stars; or,
surveying a comet flaming innoxious by us, as we just now would mark the
passing pomp of a travelling monarch; or, in a shady bower of Mercury or
Venus, dedicating the hour to love, in mutual converse, relying honour,
and revelling endearment, while the most exalted strains of poesy and
harmony would be the ready, spontaneous language of our souls.”
Thus we have in the madman’s Illusions an analogy with Love’s
Hyperbolising tendency; in the Delirium of Persecution a suggestion of
Jealousy; in the Desire for Solitude a reminder of Love’s Exclusiveness,
and desire to be cast on a desert island.
Gallantry, again, has in the past frequently assumed an extravagant form
bordering on madness. Thus, with reference to a Greek girl to whom Byron
made love in Athens, Moore says, “It was, if I recollect right, in
making love to one of these girls that he had recourse to an act of
courtship often practised in that country—namely, giving himself a wound
across the breast with his dagger. The young Athenian, by his own
account, looked on very coolly during the operation, considering it a
fit tribute to her beauty, but in no wise moved to gratitude.”
In Spain, toward the beginning of the last century, Gallantry appears to
have assumed a form of mad extravagance. As Mme. d’Aunoy relates in her
_Mémoires sur l’Espagne_, no man who accompanied a lady was so rude as
to give her his hand or to take her arm under his. He only wrapped his
cloak around his arm, and then allowed her to rest her arm on the elbow.
Nor was even a lover permitted to kiss his love or caress her otherwise
than by tenderly grasping her arm with his hands.
Of mediæval lovers’ madness cases have been cited elsewhere, showing to
what crazy excess the Knight-errants and Troubadours sometimes carried
their gallant devotion. One more amusing illustration may here be added:
the oft-cited cases of Peire Vidal, a Troubadour of the twelfth century,
who, to please his beloved, whose name was Loba (wolf), had himself
sewed up in a wolf’s hide and went about the mountains howling until his
manœuvres were brought to a sad end by some shepherd dogs, who,
having no sense of humour, gave him such a shaking that he was only too
glad to resume his normal attitude.
There is, in fact, hardly a feature of Love which, in its exalted
manifestations, does not occasionally suggest a madhouse. The
extravagant Pride shown by a commonplace man in his more commonplace
bride, is quite as ludicrous as a lunatic’s delusion that he is a
millionaire or emperor of the five continents. The sham capture of a
bride still practised among many nations when all parties are willing,
illustrates a form of Coyness which would appear as pure lunacy to one
unfamiliar with the origin of that custom.