Two thousand years ago Ovid advised the readers of his _Remedia Amoris_
who wished to cure themselves of an unwelcome attachment to flee the
capital, to travel, hunt, or till the soil till all danger of a relapse
should he averted. “Out of sight, out of mind,” wrote Thomas à Kempis;
and this theme has been varied by a hundred writers in prose and verse.
“Love is a local anguish,” exclaims Coleridge; “I am fifty miles away
and am not half so miserable.” Carew puts it thus—
“Then fly betimes, for only they
Conquer love, that run away.”
Even the unspeakable Turk has a proverb advising a lover to fly to the
mountains. The Himalayas are probably meant, for no other chain would be
high enough to allay the anguish of a polygamist rejected by a whole
harem.
On the other hand, “I find that absence still increases love,” wrote
Charles Hopkins in the seventeenth century; and Bayly gave this paradox
the familiar form of “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—to which a
modern realistic wag has added the coda “of the other man.” “La
Rochefoucauld has well remarked,” says Hume, “that absence destroys weak
passions, but increases strong ones; as the wind extinguishes a candle
but blows up a fire.”
This simile is not very appropriate, nor is the statement
unquestionable. It is more correct to say that short absence increases
Love, while long absence cures it.
There are two ways in which a short absence favours Love:
Like the thirst of a man who would wean himself of strong liquor, the
lovers ardour is at first increased when he is placed where he can no
longer drink in the intoxicating sight of her beauty. Time is needed to
annihilate the maddening memory of that pleasure.
Secondly, short absence favours the idealising process in the lover’s
mind. Removed from the corrective influence of her actual presence, his
imagination may abandon itself to the delightful task of painting a
gloriously unreal counterfeit of her charms—which is oil in the flames.
This idealising process is facilitated by the strange difficulty which
most people—and lovers in particular—experience in recalling the
features of those specially dear to them.
Given sufficient time to fix the idealised image of the beloved in the
memory, and a cure may be effected through the shock subsequently felt
on comparing this image with the greatly inferior reality.