“Tenderness,” says Professor Bain, “is a pleasurable emotion, variously
stimulated, whose effort is to draw human beings into mutual embrace.”
Darwin finds the peculiarity of love in the same desire for contact;
and, as usual, he seeks for the origin of this desire, and endeavours to
trace it to analogous peculiarities of the animals most closely related
to us.
“With the lower animals,” he says, “we see the same principle of
pleasure derived from contact in association with love. Dogs and cats
manifestly take pleasure in rubbing against their masters and
mistresses, and in being rubbed or patted by them. Many kinds of
monkeys, as I am assured by the keepers in the Zoological Gardens,
delight in fondling and being fondled by each other, and by persons to
whom they are attached. Mr. Bartlett has described to me the behaviour
of two Chimpanzees, rather older animals than those generally imported
into this country, when they were first brought together. They sat
opposite, _touching each other with their much-protruded lips_, and the
one put his hand on the shoulder of the other. Then they mutually folded
each other in their arms. Afterwards they stood up, each with one arm on
the shoulder of the other, lifted up their heads, opened their mouths
and yelled with delight.”
Concerning human beings Darwin remarks: “A strong desire to touch the
beloved person is commonly felt; and love is expressed by this means
more plainly than by any other. Hence we long to clasp in our arms those
we tenderly love. We probably owe this desire to _inherited habit_, in
association with the nursing and tending of our children, and with the
mutual caresses of lovers.”
When love first dawns on the mind, the faintest superficial contact
flashes along the nerves as a thrill of delicious emotion. To walk along
the beach in a stiff breeze, and have her veil accidentally flutter in
his face, is a romantic incident on which a youthful lover’s memory
feasts for a month. If allowed to carry her shawl on his arm, he would
not feel the cold of a Siberian winter. And later, what a variety of
tell-tale caresses are there by which mutual Love may be revealed! It is
not the voice alone that can say “I love you”; nor the speaking eyes.
Confessions of Love, proposals and acceptance—complete dramas of
Love—have been enacted by the language of two pairs of feet that have
accidentally touched under the table. A slight pressure of the hand in
the ballroom has told thousands of lovers, before a word was spoken,
that now they may soon put their arms round that lovely waist without
the excuse of a waltz or polka.
One form of hand-caress, dear alike to mothers and lovers, is thus
described by Professor Mantegazza: “In a caress we give and receive at
the same time. The hand which distributes love, as by a magnetic
effusion, receives it in return from the skin of the beloved person.
Hence it is that one of the most common and most thrilling of the
expressions of love consists in passing the hand through the hair. The
hand finds, in this labyrinth of supple, living threads, the means of
multiplying infinitely the points of amorous contact. It appears as if
each hair were an electric wire, putting us into direct connection with
the senses, with the heart, and even with the thoughts, of those we
love. It is not without reason that woman’s hair has long been given as
a token of love.”
What a clumsy thing is language, what an awkward thing a formal proposal
stuttered out by a lover more embarrassed than if he were an amateur
actor appearing on the stage for the first time, as Romeo before an
international audience of actors and critics! How much less natural,
less poetic, it is to hear the confession of Love than to feel it—
“When panting sighs the bosom fill,
And hands, by chance united, thrill
At once with one delicious pain.”—CLOUGH.
What poet, and were he a genius in condensation, could compress into a
line, a page, a volume, such an ocean of emotion as is contained in a
momentary caress of the hand? Not even the moment when the lovers are
“imparadised in one another’s arms” surpasses this in ecstasy.
Yet there is a more delicious rapture still in the drama of Courtship.
“Love’s sweetest language is,” as Herrick says, “a kiss.” All other
caresses are valueless without a kiss; for is not a kiss the very
autograph of Love?
But labial contact is a subject of such supreme importance in the
philosophy and history of Love that it cannot be disposed of briefly as
one form of caressing, but demands a chapter by itself.