Longfellow says it is folly to pretend that one ever wholly recovers
from a disappointed passion; and Mr. Hamerton believes that “a wrinkled
old maid may still preserve in the depths of her own heart, quite
unsuspected by the young and lively people about her, the unextinguished
embers of a passion that first made her wretched fifty years before.”
Occasionally this may be true, in the sense in which psychology teaches
that no impression made on the mind is ever completely effaced, but may,
though forgotten for years, be revived in moments of great excitement,
or in the delirium of fever; as, for example, in the case mentioned by
Duval, of a Pole in Germany, who had not used his native language for
thirty years, but who, under the influence of anæsthetics, “spoke,
prayed, and sang, using only the Polish language.” The persistence of an
old passion is the more probable from the fact that in mental disease
and age, as Ribot points out, the emotional faculties are effaced much
more slowly than the intellectual. Feelings form the self; _amnesia_ of
feeling is the destruction of self.
Ordinarily, however, and for the time being, it may be possible to
practically obliterate a passion. “All love may be expelled by love, as
poisons are by other poisons,” says Dryden. And if the allopathic
remedies described in the preceding paragraphs should fail to effect a
cure, the lover may find the homœopathic principle of _similia
similibus_ more successful.
Heine, in his posthumous Memoirs, thus refers to this principle of
curing like with like:—
“In love, as in the Roman Catholic religion, there is a provisional
purgatory in which mortals are allowed to get used gradually to being
roasted before they get into the real eternal hell.... In all honesty,
what a terrible thing is love for a woman. Inoculation is herein of no
use.... Very wise and experienced physicians counsel a change of
locality in the opinion that removal from the presence of the
enchantress will also break the charm. Perhaps the homœopathic
principle, by which woman cures us of woman, is the best of all.... It
was ordained that I should be visited more severely than other mortals
by this malady, the heart-pox.... The most effective antidote to women
are women; true, this implies an attempt to expel Satan with Beelzebub;
and in such a case the medicine is often more noxious still than the
malady. But it is at any rate a change, and in a disconsolate
love-affair a change of the inamorata is unquestionably the best
policy.”