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_ V. HOPE AND DESPAIR--MIXED MOODS
_She never told her love_;
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought;
And, with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat, like Patience on a monument,
_Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed_?
asks Viola in _As You Like It_. It _was_ love indeed; but only two phases of it are indicated in the lines quoted--coyness ("She never told her love") and the mixture of emotions ("smiling at grief"), which is another characteristic of love. Romantic love is a pendulum swinging perpetually between hope and despair. A single unkind word or sign of indifference may make a lover feel the agony of death, while a smile may raise him from the abyss of despair to heavenly heights of bliss. As Goethe puts it:
Himmelhoch jauchzend
Zum Tode betruebt,
Gluecklich allein
Ist die Seele die liebt.
AMOROUS ANTITHESES
When a Marguerite plucks the petals of a marguerite, muttering "he loves me--he loves me not," her heart flutters in momentary anguish with every "not," till the next petal soothes it again.
I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe;
Under love's heavy burden do I sink,
wails Romeo; and again:
Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O anything, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
* * * * *
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears;
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
In commenting on Romeo, who in his love for Rosaline indulges in emotion for emotion's sake, and "stimulates his fancy with the sought-out phrases, the curious antitheses of the amorous dialect of the period," Dowden writes:
"Mrs. Jameson has noticed that in _All's Well that
Ends Well_ (I., 180-89), Helena mockingly
reproduces this style of amorous antithesis.
Helena, who lives so effectively in the world
of fact, is contemptuous toward all unreality and
affectation."
Now, it is quite true that expressions like "cold fire" and "sick health" sound unreal and affected to sober minds, and it is also true that many poets have exercised their emulous ingenuity in inventing such antitheses just for the fun of the thing and because it has been the fashion to do so. Nevertheless, with all their artificiality, they were hinting at an emotional phenomenon which actually exists. Romantic love is in reality a state of mind in which cold and heat may and do alternate so rapidly that "cold fire" seems the only proper expression to apply to such a mixed feeling. It is literally true that, as Bailey sang, "the sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love;" literally true that "the sweets of love are washed with tears," as Carew wrote, or, as H.K. White expressed it, "'Tis painful, though 'tis sweet to love." A man who has actually experienced the feeling of uncertain love sees nothing unreal or affected in Tennyson's
The cruel madness of love
The honey of poisoned flowers,
or in Drayton's
'Tis nothing to be plagued in hell
But thus in heaven tormented,
or in Dryden's
I feed a flame within, which so torments me
That it both pains my heart, and yet enchants me:
'Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it,
That I had rather die than once remove it,
or in Juliet's
Good-night! good-night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.
This mysterious mixture of moods, constantly maintained through the alternations of hope and doubt, elation and despair,
And hopes, and fears that kindle hope,
An undistinguishable throng
as Coleridge puts it; or
Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet,
In all their equipages meet;
Where pleasures mixed with pains appear,
Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear
as Swift rhymes it, is thus seen to be one of the essential and most characteristic ingredients of modern romantic love.
COURTSHIP AND IMAGINATION
Here, again, the question confronts us, How far down among the strata of human life can we find traces of this ingredient of love? Do we find it among the Eskimos, for instance? Nansen relates (II., 317), that
"In the old Greenland days marriage was a simple and
speedy affair. If a man took a fancy to a girl, he
merely went to her home or tent, caught her by the hair
or anything else which offered a hold, and dragged her
off to his dwelling without further ado."
Nay, in some cases, even this unceremonious "courtship" was perpetrated by proxy! The details regarding the marriage customs of lower races already cited in this volume, with the hundreds more to be given in the following pages, cannot fail to convince the reader that primitive courtship--where there is any at all--is habitually a "simple and speedy affair"--not always as simple and speedy as with Nansen's Greenlanders, but too much so to allow of the growth and play of those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains. Fancy the difference between the African of Yariba who, as Lander tells us (I., 161), "thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn," and the modern lover who suffers the tortures of the inferno because a certain girl frowns on him, while her smiles may make him so happy that he would not change places with a king, unless his beloved were to be queen. Savages cannot experience such extremes of anguish and rapture, because they have no imagination. It is only when the imagination comes into play that we can look for the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, that help to make up the sum and substance of romantic love.
EFFECTS OF SENSUAL LOVE
At the same time it would be a great mistake to assume that the manifestation of mixed moods proves the presence of romantic love. After all, the alternation of hope and despair which produces those bitter-sweet paradoxes of the varying and mixed emotions, is one of the _selfish_ aspects of passion: the lover fears or hopes for _himself_, not for the other. There is, therefore, no reason why we should not read of troubled or ecstatic lovers in the poems of the ancient writers, who, while knowing love only as selfish lust, nevertheless had sufficient imagination to suffer the agonies of thwarted purpose and the delights of realized hopes. As a boat-load of shipwrecked sailors, hungry and thirsty, may be switched from deadly despair to frantic joy by the approach of a rescuing vessel, so may a man change his moods who is swayed by what is, next to hunger and thirst, the most powerful and imperious of all appetites. We must not, therefore, make the reckless assumption that the Greek and Sanscrit writers must have known romantic love, because they describe men and women as being prostrated or elated by strong passion. When Euripides speaks of love as being both delectable and painful; when Sappho and Theocritus note the pallor, the loss of sleep, the fears and tears of lovers; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover exclaim, at sight of Leucippe: "I was overwhelmed by conflicting feelings: admiration, astonishment, agitation, shame, assurance;" when King Pururavas, in the Hindoo drama, _Urvasi_ is tormented by doubts as to whether his love is reciprocated by the celestial Bayadere (apsara); when, in _Malati_, a love-glance is said to be "anointed with nectar and poison;" when the arrows of the Hindoo gods of love are called hard, though made of flowers; burning, though not in contact with the skin; voluptuous, though piercing--when we come across such symptoms and fancies we have no right as yet to infer the existence of romantic love; for all these things also characterize sensual passion, which is love only in the sense of _self_-love, whereas, romantic love is affection for _another_--a distinction which will be made more and more manifest as we proceed in our discussion of the ingredients of love, especially the last seven, which are altruistic. It is only when we find these altruistic ingredients associated with the hopes and fears and mixed moods that we can speak of romantic love. The symptoms referred to in this paragraph tell us about selfish longings, selfish pleasures and selfish pains, but nothing whatever about affection for the person who is so eagerly coveted. _
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